I was looking at some TED talks today and liked the message here from Nilofer Merchant of the Walking Meeting.  I certainly need to find more opportunities throughout my day to live this idea. Here’s my sketchnote (or just sketch) of this talk.  I really need to practice my people more.

I work in a fairly large organization and have been here for many years now.  Once you’ve been any where for some time you start to be a bit jaded from the rewarding aspects that a good job and work environment offer.  I was reminded strongly of this point the other day when I overheard two brand new student staff members discussing their first day of work. "How was your day?  What did they have you doing?", says the first girl.  The other enthusiastically replied "Oh it’s so great.  I got to help a few patients. I was speaking to the wife of one of them and she was just so pleasant and happy we were helping her husband.  I’m making some beds up and talking to patients. It’s great.  It’s just really nice to be helping and talking to patients." It was so pleasant for me to hear how happy this fresh new staff member was to be here  and how excited she was to be her helping and sharing her experience with her classmate.  To see her she was almost floating with joy as she recounted her shift. It occurred to me…how many of us come in to ...

I sat in on a really informative webinar today hosted by NexLearn.  The presenter was Julie Dirksen of Useable Learning and author of "Design for How People Learn". The topic was all about how to incorporate storytelling techniques and bring them into your courses or training environments to better enhance what you are teaching and how learners will then ultimately be able to retain and use the information/skills. Much of the information centered around what we each know as we have all grown up hearing stories our whole lives.  However, knowing exactly all the components that truly create a story are things that we each take for granted when hearing/experiencing a story.  Julie found a wonderful way to share all of this and explain seamlessly how we could each incorporate more storytelling into any training scenario.  All without making the training become a cliche to the learner. Here are my sketchnotes from this webinar.  Still practicing. Still too many words.  Probably need a bigger notebook.  Still helping me to focus and remember the elements that I’m listening when participating in these events. Thanks to Julie for this great presentation and NexLearn for the opportunity to hear her speak.

This may come across as a bit silly since as I tell this tale you may think to yourself "Of course Tracy what did you expect?" However, this was a really learning experience ah-ha moment for me and was quite exciting to work through. I just participated in the "Hands-on Robotics Learning Lab" at DevLearn. This experience was provided by Enable Education and I want to give them credit for the experience they create for the learner and for a designer walking through it. That is where my ah-ha comes from and I’ll explain that in a moment. I’m not sure what I was initially expecting as I walked up the stage, but I think it was that I expected to learn how to program a robot to do something fairly simple. Sure enough that was it, but as I walked through the stages I was trying to case my environment and pick up on the learning nuances inserted for a the learner to experience. Sitting at the first table I was shown to walk through an eLearning module to learn how the robot programming working, then moved to another table with a robot to see how it works, then ...

During DevLearn last week I was able to present on a topic that I deal with every day at work.  How do you get your staff, organization, others up to speed on the use of digital devices, digital media, and popular/common software. This presentation was put together to capture many of the FREE available resources that are available throughout the ...

Okay, so I’m hoping from that title you can surmise that I am trying to put a positive spin on having a concussion.  Let’s see if I can truly do that. Eleven days ago I received a concussion.  Those that know me a little more intimately will be laughing because they will know that I actually gave myself the blow ...