In Enspire’s information-rich, busy workplace, I sometimes find myself trying to simultaneously execute multiple tasks. I’m not alone in this. The pursuit of productivity, or at least a mirage that feels like productivity, leads many of us to attempt ever greater feats of multitasking. Have any of these occurrences happened to you? You are in a meeting and decide to make a few final touches to an email. During a conference call you receive an instant message from a colleague so you immediately read it and reply. You are in the middle of something when you receive an urgent email about a completely different topic. Ironically, recently I listened to an NPR Talk of the Nation broadcast titled The Myth of Multitasking. Researchers have tried to assess how humans are coping in this highly connected world and how "chronic multitasking" may diminish our capacity to function effectively. The examples I previously listed were all "non-integrative" items. Meaning the tasks didn’t have anything to do with each other. In the NPR interview, Dr. Clifford Nass, author of The Man Who Lied to His Laptop and professor of communication at Stanford, closes by stating, "It’s extremely healthy for your brain to do integrative things. It’s extremely destructive for your brain to do non-integrative things." If you haven’t already, take a 1 minute Awareness Test. During this test see if you can count how many passes the team in white makes. How did you do? Remember how things turned out for Lucy and Ethel when they landed jobs on the chocolate factory assembly line? I hope you have better luck at monitoring and controlling the pace and flow of your work. Mind Tools offers a few tips to help you get started. The post Mutually Assured Multitasking appeared first on Enspire.

Enspire is pleased to announce our plans to bring the power of IBM Watson™ to universities nationwide, beginning in Fall 2015, with our acceptance into the IBM Watson Ecosystem Partner program. Our world-class team of software engineers and designers has been hard at work creating a Learning Management System (LMS) tool that utilizes the cognitive computing capabilities of IBM Watson. The goal of this project is to improve student outcomes across all courses. In particular, the tool helps faculty make instructional interventions earlier than previously possible via the IBM Watson Personality Insights service. Our rich custom visualizations also provide at-a-glance trend analyses that benefit both the students and instructor. The above view shows the results for a single submission.     The above view shows timeline results for 9 randomized submissions.   However, this is just the first step in a much larger roadmap. Over time, we also see a need for this technology to address challenges in the workplace, and we’ll be here to help. One particular difficulty is assembling high performing teams. Below is a 2D graphical preview of our proprietary modified k-means algorithm that groups n-dimensional personality profile vectors into equi-sized homogenous clusters. We also have several other grouping strategies in the works to improve team formation at any organizational scale (e.g., creating diverse groups along specific dimensions). The above view shows the results of clustering random 2D points into 5 equal sized groups of 10 to 11 members each. In practice, we’d be clustering people into teams based on their writing inputs and IBM Watson outputs.   Want to learn more? Contact us today! IBM Watson is a trademark of International Business Machines Corporation, registered in many jurisdictions worldwide The post Enspire is now an IBM Watson Ecosystem Partner appeared first on Enspire.

The Rustici Software internship is more than just a summer job. Our weeks aren’t just days filled with boring busywork. From Monday to Friday we are doing work that counts, as well gaining more knowledge everyday. From the moment we step in the office in the mornings, we immediately start learning. Some days it’s sitting in on a meeting or business call, while other days we have scheduled time blocked for "Lunch and Learns" or "Book Club". It might be a little different from the typical summer internship, but it’s what makes interning at Rustici engaging and unique. It’s a way for the interns to learn more about the company, life after school, and to pick the brains of the Rustici employees. Diving into food and books Every Tuesday we have an hour set aside to eat lunch with two or three employees. It’s mostly the interns learning about the different positions in the company and what everyone does. The free lunch in this arrangement is a definite bonus of Lunch and Learns. But the more interesting part of these lunches are the discussions we have with the people who work at Rustici. Everyone is always very open, they willingly give us advice about life after college and the chance to discuss questions we have. Another unique learning opportunity at Rustici is Book Club. All the interns and a couple of employees meet on Wednesdays, an hour before lunch. Over the 14 week program, the interns are reading two books, The Pragmatic Programmer and The Mythical Man-Month. These books bring our attention to the less technical side of being a developer, and have us focusing more on the ideas behind project management, working as a team, and time management. Book Club gives us a chance to discuss the content with peers and view the different takes and ideas. We get the chance to learn from people who have been at this for awhile and have experience in this field. Instead of reading for homework as a grade, we read as a group to exchange ideas and discuss how developing code has changed over the years. Why work environment matters We are continuing to learn through the culture at Rustici. In addition to the work we do on our project, we occasionally help out with other tasks around the office alongside other employees of Rustici. This includes unloading the clean dishes from the dishwasher, helping Gretchen unload a full car from a Costco run, refilling the toilet roll, or taking out the trash. These are small, easy tasks, that everyone pitches in to help look out for one another and maintain a pleasant work environment. We aren’t just learning about coding, creating a web application, and working as a team, but also about being better people. The environment created through cleaning and helping out is one where we all look out for each other, which sometimes includes taking home the sick intern who refuses to go home. The experiences here not only teach us in ways that will help us grow academically, but as people as well, and occasionally we learn a thing or two about common sense (like not to write with expo marker on contact paper. Hint: it doesn’t erase.) Always learning, always growing. There are different mediums and ways to learn, it doesn’t stop and it never will. At Rustici we aren’t just interns cast in a corner, we’re seen as the next generation to be imparted with knowledge to help us grow and inform others. Every week we come away knowing more than we did the week before. We are being given tools that we can carry into the rest of our education, jobs, and lives. We’re learning through what we create, what we read, and interactions from the people here. We may be out of school for the summer, but we’re definitely still keeping our minds sharp, and learning a lot at Rustici. The post The Intern Life at Rustici Software appeared first on Rustici Software.

Austin, Texas-based Cub Scout Pack 535 spent weekends in June building three keyhole gardens at their home school of Kiker Elementary. Enspire provided industrial quantities of ice and water to hydrate Pack 535 Scouts, family members, and workshop leaders during a capstone construction day that oscillated between sunny and rainy, but stayed consistently hot. Keyhole gardens are a variety of raised-bed garden, well suited to Central Texas’ semi-arid environment (see Enspire’s work with the Texas Colorado River Alliance). The gardens also have construction needs well-matched to Scouts who enjoyed hosing down cardboard, jumping up and down to compact mulch-able material into the beds, getting muddy, and planting vegetables. Workshop planning was expertly spearheaded by Den Leader Rick Lusk, DVM and led by Dr. Deb Tolman. Partners Whole Foods, Home Depot, and the Kiker PTA  supplied funds, food, and tools. Texas Disposal Systems offered up surplus cardboard - two tons of it (!) - which was hauled to the site on a trailer graciously offered up by Sam Painovich. The workshop was  filmed by a crew from Texas Country Reporter - a what’s-happening-around-Texas television staple since the early 1970′s - and will air as part of the show in early Fall 2015.           The post Helping Scouts garden appeared first on Enspire.

Ecology is "the study of interactions among organisms and their environment."  Apply this concept to your learning portal. Get eco-minded: reduce, reuse, recycle. Blend formal and informal learning options. Crowd-source content too by creating a social community of practice with forums and knowledge bases. Just as adaptation, diversification, and natural selection occur in nature, we need learning infrastructures that can do that. I’m a big fan of the theory "distributed cognition" which posits knowledge lies not only within an individual, but also in the individual’s social and physical environment.  I’ve incorporated "distribguted cognition" in previous posts too — Why Less is More than Ever Before  and Create More Problems for Education - because I think it’s so important to consider the ecology of learning when designing training and education experiences. That is, the learner in situ. I made a simple visual representation of "distributed cognition" as it applies to many work and learning environments: While "digital" spaces are evermore available, don’t forget the physical workplace. Include learning resources throughout the workflow and workspace. Consider simple and colorful job aids; attach process posters on the wall, a troubleshooting diagram on the side of the laser printer. Insert links to job aids, colleagues to contact for assistance, and other resources in team email messages. There is much for us to remain mindful about, yet it is hard to remember all things. Make access to training and supports easy within a new ecology of learning.. The post A New Ecology of Learning appeared first on Enspire.

A lot of my time is spent on calls talking to people about Tin Can. Sometimes the person I’m speaking to is just interested in Tin Can generally or wants some advice, and other times they are interested in finding out more about one of our products too; in those cases I often tag team the call with someone from the sales team for the relevant products. A few times after the call, the sales person will thank me for taking all the hard questions, which always surprises me because from my point of view they jumped in to answer the hard questions. I just answered the easy stuff about Tin Can that’s within my area of expertise; they had all the knowledge about our products, costs, and why we’re awesome, and they answered eloquently where I would have stumbled and lacked the facts. We each have our own domain of knowledge, expertise and skills. That’s one of the things I love about working at Rustici Software; everybody you work with has expertise in their domain, isn’t afraid to bring it to the table, and values the expertise of those around them. I experienced this again recently when doing some planning work for a refresh of tincanapi.com. Marketing really isn’t my area of expertise, but Jeff Horne has won awards for his marketeering. I bring to the table knowledge of the subject matter and audience for tincanapi.com and I’m responsible for the project, but the gaps in my expertise are filled in by really helpful feedback and comments from Jeff. By working together, we’re building something better than we could have achieved individually; the output of my work is better because of Jeff’s expertise. That’s awesome. The post Everybody’s Special appeared first on Rustici Software.

As a project manager (these days I often wear my Instructional Design hat, too)  I’ve constantly challenged myself to explore ways to best foster collaboration on projects. Enspire is a flexible workplace so my colleagues work from locations that best meets their needs on a given day. I’ve found that the following three resources have been especially helpful in facilitating collaboration between team members that are a few feet away or continents apart: Google Docs is free and allows users to create and edit documents, spreadsheets, and presentations online while collaborating in real-time with other users. At Enspire, we also use enterprise Gmail, Google Sites, Google Hangouts, and a host of other tools in the Google Apps constellation. All these resources have been tremendous assets to our teams and help us to serve our busy clients better.  Lucidchart diagramming software is integrated with Google Drive and allows us to collaboratively organize thoughts with colleagues. The intuitive drag and drop functionality truly simplifies the experience of developing our client experience! Balsamiq wire framing software can be used to create representations of early-skeletal GUIs. The wireframes have an appearance of a pencil sketch and help in planning page layout. We also use Balsamiq as part of our proposal processes. Clients that see a pretty good mockup assembled for a proposal may assume that they’re looking at the real mccoy, while clients seeing Balsamiq’s deliberately "rough" renderings will see them as intended:  a representation of ideas and an invitation to collaborate. Speaking of which, Balsamiq’a integration with Google Drive allows for collaboration between team members. Collaboration tools have developed enormously over the past few years. What collaboration tools do you use in your workplace? The post Tools for the Flexible Workplace appeared first on Enspire.

Take Our Poll Susan Smith Nash, Ph.D. has put together 26 brief video introductions to some of the issues you are likely to encounter in your e-learning experience. She starts with the letter A and goes all the way to Z.Dr Nash has a background in interdisciplinary, she has been involved in eLearning and technology-enhanced training and education since the early 1990’s. She has published many books and has many online resources; these videos are only one resource she has. In these videos she covers everything from online courses to gaming. All videos can be downloaded to your iPod or PSP. You also have the option to listen to the podcast instead of watching the videos. This all can be viewed at http://mlearners.com/ Here is an example of the letter I. Dr Nash has chosen Institution for I. She talks about traditional classes vs. distance learning. I am sorry I wasn’t able to get a better picture but you can view this at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=498642980929266102&hl=en You can read more about Dr Nash by visiting: http://elearnqueen.blogspot.com/ -Lynn

When opportunities come fast and furious, or, even worse, few and far between, it’s easy to freak out and depart controlled flight in your learning services business. Rough air or cash flow headaches are part and parcel of any enterprise. Keep your head when things get choppy. Make sure everyone’s on the right plane. Team members and clients love a business with direction. This obvious statement can challenge a services company, which at its broadest can be chartered to "just do great work".  If you envision a sunny destination or a great trip ("We’re good at sales training… let’s see if we can win some more") for your learning services business, chart a course and help your team follow you. Don’t change direction ("Now we’re going to Reykjavik!") every time things get bumpy. That can disorient and demoralize your team, and alarmed clients will all depress their steward call buttons simultaneously.  Avoid storms. Saying "no" won’t win the deal at hand, but it may win respect, or a better deal down the road, and it can preserve your good name. If a client approaches with an opportunity that’s not a good fit, say so. We’ve done it, probably less often than we should. Plunging into the cloud wall because you need or want the cash can wreak havoc with your reputation if the engagement goes poorly. At the same time, not every cloud harbors a storm. Warm up your business acumen radar to see if the shortest path to St. Maarten is over, under, or through the veil. Keep the cabin crew happy. Businesses without employees evaporate like morning dew. Your best folks, be they salespeople, project managers, artists, developers, or instructional designers are the ones clients talk to the most. However much clients might like you, unless you’re a great thought leader (I, myself, am not), clients realize that the people who will make their journey comfortable are the ones working for you. Work the comms. The only person inside your head is you. It echoes a lot in there, so you’re probably up to speed on your message and all the initiatives you’ve launched. Outside your skull visibility may be lower. It’s ok to repeat your business’ central thesis. Be lavish with praise, evenhanded in corrective feedback. Passionate employees want to know they’re doing a good job and want to know how to do a better one. Additionally, and here the aviation metaphor goes thin in our post 9/11 world, get off the flight deck now and again. Head back and talk to clients. Once you’re seated behind the yoke again, remember to make time to talk to your peers and mentors. Being in charge is varying parts exhilarating and emotionally taxing. Nobody’s supposed to say it (pilot code, and all) but a business leader who tells you he hasn’t lain awake at night or buried her head in a pillow is lying. Mind the gas tank. Business/airplane metaphors need cash flow to keep the engines turning. If it’s hard to devote time to the books, find someone who can - preferably a real accountant directed sternly to keep you in the know at weekly intervals. While cash flow dips are part of any services business story, fuel starvation often results from poor planning. Husband resources with good resource management. Multiple people can do multiple things, and "flexible workplace" can mean flexing to more hours or tasks on occasion. When all else fails, fly the plane Autopilots excel at smoothly correcting course, attitude, or altitude deviations from a setpoint in a flightpath. Competently managed, sound businesses with good people will generally stay airborne unless someone banks them into the ground or a building storm. No sane pilot would throw a plane around the sky just to see what happens. Don’t do it to your learning team. There are certainly better things you can be up to (see "Communicate"). That said, in moments of genuine crisis you need to grab the yoke and pull hard. Know the state of your business at all times, and know what control inputs can get back to controlled flight at any time without horribly overshooting your setpoint. If your setpoint keeps changing you have a strategy problem. Expect barfy team members and clients. How do you keep your learning business flying? The post Keep your Learning Business Flying appeared first on Enspire.

Everybody’s heard about Generation X and Generation Y. What do you know about Generation Z? As a learning designer, are you able to decrypt their motivations and how they consume information? By understanding Generation Z and how they think, we are better equipped to reach them. Gen Z includes kids born from 1995-2010. It’s possible that their parents had 3D ultrasounds, their arrival into the world was recorded on video, and their growth was tracked on social media sites. Gen Z has grown up with information that is "chunked" via micro blogging (text messages, IMs and tweets). They’re digital natives and carry the Internet in their pockets. They live for speed, expect instant gratification, like to express their "individual cool," and usually discover new things through friends. Caroline Greener is an Audience Engagement Specialist who for the past 8 years has supported a range of organizations in understanding, reaching, engaging and retaining audiences. In this article from 2013, she writes about the top three attitudinal and behavioral trends to consider when designing e-Learning products for Generation Z. The post Engage Generation Z appeared first on Enspire.

I spent this past New Year’s Eve revisiting the classic mystery board game, Clue. A few weeks later, I was reading this fascinating article that a friend sent me about an alternate reality game that leads its players into the darkest recesses of the Internet. And, for quite some time, I’ve been thinking about the problem of content in game-based learning — namely, how do you make a game in which the primary goal is simply to uncover content while, at the same time, respecting the integrity of game play? Can you decode a common theme here? It has to do with puzzles, which are all about decoding. In fact, what defines a puzzle and sets it apart from most other varieties of games is that it has a single correct answer or set of answers, facts to be solved for. This is what Clue and the alternate reality game described in the article have in common. Clue, for one, is a game with a variable set of three facts at its center — the perpetrator of the crime, the weapon used, and the location in which the crime was committed. These facts are drawn from three blind decks and placed in an envelope before the game starts. The remainder of the cards are dealt to the players. None of the players know which cards are in the envelope, but they know there are a finite set of possibilities. By questioning other players about the cards that they hold, a player can eventually deduce the three cards in the envelope and win the game. What I love about Clue is that it is essentially a puzzle, but it is structured in such a way as to overcome one of the biggest issues with puzzles — the problem of failure. In contrast with puzzles, most games support the player when they fail by allowing them to replay and providing multiple paths to victory. The player is rewarded with mastery over time and his or her frustration is limited. On the other hand, if you hit an impassable wall while decoding a sudoku or crossword puzzle, for instance, you must simply stop working on it, unless you can uncover some hints that allow you to break through. This can be terribly frustrating, and it can turn some players off. Of course, for a game like the internet alternate reality game, this merciless feature of puzzles is put to deliberate use, serving a sort of winnowing function which ensures that only the cleverest and most dogged of players advance. In Clue, however, one player will almost invariably arrive at the answer. This is because players have multiple rounds in which to ask questions and receive hints until one of them figures out the mystery. In fact, this process of questioning and hint-giving constitutes almost the entirety of game play. In this way, the creator of Clue baked the hints to its variable puzzle directly into the design of the game. Other puzzle-based games, such as alternate reality games and adventure games, also typically build in hints and workarounds in order to ensure that they are accessible to players. So what does this mean for us? Well, it seems we can make more deliberate use of puzzles and puzzle-based games in game-based learning and gamification. I see at least couple of opportunities: When content is king in the training or education program that you’re gamifying, you have a prime opportunity to create some puzzles and/or a puzzle-based game. Unlike most other types of games, puzzles hold facts that are directly discernible to the player. If, for instance, one central purpose of an onboarding experience is to impart to the player the names and functions of the various departments within the organization, then it seems to me that a puzzle-based game is best suited to this purpose. Whenever reasoning is a central part of the learning experience, you can design puzzles that align to the reasoning skills you want to instill. In some ways, in fact, puzzles are more about reasoning than they are about the facts at the center of them. After a game of Clue, for example, the exact set of cards in the envelope is far less memorable to me than my reasoning strategy and the breakthrough moment in which the mystery was solved. When it comes to gamification, I can think of few better modes for challenging your learners’ reasoning abilities. The post A Bit Puzzled appeared first on Enspire.

Frequently we blog about stuff we’re thinking. This week we blog about doing. We’re busy! Busy, of course, is good. To ring in the weekend we’re pleased to share new learning demos, as well as some treats from our experience design and media arm, Houndstooth. See new Enspire Learning case studies for Wells Fargo, The University of Texas, EverFi, MasterCard, and more. In this mix: mobile, 508, WCAG, and LTI tools. Lots of juicy trailers, too. See Houndstooth’s 2014 reel. See Houndstooth’s Dell Children’s Hospital Gala recap. (We posted a cell-phone video teaser a couple of weeks back. This is the full monty.) Next week check back for an article on Enspire photo and video shoots. See behind the scenes pictures from one of our recent giant medical shoots, and get some tips for your own shoot! The post Spotlight > New demos, reels, and more! appeared first on Enspire.

Gaming in Education, Education in Gaming. See Enspire’s Director of Games and Simulations Robert Bell, in distinguished company w. Gary Hoover and others. Free! 5-6 PM, Sunday, March 15th at Hyatt Regency Austin, Zilker Ballroom 4. More info, here: http://schedule.sxsw.com/2015/events/event_IAP44415   ‪#‎sxsw‬ ‪#‎GamingEd‬ The post #SXSW Learning Games appeared first on Enspire.

Congratulations to @enspire ‘s experience design and media arm, @_houndstooth, on ‪#‎sxsw‬ Experience Wave Wall’s mention in Architectural Digest! Houndstooth’s sculpture was designed and fabricated for the SXSW Eco Light Garden in Austin’s Republic Square Park. Read about it and other sculptures, here. The post HT #SXSW in Architectural Digest appeared first on Enspire.

Thanks to everyone that joined us at SHRM 2012 at booth 3809 for a chance to win one of 204 Amazon Kindle Fires. If you didn't win one you can pick up a Full Color 7" Multi-touch Kindle Fire from Amazon.

Tywana wins an Amazon Kindle Fire and celebrates with everyone around including Deb Lund, our head of P.R. at FranklinCovey.

At first we felt really lucky that we got tickets to the Late Show, Statue of Liberty night cruise, and Newsies while we are in NYC. But then we found out that we could have seen Dave in his new leading role in Newsies and saved the money for the Late Show. (Late Show has […]

ActionScript Error #1006: A user-defined namespace attribute can only be used at the top level of a class definition. Description: This ActionScript error will pop-up when a namespace is declared anywhere besides the class definition. What is a class definition you ask? It is simply the code that names the class - something like 'public […]

ActionScript TypeError: Error #1006: addEventlistener is not a function. Description: This ActionScript error is wonderfully simple. It comes from calling something that you think is a function but Flash doesn't recognize as such. Error #1006 can pop up for a different reason too. Make sure to see my first post on AS3 Error 1006 if […]

I get shin splints. I have ever since I was on the San Rafael Junior High track team launching into the sand pit over and over again as a long jumper. Recently, my cousin Vaughn Jensen talked me into doing the original distance relay race Hood2Coast. So I have been running. I have been running pretty consistently. […]

ActionScript3 Error 1152: a conflict exists with inherited definition in namespace public Description: This ActionScript 3 error is confusing by description but easy to solve. This error will show up when you have one or more names that are duplicated from a  Flash/Flex object to a variable within a class. The conflict error 1152 is […]

ActionScript3 Error 1508: The value specified for argument font is invalid Description: This ActionScript 3 error is caused by several different things. It can be a font embedding issue. It can be an issue with loading a font swf to the same location on a server. It can be several things. One of those reasons is […]

AIR 3.5 and 3.6 SDK for mobile require TLF Text to be merged into code. Because I just spent the last full day dealing with this issue (without finding an answer on any forum) I thought I would share this so that you don't have to bang your head against the wall. You probably found […]

AS3 Error #3104: A SQLConnection must be open to perform this operation. Description: This AS3 error is really straight forward and easy to fix. It means that you have to open the Database before you can put anything in or take anything out. (or change anything). You cannot do any interaction with the DB without […]