I sat in on Roger Courville‘s presentation today called "From Complex to Simple: How to Make Hard Subjects Easy Through Story Based Learning".  Hosted by GoToTraining. I think I did better in using more images and less words this time. My step-daughter is really good at taking pencil sketches and using an app (and just her finger) to create digital ...

I’ve been plagued lately with an issue at work were I design a course and it functions correctly on my computer, but then I get complaints from staff that it freezes at certain points on them.  The issue further seemed to be muddled in mystery in that of the 9 computers I have daily access to; 5 worked and 4 ...

I was at my nephew’s soccer game last night and was thrilled to be able to watch the final game of the season.  I’ll note here that these are a bunch of 3-5 year-olds.  For the first 30 minutes of "practice" there were a few drills - maneuvering the ball through cones and kicking on the net.  The kids were ...

I just had a very interesting encounter in the washroom here at work. (Wow if that isn’t quite the opening line.) Where my office is at work the closest washroom is a public washroom and being on the main floor near the lobby it get a lot of traffic. I went in this morning to rinse my mug out and ...

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 ...

I have many people tell me how much they love If This Than That (IFTTT), but so far I have had a little less success with them.  I decide that I’d like to try to streamline things more in the coming year and an idea I have for a resolution means that there are some things I’d like to have ...

If you follow me on Twitter you may have noticed since January that several of my tweets carry #lrnd2day.  Initially my plan was to add this to at least one tweet a day to help myself track what I’ve been learning.  My motto for years has been trying to learn one new thing each day and I think for the ...

Inspired by David Kelly’s posting "Come Say Hi"  I thought I’d extend an invitation as well.  I’m really excited to be attending Learning Solutions again this year.  It’s been a two year’s since I’ve attending this particular event, but I’m excited and eager to be back.  Looking at the program for the conference its a bit overwhelming  with so many ...

Never have I been so ready to go out and start enjoying nature and the weather. Going to the extreme having to wear so much winter clothing this year has been daunting. Give me a break, I’m tired of the cold and want the warm weather to come back soon. You might know exactly how I feel if you are ...

I just read through David Kelly’s blog posting "Judgement in a Vacuum" and I’m very glad he has brought this up. This is my response that I would like to share with David and you: Thanks for sharing this David.  This idea of knowing the context around projects is very true of my own work.  It is something that I ...

Inspiration to do better with what you have available to you is around us every day.  All it ever takes is one small challenge and a lot of imagination. Recently my Brother-in-Law was sharing with me a story about how he and a few colleagues were researching the benefits of the standing desk.  They decided that since they are IT ...

I’ve been following Jane Bozarth and her #ShowYourWork movement that she has been advocating for sometime now.  With her recent book publication "Show Your Work" I’ve been even more interested in sharing and learning from each others’ trials and tribuations.  I now am more acutely aware and understand that when I come across something I have done and then have either learned from the ...

…get’s slapped in the face with hundreds of forum discussions and feels none the wiser. Not much of a joke there.  But neither is my recent MOOC experience.  I participated in a MOOC several years ago and for the most part it was interesting and compelling and I was invested in truly learning with the group.  With that in mind I went ...

I’m part of a group of elearning professionals in healthcare in Canada (eACH) and over the last week I asked them to resapond to a quick survey about their Core Curriculum courses.  Here is a brief summary of the results. Lesson learned (the #showyourwork part): I tried to keep this very brief and to the point since I was sure ...