Wonderful Brain

JANUARY 23, 2014

During an interview about a week back I asked the project manager about the audience for which the training courseware would be designed. The strongest criteria, emphatically made, was the consultants ability to work out a curriculum for 24 to 70 year olds. She added, by the way, some of them ‘don’t play well with others’ or didn’t want to take the training…and were clearly hostile. I know the second part is actually more enticing to discuss than the first but we’ll save that for a sequel.

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Wonderful Brain

NOVEMBER 27, 2019

“What is the purpose of school?” my mentor asked of me when I was moved up into administration. I wrote high minded paragraphs citing everyone from Socrates to Neal Postman, that he tossed in the garbage.

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Wonderful Brain

SEPTEMBER 24, 2020

It was the right time. And the right circumstances. Locked in the prison of COVID-19 with no escape, retired from designing and strategic marketing, my working office was ready for a good cleaning out. Purging files was easy, as were research docs, visuals, loose notes, and sketches hanging around, some for twenty-five years. As ego goes, I’m far from immune. It would bother me that my grown children would not see solutions for some of the largest organizations in the world.

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Wonderful Brain

OCTOBER 30, 2012

It can’t be a secret that stereotypes are often well proven by personal experience. And in my many years building learning, whether facilitated instruction or elearning it’s a cardinal rule that instructional designers need to know many aspects of their target learner’s personality traits. One, and maybe the most important metric, is their profession.

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Virtual World

Wonderful Brain

OCTOBER 26, 2012

For the past two months or so, I’ve been writing high profile video scripts and storyboarding in a group whose company is synonymous with the 2008 economic collapse. That they made a recovery and paid back most of their bailout money is a testament to leadership and perseverance. But I wish those same qualities extended to training, for here, little was produced that could be considered responsible online education. Like most subjective or creative ventures, it comes down to choices.

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Wonderful Brain

MAY 23, 2019

Reading the NY Times, Sunday, 5 May 2019, I scan as always for an article that will inspire me to write something of a useful lesson to clients—in business communications and case studies—or an event that just sets my temper to a higher temperature. This meets all criteria. A native New Yorker (I confess I’ve been an upstater for quite some time) this headline—” 6 Years After Hurricane Sandy, Here’s What They Came Up With: Really Big Sandbags” just stopped me in my tracks.

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Wonderful Brain

JANUARY 13, 2014

In this article I want to explore 3 connected ideas. The first is about big data, the phenomenon that now makes available enormous, staggering, volumes of information almost instantaneously. The second is a condition that says information already known to us can limit how big data can be used because there are other types of knowing to expand thinking.

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Wonderful Brain

DECEMBER 30, 2018

Over the years I’ve come to realize that what I drew as a child were the scribblings of a design wannabe, a future practitioner, connoisseur, and collector. Two short years in design school, I was an assistant art director at a small agency doing scut work to major campaigns. Out of the design mainstream in upstate NY meant teaching was my main source of income.

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Wonderful Brain

DECEMBER 22, 2018

Yes, they are all around you. Can you see them, hear them, smell them? Recognize the danger early—you’ll save yourself and your enterprise. The CRZY-MKRs haven’t erupted from the earth, half-dead as decomposed zombies coming for your life force. Worse, they’re coming for your mind. Ultimately, such destructive individuals are most capable of harming the most fragile commodity in any company: the creativity of a person, persons, and inflicting fatal wounds on the organization.

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Wonderful Brain

DECEMBER 7, 2017

It’s been a while since I’ve written to my learning blog – for those who have followed me and others curious – I’ve been working on the marketing side of things for a bit. Most importantly taking distance from learning – and especially elearning – has allow me the perspective about how and why learning now looks the way it does.

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Wonderful Brain

MARCH 11, 2014

More so than in other efforts learning demands a careful balance of content and context. Many courses or projects chock a block with great information never quite achieve the results intended because of the way the information is delivered. Still too many learners won’t or cannot stay engaged. And it’s not for lack of effort by designers. Neither dynamic media, nor learner engagement exercises, even all the bells and whistles designers build on can always keep the learner riveted.

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Wonderful Brain

DECEMBER 18, 2017

In the midst of a project where I’m conducting quality control on both online and ILT courseware I came across this video: [link]. Put aside the use of religion as a foundation in the video, the point is the only way information becomes useful and or conducive to action (add to that skills and behaviors and we have the troika of what any course or instructor needs to impart) is to repeat the elements until they become internalized and habituated.

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Brain ILT Courseware Simulations 40

Wonderful Brain

NOVEMBER 3, 2016

By this time we all know the tropes that define who millennials (M) are, how they act and their fundamental personality characteristics. You’d think with all of this proven—and nowhere is it more evident than in large corporations—that learning programs would have been adjusted to align instruction with M proclivities for workplace education.

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Program

Wonderful Brain

FEBRUARY 7, 2014

When we last visited this topic about a week back I promised to create a visual—a chart of sorts—to encourage learning and instructional designers to consider how generational bias in training delivery. Just looking to start a conversation. A Quick Review. You might want to pop back to the original article: [link]. We know we’re engaging three distinct groups in today’s workplace, Baby Boomers, Generation X, and Generation Y (Millenials).

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Wonderful Brain

NOVEMBER 21, 2011

The benefits of knowledge management (KM) are a monster value-add to any organization. Nevertheless, the more I learn how companies capture and leverage their intellectual property, the more disheartened I become. How could such a straightforward process for transferring information and learning become bogged down in dense MBA rhetoric taking what is essentially a simple idea and obfuscating it in layers of process and jargon?

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Wonderful Brain

MARCH 27, 2014

This could be a story about buggy whips. You might know the classic management tale of the craftsman who was proud of building the most handsome and useful whips to spur on carriage horses at the turn of the last century. Unfortunately, as you you probably know the tale, carriages once replaced by the automobile rendered his lovely product useless.

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Wonderful Brain

MAY 25, 2011

Using social media (SM) to prepare material for instructional design, courseware and webinars and such is the flip side of the same coin that encourages social media as intake media. We read a lot about using SM to learn, but how about to build? Here are 5.1 reasons to build learning via SM. A Social Collective. People learn best in a social context and are self-directed, particularly when focused on a specific task.

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Social Media Brain Media Social 69

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Program

Wonderful Brain

APRIL 11, 2011

It’s no secret that coming from leadership positions in public and corporate education I am very critical of substandard learning; ‘e’ or otherwise. Without vigorous advocacy at the top you’ll never get great results. So I ask, where have the learning leaders in major corporations gone?

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Wonderful Brain

OCTOBER 10, 2011

What can we learn from the methods used to develop curriculum from the academic and corporate sides of the street? In this comparison we can draw come conclusions and discover ways to enhance the integrity of the processes and the resulting knowledge development. Click here for the Improving Performance White Paper. Comments and responses are welcome. Please respond via the blog

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Brain Knowledge Management Comparison Knowledge 60

Wonderful Brain

JUNE 5, 2011

“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works.”. Would you like to guess the year this hypothesis was coined? That’s right! What a year! If you find this concept plausible, if the clarity with which business results are expressed, then the more accurate learning objectives can be formed. Further, the more likely instruction can be well designed to achieve the intended outcomes. A + B = C.

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Wonderful Brain

MAY 18, 2012

Contrary to many articles published lately, scenarios are not written questions with a supposition or proposition followed by questions. They are micro dramas that bring learners onto the screen and compel interaction. Once in, learner needs to work his way out. One my mantras I have consistency followed is that elearning is an analogue to a television drama.

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Format

Wonderful Brain

DECEMBER 8, 2011

When I first heard the term ‘gamification’* I had the sensation of a spider wiggling down my shirt at a picnic. It’s in the same league as ‘monetization’ and ‘level set’ and, ‘incubator’, words coined to make professionals sound, well, professional. I’m not against jargon in general; shortcuts are good if they are pithy and have substance. Not so ‘gamification.’ Defined originally as ‘funware’, it demeans both game playing and education. For the most part, game playing aims at developing recall.

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Wonderful Brain

MAY 7, 2012

This is National Teacher Appreciation Week, an opportunity to celebrate great teachers. While attention is focused let me float an outrageous idea. Though I don’t have the workings of this proposal completely flushed out I hope to instigate a dialogue and let you continue the conversation. I believe teachers are underpaid. And underappreciated. Let me back up a sec: What brought this top of mind are commercials currently airing (and somewhat self-aggrandizing) for the energy industry.

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Wonderful Brain

NOVEMBER 23, 2011

I promised a colleague a week ago I’d share an experience I had producing a mobile learning project for a major airline. So to him, I apologize for this installment being a bit late…think of it as slow 3G, OK? A caveat. So many of us are involved in love affairs with the latest technologies sometimes we forget to brake our enthusiasm and learn after too much money and effort that the latest isn’t always the greatest.

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Wonderful Brain

FEBRUARY 22, 2013

Who hasn’t been the recipient of the exhortations of motivation? It seems everywhere; used to suggest, cajole and inspire workers. Indeed exhort all of us to get out in front of a task and get going. I remember, I think, a professor or mentor of mine in the education business who consistently said that motivation, a mental state, is not what we want to create. No, he said, what we really want is movement.

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Wonderful Brain

JULY 23, 2011

I’m writing this preamble dockside on a lake in Maine, early morning sunshine firing diamonds of light off the water. The temperature is mild and the bugs have yet to arrive for their fleshy feast. I’m in a good frame of mind–no curmugeonly thoughts or clever bon mots at the ready. All is tranquil. I point this out as so you’ll know there is no overarching agenda, no negativity anywhere in the vicinity of the words that follow.

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Wonderful Brain

NOVEMBER 7, 2011

An Inability to Take Action Because of Practical Issues is Not Wholly the Cause of Inaction. There are as many reasons for contracts failing to close, as there are flavors of Haagen Dazs. Unfortunately, if you don’t close many deals, you’ll be eating some house brand frozen treat. So a double yecch, right? What brought this to mind was a TED video I viewed last evening.

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Wonderful Brain

JANUARY 11, 2012

There seems to be a revival of interest about informal learning. I suppose the definitions range from information gleaned from informal sources—everything from Wikipedia to People Magazine to storytelling, to disruptive media like tablets and smartphones. Some suggest it’s content discovered while looking for something else. Kind of like an accidental scavenger, a web surfer.

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Wonderful Brain

MARCH 26, 2012

Mulling over branding and applying logic to emotion has become more meaningful to me on a professional and personal basis. In some engagements, I’m compelled to live within the ecology of a company’s personality that is expressed in many ways through its brand. And on a personal level, who has not been bombarded into submission in to formulate a noteworthy and memorable—not to say powerful and compelling brand: can’t communicate your value instantaneously without being commoditized.

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Wonderful Brain

DECEMBER 19, 2011

Let me make this clear at the outset; my birth family are the tribe of the Old Testament so my father’s association with the Christmas holiday was learned from coworkers, Nat ‘King’ Cole, the tree at Rockefeller Center and New York fragrant with good cheer – often lubricated with smoky liquids around the 25 th. That is until he had grandchildren. This was of course the divine gift my wife and I delivered to him – most likely our lifetime’s crowning achievement.

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