“You, yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection” – Buddha

Happy Valentines Day! I hope you’re sharing time with people you love today. We’ll be making some chocolate covered strawberries and piling on the couch for a family movie night tonight. What are you getting up to?

Here are this week’s finds. Thanks for reading!

What I’m Listening to: Today I’m giving Brain.fm a try on a recommendation from a friend. So far I’m liking the vibe it creates to work along to.

Last week’s most clicked item:
7 simple & effective methods to get better at Visual/UI Design

Change what we do or improve what we are doing? The L&D conundrum as I see it.

Myles Runham (@mylesrun) takes a peek some parallels between disruption of L&D and the news/journalism fields. Consider how both are experiencing fundamental changes in audience relationships, what is made for them (with them?) and how they connect with it.

Change what we do or improve what we are doing? The L&D conundrum as I see it.

The Way We Work Is Killing Us

This interview with the author of ‘Dying for a Paycheck’ Jeffrey Pfeffer says that many companies are completely missing the point. Offering lunchtime yoga classes does nothing for management practices like long work hours, unpredictable schedules, toxic bosses, and after-hours emails. Why would we foster work systems that both punish workers and lose companies money?

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-way-we-work-is-killing-us

Commit Yourself to Learning

Ken Blanchard tells us the only way to grow as a leader is to keep learning — and if you aren’t learning and growing, you’re just wasting away. I love that he models this by sharing something he learns every day. A great Work/Learn Out Loud example. This type of learning fosters genuine relationships as it increases job satisfaction — a positive result for individuals, leaders and the organization.

Commit yourself to learning

Don’t Learn More, Learn Smarter. A Quick Guide to Agile Learning

Just like your body, your brain needs to be regularly looked after, fed and trained. This article explores the idea of applying a “lean” approach to our knowledge acquisition to squeeze more value from what we learn – a method experts call agile learning.

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/341618

Using a funnel approach when designing a learning campaign

Matthew Mason (@superblearn) shows us how L&D can borrow the funnel approach from our marketing friends. The marketing funnel breaks down the customer journey, from the “awareness” stage when they first learn about a business, product or service to the “purchase” stage, where they are ready to buy. The funnel approach can also be used to break down the learner journey. It takes them from the “interest” stage, where they learn why the topic is important to them, through to the “integration” stage, where skills and knowledge are applied in the development of mastery.

Using a funnel approach when designing a learning campaign

Live Subtitles and Real-time Translation in PowerPoint

Wouldn’t it be amazing if while you’re giving a presentation, your audience could see real-time closed-captioning of your talk and even a live translation into another language? Live transcription of your words can aid audiences with hearing impairments, or who have difficulty with the language you’re speaking, or in cases where the audio setup of the room is less than ideal. (There is also a similar option available for Google Slides)

Live Subtitles and Real-time Translation in PowerPoint

A few other things just because I can.

Tools & Resources

• [tools] Explore is a FREE online chart maker & visual data tool for all your spreadsheet data
• [powerpoint] 85 animated PowerPoint callouts free for download
• Invideo is an app sort of like Canva but for creating videos
• [design] BioRender: Create Professional Science Figures in Minutes with thousands of pre-made icons and templates from more than 30 fields of life sciences

Conferences & Learning Events

• I’ll be participating in next week’s Elearning Guild Make Learning Stick online conference Feb 19-20
• Check out the upcoming conference schedule
• L&D webinars and professional development events calendar by Kari Knisely (@KariKnisely)

Call for Speakers:

• DevLearn is now accepting speaking proposals through March 6
• TechLearn Conference 2020 in Austin | Call for Presenters (Deadline is March 2) https://buff.ly/2OdNxZx
• LearningTechDay in Belgium is looking for some good speakers. Could that be you?

Interested in the things that didn’t make the cut here? Follow me on Twitter

I love talking about learning, design, and technology. If you’re looking for a speaker, let’s talk! Speaking and Workshop Information Sheet.

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