The Best Training Session You’ll Ever See
I took my first tennis lesson 40 years ago, and I still remember it vividly. What was remarkable about it was that at no time during the lesson did I actually strike a tennis ball with a racket....
View ArticleProtected: Compulsion Loops and Addictive Training Games
This content is password protected. To view it please enter your password below: Password: The post Protected: Compulsion Loops and Addictive Training Games appeared first on Future of Training. The...
View ArticleCompulsion Loops and Addictive Training Games
These days, in learning, it’s cool to be gamey. So, not surprisingly, there’s a lot of hype. And a lot of bad educational games. To get past the hype, we need to move beyond simply saying “games are...
View ArticleUnfair Tests and Natural Learning
A recent New York Times Magazine article (“Why Flunking Exams is Actually a Good Thing,” Sep. 4, 2014) describes a fascinating line of research by Robert Bjork, Nicolas Soderstrom, and their colleagues...
View ArticleReading John Dewey
John Dewey is arguably the greatest philosopher of education the world has seen. Unfortunately, for most of us, his stilted, formal prose causes unpleasant flashbacks to the dreary tomes of Philosophy...
View ArticleFailure-driven Learning versus “Success-driven learning”
The heart of our pedagogical approach is the theory of “failure-driven learning,” which says, in a nutshell, that learning happens only when the world does something different than what you expected....
View ArticleFailure-driven Learning versus “Coloring Inside the Lines”
In my last post, I talked about the most common challenge to the theory of failure-driven learning. In this post, I want to address another frequent challenge, which I call he “coloring inside the...
View ArticleFailure-driven Learning: The Science Is In
In a previous post, I mentioned three objections to the theory of failure-driven learning. In this post I want to talk about the third of these: “What’s the science behind it?” The idea that you learn...
View ArticleWhen it’s not up to you: compliance training and decision-making
Training, as we think of it, involves decision-making. We design training for a particular job role by delineating the set of decision-making contexts—tasks—that make up the role, and we develop the...
View ArticleLearning Styles: Saying Goodbye to a Shibboleth of Instructional Design
If you gave a prize for the most intuitively appealing idea in education, it would probably go to the theory of “learning styles.” The gist of the theory is simple: it asserts that each person has a...
View ArticleCheap seat time
To process my grief over the imminent end of the season, I’ve been reflecting on baseball’s lessons for instructional designers. (Stick with me.) Baseball—distinctively among major American […] The...
View ArticleWas he trained to do this?
This is a really interesting documentation of “when customer service goes wrong.” We’ve done a lot of work with call centers (not, I should underline, […] The post Was he trained to do this? appeared...
View ArticleAn Open Source eLearning Tool
It seems everyone is never totally happy with their development tools. Be they off-the-shelf (e.g., Lectora, Storyline, et al) or custom. Off-the-shelf is expensive and […] The post An Open Source...
View ArticleOsmo: truly blended training
This looks very interesting and promising. While positioned as an educational toy for children, it’s relatively easy to imagine applications in a corporate world (e.g., […] The post Osmo: truly blended...
View ArticleKilling the Next Button: Navigating eLearning Courses by Scrolling
You know the drill: open an eLearning course, interact with a screen’s worth of content, and then click Next. But is horizontal navigation really the […] The post Killing the Next Button: Navigating...
View ArticleHarvard Prof Stops Lecturing, Embraces Peer-to-peer
Eric Mazur is a physics professor at Harvard whose energetic, charismatic style has made him a popular teacher for decades. A few years ago, Mazur suddenly renounced his typical […] The post Harvard...
View ArticleSocial Learning: Beware the Hype Machine
“Social Learning” is something I hear a lot about from our clients and elsewhere. But what it is exactly is tough to say. Everyone has […] The post Social Learning: Beware the Hype Machine appeared...
View ArticleXFinity UX – Too Many Clicks
At home I have the new Xfinity cable/DVR boxes. They just updated their User Interface. One of the things they did, which I felt was […] The post XFinity UX – Too Many Clicks appeared first on...
View ArticleBack in My Day, Games were Hard
Gregg Collins recently posted about How Games Drive Learning. He also linked to “Does Easy Do It? Children, Games, and Learning,” an article by Seymour […] The post Back in My Day, Games were Hard...
View ArticleCheap seat time
To process my grief over the imminent end of the season, I’ve been reflecting on baseball’s lessons for instructional designers. (Stick with me.) Baseball—distinctively among major American […] The...
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