In addition to a squeezie soccer ball, a squeezie eyeball and a squeezie brain, I’ve been given a stuffed penguin and a stuffed carrot.  Just wait until you see the flashing seagull — and I’m not kidding about that, either.  Of c ourse, this is in addition to the free pens.

What’s interesting though, is stealing getting ideas by talking to people from the several hundreds of vendors.  I’d say that nearly half are doing some form of leadership training.  Of course we’re not buying any, but everyone’s spin has something to recommend it, and I’ve learned new ideas that I’m jotting on business cards and adding to my notes every evening.

I’ve gotten so many new ideas, and connections between old ideas and new ones, that there’s no possible way I could have remembered any of them without jotting them down on the spot, then expanding them via either writing them out or typing them.  Retention of content is definitely improved by repetition of material in different forms over and over within the first 4 hours.

Aha, a session on learning through social networks is beginning.  Gotta go.

So far the line-up at Starbucks has proven to be nearly as good a networking opportunity as the ice-breaking activities some of the presenters are doing in the smaller sessions.  There always seems to be at least two friendly people within earshot while I’m either in line or waiting, and we’ve struck up conversations that are related to training interests and common work problems/strategies two mornings in a row now.

It’s great.  I’ve collected an impressive set of business cards already, and each has notes on the back with subjects I want to e-mail the owner about to collaborate on to strategize about solutions, shared ideas or tactics, sharing a resource/webpage/book title, or some other tidbit.  There’s a topic coming up tomorrow called “informal learning” and that’s exactly what this is.  Someone who showed up here and didn’t even go to a session could learn a tonne.

Speaking of learning, the homework is daunting.  I spent nearly two hours turning my notes from today’s sessions into a format that would make sense to me in two weeks, and now I need to research some of the concepts and links from today because it’s clear that they’re going to keep coming back tomorrow.  It’s a good reminder that we’re sheltered in our little corner of the world and that there’s a lot of learning theory that is going on that we’re not looking at.  Sure, sometimes it’s the flavour of the month, but sometimes it’s common enough that 90% of the room is familiar with a concept and I’m going duh.  Not good, donkey.  Back to the research.

‘Nuff said.  My next session is starting, but here’s my point.

The guy was very good, and an engaging speaker as well as theorist, but. . .

he used OHPs.  For you young folks, that’s overhead projector slides.  You may have to google to even figure out what I’m talking about.  He even put the first one on upside-down just for a laugh.  It was really cute.  Oh, it was effective.  But cute.

The workshop was on how training using activities will always increase learning transfer, add value, improve retention etc.  Thiagi has a pile of books out and is well renowned in the facilitation and training world for using activities and games to get people thinking and working together better.

At one point today he made the claim that absolutely any content could be conveyed (better) with activities, and challenged us to name a subject matter that we thought perhaps could not.  Looking to stump him I said “theology.”  Turns out that he had gone to a Jesuit university in India, and the first week there one of the professors (now a cardinal) divided them into debating teams to debate the existence of god.  Boom.  An activity.

Of course we started the day with a game — and it turned out to be a “framegame.”  The principle of a framegame, for those who don’t know, is that it is basically a shell or template.  The form can be adapted to nearly any content with nearly any context or situation.

The value of the framegame (and pretty much with any training game, of course) is in the debrief.  It is here that — if well done — the trainees get their light-bulbs switched on and the connection between the point and real life becomes clear.

Because they were active when the point was learned, and because they were interested, or curious, or engaged, the point will stick in their heads.  One guy gave an example from a seminar he had taken 3 years ago.  It stuck in his head because the context in which he had gotten the learning was so odd (it was in a training game) that he could never forget it.

One super example I’d like to use at home is a 10-15 minute exercise (could be done either in or between syndicates) after a lecture or guest speaker.  The students work in groups to create 3-4 close-ended questions and one or two open-ended ones based on the subject matter they learned in the lecture. They have 3-5 minutes to do this.  Then the groups get together and there’s a quiz (could be a challenge like a game show). One group reads a question, one person from another group has to answer (or however).

Thiagi group did a study, and retention skyrocketed after the exercise among university students in economics).  The reasons?  Active learning, participation, having to think of questions as well as the pressure to answer them correctly.  For our audience the peer pressure and competitiveness will be both fun and effective too.

We did maybe 10 games during the day and debriefed all of them. Most of the afternoon was on important points in effective game/case study/activity debrief.  This is crucial, because if the student doesn’t know WHY, and what the point is, then the learning is a waste of time for him/her.

The whole thing got me thinking hugely, plus it was a whole lot of fun.

Get this — Thiagi’s business cards are the backside of decks of playing cards.  Great idea for what his group does.  Check the website, there’s hundreds of pages of free training activities and ideas for f2f and DL training.

Thudonkey in front of the Capitol

Well, I made it. I’m in Washington D.C.  You would not believe all the huge buildings made of big pieces of white stone.  They all seemed designed to dwarf anyone standing in their shadow or approaching them.  See, they say.  You are small and the system is big.  The individual is nothing and the country is great.

Of course, depending on your belief in the principles on which the USA was built (and on the multitude of ways in which they have since been interpreted) this might be interpreted as either a scathing indictment or a ringing endorsement of the power of democracy.  I’ll leave you all to decide that for yourselves.

Here are a couple of photographic examples: the Capitol Building and the Washington Monument.

His is bigger than. . .

My sight-seeing also included scoping out some of the Smithsonian musea to get a sense of whether a week of vacationing here might be in the cards in the next year or two, plus a tour of the Library of Congress.  That was really cool.

Sunday morning I plan to get up early enough to hike down to all the other monuments and cool outdoor stuff.  It was too rainy on Friday for that.

I also found a tourist store with the absolutely tackiest Washington/American stuff that you could ever imagine, but everyone can breathe a sigh of relief, because I didn’t buy anything.  Yet.

The general schedule for the conference is here. I’m going to a Saturday workshop on how to conduct training games and activities, but not a pre-conference certificate program — apparently the DND isn’t made of money

I’ve narrowed down my choices for each block of sessions (marked 100, 200 etc.) and those appear on this sked. Some of the choices appear twice, and when I go will obviously depend on other choices, yada, yada, yada, but my choices will also depend on what I see in the expo and what I hear and observe at the conference itself.

There are some big names to see, and that will be cool too.  Ken Blanchard, Donald Kirkpatrick and Bob Pike are certainly ones that I recognize.

The white pages hotel choice sucks, as you can see here. Not only is it a reasonable price and lovely looking, it’s one block away from the conference and the metro.

I’m promising myself to be good and do post-session writing before I head out on the metro to forage for exciting food and Washington D.C. adventures.  Did you know that there’s a Spy Museum?

It seems to be conference season at work. I had the pleasure of travelling to the excitement capital of Canada: Gagetown, NB. Don’t go for the cuisine, but the conference was good.  It was the Symposium on Advanced Learning Technologies, sponsored by the Combat Training Centre and the Canadian Defence Academy. I learned a lot of interesting things and had the opportunity to see the simulations, games and virtual tech that are being used in other parts of the CF.  That was cool.

Even more useful was the opportunity to see that instructional designers are hard at work and being utilized in an effective manner at all levels of the process in other schools in the CF. That is very encouraging for us here.

To see my thoughts on the Gagetown symposium, check out the page called (not-so-inventively) Gagetown symposium.

My next conference will be the ASTD one in Washington DC.  I’ll post my tentative sked before I go, then blog about it while I’m there. Maybe someone will even follow along

I find myself doing this with George’s and Stephen’s readings for the CCK course on the one hand, and on the other jotting down words or phrases which capture me in one way or another:  things on which I want to reflect further, claims I think aren’t quite justified, elegant phrases, etc.

I’m looking forward to playing with the CMAP toy.  It looks very cool.  Even cooler is the Wordle toy.  I notice someone input the first chapter of a Jane Austen novel, and I also notice that Stephen Downes was there ages ago.  I’m not at all sure it has anything to do with knowledge, but it makes pretty pictures.

Here’s the claim that caught my eye today.  It’s from George’s paper “Connectivism:  Learning Theory or Pastime of the Self-Amused?” 

context-less, content-centric approaches to knowing and understanding are fraught with likelihood of misunderstanding

I quite liked the phrase “context-less, content-centric” even though I’m unlikely to be able to fit it into conversation any time soon.  Now I’m trying to decide whether or not I think something can even be known when it is completely context-less.  I know I spent my MA thesis arguing that we could construct lexicons built on context-less, content-centric lexicons (me and Chomsky, oh yeah), but I’ve gotten better.  Really.

It also practiced what it preached.  There were a number of connective tactics and methods used within that article, even though Stephen specifically warned the reader that it was going to be more or less a paper rather than his typical blog article.  I think that fitting one’s methods to one’s principles is essential.  There are some terribly ironic examples of performative contradictions out there, including the charming sign that says “bombing for peace is like fucking for virginity.”

One thing set me aback in Stephen’s paper, though, and I’m still chewing on it.  It’s this:

if a human mind can come to ‘know’, and if a human mind is, essentially, a network, then any network can come to ‘know’ (section k of the paper).

I don’t see how that follows.  Did I miss something?  Is the “knowing” property one that holds of the human mind because it is a network?  If so, then this claim clearly follows.  If not, then it is something that needs to be proven.  There are plenty of claims, after all, that can be made of one network and not another.

Clearly another reading is in order.

oh, and by the way, the spell-checker doesn’t know the word “proven.”  That worries me.

Another part, though, recognizes that cognition (understood as the process of reasoning (which includes that which is called “scientific method”)) has been shared since the first scientific collaboration.  This probably happened some time before sentient beings invented either fire or the wheel.  It has certainly been going on since well before such concepts as “publishing” or “government funding” became critical factors.

What, then, does the vast wash of information and technology available over the internet bring to the distribution of cognition?  Several things occur to me immediately.  The most obvious is the volume of information available to choose from.  A very thought provoking article in Wired magazine argues that the terrabytes of data now available have made the scientific method obsolete.  I disagree.  There is still ungenerated data, since someonone needs to have conceived a need for a datum in order to generate a request for the datum.  Until someone queries “left-handed hemopheliacs searching anime sites after midnight CST” we won’t know if that generates some significant pattern of data.  As such, even with a data deluge there is still a slant to the information findable and found, depending on who is doing the asking.

But I digress. George followed up his comment on distributed cognition by saying that “unsettledness is the new reality.”  Good.  Complacency isn’t any good for thinking — whether this is thinking alone or making use of a wide variety of information and analysis sources.  None of us is at her best doing rational analysis post-turkey-dinner.  It takes a keen mind and an emptyish belly to look at that information deluge and begin to determine what strands to weave, and what tapestries to create with those new threads today.