I have to confess that in a conference call meeting the other day I found myself multi-tasking instead of paying careful attention. I justified it to myself by only doing it during agenda items that didn’t completely involve me. Still, I was clearly distracted! After trying a few times to do more than one thing […]
At an international conference in Atlanta, I prepared for my two-hour workshop on learning design by carefully setting the room with tables designed to encourage dialogue and group learning tasks. The session wasn’t scheduled to begin until 2 p.m. so after ensuring that everything was in place, I went out for a bite of lunch. […]
Just back from two weeks holiday, during which time I read rather a lot. It put me in mind of an ongoing discussion we’ve had here at Global Learning Partners: can reading be considered “real” dialogue? This question arises in the context of considering what new “products and services” we can offer to our friends […]
Who out there thinks about water while you’re thinking about the future of your business? Anyone? At Global Learning Partners I know we don’t. (A good Scotch, maybe, but not water.)In this compelling clip, Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline – a book that put the idea of ‘learning organizations’ on the map – […]
What is talking? Of course the obvious answer is communicating. But that’s only one answer. I remember distinctly, a moment in my twenties when I read something like, People talk to hear themselves talk. I was appalled, what a disrespectful thing to say; it’s taken me many years to know the Truth of this, and […]
For the past several years, my husband has been telling our children a continuing story of the time he was two inches tall. The story, which still has not ended, unfolds in his childhood home, and it has taken him from the bathroom sink drain, to rides on a June bug, to close encounters with […]
Please, run, do not walk, to this TED Talk sent to me from my dear friend, Dwayne Hodgson. Folks, we live in an emerging world. Let’s make enough peace to really enjoy it. — Jane Vella Sugata Mitra: The child-driven education.
I’m fascinated with the revolutionary times in which we live. The idea of online communities and collaborative creative projects (like Wikipedia) are opening a vast new horizon of opportunities for sharing knowledge and learning. Enter into this world Rice University’s Richard Baraniuk, founder of Connexions, a free, open-source, global clearinghouse of course materials. The simple […]
We all get our moments of thrill — when we see the effect of a dialogue-approach on an individual, group or organization. I had one of those moments last week and wanted to share it because it felt extra special. About 14 years ago, I worked with Karabi Acharya (both of us then with Academy for Educational Development) on a […]
Most teachers and trainers use visuals to help emphasize specific information, to give "form" or make concrete abstract concepts or connections, and to provide visual references for lectures, among many other uses. What has been talked about less, are the ways visuals can and do benefit the instructor, and in the following example, how they […]