Thanks to Cindi for sharing the E-Learning Council site with me! This post is an example of the type of thing I’m seeing here and finding interesting as I think about games and play and learning and adults.
Category: Active Training
Book Review: A New Culture of Learning
Last week I spent 4 hours standing in a line at the airport, only to not be able to fly out at all. Thank goodness I had my Nook with me and made lots of progress on Hunger Games. Thanks to Heather Braum, I also had A New Culture of Learning by Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown with me and was able to read it, too. At only 137 pages, it was a quick read, but very affirming. If you’re a trainer or an educator and you’re thinking about the future, I recommend this book.
If travel plans had gone as scheduled, I was on my way to Houston to deliver a workshop on technology training. The workshop was created in collaboration with Stephanie Gerding, my friend and the author of The Accidental Technology Trainer. Stephanie and I have known each other for a long time now and our approach to training is very similar. The ideas in the New Culture of Learning really fit with the active approach to technology training that we discuss. Many of the ideas in the book were not new to me, however, the final chapter covered Game Theory and I realized this is something about which I would like to learn more (it also had me thinking about starting to play World of Warcraft!!). If you have resource suggestions for reading more on this, I’d love to hear them.
Resources:
School – Smart Mob Style
This isn’t a “training” example really; it’s a teaching example instead (teaching/training – boundaries between the two blur). Many of you may be familiar with Kansas State University Professor Michael Wesch because of the innovative videos he and his students have created. I read his blog regularly and am often inspired by his unique approach.
The latest post, “How to get students to find and read 94 articles before the next class,” is a great example of active learning. Rather than handing students a syllabus with a list of articles they should read, students were asked to find, read and summarize articles for the class. ZohoCreator helped pull it all together in an online database that was easily accessible for the class members. The topic was online anonymity and you can see the product of the student work here.
Ye Old Snowball Fight
I don’t think I have talked about the snowball fight as a training technique here on the blog, but it’s a favorite. Stephanie Gerding and I talked about it in yesterday’s MaintainIT train-the-trainer webinar and Paul Signorelli liked the idea and described it quite well over on the Infoblog. Thanks for the great post, Paul, and thanks as always to Stephanie for being an inspiration.
Brenda Hough 