About risk in a learning enviroment

Even though the presenter talks about a camps for kids. I think that presents a couple of valid points for any learning experience (despite the age of the learner). Some that come to mind are:
- Design your activities include moments to let the learner explore and learn on their own
- With direct involvement (lighting the fire, don't getting burn, put the fire down) you learn the whole process, not just disconnected steps.
- Foster the sense that everything is "knowable"
- Learn the boundaries of our new digital word

Enjoy the video :0)

Defining Moments

When I see something I like in a magazine, because I am almost always too busy but I don't want to loose the information I like for future reference, I automatically rip the page, and goes to my pile of things for "process"(&).

The other day, thumbing through part of the "process" pile, I found an article from the July 2007 REAL SIMPLE magazine. Wrote by Gail Blanke (a life's coach) the article talks about the defining moments in everybody lives!

According to Gail Blanke (author of the article) ...

A defining moment is 'an occasion when you found something in yourself you didn't know you had, or forgot you had, and pulled it out. As a result you changed an outcome from negative to positive.
A defining moment is when you said, "Yes, I will" or "No, I won't." It's when you drew a line. Or erased one, if that was what needed to be done. It's a moment after which you never thought of yourself in quite the same way'.

Thinking about it, here are some of my defining moments:

* When I quit my job in a company where a coworker was stealing merchandise and I caught him and reported him with superiors, instead of look away

* When I pulled myself out of boredom - in jobs where I was over qualify - , and proposed new products to offer or ways to do things instead of be a conformist and just do the bare minimum

* When I worked 24 hours without sleep for the first time in my life in a project designing and developing a computer based training, the adrenalin of the commitment of team was stronger that the physical need of sleep ... however the next day I crashed pretty hard :0)



(&) I learned that in the David Allen's "Getting Things Done" (GTD) philosophy.

Storytelling - Part 2 (Pecha Kucha)

The brother of my last boss used Pecha Kucha with his students. He passed the tip to my boss and he passed to me.

The concept was challenging, "convey your message in 20 images (slides) 20 seconds each, so your whole presentation will be 6 minutes and 40 seconds".

We tried the technique for a presentation to community college advisors about the Logistics & Supply Chain Management Career Field (I crafted the presentation and my boss was the presenter).

As the crafter of the presentation I have to admit that at some points was hard to come up with a visual that will convey the message, specially when i was not going to be the presenter (in fact in the revisions meetings we had some changes of images because my boss didn't agree with them). The presentation was a success! (you can see the ppt in my portfolio) We stand out because the content and also as a contrasting alternative to dry full of text PowerPoint slides.

We plan to use this technique as often as possible.

Here is my favorite Pecha Kucha explanation video:

Storytelling - Part 1

Slideshare is an application to share PowerPoint Presentations online without having to send it to each person by email (especially if the presentation is rather more than a couple of Mb).

I started to use it while I was doing my masters in Educational Technology at San Diego State University.

In they May 2009 newsletter their were promoting a storytelling contest. the rules were simple "[the] entry to the contest can be about anything. A story about you, your travels, or something you love. Just tell it with words and pictures and in 30 slides."

These days despite the type of audience you have, capture and hold their attention is key. be short and concise, and use more images than text in the slides has been I trend I came in contact with from different sources (see future postings).

For now I will let you with a nice presentation about storytelling using PowerPoint that I found in Slideshare!

Note: at some points the presentation goes slower than the narrator, so bear with it, because I still think that provide good info. and also is good example of storytelling itself :0)

Storytelling 101

View more presentations from Scott Schwertly.

Another video that I like (instructionally speaking)

This video talks about bacteria that normally lives in our skin. I liked how they mixed a typical talking head footage with the drawings, sounds, and pictures.