Learning

I’m always trying to find ways to better teach and train. I, just like you, have seen plenty of bad training courses, where you want to stab pencils in your ears and gouge out your eyes just to stop the pain of listening and seeing the training session. W...

It takes a lot of moxie to call yourself a definitive classic. However, the subtitle of The Adult Learner  is probably correct. I picked up the book because of my work on the SharePoint Shepherd Presents DVD series . The goal of the series is to make le...

It sounds vaguely like a superpower.  It’s “Anthro-Vision – the power to see things the way they really are.”  However, that’s exactly what Gillian Tett is proposing for our everyday non-superheroes.  Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life i...

I spend quite a bit of my time in the professional world trying to explain things. Sometimes it’s to clients. Sometimes it’s developers. Sometimes it’s to the infrastructure team. Whomever it is, I know that sometimes my explanations work – and sometim...

During my interview with Steven Kotler , the author of The Rise of Superman , he credited an idea to Josh Waitzkin. He was careful to share with me that Josh was a chess champion and the subject of the movie “Searching for Bobby Fisher” (which I’ve ...

I recently wrote an article for TrainingIndustry.com titled “Everything You Think You Know about Learning Retention Rates is Wrong ” which is perhaps a bit of a hyperbole but it’s based on the discovery that the traditional thinking about how people learn...

While reading Mindset , I stumbled across a reference to Howard Gardner’s  book, Extraordinary Minds , that intrigued me. It said that “exceptional individuals have ‘a special talent for identifying their own strengths and weaknesses.'” On the basi...

It wasn’t the first time I got into a discussion with someone who claimed to be an instructional designer.  It wasn’t even the first time I encountered someone with a PhD in instructional design.  It was also not the first time that I shuddered to th...

I’ve been a big fan of job aids for years. It’s my awareness that job aids are more impactful than training that led to the creation of the SharePoint Shepherd’s Guide . I’ve read many materials about how adults learn – like The Adult Learner  and Effic...

Sometimes, you say a thing and it just catches on. It’s a moment of insight that gets frozen in time like a mosquito in amber, and later you realize just what you have. Kirkpatrick’s Four Levels of Training Evaluation  is like this. It’s a simple framewo...

For a long time, I’ve thought about the ability to learn as a master skill – the one that unlocks all the other possible skills.  Learning in Adulthood: A Comprehensive Guide echoes that same sentiment.  It acknowledges that, today, the world we li...

Who is the keeper of conventional wisdom?  Wouldn’t that be the educational establishment?  What would happen if conventional wisdom was wrong?  A Nation at Thought: Restoring Wisdom in America’s Schools is a reflection on what we’ve done to traditio...