The one about archery

Over the course of the last year I've been keeping this blog from a professional perspective, but now it's time to write a post about something a bit more fun.  I've been a regular archer for the past six years or so, and teaching it to beginners for three of those, so it's high time that I take a moment to reflect on my experience of learning processes from a physical skill, as opposed to my normal workplace and academic pursuits.

Nowhere have I felt the reality of the term 'analysis paralysis' more than when I came to teach the sport to others.  After an enthusiastic few weekends on the Archery GB leader course (or GNAS as it was then known as), I was keen to get started with teaching beginners.  But one thing started to diminish my enjoyment of the sport.

I suddenly found myself shooting terribly.

Trying to hold a whole new set of information in my head whilst shooting brought my performance down because I was over-analysing my own shooting.  Having a new sense of awareness of what could go wrong just seemed to make those very things happen, and identifying your own faults is always problematic.  I eventually managed to get past this, and I'm still enjoying both participation and teaching, in fact I've developed the begineers course for our club so that it can be delivered consistently by any of our leaders.  I even called on some of my new knoweldge about learning to better inform the design, which is delibeartely minimalist, since I don't want our beginners suffering from analysis paralysis!

Happy birthday dear blog...

It's now a year since I first started this blog, and it's been an interesting one for sure.  I started keeping a blog as part of an effort to get my head around the use of social media, but it's starting to feed into all of my learning processes now, especially as I make extensive use of blogging as part of an online course.  So what have been the best things about keeping a blog for the past year?

Having my thoughts captured allows me to look back over the past year and how my way of thinking has changed.  After a burst of short rambling posts centring on my exploration of forums, I found some interesting things to write about, which led to some unexpected highlights:

• My summary of the Learning & Skills Group and Forward Thinking conferences drew a good deal of attention from the associated communities
• I received an entry on Janes Hart's Top 100 Articles of 2011 for a set of three of my articles

These were a real boost to my confidence in using social media generally, knowing that a wider audience would listen to my ideas, but towards the end of last year I did find myself burning out a little, something that gets referred to as social media fatigue.  Sometimes you just want to switch off from the world.  It also reflects my enthusiasm coming up sharply against the wall of reality - you can't do everything at once, and other priorities tend to get in the way.  Since then I've made an effort to write about different aspects of my learning, and I've continued to keep up blog entries within the bounds of my online course too.

Where do I go from here?  I think it's time to bring in a new personal angle on learning, which brings me to my next post...

Would you like to play a game?

Gamification is hot on the lips of many people at the moment, from sales and marketing to social networking.  It's also gaining strength in the field of learning, particularly the online context.  Games for learning aren't something new, but the recent success of online gaming does seem to have fuelled new interest.  World of Warcraft is a runaway commercial success (a big draw in itself) and has huge communities of practice who discuss the best ways to succeed in the game.  Imagine attaining that level of engagement for a workforce!

There are similarities between creating an engaging game and an engaging learning experience, but there's a thin line to be walked here.  Making a learning  activity seem trivial can easily switch people off - who wants a badge for everything anyway?  But make the experience relevant, challenging and interactive, and there's a chance you're on to a winner.  Score yourself a really meaningful achievement:

Unlocked: Performance support through gaming

Games can also invoke a lot of positive psychology, making us feel better about ourselves through participation.  A well-designed game can actually be fun to play even if we fail, which makes us keep trying.  There is a note of caution here of course.  At some point learners have to make the transition to a real-world task, where failure has real consequences.  One has to hope that they have acquired real mastery so this doesn't happen often, and the resilience to deal with the negative feedback failure wil incur!

It's a big wide open field, and I'm looking forward to a lot of fun exploring it.  Let the games begin...

The best laid plans....

I've recently finished a project for my Masters degree, running online support for some associates of our company, in a very  different context to my normal work of producing online resources.  Whilst the online support has (after some initial scepticism) met with genuine enthusisasm, I have to reflect that things didn't go quite as I intended them to!  I had to some extent fallen into the trap of teaching as I have been taught recently, which is asynchronously using forums and blogs.  Whilst these tools do have their place, not everyone is ready to integrate them into their working practice, because they aren't directly relevant and something they don't want to spend time on when they are busy.  Fortunately I did build in a synchronous element using web conferencing, and integrating this tool into their working practice has allowed many of the participants to interact in a new way.

Overall the the project served a useful purpose for participants, and it has been hugely informative for my future practice in this field.  Through critical commentary and feedback from my tutor I have been able to piece together what needs to be done better in future.  Ultimately the key is identifying a meaningful and valuable assessment of what is to be learned, and ensuring this meets the needs of learners in their context.  Get the wrong idea about what they need to learn, and you're on unsteady ground before you start, because there's no motivation for them to engage in the tasks.

So my plans went a little astray, but with persistence and enthusiasm we have some emergent learning outcomes all round - for me and the participants!

Is that really me?

I've started doing my first voiceovers for software demonstrations using Adobe Captivate, and there's another huge wave still to come.  I class myself as a veteran of these kinds of software demonstrations, in fact in a 6 month period this year I recorded over 100 of these!  However, I've always been able to get by with silent demonstrations.  Why do I sound like I count myself lucky?

Because I hate hearing the sound of my own voice.

Whenever I hear a playback of my voice, I feel like I'm hearing a complete stranger talking.  Now there is such a thing as an acoustic reflex, which contracts the muscles in our ear when we speak, and hence affects the way we hear our own voices, which can acount for this, so I have made a conscious effort to get over my dislike.  Nevertheless, it was with some trepidation that I donned the headset to record my voiceover, dreading to hear that strange voice getting steadily worse as my recording session progressed.

I was determined to make my voice sound a little better (at least to my ears) so I played around with some ideas that I hoped might work, such as saying jokes out loud, if only to put myself at ease. However, I found the best solution came from my favourite place - outside the box. I hit on the idea of recording my voiceovers for the slides in reverse order, this way I should sound better as I went along. I'm not sure how well the voiceovers will really go down with users, in fact Rosen (2011) notes that audio is a very passive medium and can actually cause learners to disengage from a visual task. But at least I felt more confident in recording, and hopefully that will come across in my voice...

Reference:
Rosen, A., 2011. An Argument Against Voice-Over PowerPoint for e-Learning.  In Allen, M. (ed.) Michael Allen's e-Learning Annual 2012. Pfeiffer

Blog 2.0

I've been having a think about the emphasis of my blog and my motivation for using it, and decided it's time for an overhaul and to refocus my reflections.  Whilst I started this as a foray into social media, this stems from a wider interest in all things to do with online learning.  I'm suffering from a little social media fatigue, perhaps due to a deliberate attempt to fully immerse myelf in the medium to better understand it.  Whilst I've learned a lot from the experience, and about myself and my learning preferences, it has to be part of the bigger picture.

I'm studying education to complement my role at work, and I've come across the idea that social presence is needed for effective learning to take place, online or offline.  We cannot learn effectively in complete isolation, we have to contextualise the learning.  For much of my life I tended towards being a solitary learner, and I think I suffered from having insufficient experience to develop my learning into professional expertise, and also had no safety net when things didn't work according to plan.  With my current studies, I'm able to relate pretty much everything to my professional practice, accessing course materials and continuing online discussions in the workplace where this furthers business goals, and shaping course projects around the needs of our business.  Reintegrating work and learning in this way is a win-win situation for me and my employer, because I'm boosting my own learning and contributing directly to departmental objectives.  My reflections from this point will look more generally at my experiences with online learning, and will also be a foundation for my Masters dissertation.

Social media fatigue

Well I've heard people talking about this before, but not experienced it for myself, until now.  After attending a conference a while back, I've been actively exploring the use of social media, particularly in terms of learner engagement, and the extended interactions you can achieve with the medium.  It's all well and good, but after getting myself thoroughly immersed in the medium, and finding out so many useful facts, there's a certain nagging doubt creeping in.

What's in it for me, anyway?

 

 

We should all be asking ouselves this question, because once the novelty of the medium wears off, it's easy to get bored and disengage.  I've tracked my Klout score for a while now to see how my interactions affect my score, but I'm getting pretty disillusioned, particularly after I've been taking part in chats, getting mentioned, retweeted and favourited, but yet my score gets slashed 8 points in a day.  And people are warning of how your score can slump massively if you take time out.

 

 

Well I got into using social media to interact with people, not numbers and data.  If my interactions with people aren't meaningful, then what's the point?  So I'm taking a week out, turning on the metaphorical 'out of office' for Twitter (though doubtless someone's already got an app for that...) and I don't give a hoot what happens to my Klout score.