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Successful workshop delivery - three periods

Delivering a successful workshop is in some ways like a runner competing in a race. What I mean is that the casual observer only sees the performance on the actual day. But, the key to success is what the runner has done prior to the race itself. It is the same with successful workshops - success lies in the preparation. I mention the running analogy because I recently re-read a book by the Australian athletics coach, Percy Cerutty. He broke an athlete's year into three periods, the Conditioning Period, the Race Practice Period and the Race Period. It is the same for successful workshop delivery, where the three periods could be termed:

1. Preparation
2. Practice 
3. Delivery 

Preparation

The most important of these periods is the preparation period. It is here that you are assessing the audiences needs, who they are, what it is that you wish them to learn. The length of this period will vary, but to give you an idea, it should be about as long as the other two periods combined.

Practice

The idea of the Practice Period is to prepare ourselves for the actual delivery. You must become familiar with your content to the point of being an 'expert'. if using slides you must know exactly what is on each slide, when to change slides, when to push the "B" button to blank the screen. You should practice any activities you are including in the workshop. Rope in co-workers, friends or family to help with this, especially if an activity is new to you.

Practice delivering the entire workshop, you need to know how long different sections will take. You can use the timing functions on powerpoint/keynote, however you should practice to the point that you can trust your own inner 'time recorder', you will always appear to be presenting more naturally if you do this.

Delivery

Once you begin your delivery of your workshop all your preparation and practice pay off. This is where the audience thinks it all 'looks effortless'. If you are repeating a workshop a number of times you need to watch out for staleness. Signs of staleness are (1) loss of enthusiasm, (2) a marked disinclination to present the workshop, (3) a feeling of 'here we go again'. The cure for staleness is ideally to take a break from presenting the same workshop for a while, however more realistically it means recharging your enthusiasm for the workshop.

Each of these periods is important. Without sufficient focus on each period the final result will be less than ideal. The question is, will you be satisfied with finishing towards the back of the field. More importantly, what will your learners feelings be?

Presentations, technology and some simple ideas

Following on from my last post on how the film JAWS caused me to re-think technology and storytelling, I came across this blog post in "Fast Company" magazine by the authors of Made to Stick, Dan and Chip Heath.

Whilst I'll let you read the article yourselves by following the link, I'll summarise my key points from it below.

1. "A good idea doesn't need visual drapes". That is don't decorate slides with clipart or stock photos just to make the slide look 'better'. 
2. Limit your points. Don't fill your presentation with so many points that the most important points get lost amongst the rest.
3. Use concrete examples that are meaningful to your audience. Don't talk in abstractions. 
4. "Before your audience will value the information you're giving, they've got to want it". Curiosity comes before content. Think like you're watching a mystery film, don't give away the ending at the start, make the audience curious.

So four points:

Don't decorate your slides

Limit your points

Use concrete examples

Make the audience curious

Spielberg and learning

Last night I watched an interview with Steven Spielberg. It was interesting on many levels:

• his approach to storytelling
• how he 'framed' shots
• the importance of music to the story

What I really liked however was how the filming of JAWS unfolded, and in this there is a lesson for learning, storytelling and the use of technology. Spielberg explained how the mechanical shark broke down before filming had begun and that it would take weeks to fix. Filming couldn't wait so many sequences of the film were shot without the mechanical shark. 

So instead of seeing the shark, it was only suggested. Ripples, the wharf being dragged, swimmers being dragged downward, water churning. Speilberg says that NOT having the mechanical shark MADE the film the success that it was. 

The shark, with all its teeth rearing up out of the water at Roy Scheider, doesn't appear until quite late in the film and when it does launch itself at Scheider it scares the hell out of the audience - something that wouldn't have happened IF the shark had been seen in every scene.

What are the lessons for learning here?

1. Don't get carried away with technology, focus on the story and how you communicate with your audience. Powerpoint/Keynote, computers, elearning etc are NOT central to learning - rather focus on the story, the learning, the message.
2. The power of the unexpected. When the shark was eventually actually seen, it made an impact, audience members jumped out of their seats, popcorn went flying. As "Made to Stick" reminds us, learning sticks when the message is simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional and in the form of a story - a shark eating swimmers certainly contains all of these and Spielberg told the story brilliantly!

Here's the original JAWS trailer, (love the voiceover!) Notice how the actual shark doesn't appear in the trailer either (other than a fin), all adding to the suspense for the film-goer.

  

Informal Learning - its not new!

There is quite a buzz around the idea of Informal Learning at the moment. This is due in large part to the continuing rise of technologies that allow learners to form their own connections with other learners, search, browse and form their own personal learning places filled with information that they find interesting and useful. 

This may lead to useful learning.

This sentence is the key. 

Self-directed searching, browsing and accumulation may lead to learning - but it may not. Whether it leads to learning or not depends on:

• how the person processes all the new information they are finding
• what their existing knowledge base is
• whether they understand what they are reading/viewing
• whether they overload themselves with too much information at one sitting 

Will the learning be useful? This depends upon whose perspective you are assessing this. Personal usefulness and business usefulness. 

Usefulness depends on where you coming from, your perspective. You'd imagine that in work environments usefulness would relate more to measurable work outcomes.  Usefulness from a personal perspective is more subjective and hard to measure.

But, back to the title of this post. Informal Learning is not new. Planting of crops was not taught through formal means over the last few thousand years, the wheel was not invented because of insights gained through a formal diploma, and so on. Most learning has historically been informal. People learnt from their family and others with whom they had direct contact. Storytelling was used to pass down knowledge from generation to generation. Trial and error. Luck. Disaster. 

New insights, innovations, arose when someone combined two or more pieces of existing knowledge and created something new.

Over time however learning was formalised, it made sense. Schools,universities and colleges were able to share knowledge and direct learning. As a society people learnt more and faster than ever before. But are times changing once more?

The internet made information freely available, Google made it easy to search for information, now social networks allow people to create their own 'villages' of learning. I use the term 'villages' because in many ways social networking is building virtual villages. It allows learners to learn in the same way that people did through storytelling in tribes, 'common knowledge' takes on a renewed meaning.  

Once the debate between learning philosophies looked like this (virtually the same as the earlier image). Either/or with a little shared space.

To recreate the formal vs informal learning debate along these lines however gets us nowhere really. Humanistic vs vocational learning/Informal vs formal learning. I don't believe that it matters, and indeed most probably looks more like this:

The best learning happens through both informal learning and formal learning. The aim in all cases is to find ways to improve the effectiveness of both. To focus solely on one over the other reduces outcomes, this is the new 'blended learning'.

Inflaters and learning

I was lucky enough a week ago to see the comedian Adam Hills perform.  What does Adam Hills have to do with learning?  Well, after laughing alot on the night, the next morning I started thinking of at least 2 lessons from Adam Hills' performance that were important for learning professionals. Firstly, and probably the most obvious, was his use of stories, he is a brilliant story teller. All the way through a joke he is drawing the audience along with his story until he delivers the ending, nearly always unexpected (if you haven't ready earlier posts on Surprise, look back, here and here). Just listen to a few of his stories and you can learn how he structures and paces his stories for maximum effect.

Here is a youtube clip that shows his story-telling skills!

Finally he finished with another story, a serious one about a friend who had died.  It was serious but also explained how he saw his role as a comedian, he is an inflater. What is an inflater? An inflater is a person who makes those around them stand up a little straighter, taller, cheerier, happier. 

This is my second lesson from the night. Whilst learning professionals don't have to be comedians to be effective, they must still aim to leave learners inflated - more confident, more skilled, standing taller. ready to try new approaches, to take risks.

Informal versus Formal Learning

I have just a really interesting blog post on Tony Karrer's elearningtech blog about directed and non-directed learning goals. In the post Tony speaks of how he and Jay Cross (host of the LearnTrends site) differ on how they view how 'directed' informal learning should be and how to make it more 'concrete'. Tony saw concrete as meaning 'set' concrete whereas Jay saw it more as 'wet' concrete, still to take on its final form. I added a comment to the post which I have recreated below.

The discussion of different perceptions of what concrete looks like is to me the central point. I like the idea of concrete that still has time to be formed into something. I know others that want concrete to be solid, set and unchanging. Isn't this just a matter of differing personality traits? Because of this I think that informal learning sits well with those who like 'wet' concrete and 'dry' concrete for those who prefer a more formal approach. 

Knowledge itself has different meanings for different people. Some look to gain knowledge to fill a specific need whereas others seek knowledge to build a bigger picture - though they may not know what that is yet.

As for how informal learning fits within organisations, again I think it depends on where you are coming from. Firstly, everybody learns both informally and formally. From a business perspective it is understandable to want people's informal learning to be aligned with the needs of the business. However, a real benefit of informal learning for businesses is it's very lack of direction. From one perspective this may seem to be a waste of business resources however informal, self-directed learning is where business innovation springs from. If all learning were to follow pathways laid down by the business then the results will be more-or-less within business expectations. However, if learning is more informal and free-form, new ideas, solutions and innovations that arise from this will provide business with a competitive advantage over its rivals.

Think Google. 20% of their work time is given over to "Innovation Time Off". Google has found that 50% of their new innovations spring from this 20%. Surely a good case for informal learning and also a good example of the design process - moulding 'wet' concrete into innovative ideas.