Pluralizing the Teaching

Let's begin with a story. I will introduce you to some important characters in my story - Ram, Balram, Krishna, Narayan, and Shiv.

All of them are attending a three-day induction program facilitated by a senior trainer called Ms. Sarasvati.

It's Day 1 of the training, and Sarasvati has already started to make some observations about her trainees.

• Ram asks the maximum questions in the class. He is quick to form connections between new pieces of information coming his way during the program. He struggles to accept unstructured and disconnected pieces of content. For example, in the beginning of the class Sarasvati provided an overview of different functional practices within the organization. However, she never helped Ram identify the functional practice that he has joined in. Ram looked confused.

• Balram takes the maximum number of breaks. His phone seems to be ringing quite often. Sarasvati already knows that Balram will find it difficult to sit through the three-day induction program. She was not surprised to see Balram enjoying the "facility walkthrough" session the most. He was quite attentive and kept on asking questions throughout that session.

• Krishna seems to have enjoyed the Compliance piece the most because it had some fun jingles interspersed for the participants to retain the key cybersecurity guidelines and practices. Sarasvati could see Krishna grooving to the music while also learning about cybersecurity.

• Narayan was most active during group discussions and group activities as if he was looking forward to networking with his peers and form long-term connections. He was the most vocal and interactive in the group happily taking the lead in conversations with his fellow participants.

• Shiv was the quite one. He was quietly absorbing the new ways of working and making notes. While he was the most attentive throughout the class, he was particularly not comfortable asking a lot a questions or making a lot of noise during the activities. Sarasvati was surprised to see Shiv scoring a high passing percentage at the end of the three-day program.   

Do you know that all these learners are leveraging their strongest intelligence while learning? Intelligence is not always general. As per the popular phycologist, Howard Gardner, there are multiple forms of intelligence and designing instruction catering to a single intelligence leads to poor learning transfer. Gardner recommends pluralizing the teaching, that is, teaching the most important materials in multiple ways.

Further reading: Theory of Multiple Intelligences

Why do we need Instructional Design (ID)

While designing and developing trainings, I have asked myself this question many times. Often, I wondered about the significance of ID or about the significance of presenting content in a sound instructional manner to audience. I questioned the use of the flashy graphics and sound effects that supplement the textual content; are they created to only attract the learners to the content, or do they help them understand and learn? Certain issues, such as the Connect is missing, How does this content piece relate to the previous??, There is no flow in the content, Who does the pronoun refer to, raised by the reviewers of my documents often annoyed me, and I heard myself saying “Come on our learner is an adult; not a child. And just like other adults, he too can deal with some ambiguity in life.” I felt that adult information seekers or learners are able to make use of content regardless of its presentation, language, grammar and style; they are smart enough to connect the unordered, disconnected and flow less content pieces together and learn.

Then one fine day, enlightenment struck me while I was cleaning my closet and was arranging my clothes in the shelves within the closet. Somehow, the exercise resurfaced my ID-related doubts and helped me derive this amusing and interesting analogy. Continue reading, to know more.

Have you ever wondered the purpose of arranging and organizing clothes within a closet? After all, you are to use the entire place to store your clothes; then doesn’t the exercise of arranging the clothes become useless, redundant and trivial? Instead of wasting your time and effort in arranging your clothes, you can simply dump your clothes into the closet and save yourself some considerable amount of hard work. Of course you can, but you wouldn’t; simply because dumping clothes will result into a terrible chaos while taking them out of the closet. You would have to search multiple shelves to find the dress that your want to wear for party tonight or to take out the pair of trousers that you plan to wear to work today. To save yourself from this chaos, you prefer to organize and arrange your clothes in the closet so that you don’t have to look for your clothes in multiple places within the closet. Therefore, the exercise of arranging the clothes is useful because it saves you a considerable amount of time and effort later. In addition, the exercise makes your life easier and stress free.

ID does this and many more useful things to content. Applying ID on content is similar to arranging the clothes in your closet; rather it's more than that. We are living in the age of information; the age in which loads of information is available to us either on the Web or over the T.V. or radio or newspaper. Often, the learners are dumped with information and expected to make sense of it and start applying it. Just imagine the plight of the learners these days; you too are one of them. In order to learn, along with learning (which is the primary objective) the learner is expected to:

• Research and identify the relevant content.
• Structure the learning.
• Relate numerous content pieces with each other.
• Fill the information gaps.
• Adjust to the presentation of the content; regardless of his/her individual and preferred learning style.

Do you see that apart from learning, the learner does numerous other activities all by himself/herself? Isn’t this too much of an expectation from an adult learner when learning is an important stepping stone for success? I think, it definitely is.

Ideally, the learners should focus only on learning and none of the above-listed activities because they come under the ambit of ID and these activities are performed by Instructional Designers through the application of various ID theories and models.

Therefore, ID is relevant, helpful and important for the learners and crucial for the organizations that want to develop and maintain an aware, confident and effective workforce. So:

• Learners: Claim your right to learner-friendly content the next time you are expected to make sense of anything vague, unclear and complex.
• Designers: Continue creating, cleaning, arranging and maintaining the content closets for your learners/audience!

Spl Note: I hope you enjoyed reading this post as much as I enjoyed writing it. Also, I hope that I successfully conveyed my message to you. I would love to read your reactions, opinions, perspectives and views; therefore, please don't hold yourself from commenting on this post. Looking forward to your comments!

Why to Twitter?

Lately, Twitter has become very popular in the Web 2.0 community, and its popularity made me curious and triggered my research on it. Initially, I perceived Twitter as a social networking community, such as Orkut, Facebook; however, Twitter's utility sets it apart from the other popular communities available on the Net.

Wikipedia defines Twitter as the Internet Messaging Service that allows you to send SMSs through the Internet. Now, don't think of it as one of those popular Internet messaging services through which you can send SMSs to your friends for free. Instead, Twitter offers you a platform to update your current course of action and make that update available to a large group of people just by clicking a button. It terms the updates as Tweets that are 140-character long text messages posted by you on your Twitter profile. Anybody who is following you in Twitter is able to view your Tweets.

Through Twitter, your messages gain a global and wide reach without much of effort and resources. In addition, Twitter integrates with your mobile phone so you can continue posting tweets from anywhere and at anytime by using your mobile phone.

At the same time, the service provides its users the freedom and the flexibility to control access to their tweets by providing the liberty to block followers. Also, you can opt to send private/personal messages to individual followers instead of sending tweets to everyone. Then, you hold the complete authority to hide your tweets from anonymous users who are probably not following you.

The other networking communities probably are far more cluttered and loaded than Twitter because they serve a completely different purpose. Twitter, on the surface, is not loaded with numerous features and that's because it wants you to focus only on updating your friends about your latest activity.

I'd like to use Twitter to update my friends about my latest research/finding. For example, how can I update everyone about this post and request their feedback on it? Through Twitter. Just one update and everyone will know about this post.

This is just the basic utility that Twitter serves. To know and use more, read the following article:
http://www.doshdosh.com/ways-you-can-use-twitter/

Looking forward to your comments!

Sharing vs. Withholding Knowledge

Well, let's begin this blog [my first-ever blog] with a question. How many of you would think of knowledge as a source of development and growth? Am sure that most of you would. That day, while having a conversation with one of my friends over a cup of coffee, I ran into a debate of Sharing vs. Withholding Knowledge. According to my friend's opinion, we should not be very generous with sharing our knowledge because we have toiled hard to acquire it. Why should we give it so easily to someone who is a competitor and wants to beat us in our respective fields?

While I partially agree with my friend, I also wonder whether is this a right and a sensible approach towards growth? Isn't sharing similar to learning or learning more? I think the more I tell people about something, the better I understand it myself. Sharing knowledge is probably a way to collaborate with peers. You give some of it and you take some of it. Then why not share your gyan with people around and get more interested in what you do. Such conversations lead to both individual and group development. I believe that we all have the capability and creativity of developing ourselves into better individuals and professionals. So we wouldn't stop growing just because people around are not willing to share their knowledge with us. On the contrary, the knowledge hoarders suffer because they choose to miss on some good conversations because of their lack of participation.

At the same time, I agree that there are people who squeeze out information or knowledge from you and doesn't give anything in return. I personally have come across such people and honestly its difficult to decide the right course of action to deal with them. Would like to know your views and perspectives on this. So please feel free to comment and contribute.