Sarah Gilbert, Megan and I got our caricatures done, courtesy of our good friends at RISC, Inc.Wow, last week a doozy. ATD TechKnowledge had us giving presentations, participating in panel discussions, connecting with old friends and making new ones, too.
ATD TechKnowledge Recap
We presented twice last week. Our presentation on Content Strategy remained basically in-tact from DevLearn this last year with some expansion on granularity, modularity and discreteness. No need to re-download a new slide deck, though. Those details are also included in a new presentation we shared on The Big Picture of Adaptive Learning.
[slideshare id=43673699&doc=adaptivelearning-150119141121-conversion-gate02]
For more than 30 years, the Artificial Intelligence community looked at pre-determined, logic-based approaches to static maps of domain knowledge (that’s a mouthful). In the last five years, there’s been a bit of a shift to make data-driven recommendations and personalized content a reality in the near-term. The technology, math, and science that makes this possible is pretty crazy and how well it works is completely dependent on the design of the content (which informs our approach to content strategy). How well it works also depends on the quality of the data and the accuracy of a learner’s experience with the content, compared to what that content is designed for.
These technologies aren’t ready for enterprise learning yet, for reasons we expose in the presentation — chief among them is that enterprise really doesn’t have enough content to cover the bases. That said, some technologies are here now. The design practices needed to make use of adaptive learning now and into the future represent the best practices you should be applying in your organization’s information and content management practices.
And yeah, that includes using xAPI to collect analytics on how content is used in context. Then compare that to the design goals of that content. Then… continuously improve the content experience to bridge the gaps you discover.
Where Did We Get All Those LEGO Pictures?
You’d be surprised how difficult it is to find straight-up illustrations from one source of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, but as soon as I looked on Flickr, Barney Main‘s pictures showed up. We reached out and he was very kind to give us permission to use his images, and we found others online as well. People like Barney are doing some great stuff with LEGO and we were just glad to be able to share some of that with y’all.
What’s Our Content Strategy Presentation Like?
I hadn’t had the opportunity to formally meet Dan Steer before last week. He had some very lovely things to say about our presentation on Content Strategy.
What We’re Reading…
- Jabe Bloom turned me onto a new book, Design for Dasein by Thomas Wendt. It’s all about experience design making use of phenomenology. Fascinating read.
- I was turned onto the concept of Appreciative Inquiry by a few folks this week, which led me to reading more about the concept of idealized design as described by Russell Ackoff.
- Matt Cross has been a blogging machine of late and his post today on how we can do anything, but we can’t do everything is well timed.
- Speaking of experience design and phenomenology, Austin Govella has some really insightful tips on how to even schedule client workshops.
What We’re Listening To…
- Megan has the new Mark Ronson album on repeat.
- I’m digging the new Belle & Sebastian album.