VisualsSpeak blog

I was reading a post on Katie Kondrath’s get Fresh Minds blog, Being too busy to think is actually an excuse. She apparently has had a Fall like mine where she has been traveling and over-busy. She decided it was only excuses that kept her from doing what needed to be done. I’m not so sure. She goes on to notice a couple of things that have seemed very true to me lately.

• creativity is a mental function that reacts negatively to stress. The more stress someone has in their life, the less likely they are to be creative.
• The more people have on their plate, the less they want to spend time exploring possibilities. It becomes more about getting things done than “seeing what possibilities are out there.”

For Katie, it has been a matter of forging ahead by writing lists. That often works for me too, but I had gotten beyond my ‘will-do-it list’ state. This time, it has been a matter of cleaning up enough of the messes piling up to have the physical and mental space to move ahead.

When I made the choice to do 7 different conference presentations in 8 weeks, I was thinking about them separately. After all , it was just 6 trips, and only 3 were cross country. What I didn’t really figure was the impact of never really adjusting to the time changes, and the accumulation of things that wouldn’t get done when I dropped home for a only few days.

My blogs have suffered the most. They’re the easiest thing not to get to, and the hardest thing to think about when I am overtired. As I attended more conferences, I thought I would have more things to blog about, but what I found is I needed more time between them than I got in order to think. I now understand I need reflection time to process what I am experiencing and learning in order to write about it.

I did help launch a new blog for the Society for Intercultural Education Training and Research (SIETAR-USA). It was the first time I have tried to start a blog in conjunction with an event, in this case, the annual conference. While I have blogged about conference sessions before, it has been my impressions and responses posted after the fact. This time I tried to capture the essence of the sessions as they were happening to convey to other members who did not attend. This was MUCH harder. I have a new appreciation for reporters. It takes a lot more time to take detailed notes and then try to construct something from them that works in the written form.

For those of you who are interested in Intercultural Communication, there were some very interesting sessions you will want to read about listed below, as well as a number of other posts from the conference.

• Keynote with Dr Mitch Hammer The Courage to Converse: The Role of Culture in Conflict and Crisis Events
• Fireside chat with Dr Raymond Reyes
• Beyond Iraq: Intercultural training in the military and the emerging role of interculturalists

I’m slowly returning to my usual routines. I have read most of the posts in my Google Reader. I have finally unpacked and put all the piles of clothes away that got dropped in various locations. I’ve recycled the mountains of magazines and junk mail that waited for me. I wish I had a marked as read button for junk mail…. and a report as spam that would make it all go away.

What else has helped?

• Lots of Heat and Eat food from the health food store (including Thanksgiving)
• Scheduling meetings back to back on certain days so I have uninterrupted time to catch up on others
• Allowing myself to sleep in
• Reconnecting with friends I have been neglecting
• Allowing myself to think and process without jumping to doing

Do you have any other suggestions about how to get going again?

Innovation in learning was the theme of the Brandon Hall conference (IIL07) in Santa Clara this week. I’ll be writing a series of posts on a variety of sessions I attended, and will start with the one I facilitated.

Facilitating Learning with Photographs

The ninety minute session started with everyone selecting photographs to make an individual image on a piece of paper in response to the question: “What is innovation in learning?”

We then looked for patterns in the images. These visual patterns tend to be repeated over and over by an individual, regardless of the content. So you will tend to use the same ‘visual voice’ regardless of the situation. Knowing what you are most likely to do is helpful, especially when designing since sometimes your particular voice will be effective in conveying your intended message and sometimes it will not.

Conversations about innovation in learning

The participants worked in four small groups of 3-5 people. Each person got a chance to tell the story of their individual image based on the question “What is innovation in learning?”.

Then the members of each group were charged with coming together to create a presentation based on a shared vision of “What is innovation in learning?” for the rest of the participants. Each group had the same photographs to select from and were left to their own devices on on how they would go about the process.

The tape group

This group made sure everything was taped down, and cleaned up all the images at the end and put them back into the packages. They were so good at clean up , that the notes I took about their image got lost in the process. I remember a few key things about it. Perhaps one of the group members will add more to the comments?

• you need to include people who are different
• being on target
• expansive
• wine- the adult carrot
• willingness to climb in unconventional ways
• learning happens in relationship and with others
• needs to be all tied together
• using old things in new ways

3-D Cycle of Learning and Innovation

This group taped the background into a cylinder and made a three dimensional structure.

The foundation is people, who line the bottom. Need people for learning. Move up into building blocks, letting ideas follow. There are boats, fishermen, fishing rods, and the finished product. Going from A-Z, connecting links and ideas. There is measurement and growth. a bridge connecting back to the beginning, it’s never ending, you keep looking for how you can improve.

Labeling for understanding group

This group wanted to make sure everyone could understand the various aspects of their image, so they added labels to the sections. The group members had different ideas, and came from different directions. Having different sections created space for various voices.

• Be Wise
  • bringing in wisdom
• Have Fun
• Come together
• Stand Out
  • be innovative, do your own thing
• Be Free
  • think outside the box, all ideas, inspirations
• Re-Think
  • have other concepts
• Believe
  • extreme goals, but be lighter

With the different ideas, they had to come up with a central common theme, which they could then stem out from. Standing out served as the common ground. Then the other sections were added. At first it was hard for the more linear thinkers, but they kept building on top of things and it started making sense. It became circular and democratized as they started trusting one another.

One image group

This group talked for most of the time. They had two discussions before deciding on their image at the end of the time alloted. First they talked about recurring themes in the individual images:

• Learn in new ways
• Levels of learning - branching
• Growth
• Brain/Mind Burst
• Sharing of innovative thought

The other conversation they had was about going back to why they came to the conference:

• The creative energy
• Bringing creative ideas to life
• A variety of innovative techniques to enhance final productivity
• Learn how to use new products and services to enhance learning experience for learners
• Learning from others who are doing what I am doing

The team talked a lot about growth and mind burst. Kept looking at it to find one strong image that they could branch ideas out from. Some were similar and some different. Thinking outside the box became the visual with tangents. Innovative growth, going where you’ve never gone before. Interaction, with the different branches from different people. Clients and others at different levels enhancing learning experience. Learning from each other. Innovative thought, new ways, diversity of thought. Innovation of ideas.

What did we learn?

Throughout the conference the theme of ‘it’s not about the technology, it’s about the learning’ kept repeating itself. Jay Cross, author of Informal Learning, in his closing keynote speech reiterated this by using his participation in the VisualsSpeak presentation as an example. Jay liked my session, because it was low-tech and because it allowed a group of strangers to get to the underlying issues in an innovative way and in less than ninety minutes.

The VisualsSpeak ImageSet is a low-tech (Alright it’s really a no-tech tool. We’re still in denial.) tool for sparking innovative conversations. Nothing to plug-in, no fancy bells and whistles, and it doesn’t require an advanced degree to operate. It is a great tool, but it is just that; a tool. The real value is that using our tool gets people talking in ways that they normally wouldn’t. Using the tool won’t make you innovative or design better learning, it’s how you use the tool and how you apply the ideas that the process facilitates.

The same holds true for technology. If we don’t design an effective program, no amount of technology is going to make it good. It doesn’t matter how cool or innovative the technology is. The underlying teaching is the important part. Technology is only the vehicle that delivers the learning and makes it available to a wide audience. The high-tech aspects of the tool mean absolutely nothing without the underlying foundation of good course content.

As trainers, course designers, e-learning specialists, etc, we cannot allow ourselves to be lulled into thinking that technology is going to solve the problems for us. A thirty year-old bicycle will get you two blocks down the street just as well as a Ferrari. The real challenge is knowing how and when to use the different technologies to deliver the most impact.

I would love to hear from others about what is innovation in learning.

• How do you go about innovating?
• What have you heard about that you think is innovative?