VisualsSpeak blog

One of the most exciting things about the North American Simulation and Gaming Association (NASAGA) conference for me was there were several sessions about using photographs in learning. Most of the time when I go to a conference, I am the only one doing a session like this. It was great to have other people who are designing, developing and using a variety of visual tools. It was also really nice to be a participant and be able to hear what others were sharing.

Beyond 1000 Words: Exploring the Magic of Pictures

This was the first concurrent session I attended. David Gouthro and Crystal Flaman created an overview of different ways to incorporate pictures for learning. They introduced us to a variety of tools that are available, and gave us the opportunity to participate in three different activities.

Expression Cards

The first activity was designed to get to know our table mates. It used Expression Cards, which are a set of 53 playing card sized images. We spread them out in the middle so we could see all the images, then each picked three to describe the following:

• a favorite childhood memory
• something that we love now
• a hope for the future

Each person at the table shared what they picked and why. We then discussed other ideas for using the cards. Our table decided to turn the cards over so we could not see them. We then randomly selected an image and talked about it in relationship to what we hoped to get out of the conference. It worked, the images sparked ideas for everyone.

Vision Board Collages

For the second activity each person got a piece of newsprint, and each table got a pile of photographs, magazines, scissors, and glue. We were instructed to create a vision of what we want in the future. The idea is to create a visual depiction of your dreams, then hang it somewhere so it can help you see your vision.

I’ve been doing this type of activity for many years in one form or another. Usually with a lot of thought, careful placement, and intricately cut out images. I noticed in the session I was able to very quickly identify key concepts, rip pictures out and stick them down in a few minutes. The result seems just as clear as the more labored versions of the past. I fully expect to get that new iPhone in the middle of the image to revolutionize my life.

The Visual Explorer

The Visual Explorer is a tool that comes from the Center for Creative Leadership, created by Chuck Palus and David Horth. It’s a set of 223 8 1/2 x 11 images. David Gouthro spread the images out on the floor down the hallway. We each selected a few images to represent the values of a high performing organization. We found partners to talk about our insights.

David and Crystal shared a whole range of resources and encouraged people to start using pictures for a wide variety of purposes. It was a great introduction to how easy it can be.

Looking @ Leadership: Visually and Interactively

Fran Kick started this session by showing us a video of ’something’. Over four minutes, it shifted and changed right up to the end when we got to see what we were looking at. It was a great exercise in perception and how our minds make associations and assumptions.

All this time, we had a set of photographs Fran has developed spread out on the floor in front of us. The set was created to teach high school students about leadership. It was created by identifying the key concepts in a number of leadership models, then selecting photographs to represent each one.

The photos are about 6 x 9 with rounded corners. They are placed on the floor randomly. We then walked among them several times to make sure we got to see them all. Then we selected a card that represented the leadership quality most important to us, and talked about the meaning of our choice in small groups.

The tool would best be used for groups learning about leadership theory. It’s a great way to cement the learning and to explore a variety of mainstream ideas about leadership. Using it with young people also gives them the opportunity to claim leadership qualities for themselves.

Other day-one sessions I heard about

Motivation Principles for Game Designers and Facilitators

This session gave participants the opportunity to explore with Thiagi six critical components to foster motivation: connection, choice, competence, confidence, collaboration, and captivation. I heard this session was particularly helpful for exploring the theoretical framework along with demonstrating classic Thiagi.

Poverty Reduction in Molansa: A Simulation

Sonia Riboux facilitated a simulation about poverty reduction. Participants had to manipulate multiple factors that contributed to economic results. Individuals had different amounts of resources to begin. I heard several people say it was very engaging.

Theatre of the Oppressed

While I didn’t get to participate this time, I have attended Stephanie Pollack’s sessions in the past, so I know this one was fantastic. The Great Game of Power was featured in the summer issue of SIMAGES. Many games and simulations address power, but few do it as directly as in Theatre of the Oppressed. Watching and listening to others describing how they see power when it is expressed with a few chairs and a table really shows you how dramatically perceptions can vary from person to person.

Coming soon:

Game night at NASAGA 2007. Day 2 concurrent sessions. What makes simulations magic? Technology day at the conference. nasaga2007

Opening Sessions and Overview

North American Simulation and Gaming Association (NASAGA) held their annual conference in Atlanta Georgia Oct 10-13. It was the first time I attended the conference, and I found it to be very warm and welcoming.

Surrounded by games!

Like any conference, there were more offerings than I could begin to attend. This one had me constantly trying to chose between sessions I thought were important for my professional development, and ones that just looked really fun.

There were games everywhere. From paper to cards, board games, and games on laptops. It was hard to take it all in. You had to pay attention, there were interesting things on tables in the hall, in the center of tables in sessions and meals. I saw groups in the lobby all hours of the day and night leaning over some kind of game. I had no idea there were so many, or people who knew how to play most anything you could name.

I suspect there is a conference within the conference that happens informally in the hallways and after hours. While I like games, I am really passionate about experiential methods. I’m not sure my brain works fast enough to really be a gamer. I think I might be too reflective. So I wasn’t sure about trying to join in the informal sessions. Would I be run out of the hotel as an impostor gamer? I was so tired from just the sessions, it was easy not to even have to take the risk to find out.

The Game of Magic: The Magic of Games

Bernie DeKoven was the first speaker. He talked about the concept of half-belief. Games and simulations work when there is enough connection to other things or experiences in our lives that they can create a half-belief. We sort of know they aren’t real, but when they engage us enough to hook us in a particular way, the game moves into a new space. The potential to learn something new emerges.

Call it What You Will: A Conceptual Framework for Training Games, Simulations, and Activities.

Silasailam ‘Thiagi’ Thiagarajan came to the stage. Thiagi has a particular kind of presence so no matter where he stands, it becomes a stage. I don’t think words can really describe the magic of Thiagi, you just really need to see him in action.

The thing I find most compelling about Thiagi is not only is he incredibly prolific (He creates a game everyday), but he also thinks deeply about how and why they work. He can structure complex concepts and lay them out in a way that they suddenly become clear to who ever choses to listen carefully. It takes focus.

He named four characteristics of games.

• Conflict (the challenge)
• Control (the rules)
• Closure (the end)
• Contrivance (the half-belief)

A simulation includes the above and adds:

• Correspondence (connection to real world)

A Training Game includes all of the above and adds:

• Competency (improvement from participation)

The Thiagi Group has created a glossary of learning activities . To help us learn about them, each person got a card with an activity and its definition. We had to mill around and ask as many people as possible about the activity they had on the card. I was surprised at how many I wasn’t familiar with. It’s so easy to become attached to our favorite methods and forget how many others are out there we can use.

In the next few days

I’ll be writing about the sessions I attended on each day of the conference, as well as the session I did with Peggy Pusch on What makes simulations magic? If you attended the conference and write about your experience, let me know so I can link to you. I’d love to hear about some of the other things I missed.

Other posts about the conference:

NASAGA 2007: Pictures everywhere, NASAGA 2007: Games, games everywhere , Game night at NASAGA 07 nasaga2007

Christine Martell, Principal of VisualsSpeak LLC, will be presenting at the 2007 NASAGA Conference (North American Simulation and Gaming Association) in Atlanta, Georgia. The Conference is being held October 10- 13, 2007 at the Crowne Plaza Hotel.

What makes simulations magic?

Margaret (Peggy) Pusch & Christine Martell

Come explore what makes simulations magic. We’ll start the process with photographs, bringing the visual and the verbal to the conversation. This session is about mining the wisdom in the room. What can we discover individually and collectively?

The Brandon Hall conference (IIL07) used Leverage Software to create a people map to help us plan who we might meet at the conference. I am in the center, and the pink arrow is pointing to a person standing on my head. Janet Clarey from Brandon Hall Research Center describes the system like this:

People with similar interests are closer to you and you can just hover your mouse of the pin and it’ll show you their profile. From there you can set up meetings, chat, send email, etc.

I took a look at this profile, and it is a guy from the Oil Industry. Hmmm. A Visual Communication professional and someone from Big Oil? Where is the bonding potential in this combination? I did notice he said he liked to make learning engaging, so maybe there’s something to this software.

Fast forward to the opening night, and I meet Olavur Ellefson. He tells me he is from the Faroe Islands. Being a geographically challenged US American, I have to ask more. Seems it is near Iceland and Greenland. Part of the UK out in the middle of the ocean, an island with 50,000 people. Luckily, his credit card has a map on it and he can show me where it is. I ask him if he lives on an iceberg. He assures me it is in the gulf stream, and the weather is merely “fresh”.

We talk a bit about the fact that I am presenting the next day with photographs, and he will present the following using a live simulation. We plan to attend each other’s sessions. He was kind enough to attend mine as part of the 3-D Cycle of Learning and Innovation group.

Getting ready to be an oil explorer

I arrive at the OilSim session, and we form oil company teams around laptops. Olavar tells us we are going to learn about the oil and gas industry, specifically about exploration. We dive right in with 200 million dollars and three oil exploration licenses for each team. I quickly realize I know very little about this world. I am working on a laptop, with two other people. The OilSim program allows us to manipulate variables, then the computer calculates the result of our choices.

We have investors and they don’t want us risking all their money on our own licenses. Our first challenge is to convince the other oil companies in the room to invest in our licenses and we have to invest in theirs. We talk to them, we have to learn about how to read the ocean floor maps to see how likely our areas are to have oil or gas, them ask them to farm in. We have to spend money to do surveys to find out more about the potential we have. We learn to read seismic maps.

After we farm-in (buying a piece of the exploration license) and accept farm-ins and get our holdings down to 60% (We are only allowed to keep 60% of our original licenses to diversify risk), we are ready to start drilling.

Apparently there are only a couple of companies that own all the oil rigs, so you have to see if they are available. Just wanting them is not enough. Much more demand than supply. There are also different kinds of rigs, for different depths and purposes. Each one costs a lot of money per day. Do we need an expensive one? Do any of the names make any sense? Yikes, this is a whole new world.

After randomly picking an oil rig, we then need other service providers to help us. Who knew there were so many people involved in this? And they had strange names that made no sense. But we picked them anyway.

Finally we are ready to drill. But wait, not so easy. You have to look at your seismic map to see where you are most likely to find something. Then you drill. But wait, you have to test the well…. or was that after we hit something? Yea, we hit gas! Then it cost us more to get it out than we make. Boo! But we can drill again into the same field. More gas. We start making the big bucks.

OK, so our team had boatloads of oil. We only drilled two wells and make a 126% return. Not bad. I’m contemplating switching careers.

What did we learn?

A lot. I had no idea the oil industry was a combination of competition and collaboration. I knew there were city sized platforms in the ocean, but I didn’t know oil rigs moved. I was totally clueless about how any of the industry worked. Kind of like my knowledge of the Faroe islands.

We spent an hour. It has been a week and I was able to write this post. I think I got most of it right? So not only did I learn new things in the moment, but I actually remember them. Can’t say that about a lot of learning.

This was problem-based simulation learning with live facilitation. Very effective. Olavar helped us when we were stuck, but just gave us clues about where we might go next. It is usually played over several days and multiple times. I can see how you would learn very quickly. It was originally developed to teach high school students about the industry, but now it’s mostly for teaching oil industry employees about the various facets of the industry.

I was engaged. And I had no prior interest in learning about the oil industry.

Wow. If only all training could be so effective. I really look forward to seeing what Olavar and Simprentis come up with next.

Oh yea, the computer was right. Olavar and I did have a lot of similar interests around learning. Who would have guessed?

Christine Martell, Principal of VisualsSpeak LLC, will be presenting at the 2007 Brandon Hall Innovations in Learning Conference on Tuesday September 25, 2007, 1:30 - 3:00 PM.

Using Photographs to Facilitate Learning

What is innovation in learning? Explore your ideas and what you’ve been learning at the conference using photographs to start the conversation. This experiential session will tap into the wisdom of participants using visuals to spark stories and to think about innovations in learning technologies.

Hope to see you there!