Michelle Stage suggests a very subtle and nonthreatening approach to gauging the learning in the classroom: a game called Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down, Thumbs in the Middle.
Who does an abeyance in ethics really hurt?
Some entrepreneurs in the candy industry offer some sweet ideas from their wisdom (teeth) to help you keep and improve your performance in performance consulting.
Life is too short to be too concerned with things you can't control.
One company uses Sony PSP units for their staff training. What a novel idea! Using gaming platforms for game playing!
Two long minutes passed since we had changed radio frequencies and I hadn't heard from my wingmen. We were approaching the Iraqi border and my flight lead still had not checked me in. I was getting nervous.
Having no radio contact at 20,000 feet and separated from my fellow pilots by 10 miles on a night combat mission in hostile territory was a dire situation. What if I lost my engine or was engaged by ground fire? How could I call for help?
I love my job. That's almost an understatement. I love learning and am constantly doing so (mostly voluntarily). And I've been fortunate in my career to share that passion with so many others.
Because our company does a lot of train-the-trainers, we have a lot of ...
In the last few years, we in the U.S. have all heard a lot about "trillion dollar" problems - health care reform, bank bailouts, automaker rescues, etc. However, not much is being said about the trillion dollar training problem.
Last year, organizations spent $134 billion dollars on training in the U.S, according to the American Society for Training and Development. However, only 15-30 percent of learning transfers into actual use on the job to improve performance. That means that somewhere around $100 billion of it was wasted! And that is only the direct cost of training - not the salaries of the people who sat in the classroom. That alone is a huge and alarming number.
But it gets worse.
People learn through interaction and actually working with the material they're supposed to be learning. Most people do not readily retain information given by a talking head. So, is that you? Are you merely a talking head? Or are those in your classroom the lucky few who enjoy the training and are able to walk away knowing what they need to know?
I strive to strike a reasonable balance between reading blogs, books, and peer-reviewed articles. Different topics flair up in popularity (such as web 2.0 and now social media) and then fade. A few concepts have longevity such as "How effective is technology enhanced learning when contrasted with traditional classrooms?" Questions like this are boring. And unanswerable given the tremendous number of variables involved in teaching online and in classrooms.
I'm firmly convinced of the following:
