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B822 Residential School : Creative Problem Solving for business

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Thursday, 5 June 2014, 05:26

There's a way to generate ideas: this is it.

I have doodles, images, stuff on the iPad and memories bursting to get out. All from the B822 'Creativity, Innovation and Change' Residential School I attended last week. To some it was a freak show or a circus; I felt right at home. I'd spent a year, full-time doing things like this at the School of Communication Arts.

1) Random Stimulus

It was a small, plaster lobster. It was smiling.

2) Play Word Association

We chucked words out

(Abiding by 'ground rules' in relation to anything goes, support etcsmile

3) Brainstorm

We took this further still. Ideas put in PostIts and stuck to some double-doors.

4) Cluster

We then, collectively, moved these ideas about until they formed a number of clusters. A cluster was then removed to another space where three A1 Flip Chart sheets of paper had been stuck together.

5) To make a mindmap. And here it is:

 

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I've been asked to bash my fingers flat with a tent-peg sledge hammer

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Monday, 29 Aug 2011, 08:11

Despite using the OU e-portfolio MyStuff for six months I am yet to upload a document, rather than pre-editing and pasting in notes.

As an exercise I am uploading the reading for Core Activity 2.4 on Reflective writing.

This serves several purposes:

a) testing the affordances of the technology - easy tagging and location of complete reports

b) collecting reports on a topic that interests me very much for future and extended use.

None of this changes my need to read, note take, take notes on the notes, reference other sources, see what other people say, blog it, then sleep on it (the best kind of 'cognitive housekeeping'.)

There is a set of 17 questions I use to analyse a dream. This usually reduces down to a core feeling or two. It intrigues me what my head delivers over night.

Could a dream be offered as evidence of reflection?

I cannot prove it happened. I cannot prove its contents, the places, people or events. Yet they are real. They exist. They have a material form do they not? We just have no way of copying them. Yet.

Now wonder Sussex University dropped the assessment of Learning Journals.

As soon as you set a parameter of length you diminish the stream of consciousness that is the mind at work; anything else is forced - considered: or is this the point?They are considered thoughts?

Reflecting I will enjoy. I live my life in the past.

Indeed I spend so much time writing about what I've done I sometimes wonder if I'm living my life in reverse.

Having to edit the stuff will be like hitting the fingers that are gently tapping away at this keyboard with a 1kg club lump wooden sledge hammer camping peg mallet.

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Design Museum

Web-Based Training (Part One)

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Friday, 2 Nov 2012, 07:19

DSC04712.JPG

Web-Based Training (WBT) (2000)

Margaret Driscoll

I bought this book in 2001. Nearly a decade on I am delighted how apt it remains, even if the term may now have been superseded by e-learning - while cyberlearning had currency for a few years too and before this we had 'interactive learning'.

Even a decade on I recommend the book.

Training and learning are in different camps, one supposing a component of applied engagement (health and safety, fixing photocopiers, burying uranium trioxide, driving a delivery van, making cars, selling phones, employee induction) while the other is essentially cognitive (though with its physicality in this kind of prestidigitation).

Yet we made ‘training programmes’ on things like cognitive behavioural therapy. Corporate and government clients had the money to do these things.

Driscoll’s definition of WBT is somewhat longer than Weller’s definition (2007) of e-learning (electronically enhanced learning with a large component of engagement on the Internet). A bit ‘wishy-washy’ my exacting Geography A’ Level teacher would have said.

Hardly a clear definition if it has a let out clause. But when was anything clear about what e-learning is or is not, or should be? The term remains a pig in a poke; its most redeeming factor being that it is a word, not a sentence, and fits that cluster of words that includes e-mail.

Web-based training Driscoll (2000) says should be:

  • Interactive
  • Non-linear
  • Easy to use graphic interface
  • Structured lessons
  • Effective use of multimedia
  • Attention to educational details
  • Attention to technical details
  • Learner control

I like that. I can apply it in 2011. I did.

I was reading ‘Web-Based Training’ (and using the accompanying CD-rom) in 2001 and then active in the development of learning, or knowledge distribution and communication websites for the NHS, FT Knowledge ... and best of all, Ragdoll, the home of Pob, Rosie and Jim, Teletubbies and the addictive pleasures of ‘The Night Garden.’

We may call ourselves students, mature students even, or simply post-graduates, but would we call ourselves ‘Adult Learners.’

It’s never a way I would have defined my clients, or rather their audiences/colleagues, when developing learning materials for them in the 1980s and 1990s. Too often they were defined as ‘stakeholders,’ just as well I saw them as people and wrote scripts per-the-script, as if for only one person.

That worked, producing for an umbrella term does not.

Adult Learning doesn’t conjure up innovative e-learning, perhaps because of the connotations Adult Learning has inelation to the catalogue of F.E. courses then comes through the door every July or August.

This definition of an ‘adult learner’ would apply to everyone doing an OU course surely?

The special characteristics of adult learners Driscoll (2000:14)

  • Have real-life experience
  • Prefer problem-centred learning
  • Are continuous learners
  • Have varied learning styles
  • Have responsibilities beyond the training situation
  • Expect learning to be meaningful
  • Prefer to manage their own learning

With some of these definitions baring more weight than others, don’t you think?

REFERENCE

And additional references used by Driscoll but not cited above:

References (Adult Learning)

Knowles (1994) Andragogy in action. Applying modern principles of adult learning.

Brookfield (1991) Understanding and facilitating adult learning

Cross (1992) Adults as learns: increasing participation and facilitating learning.

Freire (1970) A cultural action for freedom

Merriam and Caffarella (1991) Learning in adulthood

Kidd (1973) How adults learn

 

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