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E-Learning Provocateur By Ryan Tracey - Education & Personal Development
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L&D conferences in Australia & New Zealand in 2025 – E-Learning Provocateur
Happy new year! And welcome to my 2025 instalment of L&D conferences down under. Last year I included events from the land of the long white cloud, and after receiving positive feedback for doing so, I've included them once more in the spirit of Antipodean collaboration. If you're aware of any other L&D conferences in…
When life gives you lemons – E-Learning Provocateur
This year started not with a bang but a whimper. For the first time ever – through sheer luck, I assure you – my role was made redundant. Not that it was a shock. I was reading the signs leading up to that point, more accurately than I dared to imagine, so to that extent…
Represent – E-Learning Provocateur
One of my pet hates is closed captions not matching what's being said. It's painfully obvious to me that whoever published the video let the robot auto-generate the text – which is brilliantly helpful – but they left it at that. I appreciate the time and effort it takes to manually edit closed captions, but…
People use apps – E-Learning Provocateur
I watched The Internship again last night, and while it's cheesy and oh-so-predictable, I appreciated it much more the second time around. The movie depicts a team of interns at Google competing against their peers to create an app. After fruitless brainstorming in a room, they decide to take a break and go out on…
TV star – E-Learning Provocateur
When LinkedIn informed me that I'd been selected to answer a seemingly random question, it reminded me of being selected by Twitter for a brief survey, or winning a prize on one of those dodgy scratchcards. I duly ignored similar notifications thereafter, until one of the questions caught my eye: You want to create educational…
The LXD spectrum – E-Learning Provocateur
This time last year I wrote a blog post that ruffled some feathers. It was called A slight misnomer and I used it as a vehicle to propose the term "Learner Experience Designer" instead of "Learning Experience Designer" to better represent the nature of the role as I saw it. While I received loads of…
Skill shift – E-Learning Provocateur
Skills-based learning is on everyone's lips at the moment, but is it the latest flavour of the month? I say no. Rather, it heralds a fundamental shift in the way we approach organisational development. I was delighted to discuss the topic with David James on his podcast.
The tortoise and the h@r3 – E-Learning Provocateur
The singularity is near. Researchers from Tsinghua University have created a virtual hospital in which all the doctors, nurses and patients are AI-powered avatars capable of autonomous interaction. They simulate the end-to-end process of consultation, examination, diagnosis, treatment and follow-up. According to the Global Times: "AI doctors can treat 10,000 patients in just a few…
Thunderstruck – E-Learning Provocateur
When it's raining, good news can hit you like a bolt of lightning. That's what happened when I was informed I'd won this year's Internet Time Alliance Jay Cross Memorial Award. To say I'm honoured would be a ridiculous understatement. The award's dedicatee – Jay Cross – is the godfather of informal learning; the award…
Shift the odds – E-Learning Provocateur
I bet you've heard the term Human Centered Design a lot. And I suspect you've heard other terms too... like Design Thinking (DT), User Experience Design (UXD), Customer Experience Design (CXD), and Learner Experience Design (LXD). They're all variations of a theme. That theme is that everyone provides a service to someone, and to improve…
So hot right now – E-Learning Provocateur
The hottest topics among L&D geeks right now are artificial intelligence and skills-based learning, so it was my pleasure to co-host the latest IDeL Meetup to discuss the intersection of the two trends with peers in the profession. I promised to share a summary of our proceedings with those who couldn't make it, so here…
A super skill in the age of AI – E-Learning Provocateur
In the age of artificial intelligence, software can crunch numbers in a heartbeat and an agent can automate manual processes, but are they crunching the right numbers and automating the right processes? To answer this question, we need to ensure the technology is solving the right things, and solving them right. That's the premise of…
Soft landing – E-Learning Provocateur
Muhammad Tahir Rabbani risked poking the bear on LinkedIn when he asked the Learning & Development Professionals Club: How can we differentiate between hard and soft skills? His question was serendipitous because I had been giving that very question some serious thought, and where I landed was that the successful application of hard skills can…
The beauty of customer education – E-Learning Provocateur
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and I beheld much to admire in a recent podcast in which Hayley Curcio, Head of MECCAversity, shared the iconic retailer's approach not only to training its workforce but also to educating its customers. The host Marnina Diprose set the scene aptly: As an expert "we assume…
Training at scale – E-Learning Provocateur
"Those who say it can not be done should get out of the way of those who are doing it." Who said that? Was it George Bernard Shaw? Elbert Hubbard? Or is it one of those mysterious "old Chinese proverbs"...? Regardless, in my experience it applies to the scaling of training across organisations, and I…
Similar but different – E-Learning Provocateur
I for one welcome the Australian Government's proposal to establish a National Skills Passport. Tabled last year via the Working Future whitepaper, the idea is "to help people more easily demonstrate their skills to employers and reduce barriers to lifelong learning." Bravo. But of course the devil is in the detail, and so far there…
L&D conferences in Australia & New Zealand in 2024 – E-Learning Provocateur
G'day & Kia Ora to the new year! As my greeting suggests, this year's instalment of conference alerts is an Antipodean affair. Due to popular demand – well, two people – I've added events from the land of the long white cloud into the mix. If you're aware of any other L&D conferences in Australia…
Think different – E-Learning Provocateur
It's about that time again when I look back on my blogging year and choose a theme that connects the breadth of topics that I managed to cover. This time I've borrowed "Think different" from Apple's advertising campaign at the turn of the millennium. While the adverbial in this phrase omits the "‑ly" suffix in…
See no evil – E-Learning Provocateur
In this research study, strategy consultants who used GPT-4 as a tool to assist them with "inside the frontier" tasks (within the capability of AI) performed significantly better than their counterparts did in terms of quality and productivity. Hence for such tasks, the authors called AI a quality and productivity booster. However, those who used…
Reality bites – E-Learning Provocateur
Evidence-based practice is the darling of Learning & Development geeks. And with good reason. Amongst all the myths and barrow pushing, not to mention the myriad ways to approach any given problem, empiricism injects a sorely needed dose of confidence into what we do. Friends of my blog will already know that my undergraduate degree…
The definition of insanity – E-Learning Provocateur
Way back in the pre-pandemic era, I proposed a solution to fix our senseless compliance training – or to be more accurate, its management – yet it remains broken. The central premise of my argument was that it's inefficient to repeat the same mandatory training when you change jobs within the same regulatory framework, so…
A slight misnomer – E-Learning Provocateur
I confess that whenever I see someone has cited their job title as "Learning Experience Designer" my first reaction is skepticism. As the joke goes, a data scientist is a statistician who lives in San Francisco. So too at times, it seems a learning experience designer is an instructional designer who lives in Sydney. Aggrandising…
The point of preference – E-Learning Provocateur
I often miss webinars. That might be because it was delivered at 3:00am local time, or during a manic working day, or after hours when frankly I'm not in the mood. So I'm grateful when the event is recorded and I can play it back later. But, more often than not, I don't do that…
Rubber bands and chewing gum – E-Learning Provocateur
Are you a hacker? I don't mean the type of person who leaks the diplomatic cables of the United States government (but curiously, not of the Russian or Ecuadorian governments). Nor do I mean the heroes who disrupt the education of children. No – by "hacker" I mean the type of person who gets the…
Ice cold – E-Learning Provocateur
Ice breaker questions – some of us love them, the rest of us loathe them. They typically bear no relevance to the topic at hand, and if it's even mildly personal, I'm too busy scrambling for something interesting to say instead of listening to what my colleagues are saying. But I can see why trainers…
Not a cat – E-Learning Provocateur
My favourite episode of Blackadder is the one in which Baldrick burns the manuscript of Dr Samuel Johnson's dictionary. As Edmund scrambles to re-write the tome, Baldrick contributes a definition of "dog": Not a cat. While his definition is comically inadequate, it's also unassailably accurate. Indeed a dog is not a cat; so if you…
Everything, everywhere, all at once – E-Learning Provocateur
The title of this blog post is borrowed from Deloitte's summary of the priorities of C-suite executives (which in turn is borrowed from the Daniels). Why they chose the phrase to represent their findings is clear: "When asked to choose their focus areas among the 10 core business priorities broadly categorized across growth, purpose, people,…
L&D conferences in Australia in 2023 – E-Learning Provocateur
Has our conference attendance rate returned to pre-pandemic levels? I'm not sure. I attended several last year, and while there seemed to be plenty of attendees at each one, most combined L&D with HR to bump up the numbers. Which is fine, given they're allied professions, so long as the content pitched to the latter…
Indecent proposals – E-Learning Provocateur
Another year has flown by, and once again I'm pleasantly surprised by the number of articles I managed to post in-between the trials and tribulations of life. In December I like to review each one with a view to identifying a common theme. This time around, I've noticed that I – perhaps more directly than…
Tree climbers – E-Learning Provocateur
I respect Malcolm Gladwell as a thinker, but I'm disappointed by his Grand Unified Theory for fixing higher education that he espouses in an episode of the Revisionist History podcast titled The Tortoise and the Hare. I won't spoil the surprise for those who haven't yet heard it, but suffice to say it's born out…
Double defence – E-Learning Provocateur
In a past life I worked with a fellow named Jim who was very good at what he did. As what I would term a "trainer", he was well versed in face-to-face delivery and widely respected in the business as a subject matter expert. He had also racked up quite a tenure at the company,…
Higher Assessment – E-Learning Provocateur
I find it strange when a blogger doesn't approve my comment. I consider comments the life blood of my own blog, and whether they be positive or negative, classy or rude, they all add to the diversity of the conversation. If your fragile ego can't handle that, don't blog. I recently submitted a constructive comment…
Digital Learning conferences in Australia in 2021 – E-Learning Provocateur
Let's try that again. Just as we were gearing up for another year's worth of cutting edge insights and showcases, the coronavirus had other ideas. While some of the digital learning conferences I had listed for 2020 went ahead as planned, others pivoted to virtual delivery, while the rest were ironically postponed or cancelled. In…
Great and small – E-Learning Provocateur
English is a funny language. Coloured by countless other languages over centuries of war, politics, colonialism, migration and globalisation, many words have been lost, appropriated or invented, while others have changed their meaning. In Australian English for example, fair dinkum means "true" or "genuine". Linguaphiles speculate the phrase originated in 19th Century Lincolnshire, where "dinkum"…
Skills of the present – E-Learning Provocateur
The meaning of the phrase skills of the future is variable. Like so many other terms in our profession, its definition depends on who you ask. According to my own heuristic, a "skill of the future" is a capability for which demand will grow disproportionately over the next 5 years. (While the future extends beyond…
Time pilot – E-Learning Provocateur
There was an aspect I omitted from my previous post, Space invaders, in which I covered the spacing effect as a means of maximising long-term retention. Zsolt Olah picked it: interleaving and – ironically! – I judged it a bridge too far to include in the same post and so decided to split it out…
L&D conferences in Australia in 2022 – E-Learning Provocateur
Little did I know in March last year that the Learning & Development Leadership Summit would be the only in-person event that I would attend until the L&D Symposium in November! The summit was held in downtown Sydney – energised by the hustle and bustle of the city, and convenient to boot. In contrast, the…
Space invaders – E-Learning Provocateur
Sometimes, out of the blue, one of my blog posts really hits the mark. Such was the case recently with Great and small in which I had a go at redefining our pedagogical terminology. While the post only attracted a few comments – cheers Neil, Dani and Rob – my friend Helen Blunden observes that…
Semantics, semantics – E-Learning Provocateur
I dislike grammar jokes, pedants, and Oxford commas. That's my jovial way to end a year that will be remembered as a tough one for a long time to come. I found blogging a welcome distraction, so much so that in addition to my annual list of e-learning conferences in Australia (which took a beating!)…