Learn and Lead

Ken Allan tagged me to a rather unique meme, the 4 R’s Meme: Favorite Posts. He asks those tagged to select 4 of their favourite posts from their own blog, one from each of the categories: Rants, Resources, Reflections and Revelations.

The posts are then listed with a brief summary on each describing:

* why it was important,

* why it had lasting value or impact,

* how you would update it for today.

The intrepid bloggers are to tag all of their selected posts with the label postsofthepast and then select five (or so) other bloggers to tap with this meme.

Rant: Now that I look back, my first post was actually a rant about job sites encouraging attrition. Those were the heady days of jobs available dime a dozen, competition undercutting each other offering ridiculous salaries to jump jobs. There was some interesting discussion in the comments on this post. Today the situation is a little different. At this time jobs are not so easily available and salaries offered are more realistic. Well, at least until the economy booms again and we fall into the same trap of head hunting.

Resources: I have tried hard to induct some of my team members to blog about their learning. It proved harder than I thought. I looked around to see if there were other learning professionals in India blogging. My first list of top 10 had 4 blogs that weren’t really updated in a while. I did however over a period of time manage to identify more blogs by learning professionals in India. So my recent post listing the blogs by learning professionals in India is a useful resource post. I will continue to update this list.

Reflections: Instructional design is about creating learning experiences and not ‘writing content’. This was a valuable comment in my post Death of the Instructional Designer. I also reflected on what I believe are the Instructional Designers competencies.

Revelations: I have been experimenting with Blogger and Wordpress and use both, well actually all three (Blogger, self hosted Wordpress and Wordpress.com). I wrote a post comparing different these blogging platforms. While writing this post it dawned on me that the platform doesn’t matter. It’s the CONTENT that matters.

I tag following people to continue this meme.

Viplav Baxi

Sumeet Moghe

Rupa Rajagopalan

Dave Ferguson

Jeff Cobb

Catherine Lombardozzi

Last year I wrote a brief post about tech support meme and posted a hilarious video. I recently came across a whole book about, well not exactly tech support memes though some of stories are about tech support, Indian BPO stories. BPO-Sutra is compiled and edited by Sudhindra Mokhasi and he is already calling for more stories for a volume II.

So do instructional designers have any stories to build the elearning or instructional design meme? Here are two to start with. Would love to hear more from you. Either leave your story as a comment or post a link to your blog post with the story.

 

ID Meme #1

This was way back sometime in the mid-nineties. We had received a huge contract to develop elearning courses from probably the largest catalog content provider at that time. So we ramped up quickly going from a team of 15 to 200 very quickly. Instructional Design was still new to India and getting good writers was hard. But we had a strong training program and very good reviewers to parse every document. During a team meeting, one of the senior reviewers very seriously suggested that we need to include geography lessons in our refresher course on writing scenarios for the American audience. Curious we asked what prompted her to suggest that. Seriously she took out a script and read out the scenario. I don’t remember the exact words but it went something like this. “You are working as a system administrator in an NGO dedicated to the cause of tiger preservation in Alaska.” We all cried laughing that day.

 

ID Meme #2

This is a more recent one. One of the courses was returned by an American trainer saying that he can’t teach the course as he feared he might get sued because of the examples used in the course. The course was on using SQL in relational databases. The much feared example was a SQL query to identify employees above the age or 60 years in the employee master table. Both the instructional designer and the subject matter expert were wondering what the fuss was all about. It is only an example to demonstrate conditions in an SQL query, not realizing that while in India we can get away with seeking almost any info about the employees, sensitivities in the USA is a lot different.

 

So what’s your elearning / instructional design meme? Share your story here.

Rupa Rajagopalan tagged me in the ongoing meme. Here are 7 things you don’t need to know about me:

1. I once went jet skiing in Miami bay and the jet ski overturned. I don’t know how to swim but fortunately I was wearing a life jacket. As I hung on to the overturned jet ski, a boat came along. As I waved for help, the lady on the boat started clicking my photographs instead of throwing me a line and pulling me out of the water.
   
2. My favourite English movie is My Cousin Vinny. I think I have seen it multiple times, but I don’t own a VCD/DVD of the movie.
   
3. My first car was a 1967 Morris Minor. It didn’t have a driver side door handle and had to be opened from outside with the help of a screw driver. I was driving a car that was as old as me!!!
   
4. I am not sticking to my diet and am steadily gaining much of the weight I lost a year ago. My wife is very upset with me for this.
   
5. I watch far more television than I really should.
   
6. I buy management books but never seem to read them completely. I really really should complete them!!!
   
7. My first computer was state of the art 8088 CPU, 768KB RAM with two 5 ¼" floppy drives and no hard disk. I self-learned Pascal, C, dBase and Clipper on it.
   

 

So there you go people. You have been armed with such immense knowledge about me. Make good use of it J.

I tag Taruna Goel, Viplav Baxi, Archana Narayan, and Mousumi Ghosh for continuing this meme.