“Monkey mind” is a Buddhist term for the restless, distractible state where attention jumps around: impatient, scattered, eager for the shortcut. None of us want those words to describe us—but research suggests that’s exactly how many people read on the web. And it’s often how online learners a...
I recently tried a video game from a genre I never knew about – a roguelite game called Returnal – and I was surprised by the powerful effects it had on my motivation and willingness to persist through its high level of difficulty and frequent failure experiences. Returnal is infamous for its b...
My instructional design philosophy I’ve developed over decades as an instructional designer is one I call “Design for Forgetting.” It’s an alternative to the typical approach to workplace training that I think solves a lot of persistent problems in workplace training.
The Typical Approach to Workp
...When I was a young high school teacher, I remember reading an article drawing a distinction between “activity” teachers and “outcome” teachers. Activity teachers were the ones who planned their lessons full of engaging activities, but who didn’t think deeply about the learning outcomes that they’r...
I have an 8 year old who’s a good reader but would rather spend his time doing anything else — especially pursuing his interests in karate, friends, and video games. His homework from school is to read 25 minutes per day and it’s a challenge to find high‐interest reading materials for him at his gra...
Whenever we build a one‐size‐fits‐all learning experience for all students to move through independently, we should think about how the learner will get personalized feedback when they get a wrong answer. We want to present them with authentic challenges that will reveal whether they have mastered t...
I’ve written before about my admiration for the WebQuest as a learner‐centric, active learning activity that can promote critical thinking through groupwork and authentic methods of representing learning. These were all the rage when I earned my M.Ed. in 2003 but have sadly been bumped aside in fa...
We instructional designers are trained to think about learning objectives from the very beginning of a project, to design backwards from the outcomes we want to produce in learners, then think about the specific content and activities we want to build and deliver.
Non‐educators think about this...
Behind my mild mannered instructional designer persona I become a fire‐breathing singer/songwriter/performer when the full moon rises, and I’ve been thinking for years about the absolute best way to store my chord and lyric charts so I have them with me everywhere, ready to perform whenever the oppo...