Happy Wednesday!
I just switched jobs. Previously I was Sr Manager of L&D over at T-Mobile. Now I’m Sr Manager of AI Enablement at Tanium. To my new coworkers joining in from Tanium, welcome, here’s a recent episode explaining what this is all about. Enjoy. To all my T-Mobile friends, do keep in touch.
The swag is real, the lightning is AI enabled
I was having lunch with a friend and former coworker, Jimmy. He made the point that with AI, NotebookLM Gemini Notebook specifically, folks can generate a mind map and that is hilarious because it entirely defeats the point of mind maps which is to map out *your thoughts. Modality, or the delivery format of your learning, has a huge effect on what you learn and how you learn it. I’ve found that more organizations are saying just add a video because we can! It takes minutes to whip something up on Synthesia or similar products. After two decades of earnest debunking & scientific evidence the learning style idea persists among learning professionals and the general public. People overwhelmingly report that they are visual learners. So, there has been a glut of video learning. YouTube and TikTok are partly to blame for being way too good at their jobs.
Google built the ultimate education tool with Gemini Omni, then forgot to tell us
Gemini Omni is an excellent tool for creating video and well worth your time as an educator. However, pieces like this one which are breathless about the amazing transformative power of video add to the learning styles problem. Video is a passive medium and while I love it and it has a firm place in my arsenal of learning approaches people will often mistake watching a video for learning. Videos are great at conveying emotion and stories activating your episodic memory but they’re not great for procedural knowledge. I’ve encountered excellent AI explainer videos which aren’t even slop that look like they had a $40,000 budget that fail to meet their own learning objectives because it was the wrong medium to begin with. If you’re going to learn to skydive a video might help with your nerves but at some point you have to jump from a plane and your time isn’t best spent with video.
Four Things Every Learning Professional Can Take from Sports Coaching
I think sometimes in corporate learning we could be accused of oversimplifying things. There are a lot of lessons from other parts of life which could inform our daily work. This is an excellent example. I like that video can be a tool for giving feedback in addition to filming static learning objects. It’s so cheap and fast now there’s no reason why it can’t be in the ecosystem. This article beautifully distills powerful lessons from sports coaching. It highlights how feedback-rich environments and simple tools like video can revolutionize skill development beyond just content delivery. We shouldn’t be relentless about serving peoples learning styles or preferences because we already know it will not lead to better learning outcomes. Instead, as this article points out, we should be relentless about retention of skills and transfer to new environments and for that we have to have clear judgement about which modalities serve our audience and their learning goals best.
NSFW but maybe with some ear buds in, it can be a perfect cleanser after a long learning style discussion.
If you work in L&D this is a must read book. This book contains actionable research to reach people and help them learn regardless of the modality. I personally enjoy the chapters on learning evaluation.
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