Ignite, Interact, and Engage: Maximizing the Learning Outcome Presented by Sharon Morris Director of Library Development & Innovation, Colorado State Library morris.sharon@gmail.com Paul Signorelli Writer/Trainer/Consultant Paul Signorelli & Associates paul@paulsignorelli.com ALA Annual Conference June 24, 2012 Anaheim Sponsored by ALA Learning Round Table #ala12soclearn Since we’re a stone’s throw away from Disneyland, we might as well put ourselves into the right frame of mind here and draw from the masters of engagement across the street. When we think about learning, we need to be thinking about something so fun, so dynamic, and so successful that everyone wants to join us rather than seeing what we offer and what we do as something to be endured.

Ignite It starts from the moment we arrive, as we hope you noticed when you walked in the room this morning and saw that we were waiting for you rather than hiding from you.

Interact It continues with a sense that no one—absolutely no one—is going to sit this one out on the sidelines as an inactive or inattentive observer.

And it continues, from the initial to the final moments, with a sense of engagement that never lets up. Engage

Setting the Stage All too often, we enter onsite or online learning situations where we feel as if we’ve walked onto an empty set. We know something is going to happen, but there’s no sign that anyone is ready for us or that the set is even designed for the purpose that drew us there in the first place. So let’s make sure that doesn’t happen this morning. Let’s look around the room we’re in, ask ourselves whether it’s set properly for a first-rate learning experience that ignites and engages the learner in each of us. Please take two minutes and rearrange the area around you in away way that you believe will make it more accommodating for you in your role as a learner.

Livening It Up Now let’s up the ante a bit and really bring this place to life. Taking another two minutes, do anything with the tools and materials you have at hand to brighten up the room. Make it fun. Decorate it—and yourselves. Our goal is to create something memorable, something that will make this a learning experience that makes a difference to you and those you serve because you didn’t immediately put it out of mind the moment you left the room.

Summary #1 And there you have it: An example of experiential learning. The point here is that studies show we learn better if we are in stimulating environments, if we are active rather than passive, and if the learning experience is memorable—or, in the current jargon, “sticky.” Your thoughts and observations?

Onsite-Online Collaboration Any of us involved in training-teaching-learning knows there is real magic in the power of the room whether it’s a physical space or a virtual learning space. And as we see Twitter and other social media tools more and more seamlessly being incorporated into our learning spaces, we begin to realize that the blending of those onsite-online spaces is increasingly important. If we embrace rather than fight the use of social media tools and the devices that support them, we break down barriers to learning and find ourselves immersed in a far more engaging world of learning than any of us could have anticipated 10 or 20 years ago. So let’s live by the very example we’re attempt to create here: Let’s open this session up a bit by encouraging those who are interested to follow and participate via the hashtag on this slide: #ala12soclearn, for ALA 2012 Conference, Social Learning. #ala12soclearn

Expanding Our Concept of the Room If we use a tool like TweetDeck, we not only acknowledge Twitter and other social media tools as part of our playing field, but we also use them to ignite, interact, and engage and significant levels that can help us develop something sustainable—something that can last beyond the time we spend with our learners. Let’s take a look at how this works by setting up a live feed for this session right now and returning to it as time allows throughout this session. If we do this right, you’ll be able to continue what we begin here and use it to your advantage—and to the advantage of those you serve. [TweetDeck demo]

Summary #2 So, what you’ve just seen is how you can avoid fighting something you cannot defeat: Our learners’ comfort with and desire for inclusion of social media tools in their ongoing learning endeavors. And if you want to know more about how this backchannel via Twitter works, we highly recommend Cliff Atkinson’s book The Backchannel. You’ll see a reference to it again among the recommended resources at the end of our presentation today. Your thoughts, reactions, and questions?

Now we will discuss a framework for engagement Now we will discuss a framework for engagement. Please check out the handout that we passed out. On this side you will see that this, based on Bloom’s Taxonomy, is a simple way of thinking about presentations and engagement. Note the five catagories, which we will go through in a second. But first, let’s just note that audience members—you--bring your own expertise to any presentation or workshop. The presenter can decide how much to engage the audience to get member expertise and even build member expertise.

Elements of Learning: Telling So, first, Telling in which the Presenter Role is to present the information (expert) Audience Role: Consumer (listen, reflect, learn on own) Content dissemination: Presenter talks, could have visuals (words projected, images, video) to illustrate the content Best use: When presenter is expert, "sage on the stage," people come to hear this person or their ideas How many have attended such a presentation? What worked for you? What didn’t? Potential pitfalls: Using text or visuals that distract from presenter's points; audience could drift Best practices: Presentation Zen, TED talks, etc.

Elements of Learning: Sharing The second level is Sharing The Presenter’s Role is narrator or storyteller Audience Role: Listen, reflect, apply to their circumstances, learn on own Content dissemination: Presenter tells stories or uses metaphor to illustrate points, build rapport, bring emotional connection Best use: When presenter wants to connect to emotion of audience; illustrate an important concept (stories embedded in memory) How many of you tell stories when you do presentations? What are some of your suggestions for storytelling? A common pitfalls is telling stories that do not apply. What other issues might there be with this? (not telling the story well) One great source for storytelling is: Nancy Duarte Can you think of some best practices: Be specific with characters, setting, plot; story has to be believable and meaningful; metaphor has to be insightful and meaningful

Elements of Learning: Inquiring The third technique is the one we are using now: Presenter Role: Facilitate discussion, Socratic, Ask questions, encourage discussion Audience Role: Reflect, respond, discuss, apply own knowledge, share expertise Content dissemination: Presenter asks questions of crowd; audience is asked to reflect, write down, discuss with others one-on-one; group discussion with report out Have you seen this work effectively? Can you provide examples? What are some potential pitfalls? (Audience does not participate, audience members distract or take over conversation) When would you use this technique? When wanting others to share knowledge or apply knowledge, when seeking active learning, "guide on the side," when wanting others to apply concepts to their own experience Best practices: get people moving (e.g., “stand up if you think this statement is true”); give clear instructions when breaking people up into discussion groups

Elements of Learning: Experiencing Our fourth is creating an experience. The role of the presenter is to coach the members. Provide exercises or activities that get the audience to try, experiment. The Audience Role is to learn by doing, workshop Can you provide some examples of great exercises you have done in the past? Content dissemination: Audience acts out, experiments, or practices with concepts or tools What are some potential pitfalls: (People learn at different levels and coach needs to decide how fast/slow to go for all) When would you use experiencing? (When wanting people to "get" the content by internalizing it (e.g., practice five steps of giving and receiving feedback with a partner), in a laboratory setting when learning a computer program, online with screen share, etc.) Best practices: Again, give clear instructions, check in with people

Elements of Learning: Creating The fifth is when the audience is fully engaged and fully exerting their role as experts. The presenter is there to help with production, or conducting, if you will. The audience members role is to create, make something. When you changed the room around, weren’t you reinventing? What are other examples of creating in a learning environment? Content dissemination: Presenter sets context then gives tools and instructions for audience to make their own What are some common pitfalls? (Audience gets off track, resource intensive, requires a lot of pre-planning, need to be flexible with uncertain outcomes) When do you use this? (When wanting others to engage and own their learning, acquire expertise, empower them, make them independent) What are some best practices with this level of engagement?

The front of the handout shows these in a progression which makes it seem like these five techniques have certain values but as we discussed, using each of these is dependent on you, your audience, and your goals. In fact, we would like to suggest that you have at least two of these in any presentation you do. Why would you think that would be the case? People learn in different ways and what works for one person may not work for the other. So the point is not if you use more than one of these, but when you do. On the back you see you can connect any of these in any way. What have we used so far for this presentation? We started out with Create (you revamping the room), then a bit of tell to learn Tweet deck, followed by engaging you in adding to the conversation which we term “inquire.” We want to give you more time to discuss and share with others.

Diving In Let’s take a few minutes to work through what we have just reviewed. Since we have a whale-sized topic to confront, we’re going to break this down a bit by having you work with people at your table to discuss those techniques: Telling Sharing Inquiring Experiencing Creating Discuss which one works best for you and your learners, and provide examples of how you that one has worked for you. How might you add others into your repertoire? As you work, please tweet your best ideas with that #ala12soclearn hashtag; we’ll keep the TweetDeck stream running in the front of the room, and you’ll be able to review it later on your own if you want to reinforce what we’ve been learning together.

Summary #3 Returning to our theme of the power of the room, let’s review a few of the ideas that came out of the discussions you had while diving into our learning whale’s mouth.

Sustaining What We’ve Built As we reach the end of our time together, we face a trainer-teacher-learner’s dilemma: Do we walk away inspired and slowly but surely see that inspiration fade away as our normal work routines begin to wear us down, or can we build our own sustainable version of a learner’s Tomorrow Land? We have the tools to remain ignited and engaged; we simply have to reach some quick agreements and decide what steps to take: Create online space for continuing discussion? Use: Facebook A Twitter hashtag A LinkedIn discussion group A Google+ Hangout

Bringing It Home We started with the idea that we had to ignite from the beginning, interact, and create a likelihood of continual engagement.

Bringing It Home We then continued on the theme of setting the stage—as you helped set this room—and doing all we could to keep the learning process lively and celebratory.

Bringing It Home We started with the idea that we had to ignite from the beginning, interact, and create a likelihood of continual engagement. We then continued on the theme of setting the stage—as you helped set this room—and doing all we could to keep the learning process lively and celebratory. Our explorations took us down the path of looking for ways to blend our onsite and online learning capabilities, as we did here with Twitter and TweetDeck.

Bringing It Home Together, we have explored a framework for engagement: Telling and Sharing

Bringing It Home Inquiring and Experiencing

Bringing It Home Creating and then diving in to pull it all together in an experiential fashion

Bringing It Home And when all was said and done, we took a look toward creating the sort of training-teaching-learning future that we all would love to build. The rest is up to all of us. Let’s see what we can do.

Resources: If you’re viewing this later in Slide Show mode, you can click on any of these images—and the ones on the next slide—to get to excerpts for the books.

Resources:

Questions & Comments

For More Information Sharon Morris Paul Signorelli & Associates 1032 Irving St., #514 San Francisco, CA 94122 415.681.5224 paul@paulsignorelli.com http://paulsignorelli.com Twitter: @paulsignorelli http://buildingcreativebridges.wordpress.com Sharon Morris 201 E. Colfax Avenue Denver, CO 80203 303-866-6730 Morris_s@cde.state.co.us http://www.ColoradoStateLibrary.org/ Twitter: @cslsharon

Credits & Acknowledgments Slide Design by Paul Signorelli (Images taken from flickr.com unless otherwise noted): Fireworks: From Tom Bricker’s photostream at http://www.flickr.com/photos/tombricker/5709640847/sizes/m/in/photostream/ Pumpkin Coach: From Rharkness’s photostream at http://www.flickr.com/photos/rharkness/718239723/sizes/m/in/photostream/ Mushroom: From Express Monorail’s photostream at http://www.flickr.com/photos/expressmonorail/3487850561/sizes/m/in/photostream/ Ship: From Sanbeiji’s photostream at http://www.flickr.com/photos/sanbeiji/3135083430/sizes/m/in/photostream/ Main Street Without People: From Aspex Design’s photostream at http://www.flickr.com/photos/aspexdesign/6184961687/sizes/m/in/photostream/ Celebration: From Andy Castro’s photostream at http://www.flickr.com/photos/andycastro/2681078762/sizes/m/in/photostream/ Conductor: From Loren Javier’s photostream at http://www.flickr.com/photos/lorenjavier/3372602932/sizes/m/in/photostream/ Twitter Graphic: From JoshSeman’s photostream at http://www.flickr.com/photos/joshsemans/3414271359/sizes/m/in/photostream/ Telling: From Averain’s photostream at http://www.flickr.com/photos/averain/5336663293/sizes/m/in/photostream/ Sharing: From Loren Javier’s photostream at http://www.flickr.com/photos/lorenjavier/5903128819/sizes/m/in/photostream/ Inquiring: From Scott Barlow’s photostream at http://www.flickr.com/photos/barl0w/2983543331/sizes/m/in/photostream/ Build: From Thom Watson’s photostream at http://www.flickr.com/photos/thomwatson/3201952413/sizes/m/in/photostream/ Gepetto and Pinocchio: From Loren Javier’s photostream at http://www.flickr.com/photos/lorenjavier/4941145924/sizes/m/in/photostream/ Whale’s Mouth: From Thomas Hawk’s photostream at http://www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/16600473/sizes/m/in/photostream/ Tomorrow Land: From San Diego Shooter’s photostream at http://www.flickr.com/photos/nathaninsandiego/7014901963/sizes/m/in/photostream/ Question Marks: From Valerie Everett’s photostream at http://www.flickr.com/photos/valeriebb/3006348550/sizes/m/in/photostream/