All My Sketchnotes from the Learning Technologies Conference 2024 UK

 Rachel Burnham writes: This work the Learning Technologies Exhibition and Conference #LT24UK has been taking place on 17 & 18 April at ExCel in London.  I was attending the conference as part of the social media team and contributing to the social media coverage for the event by Sketchnoting sessions.   I will include in this blog all my Sketchnotes for the sessions I participated in over the two days.

 

With a keynote address on each day and up to 5 streams of sessions for the two days, a lot of different topics and takes on those topics have been explored over the two days.  Each participant will have chosen to participate in a mix of sessions, with differing formats and will have come with a range of experience and from varying contexts, so each person will have their own view about what the conference covered and how valuable it was.  My experience was that all the sessions I participated in were thoughtful, interesting and of value.  Of course, there are some points made by speakers that I disagreed with, some things that weren’t new to me but familiar territory and also lots and lots that challenged, inspired and intrigued me.  

Here are my Sketchnotes from across the two days.  I have included both the titles of the sessions and the hashtags based on the session numbers so that you can look at other social media coverage on these sessions if you wish:

Opening Address Wednesday – A world in flux: AI and the forces transforming work, and what we can – and should – do about it

Daniel Susskind was looking at how AI is disrupting not just blue collar jobs, but also professional roles. He identified that this happening at the task level for a wide range of professions, rather than replacing the job as a whole. He also identified that AI tackles tasks differently compared to the way a human does, but may still be able to do specific tasks more effectively than a person does.  It was a pity that he seemed unaware of the way that modern L&D works and the range of ways in which effective learning can be supported.

 

#T3S1 The Case for Rethinking Organizational Learning

Here is my Sketchnote from the interactive session led by Dr. Nigel Paine and Dr. Celine Mullins on rethinking Organizational Learning.

The point that resonated with me particularly was about focusing not on knowledge but on knowing. With Sketchnoting I find the value is in 'the doing' and the insight this gives rather than in the Sketchnote produced.

 

#T4S3 Instructional Design in the Real World

Andrew Jacobs chaired a fully interactive session with a fabulous panel made up of Jane Bozarth, Julie Dirksen and Cammy Bean. The session was exploring designing learning for the way people learn and work and addressed questions from session participants - by doing this it modelled one of the points made in the session that relevance leads to engagement.

It was fascinating that so many questions related to managing relationships in order to be able to design effectively eg with SMEs or other stakeholders. Lots of practical approaches for doing this were shared by the panel.

 

Opening Address Thursday – What on earth will people do next? Understanding human behaviour now and in the future?

Lively, informative and helpful keynote from Thimon De Jong at the start of the second day of the Learning Technologies Conference. He focused on the implications for learning of two key areas - mental health and our response to the introduction of new technology.  I loved his use of metaphors – being stranded on a sandbar and the elevator – a gift for a Sketchnoter!

 

#L2S1 L&D and Sustainability

I was very glad that I was able to take part in the lunchtime session yesterday on 'L&D and Sustainability' hashtag#L2S1 with Rob Hubbard, Bryan Hopkins, Natalie Ainsworth and Jodie Pritchard. There is a lot we can be doing in L&D to be contributing to sustainability in our organisations - we need to put our hands up, find out what is already going on in our organisations, talk about it and remember that we have useful skills in changing human behaviour which is so important to this work.

 

#T1S5 VR in Learning

Lots of practical advice and experience shared from two very different organisations about when, how and when not to use VR for effective learning.

Really liked the DICE mnemonic for situations in which VR can be a good option shared by Charles Neuner and the practical examples for when to use the real thing, video or VR from Matt Day. The session was chaired by Stella Collins who kept the questions flowing.

 

#T4S6 Al Literacy for L&D

This session at yesterday's Learning Technologies Conference by Jon Fletcher of the The LPI (Learning and Performance Institute) was informative, challenging and got behind the hype about AI and into sufficient detail to be practically helpful. It focused on what knowledge and skills L&D professionals need to be developing in the next months/year to be able to both use AI effectively in our own work and also to be able to support our organisation/clients at they adopt AI technologies. In addition, he helpfully identified existing skills of L&D folk which will be useful in working with AI.

There is a lot for us to be learning, but Jon set out a map of what that looks like at present and by doing so gave us a great starting point.

 

Rachel Burnham

19 April 2024

I help individuals and organisations to use visuals to think, learn and work more effectively, particularly though using Sketchnoting and drawing.

 

FieldTrip Reflections

Rachel Burnham writes: On Tuesday 4^th June, it was my pleasure and privilege to be one of the organisers for the first L&D Connect #LnDFieldTrip.   A group of 28 L&Ders, from a mix of organisations, spent the afternoon exploring The Design Museum in London and discussing & reflecting on what it said to us about design for L&D and OD.   It was great to work alongside Niki Hobson, David Hayden and Kevin Avis to make this happen and also to have the support of the wider L&D Connect community for this venture.

Here are some of my reflections on the exhibits that caught my attention – they are a bit random and I think I am still pondering on my observations and the many conversations over the course of the afternoon with other participants.

1. Purpose

One of the first exhibits that caught my eye told the well-known story of the creation of the London Tube Map and equivalent maps for metros in other cities.  

This reminded me that the London Underground map that is so familiar to many of us, is not actually an accurate geographical representation of the tube system in London – however, simplifying the map in this way made it easy to find your way around using the tube system. 

This made me think again of the importance of clarity of purpose when designing.   What we design for one purpose, may not work for another purpose. In simplifying, we may gain in some ways and lose in others. 

2.  Adding on

Sticking with signage, I loved this picture of the old style road sign, that had been added to and adapted with lots of different styles of sign.  It illustrated a display about the introduction of a national standard approach to road signage. 

This picture reminded me of how sometimes we design a programme, project, even an organisational structure and then keep adding to it and adapting it.  ‘Wouldn’t be good to include…’ ‘We could just slip this in here…’ ‘I am sure people would find this useful…’ and before you know it, it is rather a hash of confused messages and contradictory approaches.  Sometimes we need to take stock and simplify. 

3.  A nice idea!

As well as display material, there were lots of examples of different products and items.  I admired a rather stylish chair and loved the story told about it.  

It had been designed by an architect, who also designed furniture.  It was based on the idea that you could sit on it in many different ways – this appealed to me – I am always curling up on chairs and sofas with my feet under me or hanging out over the edge.  The chair was designed to be mass manufactured, but in fact that had not happened in the lifetime of the designer – it didn’t explain why and originally only handmade ones had been produced. 

I am intrigued by this story and I have been imagining all the many different ways why the chair was not mass-produced as envisaged – expense, lack of demand – perhaps it didn’t meet a real need from customers, technical challenges, a crisis of confidence in the product by the manufacturer, resistance to a radical design and so on.   I think you can see the parallels that drew me in.

4.  Rethinking the value of standardisation

One of the displays was a mock-up of a fitted kitchen that you could walk through.  Alongside, were some pictures of kitchens prior to the introduction of the fitted kitchen concept, which drew attention to how often these had surfaces at different levels, sinks that didn’t have places to stack or dry crockery and cupboards that made poor use of space.   It sounds just like the kitchen of my childhood in Chorlton which was tiny and very awkward to cook in.

The display drew attention to the value of standardisation in kitchen design which enabled fitted kitchens to be created, with their much more practical design and their capacity to be personalised.   This is what caught my attention – standardisation not as the opposite of personalisation, which is sometimes how we think of it in L&D, but as the enabler of effectiveness and personalisation. 

We sometimes focus on standardisation as being about sameness, but it is actually about being based on standards or principles or evidence about what works – it is about establishing effective ways of working.   So my kitchen sink lesson was to make me rethink the value of standardisation.

5.  Designing & empowering

Another display that caught my eye was about the design and creation of rough terrain wheelchairs for use in countries where roads and pathways often do not have paved or tarmac surfaces.  

The design focused on meeting these particular needs, but also the need for the wheelchairs to be maintained locally, so itincluded provision for training people to be able to do this. 

It got me thinking about content generation by users and about L&D’s role moving away from providing programmes to empowering users to meet their continuing needs. 

6.  The simplest solution that works

Towards the end of our time at the museum, I got to look at a display right near the start of the exhibit.  All through our time at the museum, members of our party were stood talking about and pointing to various different objects in the display and so I couldn’t get near it until the end of our time. 

The display was an array of well-designed and very familiar objects displayed from floor to ceiling – bikes, jeans, paper bags, marmite, trainers, juicers, phones and many, many more.   Looking at this display brought back so many memories and associations with the various objects.

One of the things that they had in common was a simplicity.  It reminded me that the simplest solution that meets the need is often the best solution.

The paper bag particularly caught my eye.   Paper bags are back in fashion.  At one time a plastic bag might have been considered the latest thing and something that was well-designed to meet the needs of modern shoppers.  But our criteria, for what makes a good design of bag, have changed and now we rate environmental-friendliness as important.   What makes for good design may change, if the context changes.  

7.  Collaboration

The whole exhibition focused on the relationships between three parties: users, makers and designers.  It was quite clear how important each of these was to the creation of effective designs.  Each of these parties have a contribution to make. The best design seem to draw on each. 

It is making me wonder how well designs I am involved with utilise the insights and differing expertise of all the parties and what I might do differently to enable this.

I have taken a lot from this #LnDFieldTrip experience.  It was the combination of the stimulation from the exhibition plus conversations and sharing of varying perspectives and experiences with fellow professionals that made it so effective for me.  

Thank you to everyone who took part and who supported the event.  I think we will see more #LnDFieldTrips in the future.

Rachel Burnham

9 June 2019

I help individuals and organisations to work and learn more effectively, particularly though using the tools of Sketchnoting and the curation of resources.  I make use of Sketchnoting to help people use visuals, to think, work and learn.  I help people to manage for themselves the information they need to stay up-to-date in their professional work.  

Reflections on using Curation for Designing Learning Programmes

Rachel Burnham writes:  This week the topic of using curation for design has been much on my mind.  Partly because I have been doing an update and refresh of a programme I work on that makes use of curated resources.  Partly because I have been thinking through how to further improve another programme I work on to make most effective use of the resources within it.   Partly because of conversations I have been having around this topic, through #LDInsight and particularly with Michelle Ockers (@MichelleOckers) and also with my regular collaborator, Mike Shaw (@MikeShawLD) as he puts the finishing touches to a presentation on this same topic for the World of Learning Conference in Birmingham.  

So the topic has been circling around my head and I have been reflecting on my own experience of curating resources when designing programmes.   Looking back I can see that I have been doing this for some time, though it is only in the last few years that I have consciously thought of it as curation.  It is now just a part of how I do things. 

What is curation for designing learning programmes?

What I mean by curating resources when designing programmes, is using existing resources, typically publicly available, as a substantial part of the triggering material for a learning programme.   It involves seeking out relevant materials, selecting carefully which to use, explaining the reasons for your choices so that they are put in context for the intended user, possibly sequencing and combining materials and then making them accessible to the intended user.  I make use of Harold Jarche’s Seek, Sense, Share model to support this.  This repurposing doesn’t stop there, as it also needs to include some tasks or activities that challenge the user to make sense of the material and identify what and how they can apply this to their own work.  It is this latter part that turns this from a collection of resources into a learning programme.

I know that the issue of whether simply using resources could lead to learning, was something that was bothering some of the participants in the recent #LDInsight chat that took place on 5/10/18.  For me, it is the addition of reflection, practical tasks and social and collaborative elements that transmutes these resources into rich and rewarding learning experiences.

Whilst conversations about using curation for designing learning programmes, often focus on the use of existing external resources, these are not the only elements that can be made use of.  Ben Betts in a chapter of ‘Ready, Set, Curate’ describes on pg 58  ‘thinking in thirds’:

• ·       Making use of existing material within the organisation – this could be learning material, performance support material or other useful stuff.  This allows you to make best use of what you already have and also to include material that is highly specific and particular to your organisation and its way of doing things. 
• ·       Secondly, is the external, already existing material.  This is great for subject areas that are in common across many organisations or where you want to bring in particular expertise from outside of your organisation.
• ·       The final element is newly created resources.   There may be somethings that you simply can’t find ready-made or where you want to tailor some content to be particularly specific to the needs of your intended users. 

Why use a curated approach?

For me, there are three main reasons for using a curated approach when designing learning programmes:

• ·       Abundance - there are already a lot of existing resources, either in-house or externally, around the topic and it therefore makes sense to build with these existing building blocks.   So this is about using resources wisely – time, effort, energy and of course finances.
• ·       Agility – this links to the first, but places more emphasis on the ability to meet learning needs in a timely fashion, creating a minimum, viable product or solution and possibly building on this in subsequent iterations.
• ·       Access to different voices, perspectives and expertise – I think this one is often the most compelling reason. Using curation allows you to give access to material from different sources that can lead to a wider and richer learning experience.   Michael Bhaskar in his book ‘Curation: The power of selection in a world of excess’  makes the point that we can search to find things that we know exist, but what curation adds value by giving us access to things we don’t know about.  So curation can enable us to introduce users to a topic and directly to experts in that field, enabling them to more quickly build foundation knowledge and understanding.  It also enables us to help users to stretch by encountering different perspectives and emergent expertise, because curation can allow you to easily update and refresh a programme.   Actually, if the programme stimulates and supports social and collaborative learning, it may well be the participants in the programme, who identify and share that emergent thinking either through their own work or by sharing other resources that they uncover.  

Three reflections from my experience

A.  Using a curation approach when designing a learning programme alters how you design.   When designing traditionally, broadly speaking, you identify needs, specify aim & objectives and gradually get more and more specific about what is required in the design.  And you can be as specific as you like. 

When designing using curation, again you identify needs, specify aims & objectives, but you then need to search and see what is available already both in-house and externally.   And you need to be rather more open-minded about what you are looking for, because if you are over-specific you may not find it or spend so long looking that this is a poor use of time.   Once you have identified what is available, then you can fill in gaps with material that you create.

So, the traditional design approach is a bit like commissioning a tailor-made outfit in a particular colour combination to your specific measurements.  Whereas a curated approach is more like looking through your wardrobe, reviewing what you have, then going shopping to see what is available that combines with what you have, and recognising that you may not be able to find exactly what you picture in your mind’s eye in the shade you want.

It is a change in mindset.

B.  The importance of building in regular maintenance and refreshing.

As with any learning programme, it is important to keep a curated programme up-to-date and current.  What can be different is that links to particularly external resources can stop working and resources can be withdrawn or move behind a firewall and so no longer be available.  This means that there is a need to build in regular maintenance of the programme and it may be necessary to replace links to materials with alternatives.  As ‘like for like’ replacements may not be available (see point A), this requires a flexible approach.

It is tempting to think that the answer to this issue, is to ensure that you include full copies of the material you have curated within your programme, but that of course will bring problems of copyright.   Stick to links, but be alert to the need to update.   You may find this helpful guidance from Ben Betts at HT2 Labs of assistance in relation to these issues around copyright. 

My conversation with Michelle Ockers reminded me that this maintenance review, is also an opportunity to refresh a programme and that ideas for this may well come from recent participants and what they have shared within the social and collaborative elements of the programme. 

C. My third reflection comes from working as an external contributor to curated programmes and realising that pricing work for curated programmes is an interesting challenge.   Often we have experience to base the pricing of creating content and this is well understood by clients.  Pricing the curation of content can be a bit more tricky - the product of a link to a resource seems like the work of a moment, but like many other roles involving professional expertise, it is the underlying expertise, skills and judgement that have led to you finding and selecting that particular link, that is being paid for.  

I would be very interested in hearing your experience of curating resources for learning programmes and in your response to the points I have shared.

Rachel Burnham

14/10/18

Burnham L & D works with individuals and organisations to help them learn and work more effectively.  As part of this I help L&D professionals to be even more effective through updating their skills and know-how.  I have a particular interest in curation and the use of digital technologies in learning.  I frequently Sketchnote at events and offer workshops in Sketchnoting.