Daily Archives: May 6, 2009
Visuals for Learning
Here at ExperiencePoint, we have a Friday ritual that contributes to our continued learning called the “Share Piece”. It involves one of our team taking 45 minutes and sharing something that they expect the group will find valuable. The source is usually a business book, and this works out well. We get a great synopsis, and there’s usually an accompanying presentation.
For my Share Piece, I considered the visuals that had so impressed me in previous share pieces. Why was I able to remember them so well? Did they have an impact on my retention? Accordingly, I decided to deliver my Share Piece about “Visuals for Learning” in the form of a Pecha Kucha presentation (full disclosure: the presentation was a miserable failure, I ignored my own advice and overwhelmed the visuals with too many spoken words. Luckily, a crowd that values practice as we do is a forgiving one.)
4 out of 5 doctors recommend…
The perennial question in our industry is about pay off. It’s sensible for clients to want an indication that their investment in simulation games will result in learning, new desired behaviors, and ultimately bottom-line success. It’s a tough question to answer for any learning program, but because simulations tend to look less like the formal education we’ve accepted culturally as “correct”, my experience is they receive extra scrutiny.
Fortunately this scrutiny has resulted in a growing body of academic research which is gradually but effectively building the case for simulation based learning. In 2006, Jennifer Vogel and her colleagues at the University of Central Florida undertook a meta-analysis of published research on simulation based learning. For one of my ‘Share’ pieces at ExperiencePoint, I built a quick summary of the key findings of this study.
