blended learning

"Is it really about teaching more, in less time, with shrinking budgets?  Or are we doing our brains & our bottom line a disservice, including conference event planning?"  

This is a great post on how to leverage learning that sticks, is sticky, vs. a spray and pray approach that still, unfortunately, dominates training programs and many conference events.

Here's an excerpt of this great post by 

Fresh thinking about how we learn
There are two kinds of learning. Learning physical tasks, like how to snowboard...embedded through repetition in the deeper motor regions of the brain such as the basal ganglia. This is known as procedural memory.

For workplace learning to be useful, we need to be able to recall ideas easily. 

In the last decade, Neuroscientists discovered that whether an idea can be easily recalled is linked to the strength of activation of the hippocampus during a learning task.

Many corporate training programs are the mental equivalent of trying to eat a week of meals in a day.

With this finding, scientists such as Lila Davachi at NYU and others have been able to test out many variables involved in learning experiences, such as what happens to the hippocampus if you distract people while absorbing information.

Over a few months of collaboration, Lila Davachi and I, along with Tobias Keifer, a consultant from Booz & Co., found a useful pattern that summarized the four biggest factors that determined the quality of recall. These are:

The AGES model was first presented at the 2010 NeuroLeadership Summit, and then published in the 2010 NeuroLeadership Journal. Read the full post including Learning that lasts through AGES that has a summary of this important research here.