I have spent most of the last couple of years shaking off the past (the bad vibes of Covid, lockdown and Hyper Island) and steering a course towards the future. This has involved huge amounts of reading (both fact and fiction), listening to new podcasts and long thoughtful walks, but Read more…
I really enjoy being interviewed well about things I have done and decisions I have taken. This interview by Joe Escobedo dived into some of the design principles and challenges that I faced in my 26 years at Hyper Island and when working with companies and other universities. Some of Read more…
I am currently working for a digital transformation client who are very focussed on what they are doing right now. This is perfectly appropriate given market conditions (challenging) and the genuine strength of their business (very good) but it comes with huge risks; what if customers switch to a competitor, Read more…
In the last few months I have delivered more and more sessions to help companies think about their future. I wanted to use this post to describe how I approach this. Future thinking has become more important because of things we see and have experienced around us: Covid-19, ugly Read more…
When I parted company with Hyper Island (after a quarter of a century), I wondered briefly the answers to 3 questions: would I find interesting clients and companies to work with going forward, would I be able to focus on learning design, and would I be pushed in my own Read more…
I am now a freelancer (after 12 years employed by Hyper Island in Singapore) and this gives me the freedom to question everything anew. Why did we do things this way? How was our business structured and funded? And how could we have scaled what we did without scaling people Read more…
I’ve been busy writing, (having Covid), thinking and changing my job role at Hyper Island; going independent will allow me to work for a wider range of clients and educational organisations. It’s been a scary change but also a good opportunity to reflect on what I have been doing and Read more…
I’m trying to document some of my thinking around active constructivist learning for adults. In my experience everyone appreciates the idea of learning by doing but many find it hard to imagine the range of sessions that can be designed. Many learning designers fall back on talking and telling, Read more…
When we construct sessions for learners we should borrow ideas from a wide range of different creative industries. Harnessing the skills, tools and practices from a completely new field gives a group new perspectives and helps them make new connections between ideas. In this post I want to describe Read more…
I am fascinated by learning, by how we learn, by what might be going on inside my head and inside my mind, and how experimenting and making things might be at the root of all of these. I would call myself a constructivist educator. What is constructivism? This is a Read more…