Lesson From My Jump Off a Cliff

This is a very old (June'08) post that I imported from my other blog (I did make a few changes to it but still the thoughts are old).

Paragliding Experience

Last Friday I announced to the world that this weekend I am gonna jump off a cliff. Comments poured in - they ranged from, 'write me in your will' to 'plz don't coz we don't get holiday for self-inflicted injuries'.

Much has been changed by that one experience.

The peace that was there in the air, the contentment, the solitude, the quite, the magnificence! I simply didn't feel like returning to earth.


But return I did, and within seconds everyone around me started asking questions. Somehow I didn't get the time to take it all in.

Some things just can't be explained, and when you try to explain them immediately after experiencing them, their value is somehow reduced. The magic loses its potency.
Later, I felt that a little 'pause/quite/me time' might have added more to my experience.

Almost similar thing happened next day while reading a book. The sentence was so powerful that I could not continue reading. I had to keep the book down and go for a walk to think it through. It really was that profound a sentence.

Both these experiences got me thinking, do we as IDs go on a information diarrhoea when we create our courses? Do we give our learners enough time to assimilate the content or do we try to tell them everything at once? Do we allow them to pause - to take it all in? If not, how can we add these pauses, these moments of assimilation into our learning's without losing the learners?

Is it this lack of understanding/sensitivity, our failure to give our learner a little 'me time' that beats us in the end?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What do IDs do?

I know this is not an original question. And I know that with all of us being professional IDs we do know what it is we do. But know what... early in 2007 I came across this blog entry and it made me realise that there a lot more to our profession than just our daily tasks. It will be an exhaustive effort for me to jot down everything. And to be quite honest, there some tasks which even I have not had a chance to work on. So I'll just send you to Brett Bixler's blog entry which he claims took him only 5 minutes to write down. Click here to read What is Instructional Design? by Brett Bixler.
Read more

I'm lucky :)

In life, daily I make many mistakes. This is how I learn, this is how I grow. I'm sure this is how everyone learns and grows. But here is the difference, I'm lucky. Coz I have people in my life to point me ( sometimes again and again and again and again... ) in the right direction. And while guiding, they tell me not just what I need to pay more attention to but also things I'm good at and why I'm good at those things. This is very rare ( or so I feel ) and I'm grateful to them all for their timely guidance. As an ID, this is even more rare because people generally are busy forwarding their own agenda and are rarely interested in getting people up where they could reach. And I realized that while most of us go to great lengths ensuring that the work we did was to the best of our ability, we never really care or pay attention to what others might think about our leading ability. But today I was shown what it means to be a good supervisor. While the wor
Read more

Show Don’t Tell

Show to the GDs and learners – don’t just tell! Today, I came across some content that was difficult to visualize onstage and remembered the article "Show Don’t Tell" by Shirley Jump. Why Show? Well, showing involves the learner; it allows them to participate and ensures that you have them where you want them to be – right beside you. So when you are creating a role play where say a character named Dan is to be shown angry how will you visualize him? Will you tell your GD, show an angry frown and expect that the GD and the leaner will know it’s an angry face or would rather show Dan in his office, at his desk, standing up with the report in his hand, slamming it shut with a frown on his face and throwing it on his desk? Think about it. Option one is easy for IDs, but option 2 is will have flavor to it. If you give rich details in your visual descriptions, those rich characters will give the learner an experience that will be much more memorable. So show and don’
Read more