Aside: Day of the Ninja

I want to follow-up with yesterdays post about motivation and such, but I have a feeling I’m not going to have much time until Saturday or Sunday (playing soccer, 2 Christmas parties!)

Today was the day of the Ninja. The prefect day to sneak around, be generally suspicious, without being seen. Or inflict great warfare upon your enemies. But generally to celebrate all things Ninja…

I know I’ve had fun appearing in my co-workers cubes stealthily. Too bad I couldn’t wear my ninja mask.

If you missed it – mark your calendar for next year. And maybe be a little more stealthy tomorrow.

Reenforcing Learning

My son Elijah(6, 1st grade) is an awesome learner. He has a huge curiosity especially about science. He is a sponge sucking up information.

We’ve been reading aged appropriate encyclopedias about dinosaurs and the ocean. His class did an experiment with corn starch. Observing its properties while developing hypothesizes about what what will happen and what properties it would take on.

I’ve been thinking about the different aspects of learning in his life. He gets a lot at school, he gets a different set of learning at home. There is a lot of correlation going on with his learning.

I have started to think about this for my own learning, and for other learning situations, especially in professional development/workforce training. Is there enough of the learning triangle? Motivation, Curiosity, and learning outside of work!

Motivation: For Elijah, the motivation is natural (the education system hasn’t squelched it yet!). What about for you, or your learners? Is learning exciting, or is it the feeling of angst and dread — and just sound like too much work?

There are lots of motivation strategies to help people want to learn. I’m not a motivational expert, so my ability to speak on motivation may be limited. What I do know though is that as a learner, true motivation for me isn’t about tangibles (money is nice, but honestly it doesn’t improve my retention; and it really doesn’t make me passionate about a topic), its about finding that love of wanting to know and understand.

Elijah loves Dinosaurs because he finds them fascinating, he wants to understand where they came from, what they were like, why they were different. He loves dinosaurs because there is a mystery with answers to be discovered. I’m lucky, in my job, I have the opportunity to learn software which is exciting to me. I have an opportunity to explore and figure out new things [Aside: Instructional Designers in a lot of circumstances have this awesome opportunity to explore in their learning.]

I’m positive that there are a lot of topics that will be outright not motivational to some people (I’ve had a few bouts with topics that would rather not have dealt with). Honestly, some topics stink that we all need to muscle through- but if we can just capture the innocence that there is always something new, something empowering, something wondrous in just knowing.

Next post, I’ll talk more about the need for curiosity and learning outside of work.

If you’re reading– what do you think?