Michael Cennamo’s Post

Transcript

So my next question for you, Mike, is life. How do you continue to train yourself with technology? Technology is has a has a shelf life. I remember when Dreamweaver one was it and then we ended up bringing Dreamweaver 10 by the time we got finished in a couple years. So how do you continue to make yourself a lifelong learner and just don't sit on the pedagogy of hope? Yeah, so lifelong learning, I, I think first I would like to maybe differentiate personal learning and work learning. So it's funny because when it comes to personal learning, I will try anything like I've tried my hand at Japanese. Or the culture. I love plants, electronics, I'm I'm all over the place. I started a movie club on Zoom. We meet and talk about movies. I posted a hundred of those at least. That's my personal like interests all over the place. I'll learn anything and I'm and whoever the interest takes me. But when it comes to work. It's a lot different. I found that learning something for work. It has to be. Really close to what I'm doing. And I have to be able to apply it. If I can't do those that I I, I wind up wasting my time. So for example. As an instructional designer, I think it's really important for me to get better at data analytics to be able to. Get data from the courses I build from people who take them and analyze that data to see if the courses are effective and if they're if what they need work on. Now there are a lot of ways to do that. You could do that with Python programming our programming SQL. But my team doesn't use those tools right now, they use pretty much Google Docs. Excuse me. So for me to do this effectively, I need to focus my learning right now on applying statistics to Excel and Google Sheets and build Google Sheet dashboards. That I could send to my team and they could use them and interact with them. That's like a small like to me. It's a. Like it's a concentric circle right out my outside of my learning. If my learning is this circle I'm talking about, just one little concentric circle out is how I could. Learn something and apply it. If it's too far out of that circle, I wind up losing interest and I don't really push it and I don't I don't learn it. So my advice is if you're going to learn on the job, figure out what your job needs, Figure out what your team needs. How how can you? Learn it and then build something, because doing is a big part of this. Learn something that your team needs that you could learn and build something and and present it and and let people use it. Otherwise it's hard to learn outside of that. Does that make sense? It does. And I think you're and and I think you're explaining the the question that I had of how do you keep engaged, right, Because you're saying stay in a tight enough circles so that you're applying it. Yeah, when you make, when can I go with this next? Yeah, if you if you wanna. So when you when you keep your circle tight, let's say you have a project, right? And you're doing something that's HTML based, right? And you and you stay in there, but there's some other stuff out there you don't know about, right? And your circle so tight that things can pass by you. And then you're not an expert in your field, right? So how do you keep a tight circle? But make sure you're opened up to things that are coming, like AI or, you know, things that we. Had no idea to look out for. How do you balance the small circle and some overarching kind of open spaces that you can learn other stuff you might not need right now? Yeah, I'll tell you how, and that's a great question. So what I'm talking about is what I'm seeing as a need for my team and what are the courses or books or tools I'm going to use to, to to get better at it. What you're saying is that the way to do that is. Things like this. I keep a big network of really smart colleagues around me, I. Talk to them, I have coffee with them, I zoom with them and I get their opinions on what's out there, what's happening because I'm in a I'm just in one, one space of academia, 1 space of instructional design. I don't really know what's going on. Hey, 12. I don't know what's going on in corporate. I don't know what's going on in other schools. So I rely on people like you to kind of say, what are you interested in? Should I be interested in that? What what books are you reading? What what do you what, what's interesting you? So I think the way to do it is. Forming network and and stay in touch with that network and and let them help you figure out where that where your where your. Work is going where your field is headed.