hendrich

Stayin’ Alive is savin’ lives?

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 Old Song Finds a New Purpose

In the Offbeat department, I am inspired by a disco song’s new-found purpose—saving lives:

Under most circumstances, it’s best to keep the beat of the Bee Gees song “Stayin’ Alive” out of your head, but heart specialists have come up with one good reason to remember: It could save someone’s life.

Turns out the 1977 disco hit has 103 beats per minute, a perfect number to maintain — and retain — the best rhythm for performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or CPR.

A small study by University of Illinois College of Medicine researchers in Peoria has found that 10 doctors and five medical students who listened to the “Saturday Night Fever” tune while practicing CPR not only performed perfectly, they remembered the technique five weeks later. See the rest of the story at: http://blogs.usatoday.com/betterlife/

Shake your head if you want; it’s just plain cool to see that the BeeGees served a higher purpose after all.

How does the BeeGees’ CPR thing relate to leadership and training?

Here’s what this has to do with leadership and training. As leaders and trainers, we must find a way to tie new concepts to that which is familiar. Everyone knows the song. Not everyone knows how fast to compress when doing CPR. Add Barry Gibb and POOF, you can make a decent attempt at saving a life.  Does it get more magical than that?

Ah – Ah – Ah – Ah…

Susan Hendrich

Photosynth – a reason to say, “Wow!”

/ Susan Hendrich / 2 Comments

New tool may transform the way we look at digital images

Photos – back then

I was just thinking about all the photos my family took during the 70’s, 80’s, and early 90’s. These printed photos (doubles, of course, because Happy Harry’s drugstore offered free doubles) sit in shoe boxes, stacked neatly in a closet.  Despite my mother’s careful labeling with a felt-tip pen so that we’d “always remember,” not one of these photos has been viewed in the last 15 years.  All that posing and smiling and say-cheesing at the beach and the school and the picnic, and all we’re left with is duplicate copies of fading faces in a closeted box.  Hmnn.

Digital photos – an improvement

We all know how the availability of digital photography to the everyday citizen has changed our worlds.  It seems everyone nowadays has their flickr set or ofoto album.  But still (sorry for the pun), these images often just sit in our digital collections, even with our careful tagging and sorting.

Photosynth – a breakthrough

Fast forward a step further now, where Microsoft rolls out Photosynth.  And get ready to say, “Wow” again.  I thought about trying to distill this fascinating new tool into some witty script, but realized that the Photosynth picture says far more than just a thousand words… Check out this video, where Mr. Blaise Aguera y Arcas leads a dazzling demo of Photosynth, software that could transform the way we look at digital images. Using still photos culled from the Web, Photosynth builds breathtaking dreamscapes and lets us navigate them.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_demos_photosynth.html

Free Microsoft eLearning Development Tool

/ Susan Hendrich / 3 Comments

Free Microsoft eLearning Development Tool

Microsoft has rolled out a FREE tool called LCDS. LCDS is an eLearning development tool that Microsoft is using to develop their multimedia driven eLearning. It can output to Flash, SilverLight, SCORM, HTML and more…

FREE DOWNLOAD: http://www.microsoft.com/learning/tools/lcds/default.mspx

About LCDS from Microsoft:
The Learning Content Development System, or LCDS, is a forms-based tool that anyone can use to create e-learning content. By using the LCDS, you can:
• Author rich, interactive content by completing the easy-to-use LCDS forms
• Preview your course at any stage of development
• Set up a course structure that you can easily rearrange at any time

What I learned from Scooby

/ Susan Hendrich / 3 Comments

Evidence of Goodness

What I learned from Scooby James Hendrich (1990-2008)

Learning styles

/ Susan Hendrich / 1 Comment

Looking for information on learning style inventories?

After years of facilitating learning styles workshops, I offer you the following perspectives/ideas:
 1. The Learning Styles Online inventory is good. The “Learning and techniques” section that they provide as feedback for the quiz results is solid, and the detailed combinations of style results are powerful.
2. The Hay Group has developed the robust “Kolb Learning Style Inventory,” based on David Kolb’s ground-breaking thinking, doing, experiencing, reflecting. The inventory and detailed individual and group feedback reports cost $15.00 per participant. This inventory is empirically validated and is widely used among corporate training groups. Check out the PowerPoint pdf they have on their information page.

3. A free quiz offered by AES does a very nice job of targeting participants’ learning styles and offering concrete action steps to help optimize learning.

4. VARK (Visual, Aural, Read/Write, Kinesthetic) is an often-used system that provides good feedback and tangible recommendations. A very detailed and more instructive feedback report is available for $28/participant. Whether you use VARK or not, the FAQ page (http://www.vark-learn.com/english/page.asp?p=faq) on the vark-learn site has some useful answers to common questions your participants may be asking.

One suggestion, regardless of the inventory you choose…

“Map out” participants’ results on a chart the whole class can see. People love to compare their own learning styles to that of their peers. This referential data provdes an answer to the eternal “how do I fit in to this human puzzle?” question. I have used PowerPoint slides to map out peoples scores as data points. You also can take a sheet of newsprint and draw a grid to map out scores using participants’ initials. It can be instructive for trainers to see any trends that a particular group might demonstrate.

I would be delighted to visit with you further about learning styles if you think it might be useful. Feel free to contact me at any time to discuss.

Take care, and happy learning!

Susan Hendrich