That title should make quite a few of you perk up. What do you do when it stops being fun? When it feels like every ounce of passion has drained from your body and it all just feels like work.
The world is changing fast. Industries are being disrupted and new technologies are emerging that change the way we do things. In turn this places more emphasis on mastering news skills and learning new things as we try to keep up with the pace of change. This brings new challenges and problems for professionals: how do you keep up with what is happening and how do you ensure you are continually learning and developing?
Where does The Science of Learning come from? I was asked this by an associate on LinkedIn and a student in my class. Both are looking for the empirical evidence for The Science part. Today, I’ll try to address this because I think it is an important concept to understand.
There has been a lot of talk in the press and countless conference presentations about working with start-ups. These are often no more than beauty shows and case studies of work that has been commissioned and run are in short supply. VioletaTodorova has been instrumental in driving out NextTechNow initiative that has run 60 projects for 29 brands in the UK. I caught up with her to find out what she has learnt from creating partnerships between brands and start-ups. (I have lightly edited our conversation but typos are all my own)
Having studied learning for many years, and after writing over a hundred articles about learning over the past year, I have come to believe that there are two types of learning: training, and transformation. Training involves teaching to meet particular goals. These goals, as outlined by Bjork (1994) include:
One of my favourite picture in the National Gallery is 'Tiger in a tropical storm' by Henri Rousseau. It shows a tiger stalking an unseen prey in a rain lashed jungle. It’s a wonderfully vibrant evocative image.
At one time moral development was one of the central missions of higher education. Somehow, this part of the role of higher education got lost. Education was separated from religion, morals became ethics and what was lost was the responsibility of higher education to bring goodness to society. Education has become valueless as far as instilling in students what makes citizens, and people in general, good people.