While preparing a database design presentation with my co-worker Tim, I discovered this hypnotic video demonstrating inserts into a b-tree data structure. For some reason, the music compels me to leave the cubicle and pay a visit to Rami’s falafel truck.
The Schools We Need: Chris Lehman @ Ignite Philly
About a year ago, my husband came home from work, started gushing about a school he had visited that day, and continued to talk for hours about how inspired he was by its students and faculty. That was my introduction to Philadelphia’s Science Leadership Academy, a Philadelphia public high school that opened in 2006.
Here are high school students inventing an efficient flow process for creating biodiesel fuel–how cool is that? And it’s happening in a Philadelphia public school!
Fast forward to the second Ignite Philly, when Chris Lehmann, principal of SLA, gave his presentation on the schools we need. Take five minutes to see a compelling speaker and learn about something wonderful in our city.
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Stories in Learning: The Firm
Last week, Erin Murphy and I attended Brandon Hall’s Innovations in Learning conference, which also included the Excellence in Learning Awards. One of the award winners, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, had a great spin on corporate training.
PWC created a video series called “The Firm,” which follows several characters—the Sr. Associate who parties too much, the New Hire, the Partner, the Baby Boomer executive assistant, the Generation Y fashionista Associate—through their everyday lives as PWC employees and illustrates the finer points of employee coaching.
They released a new episode of The Firm every two weeks, got thousands of internal views, and made the episodes available on YouTube and pwc.tv to as part of their recruiting strategy.
I love this approach because it’s a story. The people are real employees with real quirks—they shave in the bathroom after partying all night and complain about the way their co-workers dress. The second season of the show was even accompanied by a fictitious blog*.
The cases used in business education already incorporate the element of story, so why not take those stories to the next level (someone out there already is, no doubt)? For starters, what about the Learning Lab’s Raise game, in which students allocate salary increases by reading employee profiles? It be so fun to give those characters a voice.
*Writing a fake blog as part of your job? Sign me up!
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Backtest the musical
In September of 2007, the Learning Lab rolled out Backtester,a Flex-based backtesting tool for use in investment classes. I learned a lot about Flex and ActionScript while working on Backtester and am particularly proud of application’s wizard component, which allows users to design an investment strategy in 3 easy steps and test it against historical data.
We made a short screencast* for last spring’s faculty meeting and have been using it to test video tagging toys such as Viddler and Veotag. This post is just a test of Viddler’s new customizable player.
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