Top # of reasons you should buy my new book, Immersive Learning

It's official! The book is out!

(Ok, technically you could have already pre-ordered it, but today was the official announcement from my publisher, ASTD)

Having stole my own thunder yesterday, I'd like to celebrate the official release by listing the top # of reasons to buy Immersive Learning. I don't know how many reasons I'll come up with, and I titled this blog first, so the exact number of top reasons is a mystery even to me until this post is published. Actually, I'm not even going to count :)

Here we go! Reasons to buy Immersive Learning:

• You believe that learning is better when it's not passive. 
• You've ever said "Practice makes perfect," or quoted that "How do you get to Carnegie Hall?" quote. 
• You think performance objectives are more meaningful than learning objectives.
• You've ever created an avatar. 
• You think there must be a better way to assess learning than multiple choice questions. 
• You have a smartphone. 
• You've ever played house, army, or, if you were like me, "store."
• You prefer green apples.
• You're related to me. 
• You've played one of my ARGs.  
• You want to know what an ARG is. 
• You know who the Underpants Gnomes are. 
• You work in corporate learning and want to learn a new design skill to add to your designer toolbox. 
• You work in higher education and want to engage your students in meaningful practice.
• You work as a K12 teacher and you're looking for ways to transition your classroom to Common Core.
• You want to flip your classroom or training and want to create amazing application activities with  all that time you used to spend lecturing. 
• You have a favorite character from a movie or tv show that you quote. 
• You made a resolution with me and my book can help. 
• I used you as an example in it.
• I used someone you know as an example in it. 
• You are looking for a book to give a great Amazon review. 
• You haven't spent all of your holiday money on Candy Crush yet. 
• You believe knowing something and doing it are two totally different things.
• You heard me speak at a conference and I made some sense.
• You want to design meaningful and effective learning experiences.  

I'm sure there are more! If you think of any, please add them in the comments. And thank you, THANK YOU, for all of your support!

Book release eve! Immersive Learning has left the building

Well, it's finally here. My book release.

It's been 2 1/2 years and tomorrow, ASTD Publishing will officially announce the release of my first book, Immersive Learning. While I haven't seen the actual physical copy of the book yet, I hear that it is currently on it's way. Last week, in a book marketing call, I had this surreal moment of "OMG MY BOOK IS DONE." Which is true, and has been true for awhile, but there is something pretty amazing about knowing that all of the work that went into it is now, finally, realized in an actual book that you can buy on Amazon.

My kids also think that is pretty cool.

You're going to hear a lot about my book and about immersive learning this year. I'll be speaking and blogging and organizing book clubs and collecting case studies and in general, happily talking about how to design for practice. I am thrilled to have an actual artifact that encapsulates my research, experience and design practices. I'm excited to share it with you, to talk and discuss and debate and to learn.

I thought I would be terrified, putting something so personal out there for the world to critique. But as we're on the cusp of the book launch, all I feel is joy.

So, pick up a copy of my book if you're so inclined and join in the conversation this year about immersive learning. You can even get a free chapter to see what it's all about. Or just make a training resolution with me and commit to making this year a better year for design and learning (or both).

Happy 2014 everyone and thanks for your support!

Sincerely,
Koreen Pagano, Author :) 

New tools, same old problems: curation and media literacy

I've been trying to find, to no avail, the source for the quote: "If it isn't written down, it didn't happen."
And of course, the flip-side, "If it's written down, it must be true."

In light of Apple's announcement on their iBooks Author program and the release of iBooks 2, there's been a flurry of discussion of how this is the nail in the textbook industry's coffin. Maybe...but likely not.

The truth is, we NEED curators, and that's what the textbook industry is. For all of their (many) faults, textbooks try to collect and document information to provide a basis for what constitutes being educated. (I'm resisting adding quotes around the key words in that sentence...) As long as we are depending on others to do the curation for us, we are subject to their biases. When I wrote my Master's thesis on media literacy, I had no idea that it would become exponentially more important to develop those critical thinking and analysis skills; at the time, I was focused on subliminal gender and political biases perpetrated through marketing and journalism. I focused my media literacy curriculum on questioning the source and asking questions like:

• what information is being communicated? 
• why are they choosing to communicate that information? 
• what information is being left out? 
• how do the intrinsic biases of the people making those decisions shape what others are being led to believe?
• who has differing viewpoints or counter information? 
• what information are the authors basing their message on?
• how does it benefit the author for you to believe his/her message?

I could go on and on. 

The point is, EVERY communication is biased, but where journalism, media agencies, and even educational curriculum developers (eg, textbook publishers) are concerned, we are not usually taught to consider the source. 

We should always consider the source. We all need to become curators.

Even more challenging is our brain's awesome and frightening ability to create fabricated memories based on our biases. We need documentation and curation to prevent not just the biases of others, but our own personal biases, from rewriting history.

Not all opinions are created equal and not all "facts" or "truth" are created equal either. The goal of "fair and balanced" shouldn't just apply to political journalism, it should apply to any content we consume. Collect data, consider the source, examine the biases...don't confuse opinion with fact.

As the opportunity for curation and publication becomes more readily available, the need for media literacy, critical analysis of content, and curation skills become increasingly important. I'm thrilled that tools are becoming available that are challenging the stranglehold of textbook publishers. But the bigger question is, are we prepared for the responsibility inherent in the use of those tools? 

Coming in 2012: Immersive Learning Design (my first book!)

It's official!

As I type this, my book contract with ASTD is in the post and I'm mentally preparing for the next few months of writing my first book to be published next year: Immersive Learning Design.

I've been blogging since starting Tandem Learning, I've written articles about the many shades of immersive learning (games, simulations, virtual worlds), and I've presented at more conferences than I could easily count. But a book is a different level of reflection for me and I am thrilled to have the opportunity to take on the challenge of documenting what I actually *do.*

The goal of the book is three-fold:

• define immersive learning as a category of design that incorporates elements of games, simulations, virtual worlds and other immersive technologies, 
• describe the design process for immersive learning experiences and differentiate immersive design from traditional instructional design, and
• detail examples of how organizations have been applying immersive learning design to address business issues and corporate learning needs.

I'm sure as I get deeper into the weeds of writing, I'll be posting more about the book, asking questions of others who specialize in immersive learning design, and recruiting organizations who are willing to share their stories of immersive learning design implementations. In the meantime, I'm gonna start limbering up my typing fingers!

Sometimes its tough to blog

There are lines that become blurry when you blog about your business and you're an entrepreneur for whom business is personal. When I started this blog, I wrote about starting this company, the issues and challenges. Over the years, it became more difficult to be that open, not because I didn't want to share what I was learning or reflect on the process, but because that process involved other people. Writing is a deeply personal activity for me, a chance to reflect and synthesize and deconstruct. The point at which that thinking involves other people, however, becomes a decision point as to whether or not MY reflection and learning can negatively impact others. 

The act of writing, publishing, is an act of responsibility. There are times when I struggle with the balance of my own reasons for blogging and respecting the privacy of other people in my life. Sometimes that means that I'll just write about purely work or professional topics. Sometimes that means that I'll write personal stuff but try not to write about anyone else. 

Sometimes that means that I stop blogging for awhile. 

Today I wrote for hours, reflecting on the current state of my personal and professional lives. It has been weeks since I've posted something here and I had finally caught my breath and wrote it all down, how I was feeling, what I was thinking. It was awesome. But I couldn't hit publish. I sat and looked at what I had written and then I deleted it. I deleted it because sometimes you have to just write for you. Sometimes there isn't a good reason to let the world into your thought process. Sometimes its just vanity to reveal the good, the bad, and the ugly. Sometimes you need to not just be a writer, but an editor too. 

I think there is a balance to strike between the personal and professional. I love to read a great professional reflective post, but I also love to read about someone's personal journey. It reminds me that we're all just figuring our way through this crazy maze. But these days, when everything you publish online is saved, cached, and accessible in the Library of Congress, I think privacy is sometimes overlooked. I value my privacy and I respect the privacy of others. So I hit delete, and I'm writing this post instead. 

Be kind to one another, everybody. These are exciting times and we're all in this together. 

Learning, and the opportunity and risk of living publicly

We are in the age of living publicly.

Social media has enabled us to broadcast and publish our work, our thoughts, our pictures, and our "updates" not just to people we know, but to the entire world. This brings with it an enormous opportunity and also tremendous risk, sometimes at the same time.

Take, for example, Rebecca Black.

If you haven't yet seen the Friday video by Rebecca Black, or heard all of the news stories about her and the video, take a minute and watch it now.



Its not a good song or video (although I would bet you money you'll find yourself singing the catchy hook later today)...in fact, its pretty awful. BUT SHE'S 13. I never fancied myself a musician, but I did think I was a pretty fantastic writer when I was a teenager. When I look back on what I wrote? Wow, I was terrible. I'm thankful that all of my writing was confined to spiral notebooks and the broadest audience was my friends and family who encouraged me to keep writing, but never gave me false praise or soul-crushing criticism. I was allowed to practice and improve, and in some cases, realize that I wasn't all that good and I didn't have the passion to work harder to become good.

That's the beauty of learning. To really learn something, to become an expert, you have to practice. You have to have a safe place to try and experiment and fail and improve and stick with it and, eventually, get better. Becoming really good at something requires dedication and practice. Sure, some people start out with natural abilities or inclinations that might make learning something easier. But there are very few things that you can't learn and be really good at if you keep practicing.

Rebecca Black may have never become a great singer, songwriter, or musician. Maybe she would have (maybe she still will). But what impact has the public lambasting of her video had on her learning, her motivation, and her development?

Criticism is hard to hear. None of us really like to hear that we're bad at something...we thrive in environments where we get positive reinforcement. On the other hand, constructive feedback is necessary if we want to get better at something.

We live in an age that allows us to get instant, unfiltered feedback on anything that we do. It may be a realistic environment, but it can be hostile and often not constructive. Now, more than ever, we need the ability to practice, to find opportunities for constructive criticism in safe environments, and to refine and hone our skills before we put ourselves out in the public eye.

In learning terms, this means that coaching, mentoring, and communities of practice will play increasingly critical roles in our development. It means that immersive and experiential learning environments will become those safe havens where we can practice safely before we're ready for prime time. It means that we all need to develop the ability to manage our public versus private identities in ways that we haven't had to even think about in the past.

I hope Rebecca Black has a long, happy, and successful life in whatever she decides to pursue. At 13, she has learned, and illustrated to many, the power of social media. But with great power comes great responsibility...and we all need to be taking (and teaching) responsibility to ensure that the opportunities afforded by social media outweigh the risks. 

The Authoress

Last year I put together the first draft of a book. It was done by the end of summer, and I needed to go back and edit it to make sure it met my initial objectives. Fast forward 6 months: I'm still editing that first draft. Oh my sweet baby Jesus, it is taking forever. 

I'm a really fast writer. I can write faster than almost anyone I know. Not fiction, mind you, but the kind of writing that college professors seemed to like. The kind of writing that would be pretty acceptable for the book that I'm working on.

But I hate editing. I don't have patience for it. Once something is done, I have a hard time looking back (I'm usually already on to the next thing). I'm more than happy to hand my stuff over to someone else to comment on or review, just so I never have to look at it, or think through it, again. 

This book is important to me and it is demanding my attention. I WANT to edit it. I WANT to look at it again, think it through again. I want to make sure that I'm communicating what I intend to. I want to get it (as close as I can) right. 

That said, wanting to do it and liking it are two very different things. 

To do in '09

I don't make resolutions, but I do make lists. Resolve is finicky, but when I've got something to do on my list, there's much better chance that thing is getting done. 

Here's my business to do list for 2009, based on my learnings from 2008. 

• Get contracts in place and finalized for any outstanding agreements, and don't start any new ventures without a contract in place from the beginning (I'm sure the sharkweasel will love this one...)
• Review company financials and make adjustments on a weekly basis
• Publish my book 
• Speak/present at three or more events
• Keep up with this blog and put some energy and thought into my new company blog
• Meet 3 of my Twitter friends that I've never met in person
• Explore 3 new social media tools and determine their usefulness for learning
• Get 3 new clients 
• Realize quarter over quarter growth
• Resume the Rockstar meetings
• Establish individual performance goals for each of the Rockstars
• Hit our sales goals
• Write another book
• Hold a conference 

Not a long list, right? Just a few little things to do this year. 365 days to check 14 things off my list. Let's get this party started.

Fast or big?

Can't remember if I mentioned that the first draft of my first book is done. We're deep into editing mode now, but the completion of the book has prompted a big decision to make: how to publish it?

Before the first page was even written, I had assumed that I would do some sort of vanity press, self-publishing, POD option. I've checked into Lulu, Lightning Source, and Booksurge as some viable options. Each of these would allow me to get copies of my book relatively quickly and provide them to prospective clients as a form of education on virtual worlds, and of course, as a marketing tool. Speed seems to be the key factor in this marketplace right now, and as quickly as the book has gotten done, self-publishing seems like the fastest way to get it into people's hands.

So what's the problem? I really think the book is good. It would be nice to actually have it published and promoted by someone other than me. It would be nice to have the credibility of a publisher behind all of this hard work. Somehow, I think it would be more legitimate.

But it will be a lot slower.

I still haven't decided which way I should go yet. Another day, another big decision...