Learning 2015 Sal Kahn and useful notes

I attended the Masie conference in Orlando, FL this year also known as Learning 2015. This was my first time attending the conference and I was very excited to learn about some of the practices the business world puts into place for staff training, learning and teaching, as well as any nuggets of wisdom from speakers and presenters that I could bring back home and use at the Library.

In one of the general sessions, Sal Khan—founded of Khan Academy—talked about a flipped classroom and stressed that lecture style learning could be done individually, outside of the classroom or at home on a learner’s own time. He spoke about how traditional education can be seen as an accumulation of gaps—if you did not learn the material the first time, or only learned it 80% then it becomes rather difficult to ever achieve the other 20% to make it 100% if you move on to the next subject, phase, or set of learning right away. Thus, your education as a whole can be considered an accumulation of gaps. One easy way to alleviate this is to spend more time outside of a learning classroom, environment, or training session by grappling with the material on your own and coming to the face-to-face session with deeper questions about what you learned, which makes the learning that much more valuable.

Khan’s discussion and presentation was probably the best part of the conference for me. I was also able to jot down various quotes I gathered from other sessions and speakers throughout the conference that I find very useful and enlightening which are listed below.

Some words of wisdom that I collected from the conference:

·         “if you’re not learning and growing—you are not keeping up”

·         “you do not stop learning and growing just because you hit a certain age”

·         “when talking about training with staff you want to stress versatility not vulnerability”

·         “it’s about knowledge flow, not knowledge store”

·         “when teaching do not start with an objective, start with a challenge for learning”

·         “failure is important—you do not learn or get good at anything unless you fail a number of times before”

·         “the larger the prize the less focus on learning” (about incentives)

·         “group competition works better than individual competition”

·         “tie gamification to intrinsic motivation, not extrinsic—otherwise it goes stale after a month”

·         “sometimes you can’t learn until you know what you don’t know”

·         “when asking someone about themselves and their learning, ask why they fail, not why they succeed—most often people are not sure why they succeed and do not fully understand how they learn, but they sure remember failing and why they failed.”

Ryan O’Grady
SLRC Office