The intersection of pedagogy and practice. Whether it’s high school science or corporate software training, these posts explore how we design effective learning experiences for humans.

I’m Presenting at Macstock!

Mike, a man with glasses and a beard wearing a black shirt, smiles at the camera against a blurred green outdoor background. To his left is the Macstock 9 logo featuring peace, heart, and computer icons, with text announcing "I'm presenting at Macstock!" on a blue background.

I am excited to be giving my first conference presentation since 2017 at the Macstock Conference and Expo next month!

The workshop will help attendees create automated systems for their creative projects: both purposeful folder structures and project management workflows that actually get the work done.

I was interviewed on the MacVoices podcast, which you can check out here to get some more details.

If you are coming to the conference, let me know! If flying to Chicago is not in the cards, you can also sign up for a digital ticket and get recordings of all of the workshops. Consider using my code MIKEBURKE50 when you register, I’d appreciate it!

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Using Narrative Structure to Improve Corporate Training

Gandalf the Grey from The Lord of the Rings stands on a stone path in the lush green hills of the Shire. Wearing his iconic pointed wizard hat and gray robes, he holds his wooden staff while overlooking the idyllic countryside. Sunlight breaks through clouds in the background, illuminating the pastoral landscape of rolling hills and distant fields that stretches toward the horizon. The scene captures Gandalf as the wise mentor figure at the beginning of the hero's journey.

The human brain sitting in your skull today didn’t evolve to process bullet points and data tables. It descended from ancestors who survived the harshest conditions on Earth without a single written manual. They passed critical knowledge from generation to generation through stories around fires, tales of where to find food, which plants could heal, and how to avoid danger.

As I often told my high school students: “The perfect brain for PowerPoint died in the Ice Age.”

Our neural architecture is wired for narrative. It’s why people will sit through a three-hour Marvel movie with a full bladder but struggle to stay awake through a ten-minute slide presentation. It’s why every major religious text consists primarily of stories rather than bulleted lists of commandments. And it’s why the most durable pieces of human knowledge are ancient tales that have survived millennia.

Yet somehow, when we design corporate training, we often ignore this fundamental truth about how humans learn.

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My Training Triforce

An edited image featuring Link from *The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time* in the background, slightly blurred, standing in a dimly lit temple with his fairy companion, Navi. Overlaid in the foreground is the Triforce symbol, but with the central triangle replaced by a blue inverted triangle.

If I ever time travel back to sometime between 1999 and 2002 to tell myself to buy Apple stock, finding my past self will be really easy. I’ll be at school or within six feet of a Nintendo 64 with The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time sticking out of the top.

To this day, I remember the songs to summon Epona and warp to the Temple of Time.

Perhaps these pivotal childhood memories are making me see an apt analogy where there isn’t one, but stick with me (through 3,600 words), and I’ll talk a lot about what I think makes for great training experiences.

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Email Merge in the Classroom

A stylized illustration of a busy classroom environment. The image shows a man in a suit, viewed from the back, in front of a computer screen displaying an email application. The scene includes various classroom supplies and decorations, such as books, folders, and a clock on the wall. In the background, there are several students seated at desks, working on computers. The classroom is adorned with colorful books on shelves, a green chalkboard with diagrams, and white papers with notes on them

As a teacher of advanced high school students, I have such a different job than many of my peers in my building; but when I walk into my son’s elementary school, I can not get over how different his teacher’s day is from mine. I could never handle their job, and I would never want to try. 

However, secretly, I have always been a little bit curious/envious of the behavior management/parent communication apps that are available for elementary school teachers. ClassDojo looks like such a cool tool that I have my fingers crossed that one of my son’s teachers will use it so I can see what it is like.

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How to Create Better Visual Presentations- Nancy Duarte

I am a huge fan of Nancy Duarte’s presentation philosophy, I own three of her books, and I build my presentation rubrics in my class around her guidance. Here are two quick videos to serve as a starting point to make better presentations.

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