Tag Archive for: instructional-design

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.

Read more

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.

Read more

Personal Trello Boards

Read more

Intro to Finance Blog Posts

The standard career plan of the 20th century was to work for a company for 30 years to get a gold watch and a pension. Across the board, careers were for life. However, as the economy globalizes and society shifts, the monolithic career is dying quickly. Unsurprisingly, the financial systems (compensation, pensions etc) around education have remained stagnant. This juxtaposition of reality and education leads to financial stress and hardship for a staggering number of teachers.

Read more

Hello

My name is Mike, you can find out more about me here. I started this site as part of a grad class project but honestly, I have wanted to do this for a while. On this blog, you will find posts about a few different topics that I am interested in or am learning about. Topics will include everything from instructional technology to personal finance.

I intend for every post to have actionable, effective information that you can actually apply to your life, teaching or hobbies.

I hope I can help you earn more, use timesaving tools, and get things done.