Things I'm thankful for in 2024
Establishing a noble holiday tradition
This time last year, I wrote a Dispatch titled ‘Why I’m thankful to work in L&D’.
My wife and I had just finished celebrating Thanksgiving with her family in the U.S., and I was in an uncharacteristically festive mood.
Filled with the spirit of the season, it occurred to me that Ross G and I had dedicated too many issues of this newsletter to the shortcomings of L&D, rather than its many virtues.
I enjoyed writing that article at the time, and I enjoyed re-reading it in preparation for this week’s edition. But in doing so, I realized I had missed a trick.
Instead of using the article to establish my personal thanksgiving as an annual holiday tradition, I chose to focus on the perennial qualities of L&D as a profession. The things I was grateful for twelve months ago I am still grateful for today, seemingly foreclosing any possibility of revisiting the format.
To address my previous oversight, I’m tweaking the format slightly this week, and sharing a few things I am specifically thankful for in 2024.
This is not a cynical rehash, nor is it a desperate admission that I have run out of ideas. Rather, it is the start of a noble tradition that will be honored in the Dispatch for years to come.
Here, in no particular order, are the things I’m grateful for this year:
🏆 I get to work with clients who care about measurement and evaluation
As Ross G mentioned last week, Mind Tools had a pretty good night at the Learning Technologies Awards earlier this month. Claire Gibson won a well-deserved Gold in the ‘Learning Designer of the Year’ category, and we also won Gold in ‘Best Use of Blended Learning - Commercial Sector’ category in partnership with South Western Railway.
In the case of the latter, much of our success can be attributed to South Western Railway’s decision to invest in learning measurement from the outset of the project. Using focus groups, semi-structured interviews, and a valid and reliable behavioral survey, Mind Tools’ Head of Insight & Analytics, Dr Gent Ahmjetaj, helped us develop an evaluation strategy that proved the impact of our intervention.
As a vendor, we discuss learning measurement at the start of every client project, but we don’t always get to see what happens post-launch. In South Western Railway and Becky Eason, we found a partner that was committed to bringing us along for the journey, with the goal of driving continuous improvement. For projects like this, awards are the icing on the cake. Or the marshmallows on the potatoes, if we’re keeping things seasonal.
👬 I have a manager who supports me, while pushing me outside my comfort zone
I’ve now worked at Mind Tools for over nine years, which I would never have expected when I started as a Content Editor here in 2015. (As I wrote last year, my initial feeling was that corporate L&D was ‘kind of… lame’.)
Although there are many reasons I’ve stayed with the company as long as I have, the main one is the relationships I’ve built with colleagues, particularly my manager.
This relationship is perhaps best represented through Ross Garner’s ‘voluntelling’ me to speak with him at World of Learning earlier this year. I’d never presented at a conference before, and the mere prospect filled me with dread.
While Ross didn’t give me much choice in the matter, he knew I could do it, and helped me feel like I could, too.
A few months after World of Learning, I spoke at the Learning Technologies conference — still nervous, but slightly more assured than I had been the first time around. Both events felt like career milestones.
✍️ I get to spend some of my working (and occasionally non-working) hours writing this newsletter
When I took that Content Editor job back in 2015, I knew basically nothing about L&D. To the extent that has changed, the little I do know can largely be attributed to hosting The Mind Tools L&D Podcast for the last eight years, which has exposed me to ideas I may not otherwise have come across.
In a similar way, writing this newsletter has forced me to set aside time for professional development. If I didn’t have to come up with a ‘Deep dive’ every other week, there’s no way I’d spend even half as much time poring over research papers.
I’m thankful to Mind Tools for affording me the time and space to write the Dispatch. And I’m thankful to you for reading it.
Want to share your thoughts on this week’s Dispatch? Interested in working with the Mind Tools Custom team? Then get in touch by emailing custom@mindtools.com or reply to this newsletter from your inbox.
🎧 On the podcast
How can we help managers demonstrate care for their teams, while maintaining high standards of accountability and performance?
In last week's episode of The Mind Tools L&D Podcast, Ross G and Anna were joined by Joris Merks-Benjaminsen to discuss:
why nice managers can still provide mediocre management;
how managers can balance care for their teams with high levels of performance;
how to build better managers.
Check out the episode below. 👇
You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify or the podcast page of our website. Want to share your thoughts? Get in touch @RossDickieMT, @RossGarnerMT or #MindToolsPodcast
📖 Deep dive
Jared Cooney Horvath believes the EdTech revolution has failed.
In this guest article for Jonathan Haidt and Zach Rausch’s Substack, After Babel, Horvath claims that while the U.S. government spends over $30 billion on EdTech products annually, these technologies have not been shown to benefit student learning.
He writes:
‘A recent analysis investigating the impact of computers on reading performance among K-12 students across the U.S. concludes, “…even small daily amounts (30min) of use of digital devices in classrooms are negatively related to scores on a reading comprehension test.” A similar analysis of learning moderators within university settings concludes, “…expanding the use of…technology at the expense of other forms of instruction is likely to have detrimental effects on achievement.” Yet another set of analyses reported that investing in air conditioning has a more beneficial impact on student learning than investing in a laptop for every student (ES = 0.21 vs 0.16)’
According to Horvath, one of the reasons EdTech has failed is because the primary function of a computer is not learning, but multitasking:
‘Seeing as the great majority of students spend over 80% of their digital device time using these tools to multitask, the automatic response for a great majority of students using these tools has become multitasking.. Unfortunately, when we attempt to employ digital devices for learning purposes, this primary function quickly bleeds into student behavior.’
Horvath, J. C. (2024). ‘The EdTech Revolution Has Failed’.
👹 Missing links
🦉 Why Duolingo optimizes for engagement
If we accept Horvath’s premise that one of the fundamental barriers to digital learning is the temptation to multitask, Duolingo appears to acknowledge this tension. In a recent interview, the company’s CEO explained that, in situations where engagement and learning outcomes are at odds with one another, Duolingo will choose to prioritize engagement. He defends this position by claiming that staying motivated is the biggest challenge when it comes to self-directed learning, and that users will lose motivation if they experience friction or frustration in the process. On the one hand, this approach recognizes the reality that learning needs to compete for attention. On the other, how many people achieve even basic fluency by using Duolingo?
🏰 How I cross-trained my way to a career
On The Mind Tools L&D Podcast, we often talk about the weird and wonderful ways people stumble into careers in L&D. Here, our pal JD Dillon shares how he strategically cross-trained to transition from a part-time Disney cast member to a full-time manager in the space of ten months, and how this journey ultimately led him to a career in L&D. As JD points out, his story underscores the importance of workplace generalists, and exposing colleagues to a wide range of skills-development opportunities.
‘How r u?’ According to eight studies using mixed methods, texting abbreviations like this make the sender seem less sincere, and the recipient less likely to write back. These shortcuts might appear to be easy time-savers, but the message they send is that the recipient isn’t worthy of your time. Interestingly, the negative effects were not mitigated by communicator familiarity or the length of the text exchange.
👋 And finally…
Gather round, readers, for this dramatic reading of ‘Crazy’ by Gnarls Barkley, performed by James McNicholas.
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
👍 Thanks!
Thanks for reading The L&D Dispatch from Mind Tools! If you’d like to speak to us, work with us, or make a suggestion, you can email custom@mindtools.com.
Or just hit reply to this email!
Hey here’s a thing! If you’ve reached all the way to the end of this newsletter, then you must really love it!
Why not share that love by hitting the button below, or just forward it to a friend?