Enspire Account Director Robert Bell will be attending InstructureCon 2015, June 16-18 in Park City, Utah. The conference is hosted by Instructure, makers of the Canvas LMS for educational institutions. Enspire has extensive expertise in developing envelope-pushing, student-centered custom tools that can be easily integrated into the Canvas platform, most notably for the University of Texas’s OnRamps program. We are continually pursuing innovation in educational technology — by leveraging a third party cognitive computing platform, we are developing a new tool that promises to deliver unique and valuable student personality insights to educators. For more information, contact Robert today: robert.bell@enspire.com. The post Enspire at InstructureCon 2015 appeared first on Enspire.

Can you recognize the learning goals behind these academic masks? By the end of this training, you will be able to… Design and don appropriate attire, as specified in Team Handbook, Section IV: Appropriate Attire, page 132, for the occasion. Approach a minimum of 20 domiciles in the vicinity of a 1-mile radius, and effectively articulate requests to residents for specific holiday-themed needs. Acquire a minimum of 2 confectionary donations per domicile within 15 seconds after requesting provisions. Don’t cloak learning objectives in unnecessary garb. Sure, number 2 of Gagne’s Nine Events of Instruction is to "inform learner of objectives," but the purpose of doing so, even according to Gagne, is to help set the learner’s expectations. Your learners probably need the "what’s in it for me?" version. Were you able to remove the academic masks and see these learner-centered objectives? This training will enable you to…. Make and wear a fun costume. Go to neighbors’ houses and yell "trick or treat!" Get tons of candy! Happy Halloween! The post Are Your Learning Objectives in Disguise? appeared first on Enspire.

Training Specialists from the Texas Juvenile Justice Department (TJJD) invited Enspire’s Creative Director, Jan Farquhar, to share best practices for designing meaningful training with participants of the 2015 Training Coordinators’ Conference, a two-and-a-half-day conference 6/15-6/17 in Austin, Texas. Conference participants, who are responsible for training probation officers in communities across the state, have, historically, primarily used lecture-based presentations. However, with employees increasingly expecting more variety in their training (including online and mobile learning opportunities), TJJD turned to Enspire to provide information and inspiration for designing creative, effective training. Working from the core believe that to be effective, trainers must create relevancy, maintain attention, and enable processing, Jan presented demonstrations and led discussions about four key strategies that help trainers meet those goals: Collaboration Stories and scenario-based learning Games and gamification Self reflection Additionally, Jan incorporated each strategy into the workshop, subtly role-modeling the tactics she was promoting. For example, "benefits of collaboration" was reinforced as learners worked together to answer questions. "Self reflection" was reinforced by asking learners periodically to jot down notes as to how they might apply each strategy in the field. Therefore, in addition to seeing demonstrations and discussing meaningful learning experiences, learners actually experienced each of the strategies first hand. The post Consulting with TJJD appeared first on Enspire.

Enspire Learning (www.enspire.com) welcomes the addition of Duarte alumnus Mark Heaps to its leadership team as Executive Producer of Houndstooth (www.houndstoothstudio.com), the commercial media and experience design arm of Enspire. Prior to Duarte, Mark served as a technical leader at Google, and Apple, and taught as a Senior Instructor of Graphic Design at Brooks College in Sunnyvale, CA. Mark has been a long standing Adobe Community Professional, and Adobe Certified Expert, who has spoken at conferences such as Adobe MAX, SXSW Interactive, PePcon, and many others. As a member of the Enspire leadership team, Mark will work to further the Houndstooth brand while at the same time integrating its commercial-quality design with Enspire Learning’s portfolio of services and a client base established over 15 years. "We are thrilled to have Mark join the Enspire team," Mary Maltbie, CEO of Enspire, said. "His team-leading experience, engagement with our current and potential clients, and ability to easily move between tactical and strategic endeavors make him a very welcome addition to our corporate family." An organic part of Enspire since 2010, Houndstooth is a multidisciplinary design and production studio wholly owned by Enspire and co-located in our office space. Created to capitalize on the wealth of interactive installation and event-planning talent in the Enspire multimedia department, Houndstooth services all Enspire projects while also pursuing engagements entirely outside the learning space under its own brand. Houndstooth specializes in motion graphics design, interactive installations, events, and sound and music design. Founded in 2001 to become a leading source of high-quality learning applications, Enspire creates solutions designed to educate, delight, and change learner behavior. The post HT welcomes EP appeared first on Enspire.

In Enspire’s information-rich, busy workplace, I sometimes find myself trying to simultaneously execute multiple tasks. I’m not alone in this. The pursuit of productivity, or at least a mirage that feels like productivity, leads many of us to attempt ever greater feats of multitasking. Have any of these occurrences happened to you? You are in a meeting and decide to make a few final touches to an email. During a conference call you receive an instant message from a colleague so you immediately read it and reply. You are in the middle of something when you receive an urgent email about a completely different topic. Ironically, recently I listened to an NPR Talk of the Nation broadcast titled The Myth of Multitasking. Researchers have tried to assess how humans are coping in this highly connected world and how "chronic multitasking" may diminish our capacity to function effectively. The examples I previously listed were all "non-integrative" items. Meaning the tasks didn’t have anything to do with each other. In the NPR interview, Dr. Clifford Nass, author of The Man Who Lied to His Laptop and professor of communication at Stanford, closes by stating, "It’s extremely healthy for your brain to do integrative things. It’s extremely destructive for your brain to do non-integrative things." If you haven’t already, take a 1 minute Awareness Test. During this test see if you can count how many passes the team in white makes. How did you do? Remember how things turned out for Lucy and Ethel when they landed jobs on the chocolate factory assembly line? I hope you have better luck at monitoring and controlling the pace and flow of your work. Mind Tools offers a few tips to help you get started. The post Mutually Assured Multitasking appeared first on Enspire.

Enspire is pleased to announce our plans to bring the power of IBM Watson™ to universities nationwide, beginning in Fall 2015, with our acceptance into the IBM Watson Ecosystem Partner program. Our world-class team of software engineers and designers has been hard at work creating a Learning Management System (LMS) tool that utilizes the cognitive computing capabilities of IBM Watson. The goal of this project is to improve student outcomes across all courses. In particular, the tool helps faculty make instructional interventions earlier than previously possible via the IBM Watson Personality Insights service. Our rich custom visualizations also provide at-a-glance trend analyses that benefit both the students and instructor. The above view shows the results for a single submission.     The above view shows timeline results for 9 randomized submissions.   However, this is just the first step in a much larger roadmap. Over time, we also see a need for this technology to address challenges in the workplace, and we’ll be here to help. One particular difficulty is assembling high performing teams. Below is a 2D graphical preview of our proprietary modified k-means algorithm that groups n-dimensional personality profile vectors into equi-sized homogenous clusters. We also have several other grouping strategies in the works to improve team formation at any organizational scale (e.g., creating diverse groups along specific dimensions). The above view shows the results of clustering random 2D points into 5 equal sized groups of 10 to 11 members each. In practice, we’d be clustering people into teams based on their writing inputs and IBM Watson outputs.   Want to learn more? Contact us today! IBM Watson is a trademark of International Business Machines Corporation, registered in many jurisdictions worldwide The post Enspire is now an IBM Watson Ecosystem Partner appeared first on Enspire.

The Rustici Software internship is more than just a summer job. Our weeks aren’t just days filled with boring busywork. From Monday to Friday we are doing work that counts, as well gaining more knowledge everyday. From the moment we step in the office in the mornings, we immediately start learning. Some days it’s sitting in on a meeting or business call, while other days we have scheduled time blocked for "Lunch and Learns" or "Book Club". It might be a little different from the typical summer internship, but it’s what makes interning at Rustici engaging and unique. It’s a way for the interns to learn more about the company, life after school, and to pick the brains of the Rustici employees. Diving into food and books Every Tuesday we have an hour set aside to eat lunch with two or three employees. It’s mostly the interns learning about the different positions in the company and what everyone does. The free lunch in this arrangement is a definite bonus of Lunch and Learns. But the more interesting part of these lunches are the discussions we have with the people who work at Rustici. Everyone is always very open, they willingly give us advice about life after college and the chance to discuss questions we have. Another unique learning opportunity at Rustici is Book Club. All the interns and a couple of employees meet on Wednesdays, an hour before lunch. Over the 14 week program, the interns are reading two books, The Pragmatic Programmer and The Mythical Man-Month. These books bring our attention to the less technical side of being a developer, and have us focusing more on the ideas behind project management, working as a team, and time management. Book Club gives us a chance to discuss the content with peers and view the different takes and ideas. We get the chance to learn from people who have been at this for awhile and have experience in this field. Instead of reading for homework as a grade, we read as a group to exchange ideas and discuss how developing code has changed over the years. Why work environment matters We are continuing to learn through the culture at Rustici. In addition to the work we do on our project, we occasionally help out with other tasks around the office alongside other employees of Rustici. This includes unloading the clean dishes from the dishwasher, helping Gretchen unload a full car from a Costco run, refilling the toilet roll, or taking out the trash. These are small, easy tasks, that everyone pitches in to help look out for one another and maintain a pleasant work environment. We aren’t just learning about coding, creating a web application, and working as a team, but also about being better people. The environment created through cleaning and helping out is one where we all look out for each other, which sometimes includes taking home the sick intern who refuses to go home. The experiences here not only teach us in ways that will help us grow academically, but as people as well, and occasionally we learn a thing or two about common sense (like not to write with expo marker on contact paper. Hint: it doesn’t erase.) Always learning, always growing. There are different mediums and ways to learn, it doesn’t stop and it never will. At Rustici we aren’t just interns cast in a corner, we’re seen as the next generation to be imparted with knowledge to help us grow and inform others. Every week we come away knowing more than we did the week before. We are being given tools that we can carry into the rest of our education, jobs, and lives. We’re learning through what we create, what we read, and interactions from the people here. We may be out of school for the summer, but we’re definitely still keeping our minds sharp, and learning a lot at Rustici. The post The Intern Life at Rustici Software appeared first on Rustici Software.

Austin, Texas-based Cub Scout Pack 535 spent weekends in June building three keyhole gardens at their home school of Kiker Elementary. Enspire provided industrial quantities of ice and water to hydrate Pack 535 Scouts, family members, and workshop leaders during a capstone construction day that oscillated between sunny and rainy, but stayed consistently hot. Keyhole gardens are a variety of raised-bed garden, well suited to Central Texas’ semi-arid environment (see Enspire’s work with the Texas Colorado River Alliance). The gardens also have construction needs well-matched to Scouts who enjoyed hosing down cardboard, jumping up and down to compact mulch-able material into the beds, getting muddy, and planting vegetables. Workshop planning was expertly spearheaded by Den Leader Rick Lusk, DVM and led by Dr. Deb Tolman. Partners Whole Foods, Home Depot, and the Kiker PTA  supplied funds, food, and tools. Texas Disposal Systems offered up surplus cardboard - two tons of it (!) - which was hauled to the site on a trailer graciously offered up by Sam Painovich. The workshop was  filmed by a crew from Texas Country Reporter - a what’s-happening-around-Texas television staple since the early 1970′s - and will air as part of the show in early Fall 2015.           The post Helping Scouts garden appeared first on Enspire.

Ecology is "the study of interactions among organisms and their environment."  Apply this concept to your learning portal. Get eco-minded: reduce, reuse, recycle. Blend formal and informal learning options. Crowd-source content too by creating a social community of practice with forums and knowledge bases. Just as adaptation, diversification, and natural selection occur in nature, we need learning infrastructures that can do that. I’m a big fan of the theory "distributed cognition" which posits knowledge lies not only within an individual, but also in the individual’s social and physical environment.  I’ve incorporated "distribguted cognition" in previous posts too — Why Less is More than Ever Before  and Create More Problems for Education - because I think it’s so important to consider the ecology of learning when designing training and education experiences. That is, the learner in situ. I made a simple visual representation of "distributed cognition" as it applies to many work and learning environments: While "digital" spaces are evermore available, don’t forget the physical workplace. Include learning resources throughout the workflow and workspace. Consider simple and colorful job aids; attach process posters on the wall, a troubleshooting diagram on the side of the laser printer. Insert links to job aids, colleagues to contact for assistance, and other resources in team email messages. There is much for us to remain mindful about, yet it is hard to remember all things. Make access to training and supports easy within a new ecology of learning.. The post A New Ecology of Learning appeared first on Enspire.

A lot of my time is spent on calls talking to people about Tin Can. Sometimes the person I’m speaking to is just interested in Tin Can generally or wants some advice, and other times they are interested in finding out more about one of our products too; in those cases I often tag team the call with someone from the sales team for the relevant products. A few times after the call, the sales person will thank me for taking all the hard questions, which always surprises me because from my point of view they jumped in to answer the hard questions. I just answered the easy stuff about Tin Can that’s within my area of expertise; they had all the knowledge about our products, costs, and why we’re awesome, and they answered eloquently where I would have stumbled and lacked the facts. We each have our own domain of knowledge, expertise and skills. That’s one of the things I love about working at Rustici Software; everybody you work with has expertise in their domain, isn’t afraid to bring it to the table, and values the expertise of those around them. I experienced this again recently when doing some planning work for a refresh of tincanapi.com. Marketing really isn’t my area of expertise, but Jeff Horne has won awards for his marketeering. I bring to the table knowledge of the subject matter and audience for tincanapi.com and I’m responsible for the project, but the gaps in my expertise are filled in by really helpful feedback and comments from Jeff. By working together, we’re building something better than we could have achieved individually; the output of my work is better because of Jeff’s expertise. That’s awesome. The post Everybody’s Special appeared first on Rustici Software.