Close your eyes … story

Last week I was with a customer for a one-day session. The main goal was to brainstorm about how to take their e-Learning experiences to a new level. It is an international company and they are developing e-Learning for a little more than a year. The development team consist of a few enthusiastic professionals with limited e-Learning experience. They are using Moodle and as authoring methods they using Team (a Stoas tool) and Captivate.



I was thinking about the right way to start the day and was thinking about the power of stories. I asked the participants to close their eyes and think of the most impressive learning experience. This could be anything, from their childhood, a formal or informal experience and any kind of activity.

The results were so inspiring! What a personal stories came up! People where sharing stories about other experiences from journeys to other continents, about kindergarten time, about learning how to fix bikes when you were young and many more. You could feel the energy in the air and everybody was eager to share the learning stories and eager to hear the stories from others.

The great thing was for me the discovery of the power of personal learning stories. If you remember a learning event from 20 or 30 years ago, it has to be a strong one!

It was easy to distil the important ingredients for a powerful learning experience. It worked, touched people and gave inspiration and a framework for the rest of the day. We were together with 5 people, I think it will be harder to do this with a bigger group because it is important to keep it personal.