July/August Fast Company article reviews by Todd Mehrkens

Learning Without Limits, Page 46, Fast Company, July/August 1999, by Gina Imperato

The article from the July/August issue focused on a learning company, the Limited Training Group. The Limited is breaking a lot of the training stereotypes with their new and unconventional approaches. One of their guiding principles is that "training cant add value if trainers dont understand how value is created in the trenches." When contacted to provide training for a company, one of the first things the Limited does is spend some time getting to know the company and the people that work their. Once again, they have realized that having great content (or at least content that the teacher thinks is great) is not enough - there must be a connection and relevance for the learner.

Another of their guiding principles illustrates a primary focus on the learner and a secondary focus on the content - "even the best courses arent worth much if people cant take them." I found it interesting that one solution to this challenge has been to encourage students to "bring their work to class", which has also been encouraged in this M.Ed. program. At first, it seemed strange (or even a bit like cheating) to be getting school credit for doing things we had to be doing anyway for work. Now, after doing it for a while, it is actually making some sense. I find it exciting to consider the tremendous learning opportunity in applying critical reflection to what we are already doing.

The Limited feels that "interaction is where the action is". They aim to have some sort of interaction every eight minutes. Although this seemed a bit extreme at the time I read the article, after attending the "Brain Friendly Learning" track at E-Summit, this might be right on the mark. The presenter we had at E-Summit told us the rule-of-thumb is to have one minute of "presentation" for each year of age, and then break in with some sort of interaction or activity. This rule-of-thumb maxes out at age 20, suggesting a 20 minute maximum when presenting to adults. However, the presenter at E-Summit shared her personal experience that adults prefer a maximum of 8 minutes presentation at one time. Her term for breaking up a presentation this way was "chunking" the content.

In looking for feedback for this article I turned to some people who had recently been subjected to trainings presented by myself. One situation was a cluster-wide training session for the new 4-H software being introduced in Minnesota. Originally, the training session had been scheduled for a whole day (9-3). However, when we came back from our lunch break, it was clear that most of the participants had reached their saturation point for learning this new computer program. As a result, we did a few wrap-up things and went home much earlier than expected.

The other situation was a 4-H Club Officer training session. The session ran from 7:30 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. and I felt we did a good job of keeping things moving and involving the participants. However, in the written evaluations of the evening, the length of the session being too long was one of the most common factors mentioned.

At the time I presented both of the above trainings, I was not aware of the concepts of "chunking", and it may have helped. However, both situations do reflect another of the Limiteds guiding principles: Four hours, not for-ever. Presenters need to be aware of absorption limits when planning and presenting trainings. If information is not retained, there is little point in presenting it.

I found this information to be incredibly helpful and look forward to applying it to computer training situations.

-- Anonymous, October 21, 1999