by Alan Nelson
I recently wrote a blog about a new course we have created for Resolution, the professional body for family lawyers. This is clearly a project that has had me thinking because there’s more to say!
As avid blog readers will know from my series of postings about keeping learners in charge, I am a fan of engaging professional learners by keeping them actively involved. Ever since Nelson Croom was launched 9 years ago we have always strived to do this and as new approaches to using the web have slowly emerged - and more recently been labelled “Web 2.0” - we have found that more and more people agree with us.
One way in which this has manifested itself for me is in my dislike of including video in professional development material. I’m probably simply betraying my own learning style preferences but I find it almost impossible to sit still and watch video on my computer for more than 15 seconds at a time. I find my mind wanders and I end up going and making another cup of coffee. I am used to being in control of my PC and so I expect to be leaning forwards with the mouse in my hand.
So when the good people at Resolution said that they had some video material that could be included to show examples of how stressful the protagonists find divorce, and therefore how sensitively their cases must be handled, it was all I could not to deliver my normal rant about the passive nature of video as a learning experience and how people learn best when they are actively engaged.
That was, until I took the time to actually look at the video. The first clip was a scene showing a father dropping his son back to his mother after having custody for the weekend. An almighty row breaks out, ostensibly about the fact that he is half an hour late and hasn’t got the kid to do his homework, but really about the fact that she still hasn’t accepted that the marriage is over. If a learner was in any doubt about how stressful the protagonists in a divorce case must find the experience, they won’t be after watching this clip.
So there we are: something I thought would never happen – a Nelson Croom course has video throughout and is all the better for it. We have of course integrated it into the active experience by using it to stimulate debate and discussion between learners, but I still have to admit that perhaps all this time I have been a bit dogmatic!
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