Learnlets is a blog capturing my reflections, and serves as the official Quinnovation blog. I’m an independent consultant helping companies perform smarter by improving their processes, practices, and infrastructure, e.g. their strategy. I earned a Ph.D. in applied cognitive science, and my interests lie at the intersection of learning, design, and technology.
In the early days of the internet, I responded to a request for predictions about the future of computing. My (paraphrased) response: “in the future there will be lots of little interactive and engaging applications that will teach you anything you need to know, including how to make little interactive and engaging applications.” The requester liked my suggestion, and it was included in the published collection. (Now if I could only remember who, where, and when!) Those little interactive and engaging applications are learnlets.
Here, the learnlets are my learnings about learning (and, occasionally, about life, the universe, and everything). I’ve gradually (d)evolved to a post a week. I’ve kept that up for years now!
I am the author of Engaging Learning: Designing e-Learning Simulation Games, Designing mLearning: Tapping Into the Mobile Revolution for Organizational Performance, The Mobile Academy: mLearning for Higher Education, Revolutionize Learning & Development: Performance and Innovation Strategy for the Information Age, Millennials, Goldfish & Other Training Misconceptions: Debunking Learning Myths and Superstitions, Learning Science for Instructional Designers: From Cognition to Application, and Make It Meaningful: Taking Learning Design from Instructional to Transformational. The latter four are still in print (you can download the other three.) I speak and publish regularly in the usual places and some unusual. In 2018 and again in 2021, I was awarded Work-Learning Research’s Neon Elephant award. In 2012 I received the eLearning Guild’s first Guild Master award.
I’ve been an academic teaching interaction design while researching learning technology applications, held several senior management positions in the elearning space, and now consult to organizations on learning technology strategy. Amongst the things I do includes serving as a co-director of the Learning Development Accelerator, advising startup Elevator 9, and working for organizations through Quinnovation, I encourage you to join the list of happy clients.
My best contributions are when people bring me in as they’re trying to get their minds around new opportunities with learning technology and to evaluate plans I come in fast and light to have the most impact for the least investment. I have worked at the bleeding edge (and I have the scars to prove it) of technology and learning for over 40 years now in a variety of roles such as leading design on a number of innovative and yet pragmatic solutions, and advising valuable new directions on many more. Would you like to be next? Let’s Quinnovate ;).
FWIW, I am on Mastodon, Bluesky, and LinkedIn as @quinnovator.