It was Father's Day today but I did not celebrate it. In fact, I don't think I would have remembered to call Papa and talk to him until he called to ask me about some bank papers.
Did only a few push-ups at home today. Wanted to go to the gym or go out. Didn't happen.
Feeling a silent rage for some reason. That can't be good.
Here are a few things if you are doing instructional design work on a technical project:
1. Understand the germ and essence of the domain and discipline. For law, it is justice and equality in representation. For medicine, it is physical and anatomical health primarily. For research, it is gaining knowledge through systematic investigation. Basically, for every discipline, there is an essence that you will need to know so that you can use it as a compass to guide all your learning design. This especially becomes your North Star for designing assessment, interactivities, stories or scenarios, checklists or performance support, and other learning interventions.
2. Use GenAI to understand the basic tenets of a discipline - what it is, what its not, major inventions in the last few years, whether it is a pure discipline or an applied one, major thinkers in the field, real-world applications, etc. Get the lay of the land. Sit in that information for a while.
3. When writing assessments for technical subjects (any subject, actually), only focusing on Blooms taxonomy is not enough. It is also important to factor in DOK - Depth of Knowledge. DOK like Blooms is a framework that maps out the cognitive processes outlined in learning. But DOK also covers the complexity with which a learner has to engage with the content. When you plot out both these things, the intersection will help you create a rich, deep assessment question.
4. Nowadays to understand a complex technical subject, I check out YouTube channels set up for IAS aspirants. I find those really good. For some ideas for interactivities, etc. I also use the 'Google + Reddit' prompt to get some fresh inputs. That's the interesting part of user-generated content. If you go to a credible source, then the ideas are not just by the content creator. They are also contributed by other people. That actually gives you a pulse of what kind of content on the subject will resonate and connect with your target audience.
5. Infuse joy. That just is the baseline for all good learning design. Make space for the smiles.
A Charles Bukowski postcard. A Charles Dickens evening. A Charlotte Bronte worldview. All the things that make a Sunday a classic send-off to a week that was.
I was just looking at my Mummy's photo and I couldn't explain what kind of love and melancholy pervades my heart. A minute later, a friend from Pune, Anant, shares this with me. It's like the air is filled with poetry - and beautiful whiff of dandelion dust will be sent your way by a pal.
Anyway my head was not screwed on properly I think. I left my keys inside the house. What a horrid, horrid way to get stuck. Called H, my cleaning lady and in many ways my saviour.
Later a friend came. We went to Subko - so crazily jam-packed.
Head hurts but it is okay. Life is good. A few bottles of kombucha in the fridge and so much stationery in the house that I won't run out 25 years later. Enough money to get through the day with plenty creature comforts. And that's nice.
Okay. Head really hurts.
Friday the thirteenth. We got through. The aircrash was a horrible, scary things. There's a photo doing the rounds on Facebook of a family where the father is clicking a self-portrait of him, wife, and adorable sons and daughter. They were apparently moving to London to start a new life. God bless them - all of them who passed on and their families. Apparently, there is one survivor.
I heard or read somewhere ages ago that because of climate change, aircrafts will have a tough time staying in the air. They will come crashing down more.
In all this, just inhaling and exhaling one slim moment at a time gets us through.
Sometimes I think it was good of the Egyptians to think so deeply of death, to see it as something to prepare for and maybe infuse with decadence. I hope that after I die, in the interim period that I wait in the ether until I find another body, I use my instructional design skills to design my curriculum more systematically than how I have set up this life.
I am really enjoying working on this technology course at present. It involves engineering and although it is a subject I had never thought I'd take to, it is quite fascinating. I have always been interested in First Principles thinking and would love to learn more of it but also now am exploring things like system logic, qualitative and quantitative reasoning, etc. And designing the curricula for this is especially beautiful. There's a concept in curriculum design called interleaving - where you take the basic framework and intersperse courses strategically with other concepts. This makes your whole course cogent and cohesive. (In higher education - especially US - it is related to the standards crosswalk. Not the same but related.) In the current project, just the potential of what can be covered and the ways in which they can be covered is so lush. You can introduce spatial decision-making with calculations or analytical interpretation with troubleshooting or growth mindset with engine design. Engineering is quite a creative farm. (I think it's more 'farm' than 'field'.)
Anyway, the book I had ordered 'Attached' arrived today. Maybe will skim through it for a while.
Today was a precious day. I lugged my burden to the first hurdle in an obstacle race. Now remains to be seen how it goes.
Let my cook go today. I think it was time. It is a hassle to figure out one more person to come and cook and all that. But enough time has been spent getting hassled over this. I will take it for one month and see how it goes. I think it's a chance for me to finally break free from this resistance to the kitchen. Who knows? Maybe I will become so evolved that I will get over food all together. How liberated would that be?!
But for now ate a yummy bambolini - with creamy custard filling. There's a place called Cremure and this is a delectable find! The bambolini is flecked with powdered sugar and the inside is now oozing with cool custard - the delicate wholesome taste of a happy sunshiney childhood. One of the absolutely decadent luscious treats I have had in a while.
Had a run-in with someone at work. Not altogether unexpected - wasn't a complete run-in. But...a case of mismatched expectations. Will get resolved soon. None of us are shirkers in this equation - so we will work this out.
Although this project is difficult, I am quite enjoying it now. It's really stretching my ID skills. So grateful for that.
Anyway, will wind down now and sleep off or play some Candy Crush or listen to Bekhayali. The nights not yet over and the day's already begun.
It was a l-o-o-o-n-g day with a lot of meetings. This obviously meant that a 20 minute job took 3 hours. I still want to finish a review and have it all ready before the 11 o'clock meeting. There is also a 10 o'clock meeting that I am hoping to get out of. Won't happen. So will get through it.
Tough and tiring days bring their own respite. I went for pani puri with a friend to a guy opposite Kanti apartments on Mount Mary. He is from a village near Varanasi, one of my favourite cities - although I have only been there once. Anyway, we are and I prayed at the Basilica for a friend's pet who is unwell. Then we sat at Bandstand. It was hot yet breezy and open and fresh...some parts of Bandra do feel innocent.
It was a beautiful evening today. In between the panics of deliveries and sudden scary things that crop up on a work day in the service industry, the view outside the window looked like a dream...gauzy, gentle drizzle like the first formulation of a sonnet, swaying treetops, and the flight of parrots.
Anyway, back to work.
Not exactly an easy day but several good things happened. Made some strong headway in the editing work. Didn't go to Subko but had good sleep and some nice chats with a few people in the online book club. To avoid mental clutter, I made a couple of swift decisions. I had to explore some option for work but with the editing assignment over the weekends and the volume of other regular work, there isn't time to take on any more. So I said no. That could be a sign of maturity. Because I want to keep some time away for reading and other reflective writing. Now, I am observing some patterns in the type of talent existing in the industry.
I am getting the sense that while the baseline has dropped considerably - in terms of skill, foundational education, and maybe even attitude, geography could play some part in the scouting and location of talent. Tier 1 cities are near useless. But smaller towns and tier 2 cities at least have people with ambition. There is a sense of kinship with the work that can be nurtured. But location and age aside, the one big thing that makes a difference is whether people read in their free time or not.
I had suspected this correlation a while ago but I could have been biased. But it is more and more clear now - people who read for pleasure can get aligned with a project expectations quicker. So, of course, all of us instructional designers read. But transactional reading does not give you that same mental limberness as reading for pleasure. Because for pleasure there is an expansiveness of cognitive faculty - you pick up one book because you liked the cover, you picked another book because the story or plot appealed, a third because you were interested to try out a genre - that dipping and sipping of uncertainty with reading is what you need in complex, sticky projects. I would say that is what you need in any project if you are responsible for written communication but one can get by in some types of assignments by only being a transactional reader. For others, you need a certain juice that comes from reading without an agenda.
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In other news, I have been thinking about China. Something about that country inspires deep respect in me.I understand that they are our enemy neighbors but compare to the other enemy neighbor that is a nuisance and a horrid, petty one at that, China at least is a worthy detractor. I was thinking about this huge cultural emblem of beauty and finesse that Japan has - all ikigai and tea ceremony and beauty and wabi-sabi and what not. But it's as if the world has forgotten about the Nanking rape - that ghastly brutal rapes and killings by Japanese soldiers of Chinese people - women, children, and men - in the most foul ways possible. Women's and men's genitals were chopped and cooked and dined on even as they lived. What kind of ugliness and brutality lives within us? And all this and now when book clubs recommend Japanese literature, it's about the trageies of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki variant. Those were brutal too - but it's as if Japan gets to tell its story and show its wound because of who its enemies were. They were taken on by America and if you have America as your enemy, you at least get the media to record and tell your story. But what about the Nanking rapes? Was that documented in pop-culture or fiction or plays or Hollywood movies? I often wonder how did China rise? I don't know too much besides the reel highlights of Mao Tse Tung and the Great Leap Forward and all that - but how did that country which had one whole generation wiped off - how did they rise? India supplied opium to China in the 17th or 18th century I think. And one whole generation got drugged and addicted and useless - one whole generation of a country of that size! How did they get back on track? How are they winning Olympics and setting up education policies like the 2035 education policy that is centered around AI and the human mind's ability to focus. How? In some of the companies I have freelanced with or worked on extended projects on, we can't even follow file naming conventions or checklists? How did that company overcome a nationwide addiction, dismantle ideologies and philosopies to accomodate Buddhism, Confuscionism, Taoism to Abrahamic religions like Islam and Christainity to Communism, etc. It is...immense...I would like to study more about this.
I did not know how complicit India was in the opium trade. It is very painful to know that we did that to another country - addiction destroys families in ways that generations can't recover from. Better to go and break a house or something.
But the Nanking rapes - how do we reconcile belonging to a specie that can do that - to its own?
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Anyway, as the line by D.H. Lawrence goes: 'We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.'
It was an okay day. Actually ended on a tough note. I think it will take a long time for some damage to get undone but let's wait and watch. Had to look at some work. As usual, I spent twice the amount on it as I had expected. It is frustrating and exhausting. But it does look like this is how it will be.
I went to the Kali temple with Papa today. Then went to visit a friend on Palm Beach. There was some sad news and overall today brought with it some pain. That too feels like a tough and tight situation for the foreseeable future. Anyway, this is the way it is.
I went to a Bank of Baroda ATM today. It is the slowest ATM ever. I feel like going to Subko tomorrow but I generally don't like going out on Sunday morning because it's a huge day on Monday. Also it's 2:30 a.m. and I have not slept yet. Sundays it will get really busy unless I go really early. Maybe I will go to another coffee shop - the Barista on Versova. I need to do some editing work and I want to go somewhere nice to do it. Let's see. Or Vanilla Miel. But the heart is set on Subko.
Okay. Will make some tea and get to some personal work for a bit. Make a to-do list for tomorrow and then maybe see what needs to be done.
All I did today was the bare minimum to push some major work off to Monday. Still got one major portion completed and that, at least, was okay.
Had to review a few things today and I realise that there is a disconnect somewhere. The disconnect is deeper than people not knowing what to do or not understanding what needs to be done. I think people don't see anymore. They don't see to observe and understand. They see only to focus on display, not emergence. And it is not work pressure or lack of time alone. With all the time and all the resources, some gap in professional understanding will remain because intellectually, some synapse is not firing together. I think we are all just tackling scattered minds and juicy pain-points.
Managed to go to the gym today. Not exceptional workout but some order in life is important. It is my friend's daughters birthday today so I wished her Happy Birthday! Had sent her a doll house and a science kit. Science is a juicy, exceptionally beautiful discipline. In fact, the respect and affection it has for the observable world is quite spectacular. My friends daughter is really intelligent. She's only 11 but has demonstrated the mind to grasp and incorporate First Principles thinking so soundly. I think all children have that but she is really sharp. No sparkly nailpolish and stuff for her. She is too talented for that. But I did want her to make a world of her own with the doll house. With the science kit, maybe she makes her own energy pipeline and makes it a self-sustaining unit.
Or she's a child. I wish her deep joy and play.
I was thinking of ordering a few other things but now am not so sure. There are a lot of books to go through. But heck, it's tempting.
Well, a work day has officially ended. Will roll around for a bit, have a bath, and plan the weekdays. Or watch Vijay Mallaya's interview. He's back apparently.
As the Chinese curse goes, "May you live in interesting times."
Beyond tired and not feeling too good.
Looks like it will be a long and sick weekend to recover. Or maybe more. Hope not. There's just so much to finish. It is exhausting. Sometimes even I am amazed by the amount of reserve I have used to get through a day.
Just to make myself feel better, read this children's book 'The Day the Crayons Quit' by Drew Daywalt. It is just so sweet! A little boy Duncan's box of crayons have written letters of protest to him. Blue has complained that he is overused. Pink is upset that it is underused. Yellow and orange are fighting to be nominated as the official colours of the sun. The illustration is so cheeky!
That was uplifting.
Anyway, back to work. Need to finish up a whole lot now.
A lot happened today. Made some strong headway in my work. Heard some rough news about a colleague. Prayed for her. I had ordered some earplugs but because I ordered them without my specs, had sent them to some other address. Strange how luck moves.
Got really angry with my cook. Sometimes she behaves very entitled. But it was okay a few minutes later. People who work are easy to forgive.
Today I received some feedback on my work that taught me something - how to think holistically in terms of experience. It is easy to do that for some types of learning that one is used to - like e-learning, in-person training sessions, videos, game-based quizzes, etc. However, it is easy to slip up on when the assets are different - like podcasts, e-zines, newsletters for drip learning, etc. So, such things you need to approach in terms of levels. In the first level, you sketch out the whole solution on paper. In the second level, you look at the operations of that solution - from beginning to end, from middle to beginning and end, from end to beginning, from anywhere to anywhere. This sort of hop, skip, and jump analysis helps to stress test the logic of your design. And the logic of the design is the nook where deep and solid learning experience rest.
But I really am exhausted and tired. So many meetings about the same thing.
I think everybody should answer s question, "How did I become better today?" as part of their status report. It needn't be something they share with anyone. But something we do and keep for ourselves and then at the end of the week, learn how much we have improved and how much we have stagnated.
Well...this is good. Ordered for charred skewers from Earth Cafe. I love, love, love that place! I think people who shun vegan food miss out on so much fine eats!
Just returned from the gym. Will wash up, have dinner, warm coffee and see if I can get some work done.
I am so exhausted and exasperated. It's strange and weird how things have come to be. With all the tools, etc., the capacity for human indifference is astounding.
Anyway, no sense in being a tinder-box.
I am so behind in the work now, that I dont know what to do about it. I get the sense in layoffs. I think a big part of burnout is because there is a lot of ineptitude that is being absorbed in the name of wokism and people who actually can do the work are carrying the weight of those who can't. Or don't. Or won't.
I see now a need for industry-wide certification. My field is too diffused. In a nutshell, what would make someone a good instructional designer is many things. But what makes someone competent are maybe 5 things:
1. Ability to chunk and present content.
2. Acumen to align material with lesson objective and learning outcome. (Needless to say, it is important to know the difference between the two. It's the same stage but the spotlight is on different things. For lesson objective, the spotlight is on the material. For learning outcome, the spotlight is on how the material is put to use. It's a crude and basic distinction but something to begin.)
3. Ability to design, create, and test assessments.
4. Ability to write with some elasticity. For example, you may need to stretch a 5-sentence into an hour long learning or surmise the essence of a 100-hour program into 85 words.
5. Pulse for the narrative of teaching - which means ability to think clear and hard on how to prune material to pick details that teach. Steady, simple, systematic and seamless - what the approach should be.
What a day. Quite strong and heavy in spaces with some eureka-moments through around like confetti!
I had to clean the storage space in my bed today and it was dusty as hell. The cleaning lady, H, and I did it in turns and I'm glad I have kept up the push-up routine. Because otherwise, flipping the mattress would have thrown off my back. We cleaned and because it's an old bed, the hydraulic gear of the bed got jammed. It wouldn't come down no matter what I tried. I have to meet friends tomorrow and I think a few others would be coming over next week. So the bed was important. Having a bed frame that looked like an obtuse angle was quite unsettling. After a few tries, I told H to chuck it. I do have a roll-out sofa that is quite sweet actually. Then there's the other spartan one in the second bedroom. It is actually better for the back. But...the obtuse bed frame is what the heart wants. I asked H to make a second cup of tea for both of us. (She is really good at it - much better than my cook actually.)Then I watched some YouTube videos to locate something that might help me. And sure enough, there was.
I found a video where a guy explained that we need to press down on the hinge area systematically, jiggle it to loosen the jammed areas, and then, if we add the mattress on top (for added weight), we can get the frame down. I tried it again and it worked.
It got me thinking about the efficacy of a really good technical video. Instructional designers are paid so much to write instructional videos, and honestly, sometimes - many times, it is not deserved at all. This guy was a cook. His explanation, walk-through of the problem, acknowledgment of variations where his solution may not apply- was so beautiful, that it helped me immediately. I understood what he was saying, he addressed the problem directly, any basic explanation he needed to give about nuts and bolts was given in context, and there was flow. Yes, I had strong intrinsic motivation to try it out immediately - but even otherwise, everything was simple, direct, helpful, free of jargon, targeted to a use-case, and relevant.
I am working on a set of instructional technical videos now and I see how easy it is for the material to get clunky. So this video was very helpful. I think good technical video scripts are written on the basis of the following:
1. An orientation and emphasis of First Principles. It is important for an instructional designer to know what First Principles thinking is. (Understand what parts of the system are absolutely true. How would the components come together if you had to do it all over again. Avoid all fluff and jargon.)
2. Fidelity to the process in reality. So the ID needs to be acutely aware of whether the 3 steps listed are steps 1, 2, and 3 or 1, 2, and 2a.
3. Provide a walk-through in a systematic fashion - Problem in original form and a couple of its common variations, why it is a problem (in case it is not obvious), steps for solution - main channel and variations, explanation why it is a solution (so you need to show the transformation from problem state to solution state), and tips on how to confirm that the problem has been solved for good or whether it needs follow-up, etc. Of course, several other details could be added. But this could be a robust enough skeleton for keeping the tech video crisp and relevant.
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It was lovely seeing Papa. Sometimes when I see him eating a mango or just sitting and talking on the phone, I think that he is so innocent - not clued into the slimy ways of the world.
Had gone to the Kali mandir today. There were so many people. Got bhog - halwaa. I love it!
Survived a couple of reckless car rides with Ola drivers. So all in all, good to have survived.
I reached out to a friend for some advice. I got it. I mulled over it a long while - mainly wrestling in my head that I couldn't do that - what he was asking of me. But - because of the resistance I felt, I think it is worth a good, solid, brave shot. If I fail, I would have failed at something worthy. If I succeed, I would have transformed.
This late night walk after a tough, rough unending day at work. I am so, so exhausted. But this...sweet chutney of wind, lane littered wit...
