Do you ever hear a magician say ‘I’m going to pull a rabbit out of a hat’ just before he …. er …. pulls a rabbit out of a hat?

No.

As Kenny Everette’s character Cupid Stunt would have said “Oooooh Michael, I’m telling you the plot!”

99.9% technology training videos don’t allow, or encourage, the audience to figure out what needs to be done.

DON’T GET ME WRONG! It is important to learn how to use the tools. But the tools are no use unless you can figure out what to do, how to do it, What tools you need will depend on that.

If we don’t do it in that order, then the old saying ‘to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail’ applies.

How does the learner learn how to tackle the problem?

How do they learn how to understand the problem?

How do they learn which different ways of solving it are available, and how to choose between them?

I wrote something similar here, about tools in a tool box.

At the start of his autobiography, Sir Richard Branson writes about an incident when he was about 8 years old. His parents left him in the middle of a forest, and made him find his way home, on his own. That would explain his spirit of adventure in later life. And his success. He had to figure out a solution.

Imagine how pointless it would have been if they showed him exactly how to get home?

Hiran de Silva

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