Category | Insights

At TiER1, we make it a priority to promote the regions in which we do business by supporting and staying active in local civic and community organizations.  Most recently, TiER1 Pittsburgh was the presenting sponsor of the Quarterly Regional Investors Council luncheon of the Allegheny Conference on Community Development – a leading nonprofit economic development and civic leadership organization that works with private and public sector partners to improve the economy and quality of life in southwestern PA. With Pittsburgh having recently been named among the 20 must-see places to visit...

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Last week we heard from Jillian Darwish of the KnowledgeWorks Foundation as she discussed the possibilities of technology and innovation and how things will change in the next ten years. During our meeting she encouraged the team to review these trends over time and see how they can apply to our field of learning. Well, there is an online conference Online EDUCA Berlin that is looking at how technology and innovation is changing the learning culture of what we assume today.  Online EDUCA Berlin starts Nov. 30th and will go through December 2nd. It is the 17th International Conference on Technology...

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There is a growing chorus of critics who cite that there is a dearth of empirical evidence to support the overall instructional design model.  Practitioners, particularly agile enthusiasts like myself, are increasingly wary of heavyweight process and design models that proscribe methods tools and deliverables.   Academic research on the effectiveness of instructional design is scant at best. The fact is that the experimental research in the field has consistently produced inconsistent and conflicting results.  There is a relative dearth of empirical evidence that supports the use of instructional...

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Don Norman introduced a design concept years ago on the tradeoff between knowledge in the head and knowledge in the world. It is a great concept for thinking about how to present information and where the memory burden is placed. An ATM device is designed with knowledge in the world. All the information needed to use the device is there on the display. Learning is not required. This is the right way to design an ATM. At the other extreme is knowledge in the head.  Knowledge in the head does require learning, but can be much more efficient. Pilots who need to react quickly in an emergency...

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I had a great experience at SIGGRAPH 2011. For those who haven’t heard of SIGGRAPH, it is one of the world’s largest annual conferences for computer graphics and interactive techniques. This year almost 20,000 people from all over the world came to learn about, talk about, and show off the latest trends, technologies, products, and research findings in the field. Some daily highlights for me were sitting in The Studio workshops where an instructor would take you through new workflows in software packages such as Photoshop, Maya, Realflow, Zbrush, and Unity. In between workshops you could...

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