Play the game !!

Read my thoughts on relevance of Game-based-approach and it's applicability to variety of scenarios across academia, Industry & Individual's. 

https://medium.com/it-though-experiential-learning/https-medium-com-sshiralkar-games-e31b813efa36?source=friends_link&sk=20712f9d5dee37fa18d52aa2d68fa843

Relevance of Experiential learning - vindicated

Probationer to Professional in a day !!

Another milestone reached in propagating message about Game based approach.

In a short program, participants were introduced to the concept and got initiated as probationer for designing games. Participants were then enabled with facilitation skills for successful execution of the approach.  By mid-course, participants had become proficient to facilitate learning from games for their situations and contexts. 

Second half of the workshop elevated level of learning and focused on understanding the impact of context & debrief as wrappers as also influence of each element in the game. 

By culmination of the program, participants were professionals and celebrated designing new games for new situations.

It was indeed a delightful experience to apply the approach to train the trainers and up-skill them within 1 day to be able to design games for situations and apply it for rapid learning or dealing with skill disruption in today's world. 

Tech-Talk @ Technovate 2017

Friday, 7th April, 2017 gave me the opportunity to bring into practice, what I love...., "Doing it differently". 


An invitation to deliver a Tech-talk at Technovate, an event hosted by one of the premier Technical Institutes in India, presented opportunity to initiate young minds, to my Game based approach premised on Experiential Learning. With activities ranging from technical quizzes and competitions to cultural activities, students had their minds buzzing. However, I imagine, least they expected, what awaited them in my session.

Application of a Game Based Approach,  prescribed in the book titled “IT Through Experiential Learning” for facilitating knowledge development and skill building, was explained as the core objective of  the session. 

Flow of Tech-talk was conceived, to blend; A gradual involvement of audience, from volunteers to each one in the audience, with, Initiating to the Game based approach, to experience its outcome. 

With a view to align content  to the event theme and audience, I requested students from Institute to partner planning and execution.  A group of enthusiastic students reciprocated by forming a cohesive team and helped me craft session content with variety and sequence, especially to keep audience engaged throughout. The session was aptly christened “Games-4-Brains” and engaged over a 100 participants for 2 hours. 

Audience was introduced to the approach through a game, that helps learn critical importance of communication and co-ordination, on the lines of an activity explained in chapter 8 of my book. 

As momentum of the session was gaining speed, students of the Institute staged a short skit and initiated concepts and application of Cloud Computing. The skit showcased a unique mode of facilitation to mass awareness, on technological concepts and its relevance. It was no longer about an erudite professor delivering a forceful lecture, but a collection of minds, interacting to capture every byte of knowledge in the environment.

Volunteers from audience were engaged to play a competition game. The game helped participants appreciate the impact of visualization, specifically on decision making. The competition game assisted participants,  consolidate, the relevance of emergent fields of "User experience design" and "Visual design" and also its association to Analytics and Decision Making.

In the the concluding part, an Acronym based quiz engaged, each individual in the audience, in a "group learning process" and raised their collective knowledge on the Digital Transformation Initiatives & Infrastructure in India, aside from awareness on technical concepts like ZigBee and RFID.

Positive feedback from a majority of the participants, endorsed success of the session.

in retrospect, I feel satisfied to have introduced young minds to a different paradigm of learning. Their feedback and comments, give me confidence that they now look at  the Game Based Approach and it's relevance to Higher Education in a fresh perspective.

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Session : Relevance of Experiential Learning

I was invited to deliver a session titled Relevance of Experiential Learning for Higher Education of 21st Century,as part of the Faculty Development Program at an Engineering College.

With an objective to enable participants experience the difference between conventional and the experiential mode, and help them conclude on the relevance and impact of experiential learning. I adopted following process; 

1. At the start of the session, a research paper on critical success factors [CSF] for project implementation was distributed to few of the participants.
2. Rest of the participants were engaged in the Blindfold Game described in Chapter # 4 of the book [http://www.apress.com/in/book/9781484224205] and game was contextualized for identifying critical success factors for project implementation.  The learning by participants of the game were summarized at the end of the game.
3. At the conclusion, the learning on the CSF for Project Implementation gained by reading the Research paper was compared with the learning of the CSF for Project Implementation from the Blindfold game.

The outcome are a telling tale and most satisfying outcome from the session.

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Journey of an idea into book

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Power of Experiential Learning

In my career journey of over 29 years, I witnessed metamorphosis of the back-office EDP (electronic data processing) unit into a core strategic function, now termed the Information Technology (IT) function. During this journey, I moved from business functions to the IT function, contributed to many large-scale IT and organization transformation programs, and recognized the power of experiential learning on their success. 

Game based approach

In early 2015, I was invited as guest faculty to deliver a lecture on “Project Management” to a class of engineering students. For groundwork, I gathered information about the course curriculum and the relevance of guest lecture from a project management practitioner. I chose to focus on key factors for successfully managing projects and engaging students through a game, instead of delivering lectures and talking about the terms and concepts. The session received huge appreciation from students and faculty for its effectiveness in facilitating learning. A colleague who witnessed the session remarked that many important aspects like project management are best learned by experience during actual work rather than curriculum and books. This remark sparked the idea and motivation to fill the void by bringing awareness about experiential learning and its application through games and provide resources for academia and professionals to apply, adopt, and deliver IT.

The Journey

As time went by, the idea of the book started taking shape from mere thoughts into scribbles, leading eventually to shaping the table of content and chapters. The process picked up momentum as the publishing commenced and the focus shifted to articulation and presentation of the idea into a form that readers will comprehend and apply.

The core theme of the book revolves around application of experiential learning through games. The book shows readers how experiential learning can be used to overcome the challenges posed in applying, adopting, and delivering IT to their business needs through innovative, game-based approach with detailed explanations and suggestions. The content is crafted to be easy to understand and aided by illustrations and sample artifacts. The book also provides guidance to expand, experiment with, and bring variations to applying the approach. It is my hope that the book will become an indispensable resource for academia and management professionals engaged in IT.

I am excited to publish this book, and I hope you will enjoy reading it and experience the effectiveness of experiential learning by applying the approach detailed in the book.

May this book become one of your most valued resources. 

[Source ➽Above content is reproduced from the book]

To know more click on any of the following social channels

    

Lead at a rapid pace by enabling everyone with technology thru #games in book - #it_thru_el,#experientialLearning 4 #informationtechnology🎓 pic.twitter.com/0UnXUM6iEH

— IT_THRU_EL (@IT_THRU_EL) January 21, 2017

Reasons to read book. Knowledge economy needs speed and depth in LEARNING, the book raises awareness about proven game based approach for rapid paced learning

A video posted by IT thru Experiential Learning (@it_thru_el) on Oct 31, 2016 at 10:40am PDT

Leverage Experiential Learning for Quality in Higher Education

Watching movie “Transformers” with my 9 yr old son amazed me to find his knowledge about the historical context of characters in the movie, their technical details to very finer level. This level of knowledge and understanding was similar to my niece aged 7 years, about the Barbie doll and both these phenomenon were reminiscent of my school friend, who barely recollected the title of the poetry in Hindi literature class but had awesome accuracy in reciting each and every dialogue from film Sholay along with details on tone and sequence. All these phenomenon have a common thread;

• ·Each represents a very high degree of retention of knowledge due to an emotional engagement with the subject.
• Learning on the subject either thru discussions with friends or deep belief in the subject, and 
• The learning was not facilitated thru any conventional method like lectures or reading.

Around 1999, I attended a leadership development program which leveraged the experiential learning method by including team based games to create experiences. I had my eureka moment when I learnt few essential leadership aspects at amazing speed and without any external instructions or aid and incidentally these were same aspects that I read books, attended lectures and watched others performing for years, however couldn’t learn as much, as on that day and my eureka moment was to experience the power of experiential learning.

It is important to mention that experiential learning method makes learning memorable - in comparison to traditional education the retention rates associated with Experiential Learning are considerably high. The average retention rates for experiential learning solutions are high, in the 80-90% area.

These statistics are proven by third party research shown in this learning pyramid - a well known piece of research from the National Training Laboratory in Bethel, Maine.

Traditional learning tends to encompass the top 2 elements of the pyramid - lecture and reading - and as mentioned earlier, the longer-term retention rates of traditional learning (typically lecture and reading based) fall into the 5-10% retention category.

Lastly I like to mention that theories relating to the success of experiential learning are not new, in 1984 a professor of learning David Kolb published a ground breaking book called ‘Experiential Learning - experience as the source of learning and development’ and highlighted that adults learn best through discovery and experience.

I have been advocating and practicing experiential learning on many occasions and situations, be it for bringing about rapid cultural change within organization, rapid adoption of new technology or more recently to facilitate learning for students or managers within organizations on ERP and continue to remain impressed with the outcomes of the experiential learning method. In view of growing concern on the quality of talent produced by education system in India, I am keen to initiate experiential method within higher education layer intending to produce authentic professionals having deeper understanding of the subject.

by Shreekant W Shiralkar who is teaching ERP & Business Intelligence at Management Institutes in India and has authored books on technology and served global organizations at leadership positions. He can be contacted on S_Shiralkar@yahoo.com