I was recently invited by the Teacher Learning Network to give a presentation as part of their professional development program. They are based in Melbourne, so the plan was for me to do it via Zoom. No problem. I feel like I live half my life on Zoom at the moment. Michael, the director there, was keen for me to talk a little bit about learning design, and especially the way that it might be of use to teachers. This is something that I’ve spent a bit of time working on, and it’s quite a niche space – after all, I think most teachers would, with a fair degree of justification, already consider what they do to be learning design. So, knowing my audience would have a significant level of experience and expertise in teaching, I needed to think carefully about how to tailor my presentation to be of value to them. In the end, I decided that I was going to focus on a few teaching-adjacent and relevant ideas: writing good learning objectives and universal design for learning. I also wanted to throw in my own ideas about the 6 ‘C’s of leanrning design: curators, creators, coordinators, critiques and so on.
So far, so good. That was before CityRail intervened. I’d left the city campus of my university in plenty of time – more than 2 hours to get home to Penrith, and I’d got onto an express train that was going to have me arrive at the station with more than 20 minutes to spare before I had to start my presentation to TLN. But somewhere outside Auburn, we ground to a halt… and then we just waited. And waited. Apparently, there had bee a problem at Auburn, and now trains couldn’t get past, and just like that my carefully planned schedule was quickly disappearing. By the time, my session was due to start, I’d worked with the excellent TLN team to rework my presentation so that I could do it via Adobe Connect and my iPad – the only question was whether my iPad battery would hold out. It was awkward, and I felt bad for everyone else on the train who got an impromptu introduction to Learning Design, but it worked. The trickiest bit was, of course, keeping the presentation going while I got off the train, and then walked to the car and then was driven home!