So, guys, we're here. Thank you for joining us. This is Talent and Development Webinar Series. This is the third Thursday of the month, as usual. Every third Thursday of the month, we do our webinars on talent development from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. Central African time. So, that's Nigerian time. And today, we're going to be talking about using accelerated learning techniques to improve training retention. And you're lucky you have a very experienced guest that I'm going to introduce very shortly. And so, we can get started. August 2018, today, we're doing the Introduction to Accelerated Learning. We talk about the pillars, and then we talk generally about the learning cycle for accelerated learning. So, it's like a framework. So, I can see that 75 percent of us don't have experience of L&D. Okay, so that's interesting. So, I've just asked that. So, what is accelerated learning? What is it? What's it all about? What's accelerated learning? Well, you can see the aircrafts there. It's not really about flying. It's just that it's a different way of learning. So, one of the major aspects of accelerated learning I see, right, is the use of... You're trying to make things as natural as possible. So, I'm going to play... I'm sure you hear something in the background. So, I'm just playing music. I'm playing music in the background. Now, that's one major aspect of accelerated learning as well. Music has such a fun... It does something to the mind. So, I give you one technique, music, that I use in my accelerated learning, how do I call it? Implementation, because I use different methodologies in our training. So, how I use music is when people come into the class for the first time. Of course, you don't know them. Everybody's a bit guarded. So, I play tracks, like 20-year-old tracks, tracks like 20 years ago. Trying to plan to say, okay, this is when this person was really a kid or this person was a teenager. So, immediately, the person comes in. He hasn't heard this song in like 10 years. He's just like, wow, okay, very relaxed, probably singing the song back to himself. And you just have the very relaxed atmosphere. And in that relaxed atmosphere, you can easily communicate. You can easily kind of break down. It's more like an ice breaker, but a very nice subtle ice breaker. And I use it throughout the training. So, that's one aspect of it. Just one. It's a very wide field. So, learning at a faster pace than what's considered normal or average, that's what really accelerated learning is. You're really learning at a much, much faster pace. Accelerated learning is like a guide, really. Just like a guide for learning. So, many people know if you're at L&D, you understand the ADDI framework. So, ADDI is one of the things frameworks people use a lot when it comes to designing learning. And accelerated learning has its own framework, really. And Donald Schuster, really, is a professor of psychology at Iowa University. So, he says, accelerated learning is neither a myth nor a passing fad. It has been known to improve the effectiveness of learning by up to 300 percent and cut down training preparation time by 30 percent. And if you go into it, if you really want to go into it, I'm going to share a website where there's a lot of content on this, and you can become a member of the institute that actually does this. And one of the pillars of the institute is Gail, this lady called Gail Hindenheim. We hopefully will get her on this webinar one of this month, and it will be a very good experience. So, she's been doing this kind of teaching for like 40 years, and she's very experienced. So, we'll share that. So, I don't know, Tobi, if you have any experience with accelerated learning at all. As we heard of it, have you seen some of your vendors use it? Yeah, I see more of that in most of the international courses we have. The group has what we call the total campus, and most sometimes we have trainers coming from the group campus to train in areas related to... So, most of the time before they come in, they have basic questions they won't ask. They will do a kind of a tell us what the venue wants, they want the venue to look like, the kind of things, the kind of setup we should be. And never, then they will always ask you to put a setup like a round table setup, five in a table, five in a table, they sit like a group. It's never usually like a training class, basically. Then you have a lot of props on the wall and all of that. So, when they come in, so they use all of that to kind of set the motion.  It's a group. And without you to write with words, or with pictures, with creative art, they put everything on the table for you to do. And it's been wonderful. And sometimes when we attend trainings in Paris or anywhere, it's always like that. So, you have to think of things you can use to explain your name, for example. Think of something you can use to explain. It makes you think, really. And it's quite interesting when you see what adults put together on this, on those points. So, you've mentioned some of the pillars. You've already mentioned some of the pillars of accelerated learning, which is quite interesting. So, let me jump into their pillars of accelerated learning. You have about seven pillars, if I'm not mistaken, seven pillars. And let's just go through them. And maybe we can have an interactive discussion around them. So, one of the very first pillars, or the first pillar of accelerated learning, is interactive learning environment, which is exactly what you said, Toby, you said, arranging you in a way that you can interact as a group, really, and have a group discussion or discuss just like natural, in a natural state, not like a classroom setting, so to say. So, interactive learning environment. Yeah, so, the physical environment itself, you need to look at that and see how you can change it to make learning natural, really. And accelerated learning focuses on four types of interactions, really. One is the physical environment, and then interaction with the diverse learning materials, different material.  So, you have very diverse learning materials. Then, also, another one of the four types of interactions is with the members of the community itself. So, the members of the community interacting with those members of the community, you do a small project. So, and then with the facilitator. So, those are the four kinds of interaction you have, and then the environment itself should be able to foster that, to be able to kind of encourage those levels of interaction. And so, the next pillar is the, what they call state management. So, when, first one was, of course, interactive learning environment, then state management, the physical, the mental, the emotional state of the learner. That state definitely contributes to the quality of learning and the communication in general with participants. So, what's the physical state? What's the mental state? What's the emotional state? I mean, I was in a training, and I just didn't understand why this lady was not getting things, and she was just not too serious. And what's what's happening? Why, I mean, I tried different techniques. It didn't work until maybe during tea break, I had to go and have a nice chat with her, one-on-one chat, and discover that her daughter was in hospital. I mean, her daughter was in hospital. What on earth would she be doing in her training? I mean, she should be in the hospital with her daughter. I couldn't even understand why she was there. And apparently, the organization was like, look, we've sent you for training, you must go for training.  You can go as in what timing do you like, and she said, no, it's okay. I said, no, go tomorrow because the training was a five-day course. Tomorrow, what time will be comfortable for you to come and what time will be comfortable for you to go? And if you don't, even maybe we could reschedule this training for you, as in until your daughter is fine, because there's no point being there. Her physical, her mental, her emotional, in fact, all three, definitely not in the training. Tobi, I don't know if you have any experiences like that with some of your... Yeah, most times for us, it's a lot, I mean, my people are actually a lot more open. And when it comes to things like health and mental state, we don't play with it. I had a few trainings I had open this week. I went for one. And when I went back the next day, one of the participants was not there because Alain, she had to take the daughter to the hospital. So I think for us, it's very important, especially so that you have some in the class. But it's good to get the trainer to actually notice. And I think it's something a lot of consultants are beginning to get very keen about. I mean, why are you not paying attention? Why are you not... But it sounds more like kindergarten school, those days in school, me in the classroom, students listening, artists listening. Yeah, so you have to be present. The key thing is you have to be present. Some trainers may not be present or some participants may not be present in that learning process. Both the trainer, the facilitator and the learner, you need to be present. And when you say present, yeah, you're not physically present, but you're mentally, you're not present mentally and you're not present emotionally. So that music, music kind of makes you connect to emotionally and it frees a lot of stress. I don't know, music does that for most people. I don't know who doesn't like music, different kinds of music, but I think that's a key thing. And that's the next, let me go to the next pillar of accelerated learning. Is that playful discovery and experimental states? That's very important. You have play in your learning and in your life in general. It's so important. Kids learn so well. There's a lot of play and then all of a sudden play ends. We are humans. Play shouldn't end. I'm not just talking about just any kind of play. Just play in general is very important for learning. And if you can bring in like this gamification, I'm sure lots of people have heard of gamification, of learning. If you can bring in some gamification and what that means is a little bit of competition really. So if you're keeping the score, not keeping the score for any evaluation sake, it's just, okay, let's have a small quiz and if people answer the quiz and they can see they're making progress and in the process of answering a fun quiz, they are learning. So there's play, the discovery and this experimentation. And that's another of the pillars of the seven pillars of accelerated learning. So play. Some organizations think play is not important. What do you think, Tobi, on this? Any ideas? You know, looking at what you have right now, just remind me of Montessori. Yeah, Montessori. And I've been in between my kids at the start of school and I've been in between making up my mind to put them in a strict Montessori and in a traditional school. My dream has always been with strict Montessori because Montessori is player and learn, complete. And I was in a place discussing it yesterday and it was quite interesting. Interesting thing is that I began studying what Montessori is right now is making me understand that the brain actually takes in, understands better when it plays and learns than when it crams, which is the usual thing we have in traditional learning. Which also what I see in classes where you have the team bonding activities, which brings out a lot of play.  And you realize how much they've learned in play. True. And it relaxes the nerves, relaxes everything. And you just realize that they learned better playing those things around or trying to draw colors and get some leadership, even if it's a leadership class, for example. You see, you use some of these games to get you to know exactly some key things you're meant to learn. So I think it's a very important aspect of learning development right now. Yes. I can give a simple example of how we could use that. So sometimes when you go into a course, you're like, okay, everybody should introduce themselves and people do the boring. My name is this. My name is that. What we do, what we tend to do sometimes in our courses is we do a crossword game. So we create a crossword of everybody's name. Prior to the class, we ask everyone to go online and send us interesting ideas or interesting things about themselves.  Another one says he loves riding his bicycle every Saturday and Sunday and riding from really long distance. So all those ideas, all those interesting things, we now put it in a crossword. And then we say, okay, you know, if you know crosswords, say across number two, across somebody's name. And inside the example is he's a stargazer. That's all. He's a stargazer. So when we do that for organizations and everybody's in the same organization, they're like, wow, so I didn't even know this guy. I didn't even know this lady. So it takes like 20 minutes to go through the exercise and people will tell them, look, fill this thing out before the end of the day. Get to know people. So they start asking, are you the stargazer? No, I'm not the stargazer. What are you as invited? By the time they now fill up that crossword with their names of themselves, first of all, they have to find themselves, first assignment, find yourself. So they find themselves. And then eventually just opens up a lot. So that's like play. And that's discovery as well as experimentation. You've read, you've seen something someone says he's, this is his life.  Okay, he's on his bicycle. Next time you travel, you probably buy him one accessory for his bicycle. And that's how relationships are built. So that's human aspect and that's interesting play aspects. We should not lose it. I think it's a big pillar of the, of the accelerated learning technique. We jump over to the next pillar now. And the next pillar, yes, you already mentioned this, Toby, it's wonderful that you already practiced it fully accelerated learning is arts. The arts on learning is very, very important in the art itself. So music, dance, story, visual art, theater, creative writing, that's bringing in the art in learning the arts. So again, music is so, so, so important that different levels that you put music in. So when you that introductory time you play music that is familiar to most people, they are familiar. If you're an international trainer, you're traveling to India, you're going to go to India to do a training.  And they'll be really shocked that this guy coming from Nigeria, coming from the US is training us and it's already playing our music. They kind of mellows everybody down. And then during activity, you play very reflective music. So it depends on the beats per minute of the music, it goes deep as well as learning goes deep into that the beats per minute, the kind of soft, soft music that kind of gets their mind calm to look through or do their activity. And then maybe when you know that it's time for them to stop, you're increasing the tempo of the music. And then it's actually making them walk faster without even knowing. And then they stop. And you stop the music and they stop. So it's a lot of psychology in it. But I find it so, so, so interesting when I use it. And if you keep studying, as literature learning, you would see how to use these things effectively, not just to use them like that. Art as well is key. You draw them to draw. You just mentioned something to be said. People were asked to draw, draw themselves, introduce themselves in the drawing. Is that what he said? That was nice and strange. But really, Dave, it's very interesting because when a certain woman was trying to draw, she had how many kids trying to draw. Usually you introduce yourself in the group. So you're not going to introduce yourself as a person. So you have one, you start from the group experiences, put it together, then we're to draw ourselves in terms of how many children. And there was one particular one, she was trying to explain, different people put the children in different ways. You could see one drawing is there with two hands and legs. And it just turns out very interesting when you see how people represented the same thing. Interesting, interesting. Everybody has a different view. So that's just everyone has different views about the same thing. And you just have to accept those different views. So another pillar of accelerated learning and quite a few pillars. You don't need to use all of them in one training. The next one is working with limiting beliefs. So again, you need to be aware of the limiting personal beliefs that we all bring really with us into our learning environment. We do bring in limiting personal beliefs. And accelerated learning theory and practice encourages us to choose language methods and processes very carefully and intentionally. So it's very important. We are very intentional and careful of what kind of language we use. I'll give you one big case. I made one big blunder. Well, this is like eight years ago, I was training large clients that had and most of the people I was training were fairly elderly. Most of them could be my dad. And I grew up in the north of Nigeria. So I speak Hausa pretty well. And I think I know Hausa pretty well. But apparently, I didn't really know the cultures I thought I did. So I said something in Hausa and I thought it was a joke. But then two gentlemen, one Hausa and one Fulani started going at it with each other. I actually thought it was a joke at first. But later on, when I realized what had happened, it was the statement I made was a kind of derogatory statement to Hausa by the Fulani. And if you understand politics of the north, you know, that is the Fulani that kind of controlled the north and they've done for a very long time. And that kind of flared up some few things that I didn't really know about existed internally. And I was trying to stop a battle. So that's me not being careful or not being deliberate or intentional with my language and not even knowing. So if you don't know stuff, please don't venture. So that was like a good lesson for me. And so I don't know if this, if you've had any experience with this. Well, I, yes, I mean, well, maybe I could actually cite in my line of in what I do as a human capital manager, you, you always have to be careful to what you think. And expressing that in the presence of people, not always assuming your perceptions are your perceptions, basically, or what you know. So I think I was in the class yesterday also. And I think that I saw two people actually in a series, they almost took over the class based on what the trainer said. And the two ladies opened them on themselves, trying to, not until the trainer had spent some time trying to calm, calm it down. And until he took another course in terms of in the week and said before, they all found the balance. Because sometimes you do this, you spend more time that you should have used to do other things. Exactly. Yeah, I think it's another thing about bias is I mean politics and so sometimes it's just best not to bring that into a training. You don't know what people's political leanings are religion. Just just leave that out because it's just a, it's a minefield. And you don't know what you're going to step on really. And another thing I read a book recently and what I advise people to get is that book on thinking fast and slow is the book. I think the name of the author is Daniel Kahneman. If I get it, got it right. And when you just start reading the book, you realize that you yourself have biases, biases you didn't even know about. And you give you tests and you test yourself and you realize that, wow, I have this bias. And how do I, how do I get rid of it? So realizing that everybody has biases, and people may do things not knowing how they affect in others. It's a very important thing, both, both as a learner, as well as a facilitator, something you need to be aware of. So another thing, another part of the pillars is practices, another pillar of accelerated learning. And just like the word says, reflective practice is something that we need to do. You realize you need to do it, but we don't. So even just 20 seconds of saying absolutely nothing and just standing still and reflecting.  We don't do that. Where every second is we're jumping up and down doing all sorts. We don't sit and reflect. And once you do that, it's amazing what comes out of it. So when learners are given the opportunity to develop their ability to stop, just stop for a minute, stop, sit back and reflect, they are able to, you know, learn even at a deeper level. So that reflective practice is very critical. Not just talking all the time as a facilitator. Just let them soak it in and then they can recall what it is they've learned even much better when they slow down, so to say, in this fast-paced world, everything is happening by the second. I was telling some millennials, I said, you guys, the way you do relationships is just on Snapchat and on WhatsApp and stuff. I mean, we took a time. We didn't have the phone. We had to do reflective writing. I'm sure you write your letters to your loved ones and you're reflecting as you write that letter. But unfortunately, in this fast-paced world, we need to even reflect much, much more. Something we need to do a lot more. At least that's what I found. And though we've gone through actually six pillars, the last pillar of accelerated learning is the role of the facilitator. So when it comes to learning, of course, and formal learning, the role of the facilitator is extremely important. It's not getting saying that the facilitator should understand those pillars and know how to utilize them in his training environment in a way that is natural and making that learning fun and also very effective. If you use these techniques very well, you are training people's retention with really, really skyrocket. So accelerated learning methods and approaches, they're only as good as the person who is using them in that training. And that is the facilitator. So I encourage, I will share the website. Let me see if I can pull that up for you guys to have a look. I've tried to pull something from the website, but I'll share that website later. I'll probably type it out and put it on the chat so you could see that. Yep. So I don't know. Those are the seven pillars. Tobi, any comments? Do you think it's, I think, I really, when I discovered it, I only discovered it a couple of years ago at an ATD conference. I think it's Atlanta. So ATD is Association for Talent Development, and I did a course on accelerated learning taught by Gail. I will share her profile. I thought it was amazing and I started implementing stuff. And yeah. Hi, Tobi. Hi. Okay. I think it's been, I discovered this like, that should be about three years ago. Well, I didn't know four years ago or something, three years ago, three, four years ago. I didn't know it was called accelerated learning. That was when I was a training manager. And then because of the experience I had with a few international courses, I used to ask the Nigerian trainers, please, when you're, when you're asking, when you're having to do an implant for me, I need you to, to do me a pre-assessment, do a pre-assessment of the class, understand people who will be in the class. I don't know how you're going to do it, but I mean, remember the ones that you did for me, and we had to say, okay, you need to do the test. Because in case of you not knowing the, the kind of people you want in the class will also not be able to, you can't be able to facilitate if you have the friend's level of people in the class and you don't know who they are. So I would usually request for post assessments, a pre-assessment, sorry, of the, of the, of the, of the candidates who are coming for the class or coming for the sessions. Then usually we'll give them the emails, they write directly to them and ask them about themselves. And just like you said, okay, then they would be able to put together information that would actually aid them. And so when they come into the class, it's easier to, to know, to be, this is to be, and this is what to be, whatever. So they call them, you ask, what name would you want to be called in the class? For example, they want to be called T. So, and when people come in, when, when they come into the class and they're being called by names, they feel they want to be called and not the usual, ordinary full names, normal names, you realize that the class bonds better because you feel, as a facilitator, you understand these people already and where they are coming from and what are their expectations with your class and who they are to a certain level. So I think now having to know that it's something that has been developed into a full blown, blown course, it's quite impressive really, it's quite impressive. And I'm actually actually reading up a bit on it also. Yes. And there's a cycle. So the next stage we're really going to talk about is for those that want to develop this for their training as facilitators, there is five learning cycles. So there's the accelerated learning cycle. And so if you're hearing the background noises, where I'm trying to control neighbors. So there's the accelerated learning cycle and it's broken down into like five. So we had the pillars, I showed you the pillars, those are like the pillars, so to say. And the cycle, I'll take you through the cycle. Now the very first step is the, that's for you that want to develop or facilitate your courses using this technique. So you have the learning preparation phase. So as I said, the learning cycles act as a template really, like to design or facilitate the kind of learning that gets impact. So the first step is the learner preparation phase. And exactly what you said to be the learner preparation phase. Before that, you even need to understand who the learner is. Who am I training? Who is the person that's coming to this class? Yeah. So you're preparing both you as a facilitator, you're preparing as well as the learners. It's like knowing your audience, right? You need to understand, again, the preparation of the learner, physical, mental, emotional, you need to prepare them, right? Building that community or the community or practice itself. So supporting the learning, sending out maybe the small quizzes to kind of get to know whether or not they are even ready for this course. This is really the course that they need. So learner preparation is a lot of work on your part that you would do as a facilitator. You need to go through that phase, that learner preparation phase. The next phase of isolated learning, if you're trying to build one, is the connection phase itself. So what's the connection phase? Learner's experiences or learners experience more like a significant meaning when it comes to connections, when they can actually feel connected to what it is they're talking about. So it's more like prior knowledge. You have to have that prior knowledge to be able to connect them to this new thing that you're trying to teach them. Now, kids have this naturally. Kids, everything is there for them to soak in. They don't have barriers. Adults have barriers. Adults have things they've learned already. They probably need to unlearn something before they relearn. And of course, business is all adults in there, at least for now. I hope legally it's adults. So I don't know, Tobi, what do you think? Connection phase and the fact that we have too much in our heads and to agree? Yeah, I tell you. Each time I find myself in a class, I always tell them, please, we know you have school fees to pay. You have a lot of things on your head at this moment, others for your job. So sometimes when the trainer is talking, you are switched off at some point. And the trainer has to bring you back. So connection phase, yes, you have to, the trainer must always find a way to bring them back, bring everybody back to the class. And so that everybody is connected again. If not really, you see clearly easily, easily they go through your phones and start going to WhatsApp, pictures, even when they are said to be kept away. So you just know that this person is not just with you at all. So I think it's very important to reconnect at each stage, connect them at each stage. So that's it. And again, it's emotional connection itself is the very first thing, try and connect to them emotionally. So if you're going to a strange class, try and try and know what it is that makes them tick. And that's why I think that pre-assessment and not just pre-assessment, getting to know your participants before you come is so, so important. And I think I go back to that crossword puzzle, that crossword puzzle just helps make that connection, settles them in, then they're ready to learn and they're helping each other learn because a really good team, nothing beats a really good team. And you're trying to make that good team as part of the training. So your step three in that process of building out this training is the discovery, the discovery phase. Yes, you've kind of gone through that connection phase, but you instead of just like covering the entire content, the learners can engage in various ways with the content itself to prepare the way for actually skill building and stuff like that. So they're discovering. And I think that's where you bring in, if you check some of the pillars you can bring in, you can bring in those arts, the arts side of things, music side of things and let them discover what it is you're teaching, make it discoverable. Don't just tell, let them find it. So I know I train a lot of technical courses and we deliberately put some roadblocks in the exercises that we give. We put roadblocks there and they're like, no, it's not working. Yes, it's not working. So how can we make it work? So you don't just give them the answer, try and mimic what it is they're going to see in their actual work environment back on the job. So discover, build that in. So that's like games as well, gamification of learning. That's the discovery phase. Quite important. And the next of the five pillars, number four, is activation phase. So if I recall, we started with the preparation, learner preparation phase, then you have the connection, you made a connection, then the discovery phase and now it's activation. How do you now bring all this together and activate that learning in a way that makes it stick? So obviously this is practice. Practice makes perfect. Athletes don't become, you see an athlete, 100 meter runner, he just runs. You see who's saying both, the guy practice and learn for 10 years. As in five years straight here, running, running, running, running every day, you're practicing, you're practicing those muscles. So for learners as well, they need to practice those muscles, those brain muscles, you practice, practice, make it a habit. Once it's a habit, it becomes easier. But habits are very difficult to start and very difficult to stop. So learner practice is key in this stage. And that's what this activation phase is. And this is what we affect you on the job. This is how you become effective on the job. So I think it's a very, very important phase of the accelerated learning phases. Activation, what special advice do you have for us to be on activation? If you're prepared and you're ready, it's taking off, it means that you have all the attention of everyone. You have them emotionally and physically ready to go with you. So part of it is also bringing up, I would say, ideas that will always bring them back. For example, case studies, I don't know if that is part of activation. I'm thinking about it. Yes, if you have case studies, okay. After a bit of learning. And this kind of cases is not a Microsoft PowerPoint, a lot of Microsoft PowerPoint thing is a lot of giving them a case. They sit together look at the challenges in the case, and they will come to present it. So regularly, they're trying out on so many things. So if before the end of a course, you have like two cases or three cases. At the end of the day, there's a deep personal learning. People leave there with a lot of take-home because they have to repeat something and redo it at a particular time. So activities are very good. Yes, definitely. Activities are very, very important. And let me share the website for the accelerators. I think it's called International Association of Accelerated Learning Practitioners, if I'm right. I'll try and share the website with you if I can get my two technology working. But there's still one last phase, but let me share. Let me just share this site with you. And I think you can join them. If you have to show some level of competence, you must have attended an accelerated learning class for you to now at least join them in the association. So let me look for this. Give me a second, guys. So if you look, I think we have the website. It's called, I'm going to paste that as well on our chat, is I think International Association of Accelerated Learning Practitioners, IAALP. So if you go to their site, they have quite a lot of material. And it's nice if you join the site as well. So this IAALP.org. So this is the homepage. Let me just scroll down. And they have so many interesting stories. I was talking to Gail. Gail is one of the, I mean, she probably has more experience on accelerated learning than anybody in the world, I think. And she was telling me about going to an African country to teach farmers accounting. So they needed to learn accounting so that they could they could learn how to keep the books. And in that way, they learn how to keep the books, they'll be able to kind of be more profitable. So she devised a completely fun training environment. They had to do buckets and this and sticks and taught illiterate farmers accounting. And next, the year after when she went back and productivity went up significantly, because she, I mean, the effects of teaching them how to keep their own records and know whether they're making a profit was huge. Such a huge gain. And she of course used all these accelerated learning techniques and in a week, they were keeping their books like accountants. So it's very powerful. It's very, very powerful. And I encourage you guys to go do more research on it and stuff. And if you're interested in a formal course, I think let me see if TD.org you can get onto TD. That's Association for Talent Development. They have a formal course on accelerated learning. Let me check if I can just check that for you and see how that looks. So it's coming up. If you go to TD.org, that is the website for Association for Talent Development. And let me see if this is search. I could just search for accelerated learning. So Oprah is coming for next year's event. And that'll be nice. Let's search, search, search. Where's the search? Okay, search, accelerated learning, pillars of alerted learning design. Okay, so they have articles there. This is the course. Okay, this is Gail. So Gail is the one teaching the certificate course. And we have, there's a video there. Go watch a short video of her introducing the course. I think that's nice. I think I probably have that already. Let me see if I had programmed that into this webinar. That would be nice. Accelerated learning quick intro. No, I didn't. So accelerated learning certificates. Yeah, this is the course I think. Let's have a look. So let's just have a look at the agenda and see whether it's funny things. I'm advertising free for ATD. That's fine. Because I think it's a really cool course. So this is it. Accelerated learning course, program information, why should you attend, improve your measure, measurable learning and retention, reduce training time, make learning fun, improve training results. So and then during the two days, you, the 21st century of learning, you'll learn the pillars, the principles. And then these are the facilitators they have. Right. So go on to td.org and check it out. I think it's really, really useful. I'll just get back to our slides. So we quickly finalize. We just have a few minutes left. And where are we? Where's our slides? Okay. Get back to our slides. Hold on a second. Is you need to bring it all together. That is the integration phase. So you're bringing everything. You've just done everything you integrated. And again, all these phases, interconnectly, you don't have to follow them in order. Of course, you follow some in order, especially the learner preparation. But integration here, the learners reflect on their key learnings, what have they learned. And they formulate new questions. And they build a bridge back to that real life that they're going back to as an, let's build a bridge of what we've learned and how we're going to implement it. I think that body system is good if we could say, okay, do you know what, get somebody else and you guys be your bodies for the next one year and encourage each other to learn what have you learned, maybe every week, every two weeks, you kind of talk to each other to encourage each other and get to implement because learning is useless if you don't implement it. You need to implement what you've learned. So that's what the integration phase is all about. So you could ask participants to review all the activities they've experienced and see how it reflects in what it is they do.  So that's reflection, the reflective phase you're using to reflect on how they will use this learning. So I don't, Toby, are you still there? I'm here, I'm here. Okay. So I just wanted to do like last words if you have any last words of advice, especially for the open coming L and D people and HR people, and then maybe also last words on accelerated learning and the techniques we've just discussed. Okay. I think it's, for me the last words, prepare, prepare, prepare, prepare. Know your, know your, know the trainers, the trainee that you're going to be handling, understand the environments where they are going, which is a summary of what we've been talking about. Make training very interesting. And overall, like you always said, you've mentioned it all that you've done here. You've taken time to go through courses and improve yourself. So be open to learn, improve yourself all the time. And I think I've learned a lot myself from the whole activity. So it also helps me to understand that I also, in terms of every, I think learning and development is general, even when you're discussing with other people. So I've learned that it's also something that we need to, that I need to also do myself. So for the upcoming, the world is very big there. And it's only one who adds more to himself or herself that gets to that point. What's, what's something unique about you that gets us to that point. So I, I, I believe that we can all get there if you're already to open our brain to learn, so learn as much as possible as we get by. Yeah. Yeah. So thank you. Thank you very much for those final words. Thank you very much. So we would like to really say thanks a lot for you spending your time and for free for all of us. And a little good to bet you could. Thank you very much.


I wanna talk about a universal way to bind keys in every Linux graphical environment, totally independent of your window manager, your desktop environment. Now, if you watch my channel, you might know that me and a lot of the people who watch it, you usually use tiling window managers. Tiling window managers, the one I traditionally have used is I3, they have the ability to bind keys to different commands or scripts or other kind of things. And that's something that I've gotten very used to and a lot of other people rely on all the time. But I've been playing with other window managers now, and if I define all my keys in I3, when I move to another one, they're all gonna be gone. And there are some that I want in common. I want my media keys, my keys for going to the next music track or changing volume or a lot of my function keys or a lot of just the keys that open programs. I want them all to be pretty much the same. On any window manager I hypothetically use, if I use GNOME or XFCE or something like that. So in this video I wanna talk about two programs that are very nice if you want a modular setup where you have the ability to take your binds and put them wherever without having to worry about them. I'm gonna talk about two programs that do this. And I wanna talk about two programs just because they're basically the same 99% of the time. But then you could choose which one you like more. There's a more traditional alternative. And that is X bind keys. And again, X bind keys, you can have it run in any environment and it will map keys to whatever you want. And the other program, this is a little more, I guess popular nowadays is, what is it? Simple X hotkey daemon, SXHKD. One of those things where the acronym is much harder to pronounce than the actual thing it stands for. But this one has a little bit more features. It was actually written, I think I pulled up the GitHub for it. I think it was written for like BSPWM, whatever it is, which doesn't actually have any kind of key binding system whatsoever. So it is supposed to be very modular. And it actually, both of these have features that most of your window managers might not actually have. And especially the Simple X hotkey daemon. It has some really cool stuff and I'll talk about those. But again, so just to be clear, how to, before I show you what these config files look like and how to set up key bindings, if you want them to actually run, you have to have the program installed. I have both of these installed, but I'm using Simple X hotkey daemon now. And you want to put in either your X in it or C.  Or if you use a graphical log in, you wanna put it in what is it, X profile or whatever. So you can do that in either case, X profile, just to write it out so people know what it is, I guess. All right, so let me show you what these actually look like. I'll open up both of these because they're pretty similar. And now X bind keys, its config files in the home directory. And I will also open up the config file for SXHK, whatever, the other one, Simple X hotkey daemon. Do I already have this open? Whatever, I probably just left it or something. Anyway, this is what they both look like. Let's look at the X bind keys config. Again, it's the more traditional choice, I guess. And again, you'll see some similarities between the two. So the X bind keys file, it looks like this. You put a command, you wanna bind in quotation marks. And then on the next line, you put whatever you want that bound to. So in this case, ST, my terminal is bound to mod four, which is the super key plus return. Or D menu run, which is my command prompt is mod four, which is the super key, the windows key plus D. So I have a bunch of programs mapped here. I have a bunch of personal scripts here, for example, D menu Unicode.   And again, these are gonna run on any kind of desktop environment. I also have music control and other stuff. There are things, of course, I don't have in here. And those are binds that are specific to each window manager. I bind those in the window manager itself. But one of the reasons I wanted to move to the, I've been configuring DWM, as you may notice, I'm in DWM right now. But to add bindings, you have to create a function in DWM and add it to this array and recompile it. It's a big pain. I just found this a little bit easier, especially considering it will bind them for any graphical environment. So here are the bad things about X bind keys. Most of the time it's gonna work. But there are a couple commands where it gets a little confused. If you have quotation marks, obviously, since these commands are going in quotation marks, you're gonna have some trouble where you have commands that have quotation marks. Because you can't really escape them in the way you expect. Now, I think this works. This command actually doesn't work. I think it's because it has a pipe. I'm not exactly sure. But either way, I didn't really debug it because the simplex hotkey daemon does it all better. Now, one of the things, I'll go ahead and start talking about the simplex hotkey daemon, which looks pretty similar, except for in this case, they have you put the key you bind first and then the command you bind it to. But a couple advantages that the simplex hotkey daemon has.  So I can say terminal and it's gonna read that variable that I assigned to my desired terminal. You'll notice that back here, I had to manually put my terminal name ST in every position. And of course, you really want it to read shell variables because I'll probably in the future, well, no, I won't probably change my terminal. But hypothetically, if I wanted to, I could easily just change my variable and not have to change this file at all these different lines. But otherwise, it looks pretty much the same. And since you don't have like quotation marks, you don't have to worry about it messing things up like this command or something like that that has quotation marks. You don't have to rewrite anything. And I mentioned there was that other command that had broken the graph command, which works totally fine in the simplex hotkey daemon. In addition to this, so the hotkey daemon actually has some other features that work are really convenient. So one of them, I think I is up here. So one nice thing is, if you have like separate lines for all these bindings, it's gonna be a little bit annoying. So one nice thing that the simplex hotkey daemon has is that it has this tercer way of binding multiple keys per line. So for example, I have a command LMC, which is just a wrapper. It's like a music controller. And LMC next means go to the next track. LMC previous means go to the previous track. And I map these at the same time to super plus greater and super plus less with this kind of syntax, which is specific to the simplex hotkey daemon. And this basically means if I press super and greater, it's gonna run LMC next. If I run super or super plus less, it's gonna run LMC previous. So that's a very nice way. And you can see you can do other things with this. Like for example, this, you know, let's see. Over here, I have super and super without any kind of other modifier compared to super plus shift plus P. So it's pretty convenient, the kind of things you can do and you can play around with it. Another thing that both of these, actually, let me think about this. One of these things, I don't actually have it in my config file, but it's really sweet. I sort of want to think of ways to start using this, but if you can check the documentation for it. What you can also do in the simplex hotkey daemon is that you can have, you can bind sequences of keys, which a lot of window managers, like they don't really have the ability to do, but they give an example here, and I've tried this out, it works pretty much exactly how you'd expect. So in this case, what you do is super, if you type in super O and then follow, you can follow it with another key, with E, with W, with M. And super O, E will open up GVM, or super O, W will open up Firefox, or super O, M will open up Thunderbird. I haven't put any of these in my config file yet, but it's one of those ideas that's pretty cool. I'll probably implement it pretty soon once I decide how to organize all the rest of my keys. So that's a really nice ability to have. Additionally, I haven't actually gotten it working, but allegedly both of these programs, both X bind keys and the simple X hot key daemon, have the ability to map release events. That is when you release a key. Maybe it's my keyboard problem, I'm not exactly sure, but I haven't quite gotten it to work. But how you would do it is, I think they give an example here as well, you put a little at sign. Yeah, so this here would run when this button here is released, because it has an at sign before it. It doesn't really work on my machine. Maybe I don't understand how they intend for it to work, but it just runs like a little bit after when you first press down. It might be my own personal problem, I don't know. But you can do the same thing in X bind keys by specifying, you can say like, release and that'll work how you'd expect. So that's another cool thing. So just generally, I definitely recommend you checking out these programs because it's nice to have a more modular setup. It's nice to be able to, I find this a little bit more of a readable file than like sending people my i3 config, which has a bunch of junk in it. Definitely more than a DWM source code or something like that. So I definitely recommend you checking this out.  Either you can, the X bind keys command, I think it's just X bind keys. So X bind keys. So that's how you would do it. And one other thing, I don't think I mentioned this before, but because I'm lazy, I'm super lazy, I actually put everything in VIM. So whenever I save one of these config files, as you can see, as you can see here, I have VIM automatically kill the previous instance of the hotkey daemon and rerun it so it has the new settings. So that way, anytime I edit these files, I don't have to restart my window manager. I don't even have to run a command. It just automatically updates. And that's nice if I need a troubleshoot. That's nice if it's just nice, it's convenient. So anyway, so hopefully that'll give you some ideas for kind of things you can do. Actually, let me give myself five seconds. There might be something else I forgot about that's really cool that I want to show. I think that's about it. But anyway, if you know anything more about these programs, feel free to throw them in the description because I've only been using them a couple of days. But either way, that's about it for this video and I'll see you guys next time.


There is a new alliance in town. The Australia-UK-US alliance, which was announced a few days ago, has led to a lot of discussions. France is really pissed because of commercial reasons. China has said that it marks a return to the Cold War mentality. And what about India? What about the European Union? A lot of questions ahead. In this episode of Mapping Fault Lines, we'll be discussing all of that. We are joined by Prabir Prakash. Prabir, thank you so much for joining us. So, like I said, a lot of questions being raised around this new alliance. It comes just a few days before the Quad Summit, the physical meeting of the Quad leaders, is set to take place. I think one of the most important questions that people have right now is, why is this agreement being done right now specifically focusing in this region? There's Australia, the Indo-Pacific, the South China Sea. We've talked about all these regions in the past. So, what is the strategic imperative, especially of the US and the UK, in forging this alliance? Well, you know, it is also what has been called as a segue from NATO into the much more closer alliance of the Five Eyes, in which essentially it's UK, US, and Australia, Canada. New Zealand is not willing to participate as of now in any of this. So, if we look at this, this seems to be coming together of essentially Anglo-US access and trying to make this as the core of what would be the future of US politics globally. In that sense, they are also discounting their relationship with France and European Union. And it seems to be that if they go, what would be called, you know, switch to Asia as their new area of contention with China, of course, being the key opponent, then it seems that they think Australia is more important because they don't seem to have anybody else except Japan in this part of the world. Now, will Japan be willing to enter into a militaristic competition with China? A very open question because it's very, very strong anti-nuclear, anti-war lobby in Japan still. They haven't forgotten the atomic bombs dropped on Japan itself. So, given that this seems to be an attempt to enter Southeast Asia with the help of India on one hand and of course, Australia on the other, this seems to be more that attempt. And of course, UK being willing to play its fast imperial role, though nobody's asking them exactly what we saw in Afghanistan, for instance, when the United States decided to quit. They didn't really concern to UK. But UK being out of the European Union at the moment, I think is wanting in some sense to regain its salient globally. And therefore, US is its partnership with US seems to be what it is looking for. For Australia, I find it very difficult to understand why nuclear submarines are something they are so interested in because it is not a defensive force. It is really an attack force because it can stay submerged, go large distances and attack from different parts of the sea, of the oceans. And therefore, in terms of defensive warfare, its value is limited. And Australia, if it wants to play an imperial role, it is really going to be very difficult. It's a small country, not such a big economy is all of that. So, this is something which I'm not able to understand at the moment. What is Australia stake? It's becoming a very junior partner, which essentially of a US enterprise to contain China and looking at Southeast Asia, it's not a history that Australia can be very proud of. So, there is that tension with Southeast Asia itself. They look upon Australia as a new colonial power in cahoots with other colonial powers or ex-colonial powers. And I don't think that relationship thinking that a kind of white imperial colonial axis, which is UK, US and Australia is going to play well in Asia. Absolutely Prabir. Of course, like we said, most analysts, most people for that matter, including that the real target here is definitely China. So, the key question here is that how is this alliance sort of expected to work with, say, the Quad in trying to corner China because we have seen freedom of navigation operations, what they call phonops in the South China Sea. We have seen naval exercises between some of these countries and this general alliance that is being built. So, is the aim to sort of in some way encircle China with the coalition of the willing, so to speak? You know, how do you encircle Eurasia from the oceans has always been a question that we have asked that if you look at the global economy, which is in the long term the driver of geo-strategies. In that case, the Eurasian land mass is integrating economically, not South Asia because of course we have the mountain chain. So, we stand a little isolated from the larger Eurasian land mass. And we have of course Pakistan and Afghanistan on the northern borders, which doesn't make it very easy for us to integrate. And the eastern part of it is also not very easy for us. But leaving out South Asia, the rest of the Eurasian land mass seems to be economically coming together. Of course, the Belt Road Initiative is a part of that. But this is a long term historical axis which existed. It's not something which is recent. And if you look at the trade relationship that China has, for example, with most of this country, you will see their major trading partner is increasingly becoming China and not US, which it is what it was about 50 years back. So, given that, how do military contain China and think that it will convert itself into a geo-strategic advantage when the economy itself is not on your side? So, if you look at Southeast Asia, which seems to be the one mainly in play, because East Asia has South Korea, United States, military distilled controls. You have Japan, where again, the preeminent military power is really the United States. And of course, you have Taiwan on which it still, even the United States, recognizes the one China policy that China has. US recognizes that officially, but at the same time, it plays football militarily with Taiwan. We know that. Given all of this, Southeast Asia with the help of Australia and UK. UK is really a distant power. How do they think they can really get their foot in over there? Their thinking seems to be that the total states who have dispute over South China Sea, they will side with Australia and United States against China when their economic interests lie elsewhere. And that economic interest is already visible. Even Australia's largest trading partner is China. So, how do we explain this thinking that militarily they will be able to reverse what seems to be greater economic integration of the Eurasian economies, particularly Southeast Asia, China and even Australia itself? So, I think that is the big question. And can India falling on a failing economic military power like United Kingdom and of course the United States, which is no longer a manufacturing power except for arms and baby aircraft where also they have run into problems. Can that be a counterbalance because of its advance in intellectual property? It's advance in software and other soft knowledge-based subjects where they still have an economic advantage. Can that offset the physical goods production where China is by far the largest producer? And India is no longer even being able to compete on a lot of these issues, particularly when it comes to for instance semiconductor equipment where China is becoming once again one of the foremost leaders, not in chips, not in software, but certainly in essentially equipment, electronic equipment. So, I think given all of this, I'm actually a little lost to understand what Australia's take in this encirclement of China as you said, which seems to be the major thrust and how do they think it will play for themselves in Southeast Asia? So Prabir, finally a quick question about Europe also. We know that France very angry as withdrawn its envoys from the United States and Australia, interesting since France is considered to be the oldest ally of the US. But this also marks a clear exclusion of not only France but also the European powers from this kind of an alliance. So how do we see this in the context of there also being discussions about how China and Russia for instance are approaching Europe? You know, if we look at the NATO itself, there has been a question mark because the NATO leadership is very clearly pro-US and very strongly anti-China and anti-Russia. There is a play with NATO and European Union on Ukraine, the Baltic states on the borders of Russia, which targets Russia and containment of Russia. Now this has been what the European Union and the NATO has been playing from the beginning. It's not a China-centered issue as much as a Russia-centered issue. Now if they segue to China as the main enemy, what happens on the Russian front? We don't know what their plans are. But obviously the European Union state and the European Union countries like Germany, France, their state in NATO will reduce if Russia is the main enemy for them. This is what they have been pushing the European countries to. I mean the United States has been pushing the European countries to while they themselves look upon the main state being China and therefore in the Pacific as they call it. Now in this particular case of course is a huge economic issue that they are going to cancel a French order on submarines, the nuclear submarines are not what they had ordered, Australia had ordered diesel-based submarines and that meant changing the submarines that French were offering them because French used this submarines as nuclear submarines and that is what was also taking the time. And here is the issue therefore for France, the huge economic loss and they don't seem to have been informed. So there is a claim that they were informed little while before this agreement was signed. So here they were selling 12 submarines to Australia. Suddenly they find that they have been thrown out quite brusquely without any information by another ally who has stepped into it and actually Australia is going to pay much more. Now the other part of it which already has been planned is if France was selling the submarines and Australia said we want nuclear submarines not busy set submarines, actually it would be easier for France to do but also they use low enriched uranium which doesn't come under the kind of strict controls that the American submarines will because they use high enriched uranium which is almost bomb level, a 60% enrichment which means it has to go to 90% enrichment in order to make it into bomb and these are far more stringent in terms of the regulations requirements that are there. US is willing to relax all of that but they are IEA guidelines on this and they do fall found of a lot of the non-proliferation issues. So apart from the French being completely blindsided by this agreement and what it means for the European Union and NATO and also the fact that European Union countries are beginning to realize that as a part of this competition between China, Russia and the United States, their economic interests do not lie with either US or UK which now is willing to enter the fray or Australia which is a bit player in all of this and their much larger economic interests lies really with the duration land mass as we have been discussing. So what do they do? Their defence terms they are tied up completely in the United States, their militaries are tied up with the United States, what do they do? I think this is the big existential question for all the European countries particularly for the big ones like France and Germany. Thank you so much Prabir for talking to us. That's all we have time for today, we will be following these issues in the coming weeks as well. Until then keep watching NewsClick.