Episode 34: Beyond the Dancing Cats: Jane Bozarth on Community, Learning, and What Still Matters

Rebecca J. Hogue
March 28, 2025April 5, 2025

Episode Summary

In this episode of Demystifying Instructional Design, I sit down with the Jane Bozarth for a candid, insightful, and often hilarious conversation about how our field has evolved, the impact of communities of practice, and what still holds true in instructional design today. Jane takes us through her journey from being an enthusiastic classroom trainer back in the pre-Internet days to becoming a well-respected voice in e-learning, social learning, and workplace training. Her stories bring to life the real-world changes she’s witnessed over the years, from mailing out VHS tapes to working with Dreamweaver and now navigating the fast-paced world of AI.

A big theme in our conversation is the difference between groups, interest-based spaces, and genuine communities of practice. Jane breaks down what really makes a community thrive. Spoiler alert: it takes more than just creating a discussion board and hoping people will engage. We talk about how communities function as living systems, with different levels of participation, and how they need purpose, intention, and care to really grow. Jane also shares some of the challenges that can come up, like groupthink, elitism, or performative participation, and how these can easily derail even the most well-intentioned efforts.

Another topic we dig into is the tension between education and entertainment. Jane doesn’t hold back when it comes to the rise of “dancing cats” and over-the-top gamified experiences. Sure, they might be fun, but are they actually helping people learn? We discuss how easy it is to get swept up by new tools and trends, and why it’s so important to stay grounded in evidence-based practice. This part of the conversation leads us into learning styles, where Jane shares some fascinating research that challenges the idea that teaching to a learner’s preferred style improves outcomes. Despite the evidence, this myth still lingers in our field.

We also talk about the role of social media in shaping our professional identities. Jane reflects on her early days in Twitter-based spaces like #LearnChat, how those communities helped shape her career, and how she’s now experimenting with newer platforms like BlueSky. Her message is simple but powerful: what you put into a community is what you get out of it. If you never speak up, ask questions, or share, you’re unlikely to build meaningful connections. But if you show up consistently and contribute, those networks can become incredibly valuable.

To wrap things up, Jane offers a thoughtful look at what has stood the test of time. Tools and technologies may come and go, but the heart of instructional design remains steady: understanding learners, setting clear goals, and designing with purpose. Her advice is a reminder to keep learning, stay focused on what matters, and continue showing up for the communities that support us.

This is an episode for anyone who cares about building better learning experiences and stronger professional communities.

In this episode

Episode Transcript

Rebecca: [00:00:00] Welcome to Demystifying Instructional Design, a podcast where I interview instructional designers about what they do. I’m Rebecca Hogue, your host. Today I am joined by Jane Bozarth. I’m so excited. Jane, would you start off by introducing yourself?

Jane: Yes. I’m Jane Bozarth in Durham, North Carolina. I started my training career many, many, many years ago.

We didn’t have web content yet. We didn’t have the internet yet. we had electricity and then sometime later we got the internet. I was a classroom trainer and a good one. I belong to a very active community of practice of trainers who helped me a lot. We’ll be talking that about that today, I hope.

And when I started my master’s program, a lot of that was online in a terrible way. It was just scrolling pages of text. Sometimes there’d be a picture. They were actually mailing me boxes of VHS tapes to watch lectures. That’s how distance learning was being done then. So, but I did see with the online courses bad.

Bad and tedious though they were, that they would solve a lot of my [00:01:00] problems at work. We had people traveling and staying in hotels just to come to new hire orientation and listen to EEO officers, read policies and that kind of thing. So I shifted my work from the standup classroom facilitation primarily to more e-learning and technology that because I was with government, state government, I had no money, never had any money.

So I was always looking for inexpensive or lower cost solutions, and that led me to my interest in social learning and social media. That in turn led me to other endeavors. And so I’ve done all of it. I mean, I’ve done standup classroom training. I’ve done e-learning, design and development.

I’ve done program management. I’ve supported social learning. So I have, I have run the gamut and I will tell you, I’m kind of exhausted. I don’t know if I’m up for ai.

I’m trying and I can keep up, but I’m having to run faster now than I used to, so. We’ll, we’ll see. But but I, I, I can talk a little about ai, but it’s not my first love.

Rebecca: Let’s talk a bit more about community, though. I’m super [00:02:00] interested how community.

Plays a role in education and in corporate in particular.

Jane: Sure. Well, you know, when we were talking the other day, we sort of did a pre-chat about this podcast. We talked about social media and what was going on with social media. I think we are watching, this is the morning after the story broke about hedge that using signal to plan.

War activities, by the way, we had that happen yesterday. Yesterday. So I think there is a distinction between what’s going on with public, social media and public facing. Anybody can join groups like Facebook or Blue Sky or Twitter, whatever’s going on there and what is still going on in, in more constrained.

Signal being the exception, the yesterday’s thing being the exception. I’m involved in a number of Slack channels, for instance, with very specific purposes, with very specific people. It’s not just all out there for the universe. I don’t plan to add in people I shouldn’t that that was the problem yesterday.

But, but I think social media has changed. When I first started, we. [00:03:00] There was lots and lots of concern about what people were posting. There were companies that had dedicated lawyers vetting every blog comment and stuff like that. I think we’re past that. We’ve come to understand better the uses and applications of online conversation, and I think, I hope generally we’re smarter inside organizations about it.

So, having said all that. One of the things that I kept running into, particularly when I was doing so much work on social media, with social media, and I wrote a book about that for trainers Was the people did not distinguish very well between interest areas, groups, and communities. Community is a very warm, fuzzy, happy word like teams used to be, but, but very often I find that people use that word incorrectly. I belong, for instance, we, my husband and I go to the Caribbean every year. It’s a long story, but we go to St. Martin every year and I belong to a Facebook group for other people who also go to St. Martin every year. And there will be posts about a, a new restaurant, there’ll be a post about a restaurant [00:04:00] changing hands during covid.

It was very helpful because there were all kinds of issues with travel. My point is it was very useful for going in and getting basic information, sharing something quick. But I wouldn’t say we developed friendships there. I wouldn’t say that we were planning to meet up when we were all on the island, right? It was strictly information, strictly transactional.

When you start talking about community, it’s something different. It’s people forming connections, people learning a little bit about one another. You know, Rebecca works with with undergraduates. Give her a call and see what she thinks. Right? Jane has no experience with undergraduates, so she won’t be useful.

Right. Understanding a little bit about each other. Reading something and saying, oh, well this is about undergraduates. I’ll send it to Rebecca. Right? You understand a little bit about each other. You’re supporting one another. Perhaps you’re trying to help each other. And when you shift to even more a community of practice, the goal of that is to get better at what we do.

And I think that gets lost sometimes. People [00:05:00] call just, we’re all interested in articulate as a community of practice. And unless you’re working together to get better at using the articulate suite well. You know, again, we’re back to, is it just a group? Am I making sense?

Rebecca: Yeah, yeah. It is just a group.

I do wanna highlight something. I know nothing about undergraduates. I teach graduates,

Jane: oh, sorry, sorry, so see. We aren’t in a, we aren’t a community yet, Rebecca.

Rebecca: We aren’t a community yet.

Clearly

Jane: we aren’t the community yet. But, but my point is, I think those of those of your students, particularly in the people who are watching, who are interested in the corporate world. You will often see the word community just bandied about in kind of meaningless ways and, and what you will often see is senior management or maybe hr or maybe some, you know, some division will want you to start a community with this sort of, if you build it, they will come.

Attitude, right? And they often have very unrealistic expectations, [00:06:00] particularly in terms of things like vanity metrics. Oh, we’ll start this discussion board and everybody in the company will use it, and they’re all gonna be warm and fuzzy and interacting with each other, and that is very unlikely that will ever happen.

But it’s not gonna happen if somebody’s not there to nurture it along, to feed content, to feed questions. To help support one another. So you know, another, another way a group can sort of, kind of be a community is if you have, and we saw this a lot during Covid too, if you have, for instance, a lot of, we had a lot of of school teachers who wanted to move into what they called corporate training with, with very little definition of what that meant.

Corporate training. The communities that grew up around that, or the groups that grew up around that very quickly became very boring for me because every third day somebody saying, how do I learn, articulate? How do I learn Captivate? How do I learn Camtasia? There would be three or four people who would step up every single time.

Help with that every day. They never got tired of it. They sort of became the [00:07:00] self-appointed mentors or senior people in the group. I just was dying, right? So it didn’t hold any value for me. It didn’t hold any interest for me. It doesn’t mean it was bad group, it doesn’t mean it wasn’t worthwhile to the people that was who were participating.

It just meant it wasn’t my thing. So my participation had nothing to do with whether the group was good or not, whether it was well led or not. It just didn’t meet any need of mind.

Rebecca: So that actually speaks interestingly to the idea of the, the living organism that is the community and the way people move through it.

Can you talk about that a little bit?

Jane: Right. Well, that’s a good example. So what, what does happen with, if you’re, if you’re lucky and if it’s nurtured and you’ve got some people sort of managing it with a group like the one I described with the teachers who wanna move into corporate again, whatever that means, there’s trajectories of participation.

So you have some people who come in and say, how do I learn about Captivate? And somebody recommends an academy and you never see ’em again.. You had some people [00:08:00] though, who would then come back and say, I did three academies and this one was by far the best in this why. And then you’ll have somebody who would say, well, you always have a vendor pop.

Well, I have an academy and I got a coupon. But then you see those brand new people, somebody would come back and say, well, look, I got, I finally got a job. I had 73 interviews and now I have a job. And I was really surprised that when I got there, they didn’t care that I had learned captivate.

They had bought something else. Right. So you, see people moving from peripheral participation, just a quick question or two or just lurking and waiting to see what other people are saying to moving in. But then, then you would start seeing people moving out.

There are people who, after they’ve joined the group I’m describing, maybe they have been to a couple of academies, maybe they have got a job, maybe they are working out, they probably move on out, right? Either they stay and become the helpers or hang around, or they just sort of move on out. So, so it breathes, it grows and it breathes.

And participation is not usually very, very consistent. You will often find, and this is true in a community [00:09:00] of practice. There’s sort of a core senior ish, and I don’t mean that by age, I mean it more experience. You see it sort of a senior membership. And then the best ones. And then when I belong to, you see these people helping to bring the newer folks in.

You have to be careful when you’re talking about community. You have to be careful about inclusion and exclusion. You have to be careful about who’s in the club and who’s not. It’s very easy for that senior group to become kind of elitist. And I’ll admit with the, with the people who were talking about how do I learn about Captivate, I didn’t snub them, but I also wasn’t very interested in those conversations.

So. What you’re looking for is, is how you can help the newer members get better at practice and become, come into the fold, and then eventually the more senior people move on out. I was very, very active in that community of practice for classroom trainers. I was a central member. I did a lot of the administrative help.

I did a lot of those sort of community support. I did a lot of sort of nurturing people I [00:10:00] thought were really high potential or, or that seemed like they were getting it and would. Would stick with the business for a while, but honestly, after I discovered e-learning, that was not really my thing anymore.

I didn’t wanna stand and engage 30 people at a time. Five days a week, which now just seems so exhausting. But nobody else was really very interested in e-learning. So I went from being a very senior leading member of that group to something else. You know, I sort of moved along my way and the people we had nurtured along stepped up and came into that more central role.

I will say eventually with the more senior people all retiring, it did kind of fall apart. It doesn’t exist anymore.

Rebecca: So one of the, success factors then for a community is that need for that core senior as an expertise in some ways.

Jane: Yeah. Well there, there need to be people helping it along.

Again, there’s this sort of, if we build it, they will come, but there’s gotta be somebody there with a little bit of impetus, with a little bit of pushing it [00:11:00] along. I don’t know that they always have to be senior, but they have to be. Not just, we’re gonna get together on Tuesday. Everybody show up and then there’s no plan.

’cause one thing your boss isn’t gonna put up with that for very long. Right. You have some sort of plan. So I would just say generally, especially with a COP. You, you do see that there are sort of layers of, of experience and layers of also participation. Though there are people that just show up for the meeting and eat the cookies.

There are people that show up and bring something they’re working on, they want to share. There are people who come with a real problem they want answers to, and there are people that come and sit in the back and say, my boss made me come. We see that every time. But one thing back to that about the idea that community is always a positive, happy, good thing.

You, you can see people get ostracized. You can see we had an issue one time with a senior member who kind of got to where she just thought she was better than everyone else and we should all just listen to her all the time. And she was the only one that knew anything about training ’cause she was older than everyone else [00:12:00] and she was very, kind of snobby to some of the newer people, and that was defeating the purpose of having a community. One. One of our goals was that we were all government trainers. We all dealt with lots of compliance stuff, right? Which is to dry it toast. Our goal was to make training better. Our goal was to help newer trainers get better and not just stand there reading what were then overhead slides, overhead projector slides, right?

It kind of got to where you just need to sit and listen to me ’cause I’m Buddha on the hill. So I don’t wanna bother with you if you’re not doing the things I want you to do. So you have to sort of watch and make sure that it is, it, it doesn’t become too clubby. We ran into a couple of problems, points of tension, one of which, and I think this is important for any of us working in the training business.

’cause this, this also applies to e-learning. One of the challenges we ran into was sort of tuning, it’s called Tuning the Enterprise Wenger writes about it as tuning the enterprise What is it you said you were really here to [00:13:00] do and is that what you’re doing? Because what we ran into at one point, and we sat down and actually had this conversation, which is important.

Are we here to help people become better trainers? Are we here to make state government training better and more effective and get people to be less resistant and not just dread having to come to what we do? Are we there to make it better and help people learn? Or are we trying to become fabulously entertaining popular fund presenters?

Rebecca: Well, it’s actually an interesting point that you’re bringing up ’cause it goes back to the basics of instructional design. Right. What’s the purpose, what’s the goal of this?  

Jane: We see the very same phenomenon when we talk about e-learning. Are you putting those dancing cats on a screen because that’s helping the learning, or do you wanna be remembered as the person that created that cool thing with the dancing cats?

Right. Are you adding decorative entertaining elements just for the sake of making it entertaining? Or does this have something to do with with people learning anything? I would argue that [00:14:00] maybe it’s gotten worse, that we’ve gone from people who wanted to be fabulously fun, entertaining presenters for 30 at a time, to now we’re just launching these huge courses that have all of this decorative stuff and the dancing cats and the theme songs, and they’re missing, are they helping us learn? 

Rebecca: That’s sort of going to the edutainment instead of education.

Jane: Well, that, and that was the conversation. Is that what we’re here to do when we say we wanna stamp out bad training? Is that what you think that means? Because for some people it did. It meant, oh, it’ll be fun and they’ll have a great time and we’ll play lots of games and there’ll be all kinds of interactivity.

That is what they thought better training was. And the rest of us, by that point, training had started having some structure around the discipline. They started, you started to see master programs emerging and that kind of thing, and so those of us who were involved in, in evidence-based practice, like wait a minute.

Rebecca: Just singing and dancing and being entertaining does not mean people are learning. We’re not helping performance. So it, it’s a tension you have to work out.

 We’re talking about communities of practice [00:15:00] as one of those tools we have at our toolbox as trainers.

Rebecca: The question is when do we use that tool? When is it good to use a community of practice versus when you might just create a course?

Jane: I will send you a link to this because it just happens to fit into this piece of the conversation. There’s an interesting piece from, it’s pretty old, I think it’s 2007, from someone named Kaia Pastors.

Who talk about the difference between top bound communities of practice. Where the, the organization hires somebody or they bring in consultants or the organization says, you’re gonna have a community of practice, and here it is and it’s on Tuesday.

And whether it just emerges on its own, the bottom up the sort of bootstrapped and what happens in and what, and, and to your point, what happens when you’ve got the top down when people are assigned or they’re put into one or we said, oh, we’re gonna use this today. They tend to preserve it perceive it as more work.

Oh lord. I’ve got another meeting. Oh, now I’ve got one more thing. Oh, what are they expecting is a deliverable. It just becomes another [00:16:00] work task group. Right. When it emerges on its own and you’re just asking each other for help, whether that’s formal or informal, you tend to have more commitment. You tend to have people not resent it.

You tend to have volunteers and the people that are not volunteers drop away. So when you start talking about whether we need the community or whether we go with a course, I, I don’t know that I’ve ever thought of it as being that dichotomous. I think when I talk, when I think about the community of practice, it’s getting better overall and getting better across.

The span of your career and the span of your work and not so much do you apply it at just this one thing? Now, with the one I belong to, one thing we did do quite a lot. It was member presented. It was member organized. Most of the time somebody came to a meeting with something that they wanted feedback on.

They had a, again, these were mostly standup presenters back then. They would show up with a lesson plan they wanted to, and they would deliver it to us and get feedback. They would have designed a new game, which you can’t really test unless you have a bunch of people to test it. Right. You [00:17:00] can’t just have a game in your head and have it run like you think.

So in that case, we would work out what they were working on. We would try to iron out, the ideas they had or point out flaws in it or see where an idea was failing or the explanation wasn’t working. So we would help them in that sense, work on that particular course. Not so much choosing, but that was the purpose of the community.

One more thing that occurs to me as, as I was talking about the tensions, another, another thing that you run into with communities. Again, they’re not always warm and fuzzy. I found mine very useful, very helpful. I credit pretty much every good thing about my career to my years with that community of practice I belong to, even though I sort of outgrew it and moved into something else.

Communities you can fall into group think like there was a whole cadre of the people who thought, oh, well we just need to be fabulously entertaining. We had to really work on that. There was a lot of tension over, we’re gonna be fabulously entertaining, fun people, and we’re gonna look at [00:18:00] what the evidence says about how people learn.

We had to really struggle with that quite a bit. Another, another thing that you, we saw happen were over some of the myths that get perpetuated, like the Dale’s Cone kind of stuff, like the personality types kind of stuff, and especially learning styles. There is not one shred of of evidence says teaching to a style has an effect on, on outcome, positive outcome.

But it is just, it’s, we’re gonna have to put a stake through its heart to kill this idea. And you have people in a room, it feels very intuitive. When you’re dealing with a bunch of people who design training, whether it’s live or or online, it is very appealing to create something that’s fun, that’s engaging, that everybody loves.

That’s, that’s cute, that’s got the dancing, it’s very reinforcing and everybody pats each other on the back about it, but it. It’s not, there’s not really any There, there, am I making sense?

Rebecca: Yeah. Yeah. It’s actually an interesting challenge with, [00:19:00] ’cause everybody looks at it and goes, but I’m a visual learner or I’m a, yeah.

And, and of course as, as somebody who’s, who’s been trying to teach my students over and over about how, no, that’s a preference. That actually is not a style. How did, how did you recently updated a chapter in a book about this? How did you approach that?

Jane: But, but first of all, just let me say about, about this business of people have preferences. One of the most interesting new pieces of literature I’ve seen in years was in 2018, I believe it was Hussman and O’Loughlin. I can send it to you, but it’s cited in the long piece I sent you. Hussman and O’Loughlin most of the time when you see these studies such as they are about whether teaching to learning styles has an effect on outcomes.

Now, let me be very clear. I’m not saying people don’t have a preference. I am saying that if you’re going to teach someone to swim, I don’t care how visual they are, they still need to get in a pool. They still need to get on a bike. They still need to sit down at a piano. But but [00:20:00] Hussman and O’Loughlin, usually with these experiments you have a group of students. Usually they happen with college students or, or younger.

So it’s convenient samples, right? So you have a student, they take some sort of instrument, some sort of quiz, identifying their. Preference. These are always, are almost always dichotomous. I am merciful or I am just, I like pictures. I don’t like pictures. You know, they’re very there. They’re, there’s no wiggle room on those.

They’re very dichotomous, they’re very fixed. And then they say, then, then they say, okay, well you’re visual, you’re kinesthetic, you’re whatever you are. There’s 71 models, by the way, whatever you are. And then they are presented with some sort of intervention, right? There’s a treatment, there’s, here’s something in a visual style, here’s something, an auditory style, da da, da, da.

All this matching up. What Hussman and O’Loughlin did though, is they just asked students what their preferred style was. So the students would say, I’m a visual learner. Almost everybody will say that. By the way, I’m a visual learner. I’m an auditory learner. And then they were given an assignment and a, [00:21:00] an array of materials to choose from.

They did not choose the thing they just said was their preference.

Rebecca: Oh now. That’s interesting,

Jane: isn’t it? So it’s sort of like, my example of this is always if I wanna add a deck to my house, I might read a book on it. Sure. But I would probably also pop over to Lowe’s for the workshop on that, or I’d at least look at some videos on that.

Or I think intuitively, maybe we just don’t think of it as learning. I think intuitively we do know that we’re not gonna learn to swim by reading about that. We’re not gonna learn to play the piano by talking , but it sounds great. And, and the, the thing that bothers me more, I mean, there was some other research which I found encouraging that said, teachers do believe in teaching the learning styles, but they’re not.

They say, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But then when you look at their stuff, they’re, they’re not, I have seen it. When we talk about the dark side of some of this, I have seen it more. When people are trying to justify something they find fun and interesting, that doesn’t have a thing to do [00:22:00] with anybody learning anything.

Oh, well we need the dancing cats for the visual people because they learned to draw a dancing cat last week. Right. Or, well, we need to play a game here. ’cause they can’t figure out how else to deliver the content.

 It just justifies a design decision. It’s not like, oh, what can we do?

Right. And, and very rarely does it accommodate anything. And again there is no literature that says this works. Now, they may find some tomorrow. I mean, you know how literature is you, our research is, but so far my guess is that we haven’t found the model yet. I think probably we do have some kind of something that you can appeal to on an individual level.

But at the moment our best is, it is really dependent on the content, what approach you take to deliver it. It again, piano swimming.

Rebecca: It’s funny ’cause I use the swimming example as well. It’s like, you’re not gonna teach me how to swim by giving me a podcast.

Jane: Well, right. Well, you know, one thing that’s interesting, I do, I do think Cathy Moore, I don’t know if you remember Cathy.

She has sold her business. She [00:23:00] was great. She developed the action learning, the mapping thing. You know, she says you have to be careful talking to people who believe they’re operating from a moral imperative. People have been raised to believe that this is how people learn and you gotta accommodate their styles.

Parents wanna hear it. Schools wanna say it. Right. It starts really, really young. We will tailor instruction to your child’s needs and we will do that, you know and you just have to remember talking about what will really help somebody learn and not just shooting down. ’cause I’ve made fun of it today.

I know. As far as the book goes, what happens is I wrote a book in 2008. It’s a compilation. It’s, I edited it. It’s a compilation of tools that practitioners said they were actually using in their work. Lots of quizzes for needs analysis, task analysis, prepping for live delivery for writing a facilitator guide for a virtual classroom session, those kinds of things.

And, I’m working for the Learning Guild now, and one of my colleagues said, you know, we should, we should reissue that. I, it, it’s gone out of print. It was expensive, it was big [00:24:00] and for the 15th anniversary. And so I took a look at it. Honestly, it needed very little updating and it’s a perfect thing.

It’s called from Analysis to evaluation tools, tips and Techniques for trainers. And it was a really perfect tool for those people who said they were classroom teachers, school teachers who wanted to go into corporate. Because It helped them do some of the things they didn’t really learn to do when they were teachers.

Like how to develop, you know, how to do a job performance analysis, how to, how to write performance objectives for a work task, not just, you know, an academic task. So it was a really good time and I went back to look at it thinking this would be a lot of work. And there was, because we stayed away from technology, it was pretty much evergreen.

Except for references to learning styles. So I did go in and take all of those out. It involved even replacing a few tools, but the, the thing is back to the trajectories of participation and what happens in the community. We learned a lot in 15 years. You know, back then when we were all classroom trainers, very few people had done graduate work yet in [00:25:00] learning and development.

We’d done some academic, but we hadn’t done much in learning and development. We thought we were doing the right thing. We were not out to cause harm. And it does seem very intuitive. So I just went in and took it all out and had to find other things to replace it with. But but you know, we get, we learn stuff, we get better, right?

We used to have doctors carrying around bags of leeches, right? So we get better.  

Rebecca: I actually was introduced to your work back when you did the book on social media and, and through Learn Chat. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about what the next Evolution for Learn Chat is.  

Jane: Years ago when I said I had been very active in this, this group of standup facilitator trainers. I was, when I got interested in e-learning, I was literally the only one.

We had 85,000 state employees and I was the only one that cared about e-learning. I was learning Authorware, which in the south they pronounce Arthur Ware. I was working with Dreamweaver. I mean, I was the only [00:26:00] one. And so when I was looking for something like a new community, I found it on Twitter. I could go to Twitter and pretty much anytime day or night there would be somebody there talking about whatever I wanted to talk about.

And sometimes it was something I didn’t know I wanted to talk about. So I loved Twitter and Dave Wilkins and Rachel Happy way back in the early days, started posting an auto post that was social learning question of the day. The gist of which was usually a variation of what did you learn today, right?

Who did you learn it from? And that kind of thing. And that evolved Marsha Connor picked up the, the baton, and it evolved to the very earliest version of Learn Chat on Twitter. And I got involved with that fairly early on because again, it’s people talking about what I wanna talk about. I found it very energizing.

I was, I was meeting famous people who had written books and stuff, and I had not done much of that. I think I had one book out then, but it, it was just fabulous. So without getting too political, Twitter has run into some problems. [00:27:00] The last couple of years, Twitter has had its detractors. But learn chat at its at its height.

I mean, we did it every, every week, every Thursday, and sometimes, I mean, we would have 50, 60 participants back in the day. We’d have a lot of school teachers would come, lots of people were there. Over the years it kind of settled into the same couple dozen, three dozen, but that was still good. So anyway, when Twitter, met its challenges, LearnChat kind of fell apart. So many of the people who had been participants had dropped away. We had not found anything new. So one day Blue Sky appears. We had all tried other places. People had gone to Slack, people went to Mastodon, people went to Discord. People went to more pri, you know, more private channels.

But we had not found anything. Blue Sky’s the closest thing we found to Twitter. I don’t think it’s quite as intuitive and we have not quite figured out how to make the conversation flow. But we did bring Learn Chat back. It is spelled out [00:28:00] now, hashtag Learn Chat, so it’s a little bit easier to find.

Back in the early days we had a limit of 180 characters, so they had taken out, taken out a lot of the vows, but now it is actually spelled out and we have been shooting for the first, I think we maybe second Tuesday of the month. From eight to nine as just a start. And what’s funny, many, many of the old guard are there.

Most of the people that were really frequent flyers back then are there, and many of them joined Blue Sky because of that.

Rebecca: Yeah.

Jane: So we’re seeing it again, and it’s a very active community. . What you get from a community depends largely on what you put into it.

You cannot just lurk and never participate and never say anything and never help and then expect to get anything much in return one time. And this was some years ago. We were we hadn’t even invented Zoom yet. I was using a product called WebEx, which I guess is still around, but it ain’t, it ain’t Zoom, WebEx.

And someone messaged me at work, I think it was somebody from [00:29:00] voc rehab called and said, we’ve got a, a learner who needs to have a visual problem accommodated with what can we do in WebEx? And I didn’t know, I should have known, I didn’t know. So I tweeted it out. I said, got a problem. Somebody needs help with WebEx, needs something.

Help vi accommodate a visual, a disability. What, what you got? And I think I had something like 15 or 20 answers in just a few minutes. Just one of them said, oh, here’s a link to a job aid for that.

Rebecca: That’s awesome.

Jane: I know. And I took it. I calvo rehab back. And it was what they needed and I went on with my day.

So here’s the thing, the reason I got all those answers, including such a good one, was because I was so active on Twitter. I participated a lot. I answered a lot. I was in Learn Chat. I’ve had other people say, well, I’m on Twitter. I ask a question that ain’t nobody answered me. I’m like, really? You have four followers you’ve never posted anything.

So, you know, to get that kind of response, you know, the other thing is that I could turn that around and there’s a, a piece from Etienne [00:30:00] Wenger. I’ve written about, he sent a framework for assessing the value of online interactions. That’s what it’s called, assessing the value of online interactions. It appeared in Learning Solutions Magazine a good many years ago now.

But I can use that as an example of the value of my participating in social channels, even those with people I’m not working with. Right. When’s the last time you called a government agency and got the right answer back in five minutes?

Rebecca: You’re highlighting something that I think is really important, and it’s something that I teach my students, is that that social network isn’t a thing if you haven’t fostered it and, and worked on it.

Like it won’t be there to help you when you need it if you’re not there to begin with, right? You have to, you have to be a participant in that community in order for that community to be really be part of your network.

Jane: I have not had a job interview since 1998

‘ cause I didn’t need to have job interviews. I published so much. I wrote so much. I [00:31:00] participated so much. They came to me. I’m now, I mean, I’m exaggerating a little. I haven’t had to go apply for a job and get it in decades. I would say that is because of my social presence and my interacting with the people I needed to be interacting with and sharing a lot of stuff.

I have shared a lot of stuff over the years. We’ve tried to make stuff free. I’ve excerpted from my books, but but yeah, you have to be a participant to get the payoff. 

Rebecca: Looking back over the last however many years, what have you learned? What’s your big learning?

Jane: You know, I, that’s an interesting question.

 I will tell you what I found, what I found interesting and what I’ve learned back to, I took a book I had compiled in 2008. We reissued it in 2024, except for a little, little bit of technology stuff and some things we’d learned about like learning styles there had, there was very little to change.

I think that deep down, we got a lot of stuff right. I’m making fun of things. [00:32:00] Maybe we got wrong. We got a lot of things right, and the basics have held true over years. We need to teach to the content. We need people to learn. We need to remember that our job is not how I can teach it, but how can they learn it?

We need to be very, very clear on the outcomes that we’re after. We need to build a good plan around to get to those outcomes. I thought the thing that I learned most is that we know a lot and we keep maybe losing sight of that. I think shiny objects come along. I am. I love technology. I love technology.

I always have, but I think that sometimes we get very distracted by the new thing and the next thing, so sometimes it’s technology, sometimes it’s people around us. Sometimes it’s stakeholders who’ve gotten a hold of some buzzy, buzzy, buzzy buzzword kind of thing.

But I think that what I’ve learned most is that we need to hold true to what we do know. We need to reevaluate once in a while, and if something isn’t right or it’s not working, like learning styles, we need to [00:33:00] to recalibrate a little, but we need to stay the

course.  

Rebecca: Thank you very much for joining us today, Jane. That’s been an awesome conversation.

Jane: Thank you. I hope it’s useful. We have a couple references. Maybe you can include them as, as show notes or links or something so that people can get to them.

I’m a big believer in the power of community and I, I worry sometimes our conversations about the broader social media is getting us away from thinking about the communities you belong to and how you can be a better participant and how you can leverage what you’ve got to nurture and, and build on that.

Rebecca: Excellent. Thank you very much. Yes. I will include those references and those links in the show notes, which will be available as a blog post on demystifying instructional design.com.

Jane: Good. Stop dancing cats.

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