The ”Talk to the Elephant” Episode

Clark and Matt are joined by instruction design guru and all around fantastic human, Julie Dirksen. Julie has been in the business for over 15 years creating highly interactive and more importantly, highly effective eLearning experiences for clients all around the world. But, Julie is more than that! She is one of the those go-to people in the industry. She is an expert that many other experts in our industry turn to and call a researcher translator. Meaning she digs into core issues… practical issues, in the work learning practitioners do. She figures out what the research says, and then puts it into succinct, useful bites that are immediately applicable. Her first book, DESIGN FOR HOW PEOPLE LEARN is one of those rare books in L&D that broke out and became a best seller beyond the industry. It is the go-to book for designers and trainers. Today, Clark and I get to talk with her about latest book, TALK TO THE ELEPHANT, DESIGN LEARNING FOR BEHAVIOR CHANGE. We talk about systems thinking and how the system can affect the factors that influence how and why one behaves as one does. We explore the individual factors such as motivation, incentives, and environmental factors. And more!

As Clark will say in the episode, TALK TO THE ELEPHANT is a wonderful complement, a companion, to DESIGN FOR HOW PEOPLE LEARN. We originally planned to talk with Julie for just 20 minutes, One hour later… we were still going and felt like we could go on forever.

Julie also joins us at the end for Best and Worst.

You can find Julie at: https://usablelearning.com.

Julie rattles off so many models and tools throughout the show, we recommend you simply buy the book to get more on each, as well as their respective references. For the links she directly references, here they are:

The change ladder survey link is on the book page:

https://usablelearning.com/elephant/

Julie’s "best" was Casey Fiesler. Her video on Fair Use is here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2PuntvfN20

Casey has a shorter version here that skips the wolf-themed erotica: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuDEgnxkGDg)

The syllabus for her tech ethics course on tiktok is here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tWdqYqYBHARbZXFQX4cybe88S-0twqvUu1xLhYnLgU4/edit?usp=sharing