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Don't take facilitation skills for granted

7/29/2016

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I was in a Small Business Association eCommerce class. The instructor reminded me of my IT days when technical trainers wore pagers like sidearms and waxed poetic about heroic feats of rebooting. He, let’s call him Steve, was again telling us how lucky we were to be in his presence for only $30. His consulting fee is $100 an hour, after all. As the morning waned on, he grew disheartened by our blank stares and switched tactics, finally turning his attention to us. He had only engaged in some light crowd work earlier.

“So,” he said, rubbing his hands together, “Hadiya.” He confused my incredulous glare with engaged eye contact.

A “yes” slipped out, clinging to a breath I didn't know I was holding. I was impressed that he said my name correctly, something that happens with surprising regularity these days.

"You typically use your website to describe what you do right? But you can also use it to communicate what you don't do. For example, you're selling services, right?"

I nodded. He remembered that from our introductions from what now seems like three weeks ago. Perhaps Steve’s head is in the game.

"But," he said, "you aren't selling prostitution. You aren't selling heroin. You can use your site communicate that too."

Um. What?

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What The Sims taught me about design and development

7/19/2016

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​It’s funny how life works. Experiences that seemed like a waste of time turn into blessings years later. Of course, two things can be true simultaneously – an experience can be a waste of time and still later prove to be valuable. You see, in the early 2000s, I constantly played The Sims, or rather, The Sims played me. The original Sims game was an interesting diversion, but the The Sims 2 was everything. For the uninitiated, The Sims is a life simulation game (which now sounds awful). It was a digital doll house to me.  Game play became more nuanced via expansion packs and as the sims became more independent (don’t ask), but I still felt like I was playing with dolls, something I was clearly fine with for some reason. 
Picture
Oh, Bella Goth. Did you ever make it out of that town where nothing ever happens? (The Sims Wiki)
​The spell was broken once I started investing more time and effort into my sims’ lives than my own. My sims made it to their gym every day, but I didn’t even have a membership. Shortly after I stopped playing, the Sims 3 came out. I got pulled back in for a while, but in this new version, there were too many decisions to make and the sims were far more independent. They were getting spouses, kids, and jobs without my help. I guess you could say we grew apart.​

While I regret wasting all that time, I am now happy that it was spent engaging in what was one of the greatest training grounds for an elearning developer. Here’s what I learned from playing The Sims and how it  informs my work today:

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    Hadiya Nuriddin is the CEO of Focus Learning Solutions and the founder of Fresh Eye Reviews.

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Photos used under Creative Commons from Aurimas Adomavicius, danniatherton
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