Written by Philippe24 March 2022

How can you memorize what you learned much faster thanks to a “Memory Palace”?

One of my favorite hobbies since I was a kid has been to learn languages. I love it! In average, I have studied a new language each year for the past 20+ years. Each time, the goal is to reach a very minimum CEFR level of A2 or even B1 – i.e. the basic level needed to have the beginning of a conversation – so that I can enjoy interacting with people and discover their cultures when I travel around the world. 

All of us can learn languages and even many languages. However, it requires a lot of self-discipline, dedication and even hard work to memorize the hundreds or thousands of words of vocabulary.

Well, this doesn’t sound like good news… however there are some powerful techniques that can make the whole process much faster and much more fun! What if you could replace the effort of memorizing by a bit of creativity, imagination? 

The good news is that there is a memorizing technique that does precisely this and that can boost results in an impressive way: The “Memory Palace”. 

You might have already heard about it or even practiced it. 

  

So, what is a “Memory Palace”? 

According to Benny from Fluent in 3 Months:

“A Memory Palace is an imaginary construct in your mind that’s based on a real location. If you can see your bedroom in your mind, then you can build a Memory Palace.

Within your Memory Palace, “stations” are locations like a bedroom or sitting room and the space between them is called a “journey”. As you build your Memory Palace, you will leave words and phrases at these stations and then pick them up later on when you take a journey through your palace.

Please don’t rob yourself of this powerful language learning device by saying you’re not a visual person. In whatever way feels natural, just think about where your bedroom is in relation to your kitchen. Consider how you would move from the bedroom to the kitchen. Take note of the doors, hallways and rooms along the way.”

I don’t think that you absolutely have to base your Memory Palace on a real location, but if it helps you, why not. As for me, the most important is that you can easily visualize and “evolve” in it. 

Is this a new method? 

Actually, it dates back to the ancient Romans and Greeks. 

The method of loci (loci being Latin for “places”) is a strategy of memory enhancement which uses visualizations of familiar spatial environments in order to enhance the recall of information. The method of loci is also known as the memory journey, memory palace, or mind palace technique. This method is a mnemonic device adopted in ancient Roman and Greek rhetorical treatises. Many memory contest champions report using this technique to recall faces, digits, and lists of words.

Source: adapted from The method of loci

 

Why does it become even more relevant now?

Each learner needs to build their own “Palace”. For some, it might be easier than for others. Indeed, I have seen that some people need much more time to “build” it. 

However, now, you can help your learners by building such Palace for them, in the Metaverse. You choose a virtual world and create the Palace. Then, they can move around that Palace and get inspired and maybe even build their own! 

Once this is done, learners can project themselves again in the environnement and the associations between the words, vocabulary and the locations in the palace will drastically increase the retention rate.

       

Do you use the Memory Palace or do you have any other ways of remembering a lot of vocabulary?

Please comment below!

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Written by Philippe22 March 2022

Film: Ready Player One

Good stories are one of the best ways to engage people, and in our case, our learners. 

Therefore, as you might have noticed, at INGAGE, we enjoy good story-telling and always keep an eye for films that deal with at least one of our 3 core topics: 1) Education, 2) Insurance and 3) Technology.

Indeed, they are the 3 “pillars” that support our niche offering of “Effective Training for Insurance Professionals” based on cutting-edge technologies! 

In this case, the present film is about technology, more precisely, the Metaverse / virtual world, as this is where we conduct some of our training. 

There are several films that present a virtual world. Unfortunately, the vast majority of them are rather dystopian…

I found the film quite entertaining and IMDB gives it 7.4/10 which is quite a good mark. Well, the director is nothing less than Steven Spielberg himself!

  

What is the story about? 

When the creator of a virtual reality called the OASIS dies, he makes a posthumous challenge to all OASIS users to find his Easter Egg, which will give the finder his fortune and control of his world.

Source: IMDB

   

What is the novel behind the film?

Ready Player One is a 2011 science fiction novel, and the debut novel of American author Ernest Cline. The story, set in a dystopia in 2045, follows protagonist Wade Watts on his search for an Easter egg in a worldwide virtual reality game, the discovery of which would lead him to inherit the game creator’s fortune.

Cline sold the rights to publish the novel in June 2010, in a bidding war to the Crown Publishing Group (a division of Random House). The book was published on August 16, 2011. An audiobook was released the same day; it was narrated by Wil Wheaton, who was mentioned briefly in one of the chapters. Ch. 20 In 2012, the book received an Alex Award from the Young Adult Library Services Association division of the American Library Association[5] and won the 2011 Prometheus Award.

A film adaptation, screenwritten by Cline and Zak Penn and directed by Steven Spielberg, was released on March 29, 2018. A sequel novel, Ready Player Two, was released on November 24, 2020, although to a less positive reception compared to its predecessor.

Source: adapted from Wikipedia.

     

Have you already seen Ready Player Two? I haven’t. Would you advise me to watch it? 🙂

  

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Written by Philippe21 March 2022

Create pictures for your online courses, fast

I have been using this new technology for a few weeks now. It is amazing!

Are you also tired of standard pictures that do NOT fully represent what you need to express in your training and presentation? 

I used to either hire an expensive designer or settle for an image that didn’t fully represent the message I was trying to convey.

With this new free AI website you can design landscapes yourself just the way you want it.

Soon you will even be able to design photos of office spaces, or people acting out your key messages. 

To create this landscape, all I had to do is position the shapes, such as mountains, clouds, and a lake and then…

 AI does the magic all by itself! 

This technology is going to make individualized graphic design accessible for everyone. Just like YouTube made posting videos online accessible for everyone. 

In case you want to try it, there you go: http://gaugan.org/gaugan2. What do you think? 🙂

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Written by Philippe20 March 2022

The counterintuitive psychology of insurance

The real reason you buy insurance may have as much to do with pleasing your psyche as it does protecting your wallet. Behavioral psychologist Orit Tykocinski explores the connection between insurance and the reality-distorting risks of “magical thinking” that may make you reconsider your own rationale.

Listen to this podcast. 

Extract: 

We have to remember, insurance is an antidote, it’s not a vaccine. It doesn’t ward off evil; it doesn’t eliminate the risks that we face. However, when it comes to insurance, the distinction between an antidote and a vaccine somehow gets blurred in our minds. Why does it happen? It happens because people are not that good at assessing risks rationally. Let me give you an example. When I arranged my flight to come here, I had to decide if I wanted to buy travel insurance. Rationally, I should have based this decision on several considerations: the price of the policy, of course, the value of my luggage, the aggravation that I’m likely to experience if my luggage gets lost. And of course, the likelihood of such an event, right? But most of the time, we’re just too busy to make such rational calculations. And anyway, I doubt that Lufthansa are very keen to share their damage statistics with me. So what do we do instead? We rely on our intuition.

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Written by Philippe18 March 2022

Can Ethereum improve learning and much more?

Vitalik is the creator of the famous blockchain Ethereum. He has both Russian and Ukrainian ancestors. 

Vitalik: « Ethereum will become the launchpad for all sorts of sociopolitical experimentation: fairer voting systems, urban planning, universal basic income, public-works projects. »

Above all, he wants the platform to be a counterweight to authoritarian governments and to upend Silicon Valley’s stranglehold over our digital lives.

« As Buterin learned more about the blockchain technology on which Bitcoin was built, he began to believe using it purely for currency was a waste. The blockchain, he thought, could serve as an efficient method for securing all sorts of assets: web applications, organizations, financial derivatives, nonpredatory loan programs, even wills. »

Source: Time  –  Photo by Benjamin Rasmussen for TIME

  

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Written by Philippe17 March 2022

Can you paint this too? ;-)

Have you ever wished you had a talented designer all the time with you to help you create learning content?

Think about this A.I. from NVidia! You are welcome to try it. 

#artificialintelligence #contentcreation #onlinelearning #teacher #paint #talent

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Written by Philippe11 March 2022

How do your company’s Virtual Customer Assistants perform?

In 2018, Gartner predicted that 25% of Customer Service Operations would use VCA. Source: Gartner 2018. 

Extract: 

Analysts Present Top Predictions for Customer Experience Leaders at the Gartner Customer Experience Summit 2018 in Tokyo, February 19-20

Twenty-five percent of customer service and support operations will integrate virtual customer assistant (VCA) or chatbot technology across engagement channels by 2020, up from less than two percent in 2017, according to Gartner, Inc.

Speaking at the Gartner Customer Experience Summit in Tokyo today, Gene Alvarez, managing vice president at Gartner, said more than half of organizations have already invested in VCAs for customer service, as they realize the advantages of automated self-service, together with the ability to escalate to a human agent in complex situations.

“As more customers engage on digital channels, VCAs are being implemented for handling customer requests on websites, mobile apps, consumer messaging apps and social networks,” Mr. Alvarez said. “This is underpinned by improvements in natural-language processing, machine learning and intent-matching capabilities.”

Organizations report a reduction of up to 70 percent in call, chat and/or email inquiries after implementing a VCA, according to Gartner research. They also report increased customer satisfaction and a 33 percent saving per voice engagement.

 

The video in the following post shows an interaction between a VCA and a customer. The VCA’s natural way of behaving – in the video – is quite impressive. The company, Voca.ai, has since been bought by Snapchat. 

As we see the surge of VCAs, we can wonder about the impact on sales people and how to best train them in this new configuration.

 

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Written by Philippe9 March 2022

How will the Metaverse impact the way of teaching in companies?

Way before everybody, in 2003, Second Life created a virtual world where people could hang out, learn and experience different scenarios. In 2017, there were almost 1 million active users. 

Have you ever been in a virtual world? This will impact the future. How will you be part of it? 

Since Mark Zuckerberg started mentioning the Metaverse – and renaming his company from Facebook to Meta – there has been a lot of discussion about the topic. 

Indeed, in 2020, there were several major companies offering “a metaverse” and many more creating blockchain-based ones. For example, you might have heard of Decentraland or The Sandbox which are very interesting projects.

Quick note: There are different views on what a Metaverse is, but we will use here the definition of the Metaverse being composed of different virtual worlds. The analogy could be: While the Internet – or rather the World Wide Web – contains websites, the Metaverse contains virtual worlds. 

All this shows that there is a renewed interest in virtual worlds, whatever the technology behind them might be.

In our experience, learning in a virtual world opens a whole new range of possibilities compared to regular Learning Management Systems (LMS) or Learning Experience Platforms (LXP). Virtual worlds can be extremely immersive and help learners experience use cases rather than read about them or watch videos. 

Do you know how the Metaverse will influence your own reality, and specially your own business, clients and way of training your employees?

Would you like to be among the first ones? 

Let us know, we can help you. ? 

  

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Written by Philippe8 March 2022

Do you still think that you are smarter than an AI? ?

Artificial intelligence (AI) can now solve grade-school math problems and, more impressively, university-level math problems.    

This AI is based on a language model called Codex that is able to write computer programs. It gets additional guidance in the form of being told what topic the problem is about, what code library to use, and what the definition of mathematical concepts is. It is also able to generate new math problems. According to human evaluators, it is almost as good as humans at solving math problems.   

What if I told you that AI wrote this text?   

AI can even help create online courses for insurance for example!   

#singularity #artificialintelligence #ai #onlinecourses #coursecreators #coursewizard 

 

 

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Written by Philippe8 March 2022

Some cities are now starting to use the blockchain in Switzerland. How could this be used for learning?

Residents of this Swiss city will be able to use Bitcoin to…

…PAY THEIR TAXES! 

«The city of Lugano will accept Bitcoin, Tether and LVGA tokens as ‘de facto’ legal tender. Residents of the Switzerland city will be able to pay taxes, parking tickets, public services and tuition fees using crypto.» 

Source: Coin Telegraph

   

If even cities, local governments, are now starting to use the blockchain, is it possible to use it for learning ecosystems and LMSs? 

We have been strong believers in the blockchain and Metaverse for a long time. We are convinced that it will bring a real value to education, engagement and the motivation to learn. 

However, how can we use the blockchain in education? 

One of the main challenges for training departments is to get employees to go through the necessary online courses. Incentive programs based on the blockchain can be a great reward system to motivate employees. It’s a win for the employer, but also for employees!

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Written by Philippe4 March 2022

Are you missing out on sales because you get discouraged too fast ⁉️

Are you missing out on sales because you get discouraged too fast ⁉️  
 
Many clients raise up to 5 major objections or challenging questions before they buy, studies have shown*. ?

– The problem is that, by the time the client is finally ready to buy, about 91% of all unexperienced salespeople already gave up! ?

– That means it is the 9% of all salespeople that know how to handle client objections that are successful. 
 
*These studies were done with new, untrained salespeople. The goal was to analyze their first cold calls, to understand what training they need.
 
People with training will obviously learn to preempt and handle objections and therefore close more deals. ?

1. What do those figures look like in your experience? 
2. What do you and your team do to preempt and handle objections?

#sales #salestraining #salespeople #clientobjections #objections#success

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