An event I don't want to forget.

I will be honest; Saturday's symposium was my second one, and if someone asked me what do I remember from the first one, a year ago, I would be blank. In addition to the delicious food I ate on 2018 symposium, my mind could only retrieve vague memories. I remember I was as excited as I was last Saturday; however, the valuable knowledge that I know I learned rested hidden in some broken synapsis. Will it happen the same with this symposium? That was the question I made to myself time and time again while drinking roasted coffee and eating beagles during the multiple breaks. Actually, I noticed that it is a question I make to myself frequently, and I guess the reason is that I don't want to miss a thing of this beautiful and varied life.

But going back to my discouraging question about forgetting, Am I going to forget this symposium? And, I'm glad to say that not only this event but also our AEE530 class have given me the inputs to say NO, I won't forget. And I consider there is something different from last year that made me see this symposium differently: my current motivation to understand how do we learn. And that motivation, as we have seen in our course, is a critical factor in for learning.

Regarding the symposium, the first talk fit like a glove to help me answer my concern. If an idea, message, or whatever we want to communicate is Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, and in a Story form, it will be more likely to remembered or to stick. And because it is expected that I won't remember these six words the next year, Dan Heath created a simple acronym that I'm not likely to forget, "SUCCES". I also had the opportunity to participate in Mr. Heath’s Questions/Answers session, space where great questions and magnificent answers came and went. I won’t forget an emotional story about how easily life changes. In this story, due to a mentor, Mr. Heat canceled his law career, changing what he studies, what he writes, and the audience he speaks.

As I learned from the book HPL II, emotions play a role in developing a neural substrate for learning. And this was a fact that came to my mind when I was in the session of “Learning through the art of storytelling.” Although storytelling is not as important to transfer knowledge as it used to be, two things make it still relevant, especially to increase learner engagement (there are more, but I prefer to stick to Dan’s “S” of Simple). The first one is that storytelling emotionally connect the learner, and the second one is that It makes complex concepts lucid, especially when linking theory to practice. And despite the session described a process that some professor followed in designing a course based on storytelling, the topic of the course was even more interesting to me: children adoption. I won’t forget that just before entering the session I was talking to a friend about my interests on child adoption, a topic that was told us then. Even more Unexpected, the professor who guided the session revealed us that she, as an adoptive mother, was one of the main characters of the story told to us.

The exercise of writing this note has made me think again about what I’ve retained from this great event; I’m sure this activity itself reinforces my symposium experiences, which will help me to don’t forget. 

Finally, being aware of this blog existence allowed me to dive into the thoughts and reactions of other students towards the 2018 event, the one I had forgotten. I could recall, for instance, about the keynote speakers. Probably I wouldn’t be able to do it if I wouldn’t know about the Blog, which took me to the conclusion that knowing where information is can be as worthful as knowing the information. I’m convinced that the massive amount of useful information generated demands us to be efficient and strategic in the way we organize it. I would love to hear from you about methods to keep information that allowed you to retrieve it successfully.