Flash For Learning

As learning profressionals, we spend almost ALL of our time and resources cranking out new ways to motivate our audiences and design to make the content enriching, challenging, thoughtful and most importantly to enable the instructional goals intended by the production.

But what about the audience? Don’t THEY have a responsibility to themselves as active participants, even in asynchronous learning?

I point this out because a friend of mine (IRL - “In Real Life”) directed me to a website another buddy of his put together to share his lessons learned from smoking meat — barbecuing for long periods of time using smoke (hence “smoking”).

Here’s the link, but what’s striking to me is what happens after the jump:

Gary explains his rationale for the pledge:

What’s that? Terms seem a bit harsh? Well, here’s why I insist that you follow the 5-Step program as written before going off on your own. The 5-Step program is not so much about cooking any particular meat as it is about learning fire and smoke control. Once you understand that, you have the skills to cook any kind of meat. But it’s been my experience, from both cooking and being a member of BBQ oriented mailing lists (listservs) for the past 8 years, that when newbies try to mix and match advice from different sources, disaster is just around the corner. I am by no means saying that my way with the WSM is the only way. But I’ve found, without a doubt, that if one follows all 5 steps straight through they gain a damn good understanding of how to use the WSM—and will have learned how to prepare four different meats and enjoyed five damn good meals in the process, which is hardly a high price to pay for keeping your ego in check and following orders at the very beginning. Once you have the basics down, it’s fairly easy to cook BBQ better than 99.9% of all BBQ restaurants, and you are invited, heck encouraged, to do whatever you want after that point. But for your first five cooks, follow the program exactly—or don’t start it at all, and spend years screwing around and trying to figure out what went wrong, like I did.

I think the statement speaks for itself, but I’ll share my analysis anyway: You have a subject matter expert here, sharing lessons learned through lots of trial and error. There’s context, there’s relevance, there’s humor and personality — it’s good learning.

Thoughts?