📓 content/Mastering-the-Game-of-Allyship-with-Wendell-Brit-by-James-Stuber--Course-Builders-series-.md by @houshuang ☆

#public
Wendell is talking about transformative courses, he took the Alexander Technique course with [[Michael Ashcroft]].
He’s teaching about allyship.
- He did a 1.0 version with 70 people, and he learned a lot, and is in the process of designing the second course
- He talks a lot about how to market the course, not only to get people to sign up, but after they’re signed up, you want to make them feel that this is something worth learning and achievable, to give them a good sense of progress.
  - And he talks quite a lot about metacognition.
    
    I guess he has a background in personal development.
    
    So having students really reflect on their personalities, their motivations, their kind of meta script, meta narrative about learning, (in CSCL we would call it epistemological beliefs)
    
    like "learning something valuable has to be difficult", they might spend a lot more time struggling than is really needed.
  - And also separating the basics that is really necessary from all the things that he would like people to know.
He talks about different personas, like the learner, and the fact that you might have one part of you, that wants to learn to be an ally. But then another part that’s deeper, that absolutely hates the idea, that wants everything to stay the way this and can play dirty tricks to set you back.
- So I guess this is particularly relevant in any kind of personal development or transformative learning, and relevant also to things like weight loss, or even changing productivity, changing communication patterns.
also talks about fun, that it should be fun.
- And for him writing the course was fun.
- But he had to realize that what he thought was fun wasn’t always fun for the students.
- **And for people to think about the way in which they learn and what makes things fun for them. **
He talks about the different selves, like you have a student’s self. But then there is a student self, that’s a villain. There’s a student self, that’s a hero, that’s a guide. So they’re all these different roles and dimensions, that he’s helping them realize,
- I didn’t fully understand this. Could go back and relisten, or maybe I just need to dig more into the material he has publicly available
- talking about the hero and the guide. I’m curious, the links between this and the Hjernelæring course and the different figures - I think these might point at different dimensions (one is focusing more on the neural functioning, and the other might be at a much higher level of abstraction?)
Mentions the shadow-self sabotaging.
- There’s some kind of core process called 3-2-1 process.
  - (quote) Ken Wilber’s integral model emphasises — as did Carl Jung — that in order to optimise the level of consciousness you are operating at, so to ensure you are part of the social solution rather than part of the problem, you will need to own and integrate your shadow tendencies. One of Wilber’s many techniques that he developed for his Integral Life program, and outlined below, is a meditation tool based on Gestalt therapy. It’s called the 3-2-1 process and was designed to help one do just that. (from The Radical Humanist)
- He talks about needing to give you reasons for success. But the moment he does, it brings out the shadow self that find thousands of reasons why this will not succeed.
  - So it’s like people are afraid of or do not want success. [[The Body Keeps the Score]] talks about people not wanting to lose weight because they’re afraid of being seen as attractive because they have trauma around that they want to be anonymous.
    
    So I’m curious what the reason is for the mind to avoid success – whether it’s because they don’t want to change and in this is something very specific to the fact that they might lose some kind of privilege that they quietly want to keep or is it more generally connected to learning and transformation and change away from the status quo.
The course is structured like 30 modules, 510 minutes videos, but it is light on content. But the homework is really dense and brings out a lot – people are doing journaling exercises.
- So this is another great example, together with the Alexander Technique course, on how you can use a very simple, medium, non interactive, and still have incredibly constructivist learning, and deep personal engagement and even transformation.
  - It’s a little bit similar to my experience of [[Learning math with Iversity]] – that wasn’t personally transformational, but it felt like very rich, constructivist and interactive learning, with just simple MOOC videos. #**E: Asynchronous static materials can foster rich interactive learning**
    
    Makes me think that a lot of learning sciences and certainly CSCL are so focused on technologies and interfaces and interactive and artificial intelligence. And do not seem at all focused on the design of a video or a textbook, the specific prompts that you give people, and how they trigger certain processes.
    
    And I’m wondering if there are other fields like instructional design, multimedia teaching, that have really deep theories and frameworks about this from the perspective of kind of self directed, constructivist transformational learning, which would be highly relevant for these kinds of courses.
    
    Also relevant for [[E: Textbook design for learning]]
He knew that people would have to go really deep in their journaling, and it would be very difficult course, from that perspective.
- And the people who came to the course, they expected it to be a very difficult course, consciously, and maybe very difficult readings are a lot of work. But their subconscious was not ready for the depth of work. So there was a disconnect there.
- He talks about how he did the market research, and people told him they wanted a really difficult course. But he needed to do the market research with the subconscious mind, which is it’s almost like the salesman coming to the door and saying, Is your father home? I didn’t want to talk to you because you don’t pay the bills.
  - It makes me think of Peer2Peer University and how we had all these people show up for courses, motivated by the idea of learning for learning sake, but really shying away from – in this case, it was much more explicitly hard work, not so much kind of challenging your personal identity. But it was the idea that Yeah, on the surface you want to learn, but you don’t want to put in the work, you don’t want to actually sit down and read articles, and think deeply about these concepts. you’d much rather spend time in the discussion forums like chit chatting, and yak shaving, and feeling like you’ve put in the time this week, and that you should get some results, but you didn’t put in the hard time. And so you’re not really making a lot of progress.
- It’s difficult because the only motivation for the subconscious is pain and fear.
  - he thinks that’s the things that can make the subconscious do something
  - but he really doesn’t want to play on that
  - but he does realize that he has to give people wins much earlier.
    
    So they have to really see.
    
    And I think that’s, that’s a really good point, you know, the earlier you can really tell that you’re making a difference – that you’re really learning something, that you’re able to do now something that you could not do before.
    
    And it’s like – learning Chinese is incredibly hard.
    
    But after a week, you suddenly are able to decipher these characters that you had never even had a chance to understand before. And that’s a very powerful feeling.
    
    Whereas when you’re at intermediate Chinese, and you might spend a month working really hard and you don’t really see any clear difference. It’s very demotivating.
    
    Goes back to my thoughts about kind of benchmarking and like a E: We need personal learning coaches #E,
    
    that can actually help you keep track of your learning progress
    
    and give you feedback
    
    and tell you that if you stick with me, if you stick with this program, I promise you’ll get to a certain point.
    
    And I’m seeing your progress, even though you’re not seeing it yourself.
    
    So in this first version, he initially he kind of made it a little bit difficult, there were no quick and easy wins. Because he felt like this shouldn’t be an easy process. So a lot of people dropped off. And he realized that he has to give them more motivation and more wins early on.
    
    There’s an interesting parallel to learning juggling. Where if it’s too easy, you don’t keep going. And if you struggled a bit for it, it’s seen as much more valuable.
    
    I think there’s also this bias around people constructing their own furniture, feel it’s worth more, there was a study about that. IKEA effect
    
    The IKEA effect is a cognitive biases in which consumers place a disproportionately high value on products they partially created. The name refers to Swedish manufacturer and furniture retailer IKEA, which sells many items of furniture that require assembly.
    
    A 2011 study found that subjects were willing to pay 63% more for furniture they had assembled themselves, than for equivalent pre-assembled items. (WP)
    
    So maybe this is related to zone of proximal development or kind of desirable difficulty.
    
    Because there’s the kind of win that makes you feel like oh, I’ve got this. I’ve got this wrapped up. This is easy.
    
    And there’s the kind of win that says, hey, this is amazing. I can’t wait to go on.
    
    And I guess there’s also the kind of insight that says, Oh, I understand this.
    
    And there’s the kind of insight that says Oh, I know even less than I knew before,
    
    but then how can you make that second kind of insight not only happen but also motivate you and rather than demotivate you
He’s talking about creating different kinds of quests, at different level, to make it very easy to do something concrete,
- like find one person who you would like to be an ally for and talk to them
- or choose one book that you’re going to read during this course.
- But he’s also saying so on the one hand, you know, commit to doing something concrete, but on the other hand, I think he was saying that you should commit to not doing more than that, like, choose one book and do not read more.
  - And I’m wondering if that is to make it very concrete for the kind of subconscious brain and make it harder to be overwhelmed and, and bug out.
- You don’t just learn how to do something, but you do it as a part of the course. So it doesn’t prepare you for real life. But real life happens during the course.
  - When the course is ended, you’ve already talked to someone you’ve set up a plan.
  - And I like that idea. I think it’s similar to how Write of Passage, for example, doesn’t prepare you to write publicly but throughout the course you are writing real pieces and publishing them and getting feedback.
    
    And so you are creating this new identity and this new practice that you can continue afterwards.
    
    And you’re also building these social networks. You’re building your your followers, your recognition,
    
    just like previous, you know, with cMOOCs, the idea was for you to build your personal learning environment and your personal learning network so that when the course was over – because this was happening, happening on distributed platforms, like Write of Passage writing on your own blog – you retain access to your artefacts, and your network, and your new processes after the course is over.
    
    And I think that’s a really good model. I’m not sure it applies to everything. But it’s a really nice model.
He did a previous course called Mastering your Life,
- where they were doing roleplay, developmental psychology, integrating the parts to help you get unstuck.
- And he is reusing some of those techniques as part of his course for to teach a specific thing.
  - And he found that it’s actually easier to recruit people or to get people to show up to learn to use these methods to learn a specific thing, rather than to learn these general techniques that can be applied to anything.
He’s now moving into doing more diversity and cultural training for companies because it’s easier to get them to pay than to go after individuals. And so he’s developing this material.
- And he can then later give that material away, they worked with certain organizations.
- And he says, if you can provide the accountability structure to get people to engage deeply with this course, and usually, the course fee is the accountability structure. But if you can provide a different accountability structures, and I can give you access to this course, for free or almost for free,
  - he’s talking about the concept of free. And the, the journey is never free. There’s always a cost, whether it’s financial, or in terms of attention or personal pain. E: Relationship between price and value perception #E
    
    So it’s really on the one hand, he wants to figure out how to get paid, but it’s also for everyone to figure out how he can motivate people to pay that fee and devalue the course because if it’s if it’s free, it’s easily abandoned.
    
    James used to be working at the gym, and they do this fitness challenges, like doing a certain amount of pull ups per month, and people would not would sign up and they would not complete them. And then they added buy-in, like a t-shirt for twenty bucks,
    
    and people who signed up, they they all completed. So that kind of commitment device makes a huge difference.
    
    Wendell is thinking about how to leverage this in a business sense.
    
    What if he made for example, an Oracle deck about allyship, it’s a physical object that you can buy, you have it in your house. And if you buy it, you get access to this online course, that teaches you how to use it or to be an ally. So it’s, it’s a different way of, for people to think about how they spend money and how they commit to something.
    
    So starting with a game, and then people will buy it, in this case, to support allyship,made by black person and stuff like that, I’m not sure if that applies always. But they’ll buy it.
    
    And that seems kind of superficial, that’s some of the subset of the people buying it will maybe do online course. And then maybe a subset of those people will do like a cohort based course or a physical course or something. So it’s, it’s an onramp.
    
    And the tricky part is not only how do you price something, so that it you know, meet supply and demand and you maximize profit, but so that people perceive correctly the value so you might be able to sell something that’s worth $500 with a $30, Oracle deck, and they get this course.
    
    And maybe that course is then perceived as having a higher value than if you just said this course cost 30 bucks because there’s always a 30 $30 courses, you know, whatever. So it’s complex, but yeah, this idea of how do you manipulate kind of price and the perception of value as not completely dependent on each other
Apparently, he has a strong background in world building and Dungeons and Dragons, which probably informed his thinking about these personas and stuff like that
- some of the most important transformative moments in his life happened at the role playing table. And that gave him the insight that real learning change can happen in a, I guess, virtual environment, which is a really interesting parallel to these kinds of transformative courses.
  - after playing d&d, he would see the world with different eyes, he would make different choices. So that’s some kind of like an insight, systematic insight.
- He says that this is dependent on the inner world, somehow mirroring the outer world or feeling like a real place.
  - And if that’s the case, then you can do real deep personality work without going outside.
  - He talks a bit he mentioned, like, outer world success structures in forming the inner world. And I’m not sure exactly what he means, but it seems I’d love to learn more about it.
    
    He thinks that people have to go into their early childhood and see what kind of people they are.
    
    Are they a Hide and Seek person? Are they a Pokemon person.
    
    And if someone tells him that he can see the whole their whole life through that lens,
    
    and so he had to dig deep and find his own kind of the things that he really enjoyed, really fun for him.
    
    And then think about how he could use that to make his life more aligned to those incentive structures.
    
    So when you’re in your core game, which can be different ways of existing and social structures, reward structures, you feel good things feel easy, they kind of it’s flowing (flow?)]. And when you shift too far away from your core game, things become really hard.
He talks about how everyone has a superpower
- the narrative right now is that all white people suck.
  - And so the power goes to the marginalized people, but they’re marginalized, so they don’t get wield power, they just get narrative power.
  - And so the whole situation sucks.
- Instead, you should see that there is something that you’re so good at and that comes so naturally to you that if you just spent an hour doing that, you would really benefit someone else’s life.
  - And it would feel really fun for you. And to to identify that superpower. And, you know, create the space where you can do that and and find the team find find allies.