Maic LOLAs

LOLAs are Live Online Learning Activities that are inserted in virtual training sessions.

We have developed, field-tested, and improved 25 different types of LOLAs. I plan to present these LOLAs in this Linked In series, one at a time. The article below is about one type of LOLAs, called Magic LOLAs.

Magic LOLAs

The Internet contains many magic tricks that could be used in virtual training sessions. We frequently use these tricks, not to bemuse or amuse the participants, but to help them explore a variety of training topics, including process mapping, critical thinking, systematic observation, and performance coaching.

In Psychic Card Trick, a piece of instructional magic, the facilitator displays six random playing cards on the screen and asks each participant to secretly select one of them. The facilitator then claims to pick up the six cards, shuffle them, and deal them again, five cards face up and one card face down. The participants scan the new display. Every one of them claim that the card he or she mentally selected is the only card turned face down!

After a suitable pause, the facilitator explains that he did not fool the participants; their own brains fooled them: Once they mentally selected a card from the original display of six cards, that card becomes the figure while the other five become the ground. The brain focuses on the figure (the selected card) with an obsessive intensity and ignores the other five cards. It does not notice the fact that the five face-up cards in the second display are all different from the cards shown in the first display.

We use Psychic Card Trick to emphasize the limitations of observation as a data-gathering strategy.

You may use this and several similar magic tricks to spice up your virtual training sessions and to make them more engaging and effective.