A few weeks ago, I saw this crank-style telephone hanging on the wall to the left of the fireplace in the Cracker Barrel Restaurant in Waycross, Georgia. It’s plaque on the front says, “Chicago Telephone Supply Company Elkhart, Indiana, U.S.A.” I didn’t think to try turning the crank handle on the right side to see if the dynamo was still installed. Also, the top box seems to be missing the locking mechanism (just the hole is seen on the left under the ringer).
There is some dissonance viewing the phone from this angle, because you can see the flat screen computer monitors used by the restaurant employees in the alcove on the left.
Walking back from Barnes and Noble yesterday, I saw this telco wiring termination box with its cover open at the corner of 7th Street and 7th Avenue. Was this enough capacity for the block between 7th and 6th Avenues? It looks pretty sparse–considering fewer homes have landlines now than in the past. It’s probably seen better days when it was chock full of wires serving the houses and apartments all along the block. Also, it’s got yellow warning labels shouting “Do Not Cross with Jumpers,” and there are a handful of marking tags on strings tied to wires with a lark’s head knot.
Photo of a business cat taking notes in his office. Image created with Stable Diffusion.
As I wrote at the beginning of July here, I planned to take advantage of LinkedIn Learning’s free one-month trial. I wanted to report back on my experience of taking LinkedIn Learning courses and provide more details about some of my tips that might help you be more successful with LinkedIn Learning.
Breakdown of the Courses and Learning Paths
I created the spreadsheet above in LibreOffice Calc as a list of all of the courses I had completed between June 29 and August 3 (I’m including the end of June courses in the free Career Essentials in Generative AI by Microsoft and LinkedIn that gave me the idea to continue with the free one month trial period). I included the instruction time for each course. This allowed me to calculate that I had completed 43 hours 11 minutes of course instruction across 39 courses during my LinkedIn Learning trial period.
I regret not keeping track of how long I spent on each course, which was far longer due to pausing the video to write notes, studying notes, taking quizzes, writing assignments, and taking exams. I believe the 50% extra time per course that I wrote about in July holds true.
I focused on two main areas: Generative AI, which I am building into my workflows and maintaining a pedagogical bibliography for here; and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Communication Best Practices, which I wanted to use to improve my teaching practices by structuring my classroom as supportive and welcoming to all students.
In the Generative AI courses, I learned about machine learning, different forms of generative AI, how generative AI is integrated (or being integrated) into local and server software, and frameworks for critique of AI systems in terms of ethics, bias, and legality. Also, I took some courses on Python to get an inkling of the code underpinning many AI initiatives today.
In the DEI Communication Best Practices cluster of courses, I learned helpful terminology, techniques for engagement, what to do to support and include others, and how to be an ally (mostly with an emphasis on the workplace, but thinking about how to leverage these lessons in the classroom). These courses covered combating discrimination, planning accessibility from the beginning and benefit of all, and supporting neurodivergence.
Overall, each learning experience was beneficial to my understanding of the topic. However, some instructors delivered better courses–for my way of learning–by employing repetition, anchoring key topics with words and definitions on the video (which you can pause and write down), giving more quizzes over shorter amounts of material (instead of fewer quizzes over longer time spans of material), and giving students mini projects or assignments to reinforce the lesson (e..g, pause and write about this, or pause the video, solve this problem, and “report back”–the course isn’t interactive but the “report back” idea is to compare your solution to the instructor’s after the video is played again).
All of the courses provide a lot of information in a very short amount of time. In some cases, the information compression is Latvian repack level. Even taking notes in shorthand, I could not keep up in some instances. To capture all of the information, I had to pause videos repeatedly, repeat (using the 10 second reply often) and read the transcript.
While I enjoyed the standalone courses, the Learning Paths provided a sequence and overlap in material that helped reinforce what was being taught. Also, Learning Paths helped me see connections between the broader implications of the topic (e.g., DEI, accessibility, neurodiversity, etc.) as well as explore certain aspects of the topic in more depth (e.g., how to approach conversations on uncomfortable topics or how to ask for permission to be an ally in a given situation).
Each instructor has a unique way of speaking and engaging the learner. I really enjoyed the diversity of the instructors across all topics.
The accessibility features built into LinkedIn Learning helped me follow along and make accurate notes. In particular, I always turned on closed captioning and clicked the “Transcript” tab beneath the video so that I could easily follow along and pause the video when there was a keyword or definition or illustration that I wanted to capture in my notes.
I added the course instruction time for those courses completed on the same day to generate the chart above that illustrates the ebb and flow of my course completion across the month. In some cases, I spread out the instruction across days to give myself enough time to learn and practice the topics being discussed (e.g., Python programming or Stable Diffusion image generation). There were other days that I paused my learning to work on my research or simply to take a break from learning.
On LinkedIn Learning, some of the courses are grouped together into what are called Learning Paths, which yield a separate certificate of completion from the certificates that you earn for each individual course. In some cases, as in the Career Essentials in Generative AI by Microsoft and LinkedIn also includes an exam with a time limit (1.5 hours) that must be passed before the Learning Path certificate is given. About 50% or 21 hours 45 minutes of the 43 hour 11 minute course instruction time applied to five earned Learning Paths for me:
Career Essentials in Generative AI by Microsoft and LinkedIn, 3h 49m
Accessibility and Inclusion Advocates, 3h 18m
Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging for All, 6h 16m
Responsible AI Foundations, 4h 15m
LinkedIn’s AI Academy, 3h 54m
LinkedIn Learning Success Tips
Overall, I want to reiterate the tips that I wrote about here for being successful at LinkedIn Learning–both in terms of how you learn and how you demonstrate what you have learned. Below are some reiterated tips with details based on my experience this past month.
Be an Active Learner: Take Notes, Do the Exercises, and Complete the Quizzes
The one thing that I would like to stress above all others is how important it is to treat a LinkedIn Learning course like a classroom learning experience. What I mean by that is that you need to set aside quality time for learning, free from distraction, where you can take notes and complete the exercises, and study what you’ve learned before taking quizzes or exams. Employing your undivided attention, writing your notes by hand in a notebook, and completing quizzes, exams, and assignments all contribute to your learning, integrating what you’ve learned with your other knowledge, and preparing yourself to recall and apply what you’ve learned in other contexts, such as in a class or the workplace.
Unless you have eidetic memory, the fact is that you won’t learn a lot by passively watching or listening to courses. And even if you have photographic memory, all you will gain are facts and not the integration, connections, and recall that comes from using and reflecting on what you have learned.
Remember to Add Certifications to Your LinkedIn Profile
Remember to add each completed LinkedIn Course and Learning Path certification to your profile. They will appear in their own section as they do on mine shown above.
Completed Courses and Learning Paths do not automatically appear on your profile (consider: someone might not want all of their training to appear on their LinkedIn Profile for a variety of reasons).
To add a Course or Learning Path to your LinkedIn Profile, go to LinkedIn Learning > click “My Learning” in the upper right corner > click “Learning History” under “My Library” on the left > click the “. . .” to the right of the Course or Learning Path > click “Add to Profile” and follow the prompts.
LinkedIn also gives you the option to create post on your Profile about your accomplishment, which you should opt to do. When you do this, it auto suggests skills that it will add to your Skills section of your Profile. You can have up to 50 skills on your profile, so keep track of what’s there and prune/edit the list as needed to highlight your capabilities for the kinds of jobs that you are looking for. More on Skills further down the page.
Add Certifications to Your Resume or CV
As shown above and viewable on my CV here, I added links to my LinkedIn Course and Learning Path certifications in a dedicated section of my CV. In addition to the unique link to my certifications, I included the organization that issued it (i.e., LinkedIn), and the date of completion. You can do the same on your CV or resume.
To get the link to a Course or Learning Path completion certificate, go to LinkedIn Learning > click “My Learning” in the upper right corner > click “Learning History” under “My Library” on the left > click the “. . .” to the right of the Course or Learning Path > click “Download certificate” > click “LinkedIn Learning Certificate” > toggle “On” under the top section titled “Create certificate link” > Click “Copy” on the far right.
While you are here, you can download a PDF of your certificate for safe keeping at the bottom left of this last screen. You can add these PDFs to a professional portfolio or alongside a deliverable that you create based on the skills that you gained from that course to demonstrate your learning and mastery.
Demonstrate Your Skills
As I mentioned above, when you post about completing a course, LinkedIn Learning can autogenerate relevant skill terms to add to the Skills section on your Profile (as shown above on my Profile). When you have the spare time and focus, you should occasionally click on “Demonstrate skills” (you can do this without a LinkedIn Learning subscription). This gives you options for taking exams related to different skills that you’ve added to your Skills section of your Profile. If you pass, it provides some proof that you know something about that particular skill. Beware though: these exams can be tough. When I took the HTML exam, I discovered big gaps in what I knew from learning HTML years before without keeping up with changes to HTML in the intervening years. While I passed the exam, I made notes about those questions that I got wrong so that I knew what to learn more about to fill in those gaps.
Also, some skills don’t have exams associated with them. In those cases, you may submit a video or essay to demonstrate your experience to potential recruiters or hiring managers. If you do this, you should plan it out, shoot and edit your video to give the best visual and auditory impression, or write and revise your essay so that it is of the highest professional quality.
Is It Worth It?
Looking back on what I learned, how I learned it, and who I learned it from, I’m glad that I invested the time and energy into a month of LinkedIn Learning. I’ve already started putting some of the lessons into practice (e.g., the generative AI and ethical AI courses), and I’m planning out how I will roll out the DEI approaches in my courses when I return to teaching in Fall 2024 (I am on sabbatical this academic year). In the future, I plan to pay for LinkedIn Learning when additional classes are available and I have the time to immerse myself in learning.
If you’re looking to skill up, I think that LinkedIn Learning can be beneficial if you go into it with a learning and reflective mindset. This means that you are willing to invest your attention, time, energy, and thought to learning the course material, want to reflect on how what you learn connects to other things you’ve already learned through school and work experience, apply what you’ve learned to deliverables that demonstrate you have integrated what you have learned (e.g., a detailed post on your LinkedIn Profile, a blog post, a poster, a video, an addition to your professional portfolio, etc.), and reflect, preferably in writing, on what you’ve learned, how you applied it, what you would like to see yourself accomplish next, and how to take those next steps.
As I said above, you likely won’t gain much by passively listening to LinkedIn Learning Courses while doing other things or being distracted by your environment. Invest in this form of learning and you will add to what you know and can do. In that spirit, it’s like my Grandpa Ellis used to tell me, “Jake, no one can take away your education!”
This is the third and final post of a three part series that explores some issues and ideas proposed to me by Mack Hassler as part of the independent study that he’s conducting for me on the works of Philip K. Dick.
What would Philip K. Dick do with a blog? How might he have revolutionized the way we engage and think about belief and our perception of reality had he had a less restrictive method of communicating with fans and passers-by alike?
I use my blog as a means of connecting with people personally as well as professionally. Originally intended as a personal blog about my travels abroad in the UK, it changed over time along with my own professional transformation into a PhD student and active participant in professional organizations. It allowed me to hone my writing ability through additional practice, and it facilitated feedback from those persons who happened to by blog by the almighty digital deity, Google. Also, it is a self-promotion of sorts, not unlike those by SF authors such as Cory Doctorow or John Scalzi, but it represents my life and work as a professional academic who critically thinks about the relationship between science, technology, and culture. It’s more than a calling card–it’s a bulletin board that I organize and run that facilitates a communal response to my observations and thoughts.
Philip K. Dick would undoubtedly have had a different kind of blog than Doctorow, Scalzi, or I. In his work, he questions the nature of reality and the human mind’s ability to perceive and react to the external world. He realized, like Percy Bysshe Shelley, that our relationship to the external world is made possible by our senses and the interpretation of that sensory data by our mind. Thus, the supposed external world is actually a simulation that is ever present in our mind. Dick questions, problematizes, and critiques our relationship to the external world in his myriad works, but it’s the latter works that specifically deal with perception and the questions of belief that Shelley raised in the early 18th century.
Shelley argued that the only ways in which one may believe in a Deity is directly through our senses, reason, and the experience of others. He quickly dispenses with the last two as being unequivocally insufficient for proof in God. However, the first, direct sensory perception is the only sure way to prove that God exists, for the individual. It is here that Dick steps into the picture one and three-quarter centuries later.
In his last works exploratory works, VALIS and the Exegesis, Dick describes his own direct sensory perception of a Deity, or more accurately, a Gnostic revelatory experience. In these works, which would have been the pinnacle of blog writing had he had a digital outlet for communicating his experiences, he describes on the page what he remembers of the experiences of 2-4-74 as well as his reasoning through those experiences. Dick follows what Shelley described two centuries before as the mind actively clarifying the sensory perception. And as a reflective person, Dick offered many interpretations and counter-interpretations for his sensory experience in order to find his own way of understanding the experience. From the extended process of reasoning, Dick arrived at his own set of beliefs surrounding the experience, but he conceded that they were his experiences, and despite sharing them, one must arrive at that kind of belief on their own. Additionally, he envisioned a future with less organized religion and more personal belief based on individualized experiences. In this sense, Dick is taking Shelley to task by establishing his own beliefs in a Deity.
I wonder what Dick would have concluded had he explored these ideas online through blogging. According to Sutin’s biography of Dick, Divine Invasions, Dick corresponded with friends and colleagues, but “he was blue because it seemed there was no one to talk with about the ideas that mattered to him” (273). Those ideas were those that he recorded as his verbose self-dialog in the Exegesis. However, interpersonal communication with friends is a somewhat different dynamic than the largely anonymous online communication (hence the recent flame war initiated by the new SFRA troll). Would an online community foster or impede Dick’s personal exploration of his unique sensory experiences? In addition to the voluminous writing that he was doing at that time regarding his experience, an online forum would necessitate a certain level of response and tailoring subsequent material to his readership. Perhaps this would have enhanced or altered his reasoning based on the suggestions and theories of others. However, as Shelley pointed out, we cannot wholly trust the reports of others in our own interpretation of sensory experiences. I’m confident that Dick would have been aware of this, but it would certainly have had some influence, however insignificant but subtle, on his own thinking.
There are certainly issues today with online communication and the dissemination of ideologies and systems of belief. I have heard anecdotally that online systems of communication assist individuals in finding or establishing smaller groups that share similar beliefs. Hence, Republicans find other Republicans, and Science Fiction fans find other Science Fiction fans. However, there’s certainly a cross pollination where, for example, Republicans find their way to the Science Fiction fan enclaves and either comment positively or negatively on something a SF fan has said, and vice versa. It’s these interactions between borders that I find interesting, because a synthesis at best or a culture war at worst is taking place at these imaginary or invisible dividing lines. Shelley and Dick would probably have found themselves on the same side, looking across the border at the unreflective infidels, and they would most assuredly have “guest blogged” on each other’s site.
One final thought–what would Shelley have done with a blog? In his day, he used his wealth to print phamplets and he distributed them himself in London. Was this an early form of blogging? Perhaps the analogy might be that he was pushing an antiquated RSS feed to the masses (at least to the literate bourgeoise). It’s interesting to consider the ways in which technology facilitated the ideas of Shelley and Dick, as well as to conjecture the ways in which our contemporary technology might have played a part in the further development or alteration to their ideas.
This is part two of a three part post series that explores some issues and ideas proposed to me by Mack Hassler as part of the independent study that he’s conducting for me on the works of Philip K. Dick.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “Extract from A Refutation of Deism: In a Dialog.” Romantic Period Writings 1798-1832: An Anthology. Eds. Zachary Leader and Ian Haywood. New York: Routledge, 1998. 80-81.
You may find an expanded version of this extract online here.
In this extract, Shelley is questioning the prevailing social order, maintained by the monarchy and church, and its requirement for what he calls a “supernatural intelligence” (80). Also, he considers the conflict between order and disorder in that system, and the supposed requirement for a “power” that supports order, and another, malignant, that supports disorder (80).
In a thought experiment, he questions if order might have a penchant for evil, and disorder a hint at good. Why do these divisions necessarily remain diametrically opposed? He answers that order and disorder are constructions that we map onto our understanding of the world and our relationship to it (80). Therefore, what is good for us is heavenly ordained and that which is ill for us is the work of Satan.
He points out that order and disorder cannot be universal, because the criteria for those things are as varied and colored as the different people whose “opinions and feelings” create those criteria (80).
The most powerful passage in this extract is when he establishes that good and evil are relative, not only in effect, but more importantly in the relationship between people and their perception of the external world. It is human attribution of good or evil to objects and events external to the perceiver rather than an extrinsic or universal attribution of those descriptions.
And, connecting this extract to the previous, he concludes that one cannot reason the existence of a Deity, because what is believed to have divine motivation in the external world are really judgments and opinions of people mapped onto the events observed.
