What's New?

October 2, 2004

A new colleague joins The Thiagi Group. We are happy to announce that Dr. Ellen Kaye Gehrke has become another member of our team. Ellen teaches business courses at Alliant International Univesity in San Diego, CA where she uses all types of interactive strategies. Check out the "About Us" section for more details about Ellen.

Free online course launched. We recently completed a major eLearning project. Based on this project and on our field research, we have developed a short online course called "The Four-Door Approach to ELearning". To take this course, go to the home page, click on "Online Courses", and "The Four-Door Approach to ELearning". You must create a new account to enroll in the course. Enjoy the course.

Additions to Training Games. Added four more training games to the master list under "Freebies". Current total is 97.

September 16, 2004

Play for Performance. We posted the September issue on September 3rd. We also sent an announcement about its availability to all registered subscribers.

Upcoming public session. Thiagi will present "Seven Secrets of Rapid Instructional Design" at the meeting of the Massachusetts ISPI Chapter on Wednesday September 22, 2004. See the Chapter website for online registration.

August 19, 2004

Play for Performance. We posted the August issue on August 2nd. We also sent an announcement about its availability to all registered subscribers.

THIAGI ON THE ROAD. Thiagi conducted an instructional design workshop at a nuclear power plant (Clinton Power Station) in Illinois on July 12 and 13. On July 22nd, Thiagi and Matt conducted a 1-day teambuilding workshop for a pharmaceutical company (Fujisawa) in Chicago. This workshop featured Mattel's Break the Safe game. Thiagi also conducted a week-long (July 26-30) workshop at the Summer Institute for Intercultural Communication at Forest Grove, OR. While in Oregon, Thiagi conducted a 1-day workshop (August 2, 2004) on the Faster, Cheaper, Better Approach to Training Design in Portland. Matt and Regina Rowland (the newest Thiagi Group member) were also at this workshop with 170 participants. Regina did graphic recording of the entire session using several large wall murals. A couple of days ago, on August 17th, Thiagi did a session on online interactivity for the members of Sydney and Melbourne ISPI Chapters. No, he did not fly to Australia; he had to wake up at 2 AM to facilitate this enjoyable 90-minute session online, using Centra software.

PROJECTS. Matt is leading an exciting online learning project for Cadence Design Systems in California. This project involves Matt and Raja and Thiagi is applying the Four-Door Model for eLearning design. Thiagi is working on an activities-based, instructor-led training project for Hewitt Associates in Illinois.

PUBLICATIONS. Matt and Thiagi have been invited to contribute chapters (on Training Games and Instructional Motivation) to the next edition of The ASTD Training and Development Handbook (edited by Marlene Caroselli).

July 2, 2004

PLAY FOR PERFORMANCE. We posted the July issue of Play for Performance. We have also sent out an announcement about its availability to the registered subscribers.

THE THIAGI GROUP IN AUSTRALIA . Marie Jasinski (of Design Planet) has become the Thiagi Group's official representative in Australia . Marie and Thiagi have been collaborating on email games and RAMEs for several years. Marie has also coordinated Thiagi's earlier trips to Australia . She is planning for several workshops by the Thiagi Group in Australia in 2005. Visit Marie's Design Planet website and check out her edgy activities.

FREE TRAINING GAMES. Our list of training games under the FREEBIES section now contains 93 entries. Most of the new links take you to games that appeared in previous versions of Play for Performance.

PALO ALTO WORKSHOPS. Our FASTER, CHEAPER, BETTER workshop on training design attracted 25 participants. We are now planning another public offering of this workshop and other workshops.

ONLINE COURSES. We are working on a series of online courses on game design. We will launch the new and improved version of our introductory course in August.

LEARNING TIMES. Thiagi and Jonathan are planning a full-day virtual classroom workshop on intelligent interactivity in virtual classrooms. Based on Thiagi's successful Virtual Classroom Six-Pak Workshops series, this session is tentatively scheduled for October 2004.

June 2, 2004

We posted the June 2004 issue of Play for Performance. It's posted in two versions; one for most modern browsers and one for Netscape Navigator 4.x.

May 27, 2004

CHANGES. Since we do more than workshops, we decided to change our name from "Workshops by Thiagi, Inc" to "The Thiagi Group". However, everything remains the same. We have also decided to change our home page to avoid clutter. Let's know what you think about the new home page. When we make some more money, we will add graphic icons to the home page.

LEARNINGWARE Inc and the Thiagi Group are planning to combine their resources and expertise in the areas of computerized game shows and web game design. We will be selling LearningWare's Game Show Pro and other products in the near future. We are also planning to design and produce powerful web-based game shells.

PUBLIC WORKSHOP IN PALO ALTO. Thiagi brings his radical ideas about rapid training design to Palo Alto, CA on June 17-18. Get more information and register online for this workshop.

Break the Safe™, Mattel's unique new boardgame, is incorporated in Thiagi's teambuilding workshop. Successfully launched at the Tampa ISPI conference, the workshop package, along with the board game, will be available for sale very soon. Check out the description of the High Performance Teambuilding workshop.