“Communication – the human connection – is the key to personal and career success.”
– Paul J. Meyer
We witness great accomplishments each day by people who can communicate effectively. 2014 Nobel Peace Prize winners, Malala Yousafzai and Kailash Satyarthi, have used the power of communication for their advocacy of education and women’s /children’s rights. Their ability to communicate their message, their passion, and their determination to change things has brought great focus on the plight of women and children who are often denied the opportunity to be properly educated.
There are no boundaries to communication’s effectiveness, as seen by their success. To reach high effectiveness, it takes practice. This is why people practice writing, presenting, and conversing with others to improve their message and to get their positions clearly understood. Practice can be in a structured environment, such as a classroom or for a particular assignment. Or practice can occur impromptu through conversation on any topic. The most important aspect of practice is that you do it…all the time!
Today, new methods for communication practice are bolstering traditional methods. A recent article and presentation by Vala Afshar (Chief Marketing Officer at Extreme Networks) noted two trends that are of importance to the advocacy of Malala and Kailash:
- SPOCs (Small Personalized Online Courses)
- Immersive and Augmented Reality
These trends allow learning for anyone at any time in any place. Personalization allows for competency-based and contextual-based learning to flourish. Immersive programs are especially useful for language learning. Bringing education to everyone via online access and taking advance of these two trends leads to dramatic learning improvement especially for language and communication.
Having seen Malala talk fluently in English about her experiences, it is easy to grasp the importance of effective communication. Imagine how much further she would be today if she had access to an online tutoring tool, such as PEERS edu, rather than just self-taught learning. Imagine that most children have access to language learning online – I wonder what the world would be like then?
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