Comics and Learning Design featuring Moe Ash

Luis Malbas  
Hello, welcome everybody, the training learning and development community. Thanks for joining us, we have a ton of people in for this one, MO You must be a really popular person because there are what over 60 people or 60 or so that are registered for this one and we usually don't get that many. So that is pretty impressive. So welcome everybody. Let me give some shout outs and see who do we have in Palin's here, Carlita. Why see Gan Christine Chiddy. Lane is here. Yeah, even Jonathan Hill and Cheryl, Vanessa, gosh, so many thanks for joining us. Alright, so we're gonna be talking about comics and learning design here with Moe Asch. Is that Did Did I pronounce that? Okay? Mo

Moe Ash  
100%.

Luis Malbas  
Excellent. All right. And so, Moe, I know that you are you've got you've got your company, the catalyst. But can you give us a quick intro to yourself? I'd love to hear how you describe yourself.

Moe Ash  
Um, well, I would, I would say I'm, I'm a learning architect. I don't really work in a specific domain when it comes to learning interventions or creating learning design. Our company is an instructional design establishment. But we also work on building gamification systems for companies, specifically in learning, obviously. And also we do escape rooms, we do board game simulations, some of them are physical, other are online, and now we do elearning design. So it's a little bit of this, a little bit of that, so you know what its architecture. And that's how I'm doing my thing. Before I used to work in LED consultancy, my background is in human resources management. As a matter of fact, I'm a trainer by bike practice, but you know what, I found myself in learning design, I just stayed there. So that's that's it a nutshell suppose.

Luis Malbas  
Nice. No, it works perfectly. And you're based out of Cairo, Egypt. And so we've got you there. Late in the evening, 10pm, or at least late to some people. But we're going to be talking about comics. Now. The way that I was introduced to Mo was more actually like tagged me in a video that he had done on LinkedIn and posted it and I was it was very interesting to me, he talked about heuristics. And I have always been curious about comics and learning design and especially for myself as being somebody who used to be a comic book collector when I was a kid. And and now I have an eight year old who is heavy into graphic novels and so my love for comics are coming back and I thought wow, this would be great to reach out tomorrow and just see what you know let's let's talk more about this thing that that you that this video you posted on on LinkedIn. But before I wanted to ask you for a smoke comics, I'm your relationship comics where did that start?

Moe Ash  
I don't know maybe when I was like 10 or seven and although I'm a DC person, ah, I am totally for DC. True I am actually wearing Marvel flip flops right now but I still DC I started off with X Men and and what X Men American splint the lawyer, the funnies in the newspaper, and then later on, it just rolled over from there. And I also like Arabic comms that no one would know about here. But it kind of shaped my culture. I mean, it shaped the way I understand things, it it. It actually educated me. I'm a product of comics. If it wasn't for comics, I wouldn't have learned all about a lot of things. So that's that's how I think about like comics that kind of I grew a comics and comics grew with me and and that's how it led me to manga and it led me also to enemy to those who do not know what manga is manga is the Japanese side of comics and even has a different sequence on like, comics, it starts from left to right. But manga starts from right to left and over time you kind of build up that. That understanding of how to go through reading each and every one of them. And it becomes easy, like cognitively easy to see how events like start to unfold when it comes to comics. So it helped me understand more about aesthetics. It helped me understand more about science. It helped me understand more about cultures, about your culture, as a matter of fact, like across the pond The other to the other side of the world. And yeah, that's, that's that's what I could say about Yeah.

Luis Malbas  
Right, right. No, totally get it. And if you were especially like, if you start out with the X Men and learning about you know, our culture, I'm sure that that you were learning a ton from from reading those comics about what, what it was like over here. But where exactly did your love for comics and learning design begin? Where did you start attaching the to?

Moe Ash  
Can your hold on? Can you repeat the last part? I couldn't Yeah, sure. Sure. Sure. I mean, let me disconnect my speakers all of a sudden, okay, here.

Luis Malbas  
Yeah, Kim is saying I just want to say in chat, Kim saying I think we'd be surprised to know how influential comics have been in the world and I, I totally agree

Moe Ash  
with Okay, now I can hear him so sorry. That's okay.

Luis Malbas  
All right. All right. So you can hear me so storytelling, learning design, like where did that and comics when did you start putting that together?

Moe Ash  
I guess I guess every time I think about like building and learning, building learning assets, to me, even infographics, infographics, it's actually a form of comics. Like the first time I got introduced to infographics, I thought, well, I'm so sorry to say this, but it was mundane and annoying, because why can't we stick to comic panels? Why can't we stick to the usual way of how we see the aesthetics of an infographic to be easy, like sometimes infographic can be so confusing. And data is just clustered in different areas across the infographic. And you need to have a very hard time trying to understand where to look, instead of trying to understand the learning is trying to offer instead. And to me, infographics are actually comics, they're learning comics that but we don't really treat it that way. So from an aesthetic point of view, there's something called a mental model, like mental models are how we see the world. Like, for instance, are you a Mac user or a Windows user? Just ask?

Luis Malbas  
Great. Yeah, I'm a Mac user.

Moe Ash  
Okay, so where's the where's the escape button?

Luis Malbas  
Where is the escape button? Yeah, upper left.

Moe Ash  
Exactly. for Windows users, it's actually up on the right, is it? Wow, it is it is my mental model. That's why when I when I use my wife, smack I'm, I'm bedazzled. I'm like, where command instead of control? Yeah, this is what a mental model is we're used to certain things and, and how to perceive the world around us. And it becomes easy for us. That's where availability heuristics come into place. Because it becomes easy for us to see everything perceive everything, our mental shortcuts, because even if, even when it comes to reading, we, from a neuroscience perspective, we are accustomed to be able to read things because we already know shapes and forms since the day we were born. That's why when you see an O it represents an orange or an apple or so it's okay and oh zero, I can understand this. If we put two shapes across one another, you can see a t you can see an N Even if you got like chopsticks or like any six and you just throw it, whatever it is, you can still see a t you can still see an M you can still see an M, it's it's our mental model that would allow us to see things. So mental models make it easy for us to perceive a lot of things. When we go against those mental models or get a opposite to it, it becomes very harder for us to understand things. And it becomes a cognitive load for us to try to fathom it instead of trying to eat on it or like build a learning or an understanding about it. So when learning designers start to build things that are too traditional, like death by PowerPoint, for instance, is already a mental shortcut that says this is boring, this is one day. But when you do something that goes against it, but it's easy to comprehend, it starts it starts to become better and it resonates and people start to anchor it and people start to put it up on their long term memory and it becomes a positive experience that I can benefit from. So that's when when when I look into even when I was a trainer before I get into like the whole thing about learning design, I would take hours and hours Just think about okay, so I am talking to this audience. How would I? How would I build my presentation? What kind of aesthetics? Who am I speaking to? What kind of character even the characters that are we going to be putting up? Would they relate to it? Would it be easier for them to build a sense a sense of like a similarity bias between them and they like, okay, I can see, I can see this as my colleague, this is someone that I can, I can find in my company, or this is if it's for like university students. Okay, this is how I would look like in uni. So this is how it consumed me from the start that I like to see someone that looks like me, because in comics, although we're talking about like superheroes, but superheroes are sort of relatable. And I said that in the video like Superman, when it started to come out in late 30s. He was a god's, like the representation of a Messiah. And over time, sales started to drop, by the way, because Superman basically was indestructible. No one can beat Superman. But Batman, for instance, well, we can relate to Batman Batman, although he's a millionaire, billionaire. bazillionaire Come with me. He's using his wits, and being smart, and his gadgets and his tool belt that he built up on his own to create things so you know what I can be like that I can be like, Batman if I had the means and the power to do so. And also most of them are dealing with, with with issues like they're orphans, they have problems. So yeah, well, that person is farmable. That person is like me, that person I can relate to in a way or another. This is how, how comics make us feel more human, and make us feel like okay, even though I am I didn't jump into a pool of radioactive material, I can still be able to do the same things that they interlink.

Luis Malbas  
Nice, so, um, let's talk about that. So if you're building, say, some training, and you've decided to use comics as as, as as part of that curriculum, like, do you decide on establishing some archetypes to provide that sort of relatability? Is, is that where you start? Or tell us how you like, go about, you know, just constructing this stuff?

Moe Ash  
Okay, so one time, um, we did this game. It's called the The tale of Hermes. And it was actually it was called the Oracle and it was the tale of Hermes. So the oracle was a game storytelling game, where the audience would start to construct a story, one card after the other. So, you will be putting up a card, which is part of the Hermes tale, and another person will put another card to continue on the story. And the point of the matter is, was the Oracle stripped Hermes from all of his powers, and Hermes needs to go on a journey to regain his power, and he has to live life like a mortal, and his powers will be decided, through the fate that through the through the decisions of the oracles of Delphi, and the Oracles, which are the audience are starting to put up how the story will go. And how I built this, I wanted a character that has a lot of powers. And those powers I can relate to in terms of skills, application, and matters that are related to the learning objective that I'm putting up. So, every time Hermes gains up a skill, well, they earned that skill, because they managed to get that learning into place. They they they managed to maintain that knowledge assessment in a perfect manner, they managed to acquire a new found knowledge into the learning itself. So they get a power from Hermes pepper and they get put gain points. Now, throughout the story, they are this the fate is decided by by by the the oracles of Delphi. So I had to do a full on research on Hermes, the other gods different mythologies. And Hermes, how good is he? How is he affected by other gods? Should I get other gods instead of this one? Am I sticking to Greek mythology, but it the archetype I wanted someone that is so versatile to do this for, and didn't start off with Hermes to be completely honest, it started off that I wanted something where the audience can have a lot of autonomy and control. So they can decide what to do. And this is where the Oracles came into place. So I started with the Oracles, which are the supporting character. And then I went into the protagonist, which is Hermes. And, and even when I used to deliver storytelling back in,

like, six, seven years ago, I used to tell people about something called the Universal sort of structure. And universal source structure is something that a guy called Gustav Freytag, he created 100 years ago, and it all starts the same and ends the same with a little bit of nuances here and there. It starts as it starts always with an expose eight, just the story, the introduction, what happens, and then a rising action where okay, I start to understand there, there's an Oracle ahead Oracle, and there are the the or the other oracles of Delphi. And there's a problem, Hermes is pretty baffled at what human beings are, and they don't deserve to live the life that they're living, and we immortal gods are so much better, I'm just explaining the whole thing, and their climax. So when the climax comes up, Hermes is stripped out of everything, and needs to go on to this journey. So this is the climax of problem starts to come into place. And then the falling action, the falling action, Hermes goes into his journey starts to collect stuff, da, da, da, da, and then at the end, the dinner more or the closure. So the time the timespan of this is different depending on where you want to put the focus of the story and where you put the learning. So maybe you want to put up the learning at the at the fall of the rising action, maybe you want to put a huge time in the form of a case study may be at the climax, or maybe you want people to be accumulating knowledge and then during the falling action, you're putting it all for practice or putting it all for knowledge acquisition until they get to that end mile, which is the normal and the first one 1% I'm sorry, from one story structure to the other you have something like the something called the mountain technique, which is an exquisite climax, another for another action and climax on another action, another action climax and it goes on. Like like Game of Thrones, for instance. It was full climaxes, right? Right. And cliffhangers. Right, and there's something called a mono myth. I love mono, because most of our stories are mono by like spider man. With great power comes great responsibility. He went into his journey to understand this. Don't descend? Well, Uncle Ben said, and you have the Lion King, they're all Monomyth mono if they're just going on his journey to understand something. So using the story structures, you start to know where to encapsulate the learning that you want. And where you want to encapsulate the story. The story's essence, like okay, is the essence in learning something and building upon it and reinforcing? Or is the story of where you will give them an experience that they need to reflect on it? Or is the story that they need to go and practice right away, and then deal with the consequences of it. This is how you put story structure into learning design. And this is how we also even consider gamification, like gamification, the end of the day is only learning not only but it's laying a motivational system across an existing solid learning design structure, to be able to motivate people to go on from from one point to the other. That's why there's a mechanic and storytelling, I'm sorry, and gamification called the progression system, like how you will maintain a seamless progression that can go from one point to the other to the end of the game, or to the end of the story, so they can get to the learning objective at the end. So when I think about comics, I really need to consider what kind of character Hermes is he relatable. Yes. When you start down there his his powers? Is the Oracles relatable, yes, because decisions that we take are the Oracle. And this is what we do every day. And I start to put analogies stories are all about analogies that you make in life. Although maybe your cup of tea is not Fantasia it could be. Could be drama, it could be comedy, as much as possible. Let me feel that I'm part of the story that This, although far fetched, it could be, I can do something like, I can be something like,

Luis Malbas  
yeah. Now let me let me just back up a little bit to the comic part with with the cards, right? Is that something? Did you, you know, did you illustrate these cards so that they had certain elements in it that you know that the, like the relatability pieces and that type of thing? Is that Is that where the comics came in with that card? And also, how effective was that? Like, how effective was the training and the learning in that instance.

Moe Ash  
And the learning was extra pretty, pretty neat, to be completely honest, because we only have like two hours to play this game. Hmm. And it was, it was a bit, it was a bit complicated to think about it at first, because there were only building up there, we're only building up the story of Hermes there, we're also doing something else. What we did is that we were trying to tell them how to construct the story, how to construct the learning in the form of the story. You can let me actually I can send you the link to it. Hear this, let me send you the link to it. I'm going to put it up in the chat so people can check it out ourselves. That's the Oracle. Nice and yeah, it's like one of the Oracle's like we have like different Oracle's this is like one of the Orca, I guess that's the SR, one of the Oracle's. So they had to look at a cart, and the card was dissected into two part of Hermes tail. And the other part is the lesson plan of building up a story learning design. So they had to think as a group, okay, I am going to be putting this part of the story, and no, so I'm going to be putting this part of the learning. So if someone put this after me, I need to continue on the learning sequence. Also, I need to continue on the story sequence. And we kind of forced them me and my team, when we're doing this would kind of force them to think, Okay, if you're building up the story, you need to put it in sync with the learning design and the lesson plan and the instructional method that you're intending for your learners, whether that was in a form of a quiz, or a practice of some sort, to be able to, when you're done with the whole thing, like when you're done with the actual story. You created a story and a learning. Look at that. See, it's easy. So that was our intention at that time. And then we took the story of Hermes to be completely honest. And then we just started to replicate it onto other stuff. Like we started, we did first gamma con and then we were like, You know what, this is a good infrastructure to use what other stuff?

Luis Malbas  
Yeah, no, that sounds, I mean, that sounds like it would be a lot of fun. And it would take a great deal of creativity to produce. Now I'm going back to comics, let's take the gamification out. Let's talk about instructional comics, without the gamification is that something that you create on a regular basis or have done? You know, because I know that we have learned I mean, the both of us and probably most everybody in the audience has learned a ton from you know, from comics is entertainment, be it you know, Spider Man, or Superman or Batman or, or anybody else out there any of these superheroes, but when you're doing your learning experience, design, do you do anything where you're just using just straight comics without gamification,

Moe Ash  
all the way, all the way, we can do comics in the form of grants and branching scenarios. You're right, like the comic itself, it tells you like for compliance training, for instance, compliance, I am telling a story about someone that is getting introduced into a company. And I don't really need to do it in a way where these are the, this is the code of conduct. This is what you should do at the company. What I do is okay, this is a tour inside of the company itself, but like for instance, we we took pictures of it, I told the HR representative, like take pictures of the offices, take pictures of the places take pictures of the things that people will go for when they're doing their orientation when they first come in, and let me handle the rest. So we we took it, we started to sketch it, and we did a complete virtual tuna fight tour of the entire thing using elearning. So people before the even got into the company, they already saw the tune version, the comic version of their company a front so when they got into, like got into the job, they started to relate to this. Yeah, this is HR. This is this is marketing This, this is where operations that, and it gave a sense of likeability. And also people felt very familiar with the workplace before they even got on board in the workplace itself. So comics can be used for compliance, where we got people to have an actual introduction to the company itself, what do we do? What do you think will be the first action that you would do on the job if you had a problem where you would go through what you would, who you would talk to? So we actually made them know, who are the people? Where are the offices, what to do before I even stepped foot inside of the organization itself. And there was no gamification about it. It's just pure good elearning wood goods with

Luis Malbas  
NSX. So obviously, because of those comics are producing things in that format, you had much better engagement.

Moe Ash  
Amen. Yeah, man, because the thing is about comics, comics. And I'm going to be like, piggybacking on what Kathy Moore said, and action mapping. All you need to do when it comes to comics. And thank you, Kim, for saying Haji Kemal, it's one decision at a time, one decision past light, you don't need to put a lot of panels, you don't need to put a lot of data. Like let me put it in a rudimentary from a rudimentary perspective. Like even when we're using PowerPoint. When we're using PowerPoint, and you're not using the animation factor, animation, meaning that you're not controlling the transcendence of the data, one sentence, one point at a time, becomes an absolute cognitive load on the learner. Because there are so many decisions, there's so many data, he she wouldn't be able to absorb what you're saying on stage, while reading what is on the screen, or what's what's being put up on the projector. And that could be it. So I also tell my trainers, like put it one slide at a time control the load. In comics, it's not only controlling the load, it's controlling the load and controlling the amount of decisions, the learner needs to go through one slide at a time, if you if you feed them way too much they would get they will get way too convoluted into the whole thing they would get really

they will get into a sense

of dissonance, they wouldn't know what to do. So Haji Kemal, which is a great example is you had to go through one decision to go to the other one and the other one and the other one. And what happens is from a constructivism perspective, which is school of contrast, constructivism educational psychology, is that you're putting up a chunking that allows a constructive cognitive sequencing of events. So when people need to track back and look at things from a retrospective, they know where they started from, and where to go to where they need to. And it helps us in assimilating and accommodating the data inside of your long term memory, especially if the experience is actually fruitful or fun. So they would know the sequence, you would notice that it's chunked in a proper fashion. And you know what? It makes sense. I can I can apply it myself. But if it's too much data, they would they will get confused. And they might not even continue on the experience.

Luis Malbas  
Wow. No, that makes that makes makes a ton of sense. You know, and I'm thinking some folks in the audience, you know, they see the title, this comics and learning design. And by the way, everybody, if you do have any questions, please post them in chat. And I'm sure my would be happy to answer them. But if somebody did want to get, get, get more experience in, say, using comics for their learning design, where can they go? What can they do aside from following you on LinkedIn? Of course. But do you have any suggestions for that?

Moe Ash  
Upon? Well, there is. I could, I could simply say you need to read comics itself because comics, sometimes the banners like, let me let me try to show you something pretty quick. I think I have it here. Comics at the end of the day are just words and pictures. You can do anything with words and pictures. And that's what Harvey Pekar said. Oh, my screen is. Hold on.

Luis Malbas  
There we go. i Yeah, I just

Moe Ash  
got better. Yeah. Is it readable? Yes. Okay, so comics are just words and pictures. You can do anything with words and pictures so that that's what Harvey Pekar said. So, in the point is, there's a really good book that you should check, which is the visual language of comics introduction to the structure and the cognition of sequential images. This is by an author called Neil Cohan. And that can give you a very good understanding of how to put comics into proper perspective. Not only for not only for learning, but basically for explaining anything. Because comics, as much as it's as much as it's an art, it's actually a language. It has its own set grammar, it has its own way of putting aspects together. And I told you this before that, like, this is how it looks. This is how comics are put up, it could be put up this way. 1234567. And then you can put the nine over there. You can also make it where 2345678, if it's if it's longer, nine, it can be this way or the other way, depending on the on the culture depending on who you're talking to. Also it can you can put like a bigger picture up on on on the start of it. Because usually when I was telling you about the mental model, mental models mean that people commonly start from the left. And they go under. And they read from that point. And this is called a Z mapping. So in order for you to understand the language of comics that you need to understand that people read into a Z mapping structure they read this way. So when you're putting up the data, you need to map the data where the eye is easily able to go through the sequencing orphans. You don't need to put me on screen on my own you can get that oh my god. Awkward. I'd like to show a couple of panels and that's it.

Luis Malbas  
Yeah, no. And I could see that Kevin's actually, in the chat right now. Kevin, if those of you who don't know Kevin, Kevin is one of the best humans in l&d, and you should definitely should follow him wherever you can. And is, of course another incredible comic expert that is in this space. And yeah, no, this is, this is all fantastic. Um, let's see if any questions out there. I know that Elon had posted something on the top about seeing some strong comic storytelling examples. And I'm wondering Mo, have you had anything? Maybe for lnd? I mean, is there a comic book series that? That is particularly? You know, I know, like, recently, I saw a lot of, like, how the mouse duo of comics? I don't know if, if you mouse one and mouse two, those were recently like, being banned from some school, from some schools here in the US, but those are, you know, they're actually at my bedside those some Holocaust comics that I think were incredible.

Moe Ash  
I don't know. But when you were talking right now, and this is absolutely random, but I remembered the book, Who Moved My Cheese. But those about the two mounts, and what they did, and till this day, people still explaining the change management program. Yes, by the way, they say it all the time. And, and it still makes sense. I mean, it still makes an effort. It's pretty basic, but it works. And, and I don't know, I can't really give people on like our reference for four comics other than the one that I just shown by Neil Cohan, because that's the one that I read. And I use it as sort of a reference to me to be able to understand like, how to comics into perspective. But you know, what depends on actual comics? I do depend on actual comics, like sometimes, you know, what I am doing research, what is the research, I am just going through the amount of comics that I have. And I'm reading and comics right now you don't really need to go, you don't really need to buy like hard copies of comics, there's the digital comics started out for even Marvel DC and the likelihood of any other type. And it still offers the same really good experience. But anyway, um, what I can tell you is it's not only it's not only aesthetic, you really need to look at the characters that you're putting. I know that you can get characters, stock actors from anywhere, but trying to also think about how characters look where they look. Because where they look, and that was a very stupid, not stupid, it was a very simple technique like so. Stupid, stupid fight. Stupid father. Very simple, like really simple. I didn't. How did I not think about this. But when the character looks at the other panel, the sequence is false. Like sometimes we put characters like floating characters in elearning. And they're just looking at you like this. And it's passive. But when they're looking at something, they're giving you a signal, it, it tells you subconsciously, what to do, like how to go through things. And even the usage of words like, Superman flew off the ledge. Superman exploded off the ledge. I know, it's simple. But from a neuroscience perspective, people would, like Lighten up, the read the word exploded, it gives a better dopamine effect on them, like, wow, Superman did this. And it's those tiny things like really tiny, makes a huge impact in building a comic, from the point of literature. And from the point of aesthetics, that's one thing. The other thing, try as much as possible, when you're making comics to not get into the limbo of I need to make the perfect type of Dark Knight Christian Bale kind of character where he needs to go into something so, so complicated. A very simple story makes a huge difference in people's lives. Like, that's why motivational videos are so in some very informed me, but because it has a lot of emotions. So if you are, if your protagonists and antagonists do not portray emotion, raw emotion, people wouldn't be able to gravitate towards it. This is what I could tell you about it. So I'll try to put up under like in the CLDC, I'll try to put up a couple of resources on graphic design and things that are related to aesthetics. But if it comes to the simple things, I want you to look at those simple biases, I want you to look at something called the Zeigarnik effect. The Zeigarnik effect, the Zeigarnik Effect is if you if you made a play with me this if I said if I said

10, Tehran, what would you do? Then then 10? Turns out, okay,

this is if you didn't say the 1010 your mind would be pretty much annoyed. Yeah, you're seeking closure, I need closure. So please, when you're putting a store, you put it up on learning acid, you need to put a form of closure, you can't leave the story open. So that's actually that's a nice, that's a cognitive bias. So read about this read about something called the von restore effect is when you were building up a comic building up a story and we're highlighting pivotal moments, a certain key message, we are coloring a specific words. That's the Vaughn restores effect. Also, there's the Gestalt principles like how we put signaling how we put proximity of matters beside one another the story, sorry, the visuals beside the word. It's not too far from it, so people wouldn't be able to relate both the visual and the text. Those simple biases. do wonders when you're building up comics, I am not approaching comics only from this from the perspective comics. I look at behavioral psychology. When I do this, also mayor's 12 principles of multimedia. And read the book by the laureate laureate, Nobel Laureate Award winner Daniel Kahneman, which is nudge nudge, now you're putting like simple, basic triggers that nudge the people pick a specific action. Nudge offers a huge body of research on how you can give people like seeds of ideas in comics, where they can take actions that they never took before, or something that is so unusual, unexpected that you know what, maybe if I did this all get a different answer, or I'll be doing something that I'm not used to. This is how I'm approaching. It's not not that I have to see a comic and then copy it. I want to see how people behave and let me try to mimic it or overcome the constant wrongdoing of behavior and let me try to do something different. And in the video that I did on so sorry, I'm taking a lot of airtime. That's okay, that, that I did. The there were a couple of simple story structures, like one is called Zero to Hero, which is you get someone that didn't have any basic knowledge of any sort. And you see the evolution of that person, one part after the other in a sequence fashion. And this gives me as a learner an understanding to see how I can map my progress on my means of development. There's something called the awakening the awakening is Mo was a very bad manager, he did blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And this is his road to salvation. There's also the the adventure where Mo is going into, I feel so conceited by him saying my name more than once. Mo is getting into a story where he's collecting things. He's collecting data so we can overcome a specific challenge. These are all things that we can see in our workplace, you can make up a story of it using the simple story structure, and try to see how people using simple basic decisions, day by day, step by step one slide after the other, they can get to be able to mimic those decisions, mimic those actions and get into a behavioral change. Like we can change the behavior because it makes us it's simple. It has a structure and it has a process. Why can I do it the same because I can't change you lose. Elearning wouldn't change you. But if I give you the autonomy, where you can think you might take the decision of change.

Luis Malbas  
Very interesting. Okay, so we should be wrapping it up pretty soon here. One quick question we've gotten one from Mohammed is asking how many characters do we need to build a perfect story structure?

Moe Ash  
Usually, usually, you don't even need an antagonist, by the way, like, people always say, Okay, there's, Frodo there have done there has to be a Sorbonne. But no. I mean, you can build a story with Gandalf the Grey, and Frodo and all of the fellowship. And it can still work. Yeah, it's still fine. I mean, you don't really need a bad guy to make up a good story. In Hermes. For instance, the the Oracle. We didn't have a bad guy. All we did is Hermes lost his powers. He wants to regain his powers. You oracles would lead him. And that's basically it. So usually, antagonist protagonist. And then there are like supporting characters, the dispatcher, which is Hagrid, or Gandalf, or Gollum, or Doby, in Harry Potter, those are like your hoppers on the side. There's also the prize or the princess. They'll mean to be misogynist here. But I mean, if you there's a sweetheart in the story, there's someone like in Super Mario, and there are other people that come on the side of fellowship like legless anyone that can help you get get to what you want. Or sometimes it's just a moment. I just need Frodo.

Luis Malbas  
Right, that set now great answer. Gosh, there have been a lot of incredible resources posted in chat. I mean, I saw the watchmen in there, which, which we haven't posted yet, which that one had a big impact on me when I was when I was local Watchmen. Yeah. When I was reading comic books. Yes, but No. Um, we could, I mean, it sounds like you could talk for days about comics, about gamification, about storytelling. You have like a wealth of knowledge about this stuff. And you seem so passionate about it. It was great having you on the broadcast. Where can we go to get inspired by you some more? Do you have any place that you can share?

Moe Ash  
Um, well, I have my LinkedIn. I have my link and and the left side, our website is the catalyst experience. COMM. I'll put it up in the chat, if you may. That's our websites. You can check us out there and also we have Facebook page, and I started to put up like videos. Last one was about like, upskilling and rescaling and I'm trying to like, you know what, dig in. More unconventional topics that l&d don't usually go into Maybe I'll start doing a YouTube channel. I don't really know. I'm thinking about it. But

I'll get into. I'm a newbie, I'm a newbie,

I'm just, I'm just starting off. It doesn't sound

Luis Malbas  
like if you see Kevin's post there, but maybe this is where that collaborate dev learn the two of you could could meet up in Las Vegas or something and do a session for us, I would definitely sign up for that, because that would be amazing between the both of you. Alright, so with that, Mo, thanks again for doing this. This is great. I'm glad that we were able to get together. I'm definitely gonna want to have you back in just to talk more about this. I would love to learn more about your ideas on gamification and storytelling. So I'm definitely going to keep that in mind. And everybody. You know, Kevin cam, everyone that that jumped in today. Thanks for attending this one tomorrow. We have a showcase with maker hatters. And then for those of you that did the the women of lnd event last week, I should have all the videos ready pretty soon, hoping to have a link to that in the newsletter on Monday. And so with that, we're going to wrap things up, Moe. Thanks again and hope to see everyone soon. All right. Bye, everybody.

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