Hi, I’m Linda. Thanks so much for checking out the April 2025 edition of my Linda Be Learning newsletter. If you are just discovering me, I encourage you to check out my website and my YouTube channel to learn more about the work I do in the field of learning technology and innovation.

If you’ve been following my newsletter, you know that I introduced themes in January 2025, looking at specific technologies and their intersections with human learning. This month, I am drawing from my background in kinesiology, as an athlete, fitness instructor, master trainer and athletic conditioning coach. My Fit Mind-Body Conditioning channel is still available on YouTube and documents tons of my earlier work in this field.

In this month’s edition, we’ll explore technologies and learning methodologies used to teach kinesthetic skills.

Tech to Get Excited About

I am always discovering and exploring new tech. It’s usually:

• recent developments in tech I have worked on in the past,

• tech I am actively using myself for projects,

• tech I am researching for competitive analysis or other purposes, and/or

• my client’s tech.

This month, we’re going to look at some cool technology used for swim workouts.

FORM Smart Swim Googles

FORM is an award-winning fitness technology company pioneering real-time visual feedback to elevate athletic performance. FORM's Smart Swim 2 goggles give swimmers an immersive swim experience by combining motivating workouts with real-time swim metrics, technique awareness, focused skill development, and much more via their innovative in-goggle AR display.

For example, their SwimStraight™ Open Water Navigation helps racers swim faster and stay on course in open water. This in-goggle navigation system enables triathletes to cut minutes off their water times, saving time and valuable energy for the bike and run.

In addition to the AR content, FORM also offers virtual coaching, which is free for the first month for new customers. Swimmers receive real-time instructions and guided workouts designed by Olympic-level coaches.

FORM’s founder and CEO, Dan Eisenhardt, swam competitively for 14 years before starting his career as a sports technology entrepreneur. Before FORM, he co-founded and ran Recon Instruments, which shipped the world's first smart eyewear for sports and was acquired by Intel in 2015. At FORM, Dan is joined by a team of industry leaders with decades of combined expertise in sports eyewear design, activity-tracking algorithms, and augmented reality optics.

If you’re a swimmer looking to refine your technique, build fitness, and race faster, these goggles may be for you!

Technology for Good

Did you know that dance technology is a thing? Meet Yamilée Toussaint Beach, dance technologist, founder, and CEO of STEM from Dance.

STEM From Dance empowers girls of the Global Majority with the know-how, experience, and confidence to dream big and exceed in STEM — all through the power of dance. Traditionally, communities have used dance to release, celebrate, draw strength, communicate, and learn. Yamilée has shown that combining dance with technology transforms girls’ mindsets around STEM careers, from unthinkable to within reach.

Interested in getting involved? Learn how here!

Tech Retrospective: The Rise and Fall of XBox Kinect

Microsoft’s Kinect sensor for the Xbox 360 was announced in 2009, positioned to rival Sony’s Move controller and the Wii Remote. But unlike its gaming industry competitors, Kinect wasn’t just a game controller that could sense your wrist movements; it was technology capable of capturing your voice and the movements of your entire body, enabling all kinds of cool new ways to interact with video games.

In 2010, when Microsoft released the first generation Kinect sensor for the Xbox 360, it marked a significant breakthrough in motion sensing technology. Affordable for most gaming audiences (around $150 USD), users interacted with games without having to rely on handheld controllers. Instead, they interacted naturally with their bodies and voices, captured using an RGB camera, depth sensor, and microphone array. Kinect went on to win the Guinness World Record for the fastest-selling gaming accessory, thanks to its groundbreaking features.

Some of the groundbreaking tech in Kinect games included skeletal tracking, facial recognition, and voice recognition. The unique, controller-free experience extended its reach into healthcare for rehabilitation, education for interactive learning, and creative installations for the arts.

Because of its innovative approach, Kinect technology quickly gained popularity and evolved into Windows OS versions and the Xbox One Kinect sensor V2, each enhancing its capabilities and expanding its applications. The final iteration, Azure Kinect, released in 2019, marked a shift from gaming to enterprise and AI applications.

Each version was met with a mix of enthusiasm and criticism, reflecting the evolving expectations and preferences of its diverse user base. The features weren’t perfect, but for the price point and the ease of use, they were well ahead of their time.

Like any first-generation product, the Kinect had its fair share of problems. You needed to be at least 6 feet away from the Kinect for its sensor to work properly. If you were used to the precision of the Xbox 360 controller, the motion-sensing camera may have seemed finicky in comparison; consequently, not many games capitalized on the motion detection or what were relatively limited voice control capabilities by today’s standards. As a result, the Kinect landscape became dominated by a few dance, sports, and exercise games.

For people like me who like to move, it was the dance games that held the greatest appeal anyway. And I still look back on those Dance Central 3 days fondly!

Kinect’s journey is not unlike many other technologies that, while revolutionary at the time, faced challenges. The first, and common well beyond just the gaming industry, is resistance to change by the dominant target demographic (gamers), and in this case, a shift back towards a preference for traditional interfaces. Advancements by their competitors in the very technologies they originally introduced also played their part. There was also the practical limitation of the Kinect needing ample physical space for optimal use. All of these factors led to its gradual decline in the gaming sector.

By August 2023, Microsoft discontinued Kinect production, including Azure, which never gained widespread adoption in the consumer market. Despite this, Kinect technology lives on. Nowadays, it’s utilized in academia, robotics, and through third-party partners, highlighting its lasting impact and the industry’s ongoing evolution.

If you want to have the closest Dance Central 3 experience available with today’s tech, download Just Dance. It’s not hands-free like the Kinect was, but it will turn your smartphone into a controller and track your moves. And it’s free.

Learning Theory: Psychomotor Learning

In their seminal work, “Analyzing Instructional Content: A Guide to Instruction and Evaluation,” Phil Tiemann and Susan Markle propose four basic types of learning and point to some of the relationships between these basic types. One of those four broad types is psychomotor learning, the learning that “takes place as one learns how to move certain muscles in a precise way.”

With psychomotor learning, emphasis is on the precise form of the response - a golf swing using good form, the correct strokes and stroke order when writing kanji, music notes played correctly, just to name a few examples. Single responses make up the foundational level of psychomotor learning, what some practitioners and instructional designers refer to as “components.” An enormous amount of effort and repetition is required to learn these responses so they become fluent and effortless.

The next level of complexity occurs when responses are performed in a particular order to form chains. Tiemann and Markle describe shoe tying as the classic example of a psychomotor chain. Learners practice chains until they established a smooth flow of movement from one response to the next. So many activities of daily life involve the performance of chains, some which may have seemed effortless to learn, others, considerably more difficult.

Kinesthetic repertoires are the highest level of psychomotor learning complexity. These repertoires require many different responses and chains of responses that must occur under specific matching circumstances. The sport-specific repertoires of Olympic athletes illustrate this level of psychomotor learning well, responding automatically with complex responses to ever-changing demands of their specific sport. But other, everyday repertoires might come to mind as well, such as the subtle movements of a surgeon or a butcher carving out specific cuts of meat, the vehicle operating skills of a race car driver or a construction crane operator, or the molding skills of a sculptor or a potter working a wheel.

If only, Neo!

Psychomotor skills are never acquired just by reading an instruction manual or watching a video. You don’t learn kung fu by simply thinking or talking about it, only by actually practicing it. Pronunciation of words in a foreign language are learned by pronouncing those words, not just by listening to someone else pronounce them. Watching someone demonstrate or model can help the learner but the actual learning happens through activity. Similarly, when teaching a chain, written, spoken, or video directions or demonstrations can help, but mastery of the chain is only evidenced by the learner’s fluid performance of it.

But it’s not just about repetition. Performance doesn’t just get better with repeated attempts and high hopes. Feedback on the performance is necessary so that the learner knows how to improve. Sometimes the environment provides sufficient feedback - if you’re playing darts and you miss the board, you can see that! Other responses may be more complex and require corrective feedback from a skilled observer - a theatre director, a swimming coach, a foreign language instructor, or a piano teacher, just to name a few.

Tiemann and Markle use the term coaching to refer to the process followed by a skilled observer when providing such feedback in athletics or other motor skill areas. Consider the act of coaching in terms of its intent. A coach wants the learner to improve the quality of one or more psychomotor responses. They use the concept of “good form” to categorize the quality of psychomotor responses. The characteristics of good form provide clues for how to teach it - how to coach effectively.

Good form is evident when the learner exhibits good coordination and timing in performing a psychomotor movement. Learning good form is hard work. The purpose of coaching is to improve the quality or form of a psychomotor response by providing feedback to the performer, either during or immediately following actual attempts at the response. The coach takes into consideration the emotional level of learning and understands that feedback also impacts a learner’s motivation. Effective feedback is both instructive and motivating, providing specific clues on what to improve while motivating the learner to continue practicing.

Learning good form happens in a matter of degrees. Learners enter the coaching interaction with a pre-existing level of coordination and timing as it pertains to the specific psychomotor response in question, so coaching typically takes the learner from some reasonable approximation of the response — since I figure skate, let’s say a one-foot spin — to a close approximation of good form of that response — a scratch spin.

Performance improves as the skater learns to attend to relevant feedback, suggesting that some feedback is more relevant than other feedback.

So what determines the relevance of the feedback? Ultimately, the feedback that is most relevant is that which is useful in real-world situations where the coach is no longer present. Most athletes can tell you when something feels right, when they feel in their own bodies that the movement was made with good form. The intent of the best coaching, both verbal and through physical guidance to move the body to perform the movement correctly, is to cause the learner to attend to the internal, kinesthetic feedback provided by their own body.

Once a learner can approximate good form to some extent, then appropriate practice is necessary. In most cases, such practice involves massed and distributed repetition across time, where the learner has internalized their coach’s feedback, attending to the feel of the skill done with good form. Both the verbal and physical prompts of a coach are essential up to a point, but practice is needed to establish the smooth sequence of responses required in performing a kinesthetic repertoire. This latter point is what is often referred to as the memory aspect of psychomotor learning, or “muscle memory,” as it is often called.

As we saw with the tech highlighted at the beginning of the newsletter, there is tremendous opportunity to use technology to extend the reach and effectiveness of coaching psychomotor skills. You saw that coach feedback can be automated and/or also available synchronously through the Internet of Things (IoT), wifi, and smart devices like the FORM Smart Swim googles. Depending on the complexity of the psychomotor skills, automated coaching, as described in last month’s newsletter, might even provide a better coaching experience than coaching from human coaches.

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That’s all for now. I hope the tech you learned about in this month’s edition has inspired you to think of other ways tech can help keep us moving!

See you next month!