Hi, I’m Linda. Thanks so much for checking out the September 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.

September marks the one-year anniversary of the Linda Be Learning newsletter. When I first decided to write this monthly publication, I made a commitment to myself to stick it out for a year, to see if I would have the discipline to commit to writing each month. After the first few months, I decided to switch over to creating a theme for each month, to focus my writing efforts. The themed approach seemed to resonate with readers and also resulted in attracting a few new clients!

In this month’s edition, I’m bringing back the most popular segments from this past year’s newsletters. It illustrates the diversity of technologies, projects, and clients I’ve worked with over the past year, and hopefully will encourage newer subscribers to revisit some of those earlier editions.

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 go back and look at two of the (completely unrelated) technologies that seemed to have resonated with readers the most: The Exopulse Mollii Suit (from the Sept 2024 edition) and the Harvest Wall (from the February 2025 edition).

Exopulse Mollii Suit

The Exopulse Mollii Suit is a near full-body neuromodulation suit that relaxes spastic and tense muscles, activates weak muscles, and may help with relieving related pain. To date, it has been used to treat these symptoms due to cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, fibromyalsia, stroke or spinal cord injuries.

A personal assistive medical device, the Exopulse Mollii Suit is a game changer in the treatment of these neurological disorders and related symptoms. The suit uses a physiological reflex mechanism called reciprocal inhibition, enabling spastic muscles to relax by sending electrical signals to their antagonistic muscle. The combined effect of relaxing tense muscles and enabling the activation of weak muscles allows its users to enjoy a more active and less painful daily life.

Watch it in action, and I challenge you to think of not just its impresssive rehabilitation impact, but also potential implications for psychomotor learning.

Harvest Wall

The Harvest Wall is an indoor vertical grow wall that lets you maximize your food production by making the most out of your growing space, empowering people to grow leafy greens and vegetables in a controlled environment. Harvest Wall plants grow organically with 97% less water and no usage of chemicals and pesticides. The best part of the Harvest Wall is that its scalable feature allows you to transform an existing space into your very own indoor farm.

Upon purchase of the Harvest Wall, you also gain access to the The Global Food & Farm Community by Jill Clapperton. Through this social platform, you are able to build relationships with farming experts and other farmers in the same community, helping you understand healthy practices for farming.

To learn more, check out the Harvest Today website.

Technology for Good

While I featured a lot of technology focused on social good over the past year, the most popular segment was in the July edition, which focused on automation.

Automation is everywhere, whether we are aware of it or not. It has long been my opinion that automation is better suited for some tasks over others. Web content accessibility, per WCAG guidelines, for example, should have always been one such area where automation just happens by default.

But that’s not the case, sadly. And even more sadly, people who are responsible for ensuring such standards are in place are suspicious of whether automation can actually do the job accurately and correctly. This came up at an ASU presentation I did with a colleague back in June 2025 - here’s an excerpt.

TestParty

Enter Testparty.ai, designed to automatically scan source code to create more accessible websites, digital apps, images, and PDFs with complete visibility. Testparty products can be used to reduce compliance risk and supplement in-house or manual vendor audits. Thread, Tushy, Zedge, Dorai Home, Felt, Greatness Wins, Pasito, WestPoint Home Partners, and Pepperdine University are among some of the early adopters using this innovative new tech.

Check out this recent webinar from TestParty founders Michael Bervell and Jason Tan to learn more.

Tech Retrospectives

This segment of the newsletter is BY FAR the most popular of all the segments. Being the Anti/Auntie Tech Bro, I have seen a lot and have a LOT to say about the evolution of learning technology over the four decades I’ve now been messing with it. And I’m not shy about being critical about Big Tech and the oligarchs who founded those companies and profited handsomely while extracting from us all.

As popular as this segment of the newsletter typically is, by the numbers, the two most popular were Farmer Bill (February 2025) and Tupac at Coachella (March 2025).

So let’s take a look back at those two segments.

Farmer Bill

In his book, “The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire,” Tim Schwab discusses Bill Gates’s efforts in monopolizing agriculture and farming, first with his experimental GMO projects in Africa as well as his buying up of American farmland. Let’s begin with Tim’s take on Africa, starting at 3:12 in the following video.

The Continent published one of the stories featured in the video, which outlines how problematic Gates’s approach has been to African agriculture. From the article:

“Bill Gates and big agribusinesses are playing god,” said Durban-based cleric Bishop Takalani Mufamadi. “They claim to be messiahs of the hungry and the poor, but they have failed dismally to deliver because of the industrialisation approach, which degrades soils, destroys biodiversity, and values corporate profit over people. It is immoral, sinful and unjust.”

Two years before the Continent’s report, the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa wrote an open letter to Gates addressing the same issues, and a year prior to that, Scientific American published an opinion piece urging Gates to stop telling Africans what kind of agriculture Africans need. Independent research substantiates and supports these positions.

In addition to the shockingly problematic efforts Gates has caused in Africa, he has been making similarly concerning inroads impacting American farmers and farmlands as well. Rather than feeding more people or helping small-scale farmers, this transactional, tech-first, industrialized approach to agriculture is one that slowly but surely transfers knowledge, agency, and ownership over food production away from farmers and into corporate control.

Gates is also contributing to the concentration of power over a key component of the U.S. food system: the land itself. Americans lose about 2,000 acres of farmland a day, giving corporations and billionaires like Gates an opportunity to consolidate even more power over our food production.

In his book Controligarchs, author and investigative journalist Seamus Bruner uncovered Gates’s efforts to buy up American farmland and invest in synthetic dairy and lab-grown meats in the name of preventing climate change. He also argues that in doing so, Gates is doing more to inflate his net worth than eliminate carbon emissions. The chapter of the book focused on “the war on farmers” and monopolizing the nation’s food supply was the topic of this 2023 article from the New York Post.

So how do we combat such efforts? Legislatively, of course, but also, and more on topic for this edition of the newsletter, is learning how to grow your own food. And in the next section on learning theory and learning technology, you will be introduced to a few more experts who can help you with your efforts.

See the February edition to get introduced to those experts!

Tupac at Coachella

If you know me personally, you know that Tupac Shakur will always hold a special place in my heart. I’ve been a massive fan of his music and poetry from way back in the Brenda’s Got A Baby days, before I even moved to the United States.

Fast forward to 2012. I now live in the greater Seattle area, work in the tech industry, and had the opportunity to witness in real time the “resurrection” of Tupac at Coachella. If you’ve not seen it at all or in awhile, you can check out that performance below, and yeah, here’s the obligatory explicit lyrics warning.

For those of you not familiar with it, the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival is a two-weekend music and arts festival that takes place in Indio, California, near Palm Springs. It's considered one of the world's top music festivals, and features a diverse lineup of artists from many genres, large art installations and sculptures, culinary and drink experiences, and multiple stages hosting live music.

Coachella 2012 featured Tupac reunited with Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg, performing on April 15, 2012 or Day 3 (Sunday night) of the festival, as well as making a reappearance on closing night, over 15 years after Tupac had passed. In fact, Coachella itself didn’t even exist as a festival until 3 years after his death (which makes the part where he says “What’s up, Coachella?” even that much eerier). The performance itself was so well done, especially for the time, that when the video of it inevitably went viral, people began to question whether Tupac’s passing had been a hoax and he’d simply been in hiding all along. If that had been the case, he’d certainly aged well.

Many accounts refer to the virtual being they saw on that stage as a hologram, but technically, it’s a projection, not a hologram. Holograms are light-beam-produced, three-dimensional images visible to the naked eye. Even though he appeared to be 3D, the Tupac virtual being was a two-dimensional projection that employed a theatrical technique that’s been around for more than 430 years, a variation of an old effect called Pepper's Ghost. The technique was first used onstage in 1862 for a dramatization of Charles Dickens' The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain, employing an angled piece of glass to reflect a "ghostly" image of an offstage actor.

Virtual Tupac was a fully digital image created by Digital Domain Media Group (DDMG), who are responsible for the innovative visuals in more than 80 major motion pictures and hundreds of commercials, including Thor, Tron, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Star Trek and their Academy Award winning work in Titanic. What the audience saw was not found or archival footage of Tupac, but a very believable and kind of creepy illusion that was projected onto a Mylar screen onstage. It took AV Concepts, the company responsible for the live projection, several months of planning and four months of studio time to create. The most critical technical element was AV Concepts' proprietary Liquid Scenic server that delivered uncompressed media for 3 stacked 1920 x 1080 images, delivering 54,000 lumens of incredibly clear projected imagery. AV Concepts has used similar visual technology before for Madonna, the Gorillaz, Celine Dion, and the Black Eyed Peas, as well as resurrecting dead CEOs for corporate events.

Dr. Dre was the one who came up with and funded the idea. He and his production team also were responsible for working with Tupac’s estate and handling the legal ramifications of using his likeness, which required the approval and blessing of his mother, Afeni Shakur. The performance was shocking and unsettling, especially when Snoop Dogg and Dre interacted with Virtual Tupac as if he were a real person. But it also was imaginative and awesome, the highlight of that year's Coachella festival, and there was even some talk about taking Virtual Tupac on tour. DDMG went on to win the prestigious Cannes Lions Titanium Award later that year, in June 2012, for the most groundbreaking work in the creative communications field.

Originally it was said that Dr. Dre had a massive vision, and some people were thinking they should prepare for a trend of reanimating dead celebrities for live performances. At the time, it seemed like it could be a signicant windfall for the estates of deceased performers, as well as a means for reunion tours for bands with a deceased member. So what happened?

Check out this article for a deeper dive into the making of this phenomenal spectacle and its legacy.

Extra bonus: here’s an MTV interview with Tupac where he shares his thoughts on Donald Trump and greed — from 1992!!!! Yep, the man was a poet and a prophet.

More honorable mentions that didn’t make the cut, but are worth revisiting:

• Cars That Kill (December 2024 edition)

• Terraforming Mars (January 2025 edition)

• The Rise and Fall of XBox Kinect (April 2025 edition)

• JAWS: A Brief History (July 2025 edition)

• Kasparov vs Deep Blue (August 2025 edition)

Learning Theory and Learning Technology

Next to the tech retrospectives, I get a lot of feedback on the learning theory and learning technology segments of my newsletters. But the most popular of those was the one I wrote on psychomotor learning, in the April 2025 edition.

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 March edition of the newsletter, might even provide a better coaching experience than coaching from human coaches.

Featured Client: Read-a-Rama

I originally featured Read-a-Rama in the December 2024 edition, as well as the June 2025 edition, which focused on literacy. It makes sense to feature them once again, as we just launched the Read-a-Rama (RaR): The Online Training, a learning portal where professionals can take one of three asynchronous learning paths to get certified in the RaR methodology, participate in the growing RaR community, and gain access to the extensive curriculum, music, mindfulness, and research resources.

Visit the RaR website to get on the waitlist. To learn more, read on!

While most of my clients are adults working in the tech industry, the client I’m featuring this month focuses on literacy and nurturing children’s love of reading books. Given the current climate towards technology and public safety, as illustrated in the Tesla story, it’s important to remind ourselves that reading is in fact fundamental and is the first “code” most of us learn how to break.

Read-a-Rama is a non-profit that uses books for children and young adults as the springboard for all program activities. Founded by Drs. Michelle H. Martin and Rachelle D. Washington in 2009 at Clemson University, they provide fully-engaged year-round programming that seeks to improve literacy, particularly for children most in need of literacy intervention. Read-a-Rama programs are research-based and employ data to inform literacy and social emotional best practices.

When Dr. Martin moved to the University of Washington, she began offering camps in Washington State in 2017. Virtual programming began in March 2020, and Read-a-Rama is currently scaling their efforts, seeking to train adults across the country to offer Read-a-Rama programs at their schools, libraries, church groups, after-school programs, homeschool support programs, and other organizations that offer reading programs for children. Staff and volunteers serving Read-a-Rama campers build cultural competence to cultivate relationships with children from all backgrounds.

Visit the Read-a-rama website to learn more about offering Read-a-Rama programming at your organization.

Upcoming Learning Offerings

Ready to rethink everything you thought you knew about brand building? Join us on September 20, 2025 for our next can’t-miss Book Review as we peel back the layers of one of the most insightful marketing books out there: "Responsible Marketing: How to Create an Authentic and Inclusive Marketing Strategy" by Lola Bakare.

Together we’ll explore:

• Why outdated marketing tactics are failing (and the costly consequences for brands)

• The hidden risks of cultural missteps in 2025

• Building authentic connections without falling into the trap of performative activism

• Practical, actionable frameworks for responsible marketing (yes, you can start now) -The real future of brand-building in an inclusive world

This isn’t your average book club. This is a deep dive into the strategy, culture, and business behind the next era of marketing leadership.

I hope to see you there!

Bonus freebie: Last month, I did my first ever interview in Australia via the Online Prosperity podcast. Prosper and I had a great conversation where we discussed a ton of topics and is by far the most personal I have ever been on a podcast.

That’s all for now. I hope you’ve enjoyed this look back at some of the more popular segments from the past year’s editions of the newsletter.

See you next month!