
Light Touch Learning is me, and I’m Norman Lamont, based in Edinburgh.
Coaches and rails
Cathy Moore, Action Mapping and scenarios

Norman offers a rare and refreshing combination of clear thinking, good humor, and dedication to high-quality instructional design. His experience in advocating for good design in a wide range of settings helps him empathize with both designers and learners and find ways to work around the challenges that many organizations face.
(Cathy Moore)
Here are some of the organisations I’ve worked with. I’ve been a speaker at Learning Technologies,the Elearning Alliance, and the E-Learning Network.
I’m currently developing with Howie Pearson an Action Mapping public course, and I’m also writing a book about scenarios. If these things interest you, there are lots of resources on this site about them:
There are two complete series of posts here on scenarios:
- The Designing Predicaments Workbook is a free template for simple scenarios. This video series will help you get the best from it.
- The Branching Scenario Out Loud series shows how I built a more complex scenario, from needs analysis to final Storyline product.
Values
I once sat with a learning manager as a vendor sold the benefits of an LMS to us. He said ‘Now you’ll be able to track every page each person viewed. You can be sure they were exposed to every message you put out there. You can even force a path through so they have to open every page.’ The learning manager’s nodded enthusiastically. I knew this guy. He was smart, creative, full of initiative. I could imagine his reaction if someone told him he had to click on every page, or, worse, every link on every page. “You have to eat up all your vegetables if you want pudding”. Yeah, right. At that moment I became aware that my values were not the same as theirs. That I believe the golden rule applies in learning too. – treat others the way you’d like them to treat you.
Fun stuff
I’ve been attending ‘training people about stuff with the computer’ events since the earliest days of The Association for Computer-Based Training (now the Elearning Network). I’ve heard the same lines trotted out for decades by people in decreasingly formal dress but consistent enthusiasm for buzzwords. You can’t do through that without developing a wry sense of humour about the whole business. Sometimes I have to let off steam about it and you can see the results here.
I retired in 2018 but I’ve left this site up in case any of the ideas are useful.