Healthy Influence Blog

I’ve made enough progress on the new website to feel confident about blogging on it. This week I’ll post up what I’ve got and see how it runs.

This major revision came about when Matt Martin asked me to teach persuasion courses for the WVU Communication Studies program. My academic persuasion website had been up since the mid-1990s, but hadn’t been updated since 1998 when I left WVU to join the Federal goverment. The www.HealthyInfluence.com consulting website has been up since 2002 and had not been significantly revised since 2004. Matt’s request motivated me to rethink my online persuasion work.

I’m now combining both websites and their academic and consulting functions into one unified site at www.HealthyInfluence.com. The whole thing is held together by “Steve’s Primer of Practical Persuasion.” That page has a Google page rank of 7 and has literally hundreds of external websites that link back to it. A good and free online textbook available since 1996 has clearly attracted some attention and support, so why not focus upon it?

This new website will also encourage me to develop an idea I’ve been thinking about since I was a little kid. Warning – Geek Alert! When I was a little kid my parents bought me an encyclopedia set that included a “teaching machine.” This was in 1966 so the technology was laughable by today’s standards, but it was an interesting, functional, and useful machine. It was essentially a view screen. You would load sheets of paper with lots of text on them in sequence. The view screen would block out key portions of the text that forced you to “fill in the blank.” If you were having trouble completing any section, you could bring up a different sheet of paper and receive new instruction. The thing was a kind of Skinner box for learning.

Every since then, I’ve been fascinated with how people learn and the best way to teach them. As a result, throughout my academic career I’ve always been encouraged to focus on research activities, but I contine to keep coming back to instruction. It’s just more fun and interesting to me than any research project I’ve done.

My long term goal, therefore, is to develop Healthy Influence as an online instructional source for all things persuasion. Right now the instructional value of the site is with the Primer. And the Primer is a pretty good instructional resource. It does not simply describe persuasion concepts and theories, it teaches them. If you’ve got any kind of experience with college level texts you know that most of them are good at explaining, but not necessarily at teaching. I wrote the Primer not as a state of the art review and analysis of the literature, but as a learning tool. Now, I’ll continue on that path, but add new learning tools to the Primer. My ultimate goal is to create an “instructional engine” a motor that drives learning.