Useful learning with Hubspot

A few years ago (two decades to be exact - how time flies), I did a Masters in European Business Administration. The course comprised various subjects one of which was marketing. I remember I did my project and dissertation on setting up a UK food business in France. I was a tad early - there was academic interest but little hope of business success. Indeed, I"ve never bought Brit foods in a dedicated store because the prices have always been on the wrong side of my price/acceptability curve, even with high nostalgia peaks.

When I had finished my degree, I realised that it was totally inappropriate for small town Montpellier because it was aimed at large companies - the sort you find in London, Paris, Lyon... Oops. I got a job in admin instead, in a rush so I could repay the loan I'd taken out to pay for my "career-boosting" degree. Then I got pregnant and gave up the idea of a career in favour of keeping my job.

So I never got to use anything I had learned which is totally typical for me as I have never used my first degree either. I have a lot of talent in not terribly useful skills, like picking education I never get to use.

Still, it's all good intellectual effort, and I'm sure my life is the richer for  it...

However, I don't believe in giving up on education, and with the arrival of MOOCs (massive open online courses), there's a world of learning out there for the taking, and mostly for free. Maybe I could even dig up a talent for useful learning, that I could put to some use!

With that in mind, I recently signed up for Hubspot's Inbound Marketing certification. Here's the blurb:

The Inbound Course & Certification is a free marketing training course that covers the fundamentals of the Inbound Marketing Methodology. Learn how SEO, Landing Pages, Blogging, Conversion, Lead Nurturing, and Email marketing come together to form a modern inbound marketing strategy.

I thought it was excellent because it is customer-centric marketing rather than the marketer-centric. So it frowns upon invasive practices such as pop-ups, unwanted emails, in-your-face spam and so on - things I personally hate. Instead you have to attract people who have a problem they want answers to, help them to find a solution, convert them into customers, close the sale, and finally delight them with the way you do business afterwards.

The course is made up of twelve classes that cover all aspects of Inbound through videos where it's all clearly explained, and you can download both the videos and transcripts in order to revise for the test. In order to get certified, you have to pass the test. Sixty questions to be finished in 75 minutes that you can take a maximum of three times before being locked out for one month.

I'm proud to say I got it in one and am thus Inbound Certified, and here's my badge.

 

 If you want to update your marketing skills, I do recommend Inbound as good place to start, and you get a snazzy badge to boot. 

Playing with History

It struck me the other day, from something my eldest said, that video games could be a useful source of learning about history. I can't remember which game he was referring to, but he said that he'd learned a lot about that period of history by playing it.

Today, in Le Figaro, I read that Ubisoft has made three short movies relating to their game Assassin's Creed. It's a story set in the Italian Renaissance period and the realism of the backgrounds is stunning as you can see from the image above. I have no idea whether other historical information is either included, accurate or ignored, but it seems to me that video games could incorporate a lot of historical accuracy and actually serve a purpose other than pure entertainment.

There are many wars and many heroes throughout history which could be used in a video game based on reality. Just think of historical fiction and how stories are woven into an accurate historical context. Sometimes the only difference between historical fiction and a textbook for accuracy is in the style the book was written, and it's much more fun learning from a gripping novel than wading through a dry list of facts. Indeed, there was an article on that very subject in The Times recently.

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel has just won the Man Booker Prize. It's a story set in 1520's England, with Henry VIII on the throne and is, apparently, a brilliant account of the period. If it can be done in fiction, it can be done in gaming too.

As Antonio Senior, the author of the Times article says, "All of world history can be viewed through the prism of a handful of extraordinary fictional characters."

Games, indeed ones based on historical fiction, could make reference to:

• the country
• the ruler of the moment
• the politics
  
• the Treaties
• the threats
• the social problems (risk of riots, famine, over-taxation, disease)
• agreements with neighbouring states
• other leaders/generals/decision-makers

If the story is good, it would do no harm to pick up useful, accurate historical information along the way. History teaching focuses very much on empathy these days, well, why not something more exciting - a story, social context, political context, action, war and 're-writing' history. It may even encourage kids to pick up a book and read more about what actually happened and why.

For kids who don't like reading, but do like playing video games, it would be an easy way for them to ingest otherwise unpalatable facts and provide an alternative to merely empathising with peasants.

There is huge interest in historical fiction, let's generate an equally huge interest in historical gaming. Over to you, Ubisoft.