Blogging conversation

i love blogging.
i’ve blogged for five years now.
blogging let’s me say what i want.
it helps me think,
and learn.

Free the verse!trouble is,
blogging is like talking into a phone
without an ear piece.

talk, talk, talk.
silence, silence, silence.
talk, talk, talk.
silence, comment, silence.

conversation is the ultimate learning technology.
it’s engaging.
yet few people have the opportunity
to read the conversation of comments.

i’d like a blogging tool that encourages conversation
and makes it more accessible.
not some obscure little button
or a dysfunctional work-around like archives by date.

rather, something that surfaces
conversations that are appealing.

integrated into the blogosphere.

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For example, in early December, I blogged Learning Skills, ha, ha, ha. I wrote, in part,

This marvelously tongue-in-cheek report looks at 800 studies of learning styles and concludes that there are better uses for educational funding. “Learning style awareness is only a ‘cog in the wheel of the learning process’ and ‘it is not very likely that the self-concept of a student, once he or she has reached a certain age, will drastically develop by learning about his or her personal style’.”

Harold Jarche, Stephen Downes, Brian Alexander, Clark Quinn, Christopher Sessums, and Don Clark posted comments pro and con.

I dare say that few people ever saw this marvellous repartee. One exception is the fellow who added a comment 45 minutes ago. Were it not for email alterting me to his comment, I would have forgotten this disucssion entirely. Here are some of the comments I would have missed:

• The emporer has no clothes! But many people will still make much money off of these schemes. I guess PT Barnum was right
• In how many of the cases do the students select their own learning style, as opposed to testing ‘assigned’ learning styles? The process of double-blind experimentation sometimes blinds us.
• Different people learn in different ways at different times and in different situations. One size does not fit everyone and slicing learnng styles into being either an A, B, C, or D doesn’t work either. There is a lot of interesting learning style research out there (e.g. Kolb) but for me, I use this as my design yardstick – adapt your instruction for as many different perspectives and approaches as possible and as much learner control as practical.
• I spent 2.5 years leading a project building a system that adapted learning on the basis of independent learner characteristics (read: learning styles). I had several months to steep myself in the, er, research before I had the luxury to hire a psychometrician to complement the senior cognitive scientist also on the team. My take was that the measures were highly redundant (a view this report apparently concurs with).
• Does it make sense to design a learning experience one way for Bob and a different way for Sally? Roger Schank does not belive so. In Designing World-Class E-learning: How IBM, GE, Harvard Business School, & Columbia University are succeeding at E-Learning, he insists that people do not have different learning styles, but they do have different >b>personalities. Schank’s dictum: figure it out yourself or get help.
• Schank is right – it’s faddish, non-empirical nonsense, confusing personality traits with the process of learning. Trainers and teachers would be better served understanding personality and the role it plays in learning. This stuff is to learning what creationism is to evolutionary science.
• The question still stands – why do the same people go through the same learning experience and some come out with an ability to apply and others don’t? As a teacher and a designer I’ve seen some otherwise inattentive learners come alive once I change my approach.
• If one believes, as I do, that learning is adaptation to one’s surroundings, Roger Schank’s approach may be the most realistic. Life is not delivered according to learning styles.
• Eight years later, the coping skills I learned in high school enabled me to serve in the U.S. Army for two years without doing a push-up or running a lap. I’m glad my high school didn’t have a special football team for the uncoordinated.

The conversation overall has this marvellous back-and-forth aspect that comes from the speakers having different perspectives.

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spare me the lengthy articles
on learning style studies
with statistcal measures of reliabilty
but no claim to validity
in the real world.

i like learning from conversation.
and as i started to say,
i wish blogging made listening to it
a more natural thing to do.