There’s no point learning something in the first place if you forget it before you can put it to use. Here’s a recording of my recent webinar on making learning stick.
I’ll be in Italy the next two weeks, then in the UK for a week, and wrapping up with a week in the Netherlands. Anyone up for a rendezvous?
This morning I conducted a webinar on Making Learning Stick. Funny, isn’t it, that we invest so much to help people learn and so little to help them remember? Lots of what we learn goes down the drain before becoming converted to action.
To encourage participation, I gave away my favorite books for making the most of learning. It’s a biased list. All but three are by friends and colleagues. I like what I know.
This baker’s dozen have influenced my thinking enormously, sometimes by the act of writing them.
“All human institutions since the dawn of prehistory or earlier had always been designed to prevent change–all of them: family, government, church, army. Change has always been a catastrophic threat to human security.”
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends upon the unreasonable man.”
“The disturbing fact is that the vast majority of people, including educated and otherwise sophisticated people find the idea of change so threatening that they attempt to deny its existence. Even many people who understand intellectually that change is accelerating, have not internalized that knowledge, do not take this critical social fact into account in planning their own personal lives.”
“When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is probably wrong.”
“Given the underground resistance to change…the new idea either finds a champion or dies.”
“I watched his countenance closely, to see if he was not deranged… and I was assured by other Senators after we left the room that they had no confidence in it.”
“…as far as I can judge, I do not look upon any system of wireless telegraphy as a serious competitor with our cables. Some years ago I said the same thing and nothing has since occurred to alter my views.”
“…we hope that Professor Langley will not put his substantial greatness as a scientist in further peril by continuing to waste his time and the money involved in further airship experiments. Life is short and he is capable of services to humanity incomparably greater than can be expected to result from trying to fly…for students and investigators of the Langley type, there are more useful employments.”
In 1913 Lee De Forest, inventor of the audion tube which made broadcasting possible, was brought to trial on charges of fraudulently using the U.S. mails to sell stock to the public in the Radio Telephone Company, “a worthless enterprise.” In the court proceedings, the district attorney charged that “De Forest has said in many newspapers and over his signature that is would be possible to transmit the human voice across the Atlantic before many years. Based on these absurd and deliberately misleading statements, the misguided public…has been persuaded to purchase stock in his company…”
In 1876 Chauncey M. Depew asked his friend, the president of Western Union, whether he thought he ought to acquire a 1/6-interest in the Bell telephone patent for $10,000. His reply: “There is nothing in this patent whatever, nor is there anything in the scheme itself, except as a toy.”
“Mr. Bell, after careful consideration of your invention, while it is a very interesting novelty, we have come to the conclusion that it has no commercial possibilities.”
“Even if the propeller had the power of propelling a vessel, it would be found altogether useless in practice, because the power being applied in the stern, it would be absolutely impossible to make the vessel steer.”
In 1908 Billy Durant, in trying to raise money to create an automobile trust, boasted to J.P. Morgan & Co. “that the time would come when half a million automobiles a year will be running on the roads of this country.” This annoyed Morgan partner George W. Perkins who said “If that fellow has any sense, he’ll keep those observations to himself.” Unable to raise capital in Wall Street, Durant went home and put together something called General Motors.
“The Edison Company offered me the general superintendency of the company but only on the condition that I would give up my gas engine and devote myself to something really useful.”
“The actual building of roads devoted to motor cars is not for the near future in spite of rumors to that effect.”
“Good enough for our transatlantic friends…but unworthy of the attention of practical or scientific men.” A committee of the British Parliament in 1878 reporting on Thomas Edison’s ideas for developing an incandescent lamp.
Bulbs from Open Clipart
Alexa reports that “Based on internet averages, internettime.com is visited more frequently by females who are in the age range 55-64, have no children, have no college education and browse this site from work.” Go figger. This is for them.
My wife Uta, dog Flirt, and I are taking a week off the grid getting to know the North Coast of California better. Mendocino, Lost Cost, Redwoods, So. Oregon, Eureka, home.
Informal Learning and the Transfer of Learning: How Managers Develop Proficiency
“Our study suggested that managers learn mostly from informal learning, that proficiency is the product of informal learning, and that metacognitive knowledge and self-regulation skills moderate informal learning and the transfer process. In the light of these findings, companies should harness and leverage informal learning and cultivate the metacognitive abilities of managers, as opposed to increasing spending on formal training programs. By applying these strategies, companies may save money, develop more proficient managers, and gain a competitive advantage.”
Michael D. Enos, Marijke Thamm Kehrhahn, Alexandra Bell
Read those lines again. Think about how you develop managers. Stirring, isn’t it?
Too bad the article appeared ten years ago and didn’t make waves. (HUMAN RESOURCE DEVELOPMENT QUARTERLY, vol. 14, no. 4, Winter 2003)
Informal first!
This is a recording of a two-hour session with Prof Curt Bonk at Indiana University. Informal learning, 702010, complexity, amygdala learning, eLearning, and more.
Unless you have a lot of time on your hands or are a Jay-junkie, I wouldn’t bother. The content’s not bad — there’s just too damn much of it!
I wrote this post in Thursday, December 08, 2005, but I’m reposting it here because some people still have not got the message.
Normally, I would not expect to get many chuckles from a 186-page report entitled Learning styles and pedagogy post-16 learning A systematic and critical review, 2004, by Frank Coffield, Institute of Education, University of London; David Moseley, University of Newcastle; Elaine Hall, University of Newcastle; Kathryn Ecclestone, University of Exeter. This is an exception.
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’.”
The authors at the Learning and Skills Research Centre doubtless had a rollicking good time coming up with conclusions like “Research into learning styles can, in the main, be characterised as small-scale, non-cumulative, uncritical and inward-looking. It has been carried out largely by cognitive and educational psychologists, and by researchers in business schools and has not benefited from much interdisciplinary research.”
And how about this? “The sheer number of dichotomies in the literature conveys something of the current conceptual confusion. We have, in this review, for instance, referred to:
“The sheer number of dichotomies betokens a serious failure of accumulated theoretical coherence and an absence of well-grounded findings, tested through replication. Or to put the point differently: there is some overlap among the concepts used, but no direct or easy comparability between approaches; there is no agreed ‘core’ technical vocabulary. The outcome – the constant generation of new approaches, each with its own language – is both bewildering and off-putting to practitioners and to other academics who do not specialise in this field.”
The question at the end of the 186-page report asks whether government doesn’t have better things to do with its money, “Finally, we want to ask: why should politicians, policy-makers, senior managers and practitioners in post-16 learning concern themselves with learning styles, when the really big issues concern the large percentages of students within the sector who either drop out or end up without any qualifications?”
The weather in Berkeley is great today and my mind has turned toward vacation.
I’m reviewing blogposts from ten years ago to reflect on how things have changed and what’s still playing out. Along the way, I find little gems like Mr. Picassohead. Go ahead. Paint something.
It’s 11:10 pm in Berkeley and I am in the bowels of the Internet Time Lab listening to Melanie Mitchell tell me what’s up with fractals, dynamics, entropy, Shannon, genetic algorithms, and cellular automata. I find the STEM aspect of these topics boring, so I’m barreling through this MOOC’s recorded videos at a high rate of speed. Melanie is my tour guide and muse.
This is a quality MOOC. Melanie is diligent, Santa Fe Institute is sponsor, and it’s a fine presentation-MOOC. I’m milking the content for my own purposes, hopping around and following an inconsistent schedule.
The recordings have “first timer” written all over them. This communicates just how daring a step this is. It has the flavor of live television in the 1950s when everyone was waiting for the bloopers. No retakes. High-wire act. The material comes across as more honest that way. Maybe James Burke could read the lines next time.
Melanie’s trying so hard I feel obligated to keep plugging away. My relationship with Melanie is similar to my relationship with Angelina Jolie: non-existent, but I haven’t been over to check out the class forum. Maybe there’s some social action going on over there.
Melanie turns us on to how to open and mess with NetLogo, a nifty open source what-if system modeling tool. But then we descend into the first and second laws of thermodynamics. Entropy. Got it. The connection is murky. I’m about half way through, with good intentions but ducking homework assignments.
Two people asked me yesterday what MOOCs are like. I told that them there’s still time to join this MOOC. Don’t be like the parents who want their teen to have sex education but not sex training. You want to understand what’s right and what’s wrong about the variety of activities people are calling MOOCs, just take some. JFDI. (You’re not committing a lot of time; most people bail out early on.)