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Jay's Other Blogs |
Research on Learning and Performance recent finds and thoughts Thursday, September 27, 2001
Don Clark's A Time Capsule of Training and Learning is simply awesome. Want perspective? Here 'tis.
posted by jay cross on 9/27/2001 | link
Cisco E-Learning - Education
Not entirely original, but a nice summary of the benefits and common sense around eLearning. At Cisco, we believe that e-learning is a revolutionary way to empower a workforce with the skills and knowledge it needs to turn change to an advantage. Key Cisco E-Learning Philosophies E-learning is the online delivery of information, communication, education, and training.
One Innovation Voice: Conversation in Basque Country I3 UPDATE / Entovation International News
a free monthly briefing on the knowledge agenda The essence of knowledge management down to three things: managing people - since that is where tacit knowledge is found; managing processes - the flow and conversion of knowledge; managing information - explicit knowledge. (Nick Willard, cited in Will The Real Knowledge Management Stand Up?, No. 27, Feb 1999). "Just as you have to stand back from an impressionist painting to really understand it, so too in modern management is it important to step back to see the wood from the trees." (The Monet View of Knowledge Management, Debra Amidon, No. 10, May 1997). "Whatever programmes of restructuring and reengineering are taking place, has your organisation mapped out its knowledge base? If it hasn't, how can it know what it is losing when restructuring?" (Knowing What You Know, No. 6, Nov 1996). The core premise of the future is collaboration. This does not mean that organizations don't compete. This is inevitable. What it does mean is that the shift in orientation becomes one of sharing and leveraging one another for mutual success." (Collaborating for Innovation, Debra Amidon, No. 25, Nov 1998).
One Innovation Voice: Conversation in Basque Country
"10 KM lessons learned: 1. Many people just do not get it; 2. It's about Community; 3. External members of the community are critical; 4. Next Step - community in the clients; 5. Connecting has more results than collecting; 6. Difference in managing information and knowledge sharing; 7. Access to the knowledge is not enough; 8. Practice is more important than process; 9. The knowledge resides in the narrative; and 10. We understand the world through story-telling." (Stephen Denning, CKO, The World Bank).
techLEARNING.com | Technology & Learning - The Resource for Education Technology Leaders The Power of Animation
If a picture is worth a thousand words, what is an animation worth? A thousand pictures? A million words? The fact is, animation is able to convey a vast amount of information in a very short period of time, and can be a powerful method of reinforcing concepts and topics first introduced to students through text, discussion, or other media. Though still in its fledgling stage, animation holds the promise of allowing visual learners and those with special needs new and powerful ways to comprehend complex phenomena. For all learners, animation can enhance understanding by depicting real objects slowed down-as in a beam of white light passing through a prism and emerging from the other side as the separate wavelengths of the spectrum-or by depicting actions that have been sped up, such as the melting of arctic ice caps.
What a nice surpirse! This is a "Blogger of Note" today.
The primary topic here is learning to learn.
from today's New York Times Book Review
Sailing Alone Around the Room by Billy Collins excerpt from Collins' The History Teacher Trying to protect his students' And the Stone Age became the The Spanish Inquisiiton was "What do you call the matador's The condescending teacher "protects" the student from the real world by sugarcoating reality -- and ends up preparing the student for a world that does not exist. And so it goes, oversimplifying the complex, toning down violence, skirting conflict, teaching nonsense.
thinking in free verse
this morning in the fog in the past, before the tragedy, put stuff in, cram. memorize facts, learn to drive, believe in your vision, train your mind, staring into the fog, what's done is dunne. our brains are individual neurons of a global brain. without context, there is no content. without others, there is nothing to learn. it takes a village. might "learning to learn"
A disconnect in online learning
Since the dawn of the Internet age, boosters have predicted the end of leafy college campuses as schools go virtual. The miracle of the Internet was supposed to let great teachers reach any student, any time, anywhere. And people all over the world would get the equivalent of a Harvard degree through a computer and a network connection. What a crock. "The people peddling this stuff are suggesting that distance learning offers a bona fide education," said David F. Noble, a history professor at York University in Toronto. "But it's a con job. This is a scam. Distance education is just a digital diploma mill." Unlike Noble, I believe that new technologies such as the World Wide Web offer enormous benefits to students. But they work best as an adjunct -not a replacement - to traditional classroom education. Hounds baying at the moon. This is old news. I may put together a rants page of opposing viewpoints.
posted by jay cross on 9/14/2001 | link
On the Difficulty of Changing Our Perceptions about Such Things as Learning
Jay and Ursla Visser, Learning Development Institute An awesome paper. It's an open question whether we must destroy the schools to save them. Niels Bohr stressted that "All knowledge presents itself within a conceptual framework adapted to account for previous experience and that any such frame may prove too narrow to comprehend new experiences." Thus, the conceptual frame must be widened to restore order, abadoning some previous mental baggage along the way. For example, and I love this one, Nicolescu says: "Quantum physics caused us to discover that abstraction is not merely an intermediary between us and Nature, a tool for describing reality, but rather one of the constituent parts of Nature." To enable us to read new meanings into old words, the authors (Vissers) invent "<" school ">" and "<" schooling ">" as more expansive terms than school and schooling. This is tough to put into practice, "the conservative human mind is quick at creating old images in association with new words. Many a traditional educator may thus be seen using politically correct lanugage to describe stale practice. It's merely part of a well-developed immune system that fights change."
Back to Illich, this time on the Web of Education
Schools are designed on the assumption that there is a secret to everything in life; that the quality of life depends on knowing that secret; that secrets can be known only in orderly successions; and that only teachers can properly reveal these secrets. An individual with a schooled mind conceives of the world as a pyramid of classified packages accessible only to those who carry the proper tags. New educational institutions would break apart this pyramid. Their purpose must be to facilitate access for the learner: to allow him to look into the windows of the control room or the parliament, if he cannot get in by the door. Moreover, such new institutions should be channels to which the learner would have access without credentials or pedigree--public spaces in which peers and elders outside his immediate horizon would become available. While we can specify that the alternative to scholastic funnels is a world made transparent by true communication webs... preserving the right of equal access to the tools both of learning and of sharing with others what they know or believe. But this would require that the educational revolution be guided by certain goals: 1. To liberate access to things by abolishing the control which persons and institutions now exercise over their educational values. 2. To liberate the sharing of skills by guaranteeing freedom to teach or exercise them on request. 3.To liberate the critical and creative resources of people by returning to individual persons the ability to call and hold meetings--an ability now increasingly monopolized by institutions which claim to speak for the people. 4.To liberate the individual from the obligation to shape his expectations to the services offered by any established profession--by providing him with the opportunity to draw on the experience of his peers and to entrust himself to the teacher, guide, adviser, or healer of his choice. Inevitably the deschooling of society will blur the distinctions between economics, education, and politics on which the stability of the present world order and the stability of nations now rest.
Knowledge management systems built from the ground up on a logical taxonomy never seem to work. The latest approach in KM is to throw everything in a pile and let a search engine do the walking. Frankly, this is the only way I can find stuff in the far corners of my own websites. Let the computer do the work. In an ever-changing world, it's nonsense to try to hardwire knowledge.
*Prices are variable. Most listed here are starting points for a small collection of a few hundred thousand documents. posted by jay cross on 9/10/2001 | link
 The Nurnberg Funnel Reviewed by The frontpiece of this book shows a plump, happy faced youth dressed in the clothes of several hundred years ago with a funnel sticking out of the top of his head. Two teachers are industriously pouring large amounts of liquid knowledge into his head. This is the Nurnberg Funnel. It was supposed to "make people wise quickly." But the author of this book says, "There is not and never was a Nurnberg Funnel." (p.102) "Nevertheless the need to make people wise very quickly is often overwhelming. And in trying to make instruction efficient, designers have frequently lapses into trying to pour information into the learner's mind." Carroll's Critique of Systematic Self-Instruction Caroll thinks that "standard self-instruction" is often in "conflict with the learning styles and strategies" that ordinary people adopt spontaneously. These are the tutorials which "required users to proceed step by step through sequences of drill and practice exercises." (p.5) He has strong words to say about what he calls the standard systems approach to instruction. He says it has fundamental flaws and regards it as a single, thin, mechanical approach which only superficially understands how human learning takes place. In fact, for Carroll, systematic approach to instruction is the Bad "S-Word" pervading the otherwise happy world of the learner. Carroll's indictment, if substantiated, extends to much of the computer-based training approach being implemented these days. There is no questions that many CBT courses are numbingly dull drill and practice. On the other hand, it is a hopeful sign that somebody within the world's largest computer company has finally noticed how bad their manuals generally are. One is unable to determine from Carroll's exposition, however, if the S-word writers were represented in Carroll's experiments by the best of their genre or the worst. Serialists and Holists Pask (1976) describes two types of learners, "holists" and "serialist." Pask's description of holist learners sounds strikingly like those Carroll describes in the passages above (in the section titled "The Problems of Initial Learners."). One gathers from Carroll's book he believes almost all of us are holists. However, in my experience, roughly half of learners appear to be holists. Holists like to get the big picture before getting to the details. They like to start reading in the middle of books. They skip around a lot. They like making their own connections. Serialists on the on the other hand like to proceed through learning step by step. The like to fulfill all prerequisites necessary for one level before going to the next. They like to read books starting at the first page. Obviously, like many "personality typologies", it is better to regard "holist" and "serialist" as tendencies not types. Most people certainly can have aspects of both types. But Carroll might want to consider that some of his anomalous data on learner reactions to his minimalist manuals could well be explained by this distinction. I certainly found the serialist-holist distinction to explain otherwise puzzling data in some research that I have done on learning materials. Here are some of the quotes from Carroll that suggest serialists talking about Carroll's minimalist manuals: "...there was a tendency for learners to treat the intentionally incomplete hints, checkpoints and remedies as if they were the more familiar kind of step-by-step procedure."(p.136) Carroll also reports that several learners expressed a desire for "more structure" (p. 156) and that three participants "became frustrated enough to ask to be excused from the experiment and were replaced."(p. 167) Carroll is to be congratulated for reporting this anomalous data that runs counter to one of his major presuppositions (which is that substantially all learners act in the manner of holists) and he should not be blamed for failure to make something of it, since it would be hard to do that within the research and design paradigm he is working in. Knowingly or unknowingly, we have all been attempting to design manuals for holist and serialist learners for many years. Carroll's approach will certainly appeal to the holist in us. More than that, he may even have at least part of a framework for a single manual for both. That remains to be seen. Carroll has done at least one fascinating research project that points in this direction. In this design he prepared four versions of a minimalist manual: skeletal, elaborative, inferential, and rehearsal. But, regretfully, he doesn't provide sufficient examples of these four versions for me to comment further. the world is an onion. There's always a play within a play, and more layers to peel back. My personal learning style is at work here. Browsing text, stopping to re-read what catches my eye, then cutting and pasting what strikes me as worthy of retention into this Blog. When I can't lay my hands on digital text, I do something similar with Yellow Highlighters (one of the most powerful learning devices ever invented), even down to copying the highlighted text into a file (ref.doc) which was one of the seeds of what evolved into Jayhoo. The maxim says that the teacher always learns more than the student and right now I'm teaching, or at least providing links to, a faceless class. Frankly, it doesn't matter much if I'm the only one in the classroom when I further sift this Blog to create more distilled, refined content for www.meta-time.com. (Take that, you little people sitting in the dark!)
Minimalism
and Documentation Mary Ann Eiler. 'Minimalism and Documentation Downsizing: The Issues What is minimalism? Is minimalist documentation Realizing that Carroll's original formulation of minimalism at the IBM What is Minimalism? (1) tend to jump the gun, (2) avoid careful planning, (3) resist detailed systems of instructional steps, (4) are subject to learning interference from similar tasks, and (5) have difficulty recognizing, diagnosing, and recovering from their errors. For each "problem" however there is a corresponding
(2) learn by thinking and reasoning, (3) desire meaningful context and goals, (4) use prior knowledge to manage and assimilate new experience, and (5) use error diagnosis and recovery episodes to explore the boundaries of what they know. These problem-types and corresponding learning strategies form the basis for Carroll's minimalist
Previews, introductions, summaries, and reviews often violate Principle Is minimalism a complete documentation solution? Carroll and van der
3 (more Illitch)
Schools select for each successive level those who have, at earlier stages in the game, proved themselves good risks for the established order. Having a monopoly on both the resources for learning and the investiture of social roles, the university coopts the discoverer and the potential dissenter. A degree always leaves its indelible price tag on the curriculum of its consumer. Certified college graduates fit only into a world which puts a price tag on their heads, thereby giving them the power to define the level of expectations in their society. The American university has become the final stage of the most all encompassing initiation rite the world has ever known. No society in history has been able to survive without ritual or myth, but ours is the first which has needed such a dull, protracted, destructive, and expensive initiation into its myth. The contemporary world civilization is also the first one which has found it necessary to rationalize its fundamental initiation ritual in the name of education. We cannot begin a reform of education unless we first understand that neither individual learning nor social equality can be enhanced by the ritual of schooling. We cannot go beyond the consumer society unless we first understand that obligatory public schools inevitably reproduce such a society, no matter what is taught in them. Once a man or woman has accepted the need for school, he or she is easy prey for other institutions. Once young people have allowed their imaginations to be formed by curricular instruction, they are conditioned to institutional planning of every sort. "Instruction" smothers the horizon of their imaginations. They cannot be betrayed, but only short-changed, because they have been taught to substitute expectations for hope. They will no longer be surprised, for good or ill, by other people, because they have been taught what to expect from every other person who has been taught as they were. This is true in the case of another person or in the case of a machine. School sells curriculum--a bundle of goods made according to the same process and having the same structure as other merchandise. Curriculum production for most schools begins with allegedly scientific research, on whose basis educational engineers predict future demand and tools for the assembly line, within the limits set by budgets and taboos. The distributor-teacher delivers the finished product to the consumer pupil, whose reactions are carefully studied and charted to provide research data for the preparation of the next model, which may be "ungraded," "student-designed," "team-taught," "visually-aided," or "issue-centered." The result of the curriculum production process looks like any other modern staple. It is a bundle of planned meanings, a package of values, a commodity whose "balanced appeal" makes it marketable to a sufficiently large number to justify the cost of production. Consumer-pupils are taught to make their desires conform to marketable values. Thus they are made to feel guilty if they do not behave according to the predictions of consumer research by getting the grades and certificates that will place them in the job category they have been led to expect. School serves as an effective creator and sustainer of social myth because of its structure as a ritual game of graded promotions. Introduction into this gambling ritual is much more important than what or how something is taught. It is the game itself that schools, that gets into the blood and becomes a habit. A whole society is initiated into the Myth of Unending Consumption of services. posted by jay cross on 9/8/2001 | link
A friend encouraged me to read Ivan Illitch, and I've just started. What wonderful prose! What grand, independent thinking. Deschooling Society begins,
"Why We Must Disestablish School" Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby "schooled" to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is "schooled" to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question. In these essays, I will show that the institutionalization of values leads inevitably to physical pollution, social polarization, and psychological impotence: three dimensions in a process of global degradation and modernized misery. I will explain how this process of degradation is accelerated when nonmaterial needs are transformed into demands for commodities; when health, education, personal mobility, welfare, or psychological healing are defined as the result of services or "treatments." I do this because I believe that most of the research now going on about the future tends to advocate further increases in the institutionalization of values and that we must define conditions which would permit precisely the contrary to happen. We need research on the possible use of technology to create institutions which serve personal, creative, and autonomous interaction and the emergence of values which cannot be substantially controlled by technocrats. School appropriates the money, men, and good will available for education and in addition discourages other institutions from assuming educational tasks. Work, leisure, politics, city living, and even family life depend on schools for the habits and knowledge they presuppose, instead of becoming themselves the means of education. Simultaneously both schools and the other institutions which depend on them are priced out of the market. School has become the world religion of a modernized proletariat, and makes futile promises of salvation to the poor of the technological age. The nation-state has adopted it, drafting all citizens into a graded curriculum leading to sequential diplomas not unlike the initiation rituals and hieratic promotions of former times. The modern state has assumed the duty of enforcing the judgment of its educators through well-meant truant officers and job requirements, much as did the Spanish kings who enforced the judgments of their theologians through the conquistadors and the Inquisition. To detach competence from curriculum, inquiries into a man's learning history must be made taboo, like inquiries into his political affiliation, church attendance, lineage, sex habits, or racial background. Laws forbidding discrimination on the basis of prior schooling must be enacted. Laws, of course, cannot stop prejudice against the unschooled-nor are they meant to force anyone to intermarry with an autodidact but they can discourage unjustified discrimination. A second major illusion on which the school system rests is that most learning is the result of teaching. Teaching, it is true, may contribute to certain kinds of learning under certain circumstances. But most people acquire most of their knowledge outside school, and in school only insofar as school, in a few rich countries, has become their place of confinement during an increasing part of their lives. But the fact that a great deal of learning even now seems to happen casually and as a by-product of some other activity defined as work or leisure does not mean that planned learning does not benefit from planned instruction and that both do not stand in need of improvement. The strongly motivated student who is faced with the task of acquiring a new and complex skill may benefit greatly from the discipline now associated with the old-fashioned schoolmaster who taught reading, Hebrew, catechism, or multiplication by rote. School has now made this kind of drill teaching rare and disreputable, yet there are many skills which a motivated student with normal aptitude can master in a matter of a few months if taught in this traditional way. This is as true of codes as of their encipherment; of second and third languages as of reading and writing; and equally of special languages such as algebra, computer programming, chemical analysis, or of manual skills like typing, watchmaking, plumbing, wiring, TV repair; or for that matter dancing, driving, and diving. Skill teachers are made scarce by the belief in the value of licenses. Certification constitutes a form of market manipulation and is plausible only to a schooled mind. Most teachers of arts and trades are less skillful, less inventive, and less communicative than the best craftsmen and tradesmen. Let me give, as an example of what I mean, a description of how an intellectual match might work in New York City. Each man, at any given moment and at a minimum price, could identify himself to a computer with his address and telephone number, indicating the book, article, film, or recording on which he seeks a partner for discussion. Within days he could receive by mail the list of others who recently had taken the same initiative. This list would enable him by telephone to arrange for a meeting with persons who initially would be known exclusively by the fact that they requested a dialogue about the same subject. Matching people according to their interest in a particular title is radically simple. It permits identification only on the basis of a mutual desire to discuss a statement recorded by a third person, and it leaves the initiative of arranging the meeting to the individual. Three objections are usually raised against this skeletal purity. I take them up not only to clarify the theory that I want to illustrate by my proposal for they highlight the deep-seated resistance to deschooling education, to separating learning from social control but also because they may help to suggest existing resources which are not now used for learning purposes.
Thinking about learning
An optimal learner knows how to recognize boxes and to test their limits. The learner must feel empowered to assess the legitmacy of boxes and to differentiate reasonable boxes ("Don't drive while drunk.") from unreasonable boxes ("Do not remove this tag.")
Learners need to be able to select the right perspective. They need to know when to back away and when to drill down, when to look through the telephoto lense and when to use the wide-angle.  posted by jay cross on 9/8/2001 | link
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Martin Seligman introduces the concept of learned helplessness by describing a dog that's raised in a box with a glass top. After a while, you can take off the glass, but the dog doesn't try to get out. He's learned not to. 
This is remarkably close to the box formed by the famous challenge, "connect the nine dots." One of Frank Lloyd Wright's precepts was to "break the box," e.g. replacing solid 90o corners with glass ones. 
And so we come to context. A box is defined as much by what surrounds it as by the space inside it. In fact, there's always a whole lot more outside than in. To get a view of the box and its surroundings, the learner must hop up to a higher plane. A professor of mine in B-school called this "going up in the helicopter." Getting To Yes advises one to take a look from the balcony. The principle is to get some distance from the box, to see the box in its box. (The universe is a nested Russian doll.)