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Jay's Other Blogs |
Research on Learning and Performance recent finds and thoughts Thursday, October 25, 2001
Breaking Down the Digital Walls
BREAKING DOWN THE DIGITAL WALLS: The authors, R.W. Burniske and Lowell Monke, take the serious view that all this expensive technology will be a tragic waste unless it results in more than vocational training to improve a student's future job prospects. They passionately believe that this technology can and should at the very least hone a student's critical thinking skills, molding him or her into a person possessed of intelligent insight and sound judgment.
EdTech Teaching Models
Also see Design Shop
Life On The Internet: Could Blogging Assist KM? Life On The Internet: Could Blogging Assist KM?
The MIT Media Lab spiders (indexes) the content of 9,000+ weblogs and features the ten most popular on its site at http://blogdex.media.mit.edu/ . This allows you to search across weblogs by content (most search engines ignore weblogs). Many Blogs are gathered together into groups via their own web sites, usually by topic, ethnicity or other personal characteristics, or audience. Some Portals have groups of Blogs and support discussion groups for the Bloggers (Yahoo, for example). The Blogs themselves are typically hosted by a blogging site which has the necessary software to make creating a daily journal/diary/message to the world easy for someone who is not likely to be a techie (although there are lots of techie Blogs, too). Such hosting sites include Blogger (www.Blogger.com), Diaryland (www.Diaryland.com), Pitas (www.Pitas.com), Blogspot (www.Blogspot.com), and Userland (our friend Dave Winer at www.Userland.com). Delightful as blogging can be, I’m not suggesting you take up this addictive pastime (unless you want to). I have another agenda in mind. Blogging and KM One of the tough tasks in KM is getting expertise located in an organization (that is, figuring out who has it on a subject by subject basis). Tougher still is validating its credibility with other members of the organization. Toughest of all is getting the experts to agree to share their expertise with others, except as part of their regular job. Employees who have spent a career lifetime enhancing their value because they “know” something others don’t are logically reluctant to give away their valuable expertise and, in that process, loose some or all of their value. In fact, plans to implement knowledge management often require prior exercises in changing corporate culture, moving employees from a gatekeeper culture, where knowledge is kept hidden and produced only when it can enhance the employee’s value, to a sharing culture, where knowledge sharing is encouraged and rewarded. It’s this kind of intermediate (and “squashy”) step that makes many executives decide that KM is Document Management, something that can be reduced to numbers and Return on Investment dollars. But what if the two – blogging and KM – got together? That is, what if we took the technology that allows Bloggers to quickly annotate their journeys through the web with information about the whys and wherefores with a KM system that allowed their organizational colleagues to use the weblogs as a source of expertise? Consider: -- If experts could use blogging software that was part of their normal work environment, probably part of their browser, to note and annotate web sites they wanted to share as part of their area of expertise (note the expert decides what to share, avoiding privacy problems); -- If these weblogs were collected by the KM system and then indexed by a spider against an organizational taxonomy (list of categories) that was optimized for the organization, its interests, and its experts; -- If organizational employees could search for collections of expertise by topic (or, as they became aware of their identity, by expert), assisted by the spidered weblogs All of this assumes that such weblogs would be internal to the organization (or limited to authorized external users such as contractors and business partners). Knowledge Management offers the possibility of allowing organizations to tap into not just the documents they’ve created, but the expertise of their employees, past and present. Weblogging is interesting because it is a fairly non-intrusive way of allowing workers to share the process by which they seek, analysis, and select information. If we could then add to the process some of the web-certified techniques for validating information and expertise we could further enhance the KM process. For example, we could (as popular “expert” sites on the web do) encourage users of KM expertise to rate information and experts on their usefulness so that others could pick based on high ratings. Or we could ask experts’ peers to validate their information before it was posted (as occurred in the Xerox Eureka experiment), so that each piece of expertise carries more credibility. Users today nearly “live” on the web. If we can offer them tools that extend that experience and build on it, taking their web work and turning it into reusable information for their colleagues, perhaps KM is not so far away as some think and that 53% plan for implementation this year will be for far richer, more useful, and more interesting systems.
Critical Success Factors: eLearning Solutions
Marion Wands and Andrew Le Blanc mwands@dc.com Critical Success Factors: eLearning Solutions is an edited version of a comprehensive document prepared for the Australian Tax Office by Marion Wands (DC) and Andrew Le Blanc (ATO) which was based largely on research done by Dr G. Cooper. For the full version of this document please email Dane Buchardt. Organisational Factors Technical Infrastructure Understanding the implications of technical infrastructure on the application of eLearning media is essential to a successful strategy. Involvement of IT staff in the identification of suitable eLearning products will maximise the chance of selecting usable tools. Clearly Defined Change Leadership Strategy The effectiveness of the application of eLearning strategies will be enhanced by the implementation of a comprehensive change leadership program. This program will consist of identification of cultural issues that will affect individuals' willingness and ability to use the technology, skill development for key stakeholders, work practices, learning environments, strategic HR initiatives to support eLearning such as performance management, career planning, succession planning and communication briefings. Management Support for Training Management support for eLearning is critical to its overall success. It is essential that managers understand their roles and are able to use the various eLearning media competently. Their view of the eLearning media and public comments will posted by jay cross on 10/21/2001 | link
Personal Knowledge Management
As T. Matthew Ciolek notes, "The Web is the global sum of the uncoordinated activities of several hundreds of thousands of people who deal with the system as they please. It is a nebulous, ever-changing multitude of computer sites that house continually changing chunks of multimedia information… If the WWW were compared to a library, the "books" on its shelves would keep changing their relative locations as well as their sizes and names. Individual "pages" in those publications would be shuffled ceaselessly. Finally, much of the data on those pages would be revised, updated, extended, shortened or even deleted without warning almost daily." He further notes that "The present body of the WWW is determined largely by the developers’ hunger for recognition and applause from their peers….
EDUCATION AND LEARNING TO THINK
by LAUREN B. RESNICK 1987 (!) This paper addresses the question of what American schools can do to more effectively teach what have come to be called "higher order skills." Unlike most National Research Council documents, it is not so much a report as the result of extended reflection upon a set of questions raised by and about the nation's educational system.
American schools, like public schools in other industrialized countries, have inherited two quite distinct educational traditions-one concerned with elite education, the other concerned with mass education. These traditions conceived of schooling differently, had different clienteles, and held different goals for their students. Only in the last sixty years or so have the two traditions merged, at least to the extent that most students now attend comprehensive schools in which several educational programs and student groups coexist. Yet a case can be made that the continuing and as yet unresolved tension between the goals and methods of elite and mass education produces our current concern regarding the teaching of higher order skills. Mass education derives from a "low literacy" tradition (Resnick and Resnick, 1977) aimed at producing minimal levels of competence in the general population. It originated in Europe in Reformation and counter-Reformation efforts to produce a literate, catechism-and bible-reading population. Mass education was, from its inception, concerned with inculcating routine abilities: simple computation, reading predictable texts, reciting religious or civic codes. It did not take as goals for its students the ability to interpret unfamiliar texts , create material others would want and need to read, construct convincing arguments, develop original solutions to technical or social problems. The political conditions under which mass education developed encouraged instead the routinization of basic skills as well as the standardization of teaching and education institutions. Standardization was a means of ensuring that at least minimal curriculum standards would be met, that teachers would be hired on the basis of competency for the job rather than political or familial affiliation, and that those responsible for the expenditure of public funds could exercise orderly oversight over the educational process. Standardized testing was one of the methods developed to exercise oversight and centralized control of the schools The most important single message of modern research on the nature of thinking is that the kinds of activities traditionally associated with thinking are not limited to advanced levels of development. Instead, these activities are an intimate part of even elementary levels of reading, mathematics, and other branches of learning-when learning is proceeding well. In fact, the term "higher order" skills is probably itself fundamentally misleading, for it suggests that another set of skills, presumably called "lower order," needs to come first. ... Cognitive research on the nature of basic skills such as reading and mathematics provides a fundamental challenge to this assumption. Indeed, research suggests that failure to cultivate aspects of thinking such as those listed in our working definition of higher order skills may be the source of major learning difficulties even in elementary school. The process of understanding a written text, as it emerges in current psychological and artificial intelligence accounts, is one in which a reader uses a combination of what is written, what he or she already knows, and various general processes (e.g., making inferences, noting connections, checking and organizing) to construct a plausible representation of what the author presumably had in mind Four kinds of knowledge are called upon as readers construct meanings for texts. The first is linguistic knowledge: knowledge about how sentences are formed, rules of forward and backward reference, and the like. This knowledge is often only implicit, but readers depend on it to find common referents, to link agent to action to object, and to otherwise construct a representation of a coherent set of events and relationships. The second kind of knowledge is topical knowledge, that is, knowledge about the text's subject matter. Like linguistic knowledge, topical knowledge is often used so automatically that readers are unaware of its contribution. Third, readers invoke knowledge about rules of inference. This knowledge, too, is likely to be implicit for the skilled reader. Finally, knowledge of conventional rhetorical structures often aids the process of text interpretation. This broad analysis of comprehension as a meaning-imposing process that depends on the reader's knowledge of text structure as well as linguistic, topical, and inferential knowledge is common to all current cognitive theories of reading. Cognitive theory, in other words, suggests that processes traditionally reserved for advanced students-that is, for a minority who have developed skill and taste for interpretive mental work-might be taught to all readers, including young children and, perhaps especially, those who learn with difficulty. Cognitive research suggests that these processes are what we mean by reading comprehension. Not to teach them is to ignore the most important aspects of reading. This convergence of cognitive research on reading with traditional high literacy concerns offers some promise that the goal of extending high literacy standards to the mass educational system can be achieved. There is substantial evidence that children's difficulty in learning school mathematics derives in large part from their failure to recognize and apply the relations between formal rules taught in school and their own independently developed mathematical intuitions. Although the evidence is limited, it suggests that successful math learners engage in more metacognitive behaviors (e.g., checking their own understanding of procedures, monitoring for consistency, trying to relate new material to prior knowledge) during math learning; they are also less likely to practice symbol manipulation rules without reference to the meaning of the symbols (Peterson et al., 1984; Resnick, 1987). Strong math learners also engage in more task analysis (Dweck, in press); that is, they figure out alternative strategies for attacking problems and generating solvable subproblems. These sense-making and knowledge-extending activities parallel those that are so well documented for high levels of reading skill. They are also activities generally viewed as characteristic of high levels of mathematics thinking and problem solving. Thus, we again see a convergence between the processes identified by cognitive research and those associated with traditional elite mathematics education. GENERAL REASONING: IMPROVING INTELLIGENCE Mathematics and reading are not unique in the extent to which high-level performance depends on processes of monitoring one's understanding, imposing meaning and structure, and raising questions about presented material. Much the same story can be told about all the subject matter in the school curriculum and about all but the most routine job performances. Recent research in science problem solving, for example, shows that experts do not respond to problems as they are presented-writing equations for every relationship described and then using routine procedures for manipulating equations. Instead, they reinterpret the problems, recasting them in terms of general scientific principles until the solutions become almost self-evident (Larkin et al., 1980). Expert writers treat the process of composing an essay as a complex task of shaping a communication that will appeal to and convince an intended audience rather than as a simple task of writing down everything they know about a topic Self-Monitoring Skills Direct strategy training may be only partially helpful in increasing performance because many individuals primarily lack good judgment regarding when strategies should be applied. Extensive research supports this prediction. For example, research with retarded individuals shows that it is relatively easy to improve memory task performance by simply instructing people to rehearse or to engage in verbal elaboration and other mnemonic activities. Typically, the improvement comes almost immediately, suggesting that the strategies are, in some sense, already known. However, in these studies there was almost complete lack of transfer, even to tasks that were only slightly modified. This meant that retarded individuals' difficulty was in not knowing when memory strategies were called for rather than in being unable to use the strategies. Although we cannot offer a "seal of approval" for any particular approach, the cumulative evidence justifies cautious optimism for the venture as a whole. Thinking and problem-solving programs within the academic disciplines seem to meet their internal goals and perhaps even boost performance more generally. It seems possible to raise reading competence by a variety of methods, ranging from study skill training through the reciprocal teaching methods of Brown and Palincsar to the discussions of philosophical texts in Lipman's pro-gram. On the other hand, general improvements in problem-solving, rhetoric, or other general thinking abilities have rarely been demonstrated, perhaps because few evaluators have included convincing assessments of these abilities in their studies. Reasoning has never had an explicit place in the mass education curriculum. Philosophy has no regular position in the standard American high school curriculum, nor is reasoning specified as part of the elementary school syllabus in the way reading, writing, and mathematics are. By contrast, both have been cornerstones of the elite, academy education tradition. Thus, incorporating reasoning into the regular educational program would extend the high literacy tradition to the entire school system. However, it is not clear whether reasoning should be treated as a separate discipline or suffused through the curriculum. Most philosophers working within the informal logic movement want to see critical thinking or reasoning courses included in the curriculum. Their argument is partly practical: reasoning skills will be passed over or trivialized if they are spread through the curriculum and not given formal recognition. Higher order thinking is the hallmark of successful learning at all levels-not only the more advanced. Good thinking depends on specific knowledge, but many aspects of powerful thinking are shared across disciplines and situations. A central issue, both for educational practice and for research that can guide that practice, is whether thinking and learning abilities are general-that is, applicable in all domains of thinking-or specific to a particular domain. The evidence shows clearly that thinking is driven by and supported by knowledge, in the form of both specific facts and organizing principles. This knowledge, together with the automated recognition and performance that come with extended practice, allows experts in any field to engage in more sophisticated thinking than people new to the field. At the same time, many aspects of thinking are shared across fields of expertise. These include a wide range of oral and written communication skills, mathematization and representational abilities, principles of reasoning, and skills of argument construction and evaluation. These can be thought of as "enabling skills" for learning and thinking. Generally speaking, people rely on powerful but only narrowly applicable thinking methods in domains in which they are expert and use broadly applicable but weak methods for learning and thinking in fields they know little about. Good thinkers need both the powerful but specific and the general but weak kinds of skills. A fourth 'R'-reasoning-might be considered a candidate for a new enabling discipline in the school curriculum. Links between thinking skills and motivation for thinking must be developed. Everyone agrees that successful educational achievement requires both motivation and appropriate cognitive activity. Yet our theories implicitly treat motivation and cognition as if they worked independently to determine the nature and extent of learning. In fact, these traditionally separate factors appear far more intimately related than most current research helps us to appreciate.* However, recent research linking children's conceptions of their own and others' intelligence to the ways in which they analyze learning tasks offers a promising new connection, as does research on intrinsic motivation for learning. Active experimentation on what kinds of school activity organization cultivate motivation for particular kinds of complex and strategic learning is needed. The two concerns must be merged as this work proceeds; efforts to develop more intellectually functional motivational patterns should not become substitutes for efforts to establish specific cognitive competencies. Motivation for learning will be empty if substantive cognitive abilities are not developed, and the cognitive abilities will remain unused if the disposition to thinking is not developed.
from The Chronicle of Higher Ed, reporting on eCornell
The two cultures, revisited. That expectation of profit, though, still concerns some Cornell J. Robert Cooke, dean of the faculty at Cornell, says one fear was
New Habits of an e-Learner
Confessions by Elliott Masie I can get pretty weird as an e-Learner. After approximately 500 hours as * Browsing is What the Browser Was Designed For: I browse! I sample a * Triple Tasking: I triple task! When I am participating in a * Talking While I Learn: I normally don't talk to myself, except, when I * I Compete With Instructional Times: When an author says that a module * I Copy, Paste and Send: When I am in the middle of a cool e-Learning
Are you familiar with Fathom?
Topics are strung along paths, which run along the top of the screen. A path might be "Education in Cultural Context." When one path crosses another, say "The Future of Work" at a common story, for example "Measuring the Performance of Education," you can hop to the other path. You can easily click your way around a subject to see connections. A powerful concept although these paths don't always have many nodes. For a quick and very worthwhile demo, go to Fathom, scroll midway down the page to "Learning Trails." Click for the Flash demo. Good stuff. Making connections could be a meta-learning skill. I'll try it for a while this morning. New idea? Put nodes at either end.
Instream Partners One Maritime Plaza Suite 1750 § San Francisco, CA 94111 § p. 415.217.6400
"Instream would like to thank those companies who joined us for our quarterly eLearning CEO Luncheon on September 27th. The networking event featured executives from Alamo Learning Systems, Teamscape, HR One, Internet Time Group and Docent." Boutique investment banker Instream has a worthwhile way of looking at eLearning companies' performance: by capitalization and by traditional or eLearning offerings.
 Order out of chaos Will user-friendly Web log software make it easier for employees to share knowledge? By Steve Alexander Will businesses blog? Jay Cross, CEO of the Internet Time Group, a Berkeley, Calif., e-learning and knowledge management consulting firm, thinks a Blogger-enhanced content management system could be a powerful business tool. “It would allow subject matter experts to document what’s important to them, and then publish it,” Cross says. “Instead of some knowledge engineer telling you what’s good for you, which is the old style of top-heavy corporate thinking, you’d have people in the sales force saying to each other, ‘This is information that’s really worthwhile.’ So you get informal exchanges of information within the corporation.” Cross believes that a Blogger-based content management system would help employees deal with information overload, as an editor could filter out the clutter and make sure only relevant information gets posted. While Cross sees the potential for Blogger and other Web log software, he believes it will be a difficult sell at a time when dot-com technology is out of vogue and the nation’s economy is depressed. “I think a content management system using Blogger may be a stealth sell; people buy it because it doesn’t cost much. If you offer five seats for $1,000 and there are some early adopters, it might catch on,” he says.
The Eight ITP Commitments
You want holistic? Here are the tenets of George Leonard's Integral Transformative Practice.
Results: "Leonard and Murphy kept careful records of all changes in the class members' conditions and engaged the services of a statistician to analyze the figures, which showed a strong correlation between adherence to the program and success in realizing affirmations, along with significant improvements in overall health. There were also some unexpected findings that suggested the importance of what we call "mind" or "intentionality" in positive human change. For example, how focused participants were while doing the ITP Kata seemed to be even more important than the number of times they did the Kata, and how conscious they were of what they ate more important than exactly what they ate--though both were important. "In addition, there were positive changes that challenged conventional explanation. A 45-year-old woman with a long family history of cataracts reversed her own cataracts over the two years of the program. A 57-year-old woman who suffered from functional epilepsy was averaging one gran mal seizure a month when the program started. She has had none since. A 46-year-old man increased his leg strength by 140 percent without changing his physical exercise regimen. The positive changes were by no means entirely physical. For example, one woman manager significantly increased the amount of time she could spend in the "flow state" while on the job." The Meta-Learning Lab should consider adding George Leonard to its advisory board.
Charles M. Reigeluth Home Page of Charles M. Reigeluth, professor, instructional design consultant, author, and cofounder of several nonprofits seeking to change schools. "He has developed a vision of a new educational system to better meet the needs of learners in the information society of the 21st century, and he has developed and refined guidelines for the change process to help educational stakeholders to bring about the changes most appropriate for their community. He is also the major developer of several instructional design theories, including the elaboration theory and simulation theory."
Instructional Design Theories Home Page a short on-line course on Basic Methods of Instruction and overviews of his two influential books on instructional design theory. What is systemic change and is it needed? Systemic change means different things to different people. First and foremost I think of it as accounting for the interrelationships that exist within any educational system--the recognition that a substantial change in one part of the system requires substantial changes in other parts in order for it to serve its function and even to survive. If the other parts aren't changed to be compatible with it, it will be changed back to be compatible with them, which is what has happened to most educational reform efforts that go beyond "tinkering." I think of systemic change as a coin with two sides: process and product. The product side is concerned with what the educational system is like after it has been changed. It is a systemic change if all parts of the system have changed in substantial ways. The process side is concerned with how the change happens--what occurs up until the system has been changed. It is a systemic process if: 1) it is driven by the changing or changed needs of those it serves: the community, the students, the parents, the employers, and the tax payers, to name a few (I refer to them as the stakeholders); 2) it is founded on the stakeholders' beliefs or values about education; 3) it is founded on an ideal vision of education that is based on those beliefs; 4) it requires an evolution of stakeholders' mindsets about education. Systemic change is not always needed. In fact, it is only needed if the needs of the system's suprasystem change dramatically. So systemic change in education is only needed if the educational needs of the community (its stakeholders) change dramatically. Has that happened in your community? That is a question you and your fellow stakeholders need to address. What Are Instructional Strategies and Theories? Sites he likes to visit AECT's Division for Systemic Change in Education Association for Educational Communications and Technology International Systems Institute International Society for the Systems Sciences International Federation for Systems Research Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development American Educational Research Association Instructional Technology Directory U.S. Dept. of Education Global Learning Communities Engines for Education School Reform Networks Education First Alliance Making a Difference Idaho Systems Institute Phi Delta Kappa Instructional Systems Technology Department at Indiana University posted by jay cross on 10/12/2001 | link
Damn. I see lots of potential in Groove. A potential killer app. Until today. And this...
Microsoft and Groove Networks Announce Strategic Relationship Microsoft Invests $51 Million as Groove Networks Closes Financing Round; Companies to Pursue Shared Vision for Web and Peer Services BEVERLY, Mass. and REDMOND, Wash., Oct. 10 /PRNewswire/ -- Microsoft Corp. MSFT and Groove Networks Inc., the leading provider of decentralized software for secure business collaboration, today announced a strategic relationship designed to advance the delivery of Web and peer services to businesses. As part of the relationship, Microsoft has invested approximately $51 million in Groove Networks, resulting in a minority equity stake. Previous investors, including Accel Partners, also participated in Groove Networks' $54 million financing.
Peter Henschel, in LiNEzine
The manager’s core work in this new economy is to create and support a work environment that nurtures continuous learning. Doing this well moves us closer to having an advantage in the never-ending search for talent. By sheer force of habit, we often substitute training for real learning. Managers often think training leads to learning or, worse, that training is learning. But people do not really learn with classroom models of training that happen episodically. These models are only part of the picture. Asking for more training is definitely not enough—it isn’t even close. Seeing the answer as “more training” often obscures what’s really needed: lifelong, continuous learning in work and at work. That is one reason why preserving the integrity of these informal communities is so important. The worst effects of downsizing and reengineering come from their complete disregard for communities of practice. The fact that training deals only with explicit knowledge, while the value is often in tacit knowledge, is another reason training can get at only part of what is understood to be effective. The other main limitation of traditional classroom training is that it is episodic and mostly relies on “push” (we want you to know this now) rather than “pull” (I need to know this now and am ready to learn it). Another dimension to the community idea is seldom discussed, but critically important: Learning is powerfully driven by the critical link between learning and identity. We most often learn with and through others. What we choose to learn depends on: Who we are Who we want to become Which communities we wish to join or remain part of. So, not wanting to be like “them” can be enough to keep someone from learning. That fact seems to hold whether we are talking about company apprentices, high school gangs, or seasoned software engineers. But it gets even more interesting: IRL studies, among others, have shown that as much as 70% of all organizational learning is informal. Everyday, informal learning is constant and everywhere. If this insight is true even in a bare majority of enterprises, why would we leave so much learning to sheer chance? Seven Principles of Learning From extensive fieldwork, IRL developed seven Principles of Learning that provide important guideposts for organizations. These are not “Tablets from Moses.” They are evolving as a work in progress. However, it is already clear that they have broad application in countless settings. Think of them in relation to your own experience. 1. Learning is fundamentally social. While learning is about the process of acquiring knowledge, it actually encompasses a lot more. Successful learning is often socially constructed and can require slight changes in one’s identity, which make the process both challenging and powerful. 2. Knowledge is integrated in the life of communities. When we develop and share values, perspectives, and ways of doing things, we create a community of practice. 3. Learning is an act of participation. The motivation to learn is the desire to participate in a community of practice, to become and remain a member. This is a key dynamic that helps explain the power of apprenticeship and the attendant tools of mentoring and peer coaching. 4. Knowing depends on engagement in practice. We often glean knowledge from observation of, and participation in, many different situations and activities. The depth of our knowing depends, in turn, on the depth of our engagement. 5. Engagement is inseparable from empowerment. We perceive our identities in terms of our ability to contribute and to affect the life of communities in which we are or want to be a part. 6. Failure to learn is often the result of exclusion from participation. Learning requires access and the opportunity to contribute. 7. We are all natural lifelong learners. All of us, no exceptions. Learning is a natural part of being human. We all learn what enables us to participate in the communities of practice of which we wish to be a part. As an IRL trustee, Paul Allaire, Chairman of Xerox, once said, “To do things differently, we need to see things differently.” As managers think about what to do differently, it helps to appropriate some new eyeglasses and see through the new lenses that the above principles provide. The challenge for each of us is to put on these new eyeglasses and look through them at the realities we face every day. Communities of Practice, In Practice Some examples in practice that IRL team members have observed: These principles help us understand why kids on a street corner can learn to run all the complex aspects of an illegal drug business but, somehow, cannot learn math in school. Their identity is wrapped up in the first venture; their engagement absent from the latter. The seven principles also help us understand why co-location alone does not necessarily help a software team “cohere” and learn together. If its members have not developed a community out of which a new practice develops, no amount of physical or organizational rearranging will make a difference. When a new technology requires both sales and service teams to learn “the new stuff” well and faster, it may not be enough to gain the knowledge; it may also require a change or shift in professional identity in order to succeed with customers or other technicians. When a well-designed business process or a new system fails in its implementation, it may be because developing new practices, based upon a whole community’s understanding of the old ones and its limitations, was not part of the strategy. Peter goes on to describe some specific management practices (identities?), and concludes, "If we do not pay attention to this new management work—and what it demands of us—we face the reality expressed by Intel’s CEO, Andy Grove: 'There is at least one point in the history of any company when you have to change dramatically to rise to the next performance level. Miss the moment, and you start to decline.'” posted by jay cross on 10/9/2001 | link
Human-centered design has grown out of traditional design, social sciences, engineering, and business. It is taught at ID through the highly effective framework of four human factors, which address the physical, cognitive, social, and cultural factors involved in people's interactions with products, systems, organizations, and messages. The framework of human factors supports ID's designers as they address not only the users' physical capabilities and cognitive functions, but also the cultural background and social situation of the user at the time of using the product or service. As a result, ID students learn how to modify a product for different cultures, for different situations within a culture, and ultimately, for the "market of one."
In addition to the human factors framework, the Institute of Design uses a range of methods to help gather data, analyze and understand human behavior, and to develop prototypes to test human-centered designs. Following are brief descriptions of some of those methods. This is hot.
OnlineLearning Magazine - Industry watch The state of simulations
Soft-skill simulations emerge as a powerful new form of e-learning By Clark Aldrich This is a comer.
Attributes of a life-long learner identified by the groups:
exibits curious, imaginative inquiry Deepening Our Understanding of Essential Abilities ties directly to what we're looking at with The Metalearning Lab.
From Clark Aldrich,
Will Wright, creator of SimCity and The Sims, told me. "People often learn more by talking to each other about a game than playing the game itself. The community is what snow balls and creates success. There are a few different ways of encouraging this. The first is that I always try to have several ways of success; I try not to force them down any one path. In The Sims, for example, you can go for happiest people, or the best job, or the biggest house. By creating unique solutions, even unique goals, people then want to share war stories with others. A second way to foster communities is by helping people create artifacts. It used to be that if a person spent 20 hours playing a game, they would feel like they wasted 20 hours. But if they can create something, such as snapshots or even useful files, and they can share that information, then that time was productive."
Review: How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School Committee on Developments in the Science of Learning
by: John D. Bransford, Ann L. Brown, and Rodney R. Cocking, editors (The full text is online.) We predict that How People Learn will become one of the most influential books ever published on teaching and learning. It is based on the most important findings from the neurosciences, cognitive and social psychology, human development, processes of effective learning, environments in which learning best takes place, and emerging technologies. All of this research is leading to new understandings of how to apply science to the practices of education. These scientific achievements include a fuller understanding of memory and the structure of knowledge, problem solving and reasoning, the early foundations of learning, regulatory processes that govern learning including metacognition, and how symbolic thinking emerges from culture and community of the learner. The book highlights three key findings: 1. Students come to the classroom with preconceptions about how the world works. If their initial understanding is not engaged, they may fail to grasp the new concepts and information that are taught, or they may learn them for purposes of a test but revert to their preconceptions outside the classroom. 2. To develop competence in an area of inquiry, students must: (a) have a deep foundation of factual knowledge, (b) understand facts and ideas in the context of a conceptual framework, and (c) organize knowledge in ways that facilitate retrieval and application. 3. A "metacognitive" approach to instruction can help students learn to take control of their own learning by defining learning goals and monitoring their progress in achieving them. The book notes that the foregoing principles have major implications for teaching and teacher preparation. For example: 1. Teachers must draw out and work with the preexisting understandings that their students bring with them. 2. Teachers must teach some subject matter in depth, providing many examples in which the same concept is at work and providing a firm foundation of factual knowledge. 3. The teaching of metacognitive skills should be integrated into the curriculum in a variety of subject areas. In relation to designing classroom environments, the book suggests that: 1. Schools and classrooms must be learner centered. 2. To provide a knowledge-centered classroom environment, attention must be given to what is taught (information, subject matter), why it is taught (understanding), and what competence or mastery looks like. 3. Formative assessments 4. Learning is influenced in fundamental ways by the context in which it takes place. A community-centered approach requires the development of norms for the classroom and school, as well as connections to the outside world, that support core learning values.
Learning to Use the Brain
As I began to dig in, what initially turned me on was the work of the University of Chicago's Peter Huttenlocher. He was, for the first time, counting synapses, the telephone lines that enable brain cells to communicate with each other. These connections are so small and so numerous that they had previously defied a scientific census. From autopsies of the brains of fetuses and people ranging in age from a few months to their nineties, he took samples about the size of the head of a pin, each containing about 70,000 brain cells. In a sample from a 28-week-old fetus he found 124 million connections between the cells. The same size sample in a newborn had 253 million synaptic connections and in an 8 month old the number exploded to 572 million. At the fastest rate, connections were being built at the incredible speed of 3 billion a second, eventually reaching a total of about 1,000 trillion connections in the whole brain. After that point, the connections begin a gradual decline. By about age 10 or so, half the connections have died off, leaving about 500 trillion, a number that remains fairly constant through most of life. In its recent report, Starting Points, the influential Carnegie Corporation of New York said the first three years of a child's life are vitally important to brain development. Unfortunately, for a growing number of children the period from birth to age three has become a mental wasteland. Society, said the Carnegie report, needs to invest adequate resources in helping these children at this critical period in their lives if we are to stem the growing epidemic of violence. There is increasing concern that the lack of proper stimulation, may be damaging brains. The same may be true of too much exposure to the wrong kind of stimulation, such as violence. Indeed, in the last 25 years there has been a doubling, of the rates of crimes of violence, depression, suicide, and drug and alcohol abuse. Education works in two fundamental ways: Biologically, by laying down significantly more connections between brain cells that accompany learning. Memory, as a result, is increased and the additional connections also provide a buffer against the destructive forces of Alzheimer's disease. Behaviorally, by promoting positive values and attitudes about health, higher self-esteem, effective coping skills, access to preventive health services and association with people who have similar views. At the same time, education reduces risky behaviors such as smoking.
From Rebel with a Cause by John Sperling, quoted in Michael Schrage's Insight: Brave New World for Higher Education in MIT Technology Review
The idea that the Internet and new infrastructures for digital learning will ultimately supercede traditional universities seems silly. Then again, the success of Britain's Open University, an institute of higher education that relies on distance learning and whose graduates are as respected in British society as graduates from traditional institutions, indicates that alternative media can indeed facilitate effective learning for both traditional and nontraditional students. Ruch makes a compelling case that "marketizing" educational technology will make the for-profit schools even more influential. Don't be surprised if more and more traditional universities team up with their nontraditional counterparts to bring their curricula to the marketplace. Indeed, as terrific as MIT's OpenCourseWare may prove to be, don't be shocked if some entrepreneur—a Media Laboratory student, perhaps, or a Sloan School alum—uses it as the core for her own startup, packaging courses in business, design and engineering, slapping on a different interface, and transforming it into a for-profit offering.
Thomas Koulopoulos, author of The X-Economy and president and founder of Boston-based research consultancy The Delphi Group, says that e-learning shows great promise—analysts predict that it will be the next big thing—but it's not there yet. "A combination of poor platforms for personalization, immature Web-based delivery, and most notably, entrenched culture and old attitudes about training have held it back," he says. Koulopoulos also thinks that could change. "To wring the full potential from e-learning, executives need to rethink training, personalize it and slice it into smaller chunks for just-in-time delivery," he says.
So e-learning is more than an alternative means of training? As markets get more complex, our tools for sustaining our people need to get more sophisticated as well. Don't dismiss that. We will come to recognize e-learning as a crucial weapon in attaining competitive advantage. Would you say that culture and conditioning pose the greatest challenges for e-learning initiatives?
P2P in Education "One of the most interesting new projects out there is Edutella, an attempt to create a distributed web for learning metadata making use of emerging standards. We talked to Mikael Nilsson about the project, and what the future holds." The overarching goal of Edutella is to facilitate the reuse of globally distributed learning resources by creating what I like to picture as an eco-system for meta-data, a place for meta-data to flourish and cross-fertilize. More concretely, Edutella aims to produce an open-source, standards-based peer-to-peer architecture for the exchange of RDF-based meta-data. This architecture will include services such as advanced distributed queries, semantic mappings between schemas, replication of meta-data, distributed annotation etc. The providers of meta-data will be anyone with content they want to make available. This includes anything from individual teachers and students to universities and other educational institutions. When it comes to the users of Edutella, we hope that Edutella will become a technology that benefits students and teachers in their every-day use of computers for learning and teaching. ...the important points of Edutella being used in this scenario: * Distributed material and distributed searches CETIS: A lot of the discussion around "digital repositories" for education has centred around client-server systems, with the bulk of the material sat in relational databases. So what prompted you to look at a peer-to-peer solution? MN: One philosophical motivation that has played an important role is related to the democratic ideals of the Internet. The Internet was originally designed as a peer-to-peer network where anyone can connect to anyone, and that is still one of the main reasons for its success. In the same way, the success of HTTP and the modern hypertext concept is fundamentally dependent on a peer-to-peer model, where anything may link to anything. This creates a democratic web, where the is no single point of control, no middle man in control of the network. However, the web has developed into a predominantly client-server based system, which mainly relies on centralized information handling, something that really defeats the purpose of Internet technology. Peer-to-peer networks is a way out of that trap. RDF, as is turns out, is also deliberately designed as a peer-to-peer architecture, where anyone can say anything about anything, so it really fits into that philosophy. Edutella makes it possible for anyone, even with very limited technical and financial resources, to participate in the exchange of learning resources. Of course most large institutions will use databases even in the future, in varying forms and with varying content. A second motivation for the peer-to-peer solution is the problem of getting those systems to talk to each other, to interoperate in an active manner, and on a global scale. Simply having a database and perhaps a web interface does not solve the problem of distributing information about your material globally. Peer-to-peer networks have, by contrast, proven themselves to be effective propagators of information. One of the main disadvantages of classical peer-to-peer networks is the lack of rich meta-data -- often only supporting searching on a file name. Harnessing the distributive power of peer-to-peer networks for the dissemination of RDF-based meta-data seems very natural once the idea has been formulated. A third motivation lies in the overall system architecture. Peer-to-peer networks have the advantages of simple setup, extensibility in provided services, and scalability. {technobabble alert] CETIS: What kinds of metadata will Edutella hold? There are minimalist approaches like Dublin Core, or the IEEE-LOM/IMS/SCORM structural metadata. Plus you have IMS subsets like CanCore. Which are you thinking of supporting? We are aiming for a layered architecture. The meta-data will build on Dublin Core at the bottom layer. The second layer will be formed by the RDF binding of IMS/IEEE-LOM meta-data that was produced under our coordination, and which has recently been included in the IMS meta-data specification. This new IMS/IEEE-LOM RDF binding is Dublin Core-compatible, so the two layers will coexist nicely. We are also working on producing an RDF binding of the IMS Content Packaging specification (which forms a large part of the SCORM Content Structure Format), and this will form the third layer. [/technobabble] This could be very important. I happen to be reading Emergence, a new book about self-organizing systems. It's convincing me that the hierarchical taxonomies of the past are going to give way to indexes of indexes, Google-style searching, and idea-browsing of vast arrays of knowledge objects. It's breakthrough time. Down with the c-and-c system; up with chaos!
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