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Research on Learning and Performance recent finds and thoughts Saturday, December 22, 2001
tompeters!, my favorite business comedian, has kindly put his leftover 2001 powerpoint slides on the web.
uncertainty = we do not know when we'll return to normal. "our military strategy today is essentially one deisgned by napoleon," says a former member the joint chiefs. dee hock says the problem is not getting new thoughts into our heads but rather getting the old ones out.. kevin kelly says that the secret of fast progress is inefficiency -- fail fast, repeatedly.... steven hawking says that if we don't start tweaking our DNA, robots will take over.. craig venter says we're going to see lots more outsourcing of innovation. michael marks says the future of creating gadgets isn't making them -- it's imagining them. peter drucker says "my ancestsors were printers in amsterdam from 1510 to 1750 and during that entire time they didn't have to learn anything new.' so, he continues, "the continuing professional education of the adult is the no. 1 industry of the next 30 years.". diane arbus told her students to "learn not to be careful.". chivalry is dead! hmmm. this is refreshing, sort of like putting your brain in the bass-o-matic. thanks, tom. maybe if we get really confused, we'll pay $75,000 for some raving stage performer to spout kooky ideas interspersed with cuss words, bombast, and finger wagging.
 Schools That Learn by Peter Senge et alia. A Fifth Discipline Fieldbook for Educators, Parents, and Everyone Who Cares About Education I read the Orientation and Primer to the Five Disciplines thoroughly. This book is 600 pp. and I was only interested in the parts that apply to adults as well as children. I flipped through the sections on Classrooom, School, and Community, sampling whatever appealed to me, perhaps a third of what was there. My reading chairs were provided by Southwest Airlines and Frontier, so distractions were few but sleep was an ever-present temptation. Everyone remembers a "special connection" with their early teacher, a moment of respect, pride, and learning. Pity they aren't more common. Our schools are obsolete and we need to re-create them to serve students who will grow up in a post-industrial world. The five "disciplines" are ongoing bodies of study and practice that people adopt as individuals and groups. I think of them as touchstones for Senge followers. Examples throughout the book identify which discipline(s) apply. The big five are: 1. Personal mastery. Knowing who you are and where you want to go. This creates a personal gap awareness. 2. Shared vision. Commonality of purpose. 3. Mental models. Reflection and inquiry skills. I expected to find some nifty algorithms and rules of thumb. This is the least well-developed "discipline." The recurring model is the "ladder of inference." It's important to reflect with models because "in any new experience, most people are drawn to take in and remember only the information that reinforces their exsiting mental models." 4. Team Learning. This is conversation, dialogue, discussion...what I call community. 5. Systems thinking. Taking a holistic approach, understanding interdependencies, feedback, and complexity. All learners construct knowledge from an inner scaffolding of their individual and social experiences, emotions, will, aptitudes, beliefs, values, self-awareness, purpose, and more. In other words, if you are learning in a classroom, what you understand is determined by how you understand things, who you are, and what you already know as much as by what is covered, and how and by whom it is delivered. Senge gives a marvellous rif on the industrial-age heritage of schools. The world as a clock (Kepler, Descartes, Newton), an assembly of parts. Fred the great, fascinated by mechanical toys, wanted soldiers to perform as interchangeable parts. Industrial organizations bought the military model (hence, line and staff, chain of command, training). From 1770 to 1812, labor productivity increased 120 times over in the British textile industry. Schools took up the methods of the assembly line. Like any assembly line, the system was organized in dscrete stages (grades). Uniform speed (bells, schedules, fixed curriculum). The school factory was separate from daily life. Human reason is a form of animal reason, a reason inextricably tied to our bodies and the peduliarities of our brains." Human cognitive development involves just as much "body knowledge" as it does "mind knowledge." Maturana and Vella: "All doing is knowing and all knowing is doing." Life's interdependencies tend to remain invisible to the fragmented academic theory of knowledge. Reality is composed fundamentally of relationships, not things. (Somewhere today I read that "The most important things in life are not things.") autopoesis = self-producing Schools That Learn didn't meet my objectives. Great stuff for fixing up schools but not that useful for reconceptualizing adult learning. It also put me to sleep several times as I entered the land of diminishing returns. Amazon's got 50 pages of the book for free. From earlier notes, while reading the first section from a library copy of the book:
posted by jay cross on 12/20/2001 | link
Stanford is thinking about its approaches to eLearning.
On the one hand, "..internet-based technology provides Stanford the opportunity for involvement in distance learning on a vastly larger scale than in the past. Stanford faculty should be encouraged to make full use of these opportunities, in accord with Stanford's mission of developing and transmitting knowledge." This Internet stuff is great but let us never forget that, "The centrality of the undergraduate and graduate students in residence at Stanford, paying tuition and pursuing degrees, must remain in clear focus." So, faculty members, don't sign any private deals without check with us first, because, "Stanford faculty members owe their primary professional allegiance to the University, and their primary commitment of time and intellectual energies should be to the education, research and scholarship programs of the institution. Faculty should be cautious about arrangements that might put themselves into competition with Stanford, in either its research or teaching missions. As required by the Faculty Policy on Conflict of Commitment and Interest, faculty must disclose any such outside activities or financial interests that may constitute such competition, or could be perceived to do so, to their school." And if you do cut any deals on the side, don't mention your affiliation with us: "The university has the duty and right to control the use of the Stanford name, both to ensure fair compensation for the use of the name and to assure the university's high standards are not eroded."
Welcome to eCLIPSE ~ the e-Learning Centre's e-Learning Intelligence Service
- People, Systems and Environments ~ for learning professionals in academia, corporate training and continuing education I just came upon this for the first time. Reading their top 10 tools, mags, shows, etc., their judgment seems spot-on. (And not just because www.meta-time.com is atop the top 10 sites list.)
Highlights from Syllabus Magazine
Changing the Interface of Education with Revolutionary Learning Technologies
posted by jay cross on 12/5/2001 | link
Knowledge work doesn't happen at one's desk.
Forbes.com: Flashbacks 80 YEARS AGO IN FORBES/MAY 15, 1971 Homework William R. Hewlett, president and chief executive officer of Hewlett-Packard, on the boss' working habits: "Actually, you probably do most of your thinking not at work. I do it when I'm trying to get to sleep at night. In the shower in the morning. Shaving. I suppose this says that you're really thinking about the job most of the time. There are so many day-to-day distractions that I consider important that it is really hard to sit down and do any concentrated thinking."
A Pattern Language for Human-Computer Interface Design Jenifer Tidwell I was excited by the title and the concept. Unfortunately, Tidwell presents not one concrete example.
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we are all in a brawl with no rules! says the dancing bear of consultingdom. 