e-Clippings (Learning As Art)

Google isn't making us stupid - it is challenging our design

Tom King posted to something to Twitter that caught my eye about a piece that Tom Kulhmann of Articluate wrote. Thx for the pointer Tom (Tom King that is).

Geez, I can't even go with "Tom K" to differentiate here...OK how about,  the piece that Kuhlmann wrote is entitled "Is Google making our e-learning stupid?" and is a play on a piece by Nicholas Carr that appeared in the Atlantic Montly entitled "Is Google making us stupid?" Bear with me, I know its a lot of stage setting.

I had read the piece by Carr (thank goodness his name isn't Tom) and I liked it. What I didn't like was the discussion that seemed to grow out of a bunch of people who didn't even read the article. Anyway, Carr cites Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts who argues that "Reading, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It”s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains." Awesome, of course as an anthropologist/historian, we kind of knew that. We're familiar with the impact that technology has on reading and larger impact that has on society - affecting the way people read is one of the most powerful pressure points in civilization.

Wolf also argues that "When we read online, she says, we tend to become "mere decoders of information." Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged." Now that I have a bit of an issue with. When we start talking about our ability to make rich mental connections, I don't think that has ever been stronger  - what has happened (IMHO) is that we have moved that activity from a solitary pursuit to a collaborative one. Just look at the process of writing this post. I read King, then I click and read Kuhlmann, that jogs something and I go to the Carr piece - then I have two more pieces that I'm going to mention that hadn't thought about connecting until now and then I'll hit "publish" and all of this will go public for consumption, comment and so on. So, back to Kuhlmann.

I love what Kuhlmann does is this article. Here is a veteran of elearning and guess what he is talking about? DESIGN! Brilliant observation that if our literacies are changing, e.g. the "power browse", the duh, maybe we should change the way we provide information to people. Let's not forget that eLearning, by definition is "e" so it only stands to reason that maybe we should look to the dominant ways that people consume other forms of "e" materials for clues on how to shape ours. Great stuff! Practical tips as well on the rapid design front.

I do however, want to point to two additional pieces that somehow I have been able to make mental connections between...if you haven't already, read James Paul Gee's book What Video Games Can Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. Important work there on how to understand games as another form of literacy - as you read, just substitute Google for games and you'll get the idea that different may or not be better or worse but it is different and our understanding, our mental models need to change to keep up.

Finally, kind of on the other side of the coin, read "Hamlet's Blackberry: Why paper is eternal" by William Powers. For the anthropologist in me, this article was a clear rejoinder on the power of the physical to affect multiple cognitive and emotional domains.

Wait...I forgot to include "Why Professor Johnny Can't Read: Understanding the Net Generation's Texts" from Mark Mabrito and Rebecca Medley. Takes up an extends Kuhlmann's point and goes from his rapid elearning focus to a focus on education and on the responsibility if not the requirement of teachers to work to understand the texts of next-generation students. Brilliant!

So this was a long post and I'll assume you just skimmed it. :-)

Will Thalheimer and the Answer to Who Learns What from Where

---First, apologies if I cover ground pounded by others elsewhere, but I'm still catching up from the Guild Annual Gathering (have some more on that coming soon).

Will Thalheimer just brilliantly asked a great question - who do you learn from? He asked this of retail clerks but you have to wonder how different the results would be for the typical office worker population. Will highlights several key results on his blog; a couple of them are:

• People learn the most from those who they work closely with.
• People learn the most from their experience doing the job.
• People learn the most from their self-initiated efforts at learning.

Is it just me or are these things that seem to be fairly self-evident? The question then has to become, if you believe that they are self-evident, what the hell happened to our design and budget priorities? Seriously, look at the chart people - e-learning comes in at "Learn Some"...square in the middle. Look at the power in the hands of the 'head clerks' in the individual departments. How much of your corporate training is focused in a 'train the trainer' mode of those people?

Maybe we all need to read SWAY: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior and try to understand how we got here.

" Visual Thinking, Imagery, and the Brain" (Eide Neurolearning Blog)

This post from the Doctors Eide, in particular this passage "The truth is that imagery is rarely mentioned in the analysis of individual learning differences. Though two students sitting side-by-side in the same class may hear the same lecture, read the same book, and even master the same facts, the ways the do this - through visual, auditory, or perceptual imagery, may dramatically different from each other," reminds me of how we really work in this incredibly interdisciplinary field roughly denoted as "learning" and what an incredibly rich opportunity that is.

Their post mentions and links to a PDF of an article in press, entitled "What Brain Imaging Can Tell Us About Embodied Meaning," by Marcel Just. One passage from the abstract is "A set of fMRI studies on visual imagery in sentence comprehension reveals both the perceptual-motor and the symbolic aspects of brain function that underlie language
processing. Moreover, they indicate some of the conditions under which perceptual or motor representations are most likely to be activated." So now I start thinking about how this is profoundly different than thinking about "visual learners" or "visual learning styles" and how this recognizes that unless we are blind (literally - and even then, if not blind from birth, do we still process information through imagery?) - we process/learn information, at least partially, through the use of imagery - even in the absence of graphics.

How does that impact us from a design standpoint? Does it mean we could do without graphics if we could only write well enough to conjure the appropriate imagery in the learner's mind? I think I'm going to go read the full article and then probably look at this again.

"Dreaming of An Educational MMO" (Terra Nova)

(Terra Nova link)

Great story found at Terra Nova about the development of an MMOG (massive multiplayer online game) that will be focused on teaching players increasingly complex cultural contexts and language. The game is being developed at Michigan State University with the Chinese government-sponsored Confucius Institute.

I haven't had time to read through it but in addition to the excerpt below, the Institutes's site also includes a downloadable design document which lays out the learning objectives of the game. Here is an excerpt:

"The new Chengo  Chinese will be a massive multi-player online game,    consisting of four virtual  worlds: "villages", "towns", "cities" and    "cosmopolitans". The four virtual  worlds will progress with increasing    complexity, advancing from ancient times  to modern times and from    countryside to cities. Those different virtual worlds  represent a    variety of cultures and living styles, and teach different cultural    contents and language in correspondence with learners' language    proficiency and  cultural knowledge. Learners will start with "villages"    and advance into  "towns" after they grasp a certain level of Chinese    language and cultural  knowledge and reach a certain point"

John Seely Brown on learning and technology

(found via Brent)

Nice little article on ZDNet about a speech that JSB gave at MIT. Two best quotes below:

"Rather than treat pedagogy as the transfer of knowledge from teachers who are experts to students who are receptacles, educators should consider more hands-on and informal types of learning. These methods are closer to an apprenticeship, a farther-reaching, more multilayered approach than traditional formal education, he said."

and

"With every new piece of technology, to make this technology work, you have to change your teaching practices," Seely Brown said. "Part of it is (thinking about) how to go from sage on the stage to being a real mentor."

"Eliminating Transfer" from Tom Crawford

Just take a sec folks and add this feed to your readers. It's for Tom Crawford's blog and if you're not reading it, you should be. Tom is not pushing some bleeding edge techno-agenda like some people think I am (in kind of a good way I think) - Tom is covering some tried and true ground like reuse and transfer but he is covering this familiar ground with some lucid insights and very readable style. Kudos.

Let's Assume That People Have Always Been Learning And Start From There....

(Link to Jay Cross post)

Somehow Jay Cross has done it again and reached clear across the U.S. and telepathically seen what was going on in my mind before I had even posted about it. Thank you Jay for this excellent resource, "Conversation As A Core Business Process."

This is a great article and one of those that as you read it, you have to stop highlighting all the good parts, because they are all good. It is also an idea that has become a book, The World Cafe: Shaping Our Future Through Conversations That Matter.

I'll steal the same quote Jay used from the start of the article: "Consider for a moment that the most widespread and pervasive learning in your organization may not be happening in training rooms, conference rooms, or boardrooms, but in the cafeteria, the hallways, and the cafe across the street. Imagine that through email exchanges, phone conversations, and bull sessions with colleagues, people at all levels of the organization are sharing critical business knowledge, exploring underlying assumptions, and creating innovative solutions to key business issues. Imagine that the “grapevine” is not a poisionous plant to be cut off at the roots, but a natural source of vitality to be cultivated and nourished."

Dead on. Spot on. Bullseye. How many more ways can I say it? The instruction we design is not competing against a vacuum - it is competing against the way people are already learning. Until we own that and understand that we aren't each others' main competition but that we are all competing against people's own self-discovered learning methodologies - then I don't believe we will really build tools that actually help people learn better.

The Knife at the Heart of Meaningful Communication and Learning: PowerPoint

Let me just say first that I am not posting this out of a political agenda but out of an interest in learning and communication. I think that is the same vein that the original item was posted to the excellent blog, Presentation Zen.

Garr Reynolds points to this post from Arms and Influence that kicked off this look at how the (mis)use of PowerPoint can really result in some rather serious cognitive dissonance.  Reynolds' post features several quotes from Tom Ricks' new book Fiasco but I'll include one quote that he has from the investigation of the Columbia Shuttle Disaster.

"The Board views the endemic use of PowerPoint briefing slides instead of technical papers as an illustration of the problematic technical communication at NASA."
— Columbia Accident Investigation Board

I won't recount every point made in Arms and Influence post or Reynolds - they are too numerous and too well written to do anything but suffer by my interpretation here. Go read them. Then think and talk about what we can do as learning professionals to combat the corrosive influence of jamming and cramming messy important thoughts into neat and artificially delineated, easily-digestible chunks.

The Power of the Question

We learn by asking questions right? Ever had an instructor that looked at you like you were interupting them when you asked one? Where do we put the Q&A in conference sessions? Stuck between the last 5 minutes of the hour and people needing to go to the bathroom. Does that look like behavior to you that values the question as a learning channel?

So then I read about how Yahoo!, MSN and another service called AnswerBag are valuing the question (Google Answers is also in the mix along with AllExperts). These folks are all offering services which allow you to post your question to a community and get answers. Some allow people to offer those answers to you for a small price (couple of dollars).  They are also integrating RSS feeds into these technologies so that you can subscribe to an answer stream and some are even integrating it into your Instant Message client. Speaking of IM, we already have the Moviefone and Encarta IM buddies (just add encarta@botmetro.net )- where is my learning IM buddy? Where is my HR IM buddy?

When I read stories like this, I wonder if there is some huge technical hurdle I'm missing which is preventing this kind of thing from catching on in the corporate/government world or if it really just boils down to a question of culture again. This is learning. Questions were the first teaching moments from the first caveman grunting at the one next to him and pointing at something to the freshmen raising their hands in their first college classes (see...they are in the classes but the learning is in the Q&A). Who is doing this out there? Come on, someone must have this kind of stuff as a feature in their products somewhere right? Who's got it? .....just answer the question.....

The World's Harshest Teacher

Read the whole story here but, know this - if people who are getting shot at and blown up by IED's can figure out new ways to learn, then I think we can squeeze some room in to our busy day.

“Learning has to be rapid enough that we don’t repeat bad outcomes, because the insurgents’ ability to transfer knowledge and learn from events in Iraq is very quick,” said Ron Dysvick, president and chief executive officer of Triple-I, which designed and implemented the Army’s Battle Command Knowledge System (BCKS). “If we don’t mirror the insurgency with our social networking and rapid transfer of knowledge, then soldiers’ lives are put at even greater risk. Insurgents watch our forces very closely and learn what tactics are effective. We must do the same.”