e-Clippings (Learning As Art)

The Big Question about Questions

The Big Question from the Learning Circuits Blog (LCB) this month is centered on inquiry. Specifically, the question is "What Questions Should We Be Asking?" If you are one of the 4 longtime readers of this blog, you will know that I am a big fan of questions (1,2,3) so first kudos to LCB for engaging this valuable activity.

Now I want to say that I don't think that my own contribution to this question would be most valuable if it focused on specific learning questions...I'm just not that smart and I am more than content to sit back and learn from people like Tony and Wendy and Karyn and Clark and Karl and Tom.

What I do think I can add is something about the process of inquiry in the first place. As you can see on my blog, one of my favorite quotes is:
"“Common to most anthropologists is a contrarian readiness to search out diverse, improbable kinds of patterning, to be skeptical of commonly accepted categories or boundaries, and to employ varying temporal and geographic scales as tools of inquiry.”
Robert McC. Adams, Paths of Fire: An Anthropologist’s Inquiry Into Western Technology, 1996.

Another favorite of mine is a book about dead cats. Robert Darnton, in his book The Great Cat Massacre, (p. 78 to be exact ) talks about how as he is reading accounts of the life of printing apprentices in Paris in the early 1700's, he came across a story of a large-scale slaughter of cats carried out by the apprentices...the odd thing to Darnton was that the story was told as a joke or as something that was tremendously funny. He was repulsed by the story but looked at that repulsion as a breakdown in cultural understanding between him and the workers. This gap or distance he argued "may serve as the starting point of an investigation, for anthropologists have found that the best points of entry in an attempt to penetrate an alien culture can be those where it seems to be most opaque. When you realize that you are not getting something—a joke, a proverb, a ceremony—that is particularly meaningful to the natives, you can see where to grasp a foreign system of meaning in order to unravel it. By getting the joke of the great cat massacre, it may be possible to "get" a basic ingredient of artisan culture under the Old Regime."

Finally from Savage Minds comes this passage from the 1899 Notes and Queries on Anthropology (courtesy of Google Books):
"It is almost impossible to make a savage in the lower stages of culture understand why the questions are asked, and from the limited range of his vocabulary or of ideas it is often nearly as difficult to put the question before him in such a way as he can comprehend it. The result often is that from timidity, or the desire to please, or from weariness of the questioning, he will give an answer that he thinks will satisfy the inquirer. If time serve, these difficulties can easily be overcome by friendly intercourse, and a careful checking of answers through different individuals"
(87 – 88).

So what is the connecting tissue here? I think there are just some lessons on how maybe we can think when we are coming up and asking all these great questions. One attempted summary could be:
1. Do not be afraid to be a contrarian. To paraphrase, no progress was ever made by satisfied people.
2. Do not stick to one set of tools for all your inquiries. There is value to be found by looking at the same problem in different ways.
3. Look for the joke you don't get.
4. Do not, out of timidity, desire to please or weariness, accept easy answers or ask easy questions.
5. Check the answers you get against multiple sources.

That's my attempt anyway. If you want some additional background from one of the seminal sources on how to conduct interviews, try Learning How To Ask.

The LCB BIG Question (December 2006)

First let me start with thanking Tony and Dave for asking this question(s). I know that prediction posts are standard if not trite at this time of year but this one at least asks how the past year was and gives us the permission to blend in the personal with the professional. I also want to further thank both of those guys for all the work they have done on the entire Big Question series - it has added a relevance and a vibrancy to the debate and you should be commended.

I've also been reading through some of the other bloggers who have posted responses to this question before me and all have done well but two pieces I wanted to point to:

• Geetha Krishnan's point that "Honestly, I don’t even know whether ROI is a valid concept in learning.." Thank you. Dead-on. Look at performance but please don't tell me you are going to measure something that is going on inside someone's head. Jay also adds to this point.

 

• Brent is right (OK first, everyone should buy Jay's book) THEN everyone should pre-order two more books, Karl Kapp's Gadgets, Games and Gizmos for Learning: Tools and Techniques for Transferring Know-How from Boomers to Gamers and then David Shaffer’s How Computer Games Help Children Learn (if you can’t wait for David’s book, you can read some of his papers here.

Uno: What will you remember most about 2006?

• The U.S. election
• Returning to my colleagues and being welcomed back like I'd just been gone for a long weekend.
• My son getting thrown from a horse and the damnable speed of my imagination as it ran through all sorts of nightmare scenarios while he was till in the air (he's fine).
• Creating a book using Blurb's BookSmart software and realizing how hard narrative really is and how different a process it is from creating a PPT deck.
• That I continue to be impressed by the intelligence, civility and outright generosity of our little corner of the blogosphere. Not that I don't love you all, but Lee, Brent, Dave, Jay, Tom, EEK, Jerry - you guys rock.
• Being able to facilitate a conference, bring together and have the honor of having a conversation with the people that I consider rock stars: Jerry, Jay, David, Marcia, EEK, Clay, Ross and even those were asked but could not make it due to I'm sure oppressive calendars (Tim, Emily). Honestly, one of the big learning moments in my life. Thanks.

Dos: What are the biggest challenges for you/us as head into 2007?

• Stupid, idiotic crap that we foist on ourselves like the whole Blackboard patent fiasco, the wrong-headed debate on net neutrality (Internets and tubes anyone?) and misguided, thinly veiled attacks on the First Amendment like this.
• Big challenge for me - maintain relevance when talking to others who don't live at the same technophile, Mt Everest kind of altitude that me and most of the people reading this live at.
• Big Challenge for e-Learning companies: Figuring out business models that work.
• Lose some damn weight. (maybe that’s a challenge for all of us – I mean like some physically, some mentally – maybe I should say ‘get fit’)

Tres: What are your predictions for 2007?

• Pessimist in me says "same crap, different year"
• Optimist in me says "it'll get better"
• Someone will describe a standard for “avatar portability and interoperability”
• People will figure out that ‘mobile learning’ is about more than devices
• A whole bunch of people will figure out that RSS, blogs, wikis, widgets and games can be helpful and then act like they invented it
• I’ll try to do a bunch of stuff and succeed in doing about half of it
• My son will amaze me with something he says like this year when he brought home an art project and when I asked him about it, he casually glanced over his shoulder and said “yeah, we did that like Mondrian, he uses black lines to separate white spaces.” I did not know that when I was 7.
• That in December of ’07, my wife and I will have been married for 17 years and no one will believe it.

Thanks everyone for a great year - I'm still a bit stunned that anyone reads this little effort and while I put on a brave front and say that it doesn't matter to me - it does - and I sincerely thank you.
Mark

Follow Up the Big Question Top 10 Reason Not To and To Blog (Tony Karrer)

Tony Karrer has done an awesome and funny thing and has summarized some of the responses to the "Big Question" ("Should All Learning Professionals Be Blogging?) from over at LCB.

Some of my favorites:

Why You Should:
9. Because it forces you to do your homework (Rodolpho Arruda)
7. Because if you don’t we’ll think you’re lame and don’t know how to do your job.
1. Because your job depends on it.

Why You Shouldn't:
10. Because you are too lame
9. Because if you live in the US you don’t know how to write (Peter Isackson)
8. Because you’re a scared little wuss - Fear of Blogging (Wendy)
4. Because you’ll screw up blogging just like you screwed up using PowerPoint. (Matthew N.)

Priceless stuff.