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Archives for September 2008

Learning Styles, Brain-Based Learning, and Daniel Willingham

11 September 2008 by Clark 9 Comments

I’ve gone off on learning styles before because there’s a lot of fluff and not much substance.   I’d been pointed to Dan Willingham‘s video on brain based learning, and in pointing it to someone else, found his one on learning styles. He’s a cognitive psychologist (my background, btw), and is putting out the research-based views on these topics.

My point has been that the learning styles instruments are broken, though the idea makes sense in that it helps teachers/instructors be sensitized to individual learner differences.   And I’ve argued that you use the right medium for the message, not try to re-represent.   Dan goes into more detail, and points out that people do learn certain things better, but that meaning is the core, and that you match the presentation to the nature of the knowledge.   He argues that learning styles shouldn’t make a difference to what you do (if you already use appropriate design).   I love his conclusion:   “good teaching is good teaching, and teachers don’t need to adjust their teaching to individual learning styles”. Hear, hear (and not “see see” or “feel feel” :).

He also goes on about brain-based learning, and talks about how most of it (95%) doesn’t make sense.   His point is that one level of research doesn’t necessarily translate to another.   His claim is that much of this stuff isn’t really brain-based research, and then a lot of it is just wrong(!).   He gets quite specific about what’s wrong with a couple of popular examples, and points to people who are doing it well.   At the end, he says if someone’s claiming “there’s all this new information about the brain…will revolutionize teaching”, you should stay away.

Highly recommended, if you care about learning or education.

Money and trust

10 September 2008 by Clark 5 Comments

I found out another site was aggregating my, and other’s, blogs, indicating that they had the best folks in knowledge management.   Flattered as I was, I asked that my blog be taken off their roles.   Let me explain why.

First, I hadn’t been asked. I think it’s only fair to ask for the right to copy someone else’s work (I recall the time Jay and I found a white paper we’d jointly written being given away as an article in a university consortium’s newsletter!).   Let the author know why you’re doing it, and what the proposal is for them (publicity, cash, what have you).   Many would be happy to be included in a list, but I want to opt-in, not opt-out.   I wouldn’t even have found out if WordPress (my blog software) didn’t track references to the blog as comments.

I note that the indication of who the posts are from is hard to find.   There’s a link to the original, to be fair, but otherwise there’s no list of who’s included in this list.   Where’s the blogroll?   Who is aggregated there?

Another concern is that there’s no indication of *who* is behind this.   From an authenticity and trust factor, I like to know who’s behind a site.   I get mighty uncomfortable when I find site for organizations and there’s no human name to be found.   Why are they hiding it?   One of the criteria in being web-literate is knowing not only the authorial voice (who you’re listening to), but also editorial voice, that is, who’s doing the selecting, who “approved this message”.

However, worst of all was the advertising all around the page.   Google ads to the left and right, Amazon ads in the body!   So, if people go to that site, this (unknown) person’s making money.   And I don’t mind people making money, but they better add value.   That’s why I recently went through the trouble of getting a Creative Commons license for my site.   I want attribution, and I don’t want anyone making money off of my work (at least, if I’m not :).   I don’t have a thing against ads on blogs or sites, if they’re making a contribution, e.g. an aggregation, adding value by being selective, communicating who it is and why they should be trusted.

So I opted out.   I’m willing to be wrong, but frankly this didn’t strike me as a fair relationship.   And a lesson in work literacy.   So, am I too uptight?   Or was this a reasonable decision? (And fair warning to my fellow bloggers.)

New curricula?

9 September 2008 by Clark 2 Comments

I‘m working on a project that‘s creating a new and needed curriculum for a specific course and it got me thinking more broadly about what that might be in a broader sense.   I‘ve talked about the elements before, when I reacted to Stephen Downes‘ proposal.   But I tried to get more concrete about what might make a good undergraduate program that might be what I would want for my kids.

Now, back when I was teaching at UNSW, I had a role in forming a joint Computer Science/Psychology undergraduate program.   At the time (and it‘s not all that different now), technology was getting more capable, and the issues increasingly became how to design systems that meet real needs.   I believed then (and now) that an understanding of how people really think and learn, and how technology can be designed, would be a valuable combination.   The program (if I recall correctly) also covered a wee bit of how business worked.

I still think that model isn‘t far wrong.   Ok, it was pretty technical, teaching programming, and not sure I‘d focus on that instead of skills around designing technology capabilities (not implementing), and managing the process.   I‘d add a social component as well, but keeping cognition and technology.   I‘d elaborate the business side, and add some focus on about society and culture (and values; I haven‘t abandoned my concern with wisdom).

I think this might be the core of a general liberal arts program, so at one level this may be part of all degrees, but it certainly could be it‘s own unique focus with some depth in each of the areas. Cognition, sociology, technology design and management, etc.   And I like innovations like outcomes-based education, and service learning, but these aren’t mutually exclusive with the above.

Of course, right now my son wants to be an architect, but I‘ve no problem with that.   He‘ll need special skills, but still will need to know technology (can you say CAD?) and people (who occupies the buildings?).   He may change his focus (I was going to be in submarines at that age), but the core won‘t change.

Now, if only our schools had a focus on a reasonable curriculum (not ‘no child left untested‘), and were properly resourced so they could develop this for learners before they hit college (spiraling back around), and…

To-Learn Lists?

5 September 2008 by Clark 4 Comments

The Learning Circuit’s Blog Big Question of the Month is about To-Learn lists: whether they make sense, how to implement them, etc.   Interesting question.   On the face of it, it seems useful: identifying and focusing on explicit and specific learning goals.   In practice, do they make sense? Do they even exist?

i would suggest that they do exist, and that every time a manager and employee agree on a development plan, there’s at least an implicit To-Learn list.   Obviously, a competency path in an LMS is similarly a formal TL list. And we have an implicit one when we sign up for a course, whether online or face-to-face, buy a book on a topic, or access an online tutorial, FAQ, help page, etc.

I do think that being explicit about learning is valuable, hence my focus on meta-learning, and having clear goals is a way to make them happen.   On the other hand, I think many of our learning goals are small and immediate (like my desire to figure out how to fix the CSS on my website and this blog).   Would it make sense to capture them in the context and generalize them to be thought of at other times?   Probably, and consequently another way we could use our mobile tools to make us more effective (I regularly capture ToDos in my mobile devices, which is why the iPhone is still making me crazy!). And there have been times I’ve put things to look up into my ToDo (though these days I often just look them up in the moment).

So, I think they’re a great idea, maybe not separate from ToDos in general, but worth thinking of as a sub-category, and worth taking the effort to make explicit.   Little bits of learning over the long haul: slow learning!

Killer Game App?

4 September 2008 by Clark 5 Comments

Martine asked on the Serious Games list what the killer app was for ‘serious games’ list, and it prompted some thinking.

As I‘ve suggested before, Pine and Gilmore say that after the product and services economy is the ‘experience’ economy, that we’re in now, where we pay for experiences.   A good example is Apple, which makes buying and owning Apple products more than a product/service, but an experience (think also: themed restaurants/travel, amusement parks, etc).

They argue that the next phase is the ‘transformation’ economy, where experiences will transform us.   Read: learning.   I’ll suggest serious games is a component of that transformation experience, and the principles underlying ‘engaging learning’ (engaginglearning.com), designing learning games, are the principles for designing those transformative experiences.

However, it occurs to me that the killer app may just well be a game-based high-stakes assessment.   Why?   Assessment is important, and tough to do well.   Simulation is the closest thing to real performance, and consequently should provide the highest fidelity assessment.   You have to perform to succeed (read: win the game).

A number of years ago I was leading an R&D project building an intelligently adaptive learning system, using learner characteristics.   We started with a profiling instrument to develop the basis for adaptation, but intended to build a game-based environment to assess learner’s ‘styles’ (c.f. my rant on learning styles) as the basis for adaptation.   I think this idea could be extended for many important skills.

There’s no reason, for instance, that SimuLearn’s Virtual Leader couldn’t be a leadership assessment as well as a learning environment (if you buy their leadership model).   In fact, any assessment use would naturally (ala problem-based learning) serve as the basis for a learning experience as well.

So, my take on the killer app for games (besides games already being the killer app for elearning :), is high-stakes assessment.   This is a test: what do you think?

Facebook Apprenticeship

3 September 2008 by Clark 1 Comment

Jay Cross has an interesting post about using Facebook in the organization, and makes a connectionCognitive Apprenticeship I hadn’t seen (and wish I had :).   He’s citing another post on FaceBook and the Enterprise, where JP Rangaswami posits that Facebook can be used to allow individuals to track what their bosses are doing, as role models.   Jay connects this to Cognitive Apprenticeship (my favorite model of learning), where the boss is modeling his thinking processes, and the employee can use that model as a guide to performance.   Modeled performance is one of the components.

This is a great idea, making individuals thought processes visible for others to see, though whether it has to be the boss specifically, or others employees worth tracking (the more experienced practitioner, the expert in a particular area of interest) is an open question.   Likewise, the employee’s actions might be made visible as a basis for coaching/mentoring.

I’m not sure Facebook is the right tool, but a combination of tools might make sense and Facebook’s APIs might make it possible.   As I commented on Jay’s blog:

I‘m reminded of an interview I heard (wish I knew where; time for Evernote?) where this guy talked about how he kept his team on track: his del.ico.us tags, using basecamp, IM, etc left a trail of what he was paying attention to, where everyone was at, letting them work in tight synchrony.

That sort of open process can be quick, informative, and how Web 2.0 might really transform the ways people work, making personal learning a process of looking in the window of other’s working, and vice versa.   Of course, there are other issues, like privacy, and having a culture where sharing is the basis for improvement, not chastisement.

This actually might fit in with Tony Karrer’s post over at the Learning Circuit’s blog about to-learn lists: could we couple learning goals with semantic web to track relevant actions/posts/tags/etc to auto-support to-learn lists?   And this may be one of the answers to Brent Schlenker’s question about what is eLearning 2.0.

JP’s message recalls how his employees actually wanted to see not how he handled the incoming mail, but how he responded; his outgoing mail.   Very interesting.   Somewhere between seeing what someone’s paying attention to, and seeing how they actually communicate, is a very interesting opportunity.   Blogs provide some insight, tweets another.   So do del.ico.us tags (which I don’t use yet, and perhaps should). You can follow the people blazing the paths, at least. I’m happy following blogs and tweets so far, and learning from it.   Are many of you doing that?   And finding it valuable?

Chromed Comics

2 September 2008 by Clark Leave a Comment

The web is an interesting place, and Google is an interesting player.   They’re just announcing their new browser, Chrome, which uses the same WebKit engine as Safari (as opposed to Firefox’s Gecko engine).   The challenge is to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (which is raising new anti-trust issues with the announcement that once you install it, you may not be able to remove it), but at the same time it’s also challenging Apple and Mozilla (owners of Safari and Firefox, respectively) with whom they’ve had a pretty good relationship.   Of course, Google’s Android OS for mobile phones also challenges Apple’s Mac OS X for the iPhone.   The point being that there are times when it’s hard to decide who’s doing what to who!

Which isn’t to say that Chrome isn’t a compelling vision, and the way they chose to reveal this vision is with a comic!   They got Scott McCloud (author of the must-read Understanding Comics) to write/draw it, and he clearly had access to folks who understood the underpinning ideas and manages to communicate them.     Granted, it helps if you understand the differences between threads and processes, but it really does help illuminate the underlying ideas.

Two lessons:

1. you’ve got to stay on top of the changes in the web space: the arguments for the new technical implementation may not be important to you (they are, but it’s about performance and if you’re not a mega-surfer yet you won’t really notice), but Google’s weight behind it is important from a market perspective.

2. Comics are an underused communication tool with great power.   We’re looking at them for a project we’re working on, fortunately the client’s enthused.   Start considering how you might employ them.

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