Archives for December 2011

I’ve been monitoring the comments on my #change11 posts, and rather than address them individually, I’m posting responses.  So, a couple of questions have recurred about the slow learning concept.  One is how the notion of quick small bites reflects a slower learning process.  Another is how it might play out in the organization.  And a final one is about the overall pedagogy.

To address the first one, the notion is that the learnings are wrapped around the events in your life, not where you’re taken away from the context of your life to have a learning experience.  I think of this as embedded learning versus event learning.  Yes, it’s quick bits, but they don’t mean as much on their own as in their cumulative effect over time.  Whereas the cumulative effect of the event model dissipates quickly, the distributed model builds slowly!

To address the pedagogy, it’s about having little bits of extra information that connect to the events in your life, not separate (unless the events in your life aren’t frequent enough, and then we might create little ‘alternate reality’ events that create plausible and fun scenarios that also provide the desired practice to develop you on the path.  It’s not breaking up event-based learning into smaller chunks so much as wrapping around the meaningful events in your life, when possible.

And that pedagogy will very much be our choice.  I do hope we can take the opportunity to include a sufficient level of challenge, and the opportunity to personalize it, rather than keep it generic. Consider minimalist approaches, weave in learning-to-learn, connecting people as well as providing additional information.  For instance, we should be asking personalization questions afterward (whether via system or person).  The algorithms hopefully will have some serendipity as well as relationships to my personal experience.  Some elliptical material. This would support discovering new relationships in learning, as well, as we mine the effects of some random juxtapositions across many experiences.

How to make this practical in organizations worried about immediate productivity?  In my experience, it’s already happening. Folks are (trying) to take responsibility for their learning.  They take the social media cigarette breaks to go out and connect to their networks when the office blocks access through the firewall.  They’re discussing work topics in LinkedIn groups, and using Twitter to both track new things and to get questions answered.  The question really is whether orgs will ignore or hamper this versus facilitating it.  That’s why I’m part of the Internet Time Alliance, where we are working with organizations to help them start supporting learning, not just offering training.

We do see small bits of moves toward slow learning, but I don’t like to assume everyone’s yet capable of taking ownership of it. And, yes, the sad state of the world is that typical schooling and old-style management can squelch the love of learning and not develop the skills that are needed.  We have multiple challenges, and I’m just suggesting the concept of slow learning, a drip-irrigation versus flood metaphor, is a wedge to help drive us out of the event-based model and start addressing the issues raised: pedagogy, curricula, infrastructure, technology, politics, and more.  The efforts to build such a system, I reckon, will force progress on many fronts.  Whether it’s the best  approach to do that is a separate question. I welcome your thoughts.

And a thanks to all for their participation this week, it’s been a learning experience for me as well!

It occurs to me that I’ve probably not conveyed in any concrete terms what I think the ‘slow learning’ experience might be like. And I admit that I’m talking a technology environment in the concrete instance (because I like toys).  So here are some instances:

Say you’ve a meeting with a potential client.  You’ve been working on how to more clearly articulate the solutions you offer and  listening to the customer to establish whether there’s a match or not. You’ve entered the meeting into your calendar, and indicated the topic by the calendar, tags, the client, or some other way. So, shortly before the meeting, your system might send you some reminder that both reiterated the ‘message’ you’d worked out, and reminded you about pulling out the client’s issues.  Then, there might be a tool provided during the meeting (whether one you’d created, one you’d customized, or a stock one) to help capture the important elements. Afterwards, the system might provide you with a self-evaluation tool, or even connect you to a person for a chat.

Or, say, you’re walking around a new town.  Your system might regularly suggest some topics of interest, depending on  your interest showing architecture, history, or socioeconomic indicators.  You could ignore them, or follow them up.  Ideally, it’d also start connecting some dots: showing a picture from a previous trip and suggesting “Remember we saw an example of <this> architect use here?  Well, right here we have the evolution of that form; see how the arches have…”  So it’s making connections for you.  You can ignore, pursue further, or whatever. It might make a tour for you on the fly, if you wanted.  If you were interested in food, it might say: “we’ve been exploring Indian food, you apparently have no plans for dinner and there’s an Indian restaurant near here that would be a way to explore Southern Indian cuisine”.

Another situation might be watching an event, and having extra information laid on top. So instead of just watching a game, you could see additional information that is being used by the coaches to make strategic decisions: strengths and weaknesses of the opposing team in this context, intangible considerations like clock management, or the effects of wind.

And even in formal schooling, if you’re engaged in either an individual or group problem, it might well be available to provide a hint, as well as of course tools to hand.

The notion is that you might have more formal and informal goals, and the system would layer on information, augmenting your reality with extra information aligned to your interests and goals, making the world richer.  It could and would help performance in the moment, but also layer on some concepts on top.

I see this as perhaps a mobile app, that has some way of notifying you (e.g. it’s own signature ‘sound’), a way to sense context, and more. It might ask for your agreement to have a link into the task apps you use, so it has more context information, but also knows when and where you are.

This isn’t the only path to slow learning.  Ideally, it’d just be a rich offering of community-generated resources and people to connect with in the moment, but to get people ready to take advantage of that it might need some initial scaffolding.  Is this making sense?

I have to say that I found the comments on my initial post very interesting and challenging.  A couple of themes have emerged that partly I want to elaborate on, and partly want to reflect upon.  I believe in, and do try, ‘learning out loud’, so I’ll both try to elaborate and draw myself up short.

One of the themes that emerged is the rejection of the GPS idea, and extolling a preference for getting lost (I did  explicitly mention that GPS’s do not  help you learn the terrain, but I’ll add that they could).  I want to unpack that a bit. One of the issues is, for me, where you want to learn, and where you don’t.  As a definitely curious individual (in both senses, I suppose :), there’s far too much of interest for me to be able to focus on it all. As a consequence, I want to decide on what I invest effort in, and what I don’t.  So, for instance, I’ve learned about keyboard shortcuts to use Word’s outline  capabilities, and I can understand where others would not (tho’ I admit to wishing everyone would learn styles, as a valuable model going forward!).  So, I think we’d use a mental GPS when it’s something we don’t want to learn, and we’d want a different relationship when we do.  If  we’re self-aware learners.

There’s also the issue of how the Sage on the Side  would operate? What curricula are being used?  Who’s providing the content?  I will admit that while I talk a constructivist game, I do tend to err too quickly to think about designed resources.  In my own defense, I will suggest that self-learning skills aren’t broadly distributed enough yet, and particularly for novices, there are times when they don’t know what they need and why it’s important.  I am very much a fan of guided discovery learning (not the unguided discovery learning that was used as a straw-man opponent to instructivist in the Kirschner, Sweller, Clark article), but I do believe guidance is necessary until learners demonstrate self-learning capability. And I definitely think we can and should be developing that capability, but I’m not sanguine that we’re very good at it yet.

However,  I’ve earlier talked about user generated curricula, and I think that’s really the way to go.   In the long term, the communities will take ownership of the paths to competency. I’m hoping, through something like Project Tin Can (horrible  name, but…), we can support defining broad paths to capability that are maintained by the community, and even self-proposed paths that are vetted by the community (says a guy who designed his own undergraduate major).

I admit that I’m trying to focus on a system that can be supporting a person in their goals with minimal human intervention. I want it to be one of the options on the table for the ‘sage’ to draw upon (e.g. the resources can be people, too), but I’m trying to make this scalable. Idealistically, I would like communities to become more other-supporting, but I think such a system would have desirable properties in terms of developing people over time.

As I think about it, I also anticipate some serendipity in the sage approach.  There’s some randomness in our cognitive architecture, and I’d like to see some similar probabilistic behavior in the system recommendations.  When we built the Intellectricityâ„¢ system, we had options ‘competing’ for the opportunity to be presented.  We also had machine learning in the background to improve the weighting.  This is where deep analytics and semantics could generate some real interesting outcomes.

And I definitely would hope that we would explicitly be working in a layer on top of the learning goals to address meta-learning or learning to learn, so we could move from providing guidance to merely suggesting resources.  So, for example, despite my time trying to improve my learning, there’s still room for improvement and I welcome any assistance I can get.  I’m mindful of Watts Humphrey’s work in software quality, where documenting your decisions and having them reviewed identified persistent mistakes, and allowed for continual improvement (resulting in large decreases in errors, much more accurate schedules, and other tangible benefits).  The approach is certainly applicable to other areas of design and work, and I think it’d be fascinating to have systemic support (because the overhead is high enough that I haven’t been able to instill it in myself ;).

Given that we’re all novices in some areas while experts in others, I think the notion of at least a bootstrap from some support makes sense to assist transition into a community of practice.  I don’t think this is fundamental opposition to rhizomes,connectivism, or anything else, but I welcome your thoughts.  I do think that the notion of a tree of trajectories may be too rigid, so I’ll have to ponder that, but I’d like to devolve that decision to the community of practice.

Going beyond just the notion of the system, I believe that we need to start thinking more broadly about our curricula, pedagogy, and more. That’s not new, but I do believe a shift from learning events to continual development is not only needed, but doable.  Given that each of us is a member of multiple communities, it may look more like a network, but that’s OK.