Consciousness is an interesting artifact of our cognitive architecture. And no, (despite being a native Californian ;) I’m not talking about social or environmental or higher consciousness. Here I’m talking about our conscious thinking, the insight we have (or not) into our own internal thinking. And it’s interesting and relevant.
First, we really don’t have a full understanding of consciousness. It’s a phenomena ew pretty much all experience, but the actual mechanism about how, or where, it arises in our brain is still a mystery. How do we have this perception of a serial narrative in our head, but our brain is massively parallel? Yet it’s there. At least, to conscious inspection ;).
Actually, much of our processing is subconscious. We compile away our expertise as we develop it. We use conscious dialog (internal or external) to shape our performance, but what we actually do gets stored away without explicit access. In fact, research says that 70% of what experts do (and that’s us, in our areas of expertise) isn’t accessible. Thus, experts literally can’t tell us what they do! (Warning, warning: important implications for working with SMEs!)
In fact, consciousness is typically used to deal with situations that aren’t practiced: conversations on topics, dealing with unique problems, and of course learning new things. Informal learning is pretty much all conscious, while formal learning is about practicing to make the conscious become unconscious!
Which, of course, is why the ‘event’ model of learning doesn’t work. There’s not enough practice, spaced out over time, for that learning to become automated. And we don’t expect our formal learning to get us all the way there, we use coaching and feedback to continue to happen.
As learning experience designers or learning engineers, our job is to make sure we provide the right support for using our conscious thoughts to guide our practice. That includes models to explain and predict outcomes, and cognitive annotated examples to model the appropriate solution. And, of course, practice that gradually develops the expertise in appropriate sized chunks and spacing between. I suppose we should be conscious of consciousness in our design ;). So what am I unconsciously missing?
While agreeing on the whole, some conscious reactions, because what fun is there in nodding heads?
“Informal learning is pretty much all conscious…” Was that supposed to be “unconscious”?
“…formal learning is about practicing to make the conscious become unconscious.” I’d agree with that for much of high school and good training courses. For the classic college seminar, though, the focus is often in the opposite direction, making the unconscious conscious.
“the ‘event’ model of learning doesn’t work” Indeed not, if that means one introductory project to learning some new skill. But let’s not overlook failure-driven learning. Once burned, twice learned.
Chris, I think problem-solving/trouble-shooting/research/design are all conscious, and yet the answer isn’t known so they’re ‘learning’. That’s what I mean by informal learning. And I’ve been kind of against the concept of ‘stealth learning’, in that I think you increase the likelihood of learning sticking if you make it explicit. That said, I do also think there’s unconscious learning.
And I think making the unconscious conscious is an early start to making the expertise unconscious (e.g. making it explicit and visible as part of the process of becoming self-monitoring).
I agree with individual events being part of the learning process, but I think they’re part of an ongoing process, and trying to achieve a meaningful outcome via a one day event. So yes, a series of learning events aggregate to a learning experience, but an extended learning experience is required to achieve retention and transfer, not just an event.
Fair enough? Thanks for the feedback (and yes, much prefer fun rather than nodding heads ;).