John Medina gave the closing keynote at DevLearn, based upon his book Brain Rules.   He covered two of his 12 rules, on memory, and on exercise.   He spoke fast, was enthusiastic, funny, and knowledgeable.   He talked about myths of learning, and said that he didn’t think there was a lot neuroscience had to say to learning design (thankfully, cf Willingham).

One of his points was that our brains evolved to provide ongoing performance guidance over hours of constant motion (evolutionarily).   This leads to implications that are contrary to most of our learning contexts!

His first rule was about memory, and he covered the basic model of cognitive models of memory, but then pointed out that it’s about 10 years from initial exposure to fixed memory, and requires extensive repetition.   During that period, distortion can occur. This explains the rule of thumb that you have to be doing something for 10 years before you can be considered an expert.   It probably takes 10 years of doing things before they’re solidified in useful experience to apply.

The second rule he covered was the relation between exercise and learning.   It was really exercise and thinking, and there’s a positive relationship.   The difference between sedentary and moderately active lifestyles is big in terms of mental acuity.   And reintroducing it for a reasonably short period (16 weeks) can reignite.   Memory improvements take longer, like 3 years.   It works for kids too, and if they stop, it drops off.

He made several observations how revising schools would work better, sadly too true.   So, repeat if you need it to stick (a great opportunity for mobile learning), and do get exercise for your own health, and maybe have an organizational incentive as well!   Here’s my concept map (it was hard as quick as he spoke, so didn’t get all the data):

Along the lines of the earlier post about social media tools, I thought it might be a ‘practice what your preach’ if I made my thinking explicit. We know that learning is facilitated when experts articulate not only their decisions, but the background rationale (ala Alan Schoenfeld, as I know it from Cognitive Apprenticeship).   To some extent I reckon I do this, amidst my tweets and blog posts.   However, I’m not sure if I show my underlying thinking enough, and I’m wondering if there is more I can do.

I try to show some of the thinking triggered by various projects I’m on, but of course on most of them I’m bound by confidentiality not to reveal the specifics, let alone the really neat new things we’re working on. I also capture some of my background principles in various papers/articles, like those available at the Quinnovation Resources page.   And I do try to capture my ongoing thinking though I wonder if I capture the contexts that generate the thoughts sufficiently.

It’s hard to be accurately self-reflective, and strike that balance between stating opinions, sharing personal reflections, and be reasonably concise.   I’d been thinking that I should, so now I reckon it’s time to ask: what would you like more of, less of, etc?   Here’s your chance to let me know what’s working, what’s not, what would make this more worthwhile for you.   Otherwise, I reckon I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing…

The other day, I wanted to read an article on the CLO site.   I went there, but I found the article too hard to read; there were bloody animated gifs everywhere!   Really, it’s only like 5 years since we realized that animated gifs make things hard to look at, and it’s based upon perceptual psychology way older than that.

Our eyes have cones at the center that pick up color and fine detail, and rods at the edge that kick in for low-light situations.   Those rods also detect motion, and we’re wired to move our attention to things that move in the periphery of our vision (survival, naturally :).   So, if we’re focused on reading something, and an ad is moving in the periphery, we can’t read it well. And CLO spread the article across four pages with moving ads all over the place.   I gave up, which I presume isn’t their intention.   Time to get a clue; you can’t process what you can’t attend to.

That’s a low level distraction, but we see this at multiple levels.   A higher-level one that’s going on around here is the kitchen demolition. It’s made it harder to blog, as I’ve had a hard time doing deep reflection when there’re continual interruptions (worse these next few days, I’ve got the kids while my wife is away visiting her mother; don’t expect there to be a lot of posts this week).   Interestingly, it hasn’t had a similar impact on my tweeting, which is an interesting outcome.   We intuitively know that tweeting is different than blogging (hence the sobriquet: micro-blogging), but it was brought home more vividly. It’s interesting to think about the cognitive differences we find, and their utility for learning.   As I previously mentioned, social networking could support virtual mentorships, and tweeting I think is more immediately tied to a person’s current state, while blogs are more closely tied to their longer-term thinking.   Both, of course, could/should be coupled together for a really rich picture.   How many of you are finding that watching a person’s tweets and blog posts together provide a rich picture?

There’s another level, of course, at the organizational level.   Doug Engelbart, one of our true visionaries, who’s guiding principle of augmenting human intelligence has led him to contributions in many places, has talked about a three-layer system for ongoing improvement.   He posits one layer reviewing our daily action for improvements, and his unique insight is a layer above, looking to improve our improvement processes, across organizations.   The ongoing review is sort of an institutionalized reflection, and the next layer is meta-learning at an societal level.

I still argue that one of the best investments that can be made is reflection, particularly for knowledge work and any individual or organization that needs to not just survive but thrive in the growing flow of information and chaos.   Systematize it, support it, promote it, reward it, and use it.