Tony Karrer & Dave Lee over at the excellent Learning Circuits Blog (where I got my start in blogging) have started a “Big Question of the Month” series which sounds like a lot of fun.

The first question is whether all learning professionals should be blogging. I think the answer is clearly no. However, all learning professionals should be systematically reflecting, and blogging is a great way to do it.

On the other hand, it’s not the only way, nor does the reflection need to be public. You could keep a journal, or make a wiki, or record podcasts. The thing is to go through the effort to be explicitly reflective.

We know that explicitly capturing our thoughts adds some rigor that we can miss when we just think. And that reviewing our thinking regularly is a valuable act in terms of learning and improving. I just don’t think everyone has to be public and in the written form. I often create graphics to capture my understanding (I’ve got to figure out how to easily add images to my blog!).

I look forward to further questions, and the dialog that goes along with it.

My colleague, and Adobe’s Ambassador for eLearning, Ellen Wagner, was teasing me this morning about whether my interest in ‘slow learning’ isn’t just “lifelong learning”. Frankly, I hadn’t looked at lifelong learning, but my initial take was that it wasn’t.

So, I googled “lifelong learning” and the wikipedia entry confirmed my suspicions:

Lifelong education is a form of pedagogy often accomplished through distance learning or e-learning, continuing education, homeschooling or correspondence courses.

I realize that this is undoubtedly not all of lifelong learning, this bit elaborates a bit:

Lifelong learning sees citizens provided with learning opportunities at all ages and in numerous contexts: at work, at home and through leisure activities, not just through formal channels such as school and higher education.

Which could be what I’m talking about, but I want to be very clear about what I mean by ‘slow learning’. Not to diminish the importance of the other components, but the concept I’m talking about is not receiving sufficient attention and I want to tease it out.What I’m talking about with slow learning are little interventions dribbled out over long periods of time. The metaphor is not attending an event, but having a personal mentor guiding you throughout your life, with an intervention pattern of a small amount of content or activity at a particular moment.

While there’s a role for the course, there’re problems. Some behaviors and attitudes are not amenable to quick fixes. Other changes are really long sequences of development. We need courses, but I want to argue that a useful, perhaps necessary, adjunct is a long-term development approach.

So there, Ellen!

As I mentioned, we were meeting on Consciousness, and Jerry Talley led us to talk about organizational consciousness. He started by mentioning the film The Corporation (which I have not seen; we have children, not a life :) and how it proposes using psychiatric assessment on the behavior of organizations (self-obsessed, ruthless, etc) and concludes that on the whole organizations are psychopaths. This, naturally, is not a ‘good thing‘, and Jerry was curious how organizations could be raised in consciousness.

Jerry proposed four critical elements necessary for corporate consciousness: perception of both the external environment and of internal states and processes, ongoing memory of corporate activity, models for shared meaning (yes!), and a capacity to experiment. I‘d tease the last part out into an ability to reflect and a willingness to act up on it. There‘s certainly an analogy between individual consciousness and organizational consciousness!

Jerry argued that most organizations have none or few of these, and was eager to hear of any one who had all of them. Scary, really. Certainly we know organizations are working on beginning to capture memory (knowledge management), and increasingly we see corporations trying to track competitive intelligence in real time. We‘re using stories to create and share understanding, and companies are beginning to realize the need to make their values explicit, though we don‘t do enough about using models (but I‘ve gone off on this enough already).

The last issue is the reflection and willingness to act on it. Of course, you can‘t do the latter if you haven‘t done the former. But that reflection doesn‘t happen. We talked about a number of large well-known organizations whose culture doesn‘t let them admit failure. We all know the managers who think that time for reflection is a waste. Even if you have ideas, the ability to take a chance is fraught with risk for many. We also noted, on the positive side, Google‘s support (mandate?) for at least their folks to spend 20% of their time on their own projects.

It was clear that our societal focus on short-term shareholder returns is in contrast to the long-term success of organizations (and for society, but that‘s another story; check out David Batstone in the meantime). If you‘re looking for the greatest short-term return, your decisions can‘t focus on other important elements like impact on society and the world, or even on long-term success (I was reminded of Akio Morita‘s (chairman of Sony) analysis of Western business in The Japan That Can Say No).

The point being here that, except for a few isolated fits and starts, our organizations are not functioning optimally (and that‘s true in the moment, not just in the long term). It‘s partly an issue of organizational culture, partly a situation that technology can help. I‘m happy if we work on both together. You really have to, after all.

On Friday I had the pleasure of gathering with some very interesting people (including the Schuylers, Betsy Burroughs, and Jeff Saperstein) at Doug Englebart‘s house to discuss Consciousness. Yassi Mogahaddam started us off asking what consciousness is. It‘s clear that any time we‘re awake we‘re technically conscious, but there are appear to be two different types of consciousness.

To illustrate, we used the situation of driving. There are times when the driving is automatic, and our minds can wander to solve problems or listen to the radio. Then there‘s the case where someone swerves in front of us and we can no longer rely on our automatized processes and we‘re in the moment. We might even get angry. All this is ‘in the moment‘ still, or what Don Norman terms ‘active cognition.

Then there are the times when we think about what we‘re doing, observing ourselves being angry perhaps, and as someone pointed out, integrating our different modes of perception. Don called this ‘reflective cognition‘, but there‘s more. Eastern wisdom tells us about being centered, and clearly there are times when we‘re consciously reflecting on our own learning and thinking (meta-cognition and meta-learning).

Of course, consciousness means many things, and more than one attendee mentioned efforts to achieve higher consciousness. I naturally had to bring up wisdom, and we talked about how we might achieve it.

We reviewed historical notions of consciousness and the development of our intelligence and attitudes (the ability of the ancient Greeks to spend time philosophizing comes in some part from their use of slaves, despite their analyses of the importance of freedom), and of points of view.

The point I want to make is that self-improvement is not necessarily a natural state, and it takes cultivation to turn people to a path of seeking more than what‘s just best for themselves. Robert Sternberg has argued that we should explicitly teach wisdom in classes, and I think it should be made intrinsic to our curriculum. And this holds true at the organizational level as well!

Donald Clark, ex-CEO of the Epic Group in the UK, has got a great blog, where he cheerfully skewers misconceptions about learning. In a rant I was pointed to, he takes aim at Gagne’s Nine Dull Commandments. As the subsequent comments point out, the problem isn’t necessarily with Gagne’s elements as it is with their interpretation and a belief in their rigid order.

It’s not a case of “if you follow it (without insight), they will learn”. The typical interpretation of many of the elements is so rote that they counter what they’re supposed to do. I’ve tried to suggest an improved approach in my white paper about the Seven Step Program to eLearning Improvement (NB: PDF), and it’s nice to see others picking up that a mechanistic implementation of Gagne’ (or anyone else) won’t hit the mark.

As I previously mentioned, I got the privilege of co-hosting a day of meetings for the UK’s visiting mission on eLearning. Sponsored by the Department of Trade & Industry, these missions send a small panel of experts from industry and academia to review and report on relevant international activity. They each have specific areas of responsibility, and are to bring back the outcomes that they determine. I have to say that the group seemed very experienced and aware, and I was eagerly awaiting the report.

The report (PDF) is now available to all. This report includes chapters on mLearning, games, performance support, and more. I haven’t yet read the whole thing, but what I have read looks suitably insightful. I recommend having a look at this critical evaluation of eLearning in the US.

Jay Cross’ Informal Learning Blog, InformL pointed me to this blog post about the need for manuals and the problems with them. The diagram says it all, really.

My PhD work included mental models, and the research is robust: that with models, learners can forget some steps and regenerate the missing bits; that models provide the ability to predict what will happen or explain what happened; and troubleshoot. But what we get in instructions are rote procedures to do something, not oriented around our goals.

When I tried to learn Macromedia’s FreeHand, their tutorial had you build a picture. It was useless. It was only by experimentation that I discovered that what I thought were the atomic elements, shapes, were actually paths that could be manipulated, e.g. cut (see the Quinnovation logo). They didn’t provide a conceptual model that talked about paths and how everything, text, shapes, etc, could be translated to them (and had to be for real manipulation). I may still have it wrong, as it’s also known that individuals will infer models, possibly incorrectly, and without guidance can retain those models with great persistence.

I’ve been trying to get most elearning to focus on the underlying models instead of rote procedures (it’s one of my seven steps to better elearning points; warning, PDF).

I also note that the claim about systems being designed to not need manuals doesn’t make sense for anything more complicated than a toaster. Unless, of course, you’re going to give me unlimited bandwidth and resources, but most people want to keep the size of their devices under control and provide the full set of features people want.

I argue that it’s not about training, it’s about supporting performance, and that includes responsibility for a broader picture. Currently too much of this is siloed off in different parts of organizations, so software engineers write help systems, a different group writes manuals, the training group prepaes training, etc., all from the same information (hence the push for ‘single-sourcing’ and content models). We can do a better job if we start from the models, and populate all these forms of information in an integrated, cross-referencing, and encompassing strategy.

If, as the experts have it, customer experience is the new differentiator, having a usable system coupled with coherent support ought to be part of the picture.

Bobbi Kamil, the “blushing bride” of my colleague John Ittelson (and demonstrably successful as the founder of Cable in the Classroom), is a strong believer in constructivism, and so (at least philosophically) am I. So, in teaching a summer course in Learning Theory courtesy of Professor Ittelson, I designed a rich sequence of assignments to accompany each developing chapter.

Owing to cognitive theory and wanting them to elaborate the concepts for themselves, practice elaborating them conceptually, and apply the principles, I had them write a journal, answer a discussion question, and work in groups to address a question (typically framed as an RFP), respectively. I felt strongly that this was an appropriate set of activities.

For reasons that I won’t go into here, I was prevented from doing more than provide feedback on the group assignments during the semester. Naturally, I was somewhat leery of what the outcomes were going to be (to put it mildly).

I can’t really comment on the personal journals (yet), but the group assignments led to some very insightful outcomes. Moreover, and here’s the big lesson: the responses to the discussion questions (in a bulletin board, with a requirement for commenting on someone else’s response), were quite simply awesome. The developing understanding was with few exceptions as good or better than I could have provided.
Then came Kisrshner, Sweller, & Clark’s robust (NB: a PDF) denunciation of Constructivism. The point they make (and it’s not original, but nicely documented) is that you can’t trust learners to self-direct, and you need to provide guidance. In some what’s it’s reminiscent of the furor Reder, Anderson, & Simon caused in their reaction to situated cognition and constructivism. And, I note, that KSC do admit that the older the student, the more you should expect self-determination.

I qualify that by saying that we can’t *expect* self-learning capability, we should develop it. On the other hand, this was a Master’s program. I’m mindful that Bobbi’s advice was to ‘have faith’. And while I had hoped to provide more personal feedback, the outcomes indeed showed that the learners could come to grips (by and large) with the challenges and ambiguities, and successfully grasp the concepts.

So, do ensure you match the guidance to the learner, but do have faith and take a chance on empowering learners to take ownership of their learning and wrestle with (an appropriate level of) ambiguity. They may not enjoy it, but the learning outcomes are the proof.

There’s some interesting lists going around about what you should learn. Stephen Downes has created a list (in reply to Guy Kawasaki’s list), and not surprisingly it’s really good. I was interested in how it compared to the list I created for my ‘learning wisdom‘ talk back in November. Stephen’s is more personal (ie what a learner should take ownership of), where mine was more curricular, but there are enough similarities to see why I resonated with it.

Here then, are his 10 items and their relation to the list I created:

1. How to predict consequences – this is my ‘systems thinking’, the ability to use models to make predictions and explanations. I add in the ability to build models (even if just qualitatively), as I think it’s an important skill going forward.
2. How to read – I didn’t have this explicitly, but he means it as more than literacy, and I lump it under ‘critical thinking’.
3. How to distinguish between truth and fiction – this, too, fits under ‘critical thinking’ in my list.
4. How to empathize – this would fit under my category of ‘stewardship’, a feeling of responsibility for others, but also the other denizens of our planet and the planet itself.
5. How to be creative – I have this under ‘design’.
6. How to communicate clearly – and I have this under communication.
7. How to learn – I have ‘meta-learning’.
8. How to stay healthy – this is one place where we begin to differ, I didn’t have this explicitly, and it’s a good element.
9. How to value yourself – I think this is a good one as well. I don’t have it.
10. How to live meaningfully – Again, one I didn’t have explicitly, I’d argue (not strongly, however) that it could fall out my element of ethics.

So, my list had 5 major categories with two elements each: I had problem-solving including research and design, systems-thinking with model-based reasoning and modeling, working with others covering leadership as well as communication, learning as an umbrella for critical thinking and meta-learning, and values covering both ethics and stewardship.

I could quibble about leadership, research, and ethics, and Stephen could quibble about health, valuing yourself, and living meaningfully, but I think both lists provide some good ideas sorely missing from our current schooling. Like David Jonassen says, the problems our kids learn to solve in schools have essentially no relation to what they have to solve in life.