I was recently thinking about grades, and was wondering what an ‘A’ means these days.   Then, at my lad’s Back to School night, I was confronted with evidence of the two competing theories that I see. One teacher had a scale on the wall, with (I don’t remember exactly, but something like): 96-100 = A+, 91-95 = A, 86-90 = A-, and so on, down to below 50 = Fail. Now, you get full points on homework just for trying, but it’s clearly a competency model, with absolute standards.   A different teacher recounted how she tells students that if they just do the required work, that it’s only worth a C, and A’s are for above and beyond. That’s a different model. There aren’t strict criteria for that latter.   And I’m very sympathetic to that latter stance, despite that it seems subjective.

The second approach resonates with my experience back in high school, where A’s were handed out for work that really was above and beyond the ordinary.   A deeper understanding.   We seem to have shifted to a model where if you do what’s asked, you get an ‘A’.   And I see benefits of both sides.   Defining performance, and having everyone able to achieve them is ideal.   Yet, intuitively, you recognize that there’s the ability to apply concepts, and then another level where people can flexibly use them to solve novel problems, combine them with other concepts, infer new concepts, etc.

I was pointed to some work by Daniel Schwartz (thanks @mrch0mp3rs) that grounds this intuition in an innovative framework based upon some good research. In a paper with John Bransford and David Sears, they made a intriguing case for two different forms of transfer: efficient and innovative, and argued convincingly that most of our models address the former and not the latter, yet addressing the latter yielded better outcomes on both.   I think the work David Jonassen is doing on teaching problem-solving is developing just this sort of understanding, but it’s on problems that are like real world ones (and yet improves performance on standard measures).   And I like David’s lament that the problems kids solve in schools have no relation to the problems they see in the world (and, implicitly, no worth).

Right now, our competencies aren’t defined well enough to support assessing this extra level.   In an ideal world, we’d have them all mapped out, and you could get A’s in every one you could master.   We don’t live in that world, unfortunately.   So we have two paths.   We live with our lower measures, and everyone gets A’s meeting them (if they try, but that’s a separate issue), and then sort it out after graduation, in the real world, or we allow some interpretation by the teacher and measure not only effort, but a deeper form of understanding.   We’ve steered away from the second approach, probably because of the consequent arguments about favoritism, social stigma, etc.   Yet the former is increasingly meaningless, I fear.

We should bite the bullet and admit that we’re waving our hands. Then we could own up that not all teachers are ready to do the type of teaching David’s doing and Daniel’s advocating, and look to using technology to make available a higher quality of content (like the UC College Prep program has been doing) to provide support.   I’d rather see a man-in-the-moon program around getting a really meaningful curriculum up online than going to Mars at this point, and I’m a big fan of NASA and the pragmatic benefits of space exploration. Just think such a project would have a bigger impact on the world, all told.

In the meantime, we have to live with some grade inflation (gee, I got into a UC with a high school average below 4.0!), bad alignment between what schools do and what kids need as preparation for life in this century, and a very long road towards any meaningful change.   Sigh.

Aaron Silvers (@mrch0mp3rs) wrote a post tying together the non-linear nature of cyberspace with the essentially linear nature of our past.   Identifying how new technologies have to establish their own natures is a familiar refrain, but he’s comparing our learning with our   new contexts, and essentially questioning the relationship between old methods and new contexts.

It was this quote which got me thinking:

communications outside of education are happening, increasingly, in hyperspace…, but our preferred methods for learning are still long-held narrative forms

I started wondering about whether we could learn without a linear narrative form, and realized we could.   That is, we really do want to train certain people (e.g. pilots) to react before conscious thought kicks in. And similarly in, say, martial arts. It gets to a point where the expert creates rationales for what they’re doing that aren’t necessarily tied to the real action.   We saw this in the problems that arose with ‘expert systems’, where experts articulated what they did, and then they built systems that did what the experts said, and they didn’t work.

Typically, we start off on component skills, addressing them with some explicit feedback, and gradually layer on more complex frameworks (“be the ball” :), and the performance is compiled into a deeper, really subcognitive level.   We’ve used stories and feedback, and then augmented with video capture and fancy feedback machines, but we’ve kept that conscious layer of description even as it gets more abstract to match our increasingly high level of control.   Our brains have evolved to process linear narrative, as we see in all the calls for incorporating story in communication. And reflection, a critical component of learning, is conscious.   Now, consciousness is a still not understood linear phenomena emerging from our parallel processing brain.   What would it mean to end-run linear consciousness?   That’s what I started trying to imagine.

And what I came up with was a simulation game/immersive environment with non-cognitive feedback, that could train your responses. You’d be performing, and the feedback would train and integrate your responses.   Yes, there’d be an explicit model of performance to guide the feedback, but the learner might not be aware of the relationships.   Yes, learners would likely create a story about what’s happening (given that we’re likely to reflect consciously on what we do), but it could be wrong or they could even have their attention drawn elsewhere. So the game might even have some layer with high or little relation to what the system is training.   But it could work, like in that possibly apocryphal story of the students who kept paying high quality attention to the instructor when he was on side of the room, and looked away at the other side of the room, and at the end of the lecture the instructor was way off in one corner of the room.

And what concerned me was that I wouldn’t want to have a parallel training system that bypassed or misled the conscious learning.   And that’s what I raised as a comment on Aaron’s post.   Not that I thought Aaron was advocating that, but it’s just where my thinking went, and he rightly queried what I was on about.   I couldn’t fit it in a comment, hence this post.

The point being, there’s a role for the linear conscious narrative and reflection in our learning, just as there’s a role for dynamic multimedia networks in our learning as well.   It’s finding out the balance, the role of activity and reflection, that’s the interesting and important challenge.

Harold Jarche (@hjarche) retweeted his prior post on “First, we kill the curriculum“, and generated some serious interest.   For instance, Mark Oehlert (@moehlert) was inspired to write “Harold Jarche is Wicked Smart and We Need to Talk about Curriculum“.     I know Harold, and he is wicked smart (see this skewering of homework), so I commented on his blog and it seems we may have a semantics difference as opposed to a fundamental one.   Still, I want to make the point.

Harold, starting from the premise that the web is as fundamental a change as was the printing press, and, as the press could foster content, so the web can foster connections.   The emergent nature of knowledge out of a network argues against a fixed curriculum and instead for contextualized knowledge.   Arguing against a fixed curriculum, he says this:

a subject-based curriculum will always be based on the wrong subjects for some people. Without a subject-centric curriculum, teachers could choose the appropriate subject matter for their particular class

and this is, I think a valid point.   There’s too much focus on rote, and already out-dated knowledge.   Making my lad continue to demonstrate his ability to do the times tables ad nauseum only kills his love of learning.   And the first year of middle school seems to be much more about turning them into manageable prisoners rather than learning much of anything.   Things are moving so fast that it’s hard to imagine that much of what we learn, other than vocabulary, math rules, and science basics are necessary.   Jim Levin argued 30 years ago that learning multiplication and long division was outdated in the age of the calculator and that estimation was the necessary skill to ensure you were in the right ball park.   Why are we still teaching long division?   In short, drill and kill is pretty dumb.

So, is there a curriclum?   I think so, and Harold really says so too:

ensuing that students have mastered the important processes. Some of the processes that readily come to mind are critical thinking; analysing data; researching; communicating ideas; creating new things

Now, I think we’re arguing over whether skills are a curriculum, and I reckon they are, that is a focused set of learning outcomes we’re trying to achieve.   Not content, but skills.   I do believe there are some fundamentals, like levers, and gravity, and the associative property, but these are frameworks and models, tools upon which we build a flexible set of problem-solving, coupled with just the sort of skills Harold’s talking about (and I’ve talked about before).

The point is, the world’s changing, and yet we’re not equipping our kids with the necessary skills.   We need a new pedagogy, problem-focused on things kids are interested in, as Harold suggests, and focusing on their information seeking and experimentation and evaluation and the self-learning skills, not on rote exercise of skills.   I don’t do long-division anymore.   Do you?   Do you graph sentences?   Do you remember formulas?   I don’t think so.   What you do is look up information, make job aids (why are stickies so ubiquitous?), or program in the formulas or use a tool.

Whether or not we call it a curriculum, those problem-solving skills what I want my kids learning, and it’s not happening.   State standards are a joke. I don’t want them learning how to bold in Word, I want them understanding the concept of ‘styles’.   I don’t want them learning how to color a square in Powerpoint, I want them to be effective in communicating visually.   I want them to be learning how to solve ill-structured problems (cf another wicked smart person, David Jonassen)!

I don’t mind the revolutionary statement “kill the curriculum”, but I might just mean it as “kill the current curriculum”, because I do believe that the most effective path to help develop those skills is a formal learning process.   However, it’s likely to be socially constructive in nature, not instructive.   Let’s kill schooling, and reinvent schools as learning labs, with curricula focused on skills and attitudes, and perhaps a minimal core of knowledge.   Which means our standardized tests need tossing, too, but then that should also be obvious. Portfolios and contextualized abilities, not rote knowledge tests.   I reckon Harold and I (and Mark, another wicked smart person) are agreeing furiously.   Anyone for a revolution?

In a conversation I had yesterday, we were talking about how not enough people were using systems-thinking. I realize schools don’t prepare for it sufficiently, but it also made me think about why it’s so necessary.

Getting back to my riff on chaos, if things are getting more random, as such would predict (e.g. in the complex or chaotic quadrants of the Cynefin model), our existing processes are less likely to work.   Off-the-shelf solutions won’t cut it, and you’ll need to be looking for matching patterns that will give you some guidance about how to act.   However, the relevant models may come from unexpected places.   That’s been the source of much innovation, and a motivation for me in my model collecting and generating.

It comes back to reasoning, and one of the most powerful tools we have is analogical reasoning.That’s a model that taps into our cognitive architecture’s orientation towards pattern-matching, and helping pull up a good match.   My Ph.D. was focused on improving analogical reasoning because of the power such reasoning has.

Which is the reason I continue to believe in the power of models.   These are frameworks and tools with analytical power that help explain and predict the world.   (Increasingly, I’m realizing the power of visual representations of such models as well.)

I believe that an experimental attitude and a rich suite of models are the tools that will prevail in the future, comprehending the problem and looking for matching models to see whether they can help, when things are new.   This is the stuff of innovation: it’s blue ocean strategy, it’s when you’re moving into new areas or taking on new responsibilities, it’s the cynefin framework itself.

Some things in the learning field are reasonably well understood (if not widely distributed nor well practiced) such as ID and information architecture.   Others are still emergent: certainly for social media, we’re seeing that it takes time and the advantages of some prior experience; mobile is still emergent; and content models are a new area as well.   The point being, I think that developing a capability for flexible problem-solving is a necessity going forward, and it may take that flexible problem-solving to get there!

I’m still reeling from the intellectual stimulation of the Corporate Learning Trends Conversations on Learning in Organizations that was held a few days ago.   One other big learning for me, in addition to the responsibility of learners, was the issue of corporate learning culture. There were two facets to this.

The first facet has to do with the characteristics of a culture that is conducive to collaboration and communication.   From a business point of view, it’s about execution and innovation.   Execution works in well-defined domains, but innovation requires a variety of factors that characterize a learning organization, including feeling safe to contribute, tolerance for different ideas, and more.   Increasingly, I believe, organizations that can innovate fastest will be those that thrive,   so successful organizations will be learning organizations.

One of the participants mentioned organizations where you can’t share mistakes, and that’s emblematic of organizations that hire smart, aggressive people and expect them to go out and succeed. Which leads to some smart choices, but also you see repeats of the same mistakes.   You don’t really see the effects of that culture until you put in social media, where it becomes obvious whether people are contributing, sharing, etc.

And that was the point I made: to address culture, you have to be explicit about it, it can’t just be background.   An organization should choose it’s culture, with a recognition of where it is now. You’ve got to be realistic, or you won’t be able to sell it, which may include being honest about how it has to change.   But if you don’t talk about it, make it explicit, support change, reward changet, etc, it can’t happen.   It may not be easy, but it should be done.

The second facet has to do with cross-cultural issues.   In the session, Allison Anderson of Intel and Dave Wilkins of Mzinga and I discussed the challenges of trying to cross borders and cultures.   I pointed to Hofstede’s cultural dimensions via a web tour, in making a point about how different cultures can have values that are contrary to a sharing culture.

I cited an example where a company in a country with a low gender difference (MAS) value had acquired a company from a country with a high gender difference value. The potential problem is that a male engineer from the high gender difference country might not listen to a female engineer from the low difference country, yet this would not be in the company’s best interest.

There are clearly problems in expecting someone to adopt a company culture different than their national culture, and yet there is clearly some advantage.   I idealistically suggest it’s worth the effort, if you buttress it with vision and mission, discusison about organizational success, and provide support for the transition.

Like with responsibility for learning, corporate vision & mission, and accepted ethical standards, organizational cultural values needs to be discussed explicitly: defined, modeled, scaffolded, and even evaluated and rewarded.   If it’s not explicit, it’s not fair to assume.   This is really about taking responsibility for organizational learning at a larger level, architecting it, and leveraging technology as an infrastructure that supports the architecture.   It’s meta-learning, and that’s the paradigm I think organizations need to not just survive, but thrive.

On the fantastic Corporate Learning Trends online conference Conversations on Learning in Organizations, one of the topics that came up was “How can we get learners to take resonsibility for their learning”, and it’s a critical one.

At the end of the day, we can’t create learning, we can only (at best) design environments that are conducive to learning.   Learners have to actually take action.   Now, in most instances they’re willing (though our current formal learning is often antithetical to ease of learning; e.g. “spray and pray”, “show up and throw-up” sessions), but when we go beyond the formal course (and we should), we largely abandon learners to their own devices.

That’s a mistake, as the empirical evidence is that efficacious self-learners are relatively rare.   They get by, but they’re far from optimal.   For instance, the first online courses had high dropout rates and relatively low success until they started facilitating the learning process.   Similarly, the work literacy movement is specifically to address the need for these skills.

And it’s not only about skills, but also attitude. When I was teaching at a university, I was always dismayed at the number of students who’s attitude was “just tell me what I need to do to get a good grade”, without caring about the inherent interest in the subject.   Sure, our current schooling may well extinguish the love of learning, and so may the ‘industrial’ approach to training.   However, an intrinsic interest in learning is critical to success, individually, organizationally, and societally.

However, organizationally don’t talk about learning, about learning skills, and we don’t take responsibility for developing those learning skills and making them meaningful.

So my first response was, and is, we need to be explicit about learning skills: about their existence, importance.   And we need to do more, we need to measure them, model them, develop them, and reward them.

As many have noted over the past 24 hours of the conference, the role of the organizational learning function is shifting to facilitating learning, not delivering it.   While there’s still a role for formal learning, our pedagogies and our responsibilities need to shift to learning facilitation, both formal and informal.

Learners need to be assisted in taking responsibility for their learning, and we need to take responsibility for making it so.   In the end, organizations that learn best, will be the ones that survive, and thrive!   So be responsible, and support responsibility!