This starts out slightly technical, but eventually gets to the learning!

My first job out of college was designing and programming educational computer games (FaceMaker & Spellicopter may be the two best known titles).   When I went back to grad school, I went for the design side, though I’ve kept the ability to understand what technology does, and do a bit more than the average bear.

So when my internet connection started getting flaky, I realized I had a problem.   Not the basic problem, but because there were several comonents in the chain, and it’s hard to isolate one without substitute parts.   And, of course, when you have two potential culprits, it’s so typical to have the manufacturer of one blame the other, and vice versa!   Now, my DSL modem and my wireless router were both quite old, at least 4 years and maybe as old as 6 or more.   And I didn’t have a spare of either router or modem. What was I to do?

(Tech details)

For those who are curious, the DSL signal comes in on the phone line, and then the modem translates it into ethernet. That could go straight into the computer, but instead I have that go to a wireless router to serve all the devices in the house (currently 4 computers, a Wii, two DS’s, and my iPhone; when no one’s visiting!).   The phenomenom I was seeing was the connection starting to hang on various accesses.   Rebooting both router and modem solved the problem (rebooting only one never seemed to work), but only for a while (8-24 hours). BTW, this behavior was described both by the ATT guy and a guy at Fry’s as classic hardware going bad.

I called ATT, and they agreed to send me a new modem (I reupped for a year).   That came and I managed to get it installed.   Took several tries, since they forgot to tell me that the modem now stores it’s own account login details, so those detalis don’t need to be stored in the router!   Ahem.   That one bit of info, and I was up and running again.

For a while.   Then the flakiness happened again.   So off I went to Fry’s for a router. For a ridiculously low price they had a refurbished one available, so I nabbed it. Same brand, only a newer version of my old one, which I was happy with.

Taking that home, I finally accessed it’s settings, but couldn’t make it talk to the modem!   The lights on both modem and router said they were connected, but no traffic would go through.   And I couldn’t access the settings via wireless, and it took a long time for the settings page (you control the router through a web page it hosts internally).

I took the router back and exchanged it.   I was willing to bet that the first one was just flaky.   With the new one, the settings page came up almost instantly, and I could access it wirelessly as well.   OK, that seemed better.And the lights indicated everything was fine. But, no traffic was still going through!?!?

I was pretty sure that, it being the weekend, I couldn’t get help ’til Monday, but I searched the Netgear site anyways, and they said they had phone help 24 hours, so I called and got through.   The guy there first said he couldn’t help me by phone for a refurbished modem, but then proceeded to tell me just what the problem was (turns out he couldn’t walk me through online, but could give me the details, which was all I needed).   Of all crazy things, the modem and the new router both want the same URL!   He had me reset the router’s IP address to something different, and viola’, I’m online!

(End tech details)

The learning here is severalfold.   First, systematicity helps.   Now, I know that, but it’s nice to have a chance to practice it.   One of things I miss most about not programming anymore, besides the ability to create new experiences, is debugging.   I loved using logic to try and figure out what’s wrong, and testing, repairing, and so on. I used to work on cars with my Dad, and the same process would be followed.   I think systematic research and testing is a meta-learning skill, and one we really don’t teach in school, yet it’s critical!

Another meta-learning skill, or really attitude, is persistence. I didn’t have an option, because no internet connection would be a critical business issue.   Fortunately I had a connection, it was just flaky (and with all this online seminar action coming up!.   And I admit there were times when I was tempted to use bad language (or did), and/or had to take time out to cool off.   But I kept thinking, testing, talking, reading, and more.

Of course, the two critical pieces of information would’ve been devastating if I didn’t have them.   And I didn’t find either in a discussion forum, I talked to people, live. I’ve learned to be very clear about the steps I’ve already taken, and that helps to short-circuit what can often be very basic stuff (e.g. “did you plug it in, and are the lights lit”). I mentioned that I’d tried the manual, and my steps, which helps build credibility with the tech person (the router person commented that he thought I could do with just the instructions).

So, I think we could and should spend more time developing reasoning skills as well as rote knowledge (duh!), and help people learn to share their thinking to help identify the problems faced.

And now, here’s hoping it was the hardware and not a different problem!

Note that this ate up a lot of my time this past week, what with store, and time on tech support, etc, so this is also an apology for my lack of blogging this past week!

I’ve affiliated with the Learning Irregulars, (“committed to making the world a better place by accelerating innovation in organizational learning. We are open, inquisitive, non-profit, impatient, and feisty”)   As our first public outing, we held a meeting this week.

The approach we’re taking for now is that we conduct activities, like meetings, webinars, and the like, asking interesting and important questions, making them public and collecting artifacts including pictures, reflections, etc. that we also make available. I like to think of it as ‘learning out loud’.   We’re looking to create a dialog around how to accelerate (and improve) organizational learning.

I conducted the part of the meeting where we told stories, and I’ve written those up over at the site. There were some interesting themes that emerged about how we’re not facing up to the large problems that confront us, though there are some great ideas that we really need to take advantage of.   Some great memes included ‘positive deviance’ and ‘questing disposition’.

I’ll quote here the takehome that I took from the meeting:

There was some consistency about needing to be more open and flatter, less hierarchical, that we could learn much from other areas in many ways …, and that we need to provide tools, models, ideas, and examples.

There should (fingers crossed) be an archive of the meeting, and we’ll be holding more.   Stay tuned!   I welcome your thoughts.

So on the way to dinner, my son told me on Friday that he’d tied a guy’s shoes together (the kid fell down when he tried to get up at the end of class, and was late to the next).   I asked, and this was a) a friend, b) a prank (the latest volley in an ongoing series),   c) the boy wasn’t hurt,   but d) was amused.   Unacceptable, still.   It was potentially dangerous, interfered with school operations, and consequently inappropriate. I chided him to that effect, and thought no more about it.   Until my wife let me know Monday night what the school administration had done as a consequence.

Three teachers, together, had reported it, not one of them talking to my son directly.   So he was called into the office, and the Vice Principal who handled it decided on lunch-time detention for two days, at a special table in the cafeteria.   We weren’t involved until afterwards, when my wife heard about it, and then talked to the VP on the second day.   OK, what he did wasn’t the smartest thing to do, and we absolutely believe that consequences are an appropriate response.   As my wife said, 95% of the time she’ll side with the teachers (her dad was one). So it’s not that there was a response, it’s just what the response was.   Our issue is with the process used, and the punishment.

Let’s start that he’s a good kid, who gets good grades because it’s expected of him, despite the fact that the current school situation is such that the content is dull, and the homework staggering (he’s opting out of sports because he doesn’t feel he has the time).   He’s bored at school, as the work’s too easy for him, and the repetitive drill is mind numbing.   However, no argument, his action wasn’t acceptable. In his case, being called to the office at all was probably enough, as the only previous time he’d been was to recognize him for something good he did.   Having a talking to,   for a first infraction, likely would weigh on him enough.   Some time for reflection and even writing an apology to the friend or the teachers   or just a treatise on the folly of the act would be rehabilitative, useful, and understandable. Instead, we have a punitive action.   “You’re bad, and we need to punish you.”

My wife talked to the VP, trying to point out that while intervention was certainly called for, public humiliation wasn’t. The VP denied that it was public, saying that the table is off to the side.   Yes, in the same room, and obviously the location of the ‘bad kids’.   As my son told us, a number of his friends walked by and commented.   I’m not buying it; it’s public humiliation, and that doesn’t make sense as a first recourse (if ever), particularly in a case of behavior that was bad judgment, not malicious.

So either I’m over-reacting, or the process they applied (the teachers not talking to him about it), and the result it came up with (public humiliation for a first offense) is broken.   While I admit it’s hard to be objective, I’m inclined to believe the latter.   Shouldn’t we be using misbehavior as opportunities to show how to respond appropriately?   We may have societally moved away from rehabilitation in our penal system, but in our education system?   What’s his lesson here?   I mean, we don’t put people in the stocks anymore!   Though I’m tempted, with a certain VP.   Of course, showing up (albeit it unnamed) in a blog post may be the same, eh?

I’ve pointed out the problems with learning styles in the past, but I want to rethink them with you, as we took quite a positive out of them in a unique way.   This was back in 99-2000, when I led a project developing an intelligently adaptive learning system (Intellectricity ™; inspired by Joe Miller‘s vision of a system that respected who you were as a learner).   The system took a unique approach, adapting on the basis of who you were as a learner instead of your demonstrated domain knowledge (though it did that, too, though not like an intelligent tutoring system).

To do this, I looked long and hard at learning styles, including Jonassen & Grabowksi’s uncritical compendium, and (the other) John Carroll’s Cognitive Factor Analysis research.   I decided then what I still do now, that essentially all of the learning style instruments are garbage.   It’s not just me saying this, but so does a commissioned study by the Learning and Skills Research Centre.   And, as I previously reported, psychologist Daniel Willingham says we shouldn’t adapt learning to styles. So, is there anything to salvage?

I want to say yes.   The obvious reason is to recognize that learners do differ, and help learning designers be mindful of that.   And there are some insights.   For example, take Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences.   When I was investigating learning styles, I didn’t like having bimodal dimensions, say where you’re either an introvert or an extrovert. The problem is, those are so context-dependent that you could be an introvert in the classroom, and an extrovert in the lunchroom.   Or even topic by topic.   I liked that Gardner assesses how social (interpersonal) you are separate from how independent (intrapersonal) you are. That became one of our principles when I challenged our psychometrician and our senior cognitive scientist to argue contrary, and they agreed with me.

So we took a different approach.   Starting from a premise of how learners differ in regards to learning, we made it more a competency than a characteristic: “how good are you at learning socially” (and I’d now add Marcia Conner‘s distinction of small group versus large group) separate from “how good are you at learning on your own”.

We ended up developing 31 different characteristics to evaluate, and chose the 9 we expected to have the most leverage into the first version of the system (which we got up and running).   These were across cognitive, affective (read: personality, e.g. the big 5 psychological traits), and conative (motivation, anxiety or ‘safety’, etc).   We had the system adapt on the basis of these competencies, not in changing the media to accommodate styles, but looking at different sequencing between (what I argue are the important characteristics) of example, concept, practice, etc.

We also believed that many if not all of these learning competencies could be improved, and designed strategies to develop skills over time. The premise did require a long-term relationship with the system, but that was our goal anyway.

The point here being that if, instead of fixed characteristics, we think of a suite of malleable learning competencies as a way in which our learners can differ, we gain two things.   First, we find ways we can support learners who have weaknesses in particular learning competencies (dealing with visual data representations, for example), and second, we can develop them in those competencies as well (which goes hand in hand with Michelle Martin & Tony Karrer’s Work Literacy).

It’s also a tangible investment in organizational competency, and potentially the only real leverage an organization can have, going forward.   Think: learning skills instead of learning styles, and develop your learners accordingly!