Dave's Whiteboard

I haven’t read any of the Twilight books by Stephenie Meyer, and now I don’t have to, thanks to the reviews at Pop Suede.  (I started with the third, the one for Twilight: Eclipse, but here they’re in what I think is the proper sequence.)

Review of Twilight:

Review of Twilight: New Moon

Review of Twilight: Eclipse

What’s the point (other than a teensy bit of humor)?

It struck me that, based on the little I’d picked up from newspapers and online, the Pop Suede folks have done a great job of capturing the plot of each book, then tweaking it enough that you see both the textual source and the satiric object.  It’s like a wildly informal approach to… a book report.

Understand: I no more want everyone churning out lolcats book reviews than I want another couple thousand terabytes of online-learning Jeopardy quiz.  But think what it took to put these things together: you had to grasp the key points of the original book, weed stuff out, and then express your understanding in a way that communicates.

It’s that kind of reworking and recasting of a complicated set of ideas that helps foster learning, not a 20-item multiple-guess test at the end of the half-day module on Twilight: New Moon.

I once needed to mitigate the effect of the typical marketing department information dump.  New victims employees were sentenced to hear 90 minutes’ worth of feeds and speeds about three major products.   So I asked the product managers to agree to a new format in which they’d present for only an hour, take a short break, and then participate in a discussion with the new hires.

This is how I explained the “discussion” to the sales folks, immediately before the first presentation:

We’re going to have three one-hour presentations today.

Yeah, I know, but after two of them, you get a 15 minute break.

Look on the back of your name card.  You’re in one of three groups based on the colored dot.

At the end of each presentation, I’ll name one of the colors.   During the break, that color group has 15 minutes to make a pitch on “the 10 main ways to sell [whatever the product is].”

After the break, you make your pitch.  The rest of you get to ask questions, kibitz, figure stuff out.
At the end, the Product Manager will jump in.

Yeah, it was manipulative.  Hey, I’d been working with sales reps for a while.

Some of the things I had in mind:

• Reduce potential product-manager-induced sleep by 33% (one hour instead of 90 minutes).
• Increase attention, at least in the first session, since the sales rep didn’t know if he had to work on the pitch till after it was over.
• More breaks than expected (a feature, but for most folks, a benefit).
• Rethinking / reworking by the sales reps replaced canned product-manager summary.
• Product manager got to hear what the sales reps thought were the main sales ideas.

In a way, it was very formal learning: one-time, face-t0-face,  scheduled.  We even had mediocre coffee, pastries, and PowerPoint.  But we also got the salespeople doing what their jobs called for: thinking about the products and how they could sell them to potential customers.

I know “knowledge management” is a high-value buzzword; I just tend to feel a twinge of weariness when I see it.  I’m not sure you can manage knowledge; the best you can hope for, I think, is to try and set up weirs, reservoirs, sidings, and whatnot to channel some of the flow.  The idea is that you’ll eventually be able to retrieve it and put it to use.

What helps foster that retrieval?  Note-taking.  I’m not sure I agree with the authors of this study (PDF), who believe that “learning to take notes well… takes as much time as learning to write in a relatively experienced way.”  They see the purposes of taking notes as “to record information and/or to aid reflection.”

A note to take: “and/or” is nearly always the worst possible phrase.  It implies precision but just smudges things.  You’re dithering or obsessing or both.  (See how I managed to say that without “and/or?”)

“Aid reflection” isn’t the term I’d use.  I like Stephen Downes’s description of note-taking as your contribution a two-way communication with the source of learning.  Downes recently noted a post by D’Arcy Norman, who says:

Note taking is not primarily about manual duplication of a set of resources produced by a teacher. It’s an active process of sense-making and internalization. Of visualizing the processes of thinking.

Granted, that’s not the way people often think about note-taking.  For them the phrase is a quick trip back to a lecture hall, with a professor relentlessly flinging chunks of some “body of knowledge” at you.  Eventually you’d have to reassemble them to the satisfaction of the flinger.

I can be  a very traditional note-taker.  As an undergraduate, I adopted two strategies that I thought were worth about 0.75 on a four-point grade scale: sit in the first or second seat of a row, and take notes.  Both of these acted to keep me more awake and more engaged, even during the tedium of English Literature: The Augustans.

I have a longstanding habit of taking notes in ink:

Two of my 101 pages of notes from "Complex Learning in Ten Steps"

Ink’s no more essential to note-taking than a soup spoon is to lunch, even if the lunch is soup.

If I’m trying to capture a lot of information for later analysis and search, my first stop is… Microsoft Word’s outlining.  I’ve created a few outline templates (one with I-A-1-a numbering, one with that technoid 1.0, 1.1, 1.1.1 format, and other with indents and various bullets for different levels).  I type fast and can shift outline levels almost without thinking, which means I’ve got more bandwidth available to take in and reprocess whatever I’m outlining.

Especially when the knowledge stream’s wider than it is deep, I use Evernote.  I like the idea that my notes are in two places–online, where I can access them from any computer, and on my own laptop, where my useful paranoia means I back my stuff up.

Evernote extends the concept of “note,” because I can take photos of signs, whiteboard sketches, or flipchart pages.  Evernote lets me search for text in images, as in the example on the right (click for a larger view).

I’ve used personal wikis to collect information, and I use several blogs as well.  Each wiki or blog has a focus, a way of deciding what parts of the flow to direct into the format.  And by actively directing–through entering text, through tagging, through classifying and moving–I’m working with the information and increasing the likelihood that I’ll recall it in a context that makes sense to me.

Some more-or-less related items I found along the way:

• iPad, Therefore iKludge: David Dobbs writes about problems with noting, and sharing notes, on devices like the iPad.
• Teaching with Wikis: Sandra Porter enables electronic notes for students who forget the dead-tree kind.
• Cognitive Effort during Note Taking (PDF), a 2005 paper that appeared in Applied Cognitive Psychology.

Much of what I found deals with note-taking in an academic setting.  That last paper by Piolat, Olive, and Kellogg makes the point that

…from a cognitive perspective, note taking cannot be conceived of as only a simple abbreviated transcription of information that is heard or read…. on the contrary,it is an activity that strongly depends on the central executive functions of working memory to manage comprehension, selection, and production processes concurrently.

I thought it worth including that statement.  For one thing, note-taking looks obvious–you take notes.  But what you really do, as the researchers are saying, is manipulate incoming information while managing the technical aspects of recording the results of your manipulation.

If you were into straight transcription, like a court reporter, then it’s possible you learn very little, because your focus is purely on the capture.  But for notes to be useful, other than as a transcript, you’re doing things mentally while you’re doing things physically.

Microsoft Word for DOS appeared in late 1983.  I’d started using a word processor only a few months before–WordStar, which at one time did bestride the computer world like a Colossus.  Relatively speaking, WordStar was geek heaven; its article on Wikipedia states, apparently with a straight face, that “WordStar is still considered by many to be one of the best examples of a ‘writing program.’”

That notion evidently comes from admiration of the small file sizes that WordStar produced because it didn’t fool around with things like WYSIWYG display on the screen or with formatting commands sent to the printer.  WordStar focused on text, dammit, and you were lucky it bothered doing that.

I got pretty good with WordStar, but when I came across a working demo of Microsoft Word for DOS, I was more than ready to switch.  Nowadays, the differences between the two seem minor (WordStar screen shot, Word screen shot), but the move away from technoid control codes and the inclusion of a few formatting touches (on-screen bolding and underlining) was a clear advance.

I use several obscure features in Word, like the seq field code, but I’m also painfully aware of drawbacks like its capricious approach to numbering paragraphs.  In general, software companies feel compelled to add features to their products.  I think that’s because they–and some of their customers–confuse “feature” with “benefit.”  There’s some relationship, of course, but over time it tends to be more hypothetical (if not downright fanciful).

Why?  As Naomi Dunford points out on the IttyBiz blog, “With very few exceptions (medicine and cutting-edge technology come to mind) you are wasting space and money by telling people about your features.”

This morning, one of the people I follow on Twitter shared this comment on feature-itis:

Track Changes is, as Senator Bob Dole said of another bright idea, is one of those things that seems great until you take a look at it.  I don’t know what aspect of Track Changes was making Chris shouty, but for me it’s always been quantity: the more changes (and changers), the more you feel like you’re being trampled to death by weasels.

One problem is that people try to cram several kinds of editing (for facts, for sequence, for syntax, for style) into a single Pickett’s Charge of revision.  A more dire problem is the confusion of “change” with “improvement.”  Shakespeare had something similar in mind in Henry IV, Part One.

GLENDOWER:
I can call spirits from the vasty deep.

HOTSPUR:
Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?

The number of changes tracked doesn’t equal the number of improvements made, any more than the number of features added equals the amount of benefit delivered (are you listening, Quicken?).

Which points toward an inherent contradiction for training or learning in organizations.  You can almost certainly reap benefits when you help people move from “can’t do X at all” to “can do Basic Things A, B, and C” — assuming, of course, that those people see A, B, and C as benefiting them.

Working further through the alphabet of features (D, E, and F…L, M, and N…) means you’re getting farther out on the long tail.  Each addition becomes more specific, which means more contextual, which means has decreasingly less appeal to most people (even though potentially more appeal to a small number of people).

I rarely see much mileage for me in talking to others about customizing Word toolbars, let alone creating multiple templates for different kinds of outlines.  As for Google Docs, one less-than-obvious reason for their popularity is that the relative lack of features makes for easier collaboration among groups of people who might have widely varying levels of skill in more traditional word processors.  If you can’t add internal cross-references or sequence codes, you’re not going to frustrate or confuse people who don’t know what to do with them.

WordStar box and disks image from Wikipedia.

Twitter’s a great way to connect with people—or to fire off a wisecrack, which I’ve done a time or two.  Like last night in #lrnchat, when I said:

Every time someone launches another “elearning” with a Jeopardy game, a neuron loses its wings.

At 140 characters, Twitter encourages economy of expression, though you can’t easily come off as concise and nuanced in a single tweet.

Jeopardy games in on-the-job learning are a hot button for me.  Like someone on the bus whose MP3 music is just loud enough that you imagine a mosquito practicing the snare drums, that kind of interaction is mostly harmless but rarely enriching.

Monkey, see?

A Jeopardy game is often a quick fix, like a food-court burger, fries, and Coke when you’re slogging through the MegaMall.  At best, a mediocre choice.  Whatever kind of learning you’re trying to encourage, will dolling quiz questions up in the format of a 56-year-old game show  do the trick?

A more significant drawback is that Jeopardy‘s format unduly emphasizes recall and application.  You’re focusing learner attention on lower-value tasks.  And there’s the disadvantage that few jobs present people with “answers” to which they have to respond with questions.

Where to (re)draw the line

I’ve created interactions based on game formats, including Bingo.  Success came in part from listening to people like Thiagi (Sivasailam Thiagarajan).  One thing he suggests is that you play with, not within, the rules.

So if you must resort to a Jeopardy format, remember that no law requires people to answer with a question.  Nothing forces you to let the winner choose the next question.  It’s far more important to match what people do in the interaction with what they’ll do on the job.

Which explains Call Book Bingo.

Some years ago, a client replaced the paper “call book” used by its sales force with a custom computer application.  Most of the sales force hadn’t used computers before, so to them it felt like a huge change.  The instructor-led training stressed hands-on practice, which meant that by the second day the sales reps felt overwhelmed and unsure of themselves.

So we passed out the sophisticated learning aid you see here, then gave the directions:

• Write a number between 1 and 75 on each line that has a number sign.  Mix ‘em up.  Use each number only once.
• When the “caller” (the instructor) gives a number, check your card to see if you have it.
• If you do, write the answer to the question in that square.

That was pretty much it–except for the time we spent coming up with questions that involved looking up and interpreting things from all the important parts of the call book.  And phrasing them so there was only one right answer.  “What’s the weekly sales volume at International House of Widgets?”  “Does Myrna’s Accounting and Catering include Contract JT-42?”  “How many stores in ZIP code 66431 carry berm flanges?”

There’s a lot there that’s nothing like Bingo: no preprinted numbers, no B-I-N-G-O across the top.  Conversely, there’s a lot that’s very much like the real job: pertinent questions about accounts, and the need to research using the new, computerized tool.

No one complained about the variation from “real” Bingo.  In fact, most often the learners would ask to continue playing till everyone got at least one Bingo.   Often they’d start helping one another as “doing my job” won out over “winning this game in class.”

Play around a little

Mindlessly including a copy of a predictable “interaction” doesn’t make for better learning any more than riding the D train makes you a New Yorker.  As the noted instructional designer Mary Chapin Carpenter urges,

Show a little passion, baby, show a little style
Show the knack for knowing when
and the gift for knowing how…

If you’d like to acquire or strengthen that knack, try this advice from game designer Richard Powers.

Circle image adapted under a CC license from this original by Patrick Hoesly.

Jonah Lehrer at The Frontal Cortex talks about “feelings of knowing” — how we feel sure we know what we can’t retrieve from memory. He’s talking about tip-of-the-tongue things: you can’t quite remember who played the sheriff of Nottingham in Robin and Marian, but you know he had a short last name that started with S.

Lehrer suggests that this “feeling of knowing” is often highly accurate.  (I hadn’t considered this concept before, so I’m glad Lehrer linked to this study (PDF) by Janet Metcalfe.) This comes into play (as he notes) when Jeopardy contestants click the buzzer without (presumably) knowing the answer: they’re betting that they will know it (retrieve it) within five seconds.

And often, they’re right.

The larger point is that we won’t get a genuinely “human” version of artificial intelligence (not to mention more energy efficient computers) until our computers start to run emotion-like algorithms. What Watson needs isn’t a bigger hard drive or some more microchips – he needs to develop feelings of knowing, which will tell him that he probably knows the answer even if he’s still drawing a blank.

For decades, we’ve assumed that our emotions interfere with cognition, and that our computers will outpace us precisely because they aren’t vulnerable to these impulsive, distracting drives. But it turns out that we were wrong. Our fleeting feelings are an essential aspect of human thought, even when it comes to answering the trivia questions on Jeopardy.

In an update, Lehrer links to a later post by Vaughan Bell at Mind Hacks, who sees the early-buzzing of Jeopardy players as a kind of metacognition. “It’s being able to manage your mental resources based on estimations.”