Dave’s Whiteboard

Series: The brain rules!

This post is part of the Working/Learning blog carnival for April, 2008, hosted this month by Manish Mohan, who blogs at Life, the Universe, and Everything about eLearning and Content Development. It’s the second run of the carnival; the first was in March 2008.

I’ve been reading John Medina’s Brain Rules. I’m also trying to relate them to learning and to things that affect my work. In other words, using his rules as a framework, what can I do with them?

I’ve decided to start with rule six, “remember to repeat.” Why this one? Because last Wednesday was the 262nd anniversary of the Battle of Culloden.

‘Twas love of our prince drove us on to Drumossie
But in scarcely the time that it takes me to tell
The flower of our country lay scorched by an army
As ruthless and red as the embers of hell…

Although I don’t weep over the defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie, neither do I let April 16 pass unnoticed. Why is that?

Medina writes about how we move information from short-term to long-term memory. Nothing much new: repetition and restatement. One of the principles that we know (but don’t always capitalize on) is spacing out the input. Or as I like to call it, three times 20 is more than 60.

If you’ve got a a given amount of time to learn something, you’ll almost certainly learned better and more thoroughly by spacing out your exposure. Instead of cramming for two hours, try four sessions of 30 minutes each. As the descendant of Scottish Highlanders, I’ve certainly spaced out my exposure to stories of the Jacobite rebellions and songs about “The ‘45.”

Medina also says that when information is retrieved from long-term memory, it’s not fixed as if it were a book pulled from a library shelf. It’s almost a repetition of the initial learning — the information is once again labile, malleable, something we can re-work.

That means when it’s re-stored, it’s been changed. Not always leading to greater accuracy.

Which brings in my great uncle. Actually, Gillies Mhor MacBain is my great-great-great-great-great-great-grand-uncle, if I can trust a genealogical history called The Mabou Pioneers. Gillies fought for Prince Charlie and died at Culloden.

Google his name, and you’ll find dozens of accounts saying that he was 6 foot 4, that he killed at least 13 redcoats, and that an English officer tried in vain to have Gillies spared because of his bravery.

Who knows what really happened? The story of Gillies MacBain has been told and retold. Details were lost on the battlefield and over the years; without a doubt, new details have been supplied. They’ve altered the cultural memory the way recall and reconsolidation can alter your personal memory.

Over time new information in the brain reshapes what’s already there. We can “remember” things that never happened.

That suggests things we can do, in the world of learning at work, to increase the value of that reworking and reconsolidation. Focus the learning on what’s important to the job, for example. Create support and structures to ease recall and increase accuracy.

Think hard about questions like:

• What’s our rationale for a three day workshop?
  • Does it make sense to firehose information this way?
• If we must have one, how do we design for spaced input?
  • Can we break up topics and interweave them?
• Are we focusing on tasks rather than on content?
  • Even (or especially) for concepts and principles, can we provide opportunities to work with them, apply them in job-relevant contexts?
• How do we design, create, or organize information externally to make it easy to retrieve and apply as needed?

I spent more time than expected thinking through this post as I was writing it. While I don’t see Medina’s brain rules as the fulcrum of all knowledge, I like the idea of trying to apply them to the blog carnival themes of “work at learning; learning at work.” So I think this post will be a first in a series based on Medina’s rules. Feel free to chime in.

Old book photo by alpoma / Alejandro Polanco.
Brain funnel image by Beth Kanter.

I like anthologies. How could I go to the beach without Gardner Dozois? And while I might be financially better off without Green Linnet’s Celtophile series of CDs, my shelves and my heart would be emptier in more ways than one.

Blog carnivals are a kind of anthology-on-the-fly, a collection of posts from several blogs. For each issue of a carnival, participants post on their own blogs, and a host posts links to all the participating posts. Like with Encephalon, the cognitive-science carnival.

I invited a few people to kick off a carnival under this particular tent: “Work at learning; learning at work.” I was thinking that posts and participants would connect in some way to training or learning in the workplace (as opposed to school or higher education). And I encouraged the invitees to suggest another blogger people might not have read.

Herewith, the first Working/Learning Blog Carnival:

• Michele Martin at The Bamboo Project shares strategies for supporting personal learning environments, nicely tying together the “work at learning” (you have to hone your craft) with “learning at work.”
• Cathy Moore at Making Change explains how to fit the entire world into a multiple choice question. How can you require the learner to think more deeply about on-the-job implications of the information at hand?
• Harold Jarche writes at his eponymous blog about learning at work, offering three easy steps to making sense out of the information that floods past you — as he says, moving from “this is an interesting idea” to “this is what I know.”
• Janet Clarey writes on her blog about working at learning. And she does mean working.
• …and my own contribution, SME? Not for Me, in which I ever so gently nudge people who design training, hoping to move them from subject-matter to practice.

Some other folks weren’t able to contribute in time for this first carnival. I think we’ll do it again and help widen the range of thoughts that people share about working and learning.

In training departments, there’s hardly a more common term than subject-matter expert. Often you’ll hear the initials (S. M. E.) or, alas, the acronym sounded as a single word, bringing to mind Captain Hook’s first mate. That’s an image I’d rather not conjure up, at least outside of a longboat.

The problem with “subject-matter expert” isn’t expertise per se, or even the notion that there’s some body of knowledge — the subject — in which this person is expert.

(You can argue philosophically about whether there’s “content,” or a cluster of skills, but I think you’ll agree that in the world of work you can find people who know relevant facts that other people don’t.)

Often, when clients look for subject-matter experts, they turn to people who presumably know a lot about whatever the job, process, or task is — regardless of whether they actually perform the job.

When I want to know what people really do on the job in question, I avoid even saying “subject-matter expert.” Instead, I borrow a much more helpful term from my friend and colleague John Howe, formerly a training director at the U. S. Department of Labor: I look for an expert practitioner.

That’s someone who:

• Currently does the job
• Produces exemplary results

…and who’s widely seen as outstanding in those two dimensions.

A subject-matter expert can trace the theoretical route of some process (along with its uncles, grandparents, and third cousins twice removed). An expert practitioner can tell you from direct experience how that process operates in the real world of work, why she makes the decisions she does, and what happens as a result.

This isn’t to say you shouldn’t seek out or listen to a subject-matter expert. The programmer who developed ways for Amtrak clerks to program customized commands on their terminals was the western hemisphere’s biggest expert on the technical parameters of this programming.

But the ticket agents and reservation agents who put those keys to work developed myriad ways to apply that programming to real-life problems. Without expert practitioners showing what they did and why they did it, training in how to use the programmed function keys would have been less practical.

And less likely to produce the desired productivity.

(This post is part of the Working/Learning blog carnival for March 2008.)