Dave's Whiteboard

Yes, you’re right.  Head First Statistics is really a form of teaching, not learning.  As with any book, you could see it as an extended lecture (660 pages, if you count the appendices).  No way to ask anything, easy to slide past questions or problems by turning the page.

Which is why HFS makes such a great example of a tool (depending on your interests) and such a great example of fun (depending on your mindset).

Those two “depending on” clauses are like the uprights for a suspension bridge.  If you’re not interested in learning about statistics and nothing’s pushing you to do so (like your job or your graduate program), then I’m confident (at the 0.975 level) you’re not going to, regardless of the form in which the opportunity to learn appears.  Much the same is true for the other upright: the way you feel about this particular opportunity. 

HFS has given both ends of that bridge some thought. Click the sample page to enlarge; you’ll see what I mean.

♦  ♦  ♦

What Dawn Griffiths has done is sketch a very high-level picture of the learning goals that HFS supports and the types of people who probably respond well to this approach.  Who’da thunk you could do that without the sacred incantation, “At the end of this course the student will be able to…?”

But–how can you be sure of what you’ll learn?

Hmm… the body-of-knowledge approach to learning.  It’s true: in many fields like statistics, there are concepts, principles, terms, equations, and so on that you’re expected to know.

By “know,” I mean you can agree on a description or definition for X with people who aren’t related to you.  Even if their reaction is, “Well, you could put it that way.”

At the same time, despite the sputterosity of purists, zealots, and cranks with time on their hands, most fields don’t have a body of knowledge; they’ve got a herd. Beyond the most basic definitions (like the difference between mean, mode, and media), no one factoid is make-or-break.

Granted, statistics does tend toward the lots-of-specific facts side. So HFS furnishes some tables.

A “Table of Contents (Summary),” which takes up a little more than half a page.  It’s followed by “Table of Contents (the real thing)” with a page for each of the 15 chapters, plus half a page apiece for the intro appendices).  Check the O’Reilly Books preview page for HFS yourself; use the next / previous buttons at the top of the book page to browse.

If I were smart, I’d end by suggesting you also look at a sample chapter (probability, PDF) or explore HFS on your own via Google Books.  The good-humored approach, the absence of dense text–those are obvious at first glance.

Beneath that, though, there’s a lot of cognitive infrastructure, the sort of thing that shifts from “fun” to “learning.”  Chapter 3, “Power Ranges,” is a good example.  It’s got 44 pages dealing with range and variation (the previous chapter dealt with mean, median, and mode).  This is what’s lurking as you turn the title page:

• The coach of the neighborhood basketball team needs one player.  He’s got three candidates.  All three have the same shooting average.  So, which one should he pick?
• Here are their individual stats (points per game and frequency).  What else does the coach need to know?
• Explanation: what “range” means (also, lower bound and upper bound).
• You try it: figure the mean, lower bound, upper bound, and rang for these two players.  Then, draw a histogram (as you learned in chapter 2) for each.
• Feedback for that exercise, and a troubling question about outliers.
• Explanation: why outliers are problematic.  Can you think of how to reduce their impact?
• Explanation: why ranges are quick-and-dirty solutions.
• Sneaky intro (“one way is to measure only part of the range”)
  accompanied by this:

That’s the first 8 pages.  Not only did you have a couple of get-out-your-pencil problems, but also questions to provoke thinking, questions to highlight potential confusion, and even, as in the above example, questions that are intelligent stand-ins for ones a learner might have.

As I said in an earlier post, fun in training (or in support of learning) shouldn’t be an afterthought.  It shouldn’t be force-injected, either, like the fake smoke-flavored streaks applied to frozen burgers to make you think they were grilled.

Dawn Griffiths shows that part of the engagement comes from a general approach (irreverence, retro photos, quirks of layout); another part comes from sample problems that offer real statistical challenges placed in…let’s say surreal settings.  (In chapter 7, you use Poisson distributions to figure out how often a movie theater’s popcorn machine is going to break downnext week.)

Maybe we can get Griffiths and the folks from Head First to have a long lunch with von Merriënboer and Kirschner.

Collaborative Enterprise’s blog carnival this month looks at formalizing the informal–are there ways to deliberately harness social media to foster learning without losing the (presumed) value of personal connection?

Sure.

Now, I tend to slightly resist two of the implications I see here.  First, while it’s true that “training, education, and schooling are not learning,” I don’t think it follows that learning can’t occur where these are present.  And second, learning did not start happening only after the invention of internet-based social media.

I know that Harold Jarche doesn’t think that, and I’m pretty sure Frédéric Domon doesn’t, either.  I just wanted to make my thinking explicit.

I’ve been watching the Winter Olympics and thinking about how it combines individual and organizational goals.  And just as I write this, I see multiple organizations that aren’t all in a single hierarchy:

• Small, individual sport groups (German women’s bobsled)
• Related-sport groups (sliding sports)
• National teams (Germany)
• Judges, referees, and other arbiters
• Timekeepers, scorekeepers
• Coaches
• Trainers
• Volunteers
• Fans
• Reporters, writers, bloggers, and other who opine
• Local, national, international Olympic officials
• Technicians
• Security
• Sponsors
• Donors

You couldn’t ever satisfy all these groups, let alone their subgroups and individual members–but they find enough common ground to bring about an Olympics.

I see a dynamic for the competitors: each has his or her personal goal, but each had to fit into a larger structure, especially but not exclusively for team sports.  If you want to compete in Nordic combined, you agree that your performance on the jump will determine your starting place in the cross-country element.

Since we’re talking athletic competition, psychomotor skill comes into play, and “training” (in the sense of focused attention, demonstration, feedback) plays a major role.  You do learn as you train–by which I mean, not only do you build the muscle memory and automatic physical behavior, but you also refine and deepen awareness and the potential to respond to outside stimuli.

Another thought came to mind when I was getting annoyed by local-news people focusing relentlessly on medal count: so-and-so “had to settle for silver” (because she was favored to win gold, but didn’t); someone else “won a stupendous bronze” (because he performed much better than expected).

Those phrases got me thinking about how, if you work within a large organization, you need to find ways to align your personal goals with the organization’s in a way that’s authentic for you and helpful to the organization.  In part, it’s the old concept of the king’s shilling: if you’re accepting the paycheck, you’re granting the organization’s right to set and pursue its goals and to ask you to help achieve them.

When you can’t ethically do that, it’s time to get out.

Another point of view emerged when I was reading an obituary for jockey and mystery author Dick Francis, who died this week.  He wome some 350 races in a nine-year career, and rode as jockey for the Queen Mother’s horse in the 1956 Grand National–where his horse, in the lead and 50 yards from the finish, suddenly collapsed.  In his autobiography, Francis wrote:

I heard one man say to another a little while ago [4 or 5 years after the race], “Who did you say that was?  Dick Francis?  Oh, yes–he’s the man who didn’t win the National.”

I’m sure Francis would have love to win it, just as every Olympian would love to win the gold.  But individuals and even organizations often need to reframe their goals, to redefine what success means.

In the workplace, I think that means organizations have to work harder at finding ways to match their goals with those of individuals within the organization.  I once worked across the hall from an ambitious young guy.  He had some “rules for success” on his wall, including “love the business.”

Me, I didn’t love the business–and I can think of at least one boss who’d agree.  But often I did love helping the customer perform better, and that didn’t mean beating him to death with PowerPoint.  It sometimes meant working with him to apply performance-improvement strategies while calling them “transfer of training,” because at the time helping that transfer occur was a lot more important than fretting about jargon.

CC-licensed photo: Olympic colors by kk+ / Kris Krüg.

As I was saying, I needed to replace my PDA.  Last Saturday, just ahead of 6 or 8 inches of “a light dusting of snow,” my wife and I each got the Verizon HTC Droid Eris.  (She meanwhile received a BlackBerry for work; we now have more smart phones in the house than we do smart people.)

The good news is we were able to make a call on the way home from the store, so the phone part was easy to master.  That was the prelude to four or five hours during which we both tinkered with our phones.

It was a good reminder that people who say “learning is fun” are usually talking about past learning, rather than future.

At a particularly high level of stress, I wrote down some comments we were making:

• I know I came across it at one point…
• How do you…?
• How did I…?
• Where was…?

…which helps explain my original delay in getting the phone in the first place.  Cost was one factor: Verizon’s data plan adds $30 to your monthly phone bill.  On a two-year contract, that’s $720 dollars (in addition to your voice plan, even though ours is relatively cheap).

In retrospect, I think the more important factor for me was transition cost (which a couple of friends might phrase as “resistance to change”).  I see three potential sources of trouble from a shift like the one I’ve made:

• You’ve got to learn some new things.
• You’ve got to learn how to do some things differently.
• You’ve got to leave some things behind.

Of those, I think “differently” is the most troubling.  That’s the real change: to accomplish X, I used to do Y.  I knew how to do Y.  I was good at Y, so much so I didn’t have to think about it, because it had been incorporated into a larger set of behavior, the way I instinctively know when to use “the” and when not to (my sister’s in the hospital, my brother’s in college).

A certain amount of stress (or perhaps challenge) can help foster learning–we’ve got a goal, we’re looking for a way to accomplish it.  Too much, though, and we see the new practice or new technology as not just a change but a hindrance–a word whose roots suggest harm, injury, or impairment.

I’ve also noticed several instances of “intuitive cognitive strategies” (a term van Merriënboer and Kirschner use for “incorrect notions that newbies come up with”).  For example, there are seven home screens–a phrase that confused me, since I thought of the middle one as the home screen.    The other sixe were…I don’t know, helper screen.  Subscreens.  Peripheral screens.

(Why this matters: you only have so much space on the smartphone screen.  By flicking your finger across it, you can switch between the various home screens and have more real estate for applications.)

Part of that confusion might have come from the concept of scenes, which are alternative sets of home screens.  (You swap in a new scene and your home screens are different–like one for work and one for play, maybe.)

Got that?  Me, either, which is why I thought that you had to add a new icon to the “main” home screen (the middle one of the seven) and then drag it wherever you wanted it, like the offspring of the iPhone and a number puzzle.

Going back to transition cost, the highest risk for me was that I’d have to re-enter my contacts and my calendar items if the Eris couldn’t sync with Microsoft Outlook.  I didn’t want to have to switch to Google’s contacts and calendar (see above, “learn some new things” and “leave some things behind”).

Cooperative learning came into play.  I don’t recall what I was doing at the time (probably trying to create a clear path for app-dragging), but my wife made a very specific search and found a description of how to get the Eris to sync directly with Outlook on my desktop.

It was a little bumpy, but I got it done–and that payoff boosted my sense of competence on the new tool.  Now I’m having fun playing with applications, and I’m more prone to see difficulties as puzzles rather than setbacks.  I just hope that the next time I’m trying to breeze someone else through “change management,” I remember how frustrated I felt when my own change was getting managed.

Here’s a video from  Lisa Gade’s look at the Eris (at Mobile Tech Review). You can see a demonstration of those seven home screens at about the 3:00 mark in the video:

Biggest mystery about the phone so far?  It turns out that your purchase doesn’t include the 238 page user guide (PDF).  (To be fair, it’s 238 5 x 5 pages, but still…)  Perhaps Verizon has a goal to encourage discovery learning.

Peculiar mystery: if you visit Android Market (the Google source for Android applications) with a computer rather than a smartphone, there’s no search function.

[Here are] some of the more popular applications and games available in Android Market. For a comprehensive, up-to-date list of the thousands of titles that are available, you will need to view Android Market on a handset.

No search?  From Google?

Onetime English major mystery:  Eris was the goddess of strife.  At the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, she lobbed a golden apple inscribed “to the fairest.”  Squabbling among goddesses led to the Trojan War, an event somewhat more frustrating than switching to a smart(er) phone.

ASTD’s T&D for January includes E-Learning: What’s Old is New Again, by Allison Rossett and James Marshall.  They wondered what e-learning looks like in the real world and surveyed nearly a thousand practitioners.

In her book on training needs analysis, Rossett talks about actuals and optimals–finding out how things really are, and determining what they could be.  She and Marshall take a similar approach here.  They summarize responses about how things are, e-learning-wise.  And they speculate about how things could be.

I think the article’s worth reading in full, especially for people who don’t work in corporate or organizational settings (two-thirds of the respondents do).  I agree that for many people, the workplace is changing, as is the definition of work.  At the same time, most of my own clients have been and are large organizations with multiple locations, often with a significant effort to provide structured learning (a term I prefer to “formal”).

I was especially struck (not to say “depressed”) by the last response in the first of several charts in the article:

Our structured training uses realistic situations, encourages choice, supports learning from that choice — less than “some of the time?”

Sadly, I think that’s accurate, and a true indictment for the organizations in which this happens.  Formal training departments may be complicit, but so too are organizational leaders.  Often, in the aeries just below C-level executives, there’s a touching faith in magic beans–nice, clear solutions to nagging problems that don’t look like they’re the organization’s real business.

Last spring, in Halifax, I came across Antonine Maillet’s novel, Pélagie-la-Charette. Maillet tells of Pélagie LeBlanc, deported like thousands of others from l’Acadie (what’s now Nova Scotia and New Brunswick; see this map at Wikimedia).  Twenty years after le grand dérangement, Pélagie leads a band of Acadians  in an oxcart (hence her nickname, Pélagie the Cart) from Georgia back to Acadia.

I’d never heard of Pélagie or of Maillet, but  I wanted to know more about the Acadians, who don’t appear much in the Nova Scotia tales I grew up with (my family tree topples over with MacDougals and Macdonalds, MacLennans and MacLellans).  As a bonus, I’d get more practice with French.

It’s slow going, though–I’m just not that fluent, and Maillet’s style is vivid, idiosyncratic, and sometimes more of a challenge than I’m up to.   But it’s a new year, and today, I fished out a post I’d found months ago on John Biesnecker’s Global Maverick blog: How to read in a foreign language.

Biesnecker argues that new learners (and perhaps rusty ones like me) don’t know how to read…in a foreign language, anyway.  We’re accustomed to understanding stuff written in our native language, or the vast majority of it.

He tried to read his first Chinese-language book while commuting.  One practice he picked up was to ignore a word he didn’t know, and just keep going.

That’s not to say you should never look a word up while reading. If there’s a word that you’ve already seen five times in the last two pages and you still can’t figure it out by context, then by all means look it up. Just don’t waste your time on obscure adjectives that you’re not going to see again soon and that don’t affect the story if they’re ignored.

Here’s how this fits together for me: I hate not being fluent in French, especially since it’s the only other language I know (the odd Gaelic phrase notwithstanding).  Sometimes that manifests itself in my not wanting to speak French with French speakers.  Objectively I know it’s good for me; emotionally, I’m unhappy when I can’t express myself or when I feel I’m making things drag.  And, frankly, sometimes I simply can’t keep because I have neither the vocabulary nor the skill.

At the same time, this is work I have to do for myself.  I haven’t even looked to see if there’s a standard English translation, though I’m sure there must be.  It’d be too tempting to let the translator do what I want and need to do.

I like Biesnecker’s suggestion, though, especially because it corresponds to the way we learn about any new culture: in pieces, in a disorganized fashion, through repetition.  I’m not in a competition to finish Pélagie before the end of the week (or the quarter).  So I’m going to restart something I began last fall: copying the French text into an online document, then writing my own English translation.

Copying the French intensifies my focus.  I end up reading the text two or three times while transcribing, and then rereading the result (either in the document or in my book) to refresh the big picture.  And writing my translation in an electronic document means I can annotate, mark stuff I’m not sure about, and leave room for ambiguity.

So far I’ve done only a few pages.  I already like Pélagie (both La Charrette and her descendant, Pélagie-la-Gribouille ( ‘the scribbler’ ), so I feel I’ve neglected her, which is why I mention this mainly personal project here.

(Special thanks to Louise Côté, whose enthusiasm for Pélagie reinforced my choice, and to Jacques Cool, who recommended an ideal accompaniment: A Great and Noble Scheme: the Tragic Story of the Expulsion of the French Acadiens from Their American Homeland.)

(Added on January 4: here’s Maillet herself, reading an English translation from chapter one of Pélagie-la-Charrette.)