Dave’s Whiteboard

The tireless Don Clark links to a Scientific American interview with Marco Iacoboni, who studies mirror neurons. Iacoboni says, “Mirror neurons are the only brain cells we know of that seem specialized to code the actions of other people and also our own actions.”

He also says:

…the hype can backfire and mirror neurons may lose their specificity.

I think there are two key points to keep in mind. The first one is the one we started with: mirror neurons are brain cells specialized for actions. They are obviously critical cells for social interactions but they can’t explain non-social cognition.

The second point to keep in mind is that every brain cell and every neural system does not operate in a vacuum. Everything in the brain is interconnected, so that the activity of each cell reflects the dynamic interactions with other brain cells and other neural systems.

More on mirror neurons in a Brain Connection column by Robert Sylwester. Nice clear examples. For instance, if you stick your tongue out at a baby, even one who’s a day old, the baby will stick hers out. This isn’t a coincidence. “The infant’s observation of her parent’s projecting tongue fires the premotor neurons that represent her tongue and this priming activates the related motor cortex neurons that project her tongue out in mimicry.”

Faking, in sports, also depends on motor neurons. Here the idea is that you move in such a way that your opponent’s mirror neurons (which assess the movements of others) decide you’re going to go here. Of course, you try to go there.

…and then you think, well, he’s expecting a fake, so I’ll make a fake fake…

So why does so much formal training and formal learning seem to leave out modeling?  Blah blah, facts, key points, nobody actually doing the work.

Mo at the Neurophilosophy blog links to an iTunes site for University College of London. UCL’s site lets you download lectures and seminars, including a series of lunch hour lectures.

The lunch-hour selections don’t require iTunes; you can watch or download from that link. While the series won’t resume till the fall, UCL makes past selections available.

Series: The brain rules!

In this second-to-last post about John Medina’s Brain Rules, I’m looking at rule 9, “Stimulate more of the senses.”

A good part of this chapter seems intuitively obvious; what caught my eye were things that had been less clear (at least to me).

I’d heard of synesthesia before — the odd sensory-crossing phenomenon in which a person experiences, say, the number 9 as having a flavor. Synesthetes “display unusually advanced memory ability,” Medina says. And they find their apparently odd perceptions to be pleasurable.

Synesthesia suggests that the sensory processes in the brain are designed to work together; the condition simply makes that more striking. But we evolved in a multisensory environment, and so our brains developed ways to effectively process the stimuli coming in from our senses.

Not only do the senses work together, but their combined effects can enhance their individual abilities. In one experiment, people had a hard time seeing a flickering light if its intensity was gradually decreased. Researchers coordinated a short burst of sound with the light flickering off. Subjects who had the sound as part of the experience could see the light beyond their normal threshhold.

Medina cites work by Richard E. Mayer of the University of California Santa Barbara. (He collaborated with Ruth Colvin Clark on E-learning and the Science of Instruction.)

Five of Mayer’s findings:

• The multimedia principle: Students learn better from words and pictures than from words alone.
• The temporal contiguity principle: Students learn better when corresponding works and pictures are presented simultaneously rather than successively.
• The spacial contiguity principle: Students learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented near to each other rather than far from each other on the page or screen.
• The coherence principle: Students learn better when extraneous material is excluded rather than included.
• The modality principle: Students learn better from animation and narration then from animation and on-screen text.

As Medina points out, these findings home deal with two senses — hearing and vision. Evidence exists that involving the other senses can also enhance learning. Certain types of memory are sensitive to smells, for example. One intriguing example suggests that the sense of smell can improve declarative memory during sleep.

Five senses photo by http://flickr.com/people/joaoloureiro/.

In the past week or so, I came across @injenuity, Jen Jones’s blog. She writes often about viral professional development (VPD). That’s her term for “a technology, tool, or teaching strategy that is quickly spread from one person to another.” (She works with instructors from kindergarten level up, through her main focus is e-learning in higher education.)

In a post last January, Jen gave some characteristics of VPD. These included:

• Instructors learn to use the technology largely on their own and with support from each other.
• You can’t worry about those who refuse to adopt instructional technology… they need to see success from their peeres first.
• Workshops are not the foundation of VPD, although they may be one component.

If like Jen you’re someone who believes people can reap great benefit from applying tools and techniques, what can you do to help?

• Model the tools and techniques… if someone has a how-to question, send a screencast with the instructions… and a little about how you made the screencast. (Why does the name Stephen Downes come to mind?)
• Communicate at the other person’s comfort level. (I read this as, if someone’s not on Twitter or not publishing on the wiki, but they send you email or call you, then use that channel.)
• Join in when people on your personal network test tools. “Any time I can jump in on someone else’s test saves me…searching for a tool and people to try it with.”

Jen posted a follow-up just this week. She’s not sure VPD translates to organizations outside of higher ed, but it seems clear to me there’s a connection. She’s using a different angle to examine some of the things Tony Karren, Michele Martin, and others have been talking about at Work Literacy. One of the differences is that Jen’s looking at the organization, rather than the individual:

My concept of VPD describes an organizational strategy, rather than an individual personal learning environment or network…

While personal networks can have spontaneous learning events that lead to transfer of knowledge, my goal in working with VPD is to make a cultural change within a specific organization, rather than develop a personal learning network.

Most people work for organizations — 86% of all U.S. workers work for someone else, and half of them (more than 56 million people) work in organizations with more than 500 employees.

I’ve been thinking a lot about individual learning; Jen has reminded me that organizations, which need to continue their activities while accommodating the arrival and the departure of specific individuals, have their own learning needs, too.

Computer virus photo by Ted Rheingold.

Harold Jarche, saying that learning content should be hackable, included a link to a Ruth Clark article from 2002, Six Principles of Effective e-Learning (PDF). Clark’s widely known for her research-based approach to understanding how people learn. The article’s well worth reading; this post is my summary of his six principles. First, here’s what she means by e-learning:

For the purposes of this discussion, e-Learning is content and instructional methods delivered on a computer (whether on CDROM, the Internet, or an intranet), and designed to build knowledge and skills related to individual or organizational goals. This definition addresses:

• The what: training delivered in digital form,
• The how: content and instructional methods tohelp learn the content, and
• The why: to improve organizational performance bybuilding job-relevant knowledge and skills in workers.

The multimedia principle: Adding graphics to words can improve learning.

Clark cites research showing up to 89% increase in test performance when learners studied text with graphics (compared to text alone). This makes use of the dual-encoding theory. As she points out, though, gratuitous or irrelevant graphics actually detract from learning (as many existing courses demonstrate).

The contiguity principle: placing text near graphics improves learning.

“If the words and the visuals they describe are separate from each other, the learner needs to expend extra cognitive resources to integrate them.” If layout or screen scrolling separates text from visuals, a heavier burden falls to the learner’s working memory.

The modality principle: explaining graphics with audio improves learning.

Here, again, Clark is recommending designing for optimal fit with working memory. By using both the visual and phonetic components of working memory, developers can have a more positive impact on learning. This isn’t to say you should use audio only, but rather strategically.

The redundancy principle: explaining graphics with audio and redundant text can hurt learning.

Clark’s talking about presenting text and reading it aloud at the same time, especially in the presence of visuals. For example explaining a graphic with both text and narration can overload the visual component of working memory.

I also think that most adults don’t like being read to, particularly when they can read the words for themselves. My own rules of thumb in this situation are:

• The less on screen, the more in audio. For example: if you’ve got a process diagram or an animation, don’t clutter it up with a lot of on-screen text.
• The more on screen, the less in audio. For example, say, “here’s a summary of Feist v. Rural Telephone Service.” Then keep quiet. If something was important to know before reading the summary, share that before you get to the summary.

The coherence principle: using gratuitous visuals, text, and sounds can hurt learning.

After my own high-pressure introduction to computer-based training, I decided that the worst course a person would ever develop would be the third. On the first one, you have no idea what you’re doing. On the second, you’re happy to have some idea of how to manage your tools. It’s the third one in which you go crazy.

You’ve seen the same kind of thing in PowerPoint presentations with every conceivable transition or text documents with more fonts than a Bruce Willis film has explosions.

This is a hard one for me, but I think Clark is right: this principle says that less is more when learning’s the primary goal.

[This principle also] suggests that visuals or text that is not essential to the instructional explanation be avoided. It suggests that you not add music to instructional segments. It also suggests that lean text that gets to the point is better than lengthy elaborated text.

The personalization principle: Use conversational tone and pedagogical agents to increase learning.

One intriguing finding that Clark cites: people who reviewed a program on the same computer that presented the program gave it higher ratings than people who made their evaluations on a different computer. “People were unconsciously avoiding giving negative evaluations directly to the source.”

She goes on to discuss the use of agents (e.g., a character offering learning advice). What’s key is not the appearance of the agent so much as an instructionally valid role. Does the agent offer genuine help, or just mindless promotion of the matter at hand?