Dave’s Whiteboard

It’s not only Mayorga Coffee’s Café Cubano that has me going this morning; I’ve just read a pair of posts by Clive Shepherd.

Last June, he wrote about “Three tiers in the content pyramid.” He was modifying an earlier idea that e-learning would develop two tiers: a high end top tie for complex, high-impact projects, and a lower tier of “good enough” contend “designed to communicate simple information or provide basic knowledge.”

In that post, he said he’d failed to consider the impact of web 2.0 tools. He also felt that as you move further down the tier, you get more user-generated content, a kind of bottom-up initiative.

[The bottom-up stuff] occurs because managers are not the only ones with an interest in learning and performance improvement — it is to every individual’s advantage that they have the knowledge and skills necessary to carry out their current jobs effectively, to take advantage of opportunities for advancement, and to remain competitive in the marketplace.

Clive goes to to say that the three tiers — high end, rapid development, and user-generated — are not in competition with each other. In fact, the more experience people have with creating content for themselves, the more they can appreciate the skills that professional bring to bear.

In a post last Friday, Clive revisited the topic. He’s now thinking that the boundaries between the tiers are less distinct, and that what may be more important is agile development (a term from Nicola Foster). Agility is “a combination of strength, coordination, responsiveness, speed, and balance.” Put another way, “agile development is about getting the right content to the right people in a timely fashion.”

I’ve been involved in the early stages of a project related to flood insurance. Clive’s posts have help clarify a notion that’s loitered near the back burner for a while. Imagine using the insight of experts and the tight focus of the Common Craft videos.

I don’t mean “use whiteboards, drawings on paper, and Lee LeFever,” though you could do worse. I mean: target a crucial outcome and use it as a compass to guide your development.

Notice that there is no interactivity whatsoever in the Common Craft products (unless you count “click here to start”). What makes them “good enough,” to use Clive’s terms, is that they make clear what they can do (e.g., explain social networking in plain English) and deliver on that in under four minutes. What happens after that is up to you (which is pretty much the way learning has always been).

I look forward to Ken Carroll’s posts about language learning, in part because he’s actively experimenting. As he says, he reads a lot of education theory, but he’s also trying to put theory to work via sites like Chinesepod.

In that post from last Friday, Ken linked to another New York Times mention of Chinesepod (highlighting in this case Chinesepod’s use of the Olympics).

Comments both on Ken’s post and on the NYT piece exhibit a wide range of opinion regarding how to learn a language — all the way from “you’ve got to take a class” to “do what you want.”

To me, this is another example of a covert discrimination — Joe Harless’s term for an apparently simple case (”learn a language”) that conceals a number of different situations requiring different actions.

There’s isn’t a “right” way to learn a language, any more than there’s a right way to cook dinner. Do you want to read, or to read and write? Do you want to read and speak? Do you want to work in a scholarly or professional or formal or technical setting in the new language?

As I talk (via voice) with francophone friends in Second Life, I often receive compliments on how well I’m doing. That’s how I learned the verb se débrouiller (“Tu te débrouilles bien – You’re doing well”).

I’m all too aware of my shortcomings, though. And after only eight months or so, insight came to me with my usual lightning speed:

First, I think people appreciate what they see as sincere effort. I have always liked the idea of speaking another language, and I remain grateful for Brother André’s enthusiasm back when I was a high school freshman.

Ce n’était rien qu’un peu de miel
Mais il m’avait chauffé le corps
Et dans mon âme il brûle encore
A la manièr’ d’un grand soleil…

(It was only a little bit of honey
But it warmed me all over
And in my soul, it’s still burning
Like a great sun…)

– Georges Brassens, Chanson pour l’Auvergnat
(video with less-than-perfect English subtitles)

More to the point, though, I finally realized something that should have been obvious:

• When I’m speaking (or text-chatting) in French, the people I’m talking to understand every word (except the French words I manufacture out of thin air from English ones).
• When they speak to me, they understand every word also — but they can’t really tell how well I’m following.

On another language-learning site, I discovered a rule of thumb that I reinterpret like this: a middle level of language skill means that you can speak comfortable in paragraphs. You don’t have to pause and pre-assemble what you plan to say — at least not any more than you do in your native language.

I’m just not there yet. I feel more like someone who’s moved to a strange city. I know there are bagel shops somewhere; I know there must a good place to get my bike fixed; I’m pretty sure there’s a great family-run Italian restaurant. Not to mention a much better route for getting from point A to point B.

I just haven’t learned those things yet. And while I can take in a lot of advice (which is really the theory that Ken Carroll talks about), I have to apply that advice, probably several times, before I can really judge its value for me and go about incorporating it into my repetoire.

I remember learning from Brother André that the French equivalent of “it’s Greek to me” is “it’s Chinese to me.” It delighted me even more to read once that the ancient Greeks supposedly would say, in the same situation, “it sounds like Hebrew.”

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/.