Dave's Whiteboard

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.)

Is all learning “social?”  In some ways, that’s a metaphysical question.  I’ve learned by reading and then applying what I read to some problem– like fiddling with the style sheet on my blog.

I suppose I’ve interacted with the person who wrote the book, and indirectly with the people who see the results of what I’ve done.  Or with myself, if I’m the only one who can tell the difference.

Parsing this can be fun, like pre-Vatican II discussions of Catholic practice.  “Brother Andrew–if it was Friday at the South Pole, and I had a ham sandwich, could I walk over to where it would be Saturday and eat the sandwich?  Would I have to wait before walking back to Friday?”

Most of the time, I think learning evidence itself through interaction with others (so, “social”).  More important, to me “learning” demands application.  Until you retrieve the facts, exercise the skill, attempt a new arrangement–do something–I don’t quite see how you can claim to have learned.

With that meandering out of the way, I’d like to highlight a highly useful series by Jane Hart: C4LPT’s Guide to Social Learning.  She discusses the shift from elearning to social learning, discusses social media, and gives examples of social media in learning.

Most helpful to me: Jane identified five types of learning.  Harold Jarche looked at those and created the chart you see on the right, showing the amount of  “directedness” for each category.

• IOL: intra-organizational learning
• GDL: group-directed learning
• PDL: personally-directed learning
• ASL: accidental and serendipitous learning
• FSL: formal structured learning

(So the list and the chart are a nice example of collaboration.  I thank Jane for clarifying this for me, and have edited this post accordingly.)

A highlight of Jane’s series is an extensive list of examples.  In a grid, she provides examples of different social media tools as they can be used for each of the types of learning in Harold’s chart.

There’s plenty more, including discussions for each of the five categories.  Take a look; see if there’s anything you can…well, learn.

“Talking to self” image adapted under a CC license from a photo by Leeni! / Kathleen.

Talking about live backchannels recently led to talking about feedback, which is good (in my view).  It’s feedback that offers the chance not to change, which was the first word trying to get in as I wrote this, but to decide. As in, decide whether to change or to keep on doing what you’re doing.

The difference?  Well, here are the basic steps of a process:

You can take the point-of-view elevator down (say, to the process for harvesting barley) or up (operating the Talisker distillery).  Processes go inside larger ones, link to others; an output here becomes an input there.

But you’re not getting the full picture.  You don’t know how you’re doing without feedback.  Thus items 7 and 9 on this diagram:

Item 9 on the diagram is feedback about the process (here’s how things are going).  You can see item 7 as both short-term and long-term feedback to the performer.  That’s the answer to “how’m I doing?”  (Sure, there’s crossover between the two, especially if it’s a single performer, but I was going for simplicity here.)

I talked recently with Dick Carlson about the backchannel.  He’s far more technically skilled than I am; he sometimes uses custom backchannel software in a session.  Each participate creates an anonymous ID (like, say, a favorite comic book character or root vegetable).  He displays the backchannel during the session, which means everybody gets to see when Granola&Grits says, “been there, declined the tshirt.”  Or when ParsnipAmazon says, “YES! ima usin this TODAY!”

Potential for an interesting bit of DIY research: do some sessions with the Veggie ID, others with name-based ID, then see if there’s discernable differences between the quality or quantity of feedback.  Okay, now, back to the post…

Not to say a backchannel is a requirement.  I have reservations, especially if most participants don’t have access to it–e.g., 60% lack devices to get to it. Shooting an anonymous remark into the stream is easier and potentially less intimidating than standing out by speaking up.

I’ve already said I’d be very distracted viewing a backchannel if I were presenting on my own.  Though on that topic, Aaron Silvers just today told me he found great value in reviewing a backchannel following a session he’d given.  During the session, he didn’t think he was doing that well, but what he saw in the stream afterward helped him see differently.

All of which is to say that software like Twitter is one way, not the way, to collect and retrieve feedback.  Which reminds me that collecting (storage) and retrieval (application) aren’t a bad way to think about the fundamentals of learning.

That’s my own “Looking for trouble?” chart.
My process diagram adapted from these CC-licensed images:
Ripening barley by net_efekt / Christian Guthier;
stills at the Lagavulin distillery by Freddie H / Frederique Harmsze;
glass of whisky by smiling_da_vince / Eelco.