Dave’s Whiteboard

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.

It’s almost embarrassing how often I rely on Stephen Downes to highlight things of interest. Today he links to an apparent rant by “Professor Anonymous,” all aflutter because college students use laptops in class and might not be listening to the lecture.

Some suspect the post is a parody. It’s hard to tell with insights like these:

• [Over a period of ten years]…other than a couple of tweaks…[my] lectures are pretty much the same.
• On one side of [my PowerPoint slide] is a neat outline or a definition. On the other side, there’s an image that’s usually aimed at gathering a few cheap laughs.
• [I use the class website] for posting links to additional reading and for reminding students of the next class assignment.

Somehow the post, and especially the discussion (over 50 comments) made me think of Starbuck’s. Or McDonald’s. Or Jiffy-Lube.

Anonymous (does she call herself “Professor” outside of faculty meetings?) seems to care about her field, and in a way to care about her students. I’m not sure, though, that she’s ready to abandon the notion that lectures with note-taking are the ideal way to teach, let alone an optimal way to learn.

I myself can be a pretty good note-taker — in college, note-taking was my main method of dealing with boring classes, though it failed me in that soporific course on Augustan literature.

I take a lot of notes now, too, long after I’ve recovered from MacFlecknoe and The Rape of the Lock. Stepping back mentally, I see the note-taking occurs in mainly three contexts. Since Professor Anonymous is clearly a believed in a body of knowledge, I’m seeing those contexts as relating to a different kind of body: a Significant Other.

Context 1: In Search Of

When I begin a new project, I often don’t know what’s going on. I’m not familiar with the “body” in question — bodies like pharmaceutical manufacturing, health claims for atomic-weapons workers, or vendor-managed inventory.

So I take notes as I go through background materials. In some cases I’m making my own outline of a relevant document; the process of condensing and arranging is helpful for me. It’s a reprocessing that works better, in my case, than simply reading.

In some cases, I don’t return to those notes; the note-taking helped me get started. As I began to understand what’s important to my client, I listen better and ask better questions.

Context 2: We Can Work It Out

I return to note-taking further into the relationship, usually a week or so after discovering how much I didn’t learn initially. I forget who said it, but it’s not the things you don’t know that get you in trouble; it’s the things you know that aren’t true.

In interpersonal relationships, and in relationships with a body of knowledge, I find over and over that somethings become more complicated, more nuanced, more contextual than I’d assumed. In a work context, I find that taking notes and sketching processes helps me focus. I try to simplify, to create a high-level understanding. That gives me a framework from which to hang the more accurate details.

Context 3: You Were Always on My Mind

The most important notes I take are the ones that seem least vital at the time. I push myself to keep a daily log of what I’ve been doing. This isn’t the same thing as blogging. My Whiteboard is for thinking out loud and inviting the comments of others.

No offense, but I don’t want to invite you to read my end-of-the-day notes.

For one thing, here on the Whiteboard, I don’t talk about current clients by name. If something’s worth talking about, I’ll invent a name and possibly another industry so I can muse without revealing any confidences.

In the relationship analogy, it’s like taking time to think about your significant other, whether she’s close by or off on a trip as mine is this week. What builds your relationship isn’t the trip to Edinburgh or Paris (though those can help); it’s day-to-day awareness.

When I’m working on a project, then, one of the most valuable things I can do for myself is to take 10 minutes or so at the end of a workday to note down what I’ve been doing, whom I’ve talked with, and especially what I’m either elated or concerned about.

It’s a form of mindfulness — something I decide to do (and with luck actually do) to focus on what I’ve been doing and why.

Going back to Anonymous’s post, I wonder if she and other commenters don’t view note-taking as an end in its own right. My own view is that they’re a tool to help me process what I’ve been doing. That process is at the heart of true learning.

Office-door image created by Matt McVickar.
Dalai Lama photo by Bruce Bortin.

More three-clicks-out serendipity:

Stephen Downes tells about Marvin Minsky essays posted on a wiki.

The Minsky essays are here at the One Laptop Per Child site.

Scrolling down the OLPC home page, you find “What’s New,” which today shows over a dozen deployments in places like Mongolia, Uruguay, and Nepal.

I haven’t paid much attention to OLPC, but one line in the news items caught my eye: a followup visit to the site of Peru’s 8-month OLPC pilot.

Astounded in Arahuay, by Ivan Krstić, is worth reading in full. Here are highlights that opened my eyes wider than the two cups of coffee at breakfast:

The school’s former principal notes three significant changes:

• In this poor, rural area, children didn’t see each other much outside of school. Since OLPC came, they connect “over the mesh” outside of school, and work together more in school.
• The kids didn’t use to share much. (”They don’t have much; what they do have, they’re reluctant to share.”) They began sharing what they’d written, pictures they’d made — and this too has extended into the physical world.
• The former principal believed that the fathers would pose a problem — when the laptops appeared, the kids didn’t want to work in the fields all day.

…Then [the kids] started showing [their fathers] the work they were doing for school. The reports they wrote, the pictures they took, the notes they compiled. And the fathers had actual proof that their kids were learning…
the school was no longer a black box whose efficacy had to be taken on faith: the kids could prove they were learning.

If you’re working in an academic or corporate setting in a developed country, take a few minutes to read about what can be done. Here’s the Arahuay page at the OLPC wiki for more about how the project began there.

That’s where you can read about second-grader Emilio (picture at left). His class was learning how to find words in an online Spanish dictionary (”costly and practically out of the children’s reach in book form”).

Emilio caught on fast — so fast that when the connection failed and the teacher told the class they’d have to try later, Emilio piped up, “No need, teacher. I got all the words, and everybody can copy them from me.”

Thanks to Jeff Cobb for linking to George Siemens’s A World without Courses. While this 15-minute presentation (an Articulate Presenter slideshow) focuses on education, Siemens connects to what I see as the less formal process of learning as well.

He sees courses as structured, organized, and dealing with bounded domains. The institutions that deliver courses provide a kind of value through accreditation and the overall reputation of the institution.

Education can now involve much more distributed content. In other words, things are not necessarily neatly organized or structured; they may appear in media not easily wrapped into a classroom format. And education can now involve distributed conversation as well.

(That last point reminds me of something Harold Jarche recently noted: Ryerson University recently charged a student with academic misconduct for creating a virtual study group on Facebook.)

I appreciate Siemens sharing his thoughts about how we’ll determine the value of learning in this highly distributed world. The examples of eBay reputation points or Amazon referral systems don’t fill me with optimism. People who figure out how to game such systems are usually nimbler than those who figure out gaming has occurred.

Some of what seems like new uncertainty, though, may be a repackaging of what was uncertain before. I’m thinking of the purported value or reputation of formal institutions. We tend to ascribe a certain worth to a degree from Harvard or Yale, and maybe a different value to one from Michigan or SMU, and perhaps a lesser one to my own almae matres, the University of Detroit and Emporia State University.

Had I gone to Yale, in theory I could benefit from a potentially wider or higher-quality network — but in practice, if a Yale grad doesn’t activity use that network, then its value lessens over time.

More and more I’m convinced that most of what I’ve learned professionally has in fact been the result of a few factors. There is a kind of recommendation/certification (e.g., workshops sponsored by groups I respect), there’s a good deal of word-of-mouth, and there’s been a fair amount of self-selection. In the latter instance, I’ve sometimes chosen some formal event because it looked like I could learn more about Topic X, and because the cost didn’t seem prohibitive.

I think I’m not as prone to see or place a value on the less formal learning that I’ve engaged in. For example, years ago my coworkers and I eagerly participated in an annual user’s conference held by Boeing Computer Services for users of its mainframe-based computer-based training system. We would step back from our day-to-day work and think about things we’d tried to improve how we used CBT to train people in the Amtrak reservation system.

That reflection and our desire to share with others turned what we jokingly called show-and-tell into a kind of integration for us and an invitation to our counterparts in other companies. (”Here’s something cool we tried that helped us deal with such-and-such a problem.”)

Getting back to George Siemens, perhaps individuals and organizations are working out ways to measure and assess the value of new ways of learning. Not all the measures are going to work, not all the value is really going to be there (call it the Bear Stearns factor). The conversation’s certainly worth having.

Image adapted from a photo by Todd Lappin of Telstar Logistics under a Creative Commons license.

Thanks to Jay Cross’s Internet Time Wiki, a link to a 1999 National Research Council report: How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School.

From the executive summary:

As a result of the accumulation of new kinds of information about human learning, views of how effective learning proceeds have shifted from the benefits of diligent drill and practice to focus on students’ understanding and application of knowledge…

Major sections of the report include:

• Learners and learning
  • How experts differ from novices
  • Learning and transfer
  • How children learn
  • Mind and brain
• Teachers and teaching
  • The design of learning environments
  • Effective teaching (examples from history, math, and science)
  • Teacher learning
  • Technology to support learning
• Future directions for the science of learning

The report is 8 years old. Sadly, I doubt much has happened to change one gloomy conclusion: “Much of what constitutes the typical approach to formal teacher professional development is antithetical to what promotes teacher learning.”