Dave’s Whiteboard

From Dean Shareski’s Ideas and Thoughts blog, an energizing presentation by Chris Lehmann. He’s the principal of Philadelphia’s Science Leadership Academy, working under a time crunch (20 slides, 15 seconds per slide), and having a great time.

I found myself connecting what he says to the world of work; I’ll keep that to myself till after you hear Chris. (Note: You can’t see all Lehmann’s slides, so I’ve posted them below the video clip.)

I actually stopped the video a few times to scribble stuff down.

“Good data costs a lot more than we want to spend.”

That’s true for schools, and it’s also true in the world of work. There’s a lot of lip service paid to Kirkpatrick’s levels and to ROI, but in reality, we can’t afford to assess everything at Level IV, and if we’re doing a full ROI assessment on whether to devote a day and a half of our own time to learning some new technology, we’re going to end up getting to spend more time with our families.

I absolutely believe in the value of data — it’s the requirement for performance improvement — but as I listened to Chris Lehmann, I realized that ofter we are in great shape if we have good enough data. Claude Lineberry (as energetic a guy as Lehmann) hammered in the point that businesses don’t do control groups. Some data, carefully chosen, is a hell of a lot better than no data, which is what many people run with all the time.

“Tests and quizzes as dipsticks…”

When I get gas for my car, I always get a fill-up; I calculate the mileage and record it in a booklet I keep in the glove compartment. This is a kind of dipstick — it’s one stream of data that I can glance at, and if I see a variation from my car’s typical performance, then I go looking for more data and for causes.

Lehmann is pushing back from treating tests as goals. As he talked, I thought of the painful annual corporate ritual, the performance review. More than once in my career, I was asked to create a list of what I’d done so my boss could “update” my goals. In other words, I was backing from accomplishments to goals.

Which, I suppose, is better than being slammed for not doing stuff people forgot about nine months ago. The platonic ideal, where you and your manager (or, you poor schmo, your “leader”) regularly look at what you’re doing, what you’re getting done, and what needs to get done — I don’t know how often that happens, but when it does, it’s the dipstick model in action.

“You want to see what kids have learned, give them a project.”

As Lehmann points out, we adults learn when we’re trying to solve something, which means we’re trying to achieve a result. A depressing amount of corporate “learning” involves passive reception: listening to presentations, clicking through page-turners, reading documents. Nothing happens, which means there probably aren’t any new neural connections forming and few old ones getting stronger.

Working on a specific outcome probably leaves gaps in your learning. You can hear someone saying, “Okay, great, you got the web page menus to work entirely with CSS — but you don’t know how to do A, B, and C.” There are two assessments there: was the point to get the menus working, or to do A, B, and C?

I content that much of the time, getting X accomplished is the way to go. If afterward, you feel you don’t have the right result, then you go back and redefine X. I have seen perfectly harmless people subjected to a one-hour lecture on the step-by-step telephone switch, only to learn afterward that their telephone-company employer did not actually own any step-by-step switches; the last one had been replaced more than 10 years before, by computers.

But it was “good for them” to learn about the switches.

Jonathan Drori helped launch the online face of the BBC. He’s edited and produced TV series on science, and is not a director at Changing Media Ltd.

In a TED talk in February, 2007, he discussed why we don’t understand as much as we think. Points that stood out for me:

• We look for evidence to support our mental models.
• Some people are all too ready to supply that evidence.
• Early mental models are extremely persistent.
• We collude: we design tests so people pass them.

At one point, Drori says that kids learn by messing around with everyday objects, things that are “bodged and stuffed.” “Bodge” was new to me, but “quick and dirty” seems a good American English counterpart. Urban Dictionary gives this example:

Bodge (verb)… to repair hastily and without care of durability or aesthetics or perfection. Popularized in British television show “Scrapheap Challenge,” known as “Junkyard Wars” in the US, and by producer Cathy Rodgers.
“Your task is to bodge together a hovercraft from nothing but twisted metal, scrapped cars, and other assorted bits of rubbish!”

But he can speak for himself:

(Here’s a direct link to Drori’s talk on the TED site.)

Earlier this week, the New York Times ran an article, “Don’t Buy That Textbook, Download It Free.”

I haven’t taken a higher-education course in some time, so I didn’t know what heights textbooks had achieved. Introductory Econometrics: A Modern Approach is discounted at Amazon — to $126.85. The Paralegal Professional is discounted to $99.20 (I’ve got a virtually unused copy; make me an offer).

Noam Cohen’s column in the Times mentioned R. Preston McAfee, an economics professor at Cal Tech, who’s put his introductory text online — free. Or, if you’re not keen on reading 328 pages online, you can order a printed copy for $11.10 from Lulu.com.

McAfee actually deals with two online publishers, Lulu and Flat World Knowledge — “to further constrain their ability to engage in monopoly pricing.”

(The Flat World site is “info only” at the moment; for now, it has four short videos explaining their business.)

Another publisher, CourseSmart, is owned by five publishers. CourseSmart’s model allows students to subscribe to a text — they can read it online, then highlight and print out portions. Oddly, you can either read online or download the book, but not both.

A third path: Connexions, which calls itself “a content commons.” Connexions includes modules (’small knowledge chunks’) and collections (groups of modules structured as books or as class notes). Modules and collections use a Creative Commons attribution license, meaning anyone can add or edit, as well as reuse, as long as there’s attribution.

I played a bit with Connexions. As you might expect, some modules are better written than others. A sidebar offers links to related material and provides cross-references to collections using the module; a footer includes a link for sending feedback to the author.

Image: Jack Kerouac’s manuscript for On the Road; photo by emdot / marya.

One reason I started the Working/Learning blog carnival is that I’ve gotten so much out of other carnivals — like Encephalon, the neuroscience and psychology carnival, now in its 54th edition.

Two hops from the carnival, I learned about Brains R Us: The Science of Educating, a day-long conference last March at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.

The videos on the site are lengthy (over an hour each). I can’t find any hint of the content of each video other than a list of speakers (on the agenda tab, below the video window). (Maybe they should have looked at Jakobsen’s suggestions.)

That’s too bad, because I suspect there’s good stuff. For instace, about at about 5:30 into the Highlights video, you see an example of a baby learned to detect differences in tones that are 70 milliseconds apart.

So what? Well, a baby’s ability on this task at the age of six months accurately predicts a language impairment at 3 years — with 91% accuracy. Speech involves “a lot of rapid auditory transitions.” Training children on a task to distinguish different kinds of beeps and boops can bring their language ability to normal.

The other videos:

• Brains
• Schools
• Children
• Teachers
• Transformation

Starting next Monday, I’m going to be doing intense research on North Carolina tides. I burn easily, though, so I’ll have to spend some time indoors, and so I may watch a couple of these and turn my notes into a series here.

An early-morning side trip at CogDogBlog let me to discover DonorsChoose.org.

This site invites teachers to describe specific projects for which they need money, and allows donors to select such projects to donate to. Like these:

• A fourth-grade class whose students need more books in Spanish for fluent readers.
• A first-grade class needing insect specimens (and copies of The Very Hungry Caterpillar).
• Rural high-school seniors whose teacher would like to use Hamlet — the Manga Edition (in which Horatio looks a bit like Harry Potter).

The Charity Navigator gives DonorsChoose a four-star rating. DonorsChoose claims to have enabled donors in 50 states to provide $23,338,925 to 1,351,770 students.

Lots of people talk about large-scale educational reform. In the short run, though, teachers in place struggle with the realities of the classroom and don’t have the liberty to wait for the New Digital Jerusalem.

The Hamlet request is far from the only Shakespearean one. There’s quite a bit of interest in No Fear Shakespeare. I’m biased; I taught high school English in rural Kansas. Thinking of these teachers reminded me of the other pre-battle speech (not the ‘band of brothers’ one) in Henry V, only with teachers instead of the English troops:

We are but warriors for the working-day;
Our gayness and our gilt are all besmirch’d
With rainy marching in the painful field;
There’s not a piece of feather in our host…
And time hath worn us into slovenry:
But, by the mass, our hearts are in the trim…

I thought it was worthwhile shining a bit more light on this corner of the world of learning.

If you’re so inclined, you can see both speeches in the clip below. (It’s just before the battle of Agincourt, where the English were outnumbered 5 or 6 to 1.) You’ll probably recognize the first speech; the “warriors for the working day” one begins around the three-minute mark.