They were hearing oral arguments in City of Ontario (California) v. Quon.  At issue was whether a member of the Ontario police could expect privacy for personal messages received on his SWAT-team pager, and whether people sending texts to that device could expect that the recipient’s employer would not review those texts.

Jones highlights some remarks by the justices:

• Chief Justice Roberts asked what the difference was between e-mail and a pager.
• Justice Kennedy wondered whether, if you’re sending a text as one arrives, the person who sent that one sees something like “you call is important to us; we’ll get back to you.”
• Justice Scalia asked whether a sent text doesn’t go right to the recipient.  (Jones thinks he was confused by the idea of a service provider.)

(You can judge for yourself, if you’d like.  Here’s the transcript of the oral arguments.  I think the remarks that Jones highlights are at pages 29 [Roberts, email and pages], 44 [Kennedy, your call is important], 48-49 [Scalia, service providers; printing texts].)

Yes, it is amusing if you think the youngest member of the Court doesn’t know the difference between email and a pager.  But that’s about all it is, amusing.  What I think is more pertinent here is that the justices were asking questions to better understand things unfamiliar to them, and that they were focusing on larger issues and not the details of technology.

For instance, Jones left off the first part of Roberts’ question, so I’ll highlight it here:

Maybe everybody else knows this, but what is the difference between the pager and the e-mail? (transcript, page 29)

I have no idea what level of techno-expertise Roberts has, but I’d guess he’s more familiar with email than with pagers, and trying to understand (a) what the difference might be, and (b) whether that difference makes a difference.

In terms of the busy-signal question from Justice Kennedy, it turns out that a few minutes earlier, Roberts had asked:

What happens, just out of curiosity, if you — he is on the pager and sending a message and they are trying to reach him for, you know, a SWAT team crisis?  Does he — does the one kind of trump the other, or do they get a busy signal?

To which the attorney answered, “I don’t think that’s in the record,” which is how a lawyer often phrases “I don’t know.”

As for Scalia’s remark about where a message goes, my guess is that he was being facetious (though we can’t know till there are audio recordings of oral arguments).

A discussion (starting about page 45 in the transcript) had to do with whether it made a difference that the text messages were handled by a service provider.  Scalia asked whether, when you send a text message, you’re pretty much aware that it remains private only if the recipient “or somebody else who has power over the recipient” chooses to look at it.  The lawyer said yes.

Roberts:  Well, then they can’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy based on the fact that their communication is routed through a communications company.

Dammeier (attorney): Well, they — they expect that some company, I’m sure, is going to have to be processing the delivery of this message.  And –

Roberts:  Well, I didn’t — I wouldn’t think that.  I thought, you know, you push a button, it goes right to the other thing.

Dammeier:  Well –

Scalia:  You mean it doesn’t go right to the other thing?

[Laughter]

You may not agree with the opinions that the justices issue, but I think the transcript illustrates several things.  First, they’ve gotten a grasp of the legal issues in the case (which is, after all, their job).  Second, they’re more than willing to ask questions.  Third, as evidenced by Roberts, at least some of them are unafraid of saying, “I don’t understand X.  Can you explain it to me?”

Which isn’t a bad way to start learning more about things you know that you don’t know.

Supreme Court image adapted from this CC-licensed photo by Virginia Foxx.

To oversimplify, many people in more traditional training jobs felt strongly that there is such a thing as “training” and that it has the potential for great value.  Other people, by and large on the you-manage-your-own-learning side, seemed to place little value on structured training as such.

Although I doubt most participants intended it, you could interpret the divergent views as “this is important work I’m doing that helps people become more productive” versus “get out of your rut.”

Maybe not a rut, but at least a well-worn path.  I’ve spent a lot of time in that corporate-training path: 7 years at Amtrak, 18 at GE, and much of my consultant career since.  Usually I’m far from the executive suite, so I have some sympathy for challenges that first-line and middle managers face together with their work groups.

Which is why, over and over, I recommend Robert F. Mager‘s What Every Manager Should Know about Training.  Not just to clients (though I’ve even sent the book as a gift when I thought it would be well received) but to the corporate trainers supporting them.

It’s not a scholarly book, nor a thick one; you could probably read the 140 pages in two hours. But in that space, Bob Mager works hard to get managers out of the training-as-dosage mythology.

• Rule 1: Training is appropriate only when two conditions are present:
  • There is something people don’t know how to do, and
  • They need to be able to do it.
• Rule 2: If they already know how, more training won’t help.
• Rule 3: Skill alone is not enough to guarantee performance.
• Rule 4: You can’t store training.
  • Use it or lose it.
• Rule 5: Trainers can guarantee skill, but they can’t guarantee on-the-job performance.
• Rule 6: Only managers, not trainers, can be held accountable for on-the-job performance.

Mager: “If training is only a means to an end, what is the end toward which it strives?  It’s performance.”  Someone familiar with concepts like ISPI’s human performance technology model (links to a PDF document) recognizes exactly what Mager’s doing: smuggling performance improvement into the organization.  He’s just hidden it in a plain brown wrapper that’s labeled TRAINING.

He was clever in choosing the title, because I’d argue the majority of people who supervise or manage in organizations use “training,” at least in casual conversation, to mean a whole complex of things related to getting people to produce valuable results on the job.  Instead of trying to convert them to performance-improvement or informal-learning jargon, Mager starts where these managers are likely to start.  Then he builds on their likely experience in other dimensions of work to help them see how training (as a structured approach toward helping people acquite skills they don’t have) is one part of overall performance.

In the chapter, Where the Magic Goes In, Mager addresses another concern managers have:

Instead of asking, “How long will it take to develop my course?” you might consider asking:

What can you do for me with the lead time I’ve got?…

For example, if [the training department has] only two days for training development, the most useful thing they can do is to verify whether training is a valid solution, and to verify which solutions will have the greatest impact on the problem.

If the trainers have time to do one more thing, a task analysis would be the most useful action.  These analyses can be turned into checklists in a matter of minutes, and the checklists can be given immediately to the instructors…and to the trainees, to show…what competent performers can do….

If there is time to do one more thing, trainers can derive the objectives of the instruction and then draft skill checks by which instructional success can be measured…

…Which, by the way, isn’t a bad way to think about any sort of guidance you’d like to provide other people.

Which is why HFS makes such a great example of a tool (depending on your interests) and such a great example of fun (depending on your mindset).

Those two “depending on” clauses are like the uprights for a suspension bridge.  If you’re not interested in learning about statistics and nothing’s pushing you to do so (like your job or your graduate program), then I’m confident (at the 0.975 level) you’re not going to, regardless of the form in which the opportunity to learn appears.  Much the same is true for the other upright: the way you feel about this particular opportunity. 

HFS has given both ends of that bridge some thought. Click the sample page to enlarge; you’ll see what I mean.

♦  ♦  ♦

What Dawn Griffiths has done is sketch a very high-level picture of the learning goals that HFS supports and the types of people who probably respond well to this approach.  Who’da thunk you could do that without the sacred incantation, “At the end of this course the student will be able to…?”

But–how can you be sure of what you’ll learn?

Hmm… the body-of-knowledge approach to learning.  It’s true: in many fields like statistics, there are concepts, principles, terms, equations, and so on that you’re expected to know.

By “know,” I mean you can agree on a description or definition for X with people who aren’t related to you.  Even if their reaction is, “Well, you could put it that way.”

At the same time, despite the sputterosity of purists, zealots, and cranks with time on their hands, most fields don’t have a body of knowledge; they’ve got a herd. Beyond the most basic definitions (like the difference between mean, mode, and media), no one factoid is make-or-break.

Granted, statistics does tend toward the lots-of-specific facts side. So HFS furnishes some tables.

A “Table of Contents (Summary),” which takes up a little more than half a page.  It’s followed by “Table of Contents (the real thing)” with a page for each of the 15 chapters, plus half a page apiece for the intro appendices).  Check the O’Reilly Books preview page for HFS yourself; use the next / previous buttons at the top of the book page to browse.

If I were smart, I’d end by suggesting you also look at a sample chapter (probability, PDF) or explore HFS on your own via Google Books.  The good-humored approach, the absence of dense text–those are obvious at first glance.

Beneath that, though, there’s a lot of cognitive infrastructure, the sort of thing that shifts from “fun” to “learning.”  Chapter 3, “Power Ranges,” is a good example.  It’s got 44 pages dealing with range and variation (the previous chapter dealt with mean, median, and mode).  This is what’s lurking as you turn the title page:

• The coach of the neighborhood basketball team needs one player.  He’s got three candidates.  All three have the same shooting average.  So, which one should he pick?
• Here are their individual stats (points per game and frequency).  What else does the coach need to know?
• Explanation: what “range” means (also, lower bound and upper bound).
• You try it: figure the mean, lower bound, upper bound, and rang for these two players.  Then, draw a histogram (as you learned in chapter 2) for each.
• Feedback for that exercise, and a troubling question about outliers.
• Explanation: why outliers are problematic.  Can you think of how to reduce their impact?
• Explanation: why ranges are quick-and-dirty solutions.
• Sneaky intro (“one way is to measure only part of the range”)
  accompanied by this:

That’s the first 8 pages.  Not only did you have a couple of get-out-your-pencil problems, but also questions to provoke thinking, questions to highlight potential confusion, and even, as in the above example, questions that are intelligent stand-ins for ones a learner might have.

As I said in an earlier post, fun in training (or in support of learning) shouldn’t be an afterthought.  It shouldn’t be force-injected, either, like the fake smoke-flavored streaks applied to frozen burgers to make you think they were grilled.

Dawn Griffiths shows that part of the engagement comes from a general approach (irreverence, retro photos, quirks of layout); another part comes from sample problems that offer real statistical challenges placed in…let’s say surreal settings.  (In chapter 7, you use Poisson distributions to figure out how often a movie theater’s popcorn machine is going to break downnext week.)

Maybe we can get Griffiths and the folks from Head First to have a long lunch with von Merriënboer and Kirschner.

I’m not far into it, but it’s already a “hey, listen to this” experience.  (Want to see the first chapter?)

Levitin contends that music isn’t simply a distraction or a pastime, but “a core element of our identity as a species, an activity that paved the way for more complex behaviors such as language…”

The six songs of the title aren’t specific songs; they’re categories for how we fit music into our lives.  At the start, he says, he was trying to figure out what all the different forms of song–work songs, love songs, counting rhymes, nearly the entire work of Bobby McFerrin–had in common.

Anthropologist Jim Ferguson (no relation that I’m aware of) told Levitin that was the wrong question.

Quoting the great anthropologist Clifford Geertz, Jim persuaded me that the right question to ask, in trying to understand music’s universality, is not what all musics have in common, but how they differ….

it is in the particulars, the nuances, the overwhelming variety of ways we express ourselves that one can come to understand best what it means to be a musical human.

Levitin sees six types of songs as having shaped human nature: songs of friendship, joy, comfort, knowledge, religion, and love.  Interestingly to me, his definition of “song” is “any music that people make, with or without melody, with or without lyrics.”

I like the inherent complexity (and possible paradox) in that.  “Without lyrics,” for example, opens the door for the effect that deliberate rhythm may have had on human behavior and the evolution of the brain.

I also like insights he includes from Pete Seeger.  Pete pointed out that not all music is intended to be popular.

“Among American Indians,” Seeger explained, “a young man got his eye on a girl and he would make a reed flute and compose a melody.  And when she came down to get a pail of water at the brook, he would hide in the weeds and play her his turn… It was her special tune.  A tune wasn’t thought of as being free for everybody.  It belonged to one person.  You might sing somebody’s song after they’re dead to recall them, but each person had a private song…”

In addition, Seeger says, the power of music comes from its combination of form, structure, and meaning.  “Ordinary speech doesn’t have quite that much organization….and this becomes intriguing, something you can remember.”

Levitin suggests that before there was language, the human brain didn’t have the full capacity to learn langauge.  That capacity emerged as the brain worked with sounds and verbalizations.  The new structure, he says, made possible three cognitive abilities:

• Perspective-taking: we could think about our own thoughts, and could realize that others have thoughts different from our own.
• Representation: we could think and talk about things that aren’t present.
• Rearrangement: we can “combine, recombine, and impose hierarchical order” on things in the world around us.

I’ve got a number of music- or language-related thoughts circulating.  This post is the first verse.

Downes is thorough–copied into Word, the post comes to eight single-spaced pages. I wanted to read it and follow what he’s saying, which explains this post. If things aren’t clear here, blame me.  Then, read Stephen’s original for yourself.

The bottom line: while factual knowledge is helpful, certain key skills are essential; they are a kind of operating system for the mind, which can then work with data from the outside world.

What’s at the core?

By “core knowledge,” he’s talking about a body or collection of things that provide the basics in a given field (e.g., you “need to know about bones to study medicine”).  He’s not saying you can’t teach (or learn) facts; learning facts is “the great shortcut in human development.”  And in order to do anything, you need to know stuff.

The question is, why these specific facts? In other words, is there a common core?

Downes says that facts learned as facts (like the multiplication tables) are a kind of direct programming, the sort of thing that remains unquestioned.  And, frankly, facts aren’t enough.

It’s not just the facts, ma’am

Here’s my summary of his six main reasons that an education based strictly and solely on facts is insufficient:

• Too many facts: you can’t learn them all, so you have to know how to find them.
• Facts aren’t fixed: things change, and we need to learn, to “change the previously existing state of our knowledge.”
• Some facts matter more: we have to select and filter so that we can decide what facts are important to ourselves and to others.
• Calling something a fact doesn’t make it one: we need to compare and assess things presented as facts.  (For example, I have no interest whatsoever in any “facts” proving that the earth is less than 10,000 years old.)
• Some facts invite acts: we need skills to decide whether the facts we have are something we should act on, and the sense that we can by acting create new facts.
• Facts aren’t capabilities: Beyond seeing the possibility of acting, we need the ability to act.

The flip side of these insufficiences, for Downes, becomes a summary of so-called 21st-century skills.  I like that there’s nothing about multi-tasking or hardware infrastructure or evolutionary changes to the brain in them.  They’re stated in more general terms, and could have applied a century ago.

So what’s different?

President Kennedy said at a 1962 dinner for Nobel laureates:

I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.

But that was 47 years ago, and 28 years before the world’s first web server.  We’ve got more facts and less static facts all the time.  (Remember how science “knew” that stomach ulcers were caused by stress?)  Beyond knowing what’s new and what’s changed, we have to cast a wider net.  Here Comes Everybody is not just a book title–it’s a new form of input.

Downes argues we also have new types of knowledge and skill, and that more of us need to use them every day.  (Baby Boomers are sometimes uneasy when they read “email is for old people.”)

Consider also the skills needed to manage just your professional presence and reputation.  That used to be done almost exclusively on paper and in person.  Now you’ve got networking sites, blogs, personal domains, avatars… your “online self” is a sort of conceptual clown car, with all sorts of characters inside.  Good thing we have so many more ways to do that.

Downes says, in part, that the role of facts is decreasing as the need for dynamic skill increases:

People need such greater capacities in literacy, learning, prioritizing, evaluation, planning and acting.

Facts: they don’t compute

Downes has an extended, useful comparison between these skills and the way we use computers.  To vastly oversimplify, other than its operating system, a computer doesn’t know anything.  (I tend to say it’s dumb as a rock but fast as hell.)  “If we had…programmed into [the computer] the knowledge of finances, literature, and mathematics, it would have been a less useful computer.”

That’s why, when we design computers, first we build the hardware, then we install the operating system, then we install application programs, and only then do we add the data – the facts with which we expect our computer to work.

The same principle applies in education and learning.

Take driving, for example. If our knowledge of how to drive depended on a set of facts, then at a certain point it would become impossible, because while we could teach people how to drive on common streets and in common situations, as we drive further and further away from home, in newer and different vehicles, our knowledge becomes less relevant, until eventually we are simply unable to drive. If, instead of focusing on the ‘facts’ of driving, we think of driving as an activity or skill, then we are able to adapt, and develop new abilities, and new knowledge, mastering the ability to drive in strange places as we progress.

…which is why Downes sees 21st-century skills as an operating system for the mind.

What the new operating system does

These skills enable us to navigate, to see, to understand, and to make our own decisions.  More important, says Downes, they change how we see facts.

To me, this is like the old view of the atom as an indivisible particle.  A fact is a thing, it’s true, it’s “real.”  Downes argues that “our relation with facts is much more contingent than previously supposed.”  (His italics.)

• Facts are not independent of how they’re expressed. Literacy means reading the lines, and between the lines, but also “reading faces, photos, ideas, omens, and portents.”
• Facts change. That’s a fact.  The earth isn’t the center of the universe.  Solid rock isn’t solid.

nobody
belongs anywhere
even the
Rocky Mountains
are still
moving
— George Bowering

• Some facts are salient, some aren’t. There’s no one set of facts that’s important to everyone.
• You can learn to tell fact from non-fact. Detecting deception (or, I think, error, or misrepresentation) is a skill, Downes says, “and you need just as much as your computer needs to be able to detect malware.”
• You’ve gotta decide. This point is key: decision-making isn’t rote performance, which means it’s not based solely on facts.
• You need to act. That action depends on skill much more than on a big ol’ heap of fact.

To be a man is to be responsible: to be ashamed of miseries you did not cause; to be proud of your comrades’ victories; to be aware, when setting one stone, that you are building a world.

—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

I’m skillful enough to let Downes finish for himself:

We still to a great degree treat facts as things and education as the acquisition of those things. But more and more, as our work, homes and lives become increasingly complex, we see this understanding becoming not only increasingly obsolete, but increasingly an impediment.

Today…if you simply follow the rules, do what you’re told, do your job and stay out of trouble, you will be led to ruin. It’s like sitting on a log floating in a river: it works for a while, and seems like the safest place to me, but all the while, you’re approaching a waterfall. Whether it be a financial crash, the degradation of the environment, war and terrorism, or even something as simple as a car accident or family crisis, you will need more and more the ability to keep yourself afloat in troubled and rapidly changing circumstances, and an abundance of facts will not help you, it will instead sweep you over the waterfall.

CC-licensed images:
Rolodex cards by mrbill;
facets of faces by Axel Bührmann.