Dave’s Whiteboard

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.

Series: The brain rules!

This post is part of the Working/Learning blog carnival for April, 2008, hosted this month by Manish Mohan, who blogs at Life, the Universe, and Everything about eLearning and Content Development. It’s the second run of the carnival; the first was in March 2008.

I’ve been reading John Medina’s Brain Rules. I’m also trying to relate them to learning and to things that affect my work. In other words, using his rules as a framework, what can I do with them?

I’ve decided to start with rule six, “remember to repeat.” Why this one? Because last Wednesday was the 262nd anniversary of the Battle of Culloden.

‘Twas love of our prince drove us on to Drumossie
But in scarcely the time that it takes me to tell
The flower of our country lay scorched by an army
As ruthless and red as the embers of hell…

Although I don’t weep over the defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie, neither do I let April 16 pass unnoticed. Why is that?

Medina writes about how we move information from short-term to long-term memory. Nothing much new: repetition and restatement. One of the principles that we know (but don’t always capitalize on) is spacing out the input. Or as I like to call it, three times 20 is more than 60.

If you’ve got a a given amount of time to learn something, you’ll almost certainly learned better and more thoroughly by spacing out your exposure. Instead of cramming for two hours, try four sessions of 30 minutes each. As the descendant of Scottish Highlanders, I’ve certainly spaced out my exposure to stories of the Jacobite rebellions and songs about “The ‘45.”

Medina also says that when information is retrieved from long-term memory, it’s not fixed as if it were a book pulled from a library shelf. It’s almost a repetition of the initial learning — the information is once again labile, malleable, something we can re-work.

That means when it’s re-stored, it’s been changed. Not always leading to greater accuracy.

Which brings in my great uncle. Actually, Gillies Mhor MacBain is my great-great-great-great-great-great-grand-uncle, if I can trust a genealogical history called The Mabou Pioneers. Gillies fought for Prince Charlie and died at Culloden.

Google his name, and you’ll find dozens of accounts saying that he was 6 foot 4, that he killed at least 13 redcoats, and that an English officer tried in vain to have Gillies spared because of his bravery.

Who knows what really happened? The story of Gillies MacBain has been told and retold. Details were lost on the battlefield and over the years; without a doubt, new details have been supplied. They’ve altered the cultural memory the way recall and reconsolidation can alter your personal memory.

Over time new information in the brain reshapes what’s already there. We can “remember” things that never happened.

That suggests things we can do, in the world of learning at work, to increase the value of that reworking and reconsolidation. Focus the learning on what’s important to the job, for example. Create support and structures to ease recall and increase accuracy.

Think hard about questions like:

• What’s our rationale for a three day workshop?
  • Does it make sense to firehose information this way?
• If we must have one, how do we design for spaced input?
  • Can we break up topics and interweave them?
• Are we focusing on tasks rather than on content?
  • Even (or especially) for concepts and principles, can we provide opportunities to work with them, apply them in job-relevant contexts?
• How do we design, create, or organize information externally to make it easy to retrieve and apply as needed?

I spent more time than expected thinking through this post as I was writing it. While I don’t see Medina’s brain rules as the fulcrum of all knowledge, I like the idea of trying to apply them to the blog carnival themes of “work at learning; learning at work.” So I think this post will be a first in a series based on Medina’s rules. Feel free to chime in.

Old book photo by alpoma / Alejandro Polanco.
Brain funnel image by Beth Kanter.

Look closely at this post’s title: a phrase, or a sentence?

I freely confess I haven’t much patience with SCORM and the relentlessly hierarchical, content management frame of mind. I feel about these things much as I used to about the Novell network at a former job. I recognized at once it was messy, complicated, and not something I wanted to have expertise in. I adopted as my mantra, “I don’t know nothin’ ’bout linkin’ no lans.”

I certainly agree that information and resources have the potential to affect many different situations. In practice, however, I’ve seen learning objects treated much more like objects than like learning.

One project I worked on dealt with EEO procedures in a federal agency. As we developed online courses, SCORM orthodoxy required that no lesson referred to anything covered in another lesson. The rationale was that the “learning objects” could be “repurposed,” which is like being reused but costs a lot more.

In other words, another agency in theory could take these objects and string them electronically into its own EEO procedure course. And apparently they’d do that oh so efficiently because of the content management and whatnot.

Here on Earth, what would really happen is that some human being would rewrite the examples, changing a case study from an immigration officer to a wage-hour investigator. All the other content — charts, steps, procedures, topic and lesson structure — would be identical to the original course, because the procedure was identical across agencies.

All the learning object packaging, all the SCORM manifests, were simply a top-down approach to warehousing information, apparently with the idea that the photo used to illustrate an employee making a claim could someday reappear in a completely different context.

Photo by privatenobby / LLewleyn Williams a.k.a. SCUD.

The eLearning Guild’s annual gathering is in Orlando, Florida this week. One of the events is the Immersive Learning Simulations challenge, in which designers grapple with some challenge for which they’ll propose an ILS (a “serious game”) — a virtual environment in which people deal with actual problems.

From the challenge intro:

This is not a session about templates or tools or rapid development, but rather is an inspiring session about how thinking differently about tough problems, using an ILS/Serious Games set of tools and theories, can lead to extraordinary solutions. The goal is for you to be energized, and motivated by this session into exploring more deeply how you can implement ILS/Serious Games and great design within your own organization to improve learner outcomes.

This year’s challenge: a North American conglomerate has acquired two other companies, one in Africa, the other in Korea. These acquisitions will directly affect your own job. Design an ILS to help align the three entities and share their cultures. “Oh, and the big shareholder meeting is coming up too. Go.”

I have no idea what I would have come up with, but it would not have been what Alan Levine did. After reading — or experiencing — his post, I’m wider awake at 5:35 than if I’d managed to get downstairs for coffee.

This isn’t thinking outside the box — this is ripping the cardboard apart and finding six different uses for it.

See for yourself:

The Great Design Challenge (Hey, Mom) by Alan Levine (cogdogblog).

Photo by tew / t whelan.

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.”