Dave’s Whiteboard

Karyn Romeis asks, as part of her dissertation, how learning professionals got started with social media, and what difference it’s made. (If you’re a learning professional and are willing to have your own experience become part of her research, I’m sure she’d welcome your comments. See details at her post.)

Naturally, this seems like a great fit with this month’s Working/Learning blog carnival hosted by Rupa Rajagopalan.

How did you get started with social media?

I wanted to say “by accident,” but it’s really been an outgrowth of how I’ve worked for most of my career. I worked for GE Information Services, the company that helped invent timesharing. Our proprietary email was used by clients from Apple Computer to the Vatican.

I realize that email doesn’t strike everyone as “social software,” but it surmounted barriers of geography, making it possible to collaborate with coworkers and clients in North America, Europe, and Asia. To me, that’s the heart of social software: easy access to rapid communication between people who share some interest or issue.

What was your introduction, and how did it unfold?

If email was the start, the real intro came with GE’s use of threaded discussions, online libraries, and the online service called GEnie. As a training specialist, I participated in the alpha test, and so I’ve been connecting online via chat rooms, instant messaging, live discussion and similar channel since 1984.

Initially these were job related rather than profession related (meaning, most of the time I wasn’t dealing with other training/learning folks), but that changed over time. And, for ten years I was also a regular and active participant in the TRDEV-L (”training and development”) listserv.

All of these, which existed before Facebook, WordPress, or Twitter, supplemented and enriched more traditional professional networking offered by local chapters and annual conferences of professional associations. I made (and make) many professional and personal friends as a result of both public-forum and one-to-one backchannel exchanges.

For example, through TRDEV I met Patti Shank, who pointed me to the HTML tutorial developed by Alan Levine, which was how I learned not only to use the web but to create my own content for it. And a little over two years ago, I started my first blog and participated in Jay Cross’s first unworkshop.

What difference has it made in your professional practice?

I’ve worked in the training/learning/performance-improvement arena for thirty years. Early on, professional associations like ISPI helped expand my understanding of what was possible and what was effective. Taking part in local meetings and national conferences acquainted me with a wide range of people with whom I shared interests — different clusters, different interests.

My early experience with mainframe CBT — the 1980s version of distance learning — helped me shed the “sage on the stage” approach to training. Listserv participation highlighted the value of open, casual exchange with strangers who (by virtue of their participating in the same medium) likely had skills, experience, or challenges like mine.

Blogging for me serves several functions.

• It acts as a personal journal. Thanks in no small part to Harold Jarche’s example, I decided to muse publicly about things that interest me and that fall for the most part under the training / learning / performance umbrella.
• My blog helps me retain what I’m learning — it’s a do-it-yourself database from which I can easily retrieve, or to which I can direct someone who’s not yet at the social-bookmark stage. “Just go to my blog and search for Hans Rosling.” (If I had a latte for every time I said that, I couldn’t fall asleep till Thursday.)
• Third, active reflection means I’m also actively looking for information. My feedreader gathers sources that have worked for me; the fact that someone has a blog is a standing invitation for me to join the conversation if it appeals to me.

Although I’m an independent consultant, in the average week I have more professional contact — and contact more attuned to my interests — than I might have had in any six months without these tools. Add to the mix a freer flow of information through social bookmarks, tags, blogs, along with tools that make it easier for someone to create, share, and modify content, and you’ve got a powerful toolbox.

No one social application is essential — Flickr, del.icio.us, or Blogger will disappear, as Netscape, Lotus 1-2-3, and WordStar did before them. But the capabilities are such that learning professionals who ignore them are likely to handicap themselves.

As Roger Schank said, it took the training profession 30 years to get the overhead projector out of the bowling alley.

I’ll turn back to Alan Levine for a powerful example of social software at work:

It was D’Arcy at the UBC Social Software Salon who described it something like being removing or downplaying the “software� portion of online social interaction. Whatever your way of describing what “social software� is how, submitted below is a nice example of the informal way the web, blogs, maybe even RSS play a role in collectively building something in a way not previously possible.

(See Alan’s full post on social software in action.)

Eastern Boundary photo by Vidiot.
Bowling scoreboard photo by Brian Wallace.

I’ve been thinking about process versus product, which tends to remind me of this quote:

In theory, there’s no difference between theory and practice. But in practice, there is.

Professionally, I tend to focus on the product. That’s in no small way due to the course of my career. I began as a high school teacher, and my graduate program highlighted techniques for teaching well.

When I moved to corporate training, the focus shifted to how to train and then how to train well. I learned from people like Bob Mager and Joe Harless that “training well” sometimes means “don’t waste time having people memorize what they can more effectively look up.”

The next eye opener was learning about the human performance technology model (useful examples and discussion in this PDF). Its strong emphasis on results (another term for product) permanently changed how I looked at so-called training problems:

• What’s the gap between what Allison Rossett calls optimals and actuals on the job?
• What factors other than skill and knowledge might be part of that gap?
• How can you address those factors?
• How will you monitor your success?

To me, the major focus was on product. So the particulars of, say, an instructional design process aren’t as important as the product that process delivers.

Lately I’m looking more closely at process. The 10,000 hours that John Medina mentions are required for expertise are in a real sense a repeated process. And sometimes the process is part of the product.

I’m a big believer in job aids. Some are like training wheels: you use them until you master the underlying task. For others, you don’t want memorization. Part of the goal is to have people rely on the job aid. The guidance may change so often that part of the product is “using the job aid.” Or the consequences are so high that memorization is not an asset — as with preflight checklists.

My thought today is that awareness plus deliberate action leads to habit. I’m trying to acquire and strengthen some work habits, hence the focus on process. I’m hoping that adding feedback (call it post-mindfulness) to the mix will lead to improved product, which will never be called Dave 2.0.

Statistics file photo by ex_libris_gul / Heather.
Poker photo by Philofoto / Christian Fortier.

Series: The brain rules!

In John Medina’s Brain Rules, rule #2 says, “The human brain evolved, too.” This chapter focuses on how our brains developed. One factor in that development was that our ancestors gave up on consistency. They didn’t have much choice; the changing environment slowly, steadily pushed them out of the trees and onto the grasslands.

Instead of learning how to survive in just one or two ecological niches we took on the entire globe. Those unable to rapidly solve new problems or learn from mistakes didn’t survive long enough to pass on their genes. The net effect of this evolution was that we didn’t become stronger; we became smarter. We learn to grow our fangs not in the mouth it in the head.

As Medina points out, learning to walk upright — something you can’t do in the trees — freed up our hands and was also energy-efficient, freeing energy to build and fuel our minds.

As we evolved, our brains became larger. The triune model sees three brains:

• The brain stem, or lizard brain, controlling basic functions like breathing, heart rate, sleeping.
• The mammalian brain, dealing with functions like “fighting, feeding, fueling, and… reproductive behavior.”
• The cerebral cortex or the human brain, managing most of what we think of as higher reasoning.

How did we manage this evolutionarily? We developed childhood.

Much of our brainpower develops after birth, which means our survival depends on adults who can protect children. we had to learn how to cooperate. We can form impressions about the internal states of other people, something known as the theory of mind.

Suppose you are not the biggest person on the block, but you have thousands of years to become one. What do you do? If you are an animal, the most straightforward approach is becoming physically bigger… but there is another way to double your biomass. It’s not by creating a body but by creating an ally. If you can establish cooperative agreements with some of your neighbors, you can double your power even if you do not personally told your strength.

Another major trait we developed is the ability to reason symbolically. Here, too, we need time. Under the age of three, children don’t reason symbolically very well. Past that age, they can grasp and wield powerful human tools like language; they can reason; and they can deliberately set out to learn.

Brain photo by jj_judes / Jude.

Cathy Moore has an excellent post on action mapping. This is a technique for effectively designing training by figuring out:

• The business goal (Where do you want to go?)
• The necessary skill (What do people need to do?)
• The relevant activities (How can they practice those skills?)
• And the information people must have (What do they really need to know?)

It’s the specificity that gets you to effective training. I think of this as working backwards from the results you want. I recall a salesperson saying to me, at the start of a session, “I hope this is a good one — it’s costing me $45,000.”

He thought of each working day in terms of his quota, and time away from customers had to be recouped somehow. He wasn’t opposed to training — he just didn’t want it to waste his time. If it was product training, he didn’t want marketing department blather about world-class excellence going forward; he wanted to know what kinds of customers would benefit from which particular features, and how. He wanted to know where the product was weak or unsuitable, so he didn’t try selling the wrong thing.

I’ve talked about the key question that gets you from old-fashioned, content based training to on-the-job performance. Cathy’s showing one way to make that movement clear for a client. Not all of them will listen, but those who do are the ones who understand that the parts of an organization need to work in an organized fashion.

Hype-mobile photo by…me.

I’ve been reading Daniel Levitin’s This is Your Brain on Music. It’s hard to describe it briefly, because Levitin so skillfully interweaves his knowledge of music with the science of the brain.

In one chapter, Levitin asks, “What makes a musician?” From there, he moves to the topic of expertise. In the world of music, you might ask what factors are involved in talent. It’s clear that some people acquire a musical scale much faster than others. What’s not clear is why and how.

We do know that the region of the brain controlling the left hand increases in size as violinists practice. We don’t know, however, whether some individuals are more prone to have this increase than others are.

So, what’s an expert? Generally, says Levitin, “someone who is reached a high degree of accomplishment relative to other people. As such, expertise is a social judgment.”

Expertise also involves value (at least most of the time). I may be extremely skillful at re programming the clock on my car’s radio, but few people would regard that as true expertise.

The emerging picture… is that 10,000 hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert — in anything. In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again.

I’m sure that 10,000 hours is an approximation. At the same time, it seems to reflect reality. Three hours a day, seven days a week, comes to 10,000 hours — in 10 years. A Scottish proverb says that to the making of a piper go “seven years of his own learning, and seven generations before.” The MacCrimmons of Skye would know more about the seven generations, but four hours of practice today would come to 10,000 in seven years.

This concept of 10,000 hours intrigues me; it also has implications for training and learning. This New York Times article from 1994 quotes Dr. Anders Ericsson, an expert in, well, expertise (as does Levitin).

“You have to tweak the system by pushing, allowing for more errors at first as you increase your limits,” said Dr. Ericsson. “You don’t get benefits from mechanical repetition, but by adjusting your execution over and over to get closer to your goal.”

You also have to manage the amount of practice per day. More than four hours on a regular basis seems to be counterproductive.

Two professors from Brigham Young University, Larry C. Farmer and Gerald R. Williams, discuss deliberate practice in this draft document (PDF). They wanted to get their students beyond merely competent skill in interviewing, counseling, and negotiation.

Research and experience indicate a similar dynamic obtains in law practice; within the first few years of practice, most lawyers reach a plateau or comfort level with these skills which they rarely surpass. The literature suggests this plateau effect derives from the human tendency to improve to “an acceptable level of proficiencyâ€? and then let up on our effort or divert our energy into other channels…”

They also cite Jennifer A. Moon’s elements of reflective practice:

• An on-going motivation to maintain self-awareness
• Mindfulness regarding professional skills and handling events related to one’s practice
• A critical orientation toward the performance of one’s professional skills or the handling
  of events in practice
• An ongoing process of self-evaluation
• An openness to evaluation by others

Not a bad list to guide you through those 10,000 hours on your own way to expertise.

Piping photo by Photo by preciouskhyatt / Patrick Kennedy.