Dave's Whiteboard

You know what the difference is between good habits and bad ones?  Good habits, you have to work at.

In other words, they require discipline, which means willpower.  In a recent post at the SharpBrains blog,  Daniel Goleman offers good news and bad news about willpower.

The bad news is that research suggests we have a fixed amount of it.  Apply it to one challenge, and you have less available for the next.

This may explain why a (reasonably) vigorous workout for me is often followed, some hours later, by a fuller meal than I might actually need.

The good news, says Goleman, is that we can increase that reservoir of willpower.  He compares it to a muscle, which gets stronger with exercise.

(If you like Goleman’s post, you’ll probably like Sharon Begley’s book Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain. As I noted here some time ago, the title sounds like a self-help nostrum, but Begley in fact assembles and makes clear a wealth of research-based understanding about the brain.)

CC-licensed daily-discipline photo by blue out.

Yesterday, the Democrats in the House of Representatives had a five-hour “tutorial” on the current draft of HR 3200, the health-care bill.  (Click that link with caution; it’s a PDF with over 1,000 pages.)

The idea, it seems, was to help  House Democrats come to grips with details of the bill.

Joel Achenbach’s article in this morning’s Washington Post says about 180 members participated (out of the 256 Democrats), and 120 “have been in there throughout,” according to the chairman of the House Democratic Caucus. *

What got my attention was the idea and its structure:

• House staffers led members though the sections of the bill.
• For the first 2 1/2 hours, members “couldn’t even ask questions.”
• Some had a printout of the entire bill; others used a 34-page summary.
• The caucus apparently supplemented with bill with a packet that included things like a health-care glossary.
• Starting around 7 p.m., a question-and-answer session lasted two hours.

As I read the article, I thought at first  I’d rather cut the grass on the National Mall with nail scissors than sit through two and a half hours of “teaching.”  And there’s the silliness of remarks like Congressman Kildee of Michigan, who compared the session to “Having people sit there like a graduate class in a great university — without being able to interrupt a professor — very unusual.”

Thinking further, I see some less obvious nuances:

• Some members (who will still need to vote on the bill) chose not to attend; presumably they’ll learn the details in some other fashion.
• The content-delivery half of the session may have had some value for members; they’d be covering more than six pages a minute, which implies a focus on the highlights.
• The “learning goals” were not only for individual members to grasp details of the bill, but for them to collaborate in crafting it and in passing it.

If politics is (sometimes) the art of compromise, then collaborative learning is sometimes the craft of laying aside your preferred mode of taking in information–for example, agreeing to formats that allow many people in a large group to attend to basics in a limited time.

I’m not advocating this as the ideal method.  Still, I’ve worked in a number of large organizations, and sometimes you have to do what’s pragmatic.

Nothing will prevent members from spending more time with the bill, in the ways that seem best to them–though I suspect more than a few will come to value the five hours spent in the Tuesday tutorial.

* For readers outside the U.S.: the House of Representatives has 435 members; 256 are Democrats, 178 are Republicans, and one seat is vacant. In theory the Democrats could pass the bill on their own, but are somewhat divided on the details.

A summertime side trip…

My car radio has a USB connection, and I have a couple of USB drives full of music.  Mostly they’re whole albums, but some of the albums are anthologies, so I’m never quite sure what old audio friend will show up.

Like the Ian Tyson classic Someday Soon, sung here by Suzy Bogguss:

When he comes to call
My pa ain’t got a good word to say
Guess it’s ’cause he was just as wild
In his younger days…

Or Shannon McNally’s Pale Moon (this isn’t the best audio, but it’s a live performance):

…I’m on the ground in N.Y.C.
the city of perpetual motion
the city that never sleeps
that’s all right, baby,
I wasn’t tired anyway…

Ian Tyson always reminds me of another Canadian icon.  Here’s Gordon Lightfoot singing about what was at that time the largest Great Lakes freighter.  (The video has news footage–the sideways launch of the Fitz from Great Lakes Steel, outside Detroit, on August 7, 1958. )

There is enough water in Lake Superior to cover the entire land mass of North and South American with one foot of water. (Wikipedia)

The dimming lights of the auto industry pain me–I grew up in Detroit (and not in a Detroit suburb).  When UAW president Walter Reuther died in a plane crash, they held the funeral in the Henry and Edsel Ford Auditorium.  It was broadcast live, and included a performance of Joe Hill. This video isn’t from the funeral, but was the clearest version I could find.

From San Diego up to Maine,
in every mine and mill,
where workers strike and organize,
That’s where you’ll find Joe Hill,
it’s there you’ll find Joe Hill.

Series: Ten Steps to Complex Learning

Ten Steps to Complex Learning ends with a seven-page chapter, Closing Remarks. Jeroen J. G. van Merriënboer and Paul A. Kirschner relate their model to instructional design and muse on future developments.

The Ten Steps “shares its focus on complex learning and its use of real-life tasks or problems as the basis for the design of learning tasks” with models like:

• Learning by doing (article by Schank, Berman, Macpherson)
• Cognitive apprenticeship (article by Collins, Brown, Newman)
• Constructivism (article by David Jonassen)

vM&K cite an article (PDF) by M. David Merrill, who lists five first principles of instruction.

• Learners engage in real-life tasks or solve real-world problems.
• Activities engage existing knowledge as a foundation for new knowledge.
• The learner experiences demonstrations of new skills.
• The learner applies new skills.
• The learner integrates new skills into real-world activities.

(Here’s a related Merrill article, 5 Star Instruction)

So what’s new?

vM&K see these models as involving new roles for designers and teachers. Changes for designers include:

• A shift from traditional, separate, specific objectives to integrated objectives.
• A shift from decomposition of “tasks for transmittal” to the analysis of learning opportunities and learning tasks.
• A shift from tasks based on information presented to information based on learning tasks.

I see a lot of value–and a lot of work–in those last two points.  “Delivering content” may never have worked as well as people thought, but (as Bob Dole said about being vice-president) it’s inside work, and there’s no heavy lifting.

“Content” focuses on some mythical body of knowledge; complex skills focus on what people actually do on the job.

What about new roles for teachers (and instructors and facilitators)?  They’ll design learning tasks, sometimes with specialists in the field (exemplary practitioners, for instance) and sometimes in collaboration with learners.

With regard to supportive information, teachers will… [still explain] how a learning domain is organized, but they will also… [demonstrate] how to approach real-life tasks systematically and [explain] which rules-of-thumb may help overcome difficulties.

With regard to procedural information, teachers will sometimes act as an… assistant looking over your shoulder to present information on routineaspects of learning tasks… or [on] part-task practice.

And, more than ever before, teachers will serve as coaches, helping learners make informed choices.

From model to methods (I’ll wait here)

vM&K discuss “design languages and tools” to help in the design process.  I confess that I’ve seen other efforts at making instructional design more efficient, and have rarely found the trade-offs worthwhile.  (Does anybody remember Designer’s Edge?)

So you can investigate the IMS Learning Design specification; I’ll wait for the movie, IMS LD versus SCORM.  You can also read about ADAPT-it, a commercial tool that supports the Ten Steps.

ISD: dead, but getting better?

The chapter ends by recalling a 2000 article in Training magazine, “Is ISD R.I.P.?” Much of the criticism in the article dealt with ISD’s inability to deal with the complex, its indifference to sound learning theory, and its tendency toward predictable, plodding approaches (to say nothing of fads).

These are precisely the issues raised by the Ten Steps: a focus on complex learning, a strong basis in learning theory, and a highly flexible design approach.

It is our hope that the Ten Steps, as well as other models for whole-task design, will contribute to a revival of the field of instructional design… to cope with the educational requirements of a fast-changing knowledge society.

…So that’s that.  Well, not quite.  There’s more in the book:

• An appendix with an overview of the Ten Steps (the link’s in Google Books; the appendix starts on page 252).
• A simplified sample learning blueprint
• Sixteen pages of references (vM&K are serious about research)
• A fourteen-page glossary, in case you forget the difference between non-recurrent and recurrent constituent skills

…but I’m not going to recap those in this series. In other words, I’m done.

Sort of. I’ll probably have another post in a few days, thinking out loud about what value I found for myself.  I’m grateful to those who’ve commented on the series.  If you’ve read without commenting, that’s fine, too; I hope it was worth your time.

CC-licensed image adaptation: I added the cartoon balloon to the delivery van photo by dok1.

UK-based Donald Taylor posted a useful and engaging explanation of how people use social media.  There’s a viewing/contributing axis, a content/people focus, and a gentle reminder that it depends on who’s doing the using.

That’s the SlideShare presentation; here’s the post as it appears on Don’s blog.