Dave's Whiteboard

An article by Clive Thompson in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine asks, “Is Happiness Catching?” Researchers Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler wondered whether certain human behaviors are “contagious.” We talk about various social changes spreading like epidemics, though that’s often the case of a metaphor turning into a meme without stopping to fact-check.

…The truth is, scientists have never successfully demonstrated that this is really how the world works. None of the case studies directly observed the contagion process in action. They were reverse-engineered later, with sociologists or marketers conducting interviews to try and reconstruct who told whom about what….Despite our pop-cultural faith in social contagion, no one really knew how it worked.

Christakis and Fowler used data from the long-term Framingham Heart Studym including sheets  on which participants named one friend likely know where the participant would be in four years (to help researchers continue following up).

The article’s well worth reading; this is my oversimplification.  Christakis and Fowler studied 5,124 subjects connected in 53,228 ways over 32 years.  When someone became obese, friends were 57% more likely to, as well.  “And a Framingham resident was roughly 20% more likely to become obese if the friend of a friend became obese–even if the onnecting friend didn’t gain a pound.”

The researchers hypothesize that certain behaviors spread through subconscious social signals.  Those signals become cues about what’s acceptable–smoking, eating large portions, things like that.  They also found that he happiest people in the Framingham study were those who had the most connections, even if the relationships weren’t necessarily deep ones.

That’s because (they believe) happiness doesn’t come only from having deep relationships; it can result from having frequent, small moments of happiness.

What I found interesting is that different “contagions” spread in different ways.  Co-workers don’t spread happiness to one another, while personal friends do.  (Co-workers have a much greater effect on smoking.)

In terms of weight control, your spouse doesn’t have much effect on your behavior.  The researchers suggest that our body-image models are people of the same sex.  If your same-sex friends gain weight, you’re more likely to.

Clearly, I need to have more male friends who are fit.  Or, if you know me, then you need to have them, for my sake.

Christakis and Fowler’s strangest finding is the idea that a behavior can skip lines–spreading to a friend of a friend without affecting the person who connects them….

The two researchers say they don’t know for sure how the link-jumping works.  But they theorize that people may be able to pass along a social signal without themselves acting on it.

For example, if your work friends become obese, you may become more tolerant of obesity and unconsciously influence family members who “then feel a sort of permission” to gain weight.

Thompson presents some critiques of this approach–one possibility is “homophily,” the flocking together of birds of a feather.  Another is the possibility that the local environment (like Framingham itself) influences the behavior, rather than the other people.  And the Framingham data included one non-family friend, which could distort the influence of the people named.

Christakis and Fowler mention what they call directionality–the type of friendship.  If Art says Jamal is a close friend, but Jamal doesn’t see Art that way, then Art’s weight gain has little impact on Jamal, whereas Jamal’s is likely to have much more on Art.

A couple of interesting patterns: when it comes to smoking, the social shift in its acceptability means that, on the one hand, we rarely encounter smokers at work or in public.  On the other hand, smokers have formed smaller, tighter networks with high percentages of smokers–the people who collect outside the office building, the people who rendezvous in the bar that still permits smoking.  Thus they have fewer contacts with people from whom they can “catch” nonsmoking behavior.

The other pattern?  The use of social networks like Facebook to widen the community of connections a person has, especially for making some improvement.

In theory, the best way to fight obesity [according to this model] isn’t to urge people to diet with a cluster of close friends.  It is to encourage them to skip a link and to diet with friends of friends.  That way, in your immediate social network, everyone is surrounded on at least one side by people who are actively losing weight, and this would in turn influence those other links to begin losing weight themselves.

Sounds great: get a weight-loss widget for Facebook, and maybe cut your ties to people with bad behavior.  (But isn’t that what the smokers have in effect done?)

A final suggestion of the study is that at least some of our influence may be partly innate.  “Your level of connectedness,” says Thompson, appears to be more persistent than even your overall temperament.”

In other words, if you tend to have lots of friends and make lots of connections, you’re likely to continue to do so, even if you switch to a completely new environment.  And those will remain even if your level of happiness declines–you’ll be less happy, but you won’t become an isolate.

I’m intrigued by this.  I don’t see myself as having a lot of close connections, but I’ve found myself making more connections in recent years, thanks in part to social networks.  And I know I’m prone to one-to-one exchanges.  It’s situational, at least for me–I place great value on being able to spend a lot of time with just one person, but on a day-to-day basis that simply doesn’t happen.  Shorter conversations or mini-exchanges (by phone, by instant message, by back-and-forth blog comments, or on Twitter) can and do energize me.

I’m not quite ready to post a widget telling these people how much weight I’d like to lose in the next three months, though.  I guess I need a bit more faith in the friend-of-a-friend model.

CC-licensed images:
Friends of Art by BlackHawkTraffic.
Circles and influence by Jeff Kubina.

I’ve already mentioned David Sousa’s How the Brain Learns, but I keep going through it and thought it deserved a little more exposure.

Sousa’s writing for teachers (including college and university faculty), along with principals and staff development folks. Almost everything here offers value for the corporate trainer or instructional designer, in terms of more structured learning

A lot of makes sense for less formal learning as well.

It’s clear from the outset that Sousa does what he encourages you to do.  By the time you get to page 9 (there are 300 pages), he’s nudging you to do more than just read:

One of the best ways to assess the value of the strategies suggested in this book is to try them out in your own classroom or in any other location where you are teaching. conducting this action research allows you to:

• Gather data to determine the effectiveness of new strategies and affirm those you already use,
• Acclaim and enhance the use of research in our profession, and
• Further your own professional development.

Besides which, he says, you get feedback on how you’re doing (as an instructor or designer), and you can collaborate with your peers to apply the research more broadly or more deeply.

So, what’s he offering?  The chapter titles are clear:

1. Basic Brain Facts (parts, development)
2. How the Brain Processes Information (models and their limitations)
3. Memory, Retention, and Learning
4. The Power of Transfer (both transfer during learning and transfer after learning)
5. Brain Specialization and Learning (lateralization, spoken language, learning to read)
6. The Brain and the Arts
7. Thinking Skills and Learning
8. Planning for Today and Tomorrow

Each chapter includes a section called Practitioner’s Corner. These are short, focused sections to help the teacher (trainer, learning professional) move stuff off the pages and into her repertory of skills.  For chapter 3 (memory, learning, retention) there are ten practitioner’s corner items.  They range from “avoid teaching two very similar motor skills” to “strategies for block scheduling” to “using rehearsal to enhance retention.”

I’ve actually felt a little intimidated by How the Brain Learns. I look at what Sousa’s done and think “I ought to be doing my own action research.”  I ought to create and document not only some successes from what I’ve done–but make those potential resources for future clients and coworkers.

• What am I trying to do?  What’s telling me to try it?
• What difference will it make?  How can I tell?
• What difference did it make?
• What do I do now?  What can I do better?  What’s telling me that?

I’m no expert on blog software.  Dave’s Whiteboard uses WordPress because that’s what my son recommended.  (He’s the kind of guy who builds a foot switch for Ableton Live [electronic-music software] out of a spare keyboard and a couple of those rubber furniture disks, so he’s a primary resource for me.)

If you don’t have your own blog, you might be unaware that there’s always an “admin side” — the behind-the-scenes stuff where the blogger creates posts, reviews comments, tinkers with the appearance, and so on.

On my WordPress dashboard, I noticed a link to a post by Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress.  The post itself is about how to keep WordPress (meaning your blog) secure from hackers, worms, and other malware.  Matt uses an analogy that seems to apply to helping people acquire and strength skills at work.

Whenever a worm makes the rounds, everyone becomes a security expert and peddles one of three types of advice: snake oil, Club solutions, or real solutions.

Snake oil is usually obvious (unless you’re in a tight spot and desperate for whatever promises to get you out fast).  Any easy, no-effort, guaranteed way to have people learn is pretty much snake oil.  In more sardonic moments, I’d include any “better training” approach that has a trademarked name or a book on the New York Times best-seller list.

By Club solutions, Matt means things that work like the anti-theft gizmo for your steering wheel.

There’s nothing wrong with The Club, any more than there’s anything wrong per se with formal training.  A Club solution, he suggests, is like using a complex password (“admin” is not complex). It’s good, but it’s not great.

As someone said, the Club deflects theft (to a non-Clubbed vehicle). In other words, it’s more tactical (for you) than strategic (for vehicle owners generally).

So, what’s a real solution? For WordPress, it’s regularly and promptly upgrading.

WordPress is a community of hundreds of people that read the code every day, audit it, update it, and care enough about keeping your blog safe that we do things like release updates weeks apart from each other even though it makes us look bad, because updating is going to keep your blog safe from the bad guys.

On the job, this means figuring out what can help people acquire and increase skills that help them produce things of value.  To modify the old story, it’s systems all the way down (and up).  You’ll find any number of ways of looking at this–the human performance technology model, for instance, or Harold Jarche’s emphasis on integrating how we work and how we learn.

Sure, you’ll find plenty of snake oil, and a whole parking lot filled with cognitive Club efforts.  When you keep the bigger purpose in mind, though, you don’t slip, and you know there’s more than one route available.

CC-licensed image of The Club in action by modenadude.

From Geek & Poke, shown here under a CC license.

I’m reading e-Learning and the Science of Instruction by Ruth Colvin Clark and Richard E. Mayer.  I’ve admired Clark for years; she energetically and effectively applies research to the problem of learning at work.

One strategy they recommend for elearning (and that you’ll find applies in other situations) is the use of worked examples.

A worked example is a step-by-step demonstration of how to perform a task or solve a problem.

That means that in some cases, a worked example can look a lot like a job aid.  Especially for procedural tasks (those you perform the same way each time), worked examples are natural ways to show specifically how to accomplish some task.

Clark and Mayer offer four guidelines:

• Replace some practice problems with worked examples.
• Apply good practice when using text, audio, and graphics in worked examples.
• Provide diverse, job-realistic worked examples to help build mental models.
• Train learners to self-explain as they use worked examples.

Practice: less can be more

Remember homework?  It’s an attempt to strengthen the use of procedure skills.  Clark and Mayer cite research (as they do throughout the book) to suggest that you can save learning time by replacing some practice with worked examples.

“One [caveat] is that worked examples are only effective if the learner studies them.”  So design some worked examples as completion problems: partly-worked examples that the learner finishes.

Other approaches: make the worked example interactive — like, say, a widget that allows the learner to change one or more factors and see the result.

The authors point out that worked examples seem to benefit novices more than they do people already skilled in a topic.

The media can work

I heard more than an echo of Ten Steps to Complex Learning. (That’s no coincidence; the book cites research by Ten Steps co-author J. J. G  van Merrienboër.)  Clark and Mayer advocate applying sound principles for media use when you create worked examples.  For instance:

• Integrate text with graphics; don’t restrict text to a caption at the edge.
• Use audio to expand on visuals; don’t use it to narrate text on the screen.
• Personalize.  Use conversational tone.  Use virtual agents (like a coach who addresses the learner).

Act like work

It’s almost depressing to think this point needs stressing.  When you create worked examples, make sure they involve realistic tasks that people face on the job.  (All the more reason to involve typical performers in the design, if you ask me.)

And vary the examples.  That’s more than changing the names; change the structure of the example.  Doing so helps you approximate the range of problems that show up on the job, where not everyone comes in asking the same thing.

…When teaching tasks that require judgment and problem-solving–tasks known as far transfer–more than one example will be needed…

Thre is no one right method for performing these tasks, since each job situation will be different.  Solving these far-transfer tasks, whether in highly structured domains such as programming…or in more ill-defined areas such as sales…requires more flexible knowledge in long-term memory.

Interestingly, worked examples help to lower extraneous cognitive load (the mental burden imposed by the course design).  A variety of examples adds to the intrinsic cognitive load, which can improve learning.

The idea is that the learner works at figuring out what the different examples have in common, and thus builds up her own mental model for the skills in question.

Do-it-yourself explaining

“Successful learners can explain worked examples to themselves, and their explanations focus on the principles behind the examples.”

So Clark and Mayer suggest that a virtual coach can demonstrate how to work through a worked example.  In other words, the worked example is an example of explaining a worked example.  From the text:

• (Onscreen text in a quality-control unit)
  Take 4 sequential widgets off the line every hour for 24 hours.  These are your subgroups.
• (Jim, the onscreen virtual coach, in audio:)
  First, I notice that the subgroups are selected on a regular basis–four in a row, every how.

So what?

Here’s what I think is worthwhile about the use of worked examples (and about the book generally):

• It’s based on research, not someone’s preferred way to present.
• It works for both procedural and non-procedural skills.
• It suggests that design does, in fact, matter, so that even an advocate of informal learner can benefit by applying the principles to things meant to foster that learning