Dave's Whiteboard

I’m never going to accomplish anything; that’s perfectly clear to me. I’m never going to be famous. My name will never be writ large on the roster of Those Who Do Things. I don’t do anything. Not one single thing. I used to bite my nails, but I don’t even do that any more.

– Dorothy Parker

I had a phone conversation today with someone I’ve met only through blog posts and tweets.  That happens often enough that it’s not actually surprising, but it’s always a pleasure to add the immediacy of voice to the connection.

I mentioned during the conversation that this blog is mainly for me–hence the tagline “interests, ideas, notions, tangents.”  I do think that if you put things into a public forum, or at least one that’s publicly available, you’d like to have some interaction; I certainly do.  But ultimately for me, the noticing and thinking-through is what matters most.

If you don’t blog yourself, you may not think much about the administrative side of the blogs you read–what the machinery looks like to the blogger.  No reason you should.  But when I find myself getting impressed with myself, WordPress can help tone that down.

For example, WordPress tells you what search terms people have used to find your blog.  Here in ascending order are the top ten all-time search terms that led people to Dave’s Whiteboard:

10th place (with 79 hits): monopoly money

Well, that’s the random stuff you get in tenth place.

9th place (85 hits): how to keep your volkswagen alive

I’m guessing my blog is a disappointment to these searchers.  The link comes from my post about John Muir’s classic repair manual, an exemplary job aid.

8th place (92 hits): aplysia

You owe more to Aplysia californica and to Eric Kandel than you might have thought.

7th place (93 hits): (I’d rather not say)

No, that’s not what the 7th most used term is.  In reality, it’s a person’s name–but an annoying person whose name happened to appear in the “so to speak” quote here.  Seems to be a relentless self-promoter, so I removed the quote from my database.  The only one who gets to be relentless here is me.

6th place (95 hits): whiteboard

Imagine that.

5th place (154 hits): 10000 hours to become an expert

Dave’s Whiteboard shows up on the first page of results here thanks to my review of Daniel Levitin’s book, This is Your Brain on Music.

4th place (182 hits): miranda july

The mention of her was one of my side trips.

3rd place (194 hits): dave ferguson

How about that?

2nd place (204 hits): gideon v. wainwright

You wouldn’t think 372 U.S. 335 would bring that many people to the Whiteboard, would you?  The match comes from a “generic musing” post about case law.

And in 1st place (with 1,814 hits): lego people

I’d never figured this one out until today.  The phrase “lego people” does appear here, but at the end of a post, in a credit for the photographer whose image I used.  How the heck could that pull in nearly two thousand visitors?

Then, today, I searched Google:

I clicked the fourth image (the one on the right); it links to one of my posts about John Medina’s book Brain Rules.  I adapted this photo by Joe Shlabotnik (Peter Dutton), thanks to the CC license he released it with.

Anytime I start feeling smug about myself and what happens on my blog, I use stats like these as a reality check.  Sometimes it’s not about me; sometimes it’s all about the Legos.

I saw this comment on Twitter:

@urbie: Flashback.. taking a text-based CBT. Owie.

I couldn’t resist retweeting…nor adding my own comment:

@dave_ferguson: RT @urbie: Flashback.. taking a text-based CBT. Owie. // Me: yeah, like going to college at the ATM screen.

This led to a side conversation with Simon Bostock about the (mostly) bad old days.  I’ve written thousands of lines of text-based CBT: long ago, I was in charge of computer-based training for Amtrak’s reservation system, and I consulted with Marriott when they launched MARSHA, their hotel system.

It’s hard to convey the impact of the all-text, monochrome oppression of dumb terminals, back in the early 1980s.  Amtrak’s ARROW system couldn’t (or wouldn’t) display lowercase letters, so the entire screen (25 rows, 80 columns) would be in uppercase.

(My ATM remark reveals the bias own experience; actually, I haven’t seen an all-text, graphics-free ATM in quite some time.  But a mainframe screen is falling into the same category as a dial telephone or a ditto machine.)

Back then, CBT could be downright horrible. So is a good deal of contemporary digital learning; it’s just horrible in newer, flashier, noisier ways.

I recalled, during my conversation with Simon, that at the time I’d taken great pride in the training we created at Amtrak.  The reason for the pride?  We made good use of the tool.  It was what we had to work with, and a better tool  for the situation than any other realistic option.

Every technology has its advantages and its drawbacks.  If you work in a group setting, let alone an organizational one, sometimes you choose to live with the givens.  So, at Amtrak: we had over 2,000 people in over 125 locations who needed to learn to use a new reservation system, different from the one about half of them had seen before.  And we wanted the training to work for new employees–say, 400 or 500 per year–so we didn’t want to keep saying “in the old system…”

So what did we do?  This kind of thing:

• Started with a goal in mind. Specifically, we wanted to teach people how to make reservations and issue tickets using the new system.  Folderol about what kind of mainframe we had or what company made the previous system was, well, folderol.
• Strenuously avoided on-screen lectures. We worked hard to avoid over-explaining.  A frequent pattern: simple example, you-do-it problem, clear feedback for varied answers, then extension to more cases.
• “Individualized” by chunking. Most people would learn on the job, so we build courses to take less than 20 minutes.  Clear topics (“how to report train time”) made it easy for someone to decide whether to take a given course.
• Built a practice system. Probably the single most useful thing we did was to create (in collaboration with the Train Operations department) a set of “training trains.”  Any user of the Amtrak system could use a special ID to work with these in any way he wanted–make reservations, change reservations, even issue tickets (nonvalid ones–they wouldn’t print).  This allowed people to apply the general procedures from the formal CBT to the kinds of problems they encountered on the job.

Note that the training trains were not part of the CBT.  One person on my team worked with Train Ops and essentially cloned actual trains.  You had to use the training-train ID to get to them, and with that ID, you couldn’t work with actual reservations.  So it provided robust practice (you were using all the capabilities of the system) while protecting you from serious consequences for mistakes (you couldn’t cancel someone’s actual trip).

Our success was a result of combining the new tool with the best of what we knew about learning in the workplace.  All of this reminded me, as Charles Aznavour does in a different setting, that at times in the past, people weren’t wrong.

Public domain image of a dumb-terminal screen by SamuraiClinton, from WikiMedia Commons.

Apt, somehow, that I learned about the demise of Training magazine via Twitter.

Though “via Twitter” is misleading.  I learned about the closing from Jane Bozarth. Twitter’s just how the news arrived; it’s the way Jane and I usually connect.  You wouldn’t say “I learned about it by phone” unless there were some unusual significance to the phone itself–as in, that’s how you found out you’d been laid off.

For a long time, especially when Ron Zemke and Jack Gordon were among its editors, Training was by far my favorite professional magazine.  Training and Development had too much ASTD superstructure showing.  While Performance Improvement often had solid content, the gems were often larded with academic or HPT jargon and boxed in a bargain-basement layout.

It’s been a long time since I subscribed to any of these.  They all ended up on the wrong side of my cost-benefit divide for me.  As for Training in particular, I wasn’t aware it was still being published.   Hence, gerontoprise, a word suggested by Caroline Kliemt in an email conversation: surprise at learning that something has just died–because you didn’t know it was still around.

(I could have used this word in 1989, when I learned of the death at age 101 of Sir Thomas Sopwith, as in the World War I fighter plane, the Sopwith Camel.)

What I valued in professional magazine pieces was most often some combination of depth (as in detail), relevance (fit what what I was working on or interested in), and clarity.  I also appreciated combining “here’s what’s new” with a refusal to drool over bandwagons.  Training could do that well, 10 or 15 years ago.

What I disliked?  The pauses.  Once you read an issue, you had nothing more till the next one.  And, for the most part, you as an individual had no voice in what topics might occur; you were relying on the editors.  In the case of Training, I did note an apparent abandonment of seriousness as the publication went through new management, lost experienced staffers, and seemed less and less interested in connecting practice to theory.

Not that I need five pounds of theory per day.  Connecting practice to theory (having a basis for doing what you do, other than “feels good for now”) can help you avoid hopping onto too many of those bandwagons.  (As Claude Lineberry once said, “Computer-based training isn’t the answer.  Computer-based training is a question.”)

I do think Training was a true resource, especially if you were new to the “learning profession” and doubly so if you were pretty much the only one in your organization doing what you were doing.  Like the defunct TRDEV-L listserv, Training was a step toward a virtual community.

You’ve got many more options for community now, which helps explains why the magazine folded.  One corollary, though, is that  you’ve got to wire up those connections yourself.  You need to think about where you can nourish and expand your professional interests and passions: blogs, Facebook, Twitter, news feeds, virtual conferences, face-to-face conferences, whatever.

But that’s true for any valued network in your life, I think.

CC-licensed images:
Going-out-of-business photo by Unhindered By Talent / Nic McPhee.
Saskatchewan telephone image by Colros / Colin Rose.

My maternal grandfather spoke Scottish Gaelic; it was his first and his preferred language.    He’d sit on his sunporch with a few friends (including my paternal grandfather) and construct Gaelic words for modern devices that weren’t in Gaelic dictionaries.  And he maintained that Gaelic was the language spoken in the Garden of Eden.

I’ve always wished that I could could speak it.  Gaelic could be a bridge not only to the past but to a culture I know little about.  The reality for me, though, is that I don’t have that bridge and am not likely to work at constructing it.  The few phrases I can muster, the little I can comprehend, are like pieces of board that get me across a few gaps.

Yes, I could take online courses, or turn to groups like An Comunn Gàidhealach Ameireaganach (the Gaelic Society of America), where I found a lively discussion about teaching Gaelic on LiveMocha.

The fact is, though, that I don’t have time or energy to get to a level of Gaelic proficiency that would satisfy me.  “Speaking Gaelic,” for me, is shorthand for a warren of skills. I’m pretty good at English; I’ve got some ability in French.  If I were to start another language, I’d want to be able to read it, at least at newspaper level, and to hold conversations in it like conversations I’d want to have in English.  I’m much likelier to try that for Spanish–though the idea of Chinese intrigues me.

All of which has to do with individual goals and definitions of “learning a language.”   One person might be happy simply to read, and have no concern about speaking.  As Henry Beard noted, nulli adsunt Romanorum qui locutionem tuam corrigant (there aren’t any Romans around to correct your pronunciation).

At first glance, the goal of “learning a language” seems obvious–but when you poke a bit, you uncover all kinds of reasons, from getting into grad school to picking up romantic partners.  And, of course, languages are messy.

One reason for that mess, says Arika Okrent, is that nobody invented human languages.  They weren’t designed (much to the dismay of the Language Police).  As she asks,  “Who invented French?”

A linguist, Okrent recently published the strangely fascinating In the Land of Invented Languages.  She’s studied a daunting number of languages deliberated created, of which Esperanto and Klingon are perhaps the most widely know… or spoken.

I think of learning as that which you’ve stored, retrieved, and then applied to some situation.  You recognize a spot on the map as France.  You’ve noticed that the slogans on the Olympic ice (with glowing hearts / des plus brillants exploits) aren’t the same idea at all.  You’ve said something spontaneously and correctly in another language.

Okrent notes that Esperantists “are motivated by the goal of fostering peace by bridging language barriers.”  For them, Esperanto is a means to an end.  They enjoy their language (they even have rock songs in it), but they’re confused by the complete lack of purpose for Klingon.

In part, she suggests, that’s because the goal of the Klingon speakers is so different from that of the Esperantists.

Klington is a type of puzzle that appeals to a type of person.  It is difficult, but not impossible, formed from the stuff of real language, just strange enough, just believable enough, small enough that you can know every word, the entire canon, but flexible enough to lend itself to the challenge of translation…

What are Klingon speakers doing?  They are engaging in intellectually stimulating language play.  They are enjoying themselves.  They are doing language for language’s sake, art for art’s sake, and like all committed artists, they will do their thing, critics be damned.

CC-licensed bridge image adapted from a photo by Unwrite These Pages / Jared Winkel.

Collaborative Enterprise’s blog carnival this month looks at formalizing the informal–are there ways to deliberately harness social media to foster learning without losing the (presumed) value of personal connection?

Sure.

Now, I tend to slightly resist two of the implications I see here.  First, while it’s true that “training, education, and schooling are not learning,” I don’t think it follows that learning can’t occur where these are present.  And second, learning did not start happening only after the invention of internet-based social media.

I know that Harold Jarche doesn’t think that, and I’m pretty sure Frédéric Domon doesn’t, either.  I just wanted to make my thinking explicit.

I’ve been watching the Winter Olympics and thinking about how it combines individual and organizational goals.  And just as I write this, I see multiple organizations that aren’t all in a single hierarchy:

• Small, individual sport groups (German women’s bobsled)
• Related-sport groups (sliding sports)
• National teams (Germany)
• Judges, referees, and other arbiters
• Timekeepers, scorekeepers
• Coaches
• Trainers
• Volunteers
• Fans
• Reporters, writers, bloggers, and other who opine
• Local, national, international Olympic officials
• Technicians
• Security
• Sponsors
• Donors

You couldn’t ever satisfy all these groups, let alone their subgroups and individual members–but they find enough common ground to bring about an Olympics.

I see a dynamic for the competitors: each has his or her personal goal, but each had to fit into a larger structure, especially but not exclusively for team sports.  If you want to compete in Nordic combined, you agree that your performance on the jump will determine your starting place in the cross-country element.

Since we’re talking athletic competition, psychomotor skill comes into play, and “training” (in the sense of focused attention, demonstration, feedback) plays a major role.  You do learn as you train–by which I mean, not only do you build the muscle memory and automatic physical behavior, but you also refine and deepen awareness and the potential to respond to outside stimuli.

Another thought came to mind when I was getting annoyed by local-news people focusing relentlessly on medal count: so-and-so “had to settle for silver” (because she was favored to win gold, but didn’t); someone else “won a stupendous bronze” (because he performed much better than expected).

Those phrases got me thinking about how, if you work within a large organization, you need to find ways to align your personal goals with the organization’s in a way that’s authentic for you and helpful to the organization.  In part, it’s the old concept of the king’s shilling: if you’re accepting the paycheck, you’re granting the organization’s right to set and pursue its goals and to ask you to help achieve them.

When you can’t ethically do that, it’s time to get out.

Another point of view emerged when I was reading an obituary for jockey and mystery author Dick Francis, who died this week.  He wome some 350 races in a nine-year career, and rode as jockey for the Queen Mother’s horse in the 1956 Grand National–where his horse, in the lead and 50 yards from the finish, suddenly collapsed.  In his autobiography, Francis wrote:

I heard one man say to another a little while ago [4 or 5 years after the race], “Who did you say that was?  Dick Francis?  Oh, yes–he’s the man who didn’t win the National.”

I’m sure Francis would have love to win it, just as every Olympian would love to win the gold.  But individuals and even organizations often need to reframe their goals, to redefine what success means.

In the workplace, I think that means organizations have to work harder at finding ways to match their goals with those of individuals within the organization.  I once worked across the hall from an ambitious young guy.  He had some “rules for success” on his wall, including “love the business.”

Me, I didn’t love the business–and I can think of at least one boss who’d agree.  But often I did love helping the customer perform better, and that didn’t mean beating him to death with PowerPoint.  It sometimes meant working with him to apply performance-improvement strategies while calling them “transfer of training,” because at the time helping that transfer occur was a lot more important than fretting about jargon.

CC-licensed photo: Olympic colors by kk+ / Kris Krüg.