College Education

One of the main decisions a designer of learning interventions has to make is the social context best suited to the learning requirement, the audience characteristics and the practical contsraints and opportunities. The main options that the designer has to choose from are self-study, one-to-one learning and learning in a group. I have obviously been wasting my time trying to convince designers of the need for a rational and considered choice here, because there’s a much simpler alternative available. A participant in a recent workshop, who works for a major financial services company, explained how the choice was made in his organisation: if you’re at the top of the organisation, you get one-to-one assistance, probably in the shape of some form of executive coaching. If you’re middle management, you get group training in classrooms. Below this level, well self-study e-learning will do the job just nicely. The implication is simple: the higher your status in the organisation, the more expensive the approach. Who needs instructional design?

Source: Clive Shepherd

Rule 5: Repeat to remember

While repetition is covered in this chapter, the main idea underlying this rule is that "information is remembered best when it is elaborate, meaningful and contextual … the quality of the encoding stage is one of the single greatest predictors of learning success … ‘quality of encoding’ means the number of door handles one can put on the entrance to a piece of information."

Medina makes three key assertions:

1. "The more elaborately we encode information at the moment of learning, the stronger the memory." The more meaning something has, particularly to the individual learner, the more memorable it becomes. So, if you want to remember something, make sure you understand it. Medina recommends that teachers make liberal use of relevant, real-world examples, which I’d also endorse strongly. Medina explains: "Why do examples work? They appear to take advantage of the brain’s predeliction for pattern matching. Information is more readily processed if it can be immediately associated with information already present in the learner’s brain."
2. "A memory trace appears to be stored in the same parts of the brain that perceived and processed the initial input." The human brain is not like a computer: "it has no ‘hard drive’ separate from its initial; input connectors."
3. "Retrieval may best be improved by replicating the conditions surrounding the initial encoding." Retrieval works best when the environmental conditions at retrieval mimic the environmental conditions at encoding. If this is true, then the most effective environment in which to learn would be on-the-job; to take the idea to extremes, the only people who should be taught in classrooms are teachers, and the only people who should be taught using computers are those who work on them!

My postings on Brain rules #1, Brain rules #2, Brain rules #3, Brain rules #4

The Brain Rules book

The Brain Rules website

Source: Clive Shepherd

Interesting article by Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi argues that the idea that the middle class is overspending itself into debt is a myth. Instead, they try to show that a key reason so many middle-class folks are over-leveraged is because of home costs linked to good schools:

Why such a staggering increase in the cost of housing? That is a long, separate discussion, but one point is worth underlining here: when a family buys a house, it buys much more than shelter from the rain. It also buys a public-school system. Everyone has heard news stories about kids who can’t read, classrooms without textbooks, and drug dealers and gang violence in school corridors. Failing schools impose an enormous cost on the children who are forced to attend them, but they also impose an enormous cost on those who don’t. . . .

A 2000 study conducted in Fresno, California, (population 400,000) found that, for similar homes, school quality was the single most important determinant of neighborhood prices —more important than racial composition, commute distance, crime rate, or proximity to a hazardous-waste site. A 1999 study conducted in suburban Boston showed that two homes less than half a mile apart and similar in nearly every aspect would command significantly different prices if they were in different elementary-school zones. Schools that scored just five percent higher than other local schools on fourth-grade math and reading tests added a premium of nearly $4,000 to nearby homes. . . .

Perhaps the strongest evidence that parents’ concern for their children’s welfare has driven their spending is the relative changes in housing prices for parents and non-parents. The federal government has not reported the data for the full 30-year period we have been examining, but looking at the period from 1984 to 2001 we see that housing prices for families with at least one minor child at home grew at a rate three times that of other families.

Source: Aaron Schutz

This recent NY Times article reports on a study that argues:

[If US] achievement gaps [of poor and minority students] were closed, the yearly gross domestic product of the United States would be trillions of dollars higher, or $3 billion to $5 billion more per day.

Looking at the actual study, however, it seems as if they are assuming a linear relationship between increase in education and increase in employment. (See page 84 of their supporting documents.)

But as I noted earlier, there is a great deal of evidence that education does not create jobs. In other words, these increases may happen on the margins, for the first few kids, but will fall off drastically after that.

I haven’t perused the study with agonizing detail. I’d be interested in other perspectives. But it seems to me like this report simply feeds the fantasy of schooling, that if we just made schools better, all of our economic (and then social) problems would be solved.

Source: Aaron Schutz

According to a new survey conducted in March for training provider Cegos, employees are keener than HR and the training function to embrace innovative training practices and new technologies. Cegos commissioned an independent study among 2,355 employees and 485 HR directors/training managers from companies employing more than 500 staff in the UK, France, Germany and Spain.

The survey found that "half of employees across Europe want more e-learning and blended learning during the next three years, while only about 40% of HR professionals plan to develop more programmes using these techniques. Learners are also keener to embrace collaborative tools like blogs, forums and wikis – 44% of employees want to see these techniques developed, compared to just 32% of HR professionals. Face-to-face learning is more popular among HR, with 42% of respondents wanting to see more classroom learning compared to 38% of employees."

The survey also found that e-learning and blended learning programmes are meeting the expectations of users. The survey showed that "for 89% of employees, blended learning is living up to users expectations ‘well’ or ‘very well’, and the same was found for 82% of respondents using e-learning." The study also asked how e-learning can be made more effective: "The vast majority of respondents (88%) rated work-based scenarios as their top choice as a tool for improving the effectiveness of e-learning. In second place, 82% rated self-assessment techniques and in third place, 73% rated help from a tutor or peer."

Source: Clive Shepherd

The Science and Technology section of this week’s Economist contains three articles on the brain, all making interesting claims:

Genius locus: Explores the evidence of the link between genius and autism.

Incognito: Evidence is mounting that the brain makes a decision before the owner knows about it.

Twice blessed: Children brought up in a bilingual home have an enhanced ability to organise, plan, prioritise, shift attention from one thing to another and suppress habitual responses.

Source: Clive Shepherd

This IT Training podcast, hosted by Helen Wilcox, features your truly, along with Paul Stevens from Assima, exploring a wide range of issues relating to e-learning content. This is a fairly hefty 26.5MB download, lasting 28 minutes, so you might like to use the following agenda to help you skip to the question that interests you most:

0:51    Do we need to create different materials for different generations?
6:03    Should materials be designed very differently depending on the topic, e.g. IT training v compliance?
10:00    Are we beginning to see a greater use of performance support materials instead of formal e-learning tutorials?
14:00    Could we get to a point where no-one needs a formal training programme?
19:13    How do you see e-learning content developing in the next few years?
22:00    Do you actually do any e-learning yourself?
25:00    What gadget do you use the most?

Source: Clive Shepherd

For 24 hours over next Tuesday and Wednesday, Learntrends will be hosting a series of online conversations on boosting the performance of organisations through learning. They expect hundreds of people to attend the free, live, online sessions. Conversations will be recorded and made available on the web to foster reflection and continuing discussion. The goal is honest dialogue. No commercials. No presentations. Few or no slides. Often, they expect to throw three or four great people into an online fishbowl and let the conversation go where it will. At other times, participants will simply talk about whatever is on their minds, with a host and time cop occasionally nudging the conversation back to the theme of improving the process of learning in organizations.

Make a point of dropping by. I certainly will be. You do not need to register to attend. Here’s the programme and the LearnTrends site, so no excuses.

Source: Clive Shepherd

In E-learning Reaping the Rewards of the Recession, Donald Clark expresses frustration at the proliferation of communities and associations directly or indirectly supporting e-learning in the UK. This got me thinking about the positioning of the various bodies involved and I resolved to clarify this in a posting. Donald must be right, because the data I generated was far too complex to display here and I ended up having to present the data in the form of a separate PDF, snappily titled Communities and professional bodies directly or indirectly supporting workplace e-learning in the UK.

I agree with Donald that there are too many bodies and that it would be better if efforts could be more concentrated, However, UK workplace e-learning is difficult to isolate as a concept:

• because e-learning also exists in education and there is a great deal of overlap of interest across education and training;
• because e-learning also exists outside the UK and there is much that professionals operating in different countries can learn from each other;
• because workplace e-learning is generally part of workplace learning and development which is in turn usually part of workplace HR; e-learning strategy needs to be integrated up through this chain;
• because digital multimedia content has multiple purposes – learning, communications, sales, etc.

We also have to look at who’s interests are being served. Is the community run as a commercial venture? Is it government sponsored? Is it administered by its own members? And what is it aiming to achieve – the raising of professional standards? the provision of networking opportunities? information and training?

As part-time chair of one of these bodies, the eLearning Network, and an active user or contributor to just about all the others, I’m up for change. Just don’t expect it to be easy.

Source: Clive Shepherd

Thanks to Stephen Downes for taking the trouble to provide a critique of my review of the fourth chapter of John Medina’s book Brain Rules. Rather than see it languish unnoticed as a comment, I thought I’d post it separately. First a few provisos:

• Stephen is responding to the verbatim extracts that represent my personal selection of highlights from the chapter in question. I presented these out of context and without any of the supporting evidence found in the book. I’m sure John would enjoy taking up the challenge of responding to Stephen, but I am not in a position to do so.
• In making the posting I was operating in my familiar role as bridge between the academics and the practitioner. I am a critical reader but do not profess to have a wide knowledge of all the available research in this area.
• It is in my nature to look for certainties and ‘truths’ and I must confess to some disappointment when these prove elusive. Nevertheless, I’d much rather see a vigorous debate of a set of ideas than blind adherence to principles that prove to be false.

Stephen’s comments are interspersed with the extracts:

Really? Wait a minute. Are these things even true? They don’t strike me as being true at all.

"The more attention the brain pays to a given stimulus the more elaborately the information will be encoded – and retained."

Um, no. For two reasons: First of all, memory is not proportional to attention. Yes, attention can influence memory. But our sharpest memories depend most of all on salience – whether something was crucial, pivotal, hurtful, etc. Second, we don’t "encode" memories. I know, we see the term used a lot, to lull us into thinking we somehow convert our perceptions into some sort of symbolic representation. But we don’t.

"Before the first quarter of an hour is over in a typical presentation, people usually have checked out."

Um… what is the evidence for that? What is ‘checked out" and how was it measured? For that matter, what is a "typical" presentation? presumably not the author’s, right?

"Emotionally arousing events tend to be better remembered than neutral events."

"Emotionally arousing"? Is this a technical term?

"Emotional arousal focuses attention on the gist of an experience at the expense of peripheral details."

What constitutes the ‘gist’ and what constitutes ‘peripheral details’? Particularly since an intense experience will be remembered entire, intact – see, for example, Romeo Dallaire describing his memories from Rwanda – "The soldiers remember clearly, digitally clearly, the shot firing, the cartridge ejecting, the child’s head exploding…."

"Our brains tend to be filled with generalised pictures of concepts or events, not with slowing fading minutiae."

Again – what does that mean? Our brains are not filled with _generalizations_ — so what are "generalized pictures"? Archetypes? Prototypes? Why not say that, instead of something that suggests something else?

"Start with the key ideas and, in a hierarchical fashion, form the details around these larger notions."

Well, that’s just the ‘pyramid’ style of writing, rewritten as a brain rule. But there are innumerable principles for organizing thought, many of which are not hierarchical. Indeed, organizing all thought hierarchically would not only be very difficult – some things just don’t lend themselves to that – but also pointless.

"We can’t multitask. People who appear to be good at multitasking actually have good working memories, capable of paying attention to several inputs, one at a time."

Sure we can. I’m watching a ball game right now. Funny – as I’m typing these words, a home run has been hit. I kid you not. (Jason bey, Boston, against the Angels).

"Studies show a person who is interrupted takes 50% longer to complete a task. Not only that, he or she makes up to 50% more errors."

Studies show lots of things. What would convert this to actual knowledge?

"The most common communication mistakes? Relating too much information, with not enough time devoted to connecting the dots. Lots of force feeding, very little digestion."

One wonders what the evidence for this is, or what makes it a ‘mistake’. Telling a story, for example, requires a lot of attention to detail, and often the readers ought to be left to connect the dots in their own ways. That’s why I’m still thinking about ‘For Whom The Bell Tolls’, several weeks after reading it.

Source: Clive Shepherd