Actor, author, comedian, film producer and behavioral scientist John Cleese offers his insights on how to foster creativity. Anyone who creates anything should see this talk.

Some of his tips include:

• Sleep on a problem
• Interruptions are dangerous
• Ideas come from our unconscious minds
• Get in the right “mood” to be creative

On how to get in the right “mood” to be creative:

• Create an “oasis” in which to be creative
• Create boundaries of space in which to work
• Create boundaries of time in which to “play”

One of Cleese’s gems:

“To know how good you are at something requires the same skills as it does to be good at that thing. Which means that if you are absolutely hopeless at something, you lack exactly the skills that you need to know that you’re absolutely hopeless at it. … It explains a great deal of life.”

See below or at YouTube.

Cleese, John, “The Importance of Creativity,” Creativity World Forum, 2008 (PDF).

Fossil fish bridges the evolutionary gap between animals of land and sea. Credit: Zina Deretsky, National Science Foundation

I’m glad that someone has gathered the courage to say this out loud: Instructional design in the 21st Century is not about events, it’s about experiences. No doubt from the looks of things, instructional design (ID) is in the natural throes of shaking off the learning events metaphor imposed on it by the educational psychologists of the Industrial Revolution, but learning and development thinkers like Charles Jennings hope that we can hasten it along for the sakes of our students and ourselves. For Jennings the shift from working with the hands to working with the head is a key indicator that promotes the need to move from events toward processes:

“Undoubtedly instructional design is crucial if the mindset is learning events – modules, courses, programmes and curricula. However, if the mindset has stretched beyond event-based learning to where most learning occurs for workers, which is in the workplace at the point-of-need, where process-based learning serves best – and where learning through doing and learning as part of the work process happens, then ID takes on a whole new dimension.”

Jennings posits the notion of “learning” held by inhabitants of the 21st Century as moving from a habitat of “knowledge” to a new one of “behavior.” The medium is the message. It’s not about content anymore.

“For years we’ve been led to believe that ‘learning’ meant acquiring knowledge. If knowledge acquisition is the end-game, then the logical conclusion was to provide information that could be turned, whatever the magic employed, into knowledge in the recipient’s head. Believe me, the old idea that data becomes information which in turn becomes knowledge and finally transmogrifies into wisdom has been debunked years ago. We use our knowledge and experience to interpret data and information. Wisdom comes to a few only after years of experience.”

Jennings reminds us that Ebbinghaus and the Forgetting Curve aside, we need to observe learning in action to make intelligent assessments about its effectiveness. Experience and practice are the keys and, as such, instructional designers need to become interactivity designers.

“Good ID will result in the design of experiences that can build capability and learning far more quickly and effectively than by filling heads with information and ‘knowledge’ and then hoping that will lead to behavioural change.

We need designers who understand that learning comes from experience, practice, conversations and reflection, and are prepared to move away from massaging content into what they see as good instructional design. Designers need to get off the content bus and start thinking about, using, designing and exploiting learning environments full of experiences and interactivity.”

Further information about Charles Jennings and his work can be found here.

The Bandwagon

If you are thinking of using social media in a class to help build useful collaborative connections, retire the fears of shy students and introduce the same engagement you see in sites like Facebook, think again.  A recent study by the Lab for Social Computing at Rochester Institute of Technology suggests that the use of social media in classrooms might yield little effect in improved communications and enhanced connections between students. The study into the effects of social media was conducted as part of a course on the use of social media and tools. It included contributions from online learning and course management systems and discussion groups that were proposed to enhance instruction, improve communication and facilitate connections between the students and course content. The results indicate that poor social acumen in the face-to-face interactions might be mirrored in the (more) virtual social medium. What’s more, echoing teacher and educational social media researcher Michael Wesch, the RIT study suggests that the educational use of social media may have to be learned:

“…the educational use of social media may not counteract poor social connections that are seen in face-to-face communication or elicit the same impacts seen in the use of social media sites such as MySpace and FaceBook.”

Researcher and team leader Susan Barnes comments on the hopes and goals of social media in the educational environment relative to her team’s findings:

“Many social media advocates have argued that the use of these tools in classroom settings could greatly enhance interaction and learning and assist shyer, more reserved students in becoming more involved, as has been seen in other online environments. However, our findings show that the incorporation of social media had no measurable impact on social connections, to the point that students did not consider other members of the class to be part of their social network.”

The RIT research team plans to expand the study to consider different educational formats and additional social media applications in an effort to determine the effects and differences of social media from traditional classrooms. The intent is to help educational planners and instructional designers better use social media in course development and delivery.

“The issues surrounding poor social network construction within online educational environments points to greater opportunities to examine how technology and mediated software can be better designed to suit the types of communication and interactions desired by our students.”  – Christopher Egert, co-author

References.
Jacobs, Stephen, Egert, Christopher A., Barnes, Susan B., “Social Media Theory and Practice: Lessons Learned for a Pioneering Course,” 39th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference, T4J-1, October 18 – 21, 2009, San Antonio, TX.

Study Examines Use of Social Media in the Classroom

“These findings cast doubt on a long-standing belief in education…. The belief in using concrete examples is very deeply ingrained, and hasn’t been questioned or tested.” – Vladimir Sloutsky, co-author

Ohio State’s Research Communications quotes Kaminski as saying:

“Teachers often use real-world examples in math class, the researchers said.  In some classrooms, for example, teachers may explain probability by pulling a marble out of a bag of red and blue marbles and determining how likely it will be one color or the other.

But students may learn better if teachers explain the concept as the probability of choosing one of n things from a larger set of m things.”

This research might help explain why so many people find word problems (and the semantic or linguistic use of mathematics) so daunting in mathematics and physics. In Kaminski’s words:

“The issue can also be seen in the story problems that math students are often given. For example, there is the classic problem of two trains that leave different cities heading toward each other at different speeds.  Students are asked to figure out when the two trains will meet.

The danger with teaching using this example is that many students only learn how to solve the problem with the trains.

If students are later given a problem using the same mathematical principles, but about rising water levels instead of trains, that knowledge just doesn’t seem to transfer.”

Sloutsky sees a role for word problems, however, just not as an instructional aid:

“It is very difficult to extract mathematical principles from story problems. Story problems could be an incredible instrument for testing what was learned.  But they are bad instruments for teaching.”

Kaminski’s and Sloutsky’s study should provide useful insight for those looking at ways to better teach subjects like mathematics, physics, signal analysis, algorithm design, dynamics, logic or economics. It should be noted that Kaminski and Sloutsky worked with Andrew Heckler of Ohio State’s Physics Department on parts of the study.

References.
Concrete Examples Don’t Help Students Learn Math, Study Finds
Students Learn Better When the Numbers Don’t Talk and Dance
Kaminski et al., LEARNING THEORY: The Advantage of Abstract Examples in Learning Math, Science 25 April 2008: 454-455, DOI: 10.1126/science.1154659.

Issues of memory, interest and higher cognitive processing aside, preliminary research at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University suggests that the retina transmits data to the brain at 10 million bits per second – the rate of a basic 10Base-T Ethernet connection. Tufte sets the stage for the discussion by noting that viewing a PowerPoint slide is vastly different from viewing the world:

“Looking around the world is easier than analyzing evidence displays, and there may also be within-brain impediments to handling vast amounts of abstract data, but at least the narrow-band choke point for information resolution should not be the display itself.

The average PP slide contains 40 words, which take less 10 seconds to read. Call that 1000 bits per second, which comes to 1/10,000 of the routine human retina-brain data capacity.

Also most of our evidence displays are in flatland, which is a easier than 3D perceptual tasks. On the other hand, many serious data displays are not in the familiar 4D space/time coordinate system that our eye-brain knows so well.

Memory problems can be partly handled by high-resolution displays, so that key comparisons are made adjacent in space within the common eyespan. Spatial adjacency greatly reduces the memory problems associated with making comparisons of small amounts of information stacked in time (PP slides, for example).

– Edward Tufte, July 26, 2006″

The process from world to retina to brain seems sufficiently complex and multivariate that I am inclined to side with Tufte’s correspondent Niels Olson when he points out:

“While PowerPoint is surely a horrid way to transmit information, I’m not sure we can inject very abstract information into people at ethernet rates. 40 words in 10 seconds doesn’t translate to 1000 bits per second transmitted over the optic nerve, which connects the retina to the banks of the calcarine sulcus in the occipital lobe, via the optic chiasm and the lateral geniculate nucleus. At a minimum the data being transmitted would require an analysis of the typography’s geometry (edge detection being a basic function of the retina), the amount of the visual field taken up by the display, the location of the display’s image on the retina relative to the fovea, and the rates of change in the display and surrounding motion (the speaker, other audience members, etc).”

Interestingly Olsen picks up on a decidedly (Eric) McLuhanesque point when he comments on the 240-words-per-minute rate, a figure that roughly corresponds to both the average reading speed of sighted readers today (McLuhan) and the rate at which words in audio form (like podcasts) are transferred [Olsen comments on this in more detail in a later post]:

“Your guesstimate of 40 words in 10 seconds leads to a 240 word-per-minute reading speed. Like normal readers, braille readers can read at 200 to 400 words per minute. Is there any evidence that a person with an aquired partial nerve blindness also aquires an impaired ability to reason spatially? My classmates at Tulane Med found they preferred listening to the lecture audio I recorded at one-and-a-half speed, which also pushes close to 200 words per minute. Most people found twice-speed to be uncomfortably fast. This 200, 240, 400 word-per-minute rate may be a more accurate definition of the rate at which the human mind can receive and abstract information in word form, and this is likely driven by communication between Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area via the arcuate tract. Keep in mind, reading is a highly abstract function.”

The discussion has far from petered out. Combining the eye and the ear, The New York Times reported on research conducted at the University of California, San Diego, which calculated the average daily intake of data for a North American at 34 Gigabytes plus 100,000 words. What this means is that if you believe the estimate, our eyes and ears are busy handling that much data via all channels in a 24-hour period. According to the New York Times and the San Diego study the eye is still hard at work in the new media:

“Print media has declined consistently, but if you add up the amount of time people spend surfing the Web, they are actually reading more than ever.”

I leave it as an assignment to the interested reader to calculate the rate of information in Mbits/second of 34 Gigabytes per 24-hour period.

HMI Report/UC San Diego

References.

Penn researchers calculate how much the eye tells the brain

Kristin Koch, Judith McLean, Ronen Segev, Michael A. Freed, Michael J. Berry, Vijay Balasubramanian, Peter Sterling, “How Much the Eye Tells the Brain,” Current Biology 16 (July 25, 2006), 1428-1434.

The American Diet: 34 Gigabytes a Day

How Much Information?

Right in keeping with this problem, the folks at MAYA Design have produced a really useful and (dare I say) informative animated short on the problem of distinguishing information from its presentational form. That is, in Gestalt terms, how to see the ground separate from the figure.

As an example of the problem of teasing information from its encapsulating medium, do you know what information is? Can you cite an example? What would you say if you were told that you can’t actually see or hear information? Would you be comfortable with the idea that neither the words on a page nor the numbers on a spreadsheet are information? In the words of MAYA Design, “Information has no form. It’s not made of atoms.”

So, what is information? In MAYA’s view:

“Information is what allows us to confidently make a selection from a set of given or implied alternatives.”

And what is our job then relative to information design? Our job is to give it form. We write it down, verbalize it, draw it and act it out. All with the intent of communicating it. Take a few minutes and look here or below and get reacquainted with the differences between medium and message.

Borrowed from their research, the brothers Heath apply six traits that make ideas (and teaching) stickier. Sticky ideas are:

SIMPLE.

“This process of prioritization is the heart of simplicity. It’s what we call ‘finding the core.’ Simplicity doesn’t mean dumbing down, it means choosing. Some concepts are more critical than others. And as the teacher, you’re the only one who can make that determination.”

UNEXPECTED.

“Piquing curiosity is the holy grail of teaching.” Cialdini said, “You’ve heard of the famous Ah ha! experience, right? Well, the Ah ha! experience is much more satisfying when it’s preceded by the Huh? experience.

So how do you create the ‘Huh?’ experience with your students? George Loewenstein, a behavioral economist, says that curiosity arises when we feel a gap in our knowledge. Loewenstein argues that gaps cause pain. When we want to know something but don’t, it’s like having an itch we need to scratch. To take away the pain, we need to fill the knowledge gap. We sit patiently through bad movies, even though they may be painful to watch, because it’s too painful not to know how they end.

Movies cause us to ask, What will happen? Mystery novels cause us to ask, Who did it? Sports contests cause us to ask, Who will win? Crossword puzzles cause us to ask, What is a 6-letter word for psychiatrist? Pokemon cards cause kids to wonder, Which characters am I missing?

One important implication of the ‘gap theory’ is that we need to open gaps before we close them. Our tendency is to tell students the facts. First, though, they must realize they need them.”

CONCRETE.

“Concreteness etches ideas into our brain—think of how much easier it is to remember a song than a credit card number—even though a song contains much more data!”

CREDIBLE.

“For an idea to stick, it needs to be credible. YouTube-era students don’t find it credible that hanging out outside, for a long period of time, alone, could be conducive to great thinking. So how do you combat their skepticism? You let them see for themselves. It’s like a taste test for ideas.”

EMOTION.

“That’s what Emotion does for an idea—it makes people care. It makes people feel something. In some science departments, during the lesson on ‘lab safety,’ the instructor will do something shocking: They’ll take some of the acid that the students will be handling and use it to dissolve a cow eyeball. A lot of students shudder when they see the demonstration. They feel something. Lab safety ‘dos and don’ts’ don’t grab you in the gut, but a dissolving eyeball sure does.”

STORY.

“The second surprise about stories is why stories, even boring stories, are so sticky. The answer starts with some fascinating research done on ‘mental simulation.’ Brain scans show that when people imagine a flashing light they activate the visual area of the brain; when they imagine someone tapping on their skin they activate tactile areas of the brain. The activity of mental simulation is not limited to the insides of our heads. People who imagine words that start with “b” or “p” can’t resist subtle lip movements, and people who imagine looking at the Eiffel Tower can’t resist moving their eyes upward. Mental simulation can even alter visceral physical responses: When people drink water but imagine it is lemon juice, they salivate more. Even more surprisingly, when people drink lemon juice but imagine it is water, they salivate less. … The takeaway is simple: Mental simulation is not as good as actually doing something—but it’s the next best thing. And, to circle back to the world of sticky ideas, what we’re suggesting is that the right kind of story is, effectively, a simulation. Stories are like flight simulators for the brain.“

The free booklet gives practical suggestions and examples of how to use “stickiness” to improve lessons and teaching. The authors are quick to remind readers that the principles are pragmatic design guidelines for better teaching not just theories for the way instructional design works. “Teaching that Sticks” is an entertaining and informative read for anyone who designs, writes or presents classes or educational material. A companion booklet “Making Presentations that Stick” is also available.

References.

http://www.madetostick.com/teachers/

Why you should train your people

In what might seem an unusual post by a leading business analyst and venture capitalist, Ben Horowitz, of Andreesen Horowitz, writes in businessinsider.com

“Almost everyone who builds a technology company knows that people are the most important asset. Properly run start-ups place a great deal of emphasis on recruiting and the interview process in order to build their talent base. Unfortunately, often the investment in people stops there.”

Horowitz’s own experience in training sounds all too familiar:

“When I first became a manager, I had mixed feelings about training. Logically, training for hi-tech companies made sense, but my personal experience with training programs at the companies where I had worked was underwhelming. The courses were taught by outside firms who didn’t really understand our business and were teaching things that weren’t relevant.”

A turning point in Horowitz’s perspective on training came through Andy Grove’s High Output Management, specifically the chapter titled “Why Training is the Boss’s Job.”

As Director of Product Management at Netscape, Horowitz decided to put his new found inspiration to work and produced a guide titled Good Product Manager/ Bad Product Manager in an attempt to educate his staff on how to bring value to product management.

“I was shocked by what happened next. The performance of my team instantly improved. Product managers that I previously thought were hopeless became effective. Pretty soon, I was managing the highest performing team in the company. Based on this experience, after starting Loudcloud, I heavily invested in training. I credit that investment with much of our eventual success. And the whole thing started with a simple decision to train my people and an even simpler training document.”

Horowitz sees four key benefits to well-designed well-delivered training:

• Productivity
• Performance Management
• Product Quality
• Employee Retention

On Productivity Horowitz credits Grove with doing the math for the amplification of benefits from training:

“Training is, quite simply, one of the highest-leverage activities a manger can perform. Consider for a moment the possibility of your putting on a series of four lectures for members of your department. Let’s count on three hours preparation for each hour of course time—twelve hours of work in total. Say that you have ten students in your class. Next year they will work a total of about twenty thousand hours for your organization. If your training efforts result in a 1 percent improvement in you subordinates’ performance, you company will gain the equivalent of two hundred hours of work as the result of the expenditure of your twelve hours.“

On Performance Management Horowitz sees training as laying the foundation in understanding between the manager and the employees in terms of job responsibilities and expectations:

“If you don’t train your people, you establish no basis for performance management. As a result, performance management in your company will be sloppy and inconsistent.”

On Product Quality, Horowitz cites a common instance of where a push to cater to an urgent demand forces training out of the process leading only to an unnecessary and expensive reinvention of the wheel:

“As success drives the need to hire new engineers at a rapid rate, companies neglect to train the new engineers properly. As the engineers are assigned tasks, they figure out how to complete them as best they can. Often this means replicating existing facilities in the architecture, which lead to inconsistencies in the user experience, performance problems, and a general mess. And you thought training was expensive.”

Last but not least, Horowitz speaks to the issue of Employee Retention. Using his own experience at Netscape as a real-life example, Horowitz recounts an instance where he analyzed exit interviews to determine why people were leaving:

“1. They hated their manager – generally the employees were appalled by the lack of guidance, career development and feedback they were receiving.
2. They weren’t learning anything – the company wasn’t investing in the employees.”

“As Andy Grove writes, there are only two ways for a manager to improve the output of an employee: motivation and training. Therefore, training should be the most basic requirement for all managers in your organization. …Managing the company is the CEO’s job. While you won’t have time to teach all of the management courses yourself, you should teach the course on management expectations, because they are, after all, your expectations.“

“Distance learning was designed to provide learners with more opportunity and flexibility for learning. Distance learning allows the learner to overcome traditional barriers to learning such as location, disabilities, time constraints, and familial obligations. However, not every learner will be successful in a distance learning environment.”

Comparing demographic (age, gender, ethnicity, employment) and affective (personality, motivation) issues that might form barriers to learning, researcher Shawna Strickland looked at what makes some people successful at online learning while others drop out. Strickland cites some common barriers to successful online learning as:

• Lack of institutional support
• Lack of free time
• Family constraints
• Financial limitations
• Poor time management skills
• Isolation
• Anxiety and stress
• Limited prior experience
• Previous academic failure

Although no correlation with learning style was found (p. 35), Strickland notes that individual motivation and the degree to which the student accepts personal responsibility for his/her learning act as a prime factors in distinguishing the successful from the unsuccessful learners.

“…the major difference between the distance and traditional learner is the motivational level of the distance learner. A possible reason for this increased motivational level is that the learner has accepted more responsibility for the educational experience. Although the authors [see Simonson et al.] have provided rationale for this key difference, they further state that, when comparing the individual attributes of the two types of learners, they are ‘not generally different from each other.’ “

Strickland also sees communication as key to a successful outcome:

“The success of distance learning is dependent on communication between the learner, his or her peers and instructor. To encourage success within distance learning, it is necessary to evaluate each individual’s needs on a case-by-case basis. While successful learners tend to display certain traits, any adult learner with the proper motivation and preparedness could be successful in a distance learning program.”

References.

Strickland, Shawna L., “Understanding Successful Characteristics of Adult Learners,” Respiratory Care Education Annual Volume 16, Fall 2007, pp. 31-38.

Furst-Bowe, J., Dittman W., “Identifying needs of adult women in distance learning programs,” Int J Instr Media (2001) 28(4), pp. 405-413.

Mupinga, D. M., Nora, R. T., Yaw, D. C., “The learning styles, expectations and needs of on-line students,” College Teaching (2006) 54(1), pp. 185-189.

Simonson, M., Smaldino, S., Albright, M., Teaching and learning at a distance: Foundations of distance education 2nd ed., Merrill Prentice Hall (2003)

The archives collection  at Wired.com has a transcribed discussion between computer gurus Alan Kay and Danny Hillis that, surprisingly perhaps, includes a few comments about learning and education. It’s a worthwhile read in many respects but I’m plucking a couple quotes from it that relate specifically to knowledge, learning and pedagogy:

“There’s this interesting interplay between what you might call talent and how much of a meta-system we can put down on top of meager talents to learn how to do things. Two recent tennis champions, Ivan Lendl and Chris Evert, were not actual athletes. They were people who just learned how to play tennis. Some of the most natural tennis players, like Nastasi and Agassi, only do well when things are going well – they don’t have learned skills to drop back on. So in any given population maybe 5 to 20 percent have a natural hacker sort of talent; they are often not helped by pedagogy. Pedagogy is about getting the other 80 percent of people within hailing distance. So I’ve been very interested in taking some very important ideas and wondering how you get them in a state where the 80 percent can actually learn them in an operational way. And that’s why I keep coming back to computers.”

Interestingly the conversation concludes with:

“DH:

The question that I keep asking myself is, where is the next frontier? Where is that place that a new world is being constructed? Do you know any candidates?

AK:

I think the frontier has to do with human learning. Knowledge is not completely relative. There are a hundred or so powerful ideas that basically mean the difference between life and death, and I think one of our major jobs should always be to be true and get as many people enfranchised into them as possible.

DH:

But in fact, if you look at what’s happening, it seems just the opposite. We’re very much heading toward a two-class society, where either you’re somebody who sort of knows about, or feels empowered to deal with all of the complexity in society, or you’re one of the people that is a victim of it and is just on the receiving end of it all.

AK:

And I think the gap actually gets bigger as the leading edge of knowledge gets less intuitive.”

The full transcript by Steven Levy and Kevin Kelly can be viewed here.