Bunchberry & Fern

Conservation of Complexity: 2

2010-03-16T21:49:00.000Z

Last post: highlighted some research which showed that sometimes books and long unwieldy blocks of text can be effective because they make you work hard to understand them.

This post: simple social media tools can be effective platforms for learning because they combine the hard work of the long text with good usability.

The first thing to say about Twitter is, like Google, it's decidedly not simple to use:

"Why are Yahoo! and MSN such complex-looking places? Because their systems are easier to use. Not because they are complex, but because they simplify the life of their users by letting them see their choices on the home page: news, alternative searches, other items of interest. . ."

(There's loads of stuff written about Twitter. Here's some recent stats showing around 80% of users have fewer than 100 followers and/or followees, for instance. But this post isn't about Twitter except as an example of Social Media so I'm leaving Twitter observations to this: read The Complexity of Simplicity which got me thinking about all this and provided most of the links and quotes for this post. Every time I use the word 'Twitter', it's interchangeable with other examples of Social Media. Twitter's just my favourite.)

The value of Twitter comes from Gradual Engagement:

"An example . . . is the search experience on Google. Though often cited as an example of a simple design, Google search was actually built for expert users. According to Product VP Marissa Mayer:

“Novice users will enter ‘tell me when it will snow in NY today’ and get no valuable results. Soon thereafter, they will end up typing ‘weather new york’ and see that the results are more valuable. Voila! An expert user. The learning curve in search is steep, but quick.”

Enabling this experience, however, requires all the computational power that an engineering powerhouse like Google can muster. Not all companies have such capabilities."

Twitter does - it's us (or, more likely, you). And it's this powerhouse that opens up learning possibilities through progressive disclosure.

Progressive disclosure's another usability term.
On complex websites and software it means that certain features are kept hidden from users until an opportune moment (like the advanced bits of the Google). But on Twitter this could mean a couple of things - either you follow new people or you un-ignore certain kinds of Tweets as they stream past you in the timeline (like some of the hashtagged #chat groups eg #KMers or #lrnchat). It could even mean that you begin to participate in these conversations.

We know that progressive disclosure is effective for learning how to use systems. (And learning geeks will be able to find theoretical analogues in their own domain.) And a good reason for this might be that we get our base units for learning mixed up. We're trained to think of learning objectives as units of 'content' but, for me at least, the base unit is just as likely to be time. Some things just can't be rushed.

Don't Make Me Write a Big Honking Report!
Here's Steve 'Don't Make Me Think!' Krug again, talking about the $3-8k pricetag for an expert usability review of a web site:

Note that I didn't mention a written report. I've come to the conclusion that very few of my clients actually derive much benefit from having one, and a) they take a long time to write, and b) writing is really hard work, so I try to avoid it if at all possible. If a client absolutely needs a “big honking report” so they have something to show to the person who's signing the check, I can do one, but it's likely to double the price.

So how does Steve Krug report back to clients? A 'series of long conference calls'. And, if you think about it, this makes sense. Conversation's a good example of The Complexity of Simplicity. And conversation epitomises gradual engagement/progressive disclosure. Importantly, conversation's also hard work - there's little chance of burying your irreducible complexity in a "big honking report" in a conference call.

In the previous post, I gave an example of a conversation that I learned from on Twitter. That conversation has happened over a period of months. And many of the people involved had no idea they were taking part.

Somebody is discussing the thing I want to learn to do next on Twitter right now. It's a massive free-for-all conference call and it's hard work. But it's working out well for me.

Next post: I'm going to have a crack at defining what 'usability' means for hypergogues.¹ Which I said I'd do this post, but ran out of space. I'd love to know how you feel about 'borrowing' ideas from UX people for learning design - are there any other areas/people/sources I should be checking out? I'd also love to know whether you found the ideas mentioned in the previous post to be credible - can learners really achieve more by reading a book than by multimedia eLearning courses?

¹Yes, I know that you don't know what 'hypergogue' means - it's all the people who help people learn at work or in life (but who don't necessarily have the word 'teacher' on their passport). Think of them as teachers in schools run on a wirearchical basis.

Further reading:
I've long had an interest in what the usability people have to teach us Learning & Development types. Here are the people who influenced this post. Any ideas for others gratefully received.
Luke Wroblewski
Jakob Nielsen
David Hamill
Steve Krug
Adaptive Path

And, it's quite expensive, but I recommend Mental Models by Indi Young
Finally, here's a round-up of another useful usability concept for learning designers - Personas

Conservation of Complexity: 1

2010-03-15T22:17:00.002Z

Don't Make Me Think! is Steve Krugman's layperson's usability bible, which these days, like Hamlet, is full of clichés. Usability on the web means, among other things, accepting the fact visitors to your site won't read the lovingly-crafted text, except in passing as they scan for the next link.

Learning designers are less interested in the idea of usability than they are in the idea of efficiency. How can we transfer learning in the least wasteful and most effective way?

And a possible answer is:
Dual-code segmented learning materials to encourage long-term memory storage through the integration of synchronised/aligned dual channels and ensuring distractions are weeded out even as context is signalled.¹

Or, in other words, multimedia eLearning. Less Don't Make Me Think! and more Don't Waste My Time! What could be wrong with that?

Everybody Tweeted a link to this:

Dumbfounded citizens from Maine to California gazed helplessly at the frightening chunk of print, unsure of what to do next. Without an illustration, chart, or embedded YouTube video to ease them in, millions were frozen in place, terrified by the sight of one long, unbroken string of English words.

"Why won't it just tell me what it's about?" said Boston resident Charlyne Thomson, who was bombarded with the overwhelming mass of black text late Monday afternoon. "There are no bullet points, no highlighted parts. I've looked everywhere—there's nothing here but words."

"Ow," Thomson added after reading the first and last lines in an attempt to get the gist of whatever the article, review, or possibly recipe was about.

From: Nation Shudders At Large Block Of Uninterrupted Text on The Onion / via Mark Changizi

And then I found myself having in this conversation on Twitter with Donald Clark (@iOPT) and Julie Dirksen (@usablelearning):

6:26 PM Mar 9th	iOPT	Screencasts in software training allow the learners to learn faster and more accurately in the short term; however …
6:26 PM Mar 9th	iOPT	learners using text based training were faster and more accurate in the long term.
6:27 PM Mar 9th	iOPT	Generally speaking, learning that requires more of a learner leads to poor immediate performance but good long term performance.
6:29 PM Mar 9th	usablelearning	RT @iOPT Generally speaking, learning that requires more of a learner leads to poor immediate performance but good long term performance.
8:22 PM Mar 9th	iOPT	@BFchirpy @usablelearning Tweets based on series of research - viewing seems to be more passive than when you have to read and process.
8:25 PM Mar 9th	iOPT	@BFchirpy @usablelearning Passive works best for short term performance - you mimic what you see, but doesn't stick in the long term
8:26 PM Mar 9th	BFchirpy	@iOPT Makes perfect sense to me. Been working on my theory of the half-baked for a while now... http://bit.ly/cuuS6H Reading = add an egg
8:27 PM Mar 9th	usablelearning	@iOPT @bfchirpy Very interesting (makes sense to me, provided that they actually do read). Worry about infantalising learners. Reference?
8:32 PM Mar 9th	iOPT	@usablelearning @bfchirpy "Lessons for a Rapidly Changing Workforce" by two psychologists - Quinones & Ehrenstein -highly recommended
8:36 PM Mar 9th	iOPT	@usablelearning @bfchirpy Will they read? Learners prefer the easy way. That's whats wrong w/ level 1 Evals - they pick the easy way out.
8:36 PM Mar 9th	BFchirpy	@iOPT Is it fair to summarise: increasing extraneous cognitive load to learning materials can increase long-term performance improvement?
8:40 PM Mar 9th	iOPT	@BFchirpy That sounds right to me!
8:40 PM Mar 9th	usablelearning	@BFchirpy hmm, is increased extraneous cog load the independent variable, or is it level of effort in acquiring more the point? /@iOPT
8:40 PM Mar 9th	BFchirpy	@iOPT @usablelearning Laser-like focus on Learning Objectives, minimal cognitive load = deferral of complexity?
8:42 PM Mar 9th	BFchirpy	@usablelearning Good call. Not sure how to separate extraneous from the metacognitive - though I've previously thought that obvious. Hmmm / @iOPT
8:43 PM Mar 9th	usablelearning	@iOPT @bfchirpy too often there isn't really a good reason to read it, so learners don't #notstupid
8:44 PM Mar 9th	BFchirpy	@usablelearning @iOPT Did you both read the piece on 'stability bias'? Learners overestimate memory-power and underestimate value of study.
8:47 PM Mar 9th	BFchirpy	Stability bias = people don't rate value of study/effort in learning http://bit.ly/bF0Cno [PDF] @usablelearning @iOPT @flowchainsensei
8:49 PM Mar 9th	usablelearning	@BFchirpy @iOPT yep -- I think that relates > more effort requiring more brain activity creating longer lasting effects
8:50 PM Mar 9th	BFchirpy	@usablelearning @iOPT We often forget that the primary function of the brain is to prevent thinking.*

		*Kathy Sierra put this much much better when she said, “Brains pay attention to what brains care about, not necessarily what the conscious mind cares about.”

Larry Tesler's another usability expert who:

". . .came up with the Law of Conservation of Complexity. I postulated that every application must have an inherent amount of irreducible complexity. The only question is who will have to deal with it.

Because computers back then were small, slow and expensive, programs were designed to be compact, not easy to use. The user had to deal with complexity because the programmer couldn't. But commercial software is written once and used millions of times. If a million users each waste a minute a day dealing with complexity that an engineer could have eliminated in a week by making the software a little more complex, you are penalizing the user to make the engineer's job easier."

I'm guessing that learning's the same. People who design learning-at-work programmes based on slavish Cognitive Load principles probably believe they're shouldering the responsibility for the 'irreducible complexity' of learning. I'm working hard on this design so you don't have to think! But by increasing the 'usability' of their learning materials, they could merely be postponing the hard work of learning.

You can't think for somebody else any more than you can eat or drink for them.

Back to books?
Reading 'frightening chunks of print' is only one way to 'require more of a learner'. Games, projects, social interactions - even actual work (heaven forbid!) - are all cognitively demanding environments suitable for improving long-term performance.

Next post: I'm going to suggest that Social Media apps are particularly apt for learning. And to try to make the case that Learning & Development people need to develop a better understanding of what 'usability' means.

¹Further reading:

Nine Ways to Reduce Cogntive Load in Multimedia Learning [PDF]
An Introduction to Efficiency in Learning (sample chapter) [PDF]
I can't find any good links (ie not behind a paywall) to Quninones and Ehrenstein's Training for a Rapidly Changing Workplace

Training Departments: Indispensable but replaceable

2010-03-09T14:51:00.001Z

Arthur's taught himself to read and write in Japanese.* His Japanese grandparents bought him an 'Anpan-Man* Computer' (a bit like a Speak & Spell toy) and this inexpensive handheld mLearning-eLearning device seems to have been enough.

How is it possible my son's taught himself to read and write Japanese on his own using only a £10 toy when expensive teachers are only just beginning to manage that now in English after six months of school? Could we replace his teachers with cheap plastic toys?

Before you get cross, the answer is, of course, no. Not yet, at any rate. But I'm less sure about Training Departments and Higher Education. First, how did he learn to read and write Japanese with a toy?

Two possible answers to that question:

1. eLearning is suited to Japanese spelling.
It's tempting to say that Japanese spelling is 'easier' than English. And it's true that, once you learn the characters in Japanese, you can pretty much read and write anything. The absurdity of this poster-child of spelling reform, Ghoughpteighbteau is simply not possible in Japanese (see if you can guess the name of this vegetable without clicking through - it's a bit like 'ghoti', except the 'gh' is from 'hiccough' not 'enough').

But Japanese kana are simply more suited to eLearning. The Anpan-Man Computer gives you immediate feedback on anything you've spelled in a way not possible with English. How would an English spelling computer respond to 'ghoti' or 'Spek & Spel' other than to say INCORRECT? Whereas Anpan-Man will tell you exactly what you've spelled, even if it's nonsense. By trial and error, my son was able to learn how to spell things like, "I like trains," or "I did a poo," and practice long past the time that any human, no matter how loving, would have got bored teaching him.

2. His teachers taught him Japanese without even trying.
They use synthetic phonics at Arthur's school - the 'synthetic' refers to the way children are taught to 'blend' sounds together to make words. They also do a lot of work on developing fine motor skills. All the kids at his school do cursive writing, for instance.

Anpan-Man would have struggled to teach him the synthetic part of synthetic phonics. He didn't really pick up the computer and properly play with it till he'd gained the confidence to start sounding out words. And as for the actual pen-holding part, there's no way he could have learned to write in Japanese without the hours of practice he got in writing English at school.

Confluence
There's a huge confluence of events and activities enabling my son to learn to read and write Japanese (and English). We're really good at teaching people to write at this age. The fact that it's much harder to teach people to write when they're older has more to do with how we've designed society than how the brain is designed (I think, you know where the comments button is).

At the centre of the confluence are the teachers. At this age, they do an amazing job of tying all the play and the toys and the enthusiasms together in a way that nothing else could.

Effluence
The Training Department (or Higher Education faculties) may well be the best qualified people to 'tie things together' in the workplace. But they're rarely there in the teams, on projects or with managers. More importantly, they don't benefit from a confluence of events that has evolved to help people learn. It's just as likely they'll have the exact opposite.

The talents of the Training Department will always be indispensable. But the way things are organised now, they're often replaceable.

*In two of the three main scripts. The third and most important, kanji, will be a different story. For example, it's unlikely he'll learn the more advanced kanji (eg things like 'eat' and 'drink') till he's at High School. For an indication why this might be, have a look at this turn-of-the-century Chinese typewriter. Chinese languages use the same character set as the Japanese kanji.

Anpan-Man is a Japanese cartoon about a bunch of superheroes, mostly made of bread - 'Anpan' means 'red-bean-jam-filled-bun' - who fight the cute but evil Baikin-Man, or Germ Man. The plot typically involves Anpan-Man, along with Little Melon-bread and Baby-Man, defending some other less able bread-based lifeform. Baikin-Man usually manages to damage his bread-head, rendering him helpless - until the baker arrives in the nick of time with a new head. Anpan-Man then delivers the fabled 'An-punch' (or 'azuki-bean-paste punch) and all is well with the world. It was apparently inspired by the near-starvation of its writer in World War II and his wistful daydreams of beanjam pastries.

Arthur's also been to school in Japan for a short time. In later life, Japanese schools are really tough. But, as the picture above shows with the pink pom-poms, there's definitely a different vibe in the younger years.

Base Units and Harvard Business Press

2010-03-05T10:15:00.002Z

What do Training Departments have in common with the Bangkok Post on Sunday, the Mars Climate Orbiter and Harvard Business Press? Business books are rrrrrubbish for data and information. They're inadequate for wisdom. And most of them fail at giving knowledge. Why?

Kafka on the train
We were philosophical at first. It was, after all, nobody's fault.

At the station, the electronic information boards had been down so they'd directed us to board our ten-minute ride to Croydon by hand signals and shouts. Unfortunately, it's an hour to the coast (and an hour back again) and that's where our train, an Express service, was going. Like I said, most of us were philosophical about this. Until the conductor demanded we pay an extra £45 for our seats.

There was an awed silence. Then there was pretty much the opposite of silence. One of the other passengers put it best:

Don't you get it? I don't pay for the *!%&$*ing seat! I pay you for a quick and painless journey to get to where I want to go! You should be paying me!

Harvard Business Press are similarly awe-inspiring. One way to look at their books might be through a DIKW lens. The Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom model isn't perfect but it does give a sense of some of the possible reasons for reading the book I've just finished - 260 pages which,

". . . will show why you must begin building a game strategy now - and offer practical guidelines. . ."

Data and Information
Facts and descriptions? Symbols and meanings? Pretty much any way you define data information, you'll still come to the same conclusion. Books are a terrible medium for both, with their primitive search and lack of opportunities for play.

Knowledge and Wisdom
Wisdom's difficult to define, but it's unlikely a book will make you any wiser than, say, a blog post or an article in a magazine. Wisdom's far more likely to be about the number of sources you've read than than the number of pages (in fact, it's just as likely to be a function of the books you haven't read. . .). You can compress wisdom into a book but getting it out takes time.

Which leaves knowledge.

Selling the Invisible
The first book which popped into my head when I was thinking of something which (a) helped me with 'knowledge' and (b) was relevant to this blog about learning. Selling the Invisible* has two qualities I feel I need:

Half-baked: it's not all there. There are spaces for notes. The chapters are short. My copy is dog-eared and marked by jotted ideas for mini-projects which would confirm or deny the book's information. I've written questions and scrawled cryptic keywords, which only I would understand, referring to specific bits of personal experience data. One of the notes says simply, "Where the *!%& were you? Telephone helpline support!"
Retellable: there's some good anecdotes. Anybody who was unlucky enough to have me as their manager knows this book.

Base units
I tweeted (by the way, you should follow me on Twitter):

"Reading another book that would work better as a slide-deck and a blog. . .

NASA wasted $326.7m on the Mars Climate Orbiter because different teams used different measurements. One team used the imperial pound-force while another was using the metric standard newton. The Bangkok Post on Sunday manages a similar trick of buffoonery when it proudly boasts of being the thickest newspaper on the market.

Harvard Business Press are like my Kafkaesque rail conductor demanding money for the seat I don't want. Like NASA and the newspapers, they've got their metrics wrong. Their publications are sold in billable units (ie books) rather than what is useful to me. The base unit of knowledge isn't bits, pounds, centimetres or facts - but the actionable idea.

I went to the business section of my local bookshop yesterday. I couldn't find a single book that I didn't think would be better as a slide-deck and a series of blog posts. This leaves publishers with a problem - how are they going to make me pay for it? I don't know and I don't care - it's not my problem if books turn out to be an accident of paper. In Czechoslovakia, a friend told me a 'socialist' joke: did you hear about the secret policeman who went to the bookshop and asked for a metre of books? Harvard Business Press, the joke's on you.

The more perspicacious among you will, of course, have noticed I've not mentioned 'Training Departments' yet. Or degree-awarding universities. Or school. But I never stopped thinking about them the entire time of writing this.

*I'm slightly embarrassed about choosing this book. I racked my brain for a couple of days and it's the one that kept springing to mind. I tried to censor myself and thing of something cooler, but some of the others were even less cool.

Informal Learning enthusiasts: the Learning & Development profession can't afford you no more

2010-03-02T11:46:00.001Z

Learning & Development professionals on the web, who are you trying to persuade? Can you try to sound a little less, erm, bonkers? - a letter to myself.

A tale of sound and fairies
Here's how I've lost work in the past. I go to a company and meet some middle managers. They want me to design a training programme. I say, "Yes, I can do that." And I can.

"But," I say.

And I begin to talk about alternatives. Have you thought about embedding this learning into a sim or a business development project? Have you consider a social learning or Knowledge Management approach? What about doing bits of this online? We all get excited. And, possibly, a little carried away.

When we part, the middle managers are beaming. We can't wait to start working with you, they say. This has been a real eye-opener. The people here are going to love this.

Throw me a bone, here. . .
It's easy to criticise Senior Managers as the pointy-head bosses from Dilbert. But, in my experience, they're not (always? often?) like that. So when they see the middle managers' excitement, they're pleased and possibly a little proud. Look, see how they've grown up and grabbed that initiative just like I've coached them to!

I live and breathe this stuff. So my thoughts about informal learning are relatively coherent. My enthusiasm is tempered with reason because my it stems from my own experiences. I've had the good fortune to work on training projects that went wrong. I've listened to learners tell me how they got more out of the lunch break than the PowerPoint presentation. I've sensed the impatience of the group summoned to compulsory training too long before/way past the time it's needed.

I've made informal learning work because I couldn't think of another way to do what I needed to do. To misquote Karl Weick, my enthusiasm is compressed expertise.

Die, heretic!
But the middle managers I spoke to ended up sounding like they've been indoctrinated into a cult. Not because they're naive or gullible. But because their enthusiasm is just that - enthusiasm. It's no wonder that their Senior Managers have expressed doubts. The stories I told at the meeting didn't survive retelling because I managed to whip up more enthusiasm than understanding.

For me, and lots of people I speak to on the web and on Twitter and around, it's time to curb my enthusiasm. To cut down on the Learning Theory. To stop thinking about how wonderful informal learning is - and, by extension, how wonderful I am.

Four things (for me) to remember:

Formal training is not all bad. We're members of the richest societies the planet has ever seen. (Despite the Econopalypse.) We must have been doing something right. To say otherwise is disingenuous.
Get your story straight and get good at telling it from the the perspective of customers and learners. My story is simple: informal learning is about learning coming to the learner rather than the other way round. It's about harnessing your interstitial time.
Your informal learning stories don't need to stand up to intellectual scrutiny. They need to stand up to retelling at the water cooler and in the stairwell and during casual conversations with pointy-haired bosses.
Learning & Development professionals separate their marketing from their actual work. In this case, perhaps we should think about the overlap? It's time to start educating our customers not selling to them.

The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous.

Who's been good at talking about Learning 2.0 from the perspective of learners and organisations rather than a theoretical or practitioner's perspective? Who manages to embrace the cutting edge but avoid demagoguery? I can't think of that many who have managed both. . .

The Karl Weick (mis)quote comes from the always enthusiastic Irmeli Aro. You should follow Irmeli Aro on Twitter. She's @connectlrmeli.

How to formalise informal learning

2010-02-24T21:37:00.002Z

In my last post, I asked some questions about formalising informal learning. And answered them.
If:

you understand that formalising informal learning will have organisation-wide consequences
you use the term 'formalise' in a very narrow and specific sense - to create social objects to promote shared understanding and collaboration
you target your formalising efforts with authenticity and tact

Then you'll be fine.

Four steps to formalising informal learning without messing it up and making everybody think you're a control freak. . .

1. Kill some sacred cows.
I'm thinking particularly about the tyranny of Kirkpatrick, SMART targets, Learning Objectives and numerical ROI metrics.

Seriously, what is it with teachers, trainers and Learning Objectives? (Note: I said 'tyranny'. I'm not saying these things never have value - like Learning Styles, NLP, Multiple Intelligences, Myers-Briggs and all that ~~bunk~~ intuitive stuff, they're especially useful as a starting point, as a social object and a foundation for collaborative work.

2. Pave the cowpaths. Like Walt Disney.
Los Angeles IxDA - Designing Social Interfaces

View more presentations from erin malone.

I read the expression 'pave the cowpath' the other day in a presentation from Erin Malone on Designing Social Interfaces. It's similar to the idea of Desire Paths and the opposite of 'build it and they will come' Potemkin Village (cf Creepy Treehouse). Don't set things up and expect learners to jump in and play with your toys. Watch what people do and help them do it more easily. Here's an example from Walt Disney:

Shortly after Disney World opened in Florida, Walt Disney called a meeting of all senior personnel to get an idea of how the opening of the park was going. All members gave their report, some good news, some bad news, including many challenges that had been anticipated during the planning of the park but could not be affirmed until the park was in full operation. The conversation then moved to maintenance and operations. The senior official in charge was very upset because the public was not always walking on the paved sidewalks, sometimes they would cut across his manicured lawns in an attempt to get to a certain location quicker. After a while and many people taking the same shortcut, a unsightly brown swatch formed like a scar across the deep green, finely cut grass. This particular official asked if chains, fences or signs asking visitors to stay on the designated paths could be erected. Disney response was simple, but brilliant:

“No. They’re telling you where to put the paths.”

Time for an interesting and true intermission about Desire Paths
This little intermission is longer than I'd like but it illustrates Desire Paths on the web perfectly.

I'm pretty keen on Desire Paths and the story above is one I've shared many times. I first heard about them on the Fritinancy blog back in 2006. It was the pre-read/write-web-as-prosthetic-memory days and I promptly forgot where I found it.

Flash forward three years and I have a conversation with somebody on Twitter about something similar to Desire Paths - and the Walt Disney anecdote.This prompted me to do some refinding. It took 20 minutes or so, but I found some links through a circuitous route (I couldn't even remember the name 'desire path' and had to dig back through kottke.org posts). Anyway, I found stuff and shared it with my Twitter friend.

Today, I had a similar problem. I knew the name 'Desire Paths' but I also knew that Nancy Friedman's Fritinancy post didn't have the Walt Disney anecdote. Deja vu.

So, I type "desire path" "walt disney" into Google and the above link comes up - it's the same guy from Twitter who blogged it name-checking me as one of the sources for the post. That, people, is a Desire Path and how informal learning works when it works well.

3. Stop reading so many Learning & Development blogs and start reading the Knowledge Management people.
I felt like a bit of a fraud writing the previous post. For all of our banging on about how to formalise informal learning, the #KM people have been doing it for twenty years (not necessarily terribly well, but they've learned a lot).

I've promised too many people that I'd do a best of #KM blogs round up. So, I'll get on to that and back up what I'm saying here in the next couple of weeks.

But for now, I'd recommend you read The Social Life of Information as a starting point.

4. Look at this
Proximity, Location and Informal Knowledge Spillovers

View more presentations from Ben Spigel.

And four things to avoid. . .

1. Don't get hung up on getting things exactly right
Communities of Practice are a classic example of something we thought was best run 'informally'. Turns out we were only partly right. Informal is as slippery a word as formal is. Informal != unorganised or even Theory Y-style laissez-faire. Training's not dead yet.

2. Don't give in to your political instincts
I think it's essential for modern organisations to embrace informal learning given some of the startling changes (I know it's a cliche but it's true) taking place now. But I find it suspicious that the world is doing exactly what I want it to... Incidentally, this goes for the informal learning is rubbish' people too.

3. Don't forget that participation bandwidth is probably just as important as Cognitive Load Theory.

4. Don't forget that the key difference between informal learning and formal learning is the permeable classroom walls. Informal learning will be eclectic and even promiscuous in where it borrows from, by definition.
You didn't think I'd go a whole two posts without mentioning games, did you? The ludologists are having some great ideas. This idea - nothing to do with informal learning - of how to think about Learning Objectives as atoms in a skill chain is really interesting, for example. Games and informal learning programmes are all about creating problem-solving spaces.

Social Gaming developers have discovered that the formal elements of design are much less important in social games. The complicated stuff is handled client-side so there's less need for a rigorously formal approach.

Can we formalise informal learning?

2010-02-24T21:34:00.002Z

Ecollab ask the question for their second blog carnival:

Informal learning - can we formalise it? Should we? How much? How?

1. Can we? Is it practical?
Any organisation seeking to 'formalise informal learning' would be simultaneously 'informalising the formal' ie potentially ie undermining the bureaucracy and promoting adhocracy. This is radical stuff - we're talking about changing the maze not the rat.

Can we formalise informal learning? It depends on who 'we' are. . .

2. Should we? Can we even define what it means?
This is even tougher. 'Formal' is a slippery word - a mode of speech favouring latinate lexical terms over good ol' germanic grunts; something made explicitly 'official' by signing on the dotted line; something rendered into abstraction. . .

Wrapping a field up in its own technical vocabulary is undeniably useful as an aid to precision and clarity, as well as a shared foundation to build on. But colonising learners' minds with a layer of metalanguage seems to defeat the purpose of informal learning. And seriously raises the barriers to active participation.

Official sanction of informal learning sounds great in theory. Everybody knows it's the way things are done round here and at least you get to have a budget. But odd things happen to gift economies - for this is what unofficial informal learning is - when incentives ie a budget get thrown into the mix.

Abstraction's useful. Dick Carlson's (@techherding) recent post, Beyond the lecture - fighting the learning wars, uses an abstraction as a device to aid understanding. It's great and I've bookmarked it to forward to clients. You should too.

But it's wrong. In fact, all abstractions are, by definition, wrong. Dick uses Bloom's Taxonomy to explain why lecturing won't work and it works well for the audience he's writing for. But here's David Weinberger on the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom hierarchy (another abstraction, and one that I learned as received wisdom during management training):

The real problem with the DIKW pyramid is that it's a pyramid. The image that knowledge (much less wisdom) results from applying finer-grained filters at each level, paints the wrong picture. That view is natural to the Information Age which has been all about filtering noise, reducing the flow to what is clean, clear and manageable. Knowledge is more creative, messier, harder won, and far more discontinuous.

Real life is messier and more discontinuous. Bloom's Taxonomy has remarkably similar problems to the DIKW hierarchy. We produce abstract models as tools to think with and to act as social objects when we talk to one another. This fact gets lost.

Worse still, when we 'formalise' things, we tend to get mixed up between all three of the loose definitions there are. The result? We end up with officially sanctioned, uncritically accepted hairballs of jargon.

Should we? It depends on what we mean by formalising. . .

How much? And when and where?
Leaders are ready, we've clearly defined what 'formalise' means: how far do we go? Where do we start?

One thing I'm fairly sure of: it's one of those things where it pays to put a lot of effort in up front because being seen to interfere later on could have negative consequences (this doesn't absolve senior managers and Learnign & Development people of responsibility later on - the whole point is that everybody's supposed to take part):

But after that, I'm not so sure. Clark Aldritch uses another abstraction, his 8 Cs of learning define the areas organisations pay attention to when designing learning programmes. (I've made them 7 Cs here and missed out cost for what will be obvious reason - a full explanation of what the Cs mean is here)

Then I gave myself 7 x three types of points - 'love', 'spend' and 'tread carefully' - and tried to work out where I would spend these limited resources. Here's what I came up with:

It seems I think that organisations should:

devote their love and attention to the community and the infrastructure for informal learning
spend cash on facilities and outside coaching
steer well-clear of content and curricula
tread carefully around preaching mission ie 'calling'

I appear to have mixed feelings about 'certification' ie motivation. Pay attention and tread carefully? I'm not sure how that works - what do you think?

Massive apologies to those who took the time to comment on the eLearning and Scale posts a couple of weeks ago. The comments were totally awesome and sent me into a hypomanic deep thought session for a couple of weeks. But I didn't make the time to write my conclusions in reply. Rubbish - no excuses. Sorry. I'm in the latter stages of setting up my own Learning & Development business and Donald Clark and Dave Ferguson in particular caused me to rethink the way I'm going about things with regard to eLearning - thank you both.

Next post: How does this translate into actions?

Outsourcing Science to Scientists Lacks Merit

2010-02-10T23:35:00.000Z

'Rampant' Donald H Taylor (you need to see his picture to understand why he's 'rampant') urges a bit more emphasis on evidence-based practice in Learning and Development, less reliance on myths and a polite tone during discussion of the merits of different approaches (the comments are good too).

I completely agree, but wonder if we're too willing to outsource our science.

North London, a few years before blogs and Social Media. . .
Picture the scene: about fifteen of us are sitting in a classroom in North London on a spring Tuesday evening working towards QTS. We're all practitioners in colleges, adult education or training organisations. And tonight's class is really really tedious. It's about Skills for Life Core Curriculum Descriptors, if you must know. We are restless.

So, one of us distracts the teacher with a piece of research they've read. It's not important what the research says (it's about learning vocabulary because all of us have a connection of some kind with language teaching) but it's one of those evidence-based pieces with practical advice that, for some people, is counter-intuitive, because that's the way they are.

The class splits into roughly two groups. About half the group say the research is probably pointing in the right direction. About half the group say the researchers have made some fundamental errors. And the class debates, ending up agreeing to disagree after things get a bit heated.

Everybody has joined in and contributed, all except for me, who sits there in an all-too-rare moment of reticence. Because, frankly, I'm shocked and a little confused. Why are we debating this?

Blogs and Social Media. . .
Back in the present, I've written about Learning Styles and how they're probably a bit flaky. I've since read similar debunkers on Cognitive Load Theory (which, as a theory, I find quite convincing),
Neuro-Linguistic Programming (which seems a bit bonkers to me) and Multiple Intelligences (which I'm kind of Dilberty about).

All of the posts seemed to cause debate. What are we doing debating all this stuff?

Frankly, I couldn't give a toss if you agree or disagree with a piece of research. What I'd like to know is how you used it in your work and what you learned. It didn't occur to anybody in my class to suggest testing out the ideas on real people in a real learning environment (nor did it occur to our lecturer to suggest it as an option).

The day after my tedious class I went to work and tested the research out on classes. There were no arguments, and I discovered the 'truth' for my situation was somewhere in between the two poles of the class debate.

Learning from deliberate practice is a core competency - not at all the kind of thing you outsource to researchers.

Training Analysis

2010-02-09T14:18:00.000Z

Here's a problem for you Learning Professionals and Trainng Experts to solve:

Drivers and guards on some of the busiest railways on the planet sometimes 'make mistakes or skip some of the steps they are supposed to do'. They have had some 'close calls because of their mistakes'. They need help to pay closer attention to safety measures.

How would you set about this? Is your Instructional Design sense tingling? Some answers to how one nation approached this after some focused grumbling.

Computer says, "No. . ."

Yesterday, I fought the computers. And the computers won.

It started off okay. I'm supporting some teams to get better at planning. It's a fairly good learning environment I've helped set up, though nothing exciting. The examples were real and challenging. My TTT was minuscule. And it's social; one of the learners commented, "No offence, but I think we're learning more from each other than we are from you." (Yay! A Skinner point!) It went as well as can be expected. What with everybody knowing their achievements were doomed to failure and all.

The problem is their IT systems, which demand constant feeding with endless, mostly useless, context-free bits of data. If the computers aren't supplied with a continual diet of checks and balances, they flash red warnings and fire off email warnings to management. There's not time for much except feeding the system's control-freak habit.

Like I say, it was a bad day. We all had a great time. But the computers won.

Nasty Habits
I used to smoke and bite my nails. I tried to give up smoking loads of times and failed. I bought Stop 'n' Grow for my nails and grew to enjoy the taste.

I quit smoking when we had kids. That was easy. The nail-gnawing was tougher; I had twenty years of failure behind me and I got used to thinking it would never happen. But recently I noticed I'd stopped that too, without even trying. I cut out caffeine just before Christmas. My fingers were a window on my nervousness and agitation, apparently.

Training at work is often worse than useless. Some workers are so frustrated by the sheer amount of time they spend feeding the above compliance-junkie IT systems (and, consequently, not having time for actual work) that they're showing signs of workplace stress. And how does the organisation deal with this stress? Have a guess in the comments, though I suspect the answer is all-too obvious.

Many of the problems that workers have in organisations are not something any amount of training will help. Because it's the organisations which need fixing, not the people. I quit smoking and nail-biting when my systems changed. Managers need to work on their systems before they start 'behaviour change' programmes for their staff.

Pointing Checking
Japan, home of some of the busiest railways on the planet, is also the birthplace of Yubisashi Kakunin. Which translates as 'Pointing Checking' or Pointing and Calling. And they don't just use it on trains; people do it anywhere there's danger if you don't pay attention. It's difficult to describe (there's links to some training videos on How to Implement Pointing and Calling below) but workers basically point at things and say 'Check!' to help them remember to pay attention.

It sounds flakier than aromatherapy and looks like OCD. But I have no idea what I think about it. When I spoke to Japanese people I fully expected them to share my amusement and commiserate with the poor souls forced into carrying out this demeaning ritual. My amusement was met with polite tolerance and my commiserations with bemusement. It's just what some people in Japan do when they're responsible for the safety of hundreds of people.

I suppose you could call it a kind of training, or a job aid, at a push. But I prefer the Japanese description - it's a Total Participation Campaign. (And it's very effective.)

If I were to go back to a client and suggest a Pointing Checking initiative, I'd be laughed out of the building. But their own systems have pretty much the same effect. (Ditto most meetings, internal reports, still having Internet Explorer, MailMarshall or other hyper-aggressive firewall etc etc etc) Huge parts of the work that Learning Professionals and educators do is about sticking tape over a crappy product.

SMART targets in the wild
A great deal of the training and conditioning that Learning Professionals receive pushes you to focus on SMART Learning Objectives after careful Needs Analysis. And this is fine in school, where the really excellent teachers plan "exhaustively and purposefully—for the next day or the year ahead—by working backward from the desired outcome". This is fine because they set the exam and they know exactly what the desired outcome is. Analysis in the classroom is fine.

But in the wild, analytical thinking is less appropriate than synthesis and Systems Thinking. Training and Education struggle to be useful outside of a Total Participation Campaign.

Further Information
If you're interested in Japan, instructional films or general weirdness click through to How to Do Pointing and Checking in your Workplace below. I found the third film entrancing (but struggled to keep awake during the other two).

There's links to more information (and diagrams!) on Pointing and Checking over at Hypergogue: Put our Heart into your Fingers, Point and Call, Okay!

Direct links to the videos, very poor quality, sound in English. Part 1:
Are you Pointing and Calling?

And Part 2:
How to Point and Call, Basic Applications

And the absolutely unmissable Part 3:
Overcoming Workers' Embarrassment

In Part 3, I couldn't help but be reminded of the Internet Time Alliance. I can just see Jay Cross and Harold Jarche leading a Pointing and Calling Social Learning initiative. :)

Obligatory last note: to be honest, I'm not sure if Systems Thinking doesn't apply to schools too. I don't know very much about schools so I've moderated my tone above. One thing I am sure of is that the current mix of clearly defined 'subjects' and exams is mostly stupid. I'd be interested to hear from anybody who actually works in a school, though.

[Massive UX Fail image is from rdolishny on Flickr]

iPad Fever: Part 2 - The Apple Way is not the right way for learning

2010-01-28T23:04:00.006Z

This is the second part of a two-part post.

In the first I talk about why the iPad is the most exciting thing in Learning & Development since forever.

This one's about the potential dangers of using an Apple tablet for educational purposes. (And how it's probably not that bad after all.)

Part 2
The iPad will change everything, if only indirectly. There are some worrying features that Learning Professionals need to watch out for.

As you can see, I'm excited about the potential for tablet PCs. But not necessarily about the Apple iPad. The lack of proper Flash support is a symptom of the Apple Problem. They're just not team players. (If you're not a geeky person, Flash is the technology used in a lot of games and animations on the web - as well as most of the annoying adverts. . .)

Learning is messier than some care to admit
Education and training is a messy business. A good learning experience will draw on as wide a set of materials and sources as possible. The Apple Way is not exactly conducive to the if-it-works-it-must-be-good approach:

"Jim Groom, an instructional technologist at the University of Mary Washington, expressed weariness with all the hype around the Apple announcement. He said he is concerned about Apple's policies of requiring all applications to be approved by the company before being allowed in its store, just as it does with the iPhone. And he said that Apple's strategy is to make the Web more commercial, rather than an open frontier. "It offers a real threat to the Web," he said."

Steve Jobs has said that Apple is a company that "stands at the intersection of Technology and the Liberal Arts." But it's more accurate to say that Apple stand at the intersection of Technology and the art of entertainment.

Educational TV
Education and news are about as different from entertainment as pop music is, say, from documentaries. Apple are genius at pop music. Click here, sync there, and as long as you're prepared to pay the price for being locked into their crazily-dependent-on-DRM system, then everything's great.

I wouldn't go as far as MacWorld and say that Apple are plotting to help newspapers renounce free, but I'm not alone in worrying about Apple's intentions. We just don't know what their plans are (though, apparently, "Steve believes in old media and wants them to do well'') and that makes things difficult to plan around. Education, like news, needs free.

If you want to get a flavour of how important 'free' is to education, you only have to look at the crazily complicated copyright world of documentaries.

"Documentaries in particular are property of a special kind. The copyright and contract claims that burden these compilations of creativity are impossibly complex. The reason is not hard to see. A part of it is the ordinary complexity of copyright in any film. A film is made up of many different creative elements--music, plot, characters, images, and so on. Once the film is made, any effort at remaking it--moving it to DVD, for example--could require clearing permissions for each of these original elements. But documentaries add another layer of complexity to this already healthy thicket, as they typically also include quotations, in the sense of film clips. So just as a book about Franklin Delano Roosevelt by Jonathan Alter might have quotes from famous people talking about its subject, a film about civil rights produced in the 1960s would include quotations--clips from news stations--from famous people of the time talking about the issue of the day."

Education News
One of the things about news is that news about news is also news. If a big news service breaks a story and gets it wrong (or right) the other news services don't need to seek permission to call them out on that or quote them. Why would they? That would be insane.

Education's the same. If something happens and other people can learn from it, it's fair game. There are, undoubtedly, exceptions to this. But the principles are the same; we shouldn't need to wait until Newton is in the public domain to teach physics.

Who else but Apple?
I'm still glad it's Apple are doing this. They're the only ones with enough control over everything to make a product that we need, as opposed to something we think we want. We can already see that this will be different to the, erm, Newton. Stephen Fry explains the impact of the iPad best:

"I know there will be many who have already taken one look and pronounced it to be nothing but a large iPhone and something of a disappointment. I have heard these voices before. In June 2007 when the iPhone was launched I collected a long list of “not impressed”, “meh”, “big deal”, “style over substance”, “it’s all hype”, “my HTC TyTN can do more”, “what a disappointment”, “majorly underwhelmed” and similar reactions. They can hug to themselves the excuse that the first release of iPhone was 2G, closed to developers and without GPS, cut and paste and many other features that have since been incorporated. Neither they, nor I, nor anyone, predicted the “game-changing” effect the phone would so rapidly have as it evolved into a 3G, third-party app rich, compass and GPS enabled market leader. Even if it had proved a commercial and business disaster instead of an astounding success, iPhone would remain the most significant release of its generation because of its effect on the smartphone habitat. Does anybody seriously believe that Android, Nokia, Samsung, Palm, BlackBerry and a dozen others would since have produced the product line they have without the 100,000 volt taser shot up the jacksie that the iPhone delivered to the entire market?"

I've gone much more linky in today's post than usual. If you're going to click through to any of the links above, I suggest the Stephen Fry* review, as he seems to be the only person to have actually played with a real iPad and makes a good comparison with an alternate version of the Emperor's New Clothes and the lack of confidence trick.

More on the iPad - technopron and gadget-freakery
Here's a round-up of the best posts on the iPad from today for those as excited as me:

I'm slightly unfair to Apple in the above. Some of the reasons that Apple limits users to what they can do on the iPad and iPhone are technical.
The interface uses very 'earthy' metaphors that behave like real-life counterparts and, generally, gets a big thumbs up for its intuitiveness all supported by 'amazing' animations.
Like many, Huffington Post's 13 Things you Need to Know about the iPad highlights the orifice of iTunes and its lack of Flash support may be designed to remove the clutter of advertising - though it's 'just silly'.
The comment thread at Boing Boing are mostly smart. Like some of the commenters, I'm optimistic about the jailbreaking opportunities for personal use. But I doubt this will help most non-independent learners.
Engadget has a hands-on. Crucial for me, the e-book bit is aces.
Linux and the Chrome operating system will fight back. The specialist devices like GPS and eBook readers are toast.
Winners and Losers: media companies, education and developers vs netbooks, eReaders and carriers.
It's probably wiser to wait for iPad 2.0. But we all know that most people won't.
Nerds only: the success of the iPad depends on memory management.
Tenuous link: the iPad is so exciting because it's so rational and boring?

Updates 29/01/10:
More reactions and thoughts:

Apple iPad disappoints eLearning Industry. The eLearning industry is disappointed that the iPad isn't designed to do what they're already doing. Does anybody know how the iPad will deal with things like Second Life?
Quietly, Apple get rid of computer UI cruft. No, I didn't know what 'cruft' was either. This is really interesting if you're interested in User Interfaces and Human Computer Interactions. Recommended.
Wired on 10 Things Missing from the iPad. Apart from the suspiciously round number of missing things, this is good and an expert techie's view.
Indie Game developers think it's going to be big. "The Wii of general computing."
Why the iPad is crap futurism. "All the problems of TV with none of the benefits." Again, another post missing the bits outside the box (ie 'us') but interesting, nonetheless.
The Apple iPad is just ahead of its time. Interestingly, they see it as a 'replacement for paper'.

Videos
You'll have to learn a lot of weird little gestures:

Though some of the gestures seem very familiar:

The iPad - watch more funny videos

And it's not the smallest Mac out there:

But, at least it fits in a manila envelope:

*And also because I am sworn to love, honour and obey Saint Sir Steven because he's lovely. You have to be British to understand this, but I wish he'd get over his squeamishness and have a baby with Kathy Burke already.

iPad Fever: Part 1 - chunky and clunky are just two of the good things about the iPad

2010-01-28T22:44:00.001Z

This is a two-part post.

One that's mostly about Learning & Development (though, as usual I jump around the shop using words like education and training and whatever else I'm thinking of.)

And another about the dangers of relying on Apple for all our innovation (with a smattering of technopron linkage for geeks - don't worry, I've marked the gadget-freakery clearly and you're free to ignore it. In fact, you probably should.)

Part 1
The iPad is just a chunky big iPhone with a clunky keyboard. And that's exactly why it's going to have a massive effect on training, education and eLearning.

People are banging on about how it's just a big iPhone and how it's merely good and how Steve Jobs' presentation lacked the wow factor of previous Apple launches. And It doesn't have proper Flash support or support multi-tasking. (According to Hitler, anyway - Warning: NSFW YouTube linkbait video)

Google Wave is not as good as email at email
Remember Google Wave? Blah blah it's hard to use blah blah it's just like email blah blah. And all before anybody had actually used it. The thing about Google Wave is that it's all true, it is absolutely rubbish - if you use it as email.

But that's not what it's for. As Max Klein points out, what it's for is massive fights, mulitple conversations and not losing important documents in the clutter of your inbox:

"It was not always like this. There was a time just a few months ago when I did not have google wave. I think of that time with horror - because that epoch was marked with conflicts, total chaos, money was being lost every day, fights were happening between me and my collaborators. Google Wave came in, and within a couple of weeks, a heavenly peace had descended on my business."

I know this is a learning blog, but you will never convince me that structured massive fights aren't a positive learning environment. Especially when mixed with periods of heavenly peace.

Untethered but not life-changing?
Roughly speaking, the iPad reactions fall into two camps. There's the yay-sayers like Steve Woodruff on how the iPad marks a turning point for increasingly untethered doctors:

"First of all, the pace at which doctors are using smartphones as part of their practice (and especially iPhone/iPod Touch) is accelerating dramatically, as is uptake/usage of the applications. Younger doctors especially will not want to practice untethered medicine.

Second, we are now at a place where the convergence of form factor, power, connectivity, affordability, and functionality argue for widespread adoption. An iPhone screen is pretty small. A laptop is inconvenient. An iPad which can be used for data lookup, data entry, point-of-need multimedia education and reference, and access to electronic health records – what’s not to like?"

And there's the meh-sayers like Learning Solutions Magazine saying that it's more of the same:

"Although there were no life-changing features in the iPad . . . because of the bigger display, it is potentially a better platform for mobile learning than the iPhone or the iPod Touch, although the iPad (like the iPod and iPhone) does not support Flash.

. . . e-Learning creators can use the Developers Kit to whip up well-designed, interactive content, including educational games and simulations, that take advantage of the larger screen real estate, the multi-touch display, and the accelerometer in all models. The 3G models will also be capable of supporting location-based learning. Given a connection to the Internet via WiFi or 3G, social networking from the iPad should be a breeze. This is all good for asynchronous e-Learning.

Synchronous e-Learning on the iPad as shown today presents some problems. . ."

I don't need the second opinion
I have to say, I'm with the doctors on this one. The iPad will change things. And I think it's in Synchronous eLearning that things will change. Here's two reasons why:

1. It's not really got a proper keyboard.
This is probably a good thing. Anything that helps people break their writing habit and draw diagrams and mindmaps and back of the napkin stories in their learning and collaborating is a good thing. Relax, there is a keyboard for all you text-heads, this just balances things out a little.

2. It's just a big iPhone.
This is the killer app. You can't sit round an iPhone. The screen's too small. More importantly, you can't sit round a laptop either. There's only one mouse to fight over. It's always someone's laptop to sit round. But the iPad can sit on a table in front of people who can all lean forward and make marks on the screen. If there's anything that will cure us of Picard's Syndrome, it is this.

We understand Synchronous eLearning now to mean an instructor and learners doing their thing at the same time. It's classroom learning in a funky new classroom. But it's learners who'll be able to synchronise with an iPad.

It's natural for all the reviews and Learning Solutions magazines to focus on the technical specification. And this explains why some people felt Steve Jobs' presentation fell a little flat - no exciting new tech. But they're analysing the iPad in terms of its parts, not its components.

The most exciting new component is us.

(I think this will be huge. As I Tweeted - and was ReTweeted - yesterday:

It's cheap and it's got good text-entry UI. It's sit-roundable. That's the last barriers to Mobile Learning down. #TKO

What do you think? Have I fallen for the hype and entered Steve Jobs reality-distortion field?

Image of iPad-discussing dolls is from Kathy Sierra with the following caption:
"Ridiculous #19 -- the power of perception. Not that it will matter when the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field engulfs us all. A week from now we will ALL be asking, "Why would a feminine product want to name itself after a computer?"

Just-in-time sexy education and training

2010-01-26T23:52:00.001Z

What's Jessonade?
You can't control how fast (or how slow) some things happen. We were getting close to home when she asked me, "Daddy, what's Jessonade?"

You can just tell when you enter an empty house. We don't need to resort to anything like a Sixth Sense to explain this. The seven that we know about are plenty good enough. The air is still, we don't hear any of the signs associated with occupation. It's pretty similar with kids; you just know when they're asking something important.

So, I could feel that 'jessonade', whatever it was, was important.

One of the things you learn with kids is that, sometimes, it's important not to laugh when they do something funny or to show too much interest in their questions. Laughter and greater than usual interest are scary.

"Jessonade, jessonade, what's that? I don't think I've heard of that," I said. "Is it like lemonade?"

This was a very weak joke. The way she said it, the word had the stress on the first syllable, JESS-onade.

"No, like in Rwanda," she said.

Explaining genocide to an 8-year old from Hackney is much harder than you'd imagine. She went to a school with more than thirty mother tongues and lacked a sense of how people could be so different you'd want to exterminate them.

"They said that women were raped."

You'll notice that this sentence doesn't contain a question mark. But I refer you to the previous remark on Sixth Senses and empty houses.

So, that's how my daughter got her first taste of sex education. You can't explain rape without sex. So we talked about sex and rape as we sat on the kerb a few steps away from the front door.

Haphazard learning
I learned about sex in a slightly more haphazard manner.

Fighting with my sister, I uttered the immortal words, "Get off me, you . . . pimp!" Mum was on me like a lynch mob.

A burning curiosity, coupled with an ostentatious sense of injustice, forced me to turn to a less reliable source of information when my mother decided my protestations of innocence ("It's just a word! What does it mean? It means something, doesn't it? Tell me, I just liked the sound!") were a ruse. Which was Gary, our 15-year-old occasional babysitter and confirmed child-hater. Gary soon discovered that the word, 'prostitute' wasn't moving things forward as much as he'd hoped. And, well, you can imagine the rest of the conversation.

So, my daughter gets her first sex education from me. And I make sure that, by the time we're finished, it's more about love than rape. And I get mine from Gary, the misopedist babysitter. And he makes sure I know enough synonyms for prostitute and sex to impress my friends in the playground.

Just-in-time learning not just-in-case. . .
This is Just-In-Time learning. You might've seen the positive example in the news recently when an American in Haiti used his iPhone to teach him first aid and stay conscious while trapped under rubble.

It's important stuff. Read Chris Atherton's (@finiteattention) latest blog post, The search for context in education and journalism (wicked problems, Wikipedia, and the rise of the info-ferret) on students suffering from something which sounds like learned helplessness:

It’s not about having access to the information; all my students have Internet access at least some of the time. Too many (N > 0) of my students are just not in the habit of looking for information when they get stuck, like someone forgot to tell them that the Internet is good for more than just email and Facebook.

How did they get this way? I would suggest that they didn't. We did. We taught them that learning is timetabled and planned. We taught them that learning happens in order.

How did we do this? Good question, I'll be covering that in a future post. (Yes, yes, I know there's no 'us' any more but I still need to get paid for my work - so, for the time being I am 'we' and they are 'them'. Ha ha ha hee hee hee wo ho ho.)

The obligatory bit where I'm slightly cross
Students don't ask because they're waiting to be told. Workers refuse tasks until they're 'trained up'. It's one thing to struggle to provide just-in-time learning opportunities due to resource constraints. But many of our learners in school and at work are actively prevented from pursuing things that interest them at a time that suits them.

How do I know this? I've done it. I've trained other people to do it. (Not sure about this? Teach an observed class and deviate from your lesson plan and see what happens.) And I've had it done to me. I once waited a month to advertise posts I needed to fill, like, yesterday because the next recruitment and selection training (compulsory, natch) was scheduled for once a quarter. The last organisational induction I attended was delivered by people who'd worked in the organisation for less time than me. And it was all okay because there was 'no way round it'.

We need a JIT strategy (where's that sarcasm mark when I need it)
It's tempting to see blog posts like this as idealistic or impractical. Yes, we know that the curricula teach the map not the territory - and that there's good reasons for this. But the thing about just-in-time learning, though, is this:

You can't stop it.

If you're involved in managing an organisation (or lecture in a university), you're choice isn't between just-in-time learning or meticulously scheduled timetable of theoretically sound learning interventions.

Nope, the choice is me or Gary.

Notes on Just-In-Time (JIT)
The reason for writing this post was that most of the people I work with have got no idea what JIT means. And I think it's less likely to confuse/enrage/turn them off than 'informal learning' or learning through social media or unworkshops or whatever else people like me blather on about on Twitter. (By the way, you should follow me on Twitter. Do you know why so many blogs have the 'You should follow me. . .' thing? And what does this mean for the future of teacher and trainer training? All will be revealed.)

The philosophy of JIT is simple. Inventory is waste.

It's interesting to compare this idea with the idea of knowledge stocks and knowledge flows. Harold Jarche has written about this Knowledge Management concept for learning:
The web for learning - from stock to flow
Learning is conversation
Connect, aggregate, filter then train

Most school and training is about building up your inventory.

The phrase Just-In-Time is from the world of things like Lean and Taichi Ohno of Toyota. Which is interesting, but this blog's not the right place to go into it. (Although I kind of did a bit last August with a post on the Five Why technique.)

More posts on Just-in-Time Learning:

Jeff Utecht at The Thinking Stick talks about something I think most trainers and eLearning designers are familiar with, when you're only a half-step ahead of the people you're teaching.
Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror talks about the only way to deal with learning when you're faced with something as fast-moving as talking to computers.
Incident Blog on a man who helped his wife deliver a baby by consulting his Blackberry.
Continuous Learning Lessons from Leaf Blowing - I just like this post a lot (thanks @usablelearning)

If any of you have written a JIT post (or a near-JIT post like the leaf blowing one), let me know and I'll add it to the list.

I had a play around with some ideas on types of learning and where JIT might fit into a Learning & Development strategy/plan over at Hypergogue. The thoughts and diagrams are based on Jane Hart's ideas at C4LPT.

As always, I'm curious to know what other people think.

Back-to-front eLearning: scaling your jackasses

2010-01-14T00:25:00.001Z

. . . the thing that we all do at some point: talk expertly about something we don't actually know anything about. It's so common, explains This American Life contributing editor Nancy Updike, that some friends of hers invented an imaginary magazine devoted to such blathering. It's called "Modern Jackass."

So goes the introduction to an episode of This American Life, unquestionably the greatest radio show/podcast on the planet. (Disagree? I'd like to hear your suggestions in the comments!)

In the radio programme, there's a segment on an electrician named Bob Berenz. Who thinks he's found a way to disprove Newton and Einstein. Apparently, this is much more common than you would imagine. It's nice to give in to your inner jackass once in a while.

So, in the same spirit, let me ask a question: what if all eLearning has got it wrong?

To answer this question, I'll have to resort to a bit of conflation, the creation of a straw man or two and, frankly, some outright speculation. (Bonus points for people who manage to spot my logical fallacies and point them out in the comments. And, by the way, not all the logical fallacies will be mine.)

Still, I think I am right. And all you eLearning designers have got it wrong.

Danger: accidental instructional designers!
Karl Kapp thinks that unqualified instructional designers should Just Say No:

Perhaps when people find themselves in the situation of accidentally becoming an instructional designer, they should back off. They should refuse to design instruction without proper training! (rather than jump into unknown territory with both feet).

He reasons that training is necessary because:

. . . instructional designers are required to make content scalable to large numbers of people and to make the material more "digestible" by applying instructional strategies to aid retention, reinforce transfer and assist in recall.

Scalability
And this seems to be a big part of eLearning's appeal. It's scalable because its digital and there's not that much difference between having one learner or one thousand.

So, qualified ISDs (instructional designers) produce eLearning roughly like this:

They put in all their training in theory (cognitivist or constructivist) and methodology (eg ADDIE or other defined workflow). And the output is effective and/or efficient learning, evidence-based evaluation and scale.

Ubiquitous Rationalisation
There is a problem with all this scale, though. It comes at a price:

Students need to know how to approach and problem solve messy problems.

Good questions should have information missing, so students can learn to figure out what else they need to know.

Intuition can be an excellent tool in the problem-solving toolbox, if you can learn how use it well.

These problems don’t necessarily have a single, tidy, correct answer.

This is Julie Dirksen's summary of a presentation by Dan Myer on how (and why) to be 'less helpful' in teaching. The world's a messy place and efforts to try to control it will always come back to haunt you. Simply put, you can't reduce the complexity of a task. You can only shift the burden.
The price of scalable eLearning is that you leave all the complex stuff out.

Julie runs through five different ways to add in complexity or ambiguity to eLearning. But, as she puts it, they all kind of suck. For ambiguity, you need people.

Enter the Jackass
To fix this, you need to turn eLearning on its head. You need to have a quiet word with your qualified Instructional Designers and point out that they've got their model completely back-to-front.

Scale is not a benefit. It's a cost.
Scale is not something you get out of eLearning. It's not a happy accident that people built the internet and then suddenly noticed that, hey, we can fit everybody in here! Scale is something you put in.

To develop eLearning that goes beyond basic rule-based procedural instructions (ie for jobs that have been or soon will be outsourced) you have to start with scale. Instead of asking, "Will this work for a group of people?" You should start by assuming that you'll have to work with groups of people. You have no choice. ISDs should be producing eLearning that looks like this:

What should the content look like?
Web pages. Wiki pages. Google Waves. Reddit-style comment threads. Media from meetings and workshops. Links to blogs and micro-blogs. The eLearning should protrude onto and overlap with the real world. The form follows the function.

Two massive, major, erm, problems
You don't need qualified ISDs for this. It's nice if you have them. They'll always be useful. But you don't need them.
You don't need a Learning Management System (or a VLE) for this. You need the web or a good intranet.

Scale is a critical success factor not a side-effect. Digital solutions, by definition, require scale.

[Classroom image: imgur]

Resolutions: More flavours, Less Texty

2009-12-29T14:55:00.002Z

There are two things about the web today - WEB 2.x! - that blogs don't take advantage of:
1. Why are blogs so texty? Most blog posts are resolutely print-like save for the hyperlinks. Why?
2. Why are blogs so readerly? Web 2.x is the Read/Write web. Why don't more blog posts allow collaboration?

Why are blogs so texty?
Smashing Magazine explored texty blog posts in their Death of the Boring Blog Post piece in November, from a design perspective. But there's more to this than boringness and design. Some of the most inspiring things I saw on the web last year weren't text but something else.

I loved this presentation by Alan Cooper on Agile - "The Wisdom of Experience" (it's from 2008 but I found it last year via @choosenick's - AKA Nick Marsh - Service Design blog). And I loved @iOPT's - AKA Donald Clark - series on Agile Learning, which culminated in this Periodic Table of Agile Learning.

While I was posting on using less texty documents to Make Your Intranet Suck Less I thought: why am I not doing the same with this blog?

I've added the odd, slightly sketchy image to the posts. And I've embedded a few 'objects' like Slideshare presentations, animations, Audiboo and YouTube movies. (How to make your intranet suck less has probably the biggest selection of embeds.) But the embedded objects have always been supported/framed by text. Why do I always start with a Presumption of Text?*

Looking back at posts over the last few months, there are quite a few which would have worked better as Slideshare presentations, for instance. There may even have been a few suitable for Audioboo, film clips, animations or cartoon strips. Visitors should have to work as little as possible to get the point. Good writing's important (here's hoping that gets better too) but some media are intrinsically more effective for certain types of message. The Presumption of Text is based on convenience - for me, not you.

So, here's New Year's resolution No. 1 - make this blog less texty.

If you want to see what this might look like, jump down to the end of the post for details.

Why are blogs so readerly?
People are big on talking up 'community' and the Read/Write web. Why aren't there more collaborative blog posts? Comments are all well and good. But they don't permit deletion.

It's only 'collaborative' if people can add to AND take away from the work. Commenting is mere eLaboration.

I searched everywhere and failed to find a way to embed a wiki into a blog post. But I did find how to embed a Google Wave. I can think of loads of cool things to do with this - and I'll go into that in future posts - Slow Motion GMT-friendly #lrnchat anybody? But for now, here's me asking you to help me out with my texty problem. There's a link to a How To article embedded in the Wave and here. If you're still not sure after reading it, drop a comment and I'll stick up some screenshots or something. If I can do it, I'm pretty sure anybody can :).

What other forms can I use on this blog to make things clearer, quicker and more shareable?

The Wave is embedded below.
You'll only be able to see it if you're logged into your Google or Wave account.

[What to do if you don't have a Wave account? I have loads of invites and they're being turned around in less than an hour these days, so ding me in the comments or on Twitter and we'll sort you one out. (Please, no bots or chancers - anybody else is fine)]:

*There are some good reasons for getting all texty, of course.

The fact that email subscribers and other people might be reading this on a mobile device, for instance. Half the things I subscribe to make almost no sense at all on my phone. It was only when @dajbelshaw asked me to turn on email subscriptions for this blog that I realised this might be a problem here. Any feedback appreciated - nitpickers and fusspots especially welcomed. All of us non-professionals on the web need all the Usability help we can get, I think.
Immediacy and relatively low levels of self-censorship - this is why I started the Hypergogue blog. Posts over there are much simpler, more frequent and more, ahem, wrong. I think I'm subconsciously trying to pick a discussion with people.
The 'form' of the blog post is relatively well-understood and people are skilled skimmers, scanners and filterers.
Screen readers
Cut and paste-ability

PS I'm going to try an experiment when I get back to the UK (I'm in Japan at the moment) and rewrite one of the posts in another medium or form. Any requests? My own preference is this one Science, Baby Einstein, Teletubbies and workplace learning because I know that only one person got what I was on about - despite it being on the subject perhaps closest to my heart. (Or perhaps, because of. . .) But it doesn't have to be one of mine - it could be one of yours. Drop a comment or, even better, stick something in the Wave.

2010: Discount Teaching and Hypergogues

2009-12-22T06:57:00.000Z

What's it like to be a teacher?
You find teachers pretty much everywhere, here's a non-exhaustive list of people who teach:

trainers, parents, managers, lecturers, professors, business entertainers, gurus, actors, newsreaders, journalists, writers, bloggers, webmasters, teachers, coaches, mentors, colleagues, every single person on the planet

Some people seem to think teaching should be a bit like this:

Others, of a more analytical bent, think it's like this:

However, there's a good deal of evidence that teachers are actually doing something more akin to this:

Examples of teaching like this are everywhere. (English grammar is an especially exemplary example of this.)

I would suggest that teaching is a little like this (from xkcd):

Though some would take issue with this. (There are a vocal group (a minority? a majority?) who claim that teaching is something that you can only do if you are accredited.) But I think this is pretty near to the truth for large numbers of people who teach.

Here's my version, just to be clear (click for bigness):

Jakob Nielsen writes in his latest post, Anyone Can Do Usability, that in usability:

Skill levels form a continuum from beginner to expert; it's not a dichotomy. Every time you learn something, your performance improves. Usability and cooking are particularly suited for continuing education, because anything you learn will remain useful for many years to come. This is why I place so much emphasis on usability training: you get better results for every extra bit you learn.

I feel the same way about teaching and I would add it to the pot along with usability and cooking. Everybody should be doing it. (And almost nobody should be doing only it and nothing else.)

Jakob Nielsen's big idea is Discount Usability. Usability is so important that everybody should do it. We should embrace the amateur because:

The true choice is not between discount and deluxe usability engineering. If that were the choice, I would agree that the deluxe approach would bring better results. The true choice, however, is between doing something and doing nothing. Perfection is not an option. My choice is to do something!

(I'm not even sure that this is true. I'm not even sure that the 'deluxe' approach would bring better results.)

If you look hard enough, you'll find people teaching everywhere. Here's a couple I came across today while busy procrastinating during the writing of this last paragraph. (plus one which I share every chance I get because it's one of my favourites - guess which one?)

Scientists arguing.
Making a game.
Badgering your followers on Twitter (check out the story bit on Elissa Miller)

So, Merry Christmas. I'll leave you with my big question (and project) for next year:

What do you need to know in order to be a 'teacher'?
Do you have to go to an accredited training centre to learn this stuff?
What is it that teachers need to know in order to do what they do well?

I'm pretty convinced that the answers aren't only to be found in schools. And that the marketers and the Knowledge Managers and the Gamers and the UX guys and the Service Design people (and all the other bloggers, Information Architects, programmers, business people, scientists, agents provocateurs, policy wonks, geeks, nerds and dweebs) have got a lot to teach us.

I'm also pretty convinced that the word teacher is ineluctably associated with schools (which is a shame, because many people I know aren't at all convinced that school is about teaching. . .)

So, I'm calling the project, Hypergogue: a totally made-up word for people who teach but don't necessarily have the word teacher in their job title. And the project has two goals:

to be a resource that people could use to teach themselves to teach
to be a resource that learners could visit to find out how good (or bad) their teachers are

There's a posterous blog where I'm collecting interesting tidbits. There's a Twitter list of Hypergogues (not to be confused with Venessa Miemis' excellent list of metacogs.) There'll be a website ready for Easter. (It's currently here if anybody has any suggestions of what they'd like to see on it.)

I'd love to know if you think this idea is good/bad/terrible/vaguely unsettling/incomprehensible. So please leave a comment or @ me on Twitter.

See you in January when I'll be sharing my ten new year's resolutions (with some linky goodness, natch) and asking for help: why is it that I hate eLearning so much and can anybody persuade me how wrong I am?

2009, Year of The Google

2009-12-21T15:06:00.000Z

It's the end of the year and I've got two more blog posts in me. This one and a brief Happy Christmas tomorrow, just in case there are people still at work in need of something with a sugary spurious Learning & Development-based centre. It's traditional towards the end of the year to look backwards, so that's what I'm going to do in this post.

There's going to be a lot of posts this year about Twitter. Here's an early contender for the best of that particular bunch by Venessa Miemis who deals much better than I could with the realisation that Twitter is really really important.

And, if I was talking about me personally, I'd have to agree. 2009 will always be the year that I got Twitter and Twitter got me. I'm smitten and can't imagine life without it.

But, I'm guessing that, like me, you have to spend a good deal of your time in the offline world working with offline people. People who aren't on Twitter. People who don't read blogs. For them, 2009 was the year of The Google.

I've been lucky enough to take part in a number of strategic planning events this year, as manager (before I quit my job - yay!), as board member and as facilitator. Strategic Planning events are often pretty samey in the way they're organised. Participants cover forests of flipchart paper to SWOT PESTs while wearing Six Hats and drinking indifferent coffee.

This year, unusually, the conclusions were similar too. People have finally noticed that The Google is affecting everybody. They realise that there isn't a single business in the private, public or non-profit sector that won't be affected by The Google. Everybody's terrified.

This might seem like old news to you. But I'm talking about people whose only connection to the web is via Microsoft Outlook. People who pay underlings to Google stuff for them and book train tickets. These are people whose idea of hi-tech is to send amusing email attachments to each other. All of them can see that the Google is going to affect them or wipe them out - possibly without even trying.

In one of these strategic planning days I took part in, The Google was in every box of the the PEST and the SWOT. And these aren't IT businesses. These are organisations from right across the board. Even a tech-savvy reader like you would struggle to see the immediate effect that The Google might have on them. But they can feel it. (This is one of the silly things about strategic planning days - the findings are often code for 'stuff we probably should have realised last year'.)

Of course, they don't really mean Google Google. Just like we 'Google' things on the web when we actually mean 'search', these people mean disintermediation, obsolescence and displacement.

And they're not just afraid of the bad stuff. They're also beginning to realise that they have whole departments of people they don't need any more. And that those long-term contracts with suppliers which used to feel canny, now feel like handcuffs. They realise they're going to have to face all this and fire some of their friends and restructure whole organisations. Some of them realise that paying people to Google stuff for them won(t wash for much longer. They're not looking forward to any of this. (Yes! We can save hundreds of thousands of pounds a year! Oh, sh. . .)

Because of Malcolm Gladwell, everybody's familiar with the idea of the Tipping Point. So I won't carry on overegging the lily any more.

But 2009 was the year of The Google. For every company and organisation in every area of public, private and not-for-profit enterprise.

Even those in education and training.

2010's going to be fun.

Intranets as a learning resource

2009-12-18T05:39:00.000Z

This is a guide to setting up something like an intranet as Knowledge Management and Learning resource. I've used a capital 'L' in learning to make it seem more important. This 'intranet' is suitable for a couple of hundred employees and could be a permanent thing for an organisation. Or a temporary thing for a project.

Note: I use the term 'intranet' very loosely throughout. I'm talking about the alternatives to using anything from a custom-built solution to something like a SocialText wiki or Microsoft Sharepoint.

First, some back story:
I once took over the leadership of a team of Learning Consultants (notice the capital letters). One of the first things I noticed was the impossibility of their ever refinding any of the work they had done previously. They had been lucky enough to have a 'Resource Development Worker' who knew where everything was. Then she left and they were screwed. I locked myself in a room to investigate and search out the handover notes my predecessor had promised were there on the network drive.

I ended up deleting hundreds of thousand of files. This for a team of five people. How did this happen?

The miracle of copy and paste is not unlike folding a piece of paper. How thick would a piece of paper be if you folded it fifty times? The answer is surprising. Starting a new project, people would simply copy and paste whole folders of files into new locations for convenience. Even doing this a few times makes things interesting. In one section I found literally thousands of folders with an average content of less than one document. In some sections there were folders containing literally thousands of files. It's fair to say they'd had their share of lumpers and splitters.

I never found the handover notes. The team was one of about 50 in the organisation who all had similar problems. A significant proportion of people sent themselves documents simply to store them in their inbox, away from meddling clickers in a system of their own choosing. Even though the Mordac-style IT manager had set a limit of 100MB on email accounts (and set up the system to block email after the limit had been breeched).

Think about this: customers' emails weren't getting through because our own IT department was blocking email accounts in order to save space that people were using in order to escape from a filing system containing millions of unusable files. Your organisation is probably the same.

It doesn't have to be that way. I took my team 'into the Cloud' with Salesforce.com (despite Mordac's squeals of protest and a threat 'not to be held responsible when it all went terribly wrong). But this is what I wish I'd done.

How to set up a Knowledge Management and Learning resource in your organisation -
A quick, dirty, naive step-by-step guide:

1. Check your premises

Knowledge managers should lead by example when it comes to finding creative solutions to practical problems. The first step along this path is to question our premises. When we fail to do this, we pursue outdated goals and methods, thereby relegating our KM programs to an increasingly irrelevant position within the firm.

Above and Beyond KM, KM's worst enemy by @VMaryAbraham

It's a cliche. But you have to ask yourself what you want to achieve. Search the web and you'll find guides to looking for the perfect Learning Management System or intranet solution. But these are often clunky and bloated. And the smaller, neater solutions are limiting. The limited feature-set of something like the 37signals software apps is elegant and perfect for administrivia. I tried Backpack with the team I mentioned above and they liked it, but only as a replacement for Outlook.

Knowledge sharing does not have to equal intranet.

2. Abandon the idea of an IT budget

If the local bank were offering a sale on dollar bills, ninety cents each, how many would you buy?
Most rational people would say, "I'll take them all please." Especially if you had thirty days to pay for them.
So, why, precisely, do you have an ad budget?
If your ads work, if you can measure them and they return more profit than they cost, why not keep buying them until they stop working?
And if they don't work, why are you running them?

Seth's blog, Do ads work? by Seth Godin

Knowledge Management systems are no different. When I was looking into sorting out the mess in the situation above, I didn't have a budget, initially. What I was supposed to do was to negotiate with the IT Manager and 'make my case' for a piece of his budget. Which plainly wouldn't have worked as his budget was tied up maintaining rooms full of largely redundant servers.

What I did was work out how much money we were losing through lost customers. And how much I though we could gain from getting new customers. If you gain more than you lose, then you're fine. (Sorry, reality is slightly more complex than this - but not much)

The number I came up with astonishing. So much so, that I took it to the Finance Director for her to check with a sheepish expression on my face. (If you don't realise why this was such an unusual thing for me to do, then I'm happy for you.)

You can afford this.

3. Forget the idea of 'ownership'
Either you all own it or nobody does.

This is the weakest point of my guide. Having a manager to 'drive adoption' is stupid. But not everybody likes their job or feels strongly about helping things get better.

4. Use off the shelf solutions. And lots of them
Tumblr is free. Posterous is free. Wordpress is free. The internet is free. Facebook is free. Twitter (or Yammer) is free. There's loads more where they came from.

These solutions are tried and tested. People know how to use them and like them. All of them are capable of serving RSS feeds too, which means you can do interesting things with the information:

You can get information out of systems in lots of different ways. RSS is amazing.

5. Blow all your money on toys
If I had my time again, I wouldn't spend my money on 'solutions'. I'd make it brain-friendly and spend it on toys. Like Flip video cameras. (Incidentally, just in case you think I'm being frivolous about 'toys', consider this. One of the terrible open secrets of the IT industry is that organisations start using something like Sharepoint because the managers need it on their CVs as it's an industry standard. You probably know an IT or Knowledge Manager - ask them if I'm exaggerating and wait for the rueful smile. How's that for a toy?)

Spend more money on input devices than anything else.

6. Turn yourself inside out
If you find information useful, the chances are your customers will too. Give them access to your Knowledge Management systems. In the example I gave above, we ended up storing half of our new files and documents on the customer website - it saved us the trouble of having to email them out all the time.

Keep your Knowledge Management systems separate from your administrivia.

7. Build for people more than data
Knowledge Management experts seem to fall into two categories: those who focus on people and those who focus on information. The latter camp will talk about taxonomies and controlled vocabulary and metadata. And this is all very useful stuff. But, given a choice on how to find out some information, most people prefer to ask.

In the story above, I told you that I deleted hundreds of thousands of files. What I didn't tell you about was the team's outrage. When I asked the IT department if we could recover some of the documents, they gave me a form to fill out. I gave it to the team - and it never got filled in. None of the data was important enough to be worth the trouble of filling out a form.

When we looked at some of the breakthroughs we'd made in our work, we discovered that many of them came from trips to the bathroom or - amazingly - by picking up lost documents from the group printer. ("What, you're working on this too?!")

Knowledge Management systems are about making your experts visible to each other. Your experts are all your staff.

Basically, I'm talking about blogging, chatting and Personal Learning Networks. It works for millions of us online, it can work at work too. How wrong am I?

How to make your intranet suck less

2009-12-17T13:44:00.000Z

An intranet can be a powerful tool for learning in organisations. But, very often, the company intranet sucks. One way to overcome this is to make them more social. But this is easier said than done. Here's one suggestion to make intranets more social and less sucky.

Virtue of patience

This morning I visited a Tokyo primary school to see my seven-year-old nephew in concert and was amazed to see they'd laid on a whole orchestra. Why not stick to something simple like the recorder? An orchestra seemed like a bit of a song and a dance to me. I suppose I should have known better. Japanese teachers are just like the rest of us - they like an easy life. But, unlike the rest of us, they're not dumb enough to go for the 'easy' option.

The kids treated us to the theme from the Mickey Mouse Club with ten kids playing the 'call' of the first few notes on a melodian answered by another ten providing a 'response' on xylophones. Add in a bass drum, some tambourines, triangles, drums and, yes, some recorders and you have yourself a show. Each kid simply needs to learn about ten notes and the patience to wait till it's their bit. Guess which is harder for the average seven-year-old?

Virtual Learning

Learning organisations should take of this. Intranets are often used for mundane clerical tasks or as glorified filing systems. But they have the potential to be so much more. You only have to look at something like Facebook or Twitter to see this. This hasn't gone unnoticed by managers.

But success in launching an in-house version of Facebook is far from inevitable, especially if it's half-baked. One company I worked with included some simple (ie rubbish) games on their intranet so that staff had 'something to do at lunchtime'. You can guess how well that went down. It's an example of what's called the creepy treehouse effect in education. From this, the company concluded that further efforts weren't worth it. And guess what? Unless your company has the resources of, say, Facebook your intranet will always seem half-baked.

Here are some other facts which get in the way:

Specially-designed 'enterprise' versions of social media are often ugly, sucky and buggy.
Learning Management Systems and Virtual Learning Environments are as ugly, sucky and buggy as anything on the market.
Managers want to make sure staff are 'on message' so moderate everything
People don't compare their intranet to another intranet. They compare it to Amazon or the BBC website.
Intranets are full of documents written by managers.
Company documents are formal. They're rarely fun.
Intranets tend to reflect the silos of their parent organisations. They often have bits for each department and the HR bit and the training bit. This makes them a Usability nightmare (and results in madness like email bulletins reminding people people not to use email for tasks that can be completed using the intranet - this does happen)
Crappy Information Architecture. Sometimes no Information Architecture.
For every Facebook there's a hundred iYomus which fail.

I don't have a magic cure for the problems above. But I do have an observation. Most organisations will struggle to get anything that feels half as intuitive or with anything like the lobster-trap power of Facebook. So it's silly to even try. But you can have something useful if you remember that intranets are like school concerts. They're easier with an orchestra.

It's at about this point in a typical blog post that my analogies begin to stretch and fray. So, I'll come straight to the point. An orchestra in this case means as many types of content options using as many types of media as you can think of.

What kind of stuff am I talking about?
Some people might make podcasts. If podcasts seem complicated, people might like to record a little interview or they might make Audioboos:
Listen!
Or make a simple animation:
GoAnimate.com: Teaching Personas Scaffold Classroom Management by monica22284

Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It's free and fun!

Or slideuments:

Enterprise 2.0 Knowledge Management - People at the Center

View more documents from T-Systems Multimedia Solutions.

Or multimedia slideshows:

Introduction To Knowledge Management

View more presentations from nickmilton.

Or short films from Ignite days, Pecha Kucha breakfast sessions or Ted talks. Or they might just post semi-random comments on interesting work-related resources. Or semi-random resources on totally random oddities and weirdness. I'm sure I've missed out loads of stuff here. (Or maybe added in too much? Who knows? This is the kind of stuff you don't find out till you try it.)

Loading up shedloads of 'content' is pointless. The main point of the intranet should be social. It's about developing Subject Matter Networks. It's about making your experts more discoverable. It's about Permission Learning. The stuff you upload can be rough and ready around the edges. And it doesn't need to last forever.

Oh, please don't it last forever. How many intranets have I seen with a document with the footer reading something like, "Produced aeons ago, due for review an aeon ago"? If somebody visits an obviously dormant website on the internet, they leave and never come back. Your intranet is no different.

Next post - The naive guide on how to set up a brain-friendly Knowledge Management system to leverage the virality of workers' social graphs in your Small to Medium Enterprise.

Leveraging the virality of bold brain-friendly learning

2009-12-16T13:54:00.001Z

Twitter is good for people saying stuff like. . .
Jargon is so comforting. Here's a tasty piece that I've put together Frankenstein-styley from a number of people on Twitter to protect the innocent:

Seeking to leverage the virality of employees' social graphs for bold brain-friendly pull-learning initiatives?

The saddest thing about this sentence is that it actually kind of makes sense. The trouble is, if a full-on 'change agent' comes to your workplace and starts spouting off like this, they're not liable to get far. Can we rescue our Change Agent from this sticky situation?

Sticky situation. . .
Michael Eury (@stickylearning) has a great post on Viral Expansion Loops, among other things. He knows all about them - and now I do because he's part of my social graph.

Here's the basic idea of a Viral Expansion Loop in organisational development:

Design a learning resource (eg a wiki, intranet, LMS/VLE)
Add content
Add in a bit social networking magic (friending, commenting, <3-ing)
Sit back and admire your handiwork**

Here's a short film explaining how a viral expansion loop starts:

In other words, it's Facebook or Twitter or Ning or Wikipedia or (cough) Babysham. But at work.

Bold Brain-Friendly Pull-learning Initiatives
As if that's not exciting enough you can also use your virally expanding social networking platform for learning - Facebook as a platform for eLearning 2.0!.

Economics of Corporate Learning

View more presentations from jaycross.

Instead of pushing people towards consultants and trainers and clunky eLearning courses, you reap the rewards of your employees socialising and learning from each other. They're pulled towards the honeypot (or the lobster trap) of the network and learn in the way that nature intended - by volunteering to share, observing peers and playing games.

A cynic might say that all this simply encourages people to do the things that come naturally but that the bureaucratic structures of pathological organisations prevents them from doing.

But let's forget the cynics. Back to our hapless jargon-ridden Change Agent. How can we express this idea in a way that even the most old-school, jaded, unnovative, just-two-more-months-till-retirement sexy executive will shout, "Hallelulah!"**

Or should we even try? Is this just another passing phase?

Tomorrow's post: why your intranet should be more like a Tokyo primary school concert.

PS Bonus points for anybody who can spot my rather Freudian typo on the above.

** Of course, without getting too carried away. Not forgetting to measure ROII, for instance. (That's not a typo, by the way)

[Image: Geek and Poke, daily geeky cartoons.]

For more on intranets (and the bold part of above is the bit where we scrap our current intranet solutions), here's a report on Intranet Usability from Jakob Nielsen. Note that it's mostly about 'tasks' and productivity. Which gives you a fairly clear idea of what most intranets are used for - booking travel, annual leave and downloading Word documents.

I'm not at all convinced that using an enterprise version of Facebook, for example, is the right way forward for any organisation that can't afford to make their own version that's at least as good as the real thing. This is one of the key lessons of Harry Beckwith's Selling the Invisible - you don't get to set the quality standards for your products, all your competitors do. Whether they're in your industry or not. It's not just the staff at theme parks who have to smile like the people at Disney. If you're intranet (or your eLearning) isn't like a 'real' website, people will switch off.

The Armageddon Problem

2009-12-03T21:51:00.003Z

First, this is a post about teaching. So here's a little note about what I mean when I say, "teaching."

Teaching happens almost everywhere and pretty much everywhen. In fact, it is almost as common as learning. Some people are schoolteachers. They do a lot of teaching but they also do a lot of stuff that isn't teaching. They don't have a monopoly on the word 'teaching'.*

And, by extension, any training that teachers (see above) do to help them teach is teacher training. Moving on...

A Big Mistake
A while back, I was putting together a team for a big Learning and Development project. It was a small team working on a change project with frontline workers, the lowest paid and least skilled workers in their organisation. I knew I needed a data/systems person, so I started looking for one of those. I also needed somebody else and the choice I had was simple - a trained teacher or a rookie-teacher but experienced frontline worker.

Obviously, the trained teacher wouldn't know much about the area we were working in, but would be able to design processes and help create environments for learning. And vice versa for our rookie. Which one did I go for?

This, by coincidence, is roughly the central plot device of the 1998 film, Armageddon.

For those of you who haven't seen the film, Armageddon is about an asteroid heading to Earth with potentially catastrophic consequences. NASA decide to send a team of oilmen to land on the asteroid to drill to its core, plant explosives and avert disaster. Although the oilmen are 'the best' at what they do (we're talking Bruce Willis here, people), they're all rookies in astronaut years. Hi-jinks ensue.

Around the time of the film's release, I read an earnest article criticising the film from a Learning & Development perspective (not that the nerdy author realised this). Put simply, they said, it would be easier to train astronauts to drill into an asteroid than it would be to train oilmen to become astronauts. Drilling? It's not exactly rocket science.

To my shame, I actually used the phrase 'Armageddon Problem' during discussions of my hiring dilemma and eventually decided to hire a professional teacher. It was easier to 'skill up' a qualified trainer than to train up an experienced worker. Teaching, unlike drilling, is rocket science, I thought.

Let's revisit the problem and see what I would do now
Note that originally, I went for the 'easiest' option. That was stupid. I had two rational choices. I could've sought to reduce the risk of failure or I to maximise positive outcomes.

Would my rookie have caused the project to fail? Almost certainly not. Teaching's just not that hard. Not if you know what you're talking about and you're committed.

Would my rookie have achieved more? Almost certainly yes. For a start, we'd have given a frontline worker the chance to become a better teacher. And the difference in results between a very very good trainer and an average one aren't that great. Plus, my rookie would have all kinds of insights into the processes and experiences of our learners.

As a minimum, we could reasonably expect:

Project with professional teacher = success
Project with rookie = success and an experienced teacher

Why did I make this mistake?
Everybody does this. The example I've given is, I believe, relatively clear cut. But this is exactly the same choice we make every single time we hire a teacher. It's the easy option.

A problem with professional teachers is that they're often baseball players, to use Jeffrey Sonnenfeld's term. They often care more about their profession than they do about the work or the service or the organisation itself. They're like HR people, most CEOs and lawyers in this respect.

Every time you hire a teacher, you rule out any chance of somebody else learning to teach.

Postscript
As somebody's who done a lot of teaching, I also know that appearances can be deceptive. I'd say the chances are it's just as hard to help somebody learn how to drill into rock as it is to train them to be an astronaut. There's something about drilling that involves tacit knowledge and intuition and know-how that I imagine is absent from NASA's shiny machines. (I'm quite willing to be wrong about this. I find the idea of astronauts thumping their control panels like Doctor Who quite appealing.) The point is, I just don't know. My 1998 self says drilling is not rocket science. My 2009 self says rocket science is not drilling.

*There are other words that describe people who teach but who aren't schoolteachers. Like 'trainer', 'coach', 'mentor', 'guru', 'manager' etc. I'm using 'teacher' because it's the one with the most affordance and because this is my blog. I do have an alternative suggestion and I'm in the middle of building a website to showcase it.

Cognitive Load Stories

2009-11-26T23:57:00.002Z

I watched a documentary about disruptive kids. If you know anything about documentaries, you can probably guess that we either (a) follow the kids as they learn not be disruptive or (b) they're not really disruptive and there's something else going on.

This was the second kind. What is the 'something else'? Cognitive Load Theory.

The picture above illustrates a one of the main points below. Probably the main point. What is it? Answers in the comments if you think you know. Only those who get the answer exactly right will receive a chirpy point - and it's about us, the teachers, not the learner.

Background story:
Researchers want to know why some kids are disruptive. They do an experiment. We get to watch.

At the end of a class, the teacher and pupils tidy up the room of all the materials. It is at this point some kids are disruptive. In general, the kids are not disruptive when they're occupied and in learning flow.

The Four Experiments
Experiment one:
The teacher says something like, "Well done. Put away the pens." The result is that everybody does what they're asked and there are no disruptive kids.

Experiment two:
The teacher says something like, "Well done. Put away the pens and then return your books to the cupboard." The results are positive and there are still no disruptive kids.

When we get to Experiment four, something different happens:
The teacher says something like, "Well done. Put away the pens, return your books to the cupboard, put the waste paper in the bins and line up for lunch." The results are startling.

Most of the class immediately set to the task. But some of the kids are frozen to the spot. After a few moments, these kids get restless and start to distract some of the 'good' kids. A few moments more and half the class is diligently carrying out the task while the other half are being 'disruptive'.

I wish I could find this documentary to show you. What you're missing here is the 'disruptive' kids' expressions when the teacher gives them four tasks to carry out. I never ever get tired of six-year-olds giving it the 'WTF?' facial gesture.

What is Cognitive Load Theory and how does it help us understand the kids?
Okay, here's Cognitive Load Theory based on Ruth Clark's (with Frank Nguyen and John Sweller) in her book Efficiency in Learning (link to PDF sample of first chapter). It's my summary, but you can go and read Ruth Clark's chapter if I don't make sense. It's only 15 pages long.

Working memory has a limited capacity
Beyond a certain 'cognitive load', performance will suffer

There are three types of cognitive load; intrinsic, germane and extraneous

Intrinsic = load caused by content
Germane = relevant load caused by a learning activity
Extraneous = irrelevant load caused by a learning activity

Cognitive load is cumulative, not parallel.

We can explain the kids' disruptive behaviour in terms of Cognitive Load Theory:

The teacher gives simple tasks. The intrinsic load of the content itself is low in all four experiments.
In the first three experiments, the kids have to remember one to three instructions. The germane load (ie the instructions for the activity) is also low. Low intrinsic load and low germane load means the task isn't taxing.
In the fourth experiment, the germane load is higher because there are four tasks to remember. Even though the intrinsic load of the task themselves is low, the instructions are too much. Performance suffers.
Not only that, but some of the disruptive kids start to distract the other kids, who are near to maxing out their attentional capacity. This extraneous load is too much for some. Performance suffers.

Cognitive Load Theory explains why your brain sometimes says, "WTF?"

And that's Cognitive Load Theory.

Three problems:

Learning Styles is mostly a load of cobblers, but they are actionable. So people like them (even me, in moderation). Cognitive Load Theory is much harder to make use of. The theory itself is unpersuasive and far less effective than stories like the one above. I have some stories about the Marines and the Rule of Three, but what about you? Can you think of any teachable stories?
Cognitive Load Theory might be suspect. @usablelearning pointed me to this piece which urges that we treat the theory with caution. (But not the above story. See?)
Cognitive Load Theory - even if the theory was sound - is a recipe for North Korean re-educational-camp-style learning experiences. I'll be talking about that in the Soul of a Stick. And, there are alternative ways to maximise attention. Which I'll be talking about it Soul of a Carrot.

If you've made it down this far, chances are you'll be interested in this post which explores a similar theme:

Apprehension Span

It's one of my favourite posts but isn't really actionable, as such. Which is a pity.

[Image: Caleb Brown, who rules.]

The Super-Pattern

2009-11-20T14:55:00.002Z

[Click to make the picture bigger]

Paul Graham is a kind of teacher.

In his case, he's a partner in Y-Combinator, a finishing school for hackers developing web-based applications. In exchange for their guidance, and seed funding ('rarely more than $20,000'), Y-Combinator take a '2-10%' stake in founders' companies. They claim 'the money is by far the smaller component'. He also writes wonderful essays, some of which are designed to help start-ups.

The biggest difference between Paul Graham and a conventional teacher is that he's got skin in the game.

One of his recent essays is called What Startups Are Really Like. Here's how it starts:

I'm in the unusual position of being able to test the essays I write about startups. I hope the ones on other topics are right, but I have no way to test them. The ones on startups get tested by about 70 people every 6 months.

So I sent all the founders an email asking what surprised them about starting a startup. This amounts to asking what I got wrong, because if I'd explained things well enough, nothing should have surprised them.

(I wish more learning professionals would do this rather than give out Happy Sheets. Why do I hate Happy Sheets? The clue is in the name.)

He received over 100 responses detailing the surprises the founders encountered. And one reporting that 'everything was actually fairly predictable'. This is a fairly meagre success rate for the essays. He goes on to list 19 surprises he encountered again and again in the emails.

He also attempts to discover a Super-Pattern:

One's first thought when looking at them all is to ask if there's a super-pattern, a pattern to the patterns.

I saw it immediately, and so did a YC founder I read the list to. These are supposed to be the surprises, the things I didn't tell people. What do they all have in common? They're all things I tell people. If I wrote a new essay with the same outline as this that wasn't summarizing the founders' responses, everyone would say I'd run out of ideas and was just repeating myself.

What is going on here?

When I look at the responses, the common theme is that starting a startup was like I said, but way more so. People just don't seem to get how different it is till they do it. Why? The key to that mystery is to ask, how different from what?

Anybody who's helping people to learn at work (or if you're working in a school or university, helping improve students' meta-learning) should think about this. When we ask this question - different from what? - we tend to think in terms of skills or knowledge-gaps. Teaching skills or knowledge gaps is child's play.

Paul Graham identifies his founders' 'different from what?' as being 'different from a job':

Everyone's model of work is a job. It's completely pervasive. Even if you've never had a job, your parents probably did, along with practically every other adult you've met.

This isn't so much a skills gap as a 'model' gap. It's a Story Gap. Most everything that you teach will have an element of Story Gap. (If you think what you're teaching doesn't have a Story Gap element to it, let me know in the comments and I'll see if I agree.) Here's Paul Graham's conclusion:

You probably can't overcome anything so pervasive as the model of work you grew up with. So the best solution is to be consciously aware of that. As you go into a startup, you'll be thinking "everyone says it's really extreme." Your next thought will probably be "but I can't believe it will be that bad." If you want to avoid being surprised, the next thought after that should be: "and the reason I can't believe it will be that bad is that my model of work is a job."

Image: idea nicked off Marty Neumeier. If you're reading this far you might like Up the Injunction, which is all about the competition that trainers face from real life. And zombies.

Motivational Affordance - Fire, or Exit?

2009-11-14T08:51:00.000Z

I have a friend called Dan. He's a smart guy. Been to college and everything.

Dan went to university in Wales. You'll need to know some things about Wales if you want to understand this story.

Some facts about Wales and going to university in Wales
Welsh is a linguistic (and political) success story. 7.5% of languages are in danger of extinction and Welsh was on a short list of endangered languages in Europe. But no more. Now about a fifth of people in Wales are fluent in Welsh.

One way they've done this is to make Welsh a compulsory option in many public places. Road signs, for example, should always be in Welsh and English (though, this sometimes causes problems). University is a public place so it's natural that Welsh is a feature of life there. When I was in Wales as a fresher, I had to sit through the Vice-Chancellor's welcome speech - an exercise in tedium if ever there was - twice. Once in Welsh (the only way I could tell it was over was when all the Welsh speakers gratefully shuffled out) and once in English (the only way I could tell it was over was when I was woke up with stale breath to a desultory round of applause).

Still, a couple hours of boring speechifying is a small price to pay for saving a language. Why do I think saving a language is so important? More on that later.

Dan's conundrum
Dan was reminiscing the other day about life in Wales. He regrets not taking the time to learn any Welsh. Not that he's completely ignorant, of course. For example, his name, he tells me, means either 'fire' or 'exit'. He's knows this because all the bars he hung around in have this sign everywhere, saying: Allanfa dân

Although this might seem like a totally dumb thing to say, it does betray a certain wisdom. He has shown awareness of the possibility of Welsh having different word order, for example. No, wait - it is a totally dumb thing to say.

Dan was in Wales for three years. He could have asked. Or visited this website. Or even worked it out for himself (have a closer look at the picture and work it out, it's elementary, Watson).

But he didn't. I asked why.

I didn't want to find out that my name meant 'exit'. I kind of liked the idea of my name meaning 'fire'.

(Incidentally, if you're a Welsh speaker, you're probably having thoughts about 'Dan' being different to 'dân' with it's to bach, or little roof, over the 'a'. Leave it. That thought is going nowhere. We're talking about Dan here.)

Ignorance is fun.

Why I love Welsh
I'm passionate about endangered languages. Why?

There is something called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (or something similar). And it basically says that the language you speak influences the way that you think (or, words to that effect). So, for every language that dies out, we not only lose a few pretty-sounding words and some amusing grammatical idiosyncracies - we lose a whole way of thinking. Or that's what I understood after I read about it in a science fiction book.

Is the Sapir-Whorf thing any more than a hypothesis? Is it a fully-formed thesis? I have absolutely no idea. And I don't even care. The idea is so startlingly beautiful and has such a motivational affordance that, like Dan, I would be disappointed if it weren't true.

(Like Dan, I could have visited this site any time I wanted to.)

Another argument for fun?
If you're helping people to learn, there will always be cases where not knowing is more fun than knowing. It's also important to realise that some people are more logical, more rigorous, more skeptical because it's more fun. Anger is fun.

It would be a sign of self-serving bias if you were to take credit for your beauty. Is it any more credible to take credit for being logical or skeptical?

Some people see helping people to learn (whether it's teaching or managing or coaching or marketing or whatever) as being all about:

my facts vs their ignorance

That's naive. Especially with adults. It's much more like:

my facts vs their facts

But even that is a dangerous illusion. This is the reality of teaching.

my fun vs their fun

Simple but no simpler

2009-11-11T12:32:00.003Z

Helping people to learn is all about simplicity. But it's easy for a love of simplicity to become the fetish of minimalism. Minimalism is aesthetically pleasing but bad for learners. Simplicity should focus on chemistry not being catchy.

The best apple crumble in the world?
I've been making apple crumble for thirty years now. It's the first dish I ever cooked on my own as a ten-year-old in Home Economics class. I still make them and, last week, I made my best one yet. How is it possible to be making, thirty years on, tastier versions of a dish which contains only four ingredients (apples, sugar, flour and butter - plus spice, if you're feeling adventurous*)?

Simple as possible. . .
Here's how school taught me to cook apple crumble:

Take equal parts flour, sugar and butter
Rub this into crumbs
Put crumbs on top of sliced apples in a dish
Place the dish in an oven and cook till it's golden

Thirty years on and I still remember the recipe. It's a model of simplicity. But it's only good for children.

. . .but no simpler
When I made my first apple crumble, I felt like I was being my mum, which was fun. Make-believe is fun. The barely game of pretending is fun for adults too but we're usually past the stage of pretending to be mummies and daddies. We want to pretend to be Heston Blumenthal or Ferran Adrià.

Pretending games for grown-ups
The simple recipe only allows you to copy the crumble. An adult would want to make it their own, to make it better. We want new super-powers . This means teachers and trainers of grown-ups channeling Kathy Sierra. Or Amy Hoy. Perhaps even making yourself obsolete (with a hint of Microwave Learning Objectives).

As everybody says, simple is good. But brevity can come at the expense of more than meaning. It can kill any sense of fun and play - or, learning, as we like to call it when we're at work.

Design Thinking
So where should we look for answers to our simple vs simplistic problem in the Greatest Toolshop in the World?

Design Thinking seems to be an umbrella term for a whole load of related approaches to problem-solving and innovation (I've included some links at the foot of this post). A particularly useful one for unReal Trainers is Systematic Inventive Thinking.

The basic idea of SIT is that you break down any product or service into its component parts and then monkey around with them to see what you come up with.

Making a better apple crumble
At first glance, there are only a few ingredients to an apple crumble. But, in SIT, we're not thinking of ingredients but components. Here's a possible list of components for an apple crumble:

fruit
sweetener
fat
flour
flavour enhancers (eg spice, salt)
dish
cooking utensils
temperature
colour
time
work
presentation
other ingredients

I could go on but you get the picture. (Can you think of any more? I can think of at least five. . .)

Playing around with any of these could potentially result in a better (or far far worse) crumble. In my case, after experimenting with oatmeal and walnuts, I learned that doing the following would result in the lightest, tastiest crumble imaginable (NB there's a clue to a couple of the missing components in the list above here):

Mix the flour, oatmeal and butter together first. Add in the sugar later.
Place the 'crumble' mix in the freezer for a half hour before topping the fruit and putting into the oven

(Now, ahem, 'my' secret's out. Did you spot two more components in 'my' crumble innovation?)

Simple doesn't necessarily mean short
There's a danger of confusing brevity with simplicity. For blank-slates and children a focus on brevity makes sense.

But for every bit of 'new information' we're giving as 'input' in workplace learning, there's a hinterland of habits we're trying to improve. It's not so much that our old dogs can't learn new tricks. but that they have to unlearn old ones too.

Think simple like a chemist, not like a jingle-writer.

I don't think there's anything that you can't get better at. Because there isn't anything that can't be broken down and done differently. Simplicity in the form of minimalism hides this fact. There are two pictures of houses above - which one is the simplest?

Anything can be broken down and done differently Which means it can be done better. Watch and see:

How People Count Cash? - MetaCafe

Design Thinking links to get you started:

What is Design thinking?

From Fast Company, the magazine about innovation

Definition of Design Thinking

Might as well be entitled 'lack of definition', nobody seems to be able to put their finger on it.

Noise Between Stations

A neat and tidy-ish definition for those who prefer that kind of thing

Thinking about Design Thinking

Another definition, or rather a list of attributes

Why Design Thinking won't save you - sense as always from Peter Merholz (Adaptive Path) who points out that you can and should be adopting viewpoints and ideas from everywhere (just like, erm, designers)

(There aren't any unbiased or non-proprietary links to SIT on the net, so I haven't included any here. Do a web search and you might have more luck than me. I heard about it through a podcast which I've now lost. I'll post if I can find something decent.)

*Spice had dangerously exotic connotations in our house...
Note: It would be more accurate in the above to say, "I still remember 'a' recipe," not "the". There's an important difference between what they taught me and what they said and did.

Science, Baby Einstein, Teletubbies and workplace learning.

2009-11-05T17:53:00.000Z

Marketing and poor journalism are not the enemies of science and reason.

Blame Einstein
Baby Einstein is offering a refund for its DVDs writes Daniel Willingham asking his usual question:*
"How can science reporting and education be improved so that consumers will not be susceptible to subtle marketing campaigns that play on misunderstandings of scientific findings?"
It's a question I've asked before too. (In fact, it's been a bit of a theme.)

Of course, it's completely the wrong question.

Blame Teletubbies
Baby Einstein didn't do what it was supposed to do (it didn't, erm, turn your baby into Einstein. . .) but some TV programmes are even worse; according to Literacy Today in 2004.

". . .watching Teletubbies was negatively related to both vocabulary size and expressive language use. . .

Teletubbies features poor language models (primarily vocalisations and single-word utterances). Those children who did view the programme tended to produce more vocalisations and fewer single and multiple word utterances than those who did not view, suggesting that children will model or imitate what they see onscreen."

Blame the pressure to publish
You would be forgiven for reading the article and coming away with the impression that Teletubbies is bad for children. You would also be forgiven for reading the article and deciding that it's entirely empty of meaningful content. (My summary: we tried an experiment which didn't work the way we expected, so we analysed the heck out of our data until it yielded something we could publish.)

Blame Game
There's little substantial difference between this and the Tinky Winky controversy in which the eponymous Teletubby was 'accused' (sic) of being a gay role model by Jerry Falwell and investigated by the Polish Ombudsman for Children. (Incidentally,it's not just Tinky Winky. Apparently all the Teletubbies are fomenting the rejection of the Christian paradigm.)

Blame Politicians
Some of the objections to Teletubbies were more insidious. Steven Byers, then Minister for School Standards said they exemplified the dumbing down of culture.

Blame your colleagues
A colleague of mine recommended the Baby Einstein DVDs to me. A teacher, she gave me lots of good reasons why I should stick my children in front of the idiot-box to watch them. But I resisted (and now I get to say, "I told you so). Why did I resist?

Blame the parents
I'm a snob. I don't let my children watch TV. Even if Daniel Willingham himself had imploringly thrust the DVDs into my hands I would probably have found a way to do something else. I don't have any real evidence that TV is a negative influence (other than that, like everything, it's harmful in excessive amounts). My opinion of TV is based on aesthetics.

All of the humbug about Teletubbies came after the opinion was formed.

Hang the blamers
There's a common image of people with an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other. The reality's more like this: a lynch mob rampaging through your mind, razing reason with whatever weapon they can get their hands on. Sometimes the nearest weapon to hand is science, sometimes aesthetics. They're both potentially just as flawed.

Blame hormones
The last post here was on Learning Styles, which many people respond to in basically an aesthetic mode. Here's a post called No, I’m Not A “Coach” — And You Shouldn’t Be, Either which seems to be largely an aesthetic judgment.

Blame my exquisite sense of taste
I would never use Comic Sans, even though many people say learners find it the easiest to read of all the available fonts. Some feel the same way about 'informal learning', 'learning 2.0', 'unLearning' - you name it. People are making decisions and posting blogs based on aesthetic principles.

Your workplace learning strategy is being decided based on whether it's (a) funky or (b) reputable. You have no chance at all of persuading the reputables to get funky.

Only ourselves to blame
Daniel Willingham wonders how to make consumers less susceptible to subtle marketing campaigns. He really should be asking how to make people more susceptible.

Credits: @techerding for the post on coaching (which I mostly agree with) and, especially, @usablelearning for this post on cognitive bias which includes an essential reminder of why the lynch mob is so important (see the bit about Damasio).

*You could say I'm a fan of the 'usual question'. Not just this one, but anybody who has one. If you haven't got one, I would seriously think about getting one if I were you.

Just in case you were wondering, this is what Steven Byers, Minister for School Standards and nemesis of dumbing down, grew up on:

[Image: Indypendent]