My driver’s ed instructor told my class: You never have the right of way. You can only yield the right of way. Recalling this precept got me thinking about driver education / driver training, and that got me thinking about how people have very different readings for "training," "education," and "learning." Learning to drive is a good example of a complex skill (the kind van Merrienboër and Kirschner grappled with in Ten Steps to Complex Learning).  We tend to think we know what the outcome of the education or training will be: a good driver. But what’s that? On the formal side, it’s really about passing requirements.  If you’re an adult who moves to Maryland, for instance,  you have to: Pass a vision test Have had an out-of-state license within the past year (no suspensions) And if your out-of-state license expired a year ago, you have to take "the knowledge and skills tests," which I take to mean a road test and what was once known as a written test. I’ve been driving for more than 40 years and have had licenses in four states, but I don’t recall taking more than one road test.  Not that I’m eager to do so, but you do get the impression that if you pass it once, still drive, and haven’t lost your license, you’re doing okay. Some of what vM&K would call constituent skills for driving are recurrent ones-how to start the car, how to stop, how to steer, how to recognize signals and respond to them.  But there are many non-recurrent skills (things we do differently in each situation).  The other day I was exiting a strip-mall parking lot, wanting to turn right onto the highway.  An oncoming car on that highway had its right turn signal on. Did that mean he’d be turning into the lot I was exiting?  How could I tell?  How could I help a novice driver figure that out? My old instructor’s advice about right of way was a kind schema or mental model, like the two-second rule-one way to help new learners acquire cognitive strategies. In writing about this, I’m seeing more clearly that there’s also an overlap of stakeholders: the general public (represented by the state) wants the roads to be safe; new drivers want to be able to drive; parents want their children to drive safely. They might not even agree on the outcome.  Is it "status as skilled driver" or simply "holder of a driver’s license?" Is "skilled" the same as "safe?" (I can answer that one: no.  Just take a drive through heavy traffic with someone who prides himself on what a skillful driver he is.) Maryland’s Motor Vehicle Adminstration publishes a skills log and practice guide "to help the new drives gain valuable experience in operating a motor vehicle in a variety of conditions and highway environments."  Maryland now requires 60 hours of supervised driving prior to taking the tests, with 10 of those hours at night.  The parent, guardian, or mentor of the new driver must sign a statement attesting to this, in addition to the 6 hours of behind-the-wheel instruction in the mandatory driver education course. I like the guide (other than the mid-60s bureaucratic tone of the writing).  A "planning guide" (on the right; click for a larger version) summarizes skills; individual sections amplify them with descriptions, examples, and checklists. Because of the state’s interest in having competent drivers, it makes sense for the state to have created this.  Is 60 hours the right amount?  Are these skills the right skills?  Will parents or guardians follow the guide, or simply certify that they had? I can’t say-and, frankly, neither can you.  This is a complex skill; there’s no one right answer.  I think you can make a case that most of the skills in the guide are basic ones for a competent driver.  At the same time, no test is going to guarantee that a new driver, or even an experienced one, will never have an accident.  (I’d settle at times for "will not talk on the phone while driving.")

ASTD’s T&D for January includes E-Learning: What’s Old is New Again, by Allison Rossett and James Marshall.  They wondered what e-learning looks like in the real world and surveyed nearly a thousand practitioners. In her book on training needs analysis, Rossett talks about actuals and optimals-finding out how things really are, and determining what they could be.  She and Marshall take a similar approach here.  They summarize responses about how things are, e-learning-wise.  And they speculate about how things could be. I think the article’s worth reading in full, especially for people who don’t work in corporate or organizational settings (two-thirds of the respondents do).  I agree that for many people, the workplace is changing, as is the definition of work.  At the same time, most of my own clients have been and are large organizations with multiple locations, often with a significant effort to provide structured learning (a term I prefer to "formal"). I was especially struck (not to say "depressed") by the last response in the first of several charts in the article: Our structured training uses realistic situations, encourages choice, supports learning from that choice — less than "some of the time?" Sadly, I think that’s accurate, and a true indictment for the organizations in which this happens.  Formal training departments may be complicit, but so too are organizational leaders.  Often, in the aeries just below C-level executives, there’s a touching faith in magic beans-nice, clear solutions to nagging problems that don’t look like they’re the organization’s real business.

You can thank my mother for this.  She gives me a subscription to National Geographic for my birthday.  Each year she asks if I’d still like to get it.  Here’s one reason I always answer "yes." The January 2010 issue includes A Better Life with Bionics.  Joel Fischman’s article  starts with Amanda Kitts (pictured at right ), who lost most of her left arm in an auto accident in 2006.  Kitts one of the people on the front lines of bionics because of her collaboration with the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago’s Todd Kuiken. Traditional prosthetic arms, the article says, rely on cables: the individual presses a lever on a harness to make one of three movements of the pincer hand.  In Kitts’s case, Kuiken "rewired" nerves that used to go all the way down her arm.  That’s reinnervation (New York Times graphic). The nerves started in Kitts’s brain…which holds a rough map of the body…. In an intricate operation, a surgeon rerouted those nerves to different regions of Kitts’s upper-arm muscles… "By four months, I could actually feel different parts of my hand when I touched my upper arm.  I could touch it in different places and feel different fingers," [says Kitts.] That was the start.  Kitts then received a new bionic arm with electrodes that could pick up electrical signals from those muscles.  How does it know which signals?  Because Kitts also has a phantom arm-a set of electrodes controlling a virtual arm in a computer-that RIC’s Blair Lock uses to fine-turn the connection between muscle signal and the desired motion. So, how does it do?  Here’s Kitts in the lab.  (Note: there’s no sound in this video.) Related items: Amanda Kitts’s Patient Story (from the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago) Prosthetic Limb Advance (from NPR’s Science Friday; includes video of bionic arm in use) The Bionic Body (interactive graphic at the National Geographic) In New Procedure, Artificial Arm Listens to Brain (New York Times, Feb. 10, 2009)

Gathering material for a post later this month, I came across this video of Capercaillie’s Karen Matheson.  Fear a’ Bhàta may date to the late 18th century.  I first heard it perhaps 15 years ago, and only later learned that my mother sang it as a child. (Gaelic fear, man, sounds a bit like the English word fair. In the chorus, because the singer is addressing the boatman, the case changes and the word sounds more like English ear.) Fhir a’bhàta, na ho ro eile Fhir a’bhàta, na ho ro eile Fhir a’bhàta, na ho ro eile Mo shoraigh slàn leat ’s gach àit’an téid thu Boatman, o ho ro eile Boatman, o ho ro eile Boatman, o ho ro eile A fond farewell wherever you go Is tric mi ’sealltainn o’n chnoc a’s àirde Dh’fheuch am faic mi fear a’bhàta An tig thu an-diùigh no’n tig thu a-màireach? ‘S mur tig thu idir gur truagh a tà mi I often look from the highest hill To try and see the boatman Will you come today or tomorrow? If you don’t come at all I will be downhearted Tha mo chridhe-sa briste, brùite ‘S tric na deòir a’ ruith o m’ shùilean An tig thu a-nochd no’m bi mo dhùil riut No’n dùin mi’n dorus le osna thùrsaich? My heart is broken and bruised With tears often flowing from my eyes Will you come tonight or will I expect you Or will I close the door with a sad sigh? ‘S tric mi ‘faighneachd de luchd nam bàta Am fac’ iad thu no ‘bheil thu sàbhailt’ Ach ’s ann a tha gach aon dhiùbh ‘g ràitinn Gur gòrach mise ma thug mi gràdh dhut I often ask people on boats Whether they see you or whether you are safe Each of them says That I was foolish to fall in love with you

I’m trying to remember the last time I looked something up in the phone book.  Honestly, I have no idea.  I do remember the last time I tried to remember.  It was a year ago, when the 2009 phone books arrived at my house. Which means the 2010 books arrived today. A year ago, I took the new books up to my office, where I kept them.  As I took the old books out, I realized I hadn’t touched them since I’d put them away a year ago.  I simply don’t use the phone book. Things were different this year — the books go in the built-in desk in the remodeled kitchen.  Looking at new and old editions of the Yellow Pages,  I realized that I’m not the only one who doesn’t use the phone book  (2010 book is on the right): Nothing remarkable (other than proof that marketing has completely trumped esthetics).  Notice the thickness, though: First Class Plumbing LLC has stayed true to Verizon, though I have to admit it’s the first time I’ve noticed there was an ad on the bottom edge of the phone book.  For those who prefer hard numbers: The new Yellow Pages (lower part of the picture) has a page count 13% lower than the old one for stuff that matters-the actual listings, as opposed to filler like seating plans for stadiums. No real surprise here, just mild bemusement as I observe the Changing of the Phone Book ritual.  I realize that many people still do rely on the phone book-not everyone’s running around with a smartphone.  Many more, though, turn online for their first-choice source of information.  Inertia may keep the books coming for a long time yet, but friction’s going to keep whittling down their size.

The New York Times reports on an analysis of 32 million user passwords.  Someone stole them from RockYou, which helps people use sites like Facebook and MySpace; the list was posted online.  As one researcher commented, a list this size is "the mother lode" for examining user habits. Imperva, a data security firm, has published highlights of its  analysis of the passwords.   The chart on the right is taken from Imperva’s analysis. Remember, the group was roughly 32,000,000 — which means that nearly 1% (290,731 individuals) used "123456″ for their password. If you add up all the "123-" variations in the top 10, you have 488,878 people who chose consecutive numbers starting with 1 as a password. The Times article notes that 20% of the account holders-6.4 million people-used only 5,000 different passwords.  (Number 5,000 in terms of popularity was "tigger123."  That’ll keep the hackers away.) I’m writing this on Thursday night, following a #lrnchat discussion on workgroups with little connectivity or tech-savvy.  Granted, the RockYou account holders probably had personal rather than workplace goals in mind.  At the same time, I’ll argue that their password selections reflect some of their own tech-savvy… or at least their actual performance, regardless of any theoretical savvy. Which means that "strong password training" probably won’t solve on-the-job security shortcomings.  People might still use weak passwords because: They don’t have an easy way to generate strong ones (like this one that includes a mnemonic). They have too many different passwords to recall. Nothing bad happens immediately after they choose a weak password. In a work setting, imagine combining the third and first points: a system or website tells you (politely but candidly) that your password isn’t secure, then offers you help in creating one that is.  The result probably won’t be "abc123″ or "qwerty."  A more practical problem is that the result’s going to be hard to remember, which increases the likelihood that someone will want to write the password down. I suspect that even the "tech-savvy" are tempted to cycle through maybe five or six pet passwords, in the same way that a lot of people list "regular backups" as part of their digital religion while rarely engaging in the practice.    

Harold Jarche posted a great set of slides on complexity, the web, and business.  I’ll get out of the way and let him explain: Net Work View more documents from Harold Jarche.

I try not to let January 25th pass without a nod to Robert Burns.  Lately I find good counsel in his Address to the Unco Guid, or the Rigidly Righteous My Son, these maxims make a rule,An’ lump them aye thegither;The Rigid Righteous is a fool,The Rigid Wise anither:The cleanest corn that ere was dight (sifted)May hae some pyles o’ caff in; (bits of chaff)So ne’er a fellow-creature slightFor random fits o’ daffin. (folly) — Solomon: Eccles. ch. vii. verse 16. O ye wha are sae guid yoursel’,Sae pious and sae holy,Ye’ve nought to do but mark and tellYour neibours’ fauts and folly!Whase life is like a weel-gaun mill,  (nicely running mill)Supplied wi’ store o’ water;The heaped happer’s ebbing still, (even though the hopper is ebbing)An’ still the clap plays clatter.  (it’s making lots of noise) Hear me, ye venerable core,As counsel for poor mortalsThat frequent pass douce Wisdom’s door  (sober Wisdom’s)For glaikit Folly’s portals:  (thoughtless)I, for their thoughtless, careless sakes,Would here propone defences-Their donsie tricks, their black mistakes,  (stupid tricks)Their failings and mischances. Ye see your state wi’ theirs compared,And shudder at the niffer;  (contrast)But cast a moment’s fair regard,What maks the mighty differ;  (what accounts for the difference)Discount what scant occasion gave,  (take away your luck)That purity ye pride in;And (what’s aft mair than a’ the lave),  (often more than all the risk)Your better art o’ hidin.  (your greater skill at concealment) Think, when your castigated pulse  (If even your often-punished pulse)Gies now and then a wallop!  (still jumps at times)What ragings must his veins convulse,That still eternal gallop!Wi’ wind and tide fair i’ your tail,  (with the wind and current in your favor)Right on ye scud your sea-way;  (you glide over the waves)But in the teeth o’ baith to sail,  (sailing against both)It maks a unco lee-way.  (makes for an uncommonly offcourse voyage) See Social Life and Glee sit down,  (sit down, as in to drink)All joyous and unthinking,Till, quite transmugrified, they’re grown  (they’ve turn into)Debauchery and Drinking:O would they stay to calculate  (oh, if only they’d wait and figure)Th’ eternal consequences;Or your more dreaded hell to state,  (what you fear worse)Damnation of expenses!  (the cost) Ye high, exalted, virtuous dames,Tied up in godly laces,Before ye gie poor Frailty names,Suppose a change o’ cases;A dear-lov’d lad, convenience snug,A treach’rous inclination-But let me whisper i’ your lug,  (in your ear)Ye’re aiblins nae temptation.  (maybe you’re no temptation) Then gently scan your brother man,Still gentler sister woman;Tho’ they may gang a kennin wrang,  (a little wrong)To step aside is human:One point must still be greatly dark, -The moving Why they do it;And just as lamely can ye mark,How far perhaps they rue it. Who made the heart, ’tis He aloneDecidedly can try us;He knows each chord, its various tone,Each spring, its various bias:Then at the balance let’s be mute,We never can adjust it;What’s done we partly may compute,But know not what’s resisted.

Collaborative Enterprise’s blog carnival this month looks at formalizing the informal-are there ways to deliberately harness social media to foster learning without losing the (presumed) value of personal connection? Sure. Now, I tend to slightly resist two of the implications I see here.  First, while it’s true that "training, education, and schooling are not learning," I don’t think it follows that learning can’t occur where these are present.  And second, learning did not start happening only after the invention of internet-based social media. I know that Harold Jarche doesn’t think that, and I’m pretty sure Frédéric Domon doesn’t, either.  I just wanted to make my thinking explicit. I’ve been watching the Winter Olympics and thinking about how it combines individual and organizational goals.  And just as I write this, I see multiple organizations that aren’t all in a single hierarchy: Small, individual sport groups (German women’s bobsled) Related-sport groups (sliding sports) National teams (Germany) Judges, referees, and other arbiters Timekeepers, scorekeepers Coaches Trainers Volunteers Fans Reporters, writers, bloggers, and other who opine Local, national, international Olympic officials Technicians Security Sponsors Donors You couldn’t ever satisfy all these groups, let alone their subgroups and individual members-but they find enough common ground to bring about an Olympics. I see a dynamic for the competitors: each has his or her personal goal, but each had to fit into a larger structure, especially but not exclusively for team sports.  If you want to compete in Nordic combined, you agree that your performance on the jump will determine your starting place in the cross-country element. Since we’re talking athletic competition, psychomotor skill comes into play, and "training" (in the sense of focused attention, demonstration, feedback) plays a major role.  You do learn as you train-by which I mean, not only do you build the muscle memory and automatic physical behavior, but you also refine and deepen awareness and the potential to respond to outside stimuli. Another thought came to mind when I was getting annoyed by local-news people focusing relentlessly on medal count: so-and-so "had to settle for silver" (because she was favored to win gold, but didn’t); someone else "won a stupendous bronze" (because he performed much better than expected). Those phrases got me thinking about how, if you work within a large organization, you need to find ways to align your personal goals with the organization’s in a way that’s authentic for you and helpful to the organization.  In part, it’s the old concept of the king’s shilling: if you’re accepting the paycheck, you’re granting the organization’s right to set and pursue its goals and to ask you to help achieve them. When you can’t ethically do that, it’s time to get out. Another point of view emerged when I was reading an obituary for jockey and mystery author Dick Francis, who died this week.  He wome some 350 races in a nine-year career, and rode as jockey for the Queen Mother’s horse in the 1956 Grand National-where his horse, in the lead and 50 yards from the finish, suddenly collapsed.  In his autobiography, Francis wrote: I heard one man say to another a little while ago [4 or 5 years after the race], "Who did you say that was?  Dick Francis?  Oh, yes-he’s the man who didn’t win the National." I’m sure Francis would have love to win it, just as every Olympian would love to win the gold.  But individuals and even organizations often need to reframe their goals, to redefine what success means. In the workplace, I think that means organizations have to work harder at finding ways to match their goals with those of individuals within the organization.  I once worked across the hall from an ambitious young guy.  He had some "rules for success" on his wall, including "love the business." Me, I didn’t love the business-and I can think of at least one boss who’d agree.  But often I did love helping the customer perform better, and that didn’t mean beating him to death with PowerPoint.  It sometimes meant working with him to apply performance-improvement strategies while calling them "transfer of training," because at the time helping that transfer occur was a lot more important than fretting about jargon. CC-licensed photo: Olympic colors by kk+ / Kris Krüg.

My maternal grandfather spoke Scottish Gaelic; it was his first and his preferred language.    He’d sit on his sunporch with a few friends (including my paternal grandfather) and construct Gaelic words for modern devices that weren’t in Gaelic dictionaries.  And he maintained that Gaelic was the language spoken in the Garden of Eden. I’ve always wished that I could could speak it.  Gaelic could be a bridge not only to the past but to a culture I know little about.  The reality for me, though, is that I don’t have that bridge and am not likely to work at constructing it.  The few phrases I can muster, the little I can comprehend, are like pieces of board that get me across a few gaps. Yes, I could take online courses, or turn to groups like An Comunn Gàidhealach Ameireaganach (the Gaelic Society of America), where I found a lively discussion about teaching Gaelic on LiveMocha. The fact is, though, that I don’t have time or energy to get to a level of Gaelic proficiency that would satisfy me.  "Speaking Gaelic," for me, is shorthand for a warren of skills. I’m pretty good at English; I’ve got some ability in French.  If I were to start another language, I’d want to be able to read it, at least at newspaper level, and to hold conversations in it like conversations I’d want to have in English.  I’m much likelier to try that for Spanish-though the idea of Chinese intrigues me. All of which has to do with individual goals and definitions of "learning a language."   One person might be happy simply to read, and have no concern about speaking.  As Henry Beard noted, nulli adsunt Romanorum qui locutionem tuam corrigant (there aren’t any Romans around to correct your pronunciation). At first glance, the goal of "learning a language" seems obvious-but when you poke a bit, you uncover all kinds of reasons, from getting into grad school to picking up romantic partners.  And, of course, languages are messy. One reason for that mess, says Arika Okrent, is that nobody invented human languages.  They weren’t designed (much to the dismay of the Language Police).  As she asks,  "Who invented French?" A linguist, Okrent recently published the strangely fascinating In the Land of Invented Languages.  She’s studied a daunting number of languages deliberated created, of which Esperanto and Klingon are perhaps the most widely know… or spoken. I think of learning as that which you’ve stored, retrieved, and then applied to some situation.  You recognize a spot on the map as France.  You’ve noticed that the slogans on the Olympic ice (with glowing hearts / des plus brillants exploits) aren’t the same idea at all.  You’ve said something spontaneously and correctly in another language. Okrent notes that Esperantists "are motivated by the goal of fostering peace by bridging language barriers."  For them, Esperanto is a means to an end.  They enjoy their language (they even have rock songs in it), but they’re confused by the complete lack of purpose for Klingon. In part, she suggests, that’s because the goal of the Klingon speakers is so different from that of the Esperantists. Klington is a type of puzzle that appeals to a type of person.  It is difficult, but not impossible, formed from the stuff of real language, just strange enough, just believable enough, small enough that you can know every word, the entire canon, but flexible enough to lend itself to the challenge of translation… What are Klingon speakers doing?  They are engaging in intellectually stimulating language play.  They are enjoying themselves.  They are doing language for language’s sake, art for art’s sake, and like all committed artists, they will do their thing, critics be damned. CC-licensed bridge image adapted from a photo by Unwrite These Pages / Jared Winkel.

Apt, somehow, that I learned about the demise of Training magazine via Twitter. Though "via Twitter" is misleading.  I learned about the closing from Jane Bozarth. Twitter’s just how the news arrived; it’s the way Jane and I usually connect.  You wouldn’t say "I learned about it by phone" unless there were some unusual significance to the phone itself-as in, that’s how you found out you’d been laid off. For a long time, especially when Ron Zemke and Jack Gordon were among its editors, Training was by far my favorite professional magazine.  Training and Development had too much ASTD superstructure showing.  While Performance Improvement often had solid content, the gems were often larded with academic or HPT jargon and boxed in a bargain-basement layout. It’s been a long time since I subscribed to any of these.  They all ended up on the wrong side of my cost-benefit divide for me.  As for Training in particular, I wasn’t aware it was still being published.   Hence, gerontoprise, a word suggested by Caroline Kliemt in an email conversation: surprise at learning that something has just died-because you didn’t know it was still around. (I could have used this word in 1989, when I learned of the death at age 101 of Sir Thomas Sopwith, as in the World War I fighter plane, the Sopwith Camel.) What I valued in professional magazine pieces was most often some combination of depth (as in detail), relevance (fit what what I was working on or interested in), and clarity.  I also appreciated combining "here’s what’s new" with a refusal to drool over bandwagons.  Training could do that well, 10 or 15 years ago. What I disliked?  The pauses.  Once you read an issue, you had nothing more till the next one.  And, for the most part, you as an individual had no voice in what topics might occur; you were relying on the editors.  In the case of Training, I did note an apparent abandonment of seriousness as the publication went through new management, lost experienced staffers, and seemed less and less interested in connecting practice to theory. Not that I need five pounds of theory per day.  Connecting practice to theory (having a basis for doing what you do, other than "feels good for now") can help you avoid hopping onto too many of those bandwagons.  (As Claude Lineberry once said, "Computer-based training isn’t the answer.  Computer-based training is a question.") I do think Training was a true resource, especially if you were new to the "learning profession" and doubly so if you were pretty much the only one in your organization doing what you were doing.  Like the defunct TRDEV-L listserv, Training was a step toward a virtual community. You’ve got many more options for community now, which helps explains why the magazine folded.  One corollary, though, is that  you’ve got to wire up those connections yourself.  You need to think about where you can nourish and expand your professional interests and passions: blogs, Facebook, Twitter, news feeds, virtual conferences, face-to-face conferences, whatever. But that’s true for any valued network in your life, I think. CC-licensed images: Going-out-of-business photo by Unhindered By Talent / Nic McPhee. Saskatchewan telephone image by Colros / Colin Rose.

I saw this comment on Twitter: @urbie: Flashback.. taking a text-based CBT. Owie. I couldn’t resist retweeting…nor adding my own comment: @dave_ferguson: RT @urbie: Flashback.. taking a text-based CBT. Owie. // Me: yeah, like going to college at the ATM screen. This led to a side conversation with Simon Bostock about the (mostly) bad old days.  I’ve written thousands of lines of text-based CBT: long ago, I was in charge of computer-based training for Amtrak’s reservation system, and I consulted with Marriott when they launched MARSHA, their hotel system. It’s hard to convey the impact of the all-text, monochrome oppression of dumb terminals, back in the early 1980s.  Amtrak’s ARROW system couldn’t (or wouldn’t) display lowercase letters, so the entire screen (25 rows, 80 columns) would be in uppercase. (My ATM remark reveals the bias own experience; actually, I haven’t seen an all-text, graphics-free ATM in quite some time.  But a mainframe screen is falling into the same category as a dial telephone or a ditto machine.) Back then, CBT could be downright horrible. So is a good deal of contemporary digital learning; it’s just horrible in newer, flashier, noisier ways. I recalled, during my conversation with Simon, that at the time I’d taken great pride in the training we created at Amtrak.  The reason for the pride?  We made good use of the tool.  It was what we had to work with, and a better tool  for the situation than any other realistic option. Every technology has its advantages and its drawbacks.  If you work in a group setting, let alone an organizational one, sometimes you choose to live with the givens.  So, at Amtrak: we had over 2,000 people in over 125 locations who needed to learn to use a new reservation system, different from the one about half of them had seen before.  And we wanted the training to work for new employees-say, 400 or 500 per year-so we didn’t want to keep saying "in the old system…" So what did we do?  This kind of thing: Started with a goal in mind. Specifically, we wanted to teach people how to make reservations and issue tickets using the new system.  Folderol about what kind of mainframe we had or what company made the previous system was, well, folderol. Strenuously avoided on-screen lectures. We worked hard to avoid over-explaining.  A frequent pattern: simple example, you-do-it problem, clear feedback for varied answers, then extension to more cases. "Individualized" by chunking. Most people would learn on the job, so we build courses to take less than 20 minutes.  Clear topics ("how to report train time") made it easy for someone to decide whether to take a given course. Built a practice system. Probably the single most useful thing we did was to create (in collaboration with the Train Operations department) a set of "training trains."  Any user of the Amtrak system could use a special ID to work with these in any way he wanted-make reservations, change reservations, even issue tickets (nonvalid ones-they wouldn’t print).  This allowed people to apply the general procedures from the formal CBT to the kinds of problems they encountered on the job. Note that the training trains were not part of the CBT.  One person on my team worked with Train Ops and essentially cloned actual trains.  You had to use the training-train ID to get to them, and with that ID, you couldn’t work with actual reservations.  So it provided robust practice (you were using all the capabilities of the system) while protecting you from serious consequences for mistakes (you couldn’t cancel someone’s actual trip). Our success was a result of combining the new tool with the best of what we knew about learning in the workplace.  All of this reminded me, as Charles Aznavour does in a different setting, that at times in the past, people weren’t wrong. Public domain image of a dumb-terminal screen by SamuraiClinton, from WikiMedia Commons.

  I’m never going to accomplish anything; that’s perfectly clear to me. I’m never going to be famous. My name will never be writ large on the roster of Those Who Do Things. I don’t do anything. Not one single thing. I used to bite my nails, but I don’t even do that any more. - Dorothy Parker I had a phone conversation today with someone I’ve met only through blog posts and tweets.  That happens often enough that it’s not actually surprising, but it’s always a pleasure to add the immediacy of voice to the connection. I mentioned during the conversation that this blog is mainly for me-hence the tagline "interests, ideas, notions, tangents."  I do think that if you put things into a public forum, or at least one that’s publicly available, you’d like to have some interaction; I certainly do.  But ultimately for me, the noticing and thinking-through is what matters most. If you don’t blog yourself, you may not think much about the administrative side of the blogs you read-what the machinery looks like to the blogger.  No reason you should.  But when I find myself getting impressed with myself, WordPress can help tone that down. For example, WordPress tells you what search terms people have used to find your blog.  Here in ascending order are the top ten all-time search terms that led people to Dave’s Whiteboard: 10th place (with 79 hits): monopoly money Well, that’s the random stuff you get in tenth place. 9th place (85 hits): how to keep your volkswagen alive I’m guessing my blog is a disappointment to these searchers.  The link comes from my post about John Muir’s classic repair manual, an exemplary job aid. 8th place (92 hits): aplysia You owe more to Aplysia californica and to Eric Kandel than you might have thought. 7th place (93 hits): (I’d rather not say) No, that’s not what the 7th most used term is.  In reality, it’s a person’s name-but an annoying person whose name happened to appear in the "so to speak" quote here.  Seems to be a relentless self-promoter, so I removed the quote from my database.  The only one who gets to be relentless here is me. 6th place (95 hits): whiteboard Imagine that. 5th place (154 hits): 10000 hours to become an expert Dave’s Whiteboard shows up on the first page of results here thanks to my review of Daniel Levitin’s book, This is Your Brain on Music. 4th place (182 hits): miranda july The mention of her was one of my side trips. 3rd place (194 hits): dave ferguson How about that? 2nd place (204 hits): gideon v. wainwright You wouldn’t think 372 U.S. 335 would bring that many people to the Whiteboard, would you?  The match comes from a "generic musing" post about case law. And in 1st place (with 1,814 hits): lego people I’d never figured this one out until today.  The phrase "lego people" does appear here, but at the end of a post, in a credit for the photographer whose image I used.  How the heck could that pull in nearly two thousand visitors? Then, today, I searched Google: I clicked the fourth image (the one on the right); it links to one of my posts about John Medina’s book Brain Rules.  I adapted this photo by Joe Shlabotnik (Peter Dutton), thanks to the CC license he released it with. Anytime I start feeling smug about myself and what happens on my blog, I use stats like these as a reality check.  Sometimes it’s not about me; sometimes it’s all about the Legos.

The other week, a #lrnchat discussion explored large training efforts.  Eventually the topic turned to fun.  In real life, when organization trainers start talking about fun and learning, I start looking for the exit.  I figure it’s not long before the Happy Gang shows up, determined to make you laugh no matter what, and I want to clear out before they do. "Making Performance Reviews Fun."  Sounds ghastly. I think I have a good sense of humor.  It’s just that institutional attempts to impose humor are a lot like institutional attempts to compose music.  I end up feeling in tune with the universe’s most morose android. Here’s what got me musing about this: at one point (around 9:35 in the transcript), the #lrnchat question was,  "What are some creative ways, in a mass approach, to make training stick?" Cammy Bean said: Use humor. Turn things upside down. Make it worth repeating. A bit later, Craig Wiggins said: @cammybean you know, i’m a big fan of humor and levity in elearning, but in some hands the idea of humor is…not humorous. Craig’s right. Not everyone has a knack for humor.  That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to be open to it.  You shouldn’t force it, thought, as if it were the interpersonal version of making people eat their brussels sprouts. Which is what I meant when I said in two tweets: I am NOT a fan of "fun" sprinkled over learning like pixie dust (clown noses, loud noises, what veg are you)… … But humor or just enjoyable attraction can arise from relevant context that has value in eyes of participants. In the genial chaos of a #lrnchat discussion, people don’t always pause to define their terms.  I have the luxury of taking that time here.  What does "humor" mean in a structured-learning context?  What does "fun" mean in a training program?  Depends on who’s talking.  And on who’s listening. I believe what people are striving for is engagement: how do you create opportunities for learners to involve themselves with what they’re learning?  This is the sort of thing Carl Sagan meant while about new discoveries in cosmology: they "remind us that humans have evolved to wonder, that understanding is a joy." Admit it: some stuff just doesn’t seem all that joyful from the outside.  Adopting vendor-managed inventory systems, for instance.  Deciding whether a building needs an elevation certificate in order to qualify for flood insurance.  Shepardizing a legal case.  Learning basic statistics. The answer is not (necessarily) to provide balloon animals and confetti, or to toss miniature chocolate bars at the participants while they chant answers to quiz questions.  Often that’s like putting frosting on those brussels sprouts.  Even if people try eating that, all they’re going to remember is a weird taste. For an organization, the challenge is helping people learn and apply skills that will achieve the group’s goals.  Assuming the people in question do in fact need to acquire or strengthen those skills, of course, so you’re not boring them to death "teaching" things they already know. That depends much more on relevant, realistic, worthwhile experiences.  Out of those, levity can emerge-if it makes sense.  Horse first, then cart, then passengers and cargo, and then (maybe) mood lighting.  (Later this week, I’ll give a couple of examples from one of those dry topics I mention above.) So, instead of trying to sneak brussels sprouts pass some unsuspecting diner, work on finding fresh sprouts, demonstrating recipes and cooking techniques that capitalize on their flavor and texture.  Then work them into, say, creating a meal for a restaurant guest who insists on having five different colors of food as dinner. The customer’s a bit of an outlier, but the core skills (menu planning, item selection, preparation, technique, timing) actually matter. Humor as an addition to the main topic can also emerge naturally.  By naturally, I mean people use humor to make new connections with the main focus, or to reinforce the connections they’ve made. Marcia Conner (at the end of that #lrnchat session) : Last 2 days spent at 100% pixiedustfree event (#wire) & can attest to the fact it can be done beautifully And Mason Masteka added a final garnish: My name is Mason, I am a eLearning Dev in Maine and I am celery.   CC-licensed images:Marvin the android from Wikimedia Commons.Sprouts with bacon by sling@flickr / Steve Ling.

Yes, you’re right.  Head First Statistics is really a form of teaching, not learning.  As with any book, you could see it as an extended lecture (660 pages, if you count the appendices).  No way to ask anything, easy to slide past questions or problems by turning the page. Which is why HFS makes such a great example of a tool (depending on your interests) and such a great example of fun (depending on your mindset). Those two "depending on" clauses are like the uprights for a suspension bridge.  If you’re not interested in learning about statistics and nothing’s pushing you to do so (like your job or your graduate program), then I’m confident (at the 0.975 level) you’re not going to, regardless of the form in which the opportunity to learn appears.  Much the same is true for the other upright: the way you feel about this particular opportunity.  HFS has given both ends of that bridge some thought. Click the sample page to enlarge; you’ll see what I mean. ♦  ♦  ♦ What Dawn Griffiths has done is sketch a very high-level picture of the learning goals that HFS supports and the types of people who probably respond well to this approach.  Who’da thunk you could do that without the sacred incantation, "At the end of this course the student will be able to…?" But-how can you be sure of what you’ll learn? Hmm… the body-of-knowledge approach to learning.  It’s true: in many fields like statistics, there are concepts, principles, terms, equations, and so on that you’re expected to know. By "know," I mean you can agree on a description or definition for X with people who aren’t related to you.  Even if their reaction is, "Well, you could put it that way." At the same time, despite the sputterosity of purists, zealots, and cranks with time on their hands, most fields don’t have a body of knowledge; they’ve got a herd. Beyond the most basic definitions (like the difference between mean, mode, and media), no one factoid is make-or-break. Granted, statistics does tend toward the lots-of-specific facts side. So HFS furnishes some tables. A "Table of Contents (Summary)," which takes up a little more than half a page.  It’s followed by "Table of Contents (the real thing)" with a page for each of the 15 chapters, plus half a page apiece for the intro appendices).  Check the O’Reilly Books preview page for HFS yourself; use the next / previous buttons at the top of the book page to browse. If I were smart, I’d end by suggesting you also look at a sample chapter (probability, PDF) or explore HFS on your own via Google Books.  The good-humored approach, the absence of dense text-those are obvious at first glance. Beneath that, though, there’s a lot of cognitive infrastructure, the sort of thing that shifts from "fun" to "learning."  Chapter 3, "Power Ranges," is a good example.  It’s got 44 pages dealing with range and variation (the previous chapter dealt with mean, median, and mode).  This is what’s lurking as you turn the title page: The coach of the neighborhood basketball team needs one player.  He’s got three candidates.  All three have the same shooting average.  So, which one should he pick? Here are their individual stats (points per game and frequency).  What else does the coach need to know? Explanation: what "range" means (also, lower bound and upper bound). You try it: figure the mean, lower bound, upper bound, and rang for these two players.  Then, draw a histogram (as you learned in chapter 2) for each. Feedback for that exercise, and a troubling question about outliers. Explanation: why outliers are problematic.  Can you think of how to reduce their impact? Explanation: why ranges are quick-and-dirty solutions. Sneaky intro ("one way is to measure only part of the range") accompanied by this: That’s the first 8 pages.  Not only did you have a couple of get-out-your-pencil problems, but also questions to provoke thinking, questions to highlight potential confusion, and even, as in the above example, questions that are intelligent stand-ins for ones a learner might have. As I said in an earlier post, fun in training (or in support of learning) shouldn’t be an afterthought.  It shouldn’t be force-injected, either, like the fake smoke-flavored streaks applied to frozen burgers to make you think they were grilled. Dawn Griffiths shows that part of the engagement comes from a general approach (irreverence, retro photos, quirks of layout); another part comes from sample problems that offer real statistical challenges placed in…let’s say surreal settings.  (In chapter 7, you use Poisson distributions to figure out how often a movie theater’s popcorn machine is going to break downnext week.) Maybe we can get Griffiths and the folks from Head First to have a long lunch with von Merriënboer and Kirschner.        

Last week, I found myself in a couple of discussions about the difference between training and learning.  I only took one philosophy course in college, and later on I hollowed out the textbook to hide a gag gift, so it’s clear I’m not that contemplative on this issue. To oversimplify, many people in more traditional training jobs felt strongly that there is such a thing as "training" and that it has the potential for great value.  Other people, by and large on the you-manage-your-own-learning side, seemed to place little value on structured training as such. Although I doubt most participants intended it, you could interpret the divergent views as "this is important work I’m doing that helps people become more productive" versus "get out of your rut." Maybe not a rut, but at least a well-worn path.  I’ve spent a lot of time in that corporate-training path: 7 years at Amtrak, 18 at GE, and much of my consultant career since.  Usually I’m far from the executive suite, so I have some sympathy for challenges that first-line and middle managers face together with their work groups. Which is why, over and over, I recommend Robert F. Mager’s What Every Manager Should Know about Training.  Not just to clients (though I’ve even sent the book as a gift when I thought it would be well received) but to the corporate trainers supporting them. It’s not a scholarly book, nor a thick one; you could probably read the 140 pages in two hours. But in that space, Bob Mager works hard to get managers out of the training-as-dosage mythology. Rule 1: Training is appropriate only when two conditions are present: There is something people don’t know how to do, and They need to be able to do it. Rule 2: If they already know how, more training won’t help. Rule 3: Skill alone is not enough to guarantee performance. Rule 4: You can’t store training. Use it or lose it. Rule 5: Trainers can guarantee skill, but they can’t guarantee on-the-job performance. Rule 6: Only managers, not trainers, can be held accountable for on-the-job performance. Mager: "If training is only a means to an end, what is the end toward which it strives?  It’s performance."  Someone familiar with concepts like ISPI’s human performance technology model (links to a PDF document) recognizes exactly what Mager’s doing: smuggling performance improvement into the organization.  He’s just hidden it in a plain brown wrapper that’s labeled TRAINING. He was clever in choosing the title, because I’d argue the majority of people who supervise or manage in organizations use "training," at least in casual conversation, to mean a whole complex of things related to getting people to produce valuable results on the job.  Instead of trying to convert them to performance-improvement or informal-learning jargon, Mager starts where these managers are likely to start.  Then he builds on their likely experience in other dimensions of work to help them see how training (as a structured approach toward helping people acquite skills they don’t have) is one part of overall performance. In the chapter, Where the Magic Goes In, Mager addresses another concern managers have: Instead of asking, "How long will it take to develop my course?" you might consider asking: What can you do for me with the lead time I’ve got?… For example, if [the training department has] only two days for training development, the most useful thing they can do is to verify whether training is a valid solution, and to verify which solutions will have the greatest impact on the problem. If the trainers have time to do one more thing, a task analysis would be the most useful action.  These analyses can be turned into checklists in a matter of minutes, and the checklists can be given immediately to the instructors…and to the trainees, to show…what competent performers can do…. If there is time to do one more thing, trainers can derive the objectives of the instruction and then draft skill checks by which instructional success can be measured… …Which, by the way, isn’t a bad way to think about any sort of guidance you’d like to provide other people.

This morning’s Washington Post has an article about college professors banning laptops from their classrooms.  (The first example is from a Georgetown Law lecture on "democracy and coercion.") Similar bans, the article claims, exist at William and Mary, the University of Virginia, and other big-name schools. It’s been years for me since college, so my own notions are just notions.  That rarely stops me from musing. That law lecture occurred in a room with a hundred students.  Ipso facto, it seems to me, the average student didn’t get to say ten words.  Not that you have to say something to rework, reconsider, connect what’s new to what’s known-but talking about new material is at least as helpful as writing notes on paper. It’s not as if a room without laptops is a room without distractions (or a room that suddenly has interesting lecture).  As a U-Va professor says, "If students don’t want to pay attention, the laptop is the least of your problems." One comment added to the Post story reminds us of all the people who doodled, crossword-puzzled, or just read the sports pages while safely and quietly lodged toward the back of the lecture hall. I don’t mean to seem one-sided.  No matter how cool your keyboard, even ten people in a room going clickety clickety clickety can be distracting-just as Worlds of Warcraft can be when it’s on the screen of the person in front of you during Conflict in Nineteenth-Century East Asia. Stepping completely outside things I know about: maybe the tried-and-true formal education approach isn’t always ideal.  A law professor in a lecture hall might not be so impartial about his methods as to concede their shortcomings.  Is a lecture to 100 people an optimal way to achieve whatever the goal is for "democracy and coercion?" Maybe not-because formal systems like law school have a built-in time and exposure constraint, culminating in not just the law degree but the bar exam. Mostly I think the question hinges on specifics: what’s the purpose of this (presumably in-person) class?  Why is it in-person?  Am I as the professor dispensing knowledge (the Font of Wisdom approach)?  Am I encouraging people to explore issues, grapple with implications, bring in things from the outside? Consider the approach of another Georgetown law professor (who does allow laptops).  He told his class that Chief Justice John Roberts was stepping down from the Supreme Court. That was untrue, as the professor knew-but the news flew out.  It seems the real point of the lesson was: credibility. (Much more on this story at Above the Law, including a follow-up.) CC-licensed image of lecture notes by Kevin Lawver.

A recent interview with Dr. Peter J. Pronovost dealt with safer ways to care for patients in hospitals.  Pronovost is the medical director for the Quality and Safety Research Group at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. The interview’s worth reading on its own merits.  I saw in it good examples of performance analysis and efforts to improve performance-with relative few attempts to train people out of non-training problems. For example, for cardiac catheterization, Hopkins had an infection rate of 11 per 1,000 procedures.  According to Pronovost, at the time that "put us in the worst 10% of the country." Here’s a diagram I created to illustrate some influences on performance: And here are points that Pronovost makes: Hopkins developed a checklist to standardize what to do before catheterization (wash hands, clean skin with chlorhexidine, drape the patient, etc.).  To me, this is support for item 3 above. Supplies, which had been stored in as many as eight places, were prepped in a cath cart-with someone assigned to make sure it was stocked and handy.  Item 2, equipment and materials. The hospital asked nurses to remind doctors to wash their hands-and empowered nurses to stop procedures if this didn’t happen.  Item 8 (standards) and item 9 (feedback) — and, you could argue, item 7 (consequences). Note also that the Hopkins project defined a specific problem (a high rate of infection), analyzed likely causes, chose action based on those causes, and measured the results. Pronovost forcefully describes another barrier to performance: workplace culture: As at many hospitals, we had dysfunctional teamwork because of an exceedingly hierarchal culture… …in every hospital in America, patients die because of hierarchy. The way doctors are trained, the experiential domain is seen as threatening and unimportant. Yet, a nurse or a family member may be with a patient for 12 hours in a day, while a doctor might only pop in for five minutes. I mention this not to single out doctors but to emphasize that performance problems usually have multiple causes.  Some you can address in a straightforward fashion (rethinking where to keep the supplies).  Others, you have to keep working at.  In commercial aviation, use of preflight checklists is maintained not only by regulations but by the active support of those who use them: it’s not smarter or more efficient to try memorizing the checklist.  In fact, it’s seen as counterproductive. (Note what the Skout Group says about workplace culture-and checklists-in terms of USAir 1549, the plane that Sullenberger and Skiles managed to set down in the Hudson River last year, with no loss of life.) Back to the hospital: isn’t there some need for training? I couldn’t say; Pronovost’s interview doesn’t have enough detail.  It could be that some hospital staff need training in preparing for catheterization.  If that’s the case, I suspect that inside the generalization of "preparing for catheterization," there are distinct subtasks: identify and obtain the supplies, prep yourself, prep the patient, assist (or be assisted by) a specialist, and so on. And perhaps there’s a meta-skill: make sure the individual assigned to this task can first demonstrate an acceptable level of skill.  In other words, something like "we expect you learned this in nursing school (or wherever); here are our standards; we’ll observe you and tell you how you did." I don’t know that I’d put the necessary culture change under "training." I’m pretty sure the label is less important than the goal: having doctors (most not hospital employees) and hospital staff work together to reduce the rate of preventable infection. Word of the day: nosocomial, meaning "occurring in a hospital." I came across it in this 2001 CDC report, The Impact of Hospital-Acquired Bloodstream Infections.  Its low estimate for life-threatening bloodstream infections acquired in the hospital is 87,500 per year.  The low estimate of deaths from these bloodstream infections: 8,750. (And bloodstream infections are estimated at 10% of all nosocomial infection.)

It’s Ada Lovelace Day, and the first thing to come to mind was this song from Peggy Seeger. When I was a little girl I wished I was a boy. I tagged along behind the gang and wore my corduroys Everybody said I only did it to annoy, But I was gonna be an engineer.  

I was surprised to learn-from my wife, no less-that I unconsciously assess things (especially edible things) on a personal scale with almost as many degrees as a thermometer. It’s an understatement scale, I guess, because even as my approval increases, the terminology is…less than exuberant, as in these examples: That’s okay.  (Barely acceptable.) That’s not bad. Not half bad.  (Well above average.) Not bad at all. That’s all right. (At least one Michelin star.) Pretty good.  (At least two.) There’s a theoretical maximum, "really good."  It’s like absolute zero, only warmer; you don’t find it much in nature. I asked my children whether they’d ever heard me apply these terms.  They couldn’t say, because it’s hard to talk when you’re convulsed in laughter. The purpose of a scale is twofold: measuring and evaluating.  Measuring is a comparison with some standard: you’re this tall (in inches, in cubits, in stacked-up poker chips).  You typed 268 characters in 3 minutes and made 4 errors. Evaluating is forming a judgment, usually by means of a further comparison.  You’re tall for a 14-year-old boy.  You meet the minimum speed required for this job. Thanks to Stephen Downes’s OLDaily, I came across Clarence Fisher’s connecting assessment.  It’s a rubric he created for middle schoolers "to help students think about the connections and global understandings they are establishing." He doesn’t plan to assign grades based on where students are-this is a conversation starter, he says.  To me, it’s a way to say to the student, "This is how it might look if you’re at a beginner level of skill.  This is more-than-beginner.  This is how it looks if you’re accomplished." Fisher offered another rubric in an earlier post-one to help grade student blog posts. What I like about these is that Fisher shares what he’s come up with for a particular situation.  He even provides Google doc versions (blogging rubric, connecting rubric) in case someone wants to use them as starting points. Pretty good, I’d say. "Approval scale" image adapted from this CC-licensed photo by mag3737 / Tom Magliery (images are his; cartoon balloons are mine).

In an online conversation, I found myself again quoting Joe Harless. In this case, the quote was from a March 1975 interview with Training magazine.  I haven’t found this online anywhere, so thought I’d summarize a bit here. A little background: Harless coined the term front-end analysis.  As he wrote in a workshop guide, to help our client achieve its business or organizational goals: We begin at the end and work backwards in the basic progression: We first find out what goals are not being achieved satisfactorily, or what the new goals are when they are set by the client. We then find out what accomplishment is not being produced satisfactorily that is causing the goal not to be met. We then find out what behaviors are not being obtained that cause the deficient accomplishment. Then, and only then, can we determine which of the influences need to be manipulated. The process just described is called Front-End Analysis. The Training interview asked if FEA were "just the Joe Harless shtick."  Harless replied that it was real "if you define real as having a definite set of procedures…and data and case histories" along with people who are applying these things. Front-end analysis began with the realization that we could produce excellent training packages, ones that pleased not only the developer but the client.  And yet follow-up evaluation ( "which…we jokingly called rear-end analysis" ) revealed that, as often as not, skills didn’t transfer to the job. So Harless wondered why.  "Being devotees of the scientific method, we advanced certain hypotheses… [And] we began testing these hypotheses." To Harless and his collaborators, rear-end analysis asks, "Why didn’t the training produce the intended result?"  Front-end analysis asks three other questions: What are the symptoms that a problem exists? What is the performance problem producing those symptoms? What is the value of solving that problem? And that’s where the quote comes from: Training: Value in terms of what? Harless: In terms of money. Front-end analysis is about money first and foremost.  So is training.  If not, you’re baby-sitting or doing psychotherapy. Harless said this as an aside to the main theme of his interview.  Even so, this is a lodestone for anyone working in organizational learning.  I agree that the individual needs to have some personal investment in order to learn effectively on the job.  She wants to raise her skills, or master a new task, or prepare for a new position, or gain satisfaction from resolving new challenges. Those are her variables.  The organization has variables as well; the relationship between the two sets is an effort to balance the work-equation.  How can those skills, those tasks, those challenges make sense for her in the organization’s context?  "Is it worth  spending X to achieve Y?" Solve for the organization.  Solve for your personal goals. I’m not trying to reduce this purely to dollars, and I don’t think Harless was, either.  (The same people who get nit-picky about "ROI for training" are strangely silent when a merger like Daimler-Chrysler-financially analyzed, you’d think, to a fare-thee-well-ends up vaporizing billions of dollars.) When Harless says, "Value in terms of money," I see it as shorthand.  Money is the most common and most convertible indicator of value in group activity.  You can choose other indicators; you just have to work harder. 1975 was fairly early in the history of performance improvement, though I don’t think we’ve yet reached the Golden Age.  Here’s the Reverend Harless preaching on a related theme: You know, trainers are forever going around looking for respectability.  They’re always asking, "How can we sell management on the idea of training?" Well, the answer is, you don’t.  You sell management on the benefits of solving human performance problems. You make it clear to management that you are there to avoid training when it’s not cost-effective. That’s how you get to be a hero.  That’s how you get to be respectable…That’s how you avoid being stuck off in some personnel department somewhere. By the way, Guy Wallace’s Pursuing Performance blog has a 2008 video interview with Joe Harless: "Almost always, the client came to us requesting the development of some kind of training intervention… [in a typical situation, the workers] already knew how to detect and correct…defects….They were not doing so because…they were being paid for the quantity of production rather than the quality of the production."