A link on Twitter led me to a post at the Law Blog of the Wall Street Journal.  Ashby Jones had fun mocking Our Tech-Savvy Supreme Court. They were hearing oral arguments in City of Ontario (California) v. Quon.  At issue was whether a member of the Ontario police could expect privacy for personal messages received on his SWAT-team pager, and whether people sending texts to that device could expect that the recipient’s employer would not review those texts. Jones highlights some remarks by the justices: Chief Justice Roberts asked what the difference was between e-mail and a pager. Justice Kennedy wondered whether, if you’re sending a text as one arrives, the person who sent that one sees something like "you call is important to us; we’ll get back to you." Justice Scalia asked whether a sent text doesn’t go right to the recipient.  (Jones thinks he was confused by the idea of a service provider.) (You can judge for yourself, if you’d like.  Here’s the transcript of the oral arguments.  I think the remarks that Jones highlights are at pages 29 [Roberts, email and pages], 44 [Kennedy, your call is important], 48-49 [Scalia, service providers; printing texts].) Yes, it is amusing if you think the youngest member of the Court doesn’t know the difference between email and a pager.  But that’s about all it is, amusing.  What I think is more pertinent here is that the justices were asking questions to better understand things unfamiliar to them, and that they were focusing on larger issues and not the details of technology. For instance, Jones left off the first part of Roberts’ question, so I’ll highlight it here: Maybe everybody else knows this, but what is the difference between the pager and the e-mail? (transcript, page 29) I have no idea what level of techno-expertise Roberts has, but I’d guess he’s more familiar with email than with pagers, and trying to understand (a) what the difference might be, and (b) whether that difference makes a difference. In terms of the busy-signal question from Justice Kennedy, it turns out that a few minutes earlier, Roberts had asked: What happens, just out of curiosity, if you — he is on the pager and sending a message and they are trying to reach him for, you know, a SWAT team crisis?  Does he — does the one kind of trump the other, or do they get a busy signal? To which the attorney answered, "I don’t think that’s in the record," which is how a lawyer often phrases "I don’t know." As for Scalia’s remark about where a message goes, my guess is that he was being facetious (though we can’t know till there are audio recordings of oral arguments). A discussion (starting about page 45 in the transcript) had to do with whether it made a difference that the text messages were handled by a service provider.  Scalia asked whether, when you send a text message, you’re pretty much aware that it remains private only if the recipient "or somebody else who has power over the recipient" chooses to look at it.  The lawyer said yes. Roberts:  Well, then they can’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy based on the fact that their communication is routed through a communications company. Dammeier (attorney): Well, they — they expect that some company, I’m sure, is going to have to be processing the delivery of this message.  And - Roberts:  Well, I didn’t — I wouldn’t think that.  I thought, you know, you push a button, it goes right to the other thing. Dammeier:  Well - Scalia:  You mean it doesn’t go right to the other thing? [Laughter] You may not agree with the opinions that the justices issue, but I think the transcript illustrates several things.  First, they’ve gotten a grasp of the legal issues in the case (which is, after all, their job).  Second, they’re more than willing to ask questions.  Third, as evidenced by Roberts, at least some of them are unafraid of saying, "I don’t understand X.  Can you explain it to me?" Which isn’t a bad way to start learning more about things you know that you don’t know. Supreme Court image adapted from this CC-licensed photo by Virginia Foxx.

About ten years ago, my parents got a computer. Dad was 87 and Mom was 81.  They weren’t really early adopters, except maybe among their age group. The primary reason was my dad’s eyesight-he couldn’t drive safely at night to visit friends and play cards.  The computer allowed us to install card-game software.  The software created virtual partners for cribbage, pinochle, and euchre, as well as solitaire cards that never got sticky. A few weeks later, my mother asked if they could get to the internet.  We got her an AOL account and bought two copies of a graphic-rich how-to book.  (That way, when she had a question, I’d use my copy and say, "Look on page 32.  I’ll walk you through the steps…") I printed the first email she sent, in May of 2000.  It read, in part: I want to know what URL means.  I want to know if my address book has the e-mail addresses in it.  And how do I get it? Those are great, goal-oriented questions.  And I had forgotten this from my dad, about a month later, until I found the copy this morning: Hi David Mom made me do it This is the old fellow trying to compose a little note. How am I doing? Love Dad For quite a while, they had fun with email (mostly receiving, since their typing skills weren’t the greatest). Over time, though, Mom and Dad had difficulties with the mechanics: they’d get attachments they couldn’t open, and their in-basket will fill up because they didn’t quite get the hang of filing. Then I had an epiphany: I set up what I called the world’s smallest blog (audience: two).  Instead of writing letters or email, I started posting to the blog.  Instead of searching their in-basket, they’d click on the desktop shortcut I created. With photos embedded in the posts, they didn’t have to open attachments.  The blog would automatically archive by month, and also by broad topic.  And my three children (who between them have more than half a dozen blogs) had author access, so they too could plop down at this digital kitchen table for a visit. I mention this for a number of reasons.  First, Sunday was the blog’s fourth anniversary (official readership is down to just my mother).  Second, and not entirely by chance, Sunday also marked the blog’s one-thousandth post. That’s right: for four years, my parents have had virtual guests about five posts a week. By and large the posts on their blog are astonishingly mundane.  I write about a trip into Washington, or making chicken stew provençal, or (much less often) about a consulting project I’m working on. Oh, and the weather.  My dad always wanted to know what our weather was like. My kids tease me, but they know the real purpose: each post is a brief chat with my mother, often with pictures (she got a lot of pictures of last February’s snowpocalypse), letting her know what’s going on here.  They add their own comments, and a fair number of pictures of the great-grandchildren. Another reason I mention this is that when I came up with the idea, I realized I’d broken through my own preconception of what a blog was.  Blogs are for the world at large?  Not necessarily.  They have your Big Thought of the Day?  Ehh, maybe not.  They’re all about ever-expanding readership?  It’s debatable. What really happened is that I had a problem to solve-Mom and Dad’s challenges in working with email, and my own spotty record in sitting down to write them some email.  And by ignoring what I thought were conventions of the medium, I found a solution. The only drawback?  My brother, who lives with my mother, urges me to post at least four times a week.  If I miss two days running, he says, my mother worries that there’s something wrong, either with her computer or with me. I’m not sure which worries her more. Screenshot from WordPress is mine; CC-licensed tea photo by adactio / Jeremy Keith.

I’ve lost about 18 pounds in the past three months, so I’ve been thinking about goals and performance improvement. (When I say there’s more to me than you might think, I’m not necessarily bragging.) In February, people in my wife’s office started a Weight Watchers group. It seems if enough people sign up, the Weight Watchers organization arranges for a leader who coordinates weekly meetings. My wife saw this as an opportunity to lose weight that had begun to bother her. I’ve gotten to benefit from the program without having to be in the group. This post and its planned successor aren’t meant to advocate for Weight Watchers per se. What I’m doing is examining this specific program as a multifaceted approach to a complex problem. You’d think the goal part would be simple. "Lose 20 pounds" sounds reasonable. When you hear that, you assume someone’s done some analysis, and a 20-pound loss is the desired result. In a way, it’s like a client who wants people to "understand" some business process. When I’m off duty, I think "understand" is a terrible word to see in a goal. It utterly fails the Heydad test: "Hey, Dad, watch me while I understand inventory management." Not that I don’t believe in understanding. It’s more that people will load this over-broad term with their own meanings, and it’s inevitable that the various meanings will clash. I’m reluctant to change a client’s own vocabulary at the outset, though, so I’ll try to find out what "understand" means in terms of observable results. And that’s an approach to take with "lose 20 pounds" as well, even if the client is your own fair self. Probe for the symptoms, probe for the possible causes, and look at the fit between cause and possible intervention. What tells you you need to lose weight? What indicates that 20 pounds is a good amount to lose? What time frame do you have in mind (and why)? How do you know a diet is the way to go? To make some of those answers explicit for myself, I’ve come up a goal of being in the best shape I can be. That’s tough to write, because I’m not in particularly good shape, and because I can be mighty self-critical. But it helps me reframe weight loss as an enabling objective: I want to lose weight as part of getting myself in shape. This reframing also helps keep quibbling down. Take body-mass index, a widely used formula to relate weight to health risks. If you’re really tall, or really short, or really muscular, then your BMI may not be a good indication of health. On the other hand, if you’re six feet tall, not muscular, and weigh 243 pounds, you could do worse than pay attention to your BMI number. That number would be 33. It’s beyond overweight; it’s  more than 20 pounds into the "obese" range. Whatever a good weight for you is, it’s probably not one with a BMI of 33. When you come to Weight Watchers, the program assumes you’ve done some of that analysis, and that weight loss is a reasonable goal for you. I can’t say for sure, but I’d guess the meeting leader tries to counsel people who don’t seem to need to lose weight. The program’s "healthy weight ranges" make use of BMI, suggesting that you aim somewhere between 20 and 25 (for that six-footer, 147 to 184 pounds).  But dogmatism isn’t the characteristic tone: For now, use the Healthy Weight Ranges chart as a guide… your ultimate weight goal is totally up to you, and any weight loss that results in a lower BMI than your current one and can be maintained for the log term means success. In addition, if you adopt a goal outside the range for your height, the program will accept that with a note from your doctor. While I assume many people have some ultimate goal in mind from the beginning, Weight Watchers suggests an interim target of 5% of your current weight. (That 243-pound person’s target would be 12 pounds.) So you’ve got a flexible goal tailored to the individual, one that relates to the short-term desire for progress while acknowledging that its achievement is a stage on the way to greater accomplishment.  The next target?  10% of starting weight.  (That’s cumulative, not an additional 10%.) I see a great deal of value in this. For most people, it’s hard to lose weight. Without extreme effort, a pound or so a week is good progress. But who wants to "progress" through 20 or 30 or 40 or more weeks? Three months isn’t a bad time horizon. In fact, in the initial stages of a weight-loss plan, most people lose at a slightly more rapid rate. Here’s the deal: if you want to lose weight, you have to use more calories than you consume. How you manage that equation can vary: eat less, move more, or combine the two. "Eat less" and "move more" are concise expressions of complexes of behavior. In my next post, I’ll talk about a number of approaches to initiate and sustain behavior to help achieve the overall goal. CC-licensed photo of baby and scale by Salim Fadhley.

My previous post talked about goals related to a complex problem.  I even reframed the problem, from "losing weight" to "being in good shape."  Yes, there are still covert qualifiers, but the main thrust is: poke and prod a problem statement for a while.  This is what Joe Harless had in mind with his dictum that an ounce of analysis is worth a pound of objectives. You want to look for some evidence that the possible causes are in fact contributing to the problem.  Evidence is what helps prevent cause-jumping, charging full-tilt toward a solution based on the cause you’re sure is at work. Outside of its meaning in Morocco, Louis Renault’s order to round up of the usual suspects is not all that different from prescribing doses of training to solve some pressing on-the-job problem. I’ve been studying Weight Watchers as one multifaceted approach to losing weight, whether as an end in itself or as part of an  overall goal of good health.  I see a cluster of "health skills" that are like constituent skills from Ten Steps to Complex Learning: Eat smart (when you’re in charge) Dine smart (as a guest, in a restaurant, at a party) Shop smart (at the grocery store) Cook smart Live smart (get along with those you live with) I’m sure there are plenty of others, and not all apply to everyone: maybe you don’t cook much and don’t want to.  The various tools and approaches used by Weight Watchers work in different ways as part of a performance system. For example, they rate food by points based on fiber, calories, and fat.  You calculate your own point allowance based on your age, your height, your sex, your activity level, and your starting weight.  My initial "point budget" was 33% higher than my wife’s.  That meant I didn’t start out feeling as though I was going to starve to death. Performance standards: I haven’t yet done the math, but I’m pretty sure your point allowance aligns with the Mayo Clinic’s strategy of setting a realistic goal for weight loss.  To lose 1 to 2 pounds a week, they say, you need to burn 500 - 1,000 more calories per day than you take in. Monitoring and feedback: By tracking your points, you’re increasing your awareness of what you eat.  I use a third-party app on my phone, but there are also paper checklists, including some with a grid to track your state of mind throughout the day (full, satisfied, hungry). Social support: people like my wife participate in weekly meetings, with the benefit of both the meeting leader and the other people working through the program.  For me, it’s mainly the fact that the two of us have collaborated (for four months now). Process change: in a series of 10 booklets, the program offers quick-start tips, menu ideas (with points already calculated), suggestions for increasing your physical activity, and even strategies based on the particular problems or setbacks you identify in yourself. In a related change, we spend about 45 minutes each weekend picking out dinner recipes for the week, then building a grocery list based on those menus.  (An unexpected discovery: many of the recipes in Jacques Pépin’s cookbooks fit our "point budgets" just as they come.  This one I estimate at 6 points per serving; my daily allowance is 32.) ♦ ♦ ♦ I don’t want to turn this post into a dieting column.  Really, I’m looking at a number of ways to go about accomplishing what Tom Gilbert would call a worthwhile result.  And part of the point is that long-term, significant performance requires a wide variety of interventions.  Some are pretty straightforward, procedural skills: learn to manage portion size; always track points.  Some are more situational. Most, if not all, have evidence to support their value.  Whether that evidence is pertinent to you is something else.  Evidence suggests, for instance, that frequent monitoring of weight (like weighing yourself daily) helps you progress and also maintain the new weight once you reach your goal.  Helps, not guarantees.  But stepping on the scale every day isn’t usually too strenuous. CC-licensed photo of retro scale by teresia.

Jonah Lehrer at The Frontal Cortex talks about "feelings of knowing" — how we feel sure we know what we can’t retrieve from memory. He’s talking about tip-of-the-tongue things: you can’t quite remember who played the sheriff of Nottingham in Robin and Marian, but you know he had a short last name that started with S. Lehrer suggests that this "feeling of knowing" is often highly accurate.  (I hadn’t considered this concept before, so I’m glad Lehrer linked to this study (PDF) by Janet Metcalfe.) This comes into play (as he notes) when Jeopardy contestants click the buzzer without (presumably) knowing the answer: they’re betting that they will know it (retrieve it) within five seconds. And often, they’re right. The larger point is that we won’t get a genuinely "human" version of artificial intelligence (not to mention more energy efficient computers) until our computers start to run emotion-like algorithms. What Watson needs isn’t a bigger hard drive or some more microchips - he needs to develop feelings of knowing, which will tell him that he probably knows the answer even if he’s still drawing a blank. For decades, we’ve assumed that our emotions interfere with cognition, and that our computers will outpace us precisely because they aren’t vulnerable to these impulsive, distracting drives. But it turns out that we were wrong. Our fleeting feelings are an essential aspect of human thought, even when it comes to answering the trivia questions on Jeopardy. In an update, Lehrer links to a later post by Vaughan Bell at Mind Hacks, who sees the early-buzzing of Jeopardy players as a kind of metacognition. "It’s being able to manage your mental resources based on estimations."

Twitter’s a great way to connect with people—or to fire off a wisecrack, which I’ve done a time or two.  Like last night in #lrnchat, when I said: Every time someone launches another "elearning" with a Jeopardy game, a neuron loses its wings. At 140 characters, Twitter encourages economy of expression, though you can’t easily come off as concise and nuanced in a single tweet. Jeopardy games in on-the-job learning are a hot button for me.  Like someone on the bus whose MP3 music is just loud enough that you imagine a mosquito practicing the snare drums, that kind of interaction is mostly harmless but rarely enriching. Monkey, see? A Jeopardy game is often a quick fix, like a food-court burger, fries, and Coke when you’re slogging through the MegaMall.  At best, a mediocre choice.  Whatever kind of learning you’re trying to encourage, will dolling quiz questions up in the format of a 56-year-old game show  do the trick? A more significant drawback is that Jeopardy‘s format unduly emphasizes recall and application.  You’re focusing learner attention on lower-value tasks.  And there’s the disadvantage that few jobs present people with "answers" to which they have to respond with questions. Where to (re)draw the line I’ve created interactions based on game formats, including Bingo.  Success came in part from listening to people like Thiagi (Sivasailam Thiagarajan).  One thing he suggests is that you play with, not within, the rules. So if you must resort to a Jeopardy format, remember that no law requires people to answer with a question.  Nothing forces you to let the winner choose the next question.  It’s far more important to match what people do in the interaction with what they’ll do on the job. Which explains Call Book Bingo. Some years ago, a client replaced the paper "call book" used by its sales force with a custom computer application.  Most of the sales force hadn’t used computers before, so to them it felt like a huge change.  The instructor-led training stressed hands-on practice, which meant that by the second day the sales reps felt overwhelmed and unsure of themselves. So we passed out the sophisticated learning aid you see here, then gave the directions: Write a number between 1 and 75 on each line that has a number sign.  Mix ‘em up.  Use each number only once. When the "caller" (the instructor) gives a number, check your card to see if you have it. If you do, write the answer to the question in that square. That was pretty much it-except for the time we spent coming up with questions that involved looking up and interpreting things from all the important parts of the call book.  And phrasing them so there was only one right answer.  "What’s the weekly sales volume at International House of Widgets?"  "Does Myrna’s Accounting and Catering include Contract JT-42?"  "How many stores in ZIP code 66431 carry berm flanges?" There’s a lot there that’s nothing like Bingo: no preprinted numbers, no B-I-N-G-O across the top.  Conversely, there’s a lot that’s very much like the real job: pertinent questions about accounts, and the need to research using the new, computerized tool. No one complained about the variation from "real" Bingo.  In fact, most often the learners would ask to continue playing till everyone got at least one Bingo.   Often they’d start helping one another as "doing my job" won out over "winning this game in class." Play around a little Mindlessly including a copy of a predictable "interaction" doesn’t make for better learning any more than riding the D train makes you a New Yorker.  As the noted instructional designer Mary Chapin Carpenter urges, Show a little passion, baby, show a little style Show the knack for knowing when and the gift for knowing how… If you’d like to acquire or strengthen that knack, try this advice from game designer Richard Powers.   Circle image adapted under a CC license from this original by Patrick Hoesly.

I know "knowledge management" is a high-value buzzword; I just tend to feel a twinge of weariness when I see it.  I’m not sure you can manage knowledge; the best you can hope for, I think, is to try and set up weirs, reservoirs, sidings, and whatnot to channel some of the flow.  The idea is that you’ll eventually be able to retrieve it and put it to use. What helps foster that retrieval?  Note-taking.  I’m not sure I agree with the authors of this study (PDF), who believe that "learning to take notes well… takes as much time as learning to write in a relatively experienced way."  They see the purposes of taking notes as "to record information and/or to aid reflection." A note to take: "and/or" is nearly always the worst possible phrase.  It implies precision but just smudges things.  You’re dithering or obsessing or both.  (See how I managed to say that without "and/or?") "Aid reflection" isn’t the term I’d use.  I like Stephen Downes’s description of note-taking as your contribution a two-way communication with the source of learning.  Downes recently noted a post by D’Arcy Norman, who says: Note taking is not primarily about manual duplication of a set of resources produced by a teacher. It’s an active process of sense-making and internalization. Of visualizing the processes of thinking. Granted, that’s not the way people often think about note-taking.  For them the phrase is a quick trip back to a lecture hall, with a professor relentlessly flinging chunks of some "body of knowledge" at you.  Eventually you’d have to reassemble them to the satisfaction of the flinger. I can be  a very traditional note-taker.  As an undergraduate, I adopted two strategies that I thought were worth about 0.75 on a four-point grade scale: sit in the first or second seat of a row, and take notes.  Both of these acted to keep me more awake and more engaged, even during the tedium of English Literature: The Augustans. I have a longstanding habit of taking notes in ink:     Two of my 101 pages of notes from "Complex Learning in Ten Steps" Ink’s no more essential to note-taking than a soup spoon is to lunch, even if the lunch is soup. If I’m trying to capture a lot of information for later analysis and search, my first stop is… Microsoft Word’s outlining.  I’ve created a few outline templates (one with I-A-1-a numbering, one with that technoid 1.0, 1.1, 1.1.1 format, and other with indents and various bullets for different levels).  I type fast and can shift outline levels almost without thinking, which means I’ve got more bandwidth available to take in and reprocess whatever I’m outlining. Especially when the knowledge stream’s wider than it is deep, I use Evernote.  I like the idea that my notes are in two places-online, where I can access them from any computer, and on my own laptop, where my useful paranoia means I back my stuff up. Evernote extends the concept of "note," because I can take photos of signs, whiteboard sketches, or flipchart pages.  Evernote lets me search for text in images, as in the example on the right (click for a larger view). I’ve used personal wikis to collect information, and I use several blogs as well.  Each wiki or blog has a focus, a way of deciding what parts of the flow to direct into the format.  And by actively directing-through entering text, through tagging, through classifying and moving-I’m working with the information and increasing the likelihood that I’ll recall it in a context that makes sense to me. Some more-or-less related items I found along the way: iPad, Therefore iKludge: David Dobbs writes about problems with noting, and sharing notes, on devices like the iPad. Teaching with Wikis: Sandra Porter enables electronic notes for students who forget the dead-tree kind. Cognitive Effort during Note Taking (PDF), a 2005 paper that appeared in Applied Cognitive Psychology. Much of what I found deals with note-taking in an academic setting.  That last paper by Piolat, Olive, and Kellogg makes the point that …from a cognitive perspective, note taking cannot be conceived of as only a simple abbreviated transcription of information that is heard or read…. on the contrary,it is an activity that strongly depends on the central executive functions of working memory to manage comprehension, selection, and production processes concurrently. I thought it worth including that statement.  For one thing, note-taking looks obvious-you take notes.  But what you really do, as the researchers are saying, is manipulate incoming information while managing the technical aspects of recording the results of your manipulation. If you were into straight transcription, like a court reporter, then it’s possible you learn very little, because your focus is purely on the capture.  But for notes to be useful, other than as a transcript, you’re doing things mentally while you’re doing things physically.

I haven’t read any of the Twilight books by Stephenie Meyer, and now I don’t have to, thanks to the reviews at Pop Suede.  (I started with the third, the one for Twilight: Eclipse, but here they’re in what I think is the proper sequence.) Review of Twilight: Review of Twilight: New Moon Review of Twilight: Eclipse What’s the point (other than a teensy bit of humor)? It struck me that, based on the little I’d picked up from newspapers and online, the Pop Suede folks have done a great job of capturing the plot of each book, then tweaking it enough that you see both the textual source and the satiric object.  It’s like a wildly informal approach to… a book report. Understand: I no more want everyone churning out lolcats book reviews than I want another couple thousand terabytes of online-learning Jeopardy quiz.  But think what it took to put these things together: you had to grasp the key points of the original book, weed stuff out, and then express your understanding in a way that communicates. It’s that kind of reworking and recasting of a complicated set of ideas that helps foster learning, not a 20-item multiple-guess test at the end of the half-day module on Twilight: New Moon. I once needed to mitigate the effect of the typical marketing department information dump.  New victims employees were sentenced to hear 90 minutes’ worth of feeds and speeds about three major products.   So I asked the product managers to agree to a new format in which they’d present for only an hour, take a short break, and then participate in a discussion with the new hires. This is how I explained the "discussion" to the sales folks, immediately before the first presentation: We’re going to have three one-hour presentations today. Yeah, I know, but after two of them, you get a 15 minute break. Look on the back of your name card.  You’re in one of three groups based on the colored dot. At the end of each presentation, I’ll name one of the colors.   During the break, that color group has 15 minutes to make a pitch on "the 10 main ways to sell [whatever the product is]." After the break, you make your pitch.  The rest of you get to ask questions, kibitz, figure stuff out.At the end, the Product Manager will jump in. Yeah, it was manipulative.  Hey, I’d been working with sales reps for a while. Some of the things I had in mind: Reduce potential product-manager-induced sleep by 33% (one hour instead of 90 minutes). Increase attention, at least in the first session, since the sales rep didn’t know if he had to work on the pitch till after it was over. More breaks than expected (a feature, but for most folks, a benefit). Rethinking / reworking by the sales reps replaced canned product-manager summary. Product manager got to hear what the sales reps thought were the main sales ideas. In a way, it was very formal learning: one-time, face-t0-face,  scheduled.  We even had mediocre coffee, pastries, and PowerPoint.  But we also got the salespeople doing what their jobs called for: thinking about the products and how they could sell them to potential customers.  

In a cartoon I saw years ago, two Romans are sitting high in the Coliseum, watching people being thrown to the lions.  One man says to the other, "You know, I’m a Christian, too — I’m just not a fanatic about it." I’m kind of that way about hiking, and about learning design.  In terms of hiking, my idea of enjoyably strenuous is Lowe’s Bald Spot, a "small subordinate peak below Mount Washington" in New Hampshire’s White Mountains.  Which may explain why I enjoy hiking (okay, walking) along converted railbeds like Québec’s Parc Lineaire Le P’tit Train du Nord.  Just last week, my wife and I ambled along a similar, smaller route in the town of Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia. What’s that got to do with learning design? Well, learning is what someone does-either through active pursuit or through the relentless looping of stimulus, response, and feedback.  Thus what you learn, where, and how all depend on your context, which includes the experiences and inclinations that you bring to the new setting. If you’re not much of a hiker, then the hiking equivalent of learning design is an effort to help you achieve a satisfactory experience.  It took us a little while to figure that the gravely path winding past a marsh had been a railbed, though I had my suspicions.  Then I saw a clear, orderly fork, a place where one track had split from another, and I knew. That kind of trail doesn’t need to provide a lot of guidance-though for newcomers, it’s helpful to make clear it is a trail, and to set forth some basics: We’d entered from a side route and only found this gate as we approached the beginning of the trail.  Seems obvious that you’re not supposed to drive here.  At least that was my take.  But then we noticed the adjoining sign: Additional user guidance, I guess.  What the trail planner (or the town attorney) had in mind, I suppose, was someone tooling along in his car on the approach to the trail, at night, and perhaps not noticing the metal gate.  A standard road sign format might help. Then we moved a bit further away: A lot of corporate and organizational learning is intended to increase effectiveness.  We want people to be more productive, able to do things more quickly, or to a higher level of quality.  It’s the mantra of better, faster, cheaper, more. That’s fine.  That’s what you should aim for in an organization, because when you’re better at what you do, you can achieve the goals you had in mind. A lot of corporate and organizational learning, though, hews doggedly to the throughput model.  Give people stuff.  Explain.  Direct.  Tell.  Don’t waste time having folks fumble around trying things. What’s more, I believe many people in those organizations-the folks attending the formal learning-expect that approach.  Boil it down.  Don’t waste my time.  Gimme facts.  For heaven’s sake, don’t be a fanatic about making me do stuff in the hope that I’m going to learn. Combine that with the urge that "learning professionals" have to be helpful, and you can end up with a day’s formal training that includes half an hour of icebreakers, another half hour on groundrules and objectives, 15 minutes’ recap before lunch and 15 minutes afterward, to say nothing of end-of-the-day reviews, reactions, and ritual bows toward the flipchart-sheet parking lot.  That’s a whole lotta time going to paralearning. I’m going to post that third picture in my office as a not-too-subtle reminder that I shouldn’t make things too obvious  

In her comment on yesterday’s post, Kathy Sierra included a link to a presentation she made at a recent Government 2.0 Expo.  Here it is: Sierra’s often talked about passion, and makes a good distinction here between "passion" and "fantasy models."  In the workplace (as elsewhere), passion means more than "I’m interested in" or "I care about" something.  For her, it means that you’re so into whatever you’re into that you’re constantly learning. Not everyone is, which explains the difference between 15 years’ experience and one year repeated 14 times. That’s how I interpret her remark about passion meaning that you’re engaged in "a sustainable way."  You’re not just connected to something passively.  You interact with it, and that interaction changes you. In her talk, she touches on the fact that many people don’t learn and change even when they’ve got a real stake in the outcome-like people who’ve had coronary bypass surgery. That doesn’t mean they can’t, of course.  It may mean that they need better tools to help them change-clearer examples, support systems, networks, all that stuff. In the meantime, her suggestions for getting started include: Teach something cool (as a bridge to other things) Provide opportunity for self-expression (meaning, let people do things with what they’re learning) Wrap the mundane or pragmatic in a compelling context If you’re in the U.S., your local jurisdiction produces an annual water quality report (here’s the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission’s version).  Sierra points to recent reports from the city of Bryant, Texas (available from the Water Services department’s main page).  Since 2004, they’ve worked at doing things differently, at least in part to raise awareness of what the department does for citizens. Links at the Water Services page offer reports from earlier years, like the 2004 edition from which I took the picture above.  Even without reading all the text, you get a striking image.  They’re talking about backflow prevention-keeping hazardous material from contaminating the water system (not to mention the water from your faucet).  The city has backflow prevention in place, and so can you. So the citizens of Bryant could learn more about their water and modify their usage based in part on the report.  And on a couple other levels: The staff of the water department has more visibility. The city thinks differently about how it communicates with citizens. Individuals (workers, citizens, passers-by) see a fresher, potentially more effective way to share a message. Maybe it’s not always calendars.  Or maybe the calendar form, and the increased resolution that Kathy Sierra talks about, helps drive people to more and more creativity.  It’s like what the poet Robert Francis said about the sestina in general and his poem Hallelujah: a sestina in particular: If you drape thirty-nine iron chains around your arms and shoulders and then do a dance, the whole point of the dance will be to seem light and effortless. Robert Francis knows, as Kathy Sierra knows, that "light and effortless" won’t happen unless you pick up those chains, get out on the floor, and dance.

Jane Hart’s been collecting reasons why organizations should not ban social media.  I wanted to contribute but didn’t think I could match contributors like Jack Vinson, Harold Jarche, or Jane herself. As it happens, that glover’s son from Stratford-upon-Avon anticipated the kinds of objections Jane had in mind.  What follows are some notions.  They’re not definitive or sure-fire.  In fact, "they are yet but ear-kissing arguments" (King Lear). There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.(Hamlet) Will, living in an age of social ferment, was pragmatic.  Yes, you’re accustomed to making your connections in an organization the way your boss (or your boss’s father) did. I have no doubt whatsoever that 1890s-era managers fretted and fulminated over the pointlessness of Mr. Bell’s contraption. We will draw the curtain and show you the picture.(Twelfth Night) Social media make it possible to provide…well, a fuller picture.  Not just in the sense of images more easily created, shared, and modified, but in the combination of images with other representations. By comparison, it’s really hard to fax a video. I’m not saying images will guarantee you’ll communicate better.  (Two words: clip art.)  But sometimes less (text) is more (meaning), and social media can help carry some of your intended meaning in ways more traditional vehicles can’t. An honest tale speeds best, being plainly told.(Richard III) Here I see advice both for the organization and for the individual.  Speed’s vital: get what you have or what you need, as quickly as you can.  Informal consultation via messaging (Yammer, Twitter, instant messaging); knowledge collection and sharing through vehicles like wikis. "Plainly told" can also mean "write so you make sense."  I posted last year about the Washington DC Metro system’s stumbling efforts on Twitter.  The tweets seemed written by a committee, few of whom actually used Twitter.  They’ve gotten somewhat better (see here), though 6 of the 100 most recent tweets were truncated. (If you’ve been on Twitter for a year and a half and haven’t figured out the 140-character limit, you need to be a bit more reflective.  And maybe when there’s a delay, say "both ways" instead of "in both directions," trusting that train riders will get the message.) Love sought is good, but giv’n unsought is better.(Twelfth Night) Speaking of both directions, Will has in mind the idea of fans, friends, and followers.  Rather than worrying about your own status (as an individual or as an organization), focus on participating in the communities around you.  Share stuff.  Offer value.  Give credit.  Link to others.  Spread the wealth. The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.(As You Like It) One of the tendencies with social networking is that formal status, credentialization, and the like matter less than they used to.  Not that they’re irrelevant: if someone wants to know about nanoscience, then Andrew Maynard is a better starting point than I am. But you know from ordinary life that very little that’s useful derives from the status or the credential itself.  No matter how extensive someone’s expertise is, I find it’s good to see that he or she recognizes its limits.  As Matt Ridley said of science, I think useful knowledge is like "a hungry furnace that must be fed logs from the forests of ignorance that surrounds us. In the process, the clearing we call knowledge expands, but the more it expands, the longer its perimeter and the more ignorance comes into view." Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.(Measure for Measure) In my experience, it’s private organizations rather than government that trumpet the value of entrepreneurial thinking, agility, openness to new trends — but it wasn’t the government that kept building Chevy Cavaliers, that fought against home video recording, or that shoehorns all training into the lecture-hall, butts-in-seats model. Yes, there’s a fear that people will waste time on Facebook or Twitter.  That’s because some people will, just as some people use March Madness as an excuse to do nothing all all on the job but yak about brackets and bubbles. Another side of this: some organizations (public and private alike) are so deeply baptized in the Church of Best Practice that the notion of trying something for themselves is heresy.  I mean, if you’re a pharmaceutical company, might it not be better for you to experiment with social media in a pharma context than to wait till Business Week features a manufacturer’s experience which you’ll then try cramming down the throats of your people? The end crowns all, and that old common arbitrator, Time, will one day end it.(Troilus and Cressida) One real shortcoming of social media — as of software generally — is that you can’t rely on it for the long term.  Google Wave, announced at the end of May 2009, is essentially dead.  Facebook may bestride the narrow world like a Colossus, but so did AOL in its time, and CompuServ before that. So what Shakespeare’s saying here is, "get thou a grip."  If you’ve never used a word processor, then learning one is a real challenge.  But once you’ve learned one, you’ve able to conceptually handle another one as your company switches from WordStar to WordPerfect to Word to Google Docs. No, those aren’t the same.  There are significant differences, but there’s enough at the core to help you cope till you figure the rest out. As Will might have said if there’d been mayonnaise jars in his time, "Keep cool.  Don’t freeze." To unpathed waters, undreamed shores.(The Winter’s Tale) This idea flows from the previous ones.  The ease and informality of connections make it possible to go where you hadn’t imagined you’d like to go.  You get exposed to other viewpoints, to experiments in progress, to the cognitive coalface being worked in other parts of the organization. Those things are hard to do with the monthly newsletter and Human Resource’s weekly email blast.   (And, by the way, if you’re one of the people perpetrating that last item: whatever made you think "blast" was something that’d have a positive connotation for the recipients?) Everyone can master a grief but he that has it.(Much Ado About Nothing) In other words, early adopters, calm down.  Show, don’t tell.  Consider your audience.  Nobody (except maybe you) wants to be using the newest Bright Shiny Object.  Most people want to be getting stuff accomplished, and maybe there’s a way your BSO can help that. In a similar vein, O grizzled veteran with deep experience (including you, over there, who’ve been on Twitter for three months now):  don’t bite the newbies.  You weren’t born with XHTML coded into your DNA, either. This above all: to thine own self be true.And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.(Hamlet) Poor Polonius gets a bad rap.  Even if he was a windbag, at least here the bag’s wafting along some good advice. First: social media was created to serve the individual or organization, not the other way around.  Using these tools will make you…well, yourself, a person who happens to be using them. Which is why, if you’re prone to be a jerk, people tend to figure that out whether they encounter you in meetings,  in email, or on Twitter.  (The 140-character limit might help minimize that, but I have my doubts.) Similarly, if you’re open to new things, if you’re someone who reflects on and shares what you’ve been doing, if you’re participating in spheres wider than your hatband, then social media tools help you to be yourself, and become more like yourself.  

Tom Fox, in the Washington Post’s Federal Coach column, provides some advice for managers in the federal government who oversee younger workers.  Fox holds that "the best leaders recognize that potential talent is nurtured by developing expertise, executive skills and solid judgment, along with providing constant feedback and opportunities for personal growth." The advice may be obvious, but it’s also pertinent: Connect the dots between now and the future. Or, help the less-experienced worker see how current responsibilities fit into a larger picture that makes sense for that worker. Encourage an apprenticeship mindset. A real leader will know that the root of "apprentice" means "to learn," not "to do all the scutwork." Reinforce lessons learned through constant feedback. It’s true that learning can happen anytime.  You can increase the likelihood of its happening by helping your staff to reflect, reprocess, question, and re-express what they’ve been doing and the results that have followed. All of which reminded me of the skillful approach to coaching that’s wrapped in the sometimes flashy, sometimes sly trappings of What Not to Wear. If you haven’t seen this TLC program: in each episode, fashion consultants Stacy London and Clinton Kelly critique the clothing choices of someone whose family or friends nominated them for this, um, performance review. As with many "reality" shows, WNTW has a certain OMG appeal.  Worldly folks like you and me would never dress as poorly or as blindly as the folks on the program, right? I’ve watched many episodes (sometimes as an antidote after watching an especially grim movie).  Beneath the apparently lightweight notion of focusing so intensely on fashion, Stacy and Clinton pay a lot of attention to helping the individual focus productively on goals. Stacy: We don’t want you to label yourself just as a mom. Lori: But my daughter is my priority. * * * Lori: If you’re trying to change my distorted version of what I look like with form-fitted clothes, you’re not helping with these styles. Period. Clinton:  You do not have a crazy distorted body, a weird body shape. You have your own body shape. WNTW follows a set pattern.  I was thinking about this pattern as a model for helping inexperienced people start figuring out an area of complexity.  Sort of a well-dressed version of complex learning. You can think of the nominated-by-friends aspect as just part of the randomness of the workplace.  We don’t always get to choose our learning opportunities.  Sometimes they show up dressed as crummy assignments, annoying coworkers, or the departure of a favorite boss. Some of the standard elements in a What Not to Wear episode: The individual models 3 of her own outfits and explains why she likes them-while surrounded by mirrors. Clinton and Stacy create 3 new outfits that demonstrate fashion  rules suited to the individual. The hosts ritually toss out most (or all) of the person’s old wardrobe. The person goes shopping solo, armed with the new rules (and a $5,000 credit card from the program). Invariably, Clinton and Stacy intervene to deal with poor choices from Day 1′s shopping, and to help with Day 2′s. A hair stylist and makeup consultant try"reframing in their areas of expertise. The individual returns home for a reveal with family and friends. Whatever you think of fashion, you have to admire the way the gurus guide the individual into the (typically strange) word of style with mindfulness. They’ll make outrageous comments about the old wardrobe, but they’re also respectful of the individual, her life, and her career.  I’ve seen them dealing with a professional witch (from Salem, Massachusetts, no less), an Episcopal priest, a dreadlocked "alternative model," and a cancer survivor who’d had a double mastectomy. Looking past the show’s structure, you find: Rules of thumb (with the why). If you’re small-statured, coats and blazers that fall just above the hip are an ideal length; otherwise, you run the risk of a longer coat length distorting your proportions. New approaches gives as experience shared. Don’t despair if the first four or five pairs of pants you try on don’t fit the way you want them to - sometimes you have to kiss a lot of jeans frogs before you find your denim prince. Simplified cognitive maps (the mannequin outfits and the rules they exemplify). Opportunity to apply basic rules Feedback on that application in a collaborative setting From time to time, WNTW does a "where are they now?" show, reconnecting with people who’ve been on the show.  I suspect these are less interesting to the show’s audience (or there’d be more 6-months-later episode). I’m sure it’s tough for the individuals to maintain or even heighten their new style awareness when in their old settings.  The answer, though, isn’t requiring Stacy and Clinton Refresher Training.  Instead of a single answer, I’d say there are many possible ways for the person to adapt to real life, continue strengthening newfound skills, and to avoid falling back into stretchy sweats and rock-concert T shirts. In terms of your professional development, is that your standard outfit?  I don’t mean on your body, necessarily.  How are you dressing your mindset?

As an undergraduate, I had a terrific time swimming way over my head in a course on modern sociological thought.  Among other things, we read Talcott Parsons, which is like getting mugged by a noun gang.  I thought I understood what he meant by specific relationships versus diffuse ones, so when Dr. Bauder asked for an example of the latter, I said, "Student and teacher."  (I mean, it should be a free exchange, right?) Her reply: "Okay.  What are you doing Saturday night?" Being specific takes more work To make the point clear: in a specific relationship, it’s the roles that are specific, and you more or less have to justify including things that don’t fit those roles.  You might shoot the breeze with the grocery store cashier about the weather, or the freshness of the strawberries, but ordinarily you don’t ask about his personal life. In a diffuse relationship, on the other hand, you have to justify leaving things out.  "You walked right past me and didn’t say a word.  What’s up?" Many of my professional connections (and some personal ones) are now virtual.  I don’t work in an office; I tend not to have long-term projects.  I don’t have everyday, flesh-and-blood colleagues.  So I need to cultivate my virtual connections: strengthen the existing ones, get the new ones get well rooted. In the physical workplace, most of your relationships are specific and often defined by various sorts of proximity.  You’re physically close.  You’re organizationally close (same team, same boss, same project, same department).  Or you what I think of as explicit proximity (relative position based on rank) and tacit proximity (based on relative depth of expertise). As the distance increased (other floors, other departments, other cities), you have to work harder to establish and maintain good working relationships.  People don’t know you. Reducing friction in your connections When you cultivate relationships in the virtual workplace, you’re using different tools to increase proximity.  For a long time, we’ve had workplace tools to reduce physical distance and collapse time-zone distance.  Now we’ve got greater (and more frequent) distance, but also more powerful tools. One concept that’s important to me, as someone who typically works on his own, is the virtual cube-mate.  I like being able to stick my hear around a metaphorical partition to say, "Listen to this."  Or "Do you know…?"  Or "Here we go again." But reducing virtual distance doesn’t mean that distance isn’t there.  And it doesn’t mean your in-person, interpersonal skill transfers to the virtual world.   As the Russian proverb says, your elbow is close, but it’s hard to bite. I have a pet phrase for asides and parenthetical remarks I’ll make, especially in a one-to-one exchange like an instant-message conversation or a series of direct messages on Twitter: "conversation insurance."  Things I do or say because: I want to make myself clear (or clearer). I want to avoid misunderstanding. I’m trying to be more like myself. Some of that’s just common sense (though common sense tells lots of people the earth is flat).  For instance, "I’m not disputing what you’re saying. I just think X applies as well…"  You go a little further because your message is going further. Some of it, though, is simply engaging long enough (in some complex combination of individual units and elapsed time) that both parties are better able to form a pattern for the other that’s not a bad approximation of face-to-face.  Which, as I think about exchanges over the past two or three days, isn’t so much conversation insurance as connection oil. I don’t know that there are Ten Quick Tips for this, which is too bad; I could have a workshop.  I do have a couple of notions: Walk, don’t run. Trying to connect closely with everyone you know (and everything they know) just makes you one of those LinkedIn Lotharios, the kind of person in whom networking seems like an infectious disease. Assume good faith. This guideline for Wikipedia editors encourages people to assume that others are trying to help, not hurt. Don’t drive crossways in the parking lot. That was advice from a colleague to his new-driver sons: when you’re at the mall, always drive along the "roads" up and down the parking lot.  Don’t go cutting across the lanes because there’s an opening.  Other drivers may not expect you. That last point is why I now use emoticons — at least on Twitter. They’re conventions, not moral failings I’ve been online a long time.  I’ve never cared for abbreviations like IMHO, YMMV, and so on.  I have a theory that each time someone types LOL, they lose a neuron.  So emoticons ( or, even worse, "smilies" ) made me shudder. But… as I did online text-chat in Second Life, in French, I worried that my humor (or attempts at it) would be misunderstood.  So I’d add emoticons I saw my francophone friends using.  It hardly hurt at all, and people got to know me. Likewise on Twitter — especially if I’m making a public comment to someone I don’t know well.  It’s easy to forget, if you’re only thinking of your chosen network, that not everyone knows you as well as you might think (or wish).  I can joke around with some people, but virtual passersby might not understand.  So an emoticon, or a few drops of some other form of connection oil, helps reduce the potential friction. Online presence is a kind of invitation, but you have to work at figuring out what the invitation means for you.  Sometimes, as with what I call book blogs — HotNewBook.com, set up mainly to promote Hot New Book.  Those are invitations to come in, browse, and buy.  The author probably doesn’t have a lot of time to interact with everyone who’d like to interact with him. Otherwise, if people are active on social sites, you have to work out how to interact with them.  In other words, it’s just like real life, except the conversation stops if your power goes out. (I’d like to thank Chris, Dick, Heather, Jane, Kevin, Sahana, and Simon, whose conversations with me this week reinforced for me the value of virtual connections.) My relationship images are based on this CC-licensed image by Doha Sam / Sam Agnew.CC-licensed cube-mate photo by el frijole.

Are you in a corporate training environment? Dick Carlson in his mild-manner way muses on how learners feel about training (Learner Feedback? You Can’t STAND Learner Feedback!). Dick and I have some differences — I think dogs ought to have noses that they themselves can see — but not in this area.  The core of Dick’s post is the ultimate assessment: can you now accomplish whatever this training was supposed to equip you to accomplish? (Yes, that does mean "that you couldn’t accomplish before due to a lack of skill or knowledge."  Don’t be cute.) Because — if we start with a true skill deficit that prevented you from producing worthwhile results — that’s vastly more important than whether the training fit your purported learning style, whether the ratio of graphics to text was in a given range, and whether the person helping you called herself a trainer, a teacher, a facilitator, a coach, or the Bluemantle Pursuivant. If you need to learn how to recover from an airplane stall or how to control paragraph borders through a class in CSS, learning assessment comes down to two words: show me. With all that, I do think that how the learner feels about what’s going on does  influence the learning situation.  I just want to make clear: that’s very different from saying that those feelings matter in terms of assessing the learning. High profile?  You bet your assessment. I was once in charge of instructor training and evaluation for an enormous, multi-year training project.  In the final phase, we trained over 2,000 sales reps to use a laptop-based, custom application.  90% of the them had never used a personal computer. Which was a drawback: the client decided that as long as the sales reps were coming for training on the custom application, we should "take advantage of the opportunity" to teach them email. And word processing.  And spreadsheets.  And a presentation package.  And connection to two different mainframe applications using simple, friendly 3270 emulation software. In a total of five days (one 3-day session, a 2-day follow-on one month later). Our client training group was half a dozen people, so we hired some 30 contractors and trained them as instructors.  I mention the contractors because we needed a high degree of consistency in the training.  When a group of sales reps returned for Session 2, we needed to be confident that they’d mastered the skills in Session 1. (If the informal learning zealots knew how we electrified the fences within which the instructors could improvise, they’d have more conniptions than a social media guru who discovered her iPhone is really a Palm Pre in drag.) We used a relentlessly hands-on approach with lots of coaching, as well as "keep quiet and make them think" guidance for the instructor.  The skills focused on important real-world tasks, not power-user trivia: open an account.  Cancel an order.  Add a new contract. We conducted nearly 600 classroom-days of training, and we had the participants completed end-of-day feedback after 80% of them.  I never pretended this was a learning assessment.  I’m not sure it was an assessment at all, though we might have called the summary an assessment, because our client liked that kind of thing.  We had 10 or so questions with a 1-to-4 scale and a few Goldilocks questions ( "too slow / too fast / just right" ), as well as space for freeform comments. Why bother? I made the analogy with checking vital signs at the doctor’s or in the hospital.  Temperature, pulse rate, blood pressure, and respiration rate aren’t conclusive, but they help point the way to possible problems, so you can work on identifying causes and solutions. So if we asked how well someone felt she could transmit her sales calls, we knew about the drawbacks of self-reported date.  And we had an instructor who observed the transmit exercise.  We were looking for an indication that on the whole, class by class, participants felt they could do thist. (Over time, we found that when this self-reporting fell below about 3 on the four-point scale, it was nearly always due to… let’s say, opportunity for the instructor to improve.) When we asked the Goldilocks question about pace, it wasn’t because we believed they knew more about pacing than we did.  We wanted to hear how they felt about the pace.  And if the reported score drifted significantly toward "too fast" or "too slow," we’d decide to check further.   (2,204 Session 1 evaluations, by the way, put pace at 3.2, where 1 was "too slow" and 5 was "too fast." ) Naturally, to keep in good standing with the National Association for Smile-Sheet Usage, we had free-form comments as well.  We asked "what did you like best?" and "What did you like least?"  (In earlier phases of this project, we asked them to list three things they liked and three they didn’t.  Almost no one listed three.  When we let them decide for themselves what they wanted to list, the total number per 100 replies went up. ) Early in the project, our client services team sat around one evening, pulling out some of the comment sheets and reading them aloud.  It was my boss at the time who found this gem, under "what did you like best?" My instructor made me feel safe to be dumb. Everybody laughed.  Then everybody smiled.  And then everybody realized we had a new vision of what success in our project would mean. We wanted the learners to feel safe to be dumb.  Safe to ask questions about things they didn’t understand.  Safe to be puzzled.  Because if they felt safe, they felt comfortable in asking for help.  And if they felt comfortable asking, that meant they felt pretty sure that we could help them to learn what they needed to learn. What about weaving their feedback into the instructional design?  In general, newcomers to a field don’t know much about that field, which means they’re not especially well equipped to figure out optimal ways to learn. Please note: I am not at all saying newcomers can’t make decisions about their own learning.  In fact, I think they should make ‘em.  In a situation like this, though, my client wasn’t the individual learner.  It was (fictionally named) Caesar International, and it had thousands of people who needed to learn to apply a new sales-force system as efficiently as possible. Mainly procedural skills.  Low familiarity with computers, let alone these particular applications.  High degree of apprehension. (By the way, Ward Cunningham installed WikiWikiWeb online eight months after our project ended, so don’t go all social-media Monday-morning-quarterback on me.) I felt, and still feel, that our design was good.  So did the Caesar brass: within six months of the end of the project, a nearly 25% increase in market share for Caesar’s #1 product, and the honchos said that resulted from successfully training the reps to use the new sales software on the job. When you feel safe to be dumb, you don’t stay dumb long. CC-licensed images:Yes / no assessment by nidhug (Morten Wulff)."Cover-the-content" adapted from this photo by antwerpenR (Roger Price).  

Disclosure: I grew up in Detroit (and I don’t mean Livonia, let alone Auburn Hills).  My dad was an auto worker (and so was I, for one summer).  People back there say things like "Chrysler’s is doing better," using the possessive even when the company is the subject of the sentence. Well, Ford’s is doing well, too.  Not just in car sales, though those are on the uptick.  I’m thinking of the Ford Motor Company digital participation guidelines just posted at Scribd.  Like any large corporate, Ford doubtless has lots and lots of text somewhere, but these guidelines are a great example of sensible policy to guide employees who are using social media. You really ought to read the whole thing for yourself, but I’m going to summarize and comment here. Be honest about who you are. The gist: when your online conversations relates to our business or industry, identify yourself as working for Ford Motor Company.  Say who you are without giving out detailed information. Not too much to ask in any conversation. Make it clear that your views are your own. Include the following somewhere in every social media profile: "I work at Ford, but this is my own opinion and is not the opinion of Ford Motor Company." "Somewhere in the profile" isn’t an onerous requirement. For nearly 10 years, in one online forum, my signature line concluded with "My opinions, not GE’s."  In case people weren’t sure. Mind your manners. Treat coworkers, other personnel, customer, competitions, the company, and yourself with respect.  Don’t post offensive, demeaning, or inappropriate comments.  Respectfully withdraw from discussions that go off-topic or become profane. I’ve seen lots of discussion about how the immediacy (and physical safety) of the Internet encourage people to be… more than assertive, let’s say.  Good for attention, not so good for reputation.  At least not positive reputation. Use your common sense. Keep certain business-related topics confidential.  If you’re talking about the company or the industry, focus on matters of public record.  Don’t divulge non-public company information, or personal information about others. Remember: what happens online, stays online. "Search engines and other technologies make it virtually impossible to take something back.  Be sure you mean what you say, and say what you mean." Also, consider everything you post online the same as posting to a physical bulletin board or submitting a letter to a newspaper.  Assume that reporters, competitors, and your boss will be able to read it. Anyone who’s been online for more than three months knows this.  It’s not bad to recall it, though. * * * If you’ve ever worked in a corporate environment, you know that’s not the whole of it.  The guidelines tell you want to do about company intellectual property, about vehicle or repair concerns, about dealer issues.  And if you’re unsure, ask the corporate communications or legal staff for advice. Notice: there’s nobody you have to check with and ask if you can participate in arenas like Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr.  The document says, "we have advised our personnel to observe these guidelines when participating in an online conversation regarding Ford or the automotive industry."

I’ve always looked at math as a tool to be mastered and wielded rather than subject matter to be absorbed. - Steven Wittens That remark on Wittens’ blog is a worthwhile viewpoint for a discussion today on Twitter about what we mean by behavior change and learning.  But let me backtrack a bit: When my son was younger — when a computer weighed nearly as much as he did — he got interested in programming.  After a while he could create startling graphics via ray-tracing, though at the time our home computer was so slow he’d start the process before going to bed, and check in the morning to see if it was done. I remember this passion of his, and a related one, when Stephen Downes led me to a 1K demo by Steven Wittens.  A 1K demo is a program of no more than 1,024 bytes, done as a tour de force. You can find lots of demo contests, with lots of prizes, but the real rewards seem to be (1) "I did it!" and (2) bragging rights. Which aren’t bad reinforcers to learning. I don’t know anything about creating a demo, but I do know animated, focused discussion when I see it.  I can usually tell good explanation from bad, and Witten’s description of his own work is admirable. While [generating all data on the fly to save space] might seem like a black art, often it just comes down to clever use of (high school) math… Unlike the actual 1K demo, the code snippets here will feature legible spacing and descriptive variable names. He explains initialization (how the demo starts) in two sentences, and then uses bullets to introduce the four main parts: activating the wires, making them visible, coloring them, and animating the camera. You can read the explanation for yourself.  I enjoyed the addendum: After seeing the other demos in the contest, I wasn’t so sure about my entry, so I started working on a version 2. The main difference is the addition of glowy light beams around the object. As you might suspect, I’m cheating massively here: rather than do physically correct light scattering calculations, I’m just using a 2D effect. Thankfully it comes out looking great. Essentially, I take the rendered image, and process it in a second Canvas that is hidden. This new image is then layered on the original. So, whaddya think? From my son’s experience and from the comments on Wittens’s blog, I’d say there’s a lot of informal, choose-your-path, get-into-it learning in the demo world.  Note what some of the (currently) 32 comments say: I always wanted to start learning more about this, but haven’t found any source for explanation. I like the step-by-step explanation that you have since it goes into the "why" any just not here’s my code. By the way, do you have any recommends for books into this topic? I  just wanted to chime in with another big "Thank you!" for taking the time to write this up. Like the other commenters, I’ve long been fascinated and mystified by some of these techniques, and your explanations are brilliant and accessible. I liked this demo so much that I took some time off my working day to port it to Flash, hoping to learn the internals of it and how it’s done… I got something 90% similar to the JS version.Although I was able to port the code line-to-line, I couldn’t understand many parts of it. I tried to look for some commenting somewhere on the net without results. So you can imagine how cool this article is to me! If anyone’s interested in having this version (AS2) please let me know. (Wittens, responding to a commenter:) I know there are still opportunities for shortening it by shaving off a few bytes here and there. But I find the problem in these challenges is rarely one byte. It’s usually 200-300 bytes over the limit that you have to simply throw away and replace with something much smaller and equally good. I would LOVE to see this as an audio visualizer. I made the visualizer on indieed.com, check out a song to see it. It’s nowhere NEAR as awesome as this.Would you be willing to sell a tweaked version of this to indieed (its my company) as our default visualizer for our player?Please email me, I’m quite impressed. There’s a long and very technical comment with suggested improvements from Jason Knight, with a calm if sly reply from Wittens: "Be careful about optimizing blindly…you added 36 characters to save 15."  And near the end end, after someone’s created a Flash version, other people start offering ways to improve that. Learning and worth At first, I thought of that last comment as some serious summative evaluation: "I want to buy this thing you made."  In a way, thought, all the comments are.  And this is how learning really happens: you work away at something, you search for ways to achieve your goal (or maybe redefine it), and you work at the thing again until you produce a result. Nearly all my clients have been large organizations, and their traditional models don’t always take in this reality.  Lots of people have said for a long time that talking isn’t teaching and that listening isn’t learning.  A misplaced emphasis on efficiency, often unmoored from effectiveness, tempts managers (and, let’s face it, training departments) to a throughput model. CC-licensed ray-tracing image by Susam Pal.

Once upon a time — the time of the first-century poet Juvenal — the phrase black swan implied something that didn’t exist.  More recently, the black swan theory refers either to highly improbable things, or to outliers with an outsized influence on events. Of course, if you had lived in western Australia before the arrival of Europeans, black swans would have been the only ones you’d ever heard of. Which simply says most people go with what they know. I’ve seen something of this in online discussions about the world of work.  If all your virtual dealings are with consultants, academics, freelancers, and and the folks who contract with them, you can easily get the impression everyone’s working independently. Even though I’m a consultant myself, I’m skeptical about that broad a generalization.  So I’m revisiting something I wrote about more than three years ago: who works where (or, who’s an employee and who’s not)? I’m getting this information from various business and non-employer statistics published by the U.S. Small Business Administration. In 2008, there were 21.4 million non-employers in the U.S.  Their total receipts were $963 billion, or roughly $45,000 per firm. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, a non-employer is an organization with no paid employees, with $1,000 in business receipts, and subject to federal income tax.  (For some reason, a non-employer in the construction industry needs only $1 in receipts to be counted.) In 2007, there were 120 million employees working at 6 million firms.  Total receipts were $29.8 trillion. Certainly with the economic downturn since 2007, those figures have changed, but I doubt they’ve changed that much.  Even if every single non-employer were a unique individual, and even if none of the non-employers also had a job working for someone else, 120 out of 141 million people in the U.S. were employees.  And, as the Census Bureau says, "Most non-employers are self-employed individuals operating very small unincorporated businesses, which may or may not be the owner’s principal source of income." I wondered where all those non-employers worked.    Here’s a breakdown by number of non-employer firms — in other words, the fields where you’d find these folks: Professional, scientific, technical services: 3 million Construction: 2.5 million Real estate, rental, leasing: 2.1 million Retail trade: 1.9 million "Store and non-store" retail — the latter would include things like catalog and home-based sales Other services: 3 million A catchall taking in everything from equipment repair to dating services to pet care Four of these sectors (construction, real estate, retail, and "other services") account for almost half of all non-employers.  Though perhaps the numbers would look different if the Census Bureau had a category for "social media expert." Meanwhile, back where you find 120,000,000 people: 5.1% of employees work for firms having 0 - 5 employees. The zero apparently takes in seasonal work when the work’s out of season. 30.3% of employees work for firms having 5 - 99 employees. 14.2% work for firms with 100 - 499 employees. 5.2% work for first with 500 - 999 employees 12.4% work for firms having 1,000 - 4,999 employees. 32.7% work for firms with 5,000 or more employees All this to demonstrate that most Americans who work, work for someone else.  And of the 120 million who are employees, nearly half work for firms with at least 1,000 employees. I don’t have a big conclusion to finish this off with a flourish.  I just think this kind of information helps set in context some workplace learning and performance-improvement issues. CC-licensed image of a black swan by specksinsd.

Last April, about six months after my dad died at the age of 96, I met someone whose own father had passed away at 97.  I said something about how, when a family member’s over 90, you always have an unspoken awareness of their mortality. She agreed, but added that for her, there was also a feeling that her father had always been there and would always be.  Not a logical feeling, but a true one.  When my grandmother died, two years after my grandfather, I remember my dad saying, "Now I’m an orphan."  He was 59. All my siblings, as well as my mother, live in metro Detroit.  All of us went to Nova Scotia last month. The main purpose: to have a memorial mass for those who couldn’t come to Michigan for his funeral, to celebrate Dad’s life, and to bury his ashes in his beloved Cape Breton. I find I don’t have a lot of patience with people who talk about reaching closure as if it’s a stop on the subway.  I suppose they mean well, but I can’t help hearing an implied timetable, a hint that you should define some point and then get off the emotional train. No, when I say "closure," I mean a kind of rethinking.  It’s figuring out how to continue your relationship with the person who’s died - and fitting that with your other relationships. I’m managing.  I couldn’t say when, but one day, a few months after Dad died, I had been feeling sad about his absence from some event taking place.  I stopped and asked myself what was going on. The feeling cleared itself up:  "He would have hated to miss this." And then he was there: I could picture him sitting the way he did in his last few years. Often quiet because of his growing deafness and fading vision; bubbling and beaming when someone sat close enough to engage with him. I don’t idealize him.  He wasn’t the best dad in the history of the world; he was simply the best one I had.  The memorial service down home helped me see him through the eyes of old family friends, of cousins and second cousins and their children.  Unlike other family names in that small place — the local paper once had five editors, all named Macdonald — for a long time there was only one family in town named Ferguson. And the people who gathered at Stella Maris church on a warm Saturday in July are working on the latest chapter in their relationship with the one Hughie Ferguson they’d known all their lives.  

Koreen Olbrish of Tandem Learning has a post about using games to assess learning, and she addresses both opportunities and problems. Games are a natural environment for assessment…in essence, they are assessing your performance just by nature of the game structure itself. Unless, of course, there aren’t clear success metrics and you "win" by collecting more and more meaningless stuff (like Farmville)…but that’s a whole other topic. So let’s assume there are success metrics built into the game and those metrics align with what your learning objectives are. Koreen’s main topic is game design, but I want to talk about that last idea:  the game’s success metrics need to align with your learning objectives. This sounds like Instructional Design 101, since it is Instructional Design 101.  Ever more fundamental — Instructional Design 100, maybe — are these questions: What do you want people to do?Why aren’t they doing that now?How will this make things better? No, the first question isn’t about instruction at all.  Nor is it about, "How do you want them to act?" It’s about what you want people to get done. When you can’t articulate what you want people to accomplish, it hardly matters what interventions you try.  You have no way to measure progress.  Might as well just run them all through whatever you feel like. Making your goals less fuzzy "Sheep dip" refers to a kind of chemical bath intended to prevent or combat infestations of parasites.  (Videos of older, plunge style and newer, spray style processing of sheep.) Farmers dip or spray sheep because… well, I’m no farmer, but here are some guesses: It’s more cost-effective than diagnosing the needs of each sheep. A dip-tank of prevention is better than a barnful of cure. Sheep on their own rarely propose new pest-management processes. Ultimately, sheep farming has a few key outputs: leather, wool, mutton.  While the sheep play an essential role, I don’t think you can successfully argue that these are accomplishments for the sheep.  So what matters is the on-the-job performance of farm workers. Speaking of on-the-job, many industries and organizations impose mandatory, formal training.  Even there, the accomplishment shouldn’t be "training completed." One client delivered "equal-employment awareness" training annually to every employee.  The original charter was full of "increase awareness" and "understand importance."  Here’s what that looked like after a lot of "how can I tell they’re more aware?" You can recognize examples of discriminatory behavior on the job. You can state why the behavior is discriminatory. You can describe steps for resolving the discrimination. That’s not exhaustive (and the legal department would probably say you need to sprinkle "alleged" all over the place), but the three points are a first step toward a success metric that connects the individual and the organization. Sometimes, it is a training problem When people in an organization can articulate overall goals, it’s easier for them (as individuals and in groups) to think about how their activities and their results relate to those goals. They’re also likelier to be better problem-solvers, because they won’t corral every problem into a formal-training solution. Even when a major cause of a performance problem is the lack of skill or knowledge, you benefit from revisiting those Design 100 questions: What are the results you expect when people apply the skills they currently lack? What could interfere with their applying them? How will this approach help them learn and apply the skills? Slightly more diplomatic language led that EEO-awareness client to decide that knowing the date of the Americans with Disabilities Act didn’t have much impact on deciding whether, in a job interview, you can ask an applicant, "Do you have a handicap?" I’m no expert on workplace games, but I’m pretty sure I get what Koreen Olbrish is talking about.  It’s the workplace first, then the learning goal, and then the application of good design in pursuit of worthwhile results. The same is true for any planned effort to support learning at work. You need to focus on what’s important, on how you know it’s important, on why you think training will help. Then you use that information to guide your decisions about how to help people acquire and apply those skills when it matters. Mindlessly grinding out courses (instructor-led, elearning, webinars, whatever) isn’t the answer, regardless of how many completion-hours people rack up. It’s just…well, you know.   CC-licensed images:Bigg’s Sheep Dip (Glenovis) adapted from this photo by  Riv / Martyn.Bigg’s Dips (yellow/black) by Maurice Michael.Quibell’s Sheep Dips by Peter Ashton aka peamasher.

I’ve signed up for PLENK2010, an online course on Personal Learning Environments, Networks, and Knowledge.  The purpose of the course is to "clarify and substantiate" the concepts of personal learning environments (PLEs) and personal learning networks (PLNs). Main link for course information is connect.downes.ca, which provides more description as well as links for registration, the course forum, and so on. The instigators… I mean, facilitators, are Dave Cormier, Stephen Downes, George Siemens, and Rita Kop. This is my first experience with a large online course, let alone one with a connectivist approach.  What that last part means: In a connectivist course, course materials and course content are defined by participants as the course progresses, rather than prior to the course by instructors. Though the course outline defines a set of selected topics, these function as signposts for an iterative process of search, practice and reflection, as described here. The "here" is How This Course Works, which envisions four main types of activity for…well, me, and a few hundred fellow travelers. Aggregating means the facilitators collect and the participants receive a variety of items in "The Daily," an electronic document offering potential content.  Yes, somebody’s doing the initial aggregation, but I expect more knowledge critters in the herd than I can fit into my cerebral corral, so I’ll be… Re-aggregating. They call this "remixing," but it comes to the same thing.  You go through items in the initial aggregation, figure out which ones to follow, decided which of those were worth following, and eventually keep some.  (I’ve already created a PLENK2010 tag in my Delicious account, and I’ll probably have a separate notebook in Evernote as well. From a what-goes-on-in-your-brain point of view, those two activities are like taking in information.  Repurposing involves actively working with it-not simply repeating it, but transforming it somehow.  "This whole course will be about how to read or watch, understand, and work with the content other people create, and how to create your own new understanding and knowledge out of them." Feed forwarding as a term is a (slightly awkward) substitute for "share."  The facilitators encourage public sharing, thinking out loud, a willingness to make mistakes in front of people.  That rarely feels as easy as it sounds, but I think it’s good advice.   So I’m testing a WordPress tag (#PLENK2010), and I’ll see if this post shows up in the course feed.  If it doesn’t, I’ll come back and create a WP category instead.  (The different between a tag and a category only matters to WordPress.)  So-look, Mom, I’m feed-forwarding! So that’s where I am today.  I expect things to seem messy at first.  I know they’ll be confusing: I’m still wandering around the course Moodle like a transfer student trying to find PSYC 423, the parking permit office, and someplace with decent coffee. One thing I’ve learned: don’t subscribe to email updates for the "introduce yourself" thread.  Or, if you do, set up a mail rule to channel all that stuff. I don’t tend to think of the web of people and resources I learn from as a PLE or a PLN.  That’s mainly from a anti-jargon bias.  These are the people I learn things from, but I don’t think of them as having special status or membership cards. I realize that most folks who do use PLE and PLN as terms don’t think that way, either; this is just freelance grousing.  Notice, I am in the course. I wonder whether PLENK2010 will become a time sink: too many topics, too many potential activities, too many possible routes.  (I’m remembering Stephen Leacock’s line: "Lord Ronald said nothing; he flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions.") But that’s kind of the way that learning works.  Clearly, people can and do learn in highly structured environments; indeed, sometimes the structure can help focus attention and keep distraction at bay.  I think it’s likely, though, that especially as you get deeper into a topic or field, a high degree of structure has less and less to do with your learning. And you always have control over what goes into your own time sink. The plan calls for ten weeks, beginning September 13 and continuing into mid-November.  As soon as I figure out what the first week’s activities are, I’ll start on them, keep some notes, and see how things go. CC-licensed image by ghemflor / Heather A.

I’ve been neglecting my cognitive tools.  Admittedly, they don’t need the shot of WD-40 that I use on the garden clippers.  But I’m not taking care of the tools I rely on every day. My grandfather would disapprove.  He was a craftsman with serious technology (locomotives) and practical technique (carpentry). I’m sure Jack D (as everyone called him) had plenty of tools, but probably not too many. He’d consider the likely benefit against the cost. His skill meant he could achieve superior results with adequate means. As for the tools he did have, he had them ready to use.  Blades were honed, sawdust was cleared, dirt was wiped away.  Pegs, racks, drawers, tins were chosen and rearranged to support effective use. Earlier today, I came across a colleague’s question related to RSS feeds.  To help answer his question, I opened my (often neglected) NetVibes feed reader.  And it’s a mess. Messy in part because it’s easy to add feeds, so I’ve added lots.  I don’t always step back and thing about what value I get from a particular feed, though. I do sometimes cluster them.  NetVibes has tabs, so I group learning stuff under one, science stuff under another, "not work" stuff under a third. I see this tendency to collect things without much reflection in my Delicious tags (513 of them) as well.  And in my Evernote notebooks. Adding is just collecting.  Grouping is a potentially helpful advance.  It take more time to pause and consider what you’ve got, what you get, what you think about that, and what you want to do differently. Which reinforced the need for (and the value of) organizing what I’ve got. If I charged for these posts, I’d call it curating, one of those highfalutin words I enjoy satirizing, like  affordances. The concept is apt, though; the medieval Latin word curator, related to "care," meant an overseer, manager, or guardian.  I can’t resist adding that in the Middle Ages, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, this meant the care of "minors, lunatics, etc." Care is much more than amassing.  In fact, care sometimes includes pruning: cutting back and discarding things that aren’t useful, things that can even impede productive growth.  "Productive," naturally, is up to you and the results you have in mind. Or, up to me.  So I’ve got some chunkifying to do.  It’s not always copy and paste, you know.  Sometimes select and delete has a big payoff as well.  If you’re going to keep the saw, then make sure it’s sharp.  But every so often, ask if that’s a saw worth the keeping. CC-licensed image:Coffee cup and clippers by Pollyalida.

I had a side conversation just now about some technical glitches related to #PLENK2010 (the online course about personal learning environments).  Well, I think I did — it was via Facebook message, but I don’t see evidence of that in the ad-crammed junk drawer of Facebook’s interface. No matter.  I found myself thinking of this exchange (and similar ones with other people) in terms of how you connect in general with people you don’t know. It might be related in some way to the riddle of online resonance that Jenny Mackness and Matthias Melcher wrote about: in this virtual / at-a-distance context, they’re asking how what can cause the initial resonance that can nudge a potential connection along till it becomes an actual one. In my own case, what I saw myself doing was delivering potentially frustrating feedback ("your X isn’t working" can often imply "and it ought to, buddy").  And I felt slightly ill at ease about that. I’m usually sane enough to believe that people like the PLENK facilitators welcome comments meant to improve or enrich the experience.  At the same time, I hate to seem querulous, let alone the online equivalent of a grammar fascist.  (Trust me, I can be querulous.  I just tend to dress it up with over-the-top humor.) Which gets to the persona part, the image I’d like people to have of me (probably a lot like the image I’d like to have of me).  In an early post here, I wrote that persona was the mask used by Greek and Roman actors, and that another meaning for "actor" is agent-the person causing something to happen. So as I start doing things in a new community like PLENK, I’m scattering bits of evidence from which people will form impressions.  I can’t control what those will be, but I can try to influence that a bit. Early in the game, then, I take out "connection insurance": I tend to send feedback privately rather than publicly-in part because of my own self-consciousness, and in part because I might be incorrect. I try to include useful, factual detail: the URL I have in mind, an exact title, a copied string of text. I try to signal that I’m in a collaborative, non-confrontational frame of mind. About confrontation: I know that some people see heated discussion as a sign of interest, and maybe even respect: I wouldn’t be arguing with you if I didn’t think you were worth the argument. Closer to the main thread here, Mackness & Melcher in their second post talk about this chart by Magdalena Bottger. Notice that arrow across the top.  In terms of early connections, I see an analogy, a continuum from"folks you just met" (the right-hand side) through "people you know well and who know you well" (over on the left). The way you move a from right to left-the way the "connection neurons" get all Hebbsian-is through a series of interactions over time.  You take extra care initially to signal intent.  People on the other side of the relationship will take that in, along with other signals. In other words, if you’re polite in private messages but seem like a cranky, dismissive, and apostrophe-challenged troll on your blog, that politeness will only carry you so far. When you have enough public personas, people can form a pattern from them.  Might be the one you’d form, might not. CC-licensed resonance image by gillicious.

If you saw Shakespeare in Love, you may remember an early scene in which Philip Henslowe, the producer, is warned by moneylenders that when people don’t pay their debts, their boots catch fire.  (The real-life Henslowe kept a diary-actually an account book listing payments and other data-that’s a prime source for information about the Elizabethan theater.)  Eventually Henslowe convinces the money guys to back Will Shakespeare’s new play, Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate’s Daughter. Geoffrey Rush as Philip Henslowe In this first week’s experience of PLENK 2010 (the online course about personal learning environments), I kept hearing Henslowe and the moneylender discuss how a play comes to be. Henslowe: Mr. Fennyman, allow me to explain about the theatre business. The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster. Fennyman: So what do we do? Henslowe: Nothing. Strangely enough, it all turns out well. Fennyman: How? Henslowe: I don’t know. It’s a mystery. By no means am I implying that PLENK is on the road to imminent disaster.  Or better, it’s a road company, in at least two senses: It’s a work in progress.  What goes in, what happens, and especially what comes out can’t be known.  Like the road company for a play, it takes place in multiple locations.  (See the Google map started by Heli Nurmi, with only some of the 1,000+ registrants.) It’s a group of people.  They’ve met in this virtual space for their own reasons, much like an earlier group: At nyght were come into that hostelryeWel nyne and twenty in a compaignyeOf sondry folk, by aventure yfalleIn felaweshipe, and pilgrimes were they alle,That toward Caunterbury wolden ryde. By nightfall, into those lodgings had comeNine-and-twenty people in a companyOf sundry folk, by chance fallenInto fellowship, and they were all pilgrimsWanting to ride to Canterbury. As with Chaucer’s pilgrims, each person in PLENK showed up at the virtual Tabard Inn because of his own reasons: curiosity, a desire for focus, challenges to address.  And each one will have a story to tell. More than one story, I think.  Harry Bailey, the host, urged that compaignye to each tell two stories on the way to Canterbury, and two on the return.  He wanted the travelers to enjoy the two-day to Canterbury (an early suggestion that the journey could be the reward). PLENK’s company isn’t like Chaucer’s; one of our commonalities is that we’ve got different destinations (if in fact we’ve figured out where we want to go). So the "road" that the company travels isn’t a specific route.  It’s more like the Oregon Trail or the Silk Road: a general direction with multiple paths. For my own part, I’ve read a sheaf of blog posts and discussion posts from participants this week, along with some of the resources contained in PLENK’s daily feed.  These are the stories that the pilgrims tell-not fictional ones, told on the way to Canterbury, but sense-making ones, told on the way to understanding. I’ve found people trying to make sense of PLNs and PLEs in contexts like high school teaching, graduate education, personal growth, and (thank goodness) learning on the job. Not all the sense they’re making makes sense to me, but it’s not supposed to, any more than every presentation at a conference or every course in the catalog is supposed to.  Really, I’m still feeling my way along, but I’m not too uncomfortable with that. PLENK facilitator Rita Kop wrote about information abundance and economy of attention the other day.  She mentioned John Hagel‘s thoughts on attention as an increasingly scarce resource.  My quick take on what that means: the more inputs available to you, the less you can afford to, well, pay attention to all of them-because you’ve only got so much attention to spread around before you hit cognitive homeopathy. Kop was trying to work out concerns of some PLENK participants and wondering about whether there’s a good match between "learner needs and educator support."  I couldn’t say, but included this in my comment at her post: For some people, plopping into PLENK is like an American suddenly teleporting to London. Or maybe Amsterdam, where enough people speak English that he’s mostly disconcerted by all that Dutch on signs. For some, though, it’s like being teleported to Riga or Mumbai, with a lot more "foreignness" — an abundance of unfamiliar information. When it comes to economy of attention, they feel like their account is overdrawn. Speaking of which, if attention’s an account, then time is the wallet you keep the card in, and I have to watch how often I get that wallet out.

Kevin Kelly, in this week’s New York Times Magazine, writes about home-schooling his eighth-grade son.  He balances a nothing-special tone ("one of more than a million students home-schooled" last year) with crisp examples like the boy’s decision to learn to make fire the old-fashioned way. He was surprised by the enormous amount of bodily energy required [to use the bow method]… and how a minuscule, nearly invisible bit of fuel… can quickly amplify into a flame and then a fire.  Chemistry, physics, history and gym all in one lesson.  And, man, when you are 13 years old and Prometheus, it’s exhilarating! (Probably took a little while longer than this demo I found on YouTube.) Kelly and his wife had a goal: to provide an ideal learning environment.  Their son had gone to school for 7 years, and planned to attend an "intense" high school.  He was the one who asked if he could be home schooled. What stands out for me is Kelly’s statement that technology was not a major factor in the success of this year.  Yes, lots of online materials and research.  But the computer was only one tool among many. Kelly sees "technological literacy" as yet another proficiency children need to acquire.  It supplements but isn’t the same kind of critter as critical thinking, logic, or the scientific method: Technological literacy is…proficiency with the larger system of our invented world.  It is close to an intuitive sense of how you add up, or parse, the manufactured ralm.  We don’t need expertise with every invention; that is not only impossible, it’s not very useful.  Rather, we need to be literate in the complexities of technology in general… What kinds of literacy is he talking about? These stood out for me: Technologies improve so fast you should postpone getting anything you need until the last second.  Get comfortable with the fact that anything you buy is already obsolete. This aligns with a tongue-in-cheek watchword: never buy a low serial number.  More seriously, it’s allowed me to happily skip at least 1 out of 2 OS  upgrades. Before you can master a device, program or invention, it will be superseded; you will always be a beginner.  Get good at it. "You will always be a beginner."  It sounds like you’re being sentenced.  It’s more like having a gate opened: you’re not the only one here. Be suspicious of any technology that requires walls.  If you can fix it, modify it or hack it yourself, that is a good sign. Nobody has any idea of what a new invention will really be good for.  The crucial question is, what happens when everyone has one? The older the technology, the more likely it will continue to be useful. That last point truly resonated with me.  Among other things, it recalled a somewhat dry but oddly compelling book I’ve been rereading: The Coming of the Book: the Impact of Printing, 1450-1800. Kelly’s website announces the coming of his latest book, What Technology Wants.  Here’s part of what he says about the book as a book: I suspect this will be the last paper-native book that I do. The amount of work required to process atoms into a sheaf of fibers and ink and then ship it to your house or the local bookstore is more than most of us are willing to pay anymore. And of course the extra time needed upfront to print and transport it is shocking. This book was finished, designed, proofed, and ready to be read four months ago. But atoms take time, while bits are instant. What about Kelly’s son?  I think he’ll do fine in that demanding high school, based on this anecdote near the end of the NYTM piece: On one particularly long day, with books piled up and papers spread out, my son was slumped in his chair. "Is everything O.K.?" I asked. "It’s hard," he said.  "I not only have to be the student, I also have to be the teacher." "Yes!  So what have you learned about being a teacher?" "You have to teach the student — that’s me — not only to learn stuff but to learn how to learn." "And have you?" "I think I am doing better as the student than the teacher.  I’m learning how to learn, but I can’t wait till next year when I have some real good teachers — better than me."