Dave Child, a web developer in the UK, is a a creator and an advocate of cheat sheets — his term for quick reference guides.  He’s also the founder of Cheatography, a site which helps people create and share cheat sheets. I’ll write more about Cheatography in a future post.  For now, I want to show one of his creations, the PHP Cheat Sheet (link is to a PDF version). Image links to http://www.cheatography.com/davechild/cheat-sheets/php/pdf/ Who uses this job aid? PHP is "a general-purpose server-side scripting language" used to produce dynamic web pages. The person using this cheat sheet is most likely competent in working with PHP.  Not that a neophyte can’t benefit at all, but such a person probably lacks a good deal of helpful context. What’s the task it supports? This is an example of what I call a reference job aid.  It doesn’t guide a specific task, the way the fire-shelter inspection guide does. Instead, it organizes certain information in a way that’s helpful in a number of different but related situations: often a quick look at the job aid is sufficient. You aren’t sure of the code if you want a long month name ("September") versus a short one (Sep).  Or you want to check the syntax of a regular expression function.  So you go to the cheat sheet. (Tangent: In my experience, organizations that frown on terms like "cheat sheet" aren’t usually strongholds of effective on-the-job support.  All the more so if the people doing actual work refer to their quick reference materials as cheat sheets-and wouldn’t dream of letting someone take them away.) One challenge in creating a reference job aid is deciding what information to include (and what to deliberately leave out) and how to organize it. The PHP cheat sheet uses boxes and subtitles as an organizing principle. Here’s Dave Child’s own description of how he came up with the first version: I wrote the first one waaaaay back in 2005 because I was visiting the PHP manual so often for the same information. I’d started printing pages from the manual and jotting notes down all over my desk, and eventually decided this was just silly and organised all the notes into one page. The layout wasn’t really planned at that point. This is the way a lot of job aids begin, especially ones for reference: people note the things that are helpful to them, but that they don’t seem to remember.  If you’re looking to support the performance of others, spend some time trying to find out what’s on homebrew job aids.  They may not have the best design; they may even include errors or misconceptions. But they invariably highlight information that the person (a) sees as important and (b) has trouble keeping in memory.

"What do you call someone who speaks three languages?" "Trilingual." "What do you call someone who speaks two?" "Bilingual." "And what do you call someone who speaks only one?" "American." It’s an old joke — and I once hear it from someone who mocked her own countrymen by changing the punch line to "French." It’s here because I’ve been wondering about how many Americans are able to speak more than one language. A 2001 Gallup poll said that about 1 American in 4 can hold a conversation in a second language.  Looking at the topic from a different angle, a 2007 report from the Bureau of the Census said that "of 281.0 million people aged 5 and over, 55.4 million people (20 percent of this population) spoke a language other than English at home." Of those 55.4 million, about 31 million claimed to speak English "very well", and another 11 million said "well." It’s something of a moving target, then, depending on how you define bilingual. I focused on it after seeing an article by science writer Catherine de Lange. The version I first saw appeared in the Washington Post, based on a longer piece de Lange wrote in New Scientist (paywall).  De Lange’s mother, who was French, spoke French to her from infancy, and the articles have to do with the effects of bilingualism on the brain. One study she mentions discussed "a profound difference [in brain imaging] between babies brought up speaking one language and those who spoke two."  In essence, researcher Laura Ann Petitto says, the babies’ bilingualism seems to "wedge open" the window for learning language, making it easier for them to acquire new languages through life. And there’s this (from de Lange’s Washington Post article): Ellen Bialystok, a psychologist at York University in Toronto, first stumbled upon one of these advantages while asking children to spot whether various sentences were grammatically correct. Both monolinguals and bilinguals could see the mistake in phrases such as "apples growed on trees," but differences arose when they considered nonsensical sentences such as "apples grow on noses." The monolinguals, flummoxed by the silliness of the phrase, incorrectly reported a grammar error, whereas the bilinguals did not. One explanation (based on work by Viorica Marian and her colleagues) is that the two languages "are constantly competing for attention in the back of the [bilingual] mind." As a result, the brain is constantly getting "the kind of cognitive workout…common in many commercial brain-training programs."  (Those programs require you to ignore distracting information.) What about the long-term effect of this competition?  De Lange reports that Bialystock and colleagues found that bilinguals were slower than their monolinguals peers to show signs of Alzheimer’s — by four to five years, even after taking in factors like occupation and education. So possibly all that activation strengthens the brain in a way that helps it resist the disease.  Not that you should try learning another language as a form of medication-though if that’s the way you look at it, enjoy. More speculative, but just as interesting were de Lange’s comments on how a bilingual person can express himself — can behave, so to speak — differently in the two languages.  There’s a hint that the person may have the mental equivalent of two channels, one for each language. Which probably bodes well for the bilingual Karen Matheson, who sings Canan nan Gaidheal (The Language of the Gaels).  (The song tells of the Western Isles — the Outer Hebrides — the stronghold of Scottish Gaelic.)  

There’s this: "Stir the mixture well / Lest it prove inferior…" And there’s this: "…then put half a drop / Into Lake Superior." Even conceding that many of the "blended learning" hits are from formal education (schools, academia), it’s a little depressing that only 3% of them mention job aids. I personally doubt it’s because everyone uses job aids. It’s almost as if developers, yearning to produce ever-more-engrossing courses, are blind to this kind of performance support. This is closely related to what Cathy Moore says in the opening minute of the following clip: And here, at 4%… is what is possibly the least expensive and most effective approach [for blended learning]: on-the-job training tasks. Apparently we are still stuck in the mindset that training is a course. The clip actually covers a lot of territory in six minutes, including realistic tasks, application, relevant examples, and so on, but I want to focus here on the aspect of figuring out how not to train — or, more accurately, how to not train. Cathy demonstrates the use of "a mega job aid" to enable on-the-job learning. This is her term for combining a job aid (which stores information or guidance so you don’t have to remember it) with instruction (which tells you how to apply what’s in the job aid to a specific task). How do you know it’s a job aid? It’s external to the individual. It reduces the need to memorize. People use it on the job. It enables accomplishment. I asked Cathy for some comments about job aids. "Before designing formal training, consider whether a job aid is all you need." Here, she’s asking what makes you think you need formal training for X?  Is there another way to help people accomplish the desired result? "If you decide training is necessary, make sure the job aids are top-notch, and consider having the ‘course’ teach people how to use the job aids." It’s not a job aid if you don’t use it while you’re performing the task. So if you build a job aid but find that people need to practice using it, that practice should be like on-the-job use.  They’re not going to be doing the real-world task from within the LMS (unless, poor devils, their real-work job is managing the LMS). Embalming a job aid inside a course is like disabling an elevator in hopes that people will learn how to get from the 3rd to the 9th floor without "cheating." "Don’t duplicate the job aid info in the course."   Part of the decision about whether to build a job aid involves the nature of the task. Among the considerations: The likelier it is that the task will change (and thus that the steps for accomplishing it will change), the more sense it makes to build a job aid — and the less sense it makes to duplicate the job aid inside a formal course. Instead, as part of your formal training, use the same job aid people will use on the job. And figure out how to make updates easily available. No matter what learning management ideology claims, there are only three kinds of people who return to an online course for reference information: People who work for the vendor. Actors appearing in the vendor’s materials. People on the job who are really bored or really desperate. Because she involves herself with what people actually do on the job, Cathy has some inexpensive yet highly effective ideas about where to get started: To evaluate and improve job aids, physically visit learners’ work stations and look around. What support materials have people created for themselves? Often someone on the job has already created a good job aid and you just need to "borrow" it. Even if it’s a less-than-ideal job aid, the fact that someone’s created it and is using it suggests both that the task is important and that people feel the need for support as they’re carrying out the task. That’s one heck of a head start, and you haven’t had to create a single "at the end of this training program" statement.

Thanks to David Glow, whose mention of it I happened to notice on Twitter last night, I found a blog post by Steve Flowers that I hadn’t seen: Just a Nudge-Getting into Skill Range. He’s talking about skill, mastery, and the (ultimately futile) "pursuit of instructional perfection." Steve starts with a principle from law enforcement: only apply the minimum force necessary to produce compliance.  (This is why those "speed limit enforced by aircraft" signs rarely mean "cops in helicopter gunships"). Then he works on a similar principle for, as he puts it, "instruction performance solutions." Trying to design training / instruction for skill mastery can hinder-or defeat-the learning process, he says. That’s because mastery, in whatever form reasonable people would define it, is likely the outcome of a long period of practice, reflection, and refinement. "Mastery" sounds good, which is why the corporate world is hip-deep in centers of excellence and world-class organizations.  A lot of the time, though, "world-class" is a synonym for "fine," the way you hear it at the end of a TV commercial: "available at fine stores everywhere."  Meaning, stores that sell our stuff. He’s not saying there’s no place for formal learning, nor for a planned approach to helping people gain skill.  What he is saying is that we need "to design solutions to provide just the right nudge at just the right moment." Most of the time, we don’t need mastery on the job, he says, and I agree.  We do need competence, which is what I believe he means by helping the performer move into a "skill range" — meaning the performer has the tools to figure out a particular problem or task. From a blog post by Steve Flowers(Click image to view his post.) I’ve been mulling some related ideas for some time but hadn’t figured out how to even start articulating them. One theme has to to with the role of job aids and other performance support-things that Steve believes strongly in. I despair at the server farms full of "online learning" that shows (and show), and tells (and tells and tells) while failing to offer a single on-the-job tool. Listen: the only people who’ll "come back to the course" for the embedded reference material are (a) the course reviewers, (b) the utterly bored, and (c) the utterly desperate. A second theme has to do with the two different kinds of performance support that van Merriënboer and Kirshner talk about in Ten Steps to Complex Learning. In their terminology, you have: Procedural information: this is guidance for applying those skills that you use in pretty much the same way from problem to problem.  That’s the heart of many job aids: follow this procedure to query the database, to write a flood-insurance policy for a business, or to update tasks in the project management system. You can help people learn this kind of information through demonstration, through other presentation strategies, and through just-in-time guidance. Supportive information: as vM&K say, this is intended to bridge the gap between what learners already know, and what they need to know, to productively apply skills you use differently with different problems.  "Updating the project management system" is procedural; "deal with the nonperforming vendor" is almost certainly a different problem each time it arises.  (That’s why Complex Learning uses the somewhat ungainly term "non-recurrent aspects of learning tasks.") Types of supportive information include mental models for the particular field or area, as well as cognitive strategies for addressing its problems. As the complexity of a job increases, it’s more and more difficult to help people achieve mastery. That’s not simply because of the number of skills, but because of how they related, and because of the support required. Part of the connection I see, thanks to Steve’s post, is that the quest for perfect instruction ignores both how people move toward mastery (gradually, over time, with a variety of opportunities and guided by relevant feedback). In many corporations and organizations, formal learning for most people gets squeezed for time and defaults to the seen-and-signed mode: get their names on the roster (or in the LMS) so as to prove that learning was had by all. We focus on coverage, on forms, on a quixotic or Sisyphean effort to cram all learning objectives into stuff that boils down to a course. I’m beginning to wonder, frankly, whether any skill you can master is a course is much of a skill to begin with. At most, such a skill is pretty near the outer border on Steve Flowers’ diagram. So the least  variation from the examples in the course-different circumstances, changed priorities, new coworkers-may knock the performer outside the range of competence. (Images adapted from photos of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway from Wikimedia Commons.)

I have two main psychomotor skills: I can touch-type, and I can drive a stick. That’s about it. I was never much at sports, though in high school I learned how to play soccer at an intramural level best known as "not entirely horrible if the year is 1964." Sometime after that, I learned about the PIP, Tom Gilbert’s shorthand for the potential to improve performance. I wrote about that some time back, but the quick summary is this: The greater the gap between the exemplary performer and the average performer, the easier it is to improve performance. What does the PIP have to do with sports? I came across an article in the health and science section to today’s Washington Post: "You throw like a girl."  Tamar Haspel began by exploring her inability to throw a ball far or accurately. She learned that the gap begins around the age of 4, long before the bodies of boys are all that different from the bodies of girls. Yet around the world, the differences are significant-pre-pubescent girls throwing at 51% to 69% of the distance that boys do, at 51% to 78% of he velocity. I liked the examination of what "throwing like a girl" means — and it seems to have to do with how much of the total body is involved, as shown by this great graphic from the Post article (image links to the source): The short answer: "women tend to rotate their shoulders and hips together, and even if they don’t, they don’t rotate the two areas as fast as men." There could be genuine biological differences. One expert Haspel consulted. Jerry Thomas of the University of North Texas, wonders if there might not be an explanation in the nervous system. Even so, he says, "People don’t like to talk about it [the biological difference] because girls will give up, but perhaps if we talk about it, girls can learn.  And they can learn." And that’s where the PIP comes in. Overall, the average woman isn’t going to learn to throw a baseball as well as a major league pitcher does.  But neither is the average man.  And as Tom Gilbert was arguing, looking at a gap between average performance and exemplary performance is a good way to cure yourself of the over-optimistic notion that if you’d only chosen the right people, you wouldn’t have to help them learn and provide them support. Haspel worked with Jenny Allart, who coaches Harvard’s softball team. What I liked about the consultation: After warmups, Allard tested Haspel’s throw, to establish a baseline. (55 feet was about the best she could do.) Allard broke the throwing actions into 3 pieces, and coached them in reverse order: Practice whipping arm and hand. Practice extending arm and rotating forward. Practice stepping back before that extension. After a half-hour lesson, Haspel was able to get the ball to first base (60 feet) and even a bit beyond-a 10% improvement in 30 minutes. I told Allard that I’d been cautioned that instruction without practice doesn’t help much. "Neither does practice without instruction," she said. This reminded me of something Jim Fuller said once: practice doesn’t make perfect; it makes permanent. Fuller was talking about the need for useful feedback, feedback that you can use to modify and improve your performance. Clearly, most people don’t do a lot of ball-throwing in their lives, and many of them don’t feel the need to improve their ball-throwing skill.  In this article, though, I see a balanced, non-deterministic approach to investigating differences and then working on ways to improve the results that an average performer can produce.  * * * (In a comment on this post, Kathy Sierra mentioned The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance. This is a link to its listing on Amazon.)

Quite a while back, I came across a site that used to be called Universal Subtitles but now seems to call itself Amara. You can submit a video via a URL of "an Ogg, WebM, flv, mp4, Youtube, Vimeo or Dailymotion video." There’s also a script capability. Once you upload the video, you can enter or upload subtitles, and then synchronize to the video. You can probably see lots of ways to apply this. I thought I’d enter the lyrics to a few songs, especially ones not well known to English speakers.  And since Amara lets you provide subtitles in multiple languages, I tried a few songs by Georges Brassens, a French singer-poet known throughout the francophone world, but who’s about as well known to English speakers as… most French-speaking singer-poets not named Jacques Brel. In this song, he’s asking to be buried not in a cemetery, but on the beach at Sète, his home town (about 50 miles west of Marseille). The control in the bottom left corner of the video lets you choose subtitles in English or in French; they’ll appear as the video plays, and you can switch between languages on the fly. (Although the embed code is finicky; I hope they’re working on something a bit more reliable for WordPress blogs.) This seems like a great way to help connect the written words of a language with native speech (in this case, with Brassens’s distinctive accent), among many other things. Besides, this is a terrific song. It’s a shame I don’t know more people who speak French, or I’d ask to include it at my funeral.

I’ve really enjoyed the wide-ranging comments on Monday’s post about throwing like a girl. I keep relating Tamar Haspel’s effort to throw a ball farther and faster with other goals that people choose, complex ones that don’t have an end point. What I mean is, it’s one thing to say, "I’m going to learn to do quadratic equations." That’s a pretty specific goal, and (I assume) at some point you can do any one that’s handed to you. Many things that adults set out to master — with "master" being a very flexible word for "develop a satisfactory level of capability" — lack those crisp boundaries. Like learning a language other than your native one. For now, though, I want to pick up on Tamar’s closing comment:  "You’ll have to excuse me, because I need to find a violin teacher." Naturally, this reminded me of Margaret Ann Cameron Beaton. She was the maternal grandmother of Natalie MacMaster, part of an extended family of Cape Breton musicians (like cousin Andrea Beaton, uncle Kinnon Beaton, and uncle Buddy MacMaster). Natalie’s album In My Hands includes the track Gramma, with a pair of Irish fiddle tunes. The track opens with a recording of Margaret Ann at the age of 91. Although I’m putting a transcription here, you ought to listen to the clip to hear not only her warm Cape Breton accent but her shimmering wish that she’d learned to play: Margaret Ann Cameron Beaton ("Gramma") I wasn’t rich enough to get a violin when I was young. But if I happened to have the money, boy, oh boy, I would be a violin player. My god, I just — I was alive with it.

When people talk about formal versus informal learning, or training versus instruction, or similar after-the-conference-but-still-in-the-bar topics, I tend to watch for hidden discriminations-clusters of things that are different, tucked into a conceptual container and wrapped in paper that says "generalization." Take "learning a language," about as good an example of a complex skill as you could find. What do you mean by "learning?"  In fact, to me there’s a curious time-travel aspect to it: someone who’s learning a language clearly has a way to go; someone who’s learned a language is evidently a skilled user — but how did she get from the one state to the other? When linguists get together, of course, they ask, "What do you mean by ‘language?’"  Or maybe they don’t, because most of them know about Max Weinreich, the linguist, who said: אַ שפראַך איז אַ דיאַלעקט מיט אַן אַרמײ און פֿלאָ A shprakh iz a diyalekt mit an armey un a flot. (A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.) (I did come across a variation: a language is a dialect with a missionary.) To me the relevant point is that, at least for adults, it’s the learner who decides what a language is, and who (probably with help) decides on what learning means. It might be the learner accepts the definition of other people, like the language program in a college. Or he may have a more pragmatic definition, like "get a job in Norway," and uses that to help him choose what learning Norwegian means (reading, writing, and speaking it well enough to earn a living). I’ve been mulling this over in terms of my own efforts to be more fluent in French. And like "learning" and "language," "French" is a covert discrimination. Despite the eye-rolling that most Americans like to do when (once every six years or so) they think of l’Académie française, millions of people worldwide who are effectively if not officially part of La Francophonie don’t lose sleep over whether le week-end is in l’Académie’s dictionary. There are the Acadiens, for instance, scattered over North America. The singer Zachary Richard gave a stirring performance of his song Réveille at an Acadien festival in New Brunswick a few years ago. I wrote about it and included an English translation of the lyrics here on my French-language blog, though I want to highlight what he said in his introduction: I appeal for help on behalf of the Acadiens of Louisiana. We have fallen off the cliff, but we have not yet struck the ground.  The next generation in Louisiana will probably be the first in two hundred years not to speak French, or to understand that preserving the French language does not mean preventing the assimilation of Anglo-American words into our vocabulary — but preventing the assimilation of the French-speaking community on the border. So what are they doing to (better) learn their language?  This video is in French; it describes efforts by Louisianans, especially those who identify as Acadien, to preserve or recover their language.  The first three minutes talk about people who meet weekly, for an hour, to speak only in French. And if you advance to about the 3:00 mark, you’ll hear Erin Stickney from Lafayette, LA, speaking in French with a strong Southern American accent. At one point she says, I would like (her children, when she has them) to learn the French of this region.  Because it’s important for Louisianans to learn the French of Louisiana. It’s good to learn the French of France also, but we have to learn this French we have here, because otherwise it’s practically the same as learning Arabic, Spanish, or Japanese. There’s a reason French exists here, and we have to continue that. I admire the efforts these people are making. Stickney is able to converse with a French interviewer and to make herself understood. Stephen Fry, of all people, spent some time with people who speak a much less widespread language: Irish.  (Many people tend to use "Irish" as the English word for Gaeilge, the Goidelic language of Ireland, and "Gaelic" for Gàidhlig, the Goidelic language of Scotland, though you’ll hear "Gaelic" applied to both.) He touches on native speakers and on efforts in Ireland to encourage use of the language, though it’s not an easily traveled road. Jim McCloskey, an expert on modern Irish, has a refined view on the role of Irish.  "Traditional Gaeltacht Irish [Irish spoken as a first language in certain regions of Ireland] will almost certainly cease to exist in the next 30 years or so," he wrote in this post on the Language Log blog. He does, however, see the creation of a lively "second language community" that’s much larger than the Gaeltacht community.  So for him, the disappearance of Irish may be more a transformation-fewer and fewer native speakers, but many people who use and enjoy using the language. A final look at language use, again from the Language Log, involves an attempt to revive Cornish. When I took a linguistics course in grad school, one "fact" we learned was that the last native speaker of Cornish died in 1777.  Whether Dolly Pentreath was in fact the last person to have learned Cornish as a birth language doesn’t matter, because give or take a few years, no one has learned it as a birth language since Vermont was an independent country. I return to Geoffrey Pullum’s post time and again. He’s talking about "living languages," rather than "learning a language."  The two are related, though, and this is his elegiac summary of what learning would have to be like to keep a language living: Always remember this, as we head into the sad time of massive language extinctions that is coming. Ask around the village and find the age of the youngest people using a language every day for all their normal conversational interaction. If the answer is a number larger than 5, the language is probably dying. If the answer is a number larger than 10, it is very probably doomed. If the answer is a number larger than 20, you can kiss it goodbye right now: no amount of nostalgic appreciation of it will make it last even one more generation as a going concern.  

Joe HarlessNewnan GA Times Herald I learned late yesterday that Joe Harless, who listed himself on LinkedIn as "independent think tank professional," died on October 4th.  (Here’s a report in the Newnan, Georgia Times Herald.) I don’t know how widely known Joe was outside the world of ISPI, the International Society for Performance Improvement, prior to his semi-retirement from that arena. (Later in life, as the Times-Herald article explains, he was involved in improving the impact of high school education near his home in Newnan and throughout the state.) I’m pretty sure it wasn’t widely enough, which is a shame for people who worked in what used to be called the training and development field. That’s because Joe, like many of his colleagues, realized that the real goal of that field should not be doing training. Here’s Joe in 1992, writing in the ISPI journal, then called Performance and Instruction: My behaviorism roots conditioned me to observe what people do, rather than what they say they do. Tom Gilbert taught me to give more value to what people produce (accomplishment) than what they do or know. I learned from observations of other technologies (medicine, engineering, plumbing, building the Tower of Babel, etc.) the wisdom of common purpose and agreeing on definitions…. I get confused when people say they are Performance Technologists but always produce training / informational / educational type interventions for every project. This confuses me because examination of more that 300 diagnostic front-end analyses done by cour company and our clients shows the information / training / education class of intervention was the least frequently recommended. More than 30 years ago, I attended JAWS - the Job Aid Work Shop that Joe developed. I’d been working for Amtrak, developing training for ticket clerks, reservations agents, and others. JAWS provided me with a systematic way of looking at how people accomplish things on the job and figuring out where it made a lot more sense to create a job aid then to try (usually fruitlessly) to have them memorize the information that the job aid contains. A side benefit of JAWS was getting to know Joe, a man serious about his work, gracious in his dealings with others, and good-humored in his presentation. Like an old-time Southern preacher, he’d become Reverend Joe and say things like, "An ounce of analysis is worth a pound of objectives." (Meaning: it’s terrific to have sound, behavioral objectives for your training-but maybe the problem you’re dealing with is not one that training can solve.) He also nudged ISPI toward a name change by saying that "the National Society for Performance and Instruction" was the equivalent of "the National Society for Transportation and Bicycles." Again from that 1992 article: Trainers sell training. They are usually commanded to do so, and are rewarded for the volume of training developed and delivered. Educators are conditioned to teach "subject-matter," not to impact performance.  Most vendors hawk a given product, not a process. Buyers typically want to buy things, not analysis. Our letterheads read Training Department, or Education Center, or Learning, Inc., etc. The names of our organizations do not imply: performance improvement sold here. I took a number of Joe’s workshops, including ones on instructional design and on front-end analysis. As he began working on what became his Accomplishment-Based Curriculum Development system, he invited a number of people like me, who’d used his workshops in our own organizations, to participate in a tryout for one of the new components. He was especially eager to hear our candid opinions. He knew what he was doing, but he was pretty sure he didn’t know everything. I attended my first professional conference around 1978, when ISPI (then NSPI) met in Washington DC, where I was working (no travel cost!). After one session, I was speaking with Stephanie Jackson, an experienced practitioner, when Joe Harless came up-Stephanie had worked for him previously. We three talked for a bit, and it was clear to me that these two were good friends. Joe said to Stephanie, "Let’s get a beer." I said something about letting them catch up with each other, to which Joe responded, "Don’t you like beer?" In my career, I’ve learned a lot from many people, but Joe Harless was the right person at the right time for me, opening doors and sharing ideas, hearty and enthusiastic and curious.  What he did was to make concrete for me ways to enable other people to produce better results on the job. He combined analytical skills with openness to new ideas and an interest in other fields that has inspired me always. We once talked about the job aid workshop, which I gave any number of times at Amtrak and GE. At one point, he had a segment where he’d present examples of good job aids and bad ones.  "Not any more," he told me. "Now I put ‘em all out and let the participants figure out which ones are good and why." I had a conversation on Twitter yesterday with Guy Wallace of EPPIC. I said that for me, "It’s practically hero worship, but you know how Joe would have laughed at that." I was holding back, I think, because of the immature connotation of "hero worship." But Joe has had more direct influence on my career than anyone I can think of. I learned from his ideas, I was energized by his search for data as evidence, and although it was probably true for many people, I loved that he called me "Cousin Dave." If someone’s influence in your life makes you want to do better, if his work and his interaction inspire you to dig deeper and reach further, then that person’s a hero. You could do a lot worse that hear Joe himself talk about performance-on-the-job accomplishment-as the heart of the matter.   Guy has a number of videos on YouTube, including a 90-minute one from a discussion in Toronto earlier this year at ISPI’s 50th anniversary.  I’ve set this link to start at the 8-minute mark, when Joe begins speaking.  You might find it worth a few minutes of your time, even with some of the callouts to old friends and inside jokes.  I’ve included a few comments here as highlights, all of which come in the first seven minutes of Joe speaking. …Even in the heyday of programmed learning in the Sixties there were some of us who were arguing that we should be about developing instructional technology, not just programmed instruction, if we truly wanted to revolutionize training and education. …Not willing to let good enough alone, there were some of us who were then arguing that we should be about the development of what? Performance technology, that would subsume instructional technology and have as its process, at the beginning, a process that was like medical diagnosis. I called my version of the diagnostic process Front End Analysis… The genesis of my front-end analysis was the confounding realization that many of the training- the training that we developed for our clients didn’t seem to make any difference in the on the job situation, even after the trainees, the learners, successfully acquired the knowledge we so carefully taught them. I don’t know — a rough analogy, I suppose, is that we gave them good medicine but it didn’t cure the disease…. We conducted follow-up investigations with the aid of some of our cooperative clients…. In a shocking number of cases, we found that a lack of skill and knowledge was not the predomination cause of the non-job-performing situations…. Thus all the training in the world would do little to help the performance. I’m going to miss Joe a lot. I do already.

Part of an email I received yesterday; I’ve changed a few [specifics] for privacy’s sake: My friend [Veronica], a retired lawyer, has just started training as a part-time [Stratosphere Airlines] ticket agent at [Overcrowded Airport]. She has started with some computer-based self instruction that seems to dump lots of info on students before any application, like memorizing the airport codes for cities that Stratosphere flies to. She says there will be interaction-role-playing-like simulations of conversations and problems a ticket agent will predictably experience. She said the trainer has confessed to her that the info dump without application is neither his own preference nor his design. It is imposed. I’ve never worked for Stratosphere Airlines; I’ve hardly ever flown them. But I recognize this situation and this approach, because they’re a direct flight to 1975, when this dull-witted, learn-X-before-Y approach was pandemic in the travel industry. It’s how I started learning what was Amtrak’s reservation system at the time: memorize a trainload of facts. One of the many unfortunate assumptions is the value of such memorization. Like Latin or limp broccoli in your school lunch, it’s supposed to be good for you. In the context of becoming competent as a ticket agent, though, it’s as misguided as memorizing the name of every street along your 25-mile commute, rather than learning the most sensible route and then useful variations, like when to avoid driving past the high school. The assumption in Veronica’s training program is that you have to know the city code before you can look up a schedule. The reality is that you have to have the code, which isn’t the same thing.  Let me demonstrate with an example from based on Amtrak’s old reservation system: Use the A (Availability) entry to find the schedule between two cities. Here’s how to check availability between Chicago (CHI) and Los Angeles (LAX) on July 5th: A 5JUL CHI LAX (don’t use spaces; they’re here just to make the example clear) How would you check the schedule for May 9th from San Francisco (SFO) to Portland (PDX)? The odds are that 80% of people, given that example, will come up with one of the two correct answers(A9MAYSFOPDX or A09MAYSFOPDX-the leading zero in the date is optional). Which means that for them an instructor or course can respond, "That’s right" and then show what the reservation system would show: the schedule from San Francisco to Portland on May 9th. I’m skipping some nuance here, like taking note of the leading zero if the person uses it (and pointing out it’s optional). I’m also skipping what a good instructor or course would do with what I call expected wrong answers-someone using the correct city codes in the wrong order, or using a code from the example. To me, this example is a bite-sized authentic task: it’s a small accomplishment that makes sense in a workplace context. Your customer asks what the schedule is from Point A to Point B, and you find out. Looking up city codes is a useful, even essential skill (if you don’t have the city code for Moose Jaw, you can’t find a flight that goes there), but it’s just one component in a cluster of authentic tasks. What’s more, I can put together a logical sequence of such bite sized tasks into a complete customer transaction suited to a novice ticket agent.  And I can then expand parts of that sequence to give practice in applying the system’s power (which is to say, its complexity) to meet a customer’s requests. "Is there a flight that will get me to Moose Jaw by 3?  Can I leave Moose Jaw on Saturday morning? Is there a discount fare when traveling with small children on the weekend?" I worked in an Amtrak ticket office for four years, and no customer ever asked me for a city code. We used them all the time-but our practice was to teach ticket agents to look them up at first, and not guess. We also has job aids for frequently-requested cities-storing the information in the job aid instead of trying to cram it into someone’s head. The training-wheels effect would kick in, so that after a week or two on the job in Detroit, you did memorize the code for Jackson, Michigan (JXN), a destination people requested from us far more often than they did Jacksonville, Florida (JAX) or Jackson, Mississippi (JAN). There’s an awful lot of stuff to learn in a railroad or airline reservation system. I often use ticket-agent training as an example of a potential drawback to using only informal learning approaches. Yes, it’s true, if I dropped you in the middle of Budapest with a tattoo on your forehead that said "Kérem, ne beszélj velem angolul" ("Please don’t speak to me in English"), you’d probably start picking up Hungarian quickly. Depending on your interests, though, a scenario-based course on Hungarian for Travelers-focused on realistic situations that made sense to you-might be a better idea. It’s almost certainly a better idea than beginning by studying verb conjugations. You’ll need those, eventually, but you can probably find out what time the flight arrives without having to study the subjective first.  Except, maybe, if the Stratosphere Airlines flight from 1975 were to arrive. CC-licensed image by Robert Huffstutter. 

I’m in Toronto this week, at the Canadian Society for Training and Development’s conference. (On Thursday I’m giving a session: Using Job Aids: How, When, Why.) I’ve been wanting for some time to rethink how I present examples of job aids, and after some experimentation at Whiteboard Labs, I’m launching Dave’s Ensampler. "Ensample" is an archaic word with the same root as "example." A long time ago, I saw a collection of organizing diagrams that Sivasailam Thiagarajam made, giving them the title An Ensampler of Hierarchical Information. The job aids at the Ensampler have more consistent tagging, and I have a page that automatically displays the titles by category.  This is new, and it’s a work in progress-for example, I’m trying out a way to have a tab in the menu here at the Whiteboard link directly to the Ensampler.  If that works (or works well enough) I’ll put a similar tab up at the Ensampler to teleport back here. Let me know what you think.

I had a conversation via Twitter the other day with Connie Malamed. I had been following her elearningcoach identity on Twitter but had forgotten (or not realized) her visual communication / information design interest. This is how things started: (I’ve linked that image to the URL she was sharing from @justdesign.) Connie and I chatted a bit about the design of tables because of the decision-table example on my Ensampler blog, and she shared these guidelines for designing tables. Thanks to another link she shared, I learned about Dana Chisnell’s Civic Design site, which features a number of field guides developed to improve the quality of citizen participation through things like the design of ballots and of support materials for poll workers. (More on this in a future post.) Chisnell’s work resonates with me; I’ve worked as an election judge (the Maryland term for a precinct worker). And I’ve sat through my county’s training program for election judges four times. Not from a political viewpoint, but from an understanding-of-information frame of mind, I’ve been thinking about all those electoral-vote maps, especially those seen (on television or online) on election day and the day after. Perhaps I don’t get around enough, but I rarely saw a map showing a proportional view of the states-they were all geographic. Side trip in case you don’t understand how electoral votes work but are mildly curious: Each state’s vote in the Electoral College is equal to its total representation in Congress (Senators plus members of the House). So the smallest possible number of electoral votes is 3, which is true for the seven smallest states in terms of population, plus (thanks to the 23rd amendment) the District of Columbia. The most populous state, California, has 55 electoral votes (due to 53 House members and two Senators)-one more than the 14 smallest states and DC combined. (I wouldn’t weep too much for those small states, who have a total of 28 Senators to California’s two.) 48 of the states award their electoral votes on a winner-take-all basis: if you get 50.1% of the vote in California (as inTexas, Maryland, Florida,Illinois, and so on), you get all of the state’s electoral votes.  The two exceptions are Nebraska (5 electoral votes) and Maine (4), which each award two of their votes on a statewide basis (representing the senatorial portion of the electoral vote) and the remainder on a congressional-district basis.  In 2008, John McCain won 4 of Nebraska’s 5 votes, while Barack Obama won 1. So here, from Wikipedia, is a typical depiction of the electoral results: numbers on a geographic map: From Wikipedia commons This is the wide-open-spaces approach. On a geographic map, Kansas (where I lived when I was first old enough to vote) is seven times the size of Maryland (where I now live)-but Maryland has 4 more electoral votes. In contrast, here are the results on a map where the size of each state is proportional to its number of electoral votes: From Wikipedia commons Regardless of my own preference for president, I think the proportional map is a better way to depict this information, which is ultimately based on population.  If more states awarded their votes by congressional district, you’d simply mark the individual squares accordingly, with two in each state for the statewide winner. (I had seen a similar map showing the makeup of the House of Representatives-each state proportional to its size in the House, and each district marked according to party-but I didn’t bookmark it and can’t find it now. If I do find one, I’ll add it here.)

As a girl from a small town in Nova Scotia, my mother had to go a long way for her professional development. It’s 1,200 miles (and they were miles back then, not kilometers) from Inverness to St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, where she did her nurse’s training, just before the outbreak of World War II. Apart from a belated recognition of Remembrance Day, the Canadian term for what the U.S. calls Veterans Day, it’s as good a way as any to mention Toronto (known in the Victoria era as "Toronto the Good," for its alleged  propriety). I spent a week there recently at the CSTD Conference there and led a session called Building Job Aids: How, When, Why. I have some biases regarding job aids. One is that an awful lot of people who call themselves instructional designers like to design instruction. So they write objectives and plan activities and encourage discovery and structure experiences. Some of them go on to embalm these things in SCOs. All in pursuit of that elusive transfer of learning. A corollary to that bias: it never seems to occur to some of these people to not design instruction. For example, they don’t create job aids. They don’t see job aids as a way of reducing or eliminating the need for formal training, nor as a tool that people use on the job and thus should practice using during formal training. Instead, job aids get crammed to the back of the cognitive closet, next to the icebreakers and under the smile sheets. Besides, you can’t track job aid use in an LMS, so how good can they really be? Guys: if people don’t use it on the job, it’s not a job aid. I kid because I love. Actually, I kid because I’m puzzled by the non-use of so practical a tool. So, in part because I’d like to make myself better known in Canada, I created a session that I thought would appeal to people who’d thought about job aids, or wondered about them, and who were interested in finding out if job aids made sense for the workplace problems they grapple with. I included lots of examples of job aids, which I’ve been adding to my show-and-tell blog, Dave’s Ensampler. I included an exercise in which people would describe to a partner some task they knew about, with the listener assessing that task’s suitability to job-aiding using questions that I’ve discussed here before (When to Build a Job Aid). What I did not do was to first walk them through-which, let’s face it, often means talk them through-that process. Given their likely backgrounds, people in my session were likely capable of putting a decent job aid to use on their own. So: this allowed more time for the exercise, since I wasn’t going on about the exercise. Second, it provided a clear albeit small demonstration of a job aid taking the place of instruction. If people could get through the task-assessing exercise without my telling them how, even though they hadn’t made this sort of analysis before, then it’s pretty clear you don’t have to train people just because you’ve uncovered a skill-and-knowledge gap. We discussed the decision questions afterward, and if you can imagine such a thing, there was very little puzzlement or confusion about what goes into the decision and why. So then I did talk a bit, showing how a good task analysis is whispering very loudly that certain tasks would be great to job-aid. My experience is that this would be a new concept to many, so I demonstrated with a short example, and using that example showed some features common to all job aids. At that point, we went into a second hands-on exercise. The day before my presentation, I created this as a replacement for what I’d originally planned to do. As I had been rehearsing, I felt that people weren’t getting enough opportunity to do things for themselves. Why not have them try to create a decision table?  From the web site of the Superior Court for King County, Washington, I copied instructions on how to file for a protection order (an anti-harassment protection order, a domestic violence protection order, and so on). I chose this topic to emphasize that  job aids can apply to important real life tasks and not just to refunding a store purchase. Participants started with a set of descriptions (created by me based on the court’s actual guidelines), along with a job aid for creating decision tables. For an exercise at 4:15 in the afternoon, less than an hour before conference-sponsored drinks and snacks, people seemed very engaged-lots of talk within the table groups, not too many obvious signs of boredom or frustration. Thanks to comments from participants both in the session and afterward, there are changes I’ll make. My original thought was that I needed to add a detailed demonstration before the exercise. A week later, though, I think that’s just my internal instructor dying to explain something again. Instead what I’m going to create  is a better  job aid for how to build a decision table once you’ve analyzed a task like choosing which protection order a person needs. I think an example-a model of building such a table-makes a lot of sense, and it too will probably be a handout. In other words: Provide details for the task that’s going to be job-aided Provide guidance in drafting a decision-based job aid Provide the least amount of description / explanation / instruction possible Then, get out of the way. Let people work with the tools. Let those synapses fire. Stand ready to respond to questions or comments, with the aim of helping people come to their own answer. I’m grateful to CSTD for accepting my proposal, and I’m indebted to the people who participated in the job aids session. Thanks to them, I’m putting together what I think of as a workbench (rather than a workshop): an engagement of three days or so in which I work with clients to build up job aid skills and immediately apply them to real work challenges. I’ll act as a guide in the skill area and as a coach for the client’s own efforts to build job aids. CC-licensed photo by Carlos Almendarez.

I’ve just seen Jane Bozarth’s terrific column at Learning Solutions, Content Becomes Its Own Context. As she read David Byrne’s How Music Works, she writes, "I found I could pretty much substitute the word "content" for the word ‘music’ in many of his ideas." I don’t plan to summarize her article here, so you’ll have to read it for yourself. I may have to read Byrne’s book. I certain enjoyed Daniel Levitin’s This is Your Brain on Music, which I wrote about almost five years ago. And like human languages, a phenomenon I use often to highlight the many possible meanings for "learning," music is both pervasive and evasive. One of Jane’s insights in her comparison is that capturing tacit knowledge isn’t easy, in music or in the world of workplace learning. Yet it’s the tacit that raises music (or cognitive ability) above the merely routine. Or as Artur Schabel put it, The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes - ah, that is where the art resides. There’s a different sort of problem for exemplars like Schnabel, as he wrote in My Life in Music: I am attracted only to music which I consider to be better than it can be performed. Therefore I feel (rightly or wrongly) that unless a piece of music presents a problem to me, a never-ending problem, it doesn’t interest me too much. Part of what that says to me, in terms of learning, is that as a person’s capabilities increase, she’s often less and less interested in the mundane. Not that she won’t do mundane tasks-every job has some of them (says the guy who installed software and tinkered with file backup yesterday). I’d argue, though, that the person with a greater  depth of job-related capability is less and less interested in being trained in the mundane. The idea of people dying the death of a thousand cuts in some mandatory training experience is almost too common to draw notice. But you don’t get better as a musician by going through high-school marching band instruction again. You might, as Pablo Casals did, choose to practice scales every day, but Casals played many other works as well, and I feel reasonably sure those weren’t the cellist equivalent of "Kitty on the Keys." A month or so back, I had lunch with a colleague I hadn’t seen in far too long, and learned that his wife had taken up not the violin but the fiddle. So I sent him a couple of links to videos of Natalie MacMaster, a dynamo of Cape Breton fiddling. We all ended up at Natalie’s concert here in Maryland last week. I mention her because it’s a good excuse to drop a video into a post, like this one where Natalie is performing with her uncle, Buddy MacMaster-and you won’t often get to hear two members of the Order of Canada playing fiddle like this. Natalie and Buddy are exemplary musicians-but notice what’s going on in the video around the 2:00 mark: a whole stageful of musicians, ranging over at least a span of 60 years of age, takes up bows and dives into the music. No one’s tracking them in an FMS (Fiddle Management System); no one’s worried about the failure to capture and embed Shareable Audio Objects. People put time and effort into becoming better at an activity they find worthwhile.      

Today’s New York Times business section included Adam Bryant’s Corner Office interview with Karen May, vice president for people development at Google. The interview is short (the feature takes up a bit less than half a page), but well-focused, particularly on two topics: training and feedback. Asked about common mistakes she’s seen with regard to training programs for employees, May says: One thing that doesn’t make sense is to require a lot of training… If people opt in, versus being required to go, you’re more likely to have better outcomes. Well, there goes the whole compliance-training industry, and a good percentage of elearning producers with them. Yes, May seems to have in mind training-as-an-event, but I think that was implicit in the question. She’s clearly not an idealist: Another "don’t" would be thinking that because some training content is interesting, everyone should therefore go to it. I don’t know whether the other bigwigs at Google listen to her (I suspect, without evidence, that the proportion of formal training there is on the low side), but I can think of a few elsewhere who’d benefit from heeding this. How many large organizations plunge into some flavor of the month because of what was said on the golf course to the vice-president in change of things beginning with R? Kay segues from training to feedback by talking about performance.  "Don’t use training to fix performance problems," she says. I’ve said something similar (not that I’m a vice president for people development), though what she’s referring to is problems of individual performance. In her view, managers will sometimes send a person to training if that person isn’t performing well. I agree that’s generally a dumb idea-when the cause isn’t a skill deficit, and especially when no one’s looked for evidence of the cause. May discusses the difficulty people have in giving candid feedback-especially "difficult feedback," which I take to mean feedback intended to help change current behavior.  There’s the potential for great value in frank feedback, of course, and she believes it’s often realized: People can do something with the feedback probably 70 percent of the time. And for the other 30 percent, they are either not willing to take it in, it doesn’t fit their self-image, they’re too resistant, in denial, or they don’t have the wherewithal to change. (I do think she’s left out the possibility that the person giving the feedback is mistaken. That’s not necessarily a common situation, but it’s hell on the person who’s on the receiving end, because attempts to correct a misimpression can easily be seen as unwillingness, resistance, denial, what have you.) May does say that many of the executives she’s coached needed help "in relationships with others, and understanding the impact they have on the people around them."  Of the need for empathy, listening, and so on, she says, "It wasn’t usually from a lack of willingness to do those things, but they didn’t have a strong muscle."      

In a previous post, I talked about playing music as a form of tacit skill. I’ve also been thinking about accomplishment and assessment: what gets done, so to speak, and what value it has. Tom Gilbert made a useful distinction between measurement and evaluation. Measurement is a description in terms of a more-or-less objective standard. A person’s height can be expressed in inches or centimeters, measures of length that people can agree on and verify. If you also measure the person’s weight, you can calculate yet another measurement, his BMI (body-mass index). Evaluation comes when you compare the measurement with some set of criteria-e.g., a BMI number between 25 and 30 puts someone in the "overweight" range, while a number over 30 puts him in the "obese" range. I chose BMI as an example because there’s disagreement about how useful an assessment it is. In other words, in that area where health, medicine, and personal fitness overlap, it’s not always an easy task to choose the best assessment. I’d go further to say that there might not be a best assessment. The term "best" implies its own assessment: best on whose terms? Best under what conditions? Which is why I found so intriguing two essays that accompany volume 4  of Traditional Fiddle Music of Cape Breton from Rounder. The first, "‘Correctness’ in Cape Breton Fiddle Music," is by musicologist Kate Dunlay. She takes up the value that fiddlers down home place on "correctness" in playing a tune. What does that mean? How do they know it when they see (or hear) it? At one time, Dunlay thought that in traditional or folk music, there would be "a great deal of variation, improvisation, and melodic freedom." She also thought that folk musicians wouldn’t be "musically literate" because traditional music couldn’t be learned from books. Only later did I realize that although traditional music indeed cannot be learned from books, traditional tunes (including those composed by real known individuals!) can be learned from any source by musicians who know how to interpret them in a traditional style. She found that Cape Breton fiddlers would tell her which books had the best settings-and that "best" usually meant "closest to what was played in Cape Breton." Dunlay quotes folklorist Richard Bauman: There is also ample evidence to show that rote memorization and insistence on word for word fidelity to a fixed traditional text do play a part in the performance system of certain communities…. the point is that completely novel and completely fixed texts represent the poles of an ideal continuum, and that between the poles lies the range of emergent text structures to be found in empirical performance. Think about that in terms of non-musical fields. We’re prone, I think, to use absolutes-they’re simpler, they’re cleaner. This is the wellspring of prescriptive grammar ("Double negatives are wrong!" "Don’t end a sentence with a preposition!") and sometimes the potting soil for ritualistic belief and behavior. Just today I was reading about the "protocol" that requires orchestral soloists to perform without a musical score. Why? Well, it’s…um… better?  It’s… the way it’s been done? Back to Dunlay, though. She talks about the differences between Irish and Cape Breton traditional music, noting that in Ireland a musician can vary a tune "more radically" than a Cape Bretoner can. That’s because the traditions treat their sources differently. As long ago as 1802, the Scots  Niel and Nathaniel Gow sought explicitly to make their Complete Repository a standard reference. The one stream isn’t better than the other; they’re just different. "Personal style is greatly valued in Cape Breton music," Dunlay writes, "but it is expressed in ways other than by creating variations of tunes." In particular, she points out that since recorded music became common, in Cape Breton the accepted version of a tune is most likely the first recorded version, or some classic recording, rather than a particular book version. "If the tune is judged to be better, the authority of the book has been overruled." As the highly regarded Winston Fitzgerald said of his version of "Miss Gordon of Park," "Nobody would play it the way it was in the book anymore… Never." In fact, she says, "the term ‘bookish’ is sometimes used to describe music that is dry and uninteresting — too exact." If you try, you might come up with other expertise-related situations in which too literal an approach yields less than satisfactory results. Another shift that Dunay describes, interesting to me: at one time, an authoritative reference for the rhythm of a tune was puirt-a-beul ("mouth music"), a form of Gaelic singing in which the voice imitated the notes and rhythms of a tune (example here). As the use of Gaelic faded in Cape Breteon, recordings became more important. Mark Wilson, in notes following Dunlay’s, touches on other facets of how "traditional" music evolves. He’s looking, to borrow Jane Bozarth’s term, at how the (very loose) community around Cape Breton fiddling looks at its own tradition and renders its judgments. In our own research experience, the violin music native to a particular locality sometimes shifts rather dramatically over short intervals of time… many aspects of "folk culture"… have been shaped, to an extent not always recognized, by somebody’s conviction that ‘in the past, things must have been so…’ Wilson says that many Cape Bretoners believe their style closely resembles the way their pioneer forebears would have played, though there’s little evidence for this. In fact, fiddlers around Antigonish (a city on the Nova Scotia mainland less than 40 miles from Cape Breton), despite similar roots in Scotland, have a style "closer to a standard Scottish country dance group of the late 1920s." In fact, despite the high regard that many fiddlers have for collections like James Scott Skinner’s Scottish Violinist, Wilson reports very little interest in how those tunes might have been performed. Skinner himself recorded tunes on wax cylinders as early as 1899. When Wilson played these for a Cape Bretoner who knew the collection by heart, the fiddler was "greatly surprised" by how Skinner played ("I found it kind of weird, you know") but not in the least troubled by the difference. Wilson points out how Don Messer’s radio and TV broadcasts "homogenized" Canadian fiddle styles, in something of the way that bluegrass and the Grad Old Opry shaped the american country music scene in the 1950s. Cape Breton was an exception to this trend, he writes, partly because of a local audience who appreciated the music and partly because of the "large numbers of reluctant economic emigrés who would usually return to the island for lengthy summer vacations" and who would want to hear what my dad always called "good Scotch music." If there’s a "so what" here, it might include these points: Calling something an assessment doesn’t make it one. Calling something a standard doesn’t make it one, and doesn’t mean it’s standardized. Werner Heisenberg could have been talking about accomplishments.

I’ve just read David Kelly’s post, What I’m Looking for More of in 2013. Like me, David’s not a fan of New Year’s resolutions. I’m not sure what his reasoning is; I know that despite all the social-media cheering for failure as a good thing, I’m not always prone to cheer for myself when I fail, particularly in the resolution-as-self-improvement realm. One way that David’s working in that realm is to talk in public about things he wants to do more of this year. I certainly see the value in that; at the same time, because of my own tendencies, I’m often reluctant to discuss that kind of goal publicly. Falling short feels that much worse to me. David lists four things he wants to do more of this year. Read more Write more Do more Help more (Read his post for the details; this is the mini-summary.) I’m particularly taken by what he says about "do more." I hear a lot of talk from people, including myself, about the type of work we should be doing. We adapt the way it should be done to the way it can be done within an organization. Sacrifices are made; that’s just the way things work in organizational learning. But the fact is, until there are more examples of the way it should be done actually being done, with examples of the benefits reached by doing things differently, our industry will continue this cycle of doing what we’ve always done. So when I say "Do More", I’m really talking about opportunities to "Do Better". I’m looking to get involved in projects both inside my organization and outside my organization that provide an opportunity to produce more examples of the needle being moved. I think the "we" here refers to people in the learning field, especially the organizational learning field. I’ve often encouraged people who are considering proposing their first presentation for a professional group-to me, that’s one of the best ways to clarify your own understanding of what you’ve been doing and what value you can uncover for someone who’s doing or interested in doing something similar. Or, even better, who’s grappling with a similar problem that you’ve had some success with. At the same time, I’m sometimes surprised at the number of people whose jobs seem mainly to involve going to conferences. Depending on my mood, that could be puzzlement, or just plain jealousy. Sure, I’d like to go to a few more conferences myself; the potential for face-to-face interaction is pretty easy to realize when you’ve connected virtually ahead of time. While I’m on this conference tangent, I admit in all honesty, I have a certain… well, if not skepticism, then doubtfulness, about "speakers." Hey, I like to speak. I know lots of words. I can talk, and I can even (though this might trigger your doubtfulness) be intentionally quiet. My point is not to criticize many people I admire who have "speaker" listed on their site biographies. I just want to underscore David’s comment about doing. At a professional conference, I readily bail on keynote addresses; I want to hear from the practitioner. David’s post came at a good time for me. This past year was not a roaring success, professionally, on many fronts. Frankly, I’ve been stuck for a while, feeling frustrated that X wasn’t happening and that Y turned out so poorly. This isn’t a useful way to proceed for very long. So what positive goals will I set for myself? Do more. David has his meaning for this; I have mine. I want to work on more projects, or longer projects. I want to connect with clients to help them achieve better results. I also want to help them avoid doing any more training than they have to, both because training usually isn’t the route to better results, and because so much of what’s done in the name of training just plain isn’t very good. Connect more. I don’t comment or communicate with my professional colleagues as often as I’d like. In fact, for certain people whom I really admire, I tend not to connect; I don’t want to be taking up too much of their time. So I want to find opportunities to share more and collaborate more. In particular I want to find opportunities to collaborate in Canada. Write more-and regularly. Were it not for Jay Cross helping me understand how blogs work, and Harold Jarche setting the example of thinking out loud about what interests me professionally, I would not have nearly 600 posts here on my Whiteboard. 2012 was a sporadic year for me, though. I want to rebuild the habit of posting regularly, which requires the habit of thinking regularly. The French verb réfléchir can be translated as to think about or to think over as well as to reflect. Count more. This is just an offhanded way of saying I want to monitor what I’m doing and compare what’s going on to what I said I wanted to have going on. About that monitoring: I’ve written a few times about weight, health, and performance management (as in this post from two and a half years ago). I weigh myself at the same time nearly every morning, and I track the data both in a food-diary app and on a spreadsheet. This routine has had the side benefit of making me very clear about normal variation. Small gains from one day to the next don’t bother me; small losses are more fun to see, but I don’t take them seriously in the absence of a trend. There’s other stuff I’d like to get in there, but I know I’m better off focusing on four things than fourteen. So thanks to David both for sharing his ideas and for helping me tease out some of mine.

This is my summary and reaction to the first part of Sharon Boller‘s whitepaper, Learning Trends, Technologies, and Opportunities. Boller is the president of Bottom-Line Performance, a learning design firm based in Indiana. The 26-page whitepaper has two main sections: Six truths about today’s learning environment. Emerging trends and technologies I think it’s well worth reading in its entirety. Here on the Whiteboard, I wanted to summarize some of those truths in part one, and add comments for which Boller has no responsibility whatsoever.   ILT is not dead. When I read this, I tell you, you could have knocked me over with a smilesheet. I’m not mocking Boller-far from it. Among the many useful features in her whitepaper are summaries of facts. For instance, ASTD said last year that 59.4% of companies reported using instructor-led classroom training, and another 13.3% use instructor-led by online or remote (such as video). Self-paced online? 18.7%, and a whopping 1.4% are using mobile as a distribution method. I looked at this summary from ASTD about the State of the Industry report that Boller mentions. While this isn’t the entire report, I found a comment about "content distribution" striking: Technology-based methods have rebounded to account for 37.3 percent of formal hours available across all learning methods. If I read that right, then non-tech methods (you know, like instructor-led classroom training) accounts for more than 60% of "formal hours available across all learning methods. Even the phrase "learning method" is telling. I’m not the kind of fanatic who goes around correcting punctuation and menus; I can even hold a civil conversation with someone who uses "understand" as part of a training objective-because I’m inclined to see it as shorthand for something that can eventually be observed. So I do understand that people in the industry use "learning method" for things that can only aspire to encourage learning. I do think it’s helpful to state that explicitly from time to time. Absolutely, you can design and create activities, experiences, exercises, games, what have you, that are aimed at supporting, encouraging, and so on, just as you can  find recipes, buy ingredients, set a table,and prepare dishes. What you can’t do is guarantee that people will eat your food. mLearning: lots of talk, little action That ASTD report tells us that 1.4% of formal learning is delivered via mobile. Like Boller, I’m sure the current figure is higher. After all,  an increase of nearly 50% would get you all the way up to 2.1% . I can’t help wondering whether one serendipitously limiting factor is that you can’t easily cram a 300-slide barrage of PowerPoint onto a smartphone screen. Tablets are an easier target for this pumpkin-headed kind of leveraging, though, and are probably already plagued with far more legacy content than the Geneva Conventions should permit. I want to underscore that in this first section, Boller’s talking about the way things are, not how they will or should be. I confess that I’m a little leery of "mobile learning" in a learning-industry context. I fear it’ll be stacking and tracking: loading stuff up because it can go onto a mobile device, and then using ever-better software to track whatever somebody thinks ought to be tracked. It’s always easier to track a score on a quiz than the quality with which someone handled an actual problem from an actual customer. Outside vendors matter. One thing Boller says in this section is really about attitudes inside an organization: Most companies are NOT in the L&D business; they are in business to do something else. This ought to be obvious, but it’s sometimes only a ritual nod that L&D makes toward the reason there’s a organization at all. Employees don’t get much formal training. 31 hours a year is the average in ASTD’s data, or 1.5% of a year’s worth of 40-hour weeks. There’s a way in which much "formal learning" in the workplace is really "focused introduction with maybe a little practice."  31 hours is like a 2-credit course in college (which may explain my level of skill when it comes to History of Art). Boller says she thinks of this time spent in formal training like driver’s education. "Would you rather have your kid spending more hours in the classroom… or more hours behind the wheel practicing driving with a qualified adult providing constant feedback?" In Maryland, where I live, the formal training requirements for a new driver, regardless of age, include completing a standardized driving course with at least 30 hours of classroom instruction and 6 hours behind the wheel. That’s the formal-training requirement. But obtaining a provisional license also requires 60 hours of driving with "a qualified supervising driver (parent, guardian, or mentor)" who completes and signs a practice log documenting those 60 hours. I can picture the diagram in my driver’s ed textbook that explained how to parallel park. That was helpful, in the way that a dictionary definition of a word is helpful. But if your goal is more than "repeat the definition when asked," you’ve got to work up to fitting your car in between two others on the street. That might not take 30 hours-but it will take spaced practice; it will take varying conditions; it will probably benefit from scaffolding (such as starting with a span of three empty spaces behind a parked car). And that’s just the parking part of the driving-a-car set of skills. Majority of eLearning "doesn’t match" what’s optimal. I can’t possibly improve on what Boller says: Clients ALWAYS say they want something that is "engaging" and not too content-heavy. Yet the stuff we routinely see looks very much "Text and Next" with tons of content and little relationship to any behaviorally-based outcomes. Sometimes this is the result of a subject matter expert who ruled with an iron fist in terms of focusing on content rather than outcomes. Other times it was the result of an internal person who decided to get Articulate or Captivate and started creating his or her own stuff - with no background in learning design. Most of the people we talk to inside organizations HATE taking eLearning courses (including lots of folks who hire us to produce it). They hate it because most of it is boring, bad or it’s not really eLearning - it’s a communication piece squished into an eLearning shell so someone’s completion can be tracked via an LMS. My only quibble is with the "not really eLearning" part. My hunch is that most people in organizations hate elearning because it’s far more about the E (as in ease of delivery and easily outsourced and easily tracked) than it is about the learning. LMS: few pull data, but they all think they need it. Boller says is that the majority of people "do not actually access or use the data available to them within an LMS." This sounds so much like the SCORM evangelism I used to hear-"there’s so much good stuff in there; it’s just not implemented right." To which my (occasionally spoken) reaction was, "No kidding." There must have been places where SCORMification actually helped increase the likelihood that people learned on the job-but that’s a belief on my part, or perhaps a hope. My own experiences with projects where the management team included a SCORM hall monitor was that the fetishization of the SCO could overrule any argument based on ephemera like principles of learning or on-the-job relevance. Just as with mainframe-based CBT back in the olden days, just as with the 12-inch laser disks and players grafted between the PC and its VGA monitor, just as with the nearly unavoidable audio response systems that have reanimated the multiple-guess question, there are convention-halls full of vendors eager to explain how their particular magic beans are just the thing you want to trade your corporate cow for. CC-licensed image of bandwagon by Jed Sullivan.

Just this morning, I came across MIT Media Lab’s announcement for its Learning Creative Learning online course. You can read about it or skim the outline to make your own judgment; I’m enjoying the laid-back description, which tracks with my previous massive open online course experience: "This is a big experiment. Things will break. We don’t have all the answer." "We hope that participants will jump in as collaborators rather than passive recipients." "Check out our shiny new platform. Actually, don’t, because we didn’t build a shiny new platform." I’ve registered, I’ve joined the LCL community on Google+, and I’ve set up a place in Evernote to help me organize what I do in LCL. This (I think) is a sign I’ve learned from past experience. A while back, I joined PLENK, a MOOC on public learning environments, networks, and knowledge. I stayed with it for a while, but eventually stopped participating. There were things about the MOOC format that annoyed me, but the biggest factor in my leaving was that I hadn’t made enough connections with people whose interests overlapped sufficiently with mine. Many of the participants were students, academics, or people closely tied to formal education (schools or colleges). That’s not the world I work in, or one I often turn to. I don’t blame the MOOC for that, any more than I blame sports bars for always having athletic events on TV. PLENK is an example of a connectivist MOOC. George Siemens seemed to use cMOOC and xMOOC as informal and possibly tongue-in-cheek shorthand for the difference between an experience like PLENK and the more, shall we say, institutional MOOC like those from edX or Coursera. More relevant to learning is this comment he makes: Our MOOC model emphasizes creation, creativity, autonomy, and social networked learning. The Coursera model emphasizes a more traditional learning approach through video presentations and short quizzes and testing. Put another way,cMOOCs focus on knowledge creation and generation whereas xMOOCs focus on knowledge duplication. As a veteran of many, many corporate training and learning efforts, I’m trying not to see the rise of the University MOOC, and especially the for-profit-corporate MOOC, as "Lecture Hall Meets Facebook." As a refresher for myself, and a first action for LCL, I posted in Google+ a link to this video by Dave Cormier, who’s partnered with Siemens and others, with advice on how to succeed in a MOOC. ORIENT: Find out where stuff is. Then remember where it is. DECLARE: Set up a place to record and share your thoughts. NETWORK: Follow others;  interact with them. CLUSTER: Once you’ve gotten your feet wet, get together with people who share your interests. FOCUS: "Halfway through," Cormier says, "your mind starts to wander." So have a way to apply what you’ve been learning. We’ll see how well I apply myself.

I’ve been reading All I Really Need to Know (about Creative Thinking) I Learned (by Studying How Children Learn) in Kindergarten, by Mitchel Resnick of the MIT Media lab. This was the suggested reading for the first session of the Learning Creative Learning online course. This paper argues that the "kindergarten approach to learning" - characterized by a spiraling cycle of Imagine, Create, Play, Share, Reflect, and back to Imagine - is ideally suited to the needs of the 21st century, helping learners develop the creative-thinking skills that are critical to success and satisfaction in today’s society. The paper discusses strategies for designing new technologies that encourage and support kindergarten-style learning, building on the success of traditional kindergarten materials and activities, but extending to learners of all ages, helping them continue to develop as creative thinkers. Resnick’s image of kindergarten learning Resnick is referring to the kind of kindergarten where kids are not "filling out phonics worksheets and memorizing flash cards" — more like the one I remember, with huge wooden blocks, a full-size rolltop desk, and nothing that I can recall as an effort to get me ready for the LSAT. His diagram’s a spiral because the steps in this process aren’t as distinct or sequential as describing or depicting them might imply. It’s through this process that kindergarteners "develop and refine their abilities as creating thinkers." And, as they grow, they need resources beyond wooden blocks and finger paint. I like his stress on little-c creativity ("creativity within one’s personal life"). Not everyone’s going to be the next Freeman Dyson or Linus Torvalds, but everyone can "become more creative in the ways they deal with everyday problems." In the Imagine section, he points out that many kindergarten materials encourage the imagination-they don’t over-structure. By contrast, a lot of "education technologies are overly constrained" — you can only do what they’re set up to do. It’s like all that fun drill and practice. He offers the example of Crickets, which I hadn’t heard of: small programmable devices, suited to children, that they can interconnect, modify, and program. Don’t take my word for it, though: In the article, he says: The design challenge is to develop features specific enough so that children can quickly learn how to use them, but general enough so that children can contine to imagine new ways to use them. For some reason, this reminded me of explanations of "simple machines" in long-ago science classes-things like inclined planes, wedges, screws, and pulleys. I’d been told that a screw was a kind of inclined plane, but when it came to pulleys, I don’t think we ever actually rigged up a bunch of pulleys to experience how the right combination would let us lift a load we otherwise could not. While reading the Create section, I read this line three times: With Mindstorms and Crickets, for example, children can create dynamic, interactive constructions — and, in the process, learn concepts related to sensing, feedback, and control. It’s the last part that got me. What it brought to mind was the first course I wrote in the computer-based training system we used for reservations training at Amtrak. Things I had learned about learning (like using a minimalist approach, or providing feedback without giving away the answer) clicked. I could create a course that would help someone learn how to request and interpret train schedules-and I wouldn’t have to be there when that happened. Resnick says (sensibly) that playing and learning ought to be linked. "Each at its best involves…experimentation, exploration, and testing." This is part of why he disliked "edutainment" (and not just for its overripe, marketeerish name). Studios, directors, and actors provide you with entertainment; schools and teachers provide you with education… In all of these cases, you are viewed as a passive recipient. If we are trying to help children develop as creative thinkers, it is more productive to focus on "play" and "learning" (things you do) rather than "entertainment" and "education" (things that others provide for you). Also in this section, he mentions Scratch, a programmable language that kids can use to create interactive stories. I haven’t gone into this, but just the illustrations of the code remind me of the MIT App Inventor that I used to build a smartphone app (touch a picture of a cat, hear a purring sound, after which the image changes to a cow). A scrap of Scratch   Say meow, then switch to the cow. Scratch is one way that Resnick’s article moves into the Share section. He quotes Marvin Minsky as saying that the Logo programming language has great grammar but not much literature. So the Scratch website is an example of "both inspiration and audience." And, in my way of thinking, if that’s not what you want to share, you at least see how sharing can happen. Resnick is talking about children, but I come to this from a career mostly involving helping adults to learn. And perhaps the single biggest drawback to learning in the workplace (well, after you get past icebreakers and listening-as-learning and endless recordkeeping) is the dearth of support for reflection. What are you doing? Why are you doing it? How’s it going? What do you think made that happen (for all kinds of outcomes)? A colleague I respect recently said he’s decided to propose his first professional-conference presentation. I was surprised that he hadn’t presented already, but no matter. I can recall the first one I did. I wanted to share with people, but I was nearly paralyzed by the idea that I didn’t have all that much to say. And you know, maybe I didn’t, depending on what measurements you choose. What I did have was my particular experience (using a complex computer-based training system) combined with the data-based, lean approach to helping people improve, which I’d learned from folks like Geary Rummler and Dale Brethower. My point is that thinking about what I’d been doing, and trying to uncover value it might have for other people, helped me see the everyday in a new light. That’s the goal of useful reflection. * * * I’ve written this post both to help me process the ideas in Resnick’s articles and to set down thoughts of my own. In addition, I found myself noting in a separate document things I wanted to know more about (like Crickets, epistemic games, and Lev Vygotsky). To me those were sidelights; I might discuss them one on one, but this post is plenty long as is.  

In the Learning Creative Learning online course, one suggested activity this week was to read Gears of My Childhood, Seymour Papert’s essay on how playing with gears as a very young child has influenced his life, and to share with others in the course a similar reflection based on your own experience. I’ve enjoyed reading many of these. People talk about skateboards, about a box of dress-up clothes, about a "typewriter" with 12 keys (constructed from an egg carton, a paper-towel tube, and similar highly engineered materials). One woman wrote about a box of watercolor paints her mother got for her: …which she said were the best watercolors on the market at that time. I felt so professional! I made many paintings with them, including huge ones… The little watercolor pans are incredibly visually appealing to me and have a particular paint smell that I still find irresistible. I love the case, the way it snaps, the way the brushes fit elegantly in the isle between the rows of pans, and the way the palette comes out and attaches to the box to create huge mixing space. She captured me with that snap. To me the word, the sound perfectly captures a way in which childhood memories are stored so deeply. We’re attending (without necessarily focusing deliberately) on so many parts of the experience and interpreting them in ways that make sense to us. So the snap of the box is a central part of how she remembers and relives her paintbox experience. She is now a teacher of visual and media arts. In her comments, she says: I recommend that my students go touch all the sketchbooks in the art store and buy the one that feels the best to hold. For many it helps establish a different relationship with the work and be a lot more productive. I think this concept also applies to the physical spaces in which we live and work. Immediately I thought of an artifact from long ago — a repair manual I bought in college to help maintain my 1963 VW Beetle. I’ve written before about How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive as an outstanding job aid. The words about touch, though, reminded me of chapter 3, "How to Buy a Volkswagen." The chapter is 10 pages long, including an 18-step "pre-purchase procedure" that starts by telling you what tools to bring along. It’s crammed with practical information intended to help the novice make a better decision about a used car: [Start the car, and with the engine idling]…put your hands over the tail pipes, quickly because they’ll soon be hot, and feel the pressure. Feel the pulses; they should be even… Then hold your hands about four to five inches away, letting the exhaust pass over them. The pulses should be even and about the same temperature   If they are not, the engine needs or will soon need a valve job.  Prior to that pre-purchase procedure, Muir has advice on things to do before you even put the key in the ignition. These are paraphrases: Walk around and look at the car. Does it sag and look beat? Do the doors open and close well? Put your foot on the brake; it should stop three inches or more from the floor. Push the clutch pedal with your hand till it’s hard to push. Let it up and see how much free play there is. More than two inches: the clutch is suspect. He goes on with a short paragraph about the upholstery (as an indicator of overall treatment), the engine (it’s air cooled - dirt is a bad sign), play in the front wheel. And then: Now sit back and look at it again. Does it stand up with pride? Does it feel good to you? Would you like to be its friend? Use your other senses. Sit in the driver’s seat and scrunch your butt around. Hold the wheel and close your eyes and FEEL! …Get away from the car and the owner or salesman to let your mind and feelings go over the car and the idea of the car. What has its karma been? can you live with the car? Walk around or find a quiet place, assume the good old lotus and let the car be the thing. At this point some revelation will come to you and you will either be gently guided away from that scene… It is important that you neither run the motor or ride in the car until this preliminary scene has run its course. It also puts the owner-salesman up the wall because he has no idea of what you are doing and will be more pliable when the hard dealing time comes. I was never quite that touchy-feely, not even when I bought my original copy of this guide from the Whole Earth Catalog back in 1968 or so. But I think Muir did a great job of situating the pragmatic, procedural parts of VW ownership and maintenance within the context of the reader situating the car into his life.

A priest, a minister, and a rabbi walk into a bar. The bartender looks up and says, "What is this, some kind of joke?" No matter how you reacted to that, it’s a lot like how I react to infographics. Most of them are more about the graphic than the info, I think. In fact, I’d been planning to write a post contrasting infographics with job aids, because I think many people confuse the former with the latter. Instead, thanks to Mark Oehlert, I came across Desmond Wong’s post, Infographics to Teach You How to Create Infographics. Wong talks about them as a marketing tool, then goes into the details of constructing them using PointPoint, and of harnessing layout and graphics to achieve your goal. What’s that got to do with those folks walking into a bar? Infographics are like jokes. (This is a different statement from "infographics are a joke.") Infographics are situational. People enjoy jokes, but enjoyment (usually) hinges on context. What’s funny at work isn’t always what’s funny at the game; what sparks conversation at the coffee shop can put off someone reading online. If you’re uninterested in the context, reading an infographic can sometimes like work-the kind of work you’re glad you don’t have to do. If the graphic elements are well-done, though-when they engage us, the way a good joke-teller does-we’ll at least take time to find out what happens next. We might not stay long, but we didn’t pass by.  Infographics rely on patterns. I haven’t read enough Jung to be sure, but I’d bet he thought about "walking into a bar" as one of his archetypes. It’s really the framework for a pattern: "I’m going to arrange some ideas here and play with them." Not every pattern shows up in every good joke, any more than the same cards show up in a good poker hand. Like music, though, jokes and infographics are subject to their version of Duke Ellington’s test: "If it sounds good, it is good." X-walks-into-a-bar is a stage for a virtual performance. For infographics, that stage is set, as Wong points out, with strong visual elements: blocks of color, distinctive shapes, headlines, callouts, hand- (or cherry-) picked data. Even the overall shape is a pattern. While I’ve seen exceptions like Randall Munroe’s graphics on money and radiation, most infographics embrace a long-but-not-wide format. My hunch is they’re following the online convention: people scroll down, but not sideways. Infographics are an invitation.  People tell jokes for all kinds of reasons, but they don’t tell them to themselves. Telling is only the start of the process. A joke is an invitation to share. Maybe you’re sharing silliness or mockery. Maybe you’re sharing stereotypes to ridicule them-or to signal that you’re on the same side. Two-way sharing can be a kind of camaraderie: "Okay, how many accordionists does it take to change a lightbulb?" Through wordplay and juxtaposition, jokes invite you to take up a different viewpoint. The unexpectedly funny jokes engage us with their contrast and make us feel good because we got them. A good infographic invites you to look at its content in new ways. Whether polemical or political or even poetic, the infographic is saying, "Did you ever think…?"  I do have some misgivings. Some people seem to think that any collection of text, shapes, and colors doing time together is an infographic. I suspect they’re the same sort of people who think "outtake" is a synonym for "hilariously funny." Still, if somebody wants to follow Desmond Wong’s tutorials and come up with his own infographic, I think that’s great. He’s got some design fundamentals and a set of templates as a fast start. The real learning begins where the infographic leaves off.

My French isn’t that good: I can hold a conversation (sometimes) but I couldn’t hold a job. One way I try to get better is to read more and listen to more in French. I recently came across the Langue Française section of the TV5Monde site, which has an almost overwhelming range of features. One of them is 7 jours sur la planète (7 Days on the Planet). It’s a regular feature  with three segments from the week’s TV news. For each segment, you can watch the video clip, read a transcript, and then test your comprehension with three levels of questions (elementary, intermediate, and advanced). I watched the first clip in the grid above, about fish fraud (one species of fish passed off as another). I got the gist, then brought up the transcript to spot words I didn’t know, or catch meanings I might have mistaken. That’s when I discovered Alexandria. TV5Monde’s site is set up so that on a page with a special icon (red circle with a question mark in the upper right of the following image), you can double-click any word to bring up a multi-language dictionary:   In this example, I clicked on l’étiquette. Alexandria popped up with a French-language dictionary, which reminded me that une étiquette is a little card or tag with the price, origin, or instructions for some product or item of merchandise. You can set the dictionary to translate into any of more than two dozen languages: ("Choose your target language.") What impresses me about this approach is that TV5Monde doesn’t have to create specialized hypertext for certain words. As far as I can tell, Alexandria’s dictionary works with any word on the page. If you don’t know any French, of course, this would be a terrible way to learn it. You wouldn’t have any background to decide between one meaning and another, and a dictionary can’t tell you much about syntax or context.  The title of the segment in French, La fraude  aux poissons passe à travers les filets, could be read as "Fish fraud passes through the nets." But even my paperback French-English dictionary has 27 main entries for passer,  and given the subject, I’d translate the title as "Fish fraud is slipping through the nets." If  you’ve got a low-to-intermediate level of ability with French, this is a powerful tool to help you understand more of what you read on the TV5Monde site.  It looks like there’s a lot more to Alexandria-more than I can spend time on this morning. I have the impression you can link any web page to the dictionary’s features. I haven’t tested that yet, but I will.

I’ve been doing a little self-directed learning lately. And it came about because someone told me about Larrivée guitars. Although I hadn’t heard of them till a couple of months ago, I can assure you they’re out of this world-one has been on the international space station for years. I play guitar, not very well. Mostly I strum chords, because I like to sing. But in that conversation I mentioned, my friend encouraged me to think about getting a quality instrument. That suggestion came at a good time; although I’m not quite ready to spring even for a used Larrivée, I did start picking up the somewhat battered classical guitar I bought when I was in college. For much of that time I’ve kept a couple of books on fingerpicking. Every so often I’ll work through one or the other, and when I sense some improvement, I feel pretty good. In addition, because I’ve been on a Zachary Richard kick lately, I’ve been trying to learn a couple of his songs, like Travailler, c’est trop dur (link to a video and an English translation on my French-language blog). That was one track: doing more with my own guitar. A second track was to find out more about Larrivée guitars, and there seem to be few better places than the Larrivée online forum. When I enter a new community like this, I wander around for a bit and don’t say too much too soon, unless I can contribute something positive, if only to my experience with a guitar-tuning app for Android phones. I saw that someone on the forum was selling some DVDs-tutorials for fingerpicking. Turns out they feature Happy Traum, a prolific and popular guitarist and instructor. In fact, one of those instruction books I’ve hung onto for so long is his. Even if you don’t play an instrument, you can get a sense of Happy’s relaxed, encouraging approach: That sealed it for me, and the DVDs arrived last weekend. As Bill Deterline said, "Things take longer than they do," so I’m not fooling myself about how quickly I’ll pick up the techniques in the DVDs. I can’t help but notice the interplay between what’s essentially a lecture-Happy Traum on DVD, explaining and demonstrating-and the invitation to not simply practice, but to actively modify your practice in order to expand you abilities. Fundamentally, this is a tightly focused relationship. In effect, Happy’s done instructional design around a specific topic: not just "fingerpicking styles" (content alone) but "how to help a beginner learn to fingerpick." He can’t see you or hear you, and he probably doesn’t have enough time in his schedule to work with every student one-to-one. Instead, he starts by slowly and carefully demonstrating and explaining fundamentals.  It’s show-and-tell so you can hear-and-do (or at least hear-and-try). The first thing we should work on is your steady thumb… Keep a bass going relentlessly, so that you always have that pulse underneath your picking… The ability to keep that thumb going while you’re doing whatever else… You have to develop the facility for doing that. It’s kind of like reprogramming your brain… First thing we’ll do, just do it on one string… Do this with me… Within a few minutes of that, he adds: "The most basic melody note" — add a treble note by plucking the first string on just the first beat Switch the treble note to the second string, still on the first beat The second string on the first and the third beat "Now let’s try putting a note on the first and second beat, but leave the third and fourth alone." Same thing, but with the second string. Alternating between the first and second string (first string on the first beat, second string on the third beat). I don’t want to keep quoting from the DVD, but I do think that attendees at more than one learning conference could profit from seeing how deftly Happy  introduces complexity at a rate that challenges but (mostly likely) doesn’t frustrate the beginner. (As for badges-when you’re able to get through "Skip to My Lou" at a normal pace, with the steady thumb-beat and the melody in the upper strings, you’ll have all the badge you need for attaining that particular level.) Probably some people could figure this out on their own, but I suspect that as with so many other fields, beginning guitar players can feel overwhelmed, not knowing what to pay attention to or what’s an optimal way to proceed. Brownie McGhee certainly didn’t learn guitar from a DVD — but Happy Traum learned from McGhee, and depending on your access to an in-person teacher and your interest in guitar, you can learn from Happy’s DVD. To emphasize the variety of things that people mean when they say "learning," I often talk about learning a language. Does learning mean mastering basic grammar? Reading literature in that language? Watching movies without subtitles?  It depends on context. And that’s true with "learning the guitar." There are some areas that most people would agree on-you probably need to know what standard tuning is, and probably need to know the basic fingering for chords. So there’s explicit knowledge as a foundation for tacit knowledge (it’s one thing to know what the tuning is, it’s another to actually tune). Beyond such fundamentals, there’s the melody or song you want to play, and there’s the integration of all this into a performance. I’m not performing much yet. One of my mid-term goals is to improve enough that I could try a Larrivée in a store without completely embarrassing myself. We’ll see how that works out.