Do you stop at a red light while driving?
Have you ever held the door open for someone?
These are motivationally-based actions - Our motivation for stopping at a red light is our own safety, and of course, we always want to do the right thing, so we hold doors open. These motivations are powerful, and deeply developed. Which leads me to the other half of opportunity, motivation.
Motivation is the key to learning.
With that, let's start on "opportunity", a topic I promised to discuss in my last blog post, but sadly neglected.
Opportunity for learning is much more than simply fitting pieces of a learning solution together. When there is an opportunity for learning, there is inevitably motivation behind it. The opportunity to engage with learners and create a learning solution to help an organization is nothing without the motivation of others behind it: The combination of motivation and opportunity takes institutionalized learning from a fad that a company might try once to a regular process that improves employee morale and corporate standard stewardship.
There are a number of distance and e-learning courses that deal with on-boarding, required information for new hires to do their jobs: Everything from where the photocopiers are to the process behind performance evaluations, health and safety measures and legal compliance standards in an organization. These are necessary, and many organizations see them, particularly the latter two as an exercise in risk-management, so the information is presented in as cut-and-dried a manner as possible to clearly delineate that the organization has fulfilled its legal requirements in training its employees.
I worked with Company X, involved in the oil and gas industry, whose representatives decided that they wanted their learning solution to change corporate culture to value health and safety above all other priorities. It was their health and safety metrics that ensured they received contracts for work; a safe company reflects well on its stakeholders and prospective clients, after all. As a result, a number of different stakeholders from various levels of the organization were invested in the look, feel, and sound of their learning solution: They didn't just want to take the opportunity to provide learning to their employees and stakeholders, they were motivated to make a change to the organization. In this case, as important as performance metrics are, the real change comes from a shift in the corporate culture to embrace safety regulations holistically throughout the organization.
In the first few organization-wide run-throughs of their LMS-mounted learning solution, there weren't many organizational ripples, and the frustration mounted. Until one of the learning solution administrators saw a new hire who took the course taping a number of electrical cords to the floor, and putting brightly-coloured strips of tape 6" away from the cords themselves. When asked, the employee responded "In the safety course, they point out the importance of putting a hand or foot near obstacles so you're aware of where they are. The bright tape is there so people can put a toe on it and know where the tape is."
A small measure, perhaps. To me it was a clear indicator that the lessons learned were swimming upstream, so to speak.
Learning solutions can fill gaps in an organization's knowledge, that's what they do well. They can also motivate change in a company from the ground up, fostered from the top down. With the right motivation and the right opportunity, there is very little that a concerned group of individuals cannot accomplish.
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
Thursday, May 17, 2012
The Absolute Value of Music
There have been numerous studies on the efficacy of music in tasks involved with higher cognitive function, from information processing and retrieval to fine motor skills and logic. Results are mixed at best, but one feature is predominant: Playing music while learning a skill ONLY HELPS IF that same music is played back while the skill is being executed. If an individual learns a skill, such as in my case, of small engine repair while listening to Bach (Or, as might be more appropriate in my case, AC/DC), it's only useful for any reason if that same music is played back while we use what we've learned.
Why?
It turns out that while we're learning, our brains don't simply focus only on what we're learning. but on the totality of our learning experience. This explains, for example, why so many classrooms are painted in neutral or calming colours, or embellished with wood: Our surroundings affect how we learn, and provide subtle signals to our brains for information processing. In this case, our brains cue what we're learning to the music to which we are listening for future retrieval. An elegant and simple solution that ensures that as long as the stimuli is present, we can continue learning. For a parallel reference, see B.F. Skinner's work on stimuli in the learning experience: In sum, our brains only pay attention to the most relevant stimuli at the moment, irrespective of whatever else is going on around us.
The mistake many trainers, educators, and instructional designers commit is a strategy of one-size-fits-all - In effect, that one stimuli will have an equal effect on all people. The benchmark of a solid learning solution isn't just measured in cost, but in effectiveness, so while a one-size solution may be easiest on the bottom line, it may render itself pointless because, in point of fact, it helps no-one learn.
When designing a curriculum according to needs, my first question is "In their shoes, what do I need before I sit down?" We can develop extraordinarily complex, far-reaching tools to educate, innovate and inspire, but these come to naught if we do not consider the basics: Voice, content, and opportunity. In what voice do we educate? While the voice of authority certainly has cachet from our experiences in the school system, it lessens in impact (Note: Please, can we stop using "impactful"? As a former English teacher, I am against jargon of all kinds, but particularly this phrase. It hurts communication and is the managerial equivalent of "Um", "uh", and "eh"- Filler for greater thoughts) as we age and specialize in our own fields. In that sense, often the best idea is to set a tone that promotes collaboration. Rather than "you should" and "you must", phrases such as "Best results are achieved by", and "your job goes more smoothly when".
Content is another matter that warrants its own series of blog posts, but I'll attempt to sum it up as succinctly as possible from here: Don't try to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. The content that you want to teach may not reach its desired result in your audience. Remember that question I asked about needs? The same should apply for content - In educational psychology, when curriculum exceeds a learner's ability, the phenomenon of "affective shielding" occurs. In essence, affective shielding is the process by which we tune out when faced with a barrage of information or information we don't understand. You can see this best when a consumer is faced with a wall of potato chip choices at the supermarket, and stares blankly. Too much or the wrong kind of information will make your intended audience shut down, completely negating the intentions of the curriculum. In sum, don't just tailor your content to your audience, be realistic in your expectations of that content: Teachers of history, English and math understand that what they teach won't change the world in 99% of cases, but as long as they can provide functional skills to their students, they know what works well and what doesn't.
Stay tuned tomorrow for the exciting conclusion to my Trilogy of Learning!
Why?
It turns out that while we're learning, our brains don't simply focus only on what we're learning. but on the totality of our learning experience. This explains, for example, why so many classrooms are painted in neutral or calming colours, or embellished with wood: Our surroundings affect how we learn, and provide subtle signals to our brains for information processing. In this case, our brains cue what we're learning to the music to which we are listening for future retrieval. An elegant and simple solution that ensures that as long as the stimuli is present, we can continue learning. For a parallel reference, see B.F. Skinner's work on stimuli in the learning experience: In sum, our brains only pay attention to the most relevant stimuli at the moment, irrespective of whatever else is going on around us.
The mistake many trainers, educators, and instructional designers commit is a strategy of one-size-fits-all - In effect, that one stimuli will have an equal effect on all people. The benchmark of a solid learning solution isn't just measured in cost, but in effectiveness, so while a one-size solution may be easiest on the bottom line, it may render itself pointless because, in point of fact, it helps no-one learn.
When designing a curriculum according to needs, my first question is "In their shoes, what do I need before I sit down?" We can develop extraordinarily complex, far-reaching tools to educate, innovate and inspire, but these come to naught if we do not consider the basics: Voice, content, and opportunity. In what voice do we educate? While the voice of authority certainly has cachet from our experiences in the school system, it lessens in impact (Note: Please, can we stop using "impactful"? As a former English teacher, I am against jargon of all kinds, but particularly this phrase. It hurts communication and is the managerial equivalent of "Um", "uh", and "eh"- Filler for greater thoughts) as we age and specialize in our own fields. In that sense, often the best idea is to set a tone that promotes collaboration. Rather than "you should" and "you must", phrases such as "Best results are achieved by", and "your job goes more smoothly when".
Content is another matter that warrants its own series of blog posts, but I'll attempt to sum it up as succinctly as possible from here: Don't try to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. The content that you want to teach may not reach its desired result in your audience. Remember that question I asked about needs? The same should apply for content - In educational psychology, when curriculum exceeds a learner's ability, the phenomenon of "affective shielding" occurs. In essence, affective shielding is the process by which we tune out when faced with a barrage of information or information we don't understand. You can see this best when a consumer is faced with a wall of potato chip choices at the supermarket, and stares blankly. Too much or the wrong kind of information will make your intended audience shut down, completely negating the intentions of the curriculum. In sum, don't just tailor your content to your audience, be realistic in your expectations of that content: Teachers of history, English and math understand that what they teach won't change the world in 99% of cases, but as long as they can provide functional skills to their students, they know what works well and what doesn't.
Stay tuned tomorrow for the exciting conclusion to my Trilogy of Learning!
Sunday, May 13, 2012
From Google Groups, an elegant solution to a ponderous ponderable: "Is it true that there are more stars in the Universe than grains of sand on the planet Earth?"
I think this answer is, in a nutshell, what I do as an instructional designer. Take material from diverse sources, clarify it, and present a solution to a problem in as clear and simple a package as possible. I must admit that at the end, I did applaud a little.
"So how many grains of sand are there in the world? You could start off by trying to guess how many grains of sand there are in a spoon of sand. Use a magnifying glass to count how many grains fit in a small section. Then, count how many of those sections fit in your spoon. Multiply the two numbers together to get an estimate. "Using this same principle, plus some additional information, mathematicians at the University of Hawaii tried to guess how many grains of sand are on the world's beaches. They came up with 7,500,000,000,000,000,000, or seven quintillion five quadrillion grains of sand." How many grains of sand are in the world? http://www.miamisci.org/tripod/whysand.html The calculation is detailed here: http://www.hawaii.edu/suremath/jsand.html That number is 7.5 x 10^18 or 7.5 billion billion. How many stars, galaxies, clusters, QSO's etc. in the Universe? http://www.faqs.org/faqs/astronomy/faq/part8/section-3.html "To get the total stellar population in the Milky Way [that is, in our galaxy alone], we must take the number of luminous stars that we can see at large distances and assume that we know how many fainter stars go along with them. Recent numbers give about 400,000,000,000 (400 billion) stars, but a 50% error either way is quite plausible." So in our galaxy alone, there might be between 2 x 10^11 and 6 x 10^11 stars How many galaxies in the Universe? http://www.faqs.org/faqs/astronomy/faq/part8/section-4.html "the Hubble telescope is capable of detecting about 80 billion galaxies (although not all of these within the foreseeable future!). In fact, there must be many more than this, even within the observable Universe, since the most common kind of galaxy in our own neighborhood is the faint dwarfs which are difficult enough to see nearby, much less at large cosmological distances. For example, in our own local group, there are 3 or 4 giant galaxies which would be detectable at a billion light-years or more (Andromeda, the Milky Way, the Pinwheel in Triangulum, and maybe the Large Magellanic Cloud). However, there are at least another 20 faint members, which would be difficult to find at 100 million light-years, much less the billions of light years to which the brightest galaxies can be seen." So the lower end estimate for the number of galaxies is 8 x 10^10 If we accept even the lower end of these Hubble figures, and if our Milky Way has a typical number of stars in it, that puts the number of stars in the universe to be at least (2 x 10^11) x (8 x 10^10) = 16 x 10^ 21 So if we round the number of sand grains to, say, 10^20 and round the number of stars to, say 10^22 then there are at least 100 stars in the universe for every grain of sand on earth. |
I think this answer is, in a nutshell, what I do as an instructional designer. Take material from diverse sources, clarify it, and present a solution to a problem in as clear and simple a package as possible. I must admit that at the end, I did applaud a little.
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