Brains, learning and e-learning

This may turn out to be the best lecture I've never attended. I had to leave before Dr Itiel E. Dror gave his talk, at the e-learning forum, but we had a chat in the break and he left me his excellent paper.

Old science and new-age sociology
He agreed that learning theory, for most educationalists and training professionals, was stuck in tail end, behaviourist theory that goes back 50 years or more. These are largely 'fossil' theories that have been hanging around because the professions rarely bother to relate practice back to current research. These fossils include the over-prescriptive, faddish and non-empirical theories of:

Bloom
Gagne
Mager
Kolb
Honey and Mumford
Kirkpatrick

Vygotsky; learning's Lysenko
Even more worrying has been the sudden entry of non-empirical sociology, which claims that all learning is a social construct. This manifests itself in the truly awful Vygotsky cult (oft quoted, seldom read) with his pseudo-Marxist, unscientific theories, loved by instructors as it puts them at the centre of the learning universe. He is learning’s Lysenko (they were born within two years of each other). It's as if we are stuck with a combination of old, discredited science and bogus new-age sociology.

Experimental psychology has many of the answers
It is a myth that there's no stable, scientific learning theory. We need only turn to the many pieces of solid evidence from experimental psychology to see how the three core processes in learning can be improved: #

1. ACQUISITION
2. MEMORY
3. APPLICATION

1. ACQUISITION
It is clear that cognitive overload is the greatest consequence of not understanding how knowledge and skills are acquired. The failure to understand how we prioritise and select information, and a lack of detailed knowledge on chunking, top-down processing and modularity, lead to demeaning, over-demanding or dull learning experiences. Expectation, motivation and engagement all have optimal techniques, which can be used to increase the efficiency of learning. Cognitive overload is at best a waste of resources, at worst a destructive force in learning. Yet far too much training ignores the fact that less is more.

2. MEMORY
We need to understand how to remember in order to retrieve, and so we need to understand how the different memory stores/structures/systems work. This is an area rich in solid research, from Ebbinghaus onwards. Working Memory is different from Long-Term Memory. It is vital we understand how these work, along with the two different types of LTM; semantic and episodic memory. Then there's incidental versus intentional learning, inferential reconstruction and context sensitive retrieval. These are pretty solid pieces of science that can be used to inform the design of learning experiences. Yet how many teachers and trainers know what these terms mean? If we were engineers we'd know the basic laws of physics, yet in the learning game we can sail on, oblivious to how memory actually works.

3. APPLICATION
Appropriate representations can be recalled but we must be aware of their limited scope. This is a trade-off between efficiency and flexibility. This 'transfer' problem is fascinating. How do we recall learnt knowledge and skills and apply them efficiently? The whole area of practice and work-related activity swings into action. Practice makes perfect, yet in education this is reduced to cramming, and in training, with its fixation on single, episode 'fixed duration courses’, ignoring actual reinforcement and application on the job, is largely ignored.

Itiel has a sensible and measured run though of some basic ideas around how we acquire, store, recall and apply knowledge and skills. His appeal for the practical application of experimental psychology to learning is badly needed.

Blended learning - a sugar coated pill

Gave a talk at the e-learning forum taday and it struck me afterwards that blended learning has taken root but it has no define shape, theory, methodology or best practice. You can call anything a blended solution. Most of the definitions are really 'blended instruction'. All we have are lots of unvalidated examples.

Blended learning, in practice, seems to be simply a nice way for the old world to cope with the new. It's a sugar coating on what many see as a bitter pill - the fact that the dominance of the classroom is fading fast. Technology is providing the social spaces, content, tools, access, media types that allow us to learn what we want, where and when we want. Blended learning is simply a cipher for the process of coping with that truth. It's a soft term that hides a hard, and for some unpalatable, truth.

Blended learning is starting to embrace a huge variety of 'word of mouse' techniques in learning. We need to see Blended learning (not instruction) as being focused on learning, not instructional techniques. With the web we have the learners themselves create, access, comment and use content. This really is matching the learner with their actual needs. It copes with different personality types, preferences and needs in a way that traditional training and education does not. In short, blended learning means that the war has been won. Technology based learning is here to stay, an irreversible trend that will radically change the way we learn on a similar scale to the way it has changed the way we work.

Bonking is fun

Dinner with the Bonk was fun. He explained how it was impossible for him to access the internet from his Brighton Hotel - this amazes vistors from the US. Like Jay Cross he loves to get his camera out every five minutes, and then sends the photos back to you from wherever he is a few days later.

We had a walk along the seafront then through the Pavilion into the lanes. I explained how Brighton had always been a town premised on 'fun', from Regency excesses to Victorian bathing, seaside hols, dirty weekends and now a base for Bohemians. Good to see an academic get out and tell people what he's researched and the practical implications of those findings. This simply doesn't happen here. Our e-learning research lies fallow and unread. In my 23 years at Epic we never had a single request from academia to use our work in research, despite the huge number of projects we deigned and implemented. These were lost opportunities. Almost everything of use has come from the US. The exception is Seb Schmoller who genuinely crosses all sorts of boundaries - and I highly recommend his fortnightly newsletter.

http://fm.schmoller.net/

Wikibooks - Blended learning

Wikipedia has spawned Wikibooks and there's already a Blended learning book on the go and lots of other books on education and learning. Wikis are an interesting compoenent in blended solutions - they provide rich knowledge bases, either general, such as Wikipedia, or specific to your oraganisation.



http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blended_Learning

Bonk goes Bonkers

Same day, different talk - I have to say that Curtis has unbounded energy. He did over 100 talks last year as well as editing a book and teaching. This time it was called "Podcasts and Wikis and Blogs, Oh My: Online Learning is Not in Kansas Anymore". We had some great comedy with Bush jokes, air guitar, wigs and audience participation. Once again we were off in a whirlwind tour of some of the newer trends in technology and learning. Some interesting examples of how free technology gadgets are being used to woo students into courses in the US, then some dual-coding theory and research from one of my favourite researchers in learning - Richard Mayer. An analysis of generational learning (Silent, baby Boomer, Gen X, Gen Y, Millenial and Neomillenial then his 10 technology trends:

1. Wireless
2. Mobile
3. Reusable Content Objects
4. Blogging
5. Electronic books and wikis
6. Podcasting
7. Virtual Worlds
8. Collaborative tools
9. Open Courseware
10. Social networking (Web 2.))

Nice list and Curtis had a wonderful line-up of examples. I came away having confirmed what I had suspected for some time, that learning-specific technology (LMS, LCMS, authoring languages, virtual classrooms etc) are being superseded by cheap, often free, software and tools on the web that were never designed for learning, but do the job just as well, if not better. Blogs, wikis, podcasting, virtual worlds and many collaborative and web 2.0 tools come from non-learning backgrounds. This was confirmed at a talk I heard at the Web 2.0 in learning symposium last week at Reuters, where Kristian Folkman saw the LMS market as being in terminal decline.

Curtis is a good speaker but I learnt just as much when I had dinner with him the night before these talks. The amount of effort he put into The Blended Learning Handbook was, to use the US term, 'awesome'. Nice guy doing us all a big service by publishing and getting out there.

Bonk's Blends

Attended a fantastic talk on Blended Learning today at the University of Brighton by Curtis Bonk. He can hold an audience for 1.5 hours as he's entertaining and his slides are data rich. The topic was his new book (see previous post).

Although I take issue with his definition of blended learning, "Blended learning is a combination of face-to-face and online instruction", I do like the book as it contains 39 very diverse papaers. The definition is flawed, I think on two counts, first it is easy to come up with a counter example e.g. reading books. Secondly, it's really a definition of blended INSTRUCTION, not blended learning.

His talks always make me think and it seemed to me, after reading the book and listening to the talk, that Blended learning (for the moment) is really just the learning world coping with the onslaught of new ways of teaching and learning. It's an adaptive response to what's happening to the learning world as the real world changes around them. By real world I mean, changes in attitudes, learner expectations, demographics, politics, but above all massive and rapid change in technology. Blended learning as a concept allows the system to absorb all of this at a sensible pace, as it's a useful bridge between the new and the old.

On the other hand we will have to move beyond blended 'instruction' to true blended 'learning' by recognising the massive role that informal learning does and will increasingly play in learning. The technology is allowing us to do what was simply not possible before.

The talk was an excellent race through many definitions, models, advantages, disadvanteages, theories, examples and practices of blended learning. It was almost overwhelming. Dissapointingly small audience, as Brighton is supposed to be one of the epicentres of e-learning but nice to see some of my colleagues from Epic out in force. Off to see him give another talk at 5 pm. If you can't get to see him try his huge resource base at:

http://php.indiana.edu/~cjbonk/

Beyond Blended Learning

Dozens of definitions of blended learning are floating around, most of them muddle-headed. Here's a collection from the excellent Handbook of Blended Learning , a collection of 39 papers edited by Curtis Bonk.

Blend of classroom and e-learning
Blend of face-to-face and e-learning
Blend of online and offline
Blend of synchronous and asynchronous

The problem with these definition is that the first two prescribe components that may not be needed in an optimal blend. The second two are too general, in that they simply divide the universe into two sets. However, the real issues with all of these definitions is that they are really definitions of blended INSTRUCTION not blended learning.

We need to look at the concept from a broader learning perspeective with definitions tat include:

Blend of formal and informal
Blend of work and learning

With these two, we move beyond blended instruction to true blended learning.

The Mess is the Message

Gave a keynote at the National Trainers Conference around new tools on the web for training (Beyond Blended Learning). The web is giving us e-learning tools and content formats that we never dreamt of just a few years ago. Here’s a few off the top of my head:

Blogs – senior exec blogs, expert blogs, trainer blogs, learner blogs – takes minutes and reinforces learning.

Vlogs – track your team training exercise with a video log – will crystallise and reinforce learning.

Wikis – twiki’s a good start for a company knowedge-base or for a project or team.

Blikis – combine a blog and wiki for projects that need both knowledge gathering and dynamic reporting.

Podcasts – audio learning gets round literacy and dyslexia – everyone can listen, many don’t like to read – MP3 palyers are cheaper than lunch.

Videocasts – don’t worry too much about quality – interviews, talks, discussions - make them short and get them distributed.

Syndication – syndicate gets the right stuff to the right people at the right time – efficient distribution.

Messenger – step above email and, with a webcam, gives you most of the functionality of a virtual classroom.

Webcams – want to see the instructor/learner – cheap and works a treat.

MMOGs – get a life in Second Life and do some avatar-based learning – there’s lots of classes online – weird and wonderful.

Digital photography - so easy to take photographs and get them into training materials, get every new employee to take a picture of themselves and various locations and people as part of their induction.

Google Sketch – build 3D images – easy as pie.

Google Earth – will blow your mind – try it then use it to find international locations of your company – or mash-up some training applications.

Amazon – give everyone a budget and a booklist – follow up with book club meetings.

Wikipedia – fantastic knowledge base with discussions, links and lots of other wiki sources such as Wikiquotes, Wikispecies, Wiktionary and so on. Use it, link to it, do print outs.

Youtube – search for education and training video clips – growing like topsy.

Basecamp – free community project management software that can be used for team-based project management training.

Moodle – free open source LMS, very popular and now adopted by some serious organisations.

This is real learning, knowledge management, creation and distribution and it’s mostly free!

THE MESS IS THE MESSAGE

E-learning jobs galore

Massive one-page ad in The Guardian today offering lots of mullah for e-learning producers, designers etc. Capita seem to have some massive public contract from the DfES. It's a shame that those companies who have worked hard to eastablish themsleves as credible producers are so ignored by the DfES. Capita's last foray into e-learning was the disastrous ICT training for teachers. On the other hand this may show that the market is growing.

A Higher Education e-learning initiative that is working, without UKeUniversities level funding. IVIMEDS has 34 international medical schools sharing content and production to produce a sophisticated set of e-learning learning resources. By all contributing a modest amount of money at the start, the schools get a big payback for relatively small investment. Professor Ron Harding, an expert in Medical Education, and Alan Langlands (ex-CEO of the NHS, now running University of Dundee) are behind the project. Five UK medical schools are busy producing content in five medical areas. This 'distributed production' model seems to be working. Recent evidence from Australia has shown that students using these resources score significantly higher than those who do not. Already international on scale, with academic credibility and a good production model, based on sharing, this could grow into something much bigger.

http://www.ivimeds.org/

FT attack on HR

HR baiting is a regular sport in the business press and Stefan Stern had another go in the FT on April 17 with 'HR is unloved but not unnecessary'. He sees the whole profession as being in crisis but was pleased to see that it attracted more comments than most of his other articles. The FT forum did indeed have some interesting responses. Many saw HR as tactical not strategic, building a wall around itself by recruiting those with restricted CIPD qualifications, not attracting high calibre, innovative managers with the ability to deal with strategic improvement. DISCUSS

Disconnected - fine book

Throwing aside all that Generation X, Y, Z and M stuff, Nick Barham gets out and talks to the youngsters who text, see school as irrelevant, spray graffiti, do pirate radio, have sex, take drugs, hate politics, spend lots of time online and generally see themselves as different. Far from being violent, over-sexed idiots, they turn out to be interesting and creative, albeit in a more fragmented, contradictory and disjointed world. The new tribes of emos, goths, skaters and chavs, the new language of texting, and most of the other aspects of their world, that we adults abhor, turn out to be far more fascinating than you imagine. If you've got kids or work with them - a great £7.99 paperback read.

Do we need any more proof of how much smarter our kids are, compared to their teachers and parents, at IT?