Dozy learners

Scientific American has published a paper in which learning was tested comparing those who learn then 'sleep on it' overnight, compared to normal '9-5' daytime learners.

Sleepers 76%, others 32%
They forced subjects in two groups to learn a new set of word pairs 12 minutes prior to testing--the well-rested radically outperformed those who had not slept; 76 percent of sleepers accurately recalled the initial pair compared to just 32 percent of their peers who had gone without shut-eye. "Memories after sleep are resilient to disruption," the researchers conclude in the paper outlining the finding published yesterday in Current Biology.

Sleep on it
This would suggest that the timimg of most education and training is not optimal. Evening homework for school kids, evening library study for students and late night reading seem to lead to much higher levels of retention.

Stop press - extortionist hits e-learning company!

Strange events down in Brighton's e-learning community......read on.....

Futuremedia Announces Legal Actions Against Attempted Extortion

BRIGHTON, England/PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Futuremedia plc(Nasdaq: FMDAY), a leading European learning communications provider, today announced that it has taken legal actions against Mr. Maas van Dusschoten. Mr. van Dusschoten, an individual residing in the Netherlands, has attempted since February 2005 to extort cash and shares from the Company and has distributed inaccurate and defamatory information about the Company and its past and present management and directors. Futuremedia is taking these actions on behalf of the Company and its shareholders. Mr. van Dusschoten's activities have been reported to the National Association of Securities Dealers ("NASD"), the Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC"), and the appropriate authorities in the Netherlands. In addition, the Company has instituted civil actions against Mr. van Dusschoten in theNetherlands where he resides.

Leonard M. Fertig, CEO of Futuremedia stated, "Mr. van Dusschoten has deliberately misled shareholders in attempting to achieve his own criminal purposes, and the Company feels it is important to make shareholders aware of these activities and the resolute efforts of the Company to put an end to them. We have ignored this individual's extortion demands for payment but need to protect the reputation of Futuremedia from these malicious falsehoods." Mr. van Dusschoten posts on the Yahoo! Finance message board under several pseudonyms, including "dickie_dickk", "Dick_I_Dick" and "fmday victims", and has posted bogus press releases and impersonated the Company's CEO, Leonard M. Fertig. He has attempted such extortion by demanding cash and shares from the Company in faxes, letters and e-mails to Futuremedia management in return for ceasing his activities, which have included misleading, incorrect, defamatory and untrue statements about the Company through posts on the Yahoo! Finance message board. Mr. Van Dusschoten has stated in his correspondence and threats that he has deliberately and intentionally caused the share price of the Company todecline through his efforts. The Company has consistently refused to succumb to these attempts at extortion.

Wasted youth - it's official!

Interesting article on home schooling in The Sunday Times this week. One paragraph really did knock me off my chair. Imagine a study in any walk of business or life that shows people simply waiting for 50-60% of their time for something to happen. That’s exactly what two researchers have found in both the US and UK. American anthropologist Philip Jackson, showed that children in school spent 50% of their time waiting. When Roland Meighan took a stopwatch into a primary school to conduct the same research with his students, he found they spent as much as 60% of their time waiting for something to happen.

I recently went into a school for a morning and saw how true this was. This was an advanced school that had eliminated unnecessary movements by hundreds of kids between classes by having only 3 periods a day. But even here it was obvious that most of the time, most of the kids were simply waiting to go into school, waiting or wandering about in corridors, sitting waiting on lessons to start, waiting on the teacher to check their work or waiting as they had finished their work. And why does the entire population of kids have to stand up ate the end of every hour and move classroom? What a massive waste of productive time, as well as providing ideal opportunities for bullying. Why don’t the relatively tiny number of teachers move?

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2099-2240330.html

Diversity training - More harm than good?

Further to my post on hopeless compliance training, I was told that a major financial company, with revenues of $14 billion worldwide, did some interesting diversity training in their London office earlier this month – they took the budget and invited people along to watch the England V Trinidad & Tobago match, with some spicy chicken thrown in! They, like many others, treat much of this stuff as a waste of time, and who can blame them.

At a recent conference on the subject, there was a long list of (I kid you not) Heads of Cohesion & Faith as well as Heads of Diversity, Heads of Inclusion and Heads of Equality. Few would argue that the laws; Equal Pay Act, Sex Discrimination Act, Race Relations Act, Disiability Discrimination Act, Part Time Workers regulations and more recent Employment Equality legislation on sexual orientation, race, religious belief or age, are sensible, but there is a sensible debate to be had about the crude training that attempts to effect behavioural change.

Louise Pendry of Exeter University claims that there’s no evaluative evidence showing that these programmes work. Even worse, many may do more harm than good. Tracie Stewart, a professor at Georgia University, has identified "backlash" or "victim blame", after some courses, where the learners, harbour resentment against other minority groups for the way they are made to feel. Rather than bringing people together, it may be reinforcing differences. Ethnic minorities may become over-sensitive, and doing as the Americans have done, policing it through legal cases, is hardly sensible. The social case may be strong but the business case is weak.

Munira Mirza investigated diversity training for the BBC and uncovered some awful training, including the popular Jane Elliot’s ‘blue eyes/brown eyes’ classroom courses. What was interesting were the comments posted after the broadcast:

When I was about 12 we had a policeman come in to school to talk about racism. He showed us a photo of a white man in police uniform running after a black man in jeans. He asked us what we thought was going on. Everyone- including a black child that he pointedly asked -said that it was a criminal being chased by a policeman. We were then told that we had made a "racist assumption" as actually the black bloke was a plain-clothes police officer. No-one raised the point that we would have probably said the exact same thing if the plain clothes officer had been white and a load of 12 year olds were told that they were racist. How helpful was that?
Hannah, Peterborough

'Diversity training' will lead to resentment, simply because grown men and women don't like being told how to behave. The whole business is superfluous. I suggest a straightforward mandatory clause attached to every employment contract in the country, reading 'You will treat all colleagues fairly and kindly'
al, UK

You cannot over-estimate the damage to race relations that "diversity awareness" training is causing in this country. It's having the opposite effect to that intended, causing divisions, resentment, and an increase in judgements based on race, where previously such things were actually quite rare. How do I know this? I was involved in putting together a diversity "toolkit" for a government department, and saw first-hand the effect it had as it was rammed down the throats of the staff.
Michael, Brighton UK

This is an example of companies trying to see if two wrongs really do make a right. I don't doubt that some people are racist in the workplace, but punishing many because of the actions of a few is ludicrous.
Andy Thorley, Crewe, Cheshire

Viral videos

You Tube, along with Google Video, iTunes , iFilm and others, are really shaping up. It’s this combination of easy to use tools (uploading, searching etc) with global distribution that make the web sing. You Tube was started in 2005 by three ex-paypal guys and roared to success on the back of cult clips such as Lazy Sunday. It uses Flash to play movie clips and moderates content – but it’s the sheer volume of uploads that’s amazed everyone. Google Video is similar but with a payment method, like iTunes. Tens of thousands of clips are uploaded every month with millions of views and global epidemics of viral behaviour.

Viral videos (Stewart’s Crossfire, Lazy Sunday, the Star Wars Kid, askaninja) have fuelled the video sharing market. This is the stuff that kids talk about, using word of mouth/ mouse. Camera phones, free editing software, camcorders and blogging (You Tube allows you to link clips to your blog) have made the whole thing a sort of medium in itself.

Let’s learn from this. I had to give a session on 'How We Learn' this week at a major bank and had to teach them to juggle (hackneyed I know) – You Tube had dozens of excellent coaching clips on how to juggle. Got to learn something? Go to these sites and get some free stuff. Teachers and trainers should be using it in their organisations to deliver videocasts . The mess is the message.

http://www.youtube.com/
http://video.google.com/

What's a podcast? Askaninja!

Check this video clip out. It says everything about the way video should be used with this new generation of learners – low production quality, highly creative, quick cuts, surreal script, oblique, funny…. watch it and learn!


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEmss2lg-ug&search=askaninja

Now take an hour to browse through You Tube, Google Video.

Microsoft GEARS up learning

Bob Mosher is one of Microsoft’s evangelists – fun guy, full of bright ideas, which he loves to share. We used Net Meeting to get his talk up and running at the Moving Learning conference. This is perhaps the best conference I've been to when it comes to moving the debate about formal/informal learning forward. As Chair, Bob's talk was a challenge, as the link went down mid-presentation.

80% of what we learn is NOT through courses and , according to Kim Cameron of the University of Michigan, we remember:

Lecture 5%
Reading 10%
Audio-visual 20%
Demonstration 30%
Discussion 50%
Doing 75%
Teaching 90%

Given this data, why rely on fixed, largely classroom based, up-front courses? He recommends Microsoft's new GEAR blend.

G - Gather
E - Expand
A - Apply
R - Receive

Gather people physically or virtually to explain the new approach and what we all want to achieve. Expand their knowledge through resources and content. Apply this knowledge in the workplace in real projects. Receive feedback on performance. This bridging knowledge into the workplace using a blend.

Sources, sharpeners and sidekicks

Chaired the Moving Learning conference last week which took a long hard look at informal learning. I liked Alison Rossett's on performance support (planners and sidekicks). This is my own spin on her ideas. As learning become more fluid so must the tools. Courses are, in most cases, too crude. It means using SOURCES, SHARPENERS and SIDEKICKS.

Take the example of going somewhere by car:

SOURCE (Atlas)
Look up a fixed source, work out your route, note down the road numbers and perhaps add up rough estimates of each legs to work out the ditance, then do a little arithemetic to work out how long it wil take you.



SHARPENERS (Route plan website)
Look up a route planner website, type in start point and destination, out pops your personal list of directions with details of every leg and a total calculated time. Print it out and have it alongside you in your car.

SIDEKICKS (Satellite navigation)
Satellite navigation gives you realtime feedback and directions (turn right/left) and helps you get back on track when you’re lost. They also give you relevant GPS information on petrol stations, restaurants and hotels.

This is how learning can be delivered, not to simply mimic courses, but playing to the strengths of online technology:

SOURCE
Knowledge bases, repositories of learning content.

SHARPENERS
Personalised learning environments, email, reminders, feeds, wikis, blogs.

SIDEKICKS
Performance support software and mobile learning.

Interestingly, to get to Microsoft, in Reading, I would, in ancient times, have a source such as a rail timetable or gone to a source station to plan my rail route and times. Now I have my sharpener website where can get my personalised rail times, including details of changes. I sharpened up even more , as I looked to the Microsoft site and found out that there's a free bus straight to their door every ten minutes. When I got to Reading I used my mobile to tell the conference organiser that I was running late - she gave me the exact building to go to to save time when I arrived - my mobile sidekick.

Rembrandt and learning

The Anatomy Lesson by Rembrandt, seems like a homage to academic learning? Yet not one of the learners is looking at the dissected arm, even the anatomist Dr Tulp. The top two are disinterested, eyeing you (the viewer) up, a couple are straining to look at the book and another staring off into space, lost in thought, only one is looking and listening to the teacher. What a wonderful study of learning in practice.

Sebald in his superb The Rings of Saturn, thought Descartes was in the room and that this was Rembrandt's rebuke to Cartesian philosophy that saw the body as a dispensable machine.

The body is that of a petty thief, recently hanged, and nobody seems to be looking at him or his dissected arm and hand. This is the cartesian dualist world of body and mind. Tulp is absorbed in his own world, not even looking at the corpse and tendon he has selected. Man is seen by all as a machine. There is a space around the poor chaps body and no one seems to cares that he was a person. One leans over him as if he were nothing. The corpse is a Chrit-like figure being sacrificed for the sake of bookish learning.

Instead they are absorbed in their own thoughts or the open book. Learning had become a bookish affair, separate from the realities of life. This is a critique of people who are lost in text, deanchored from the real world. 

I saw this painting years ago in the Mauritshuis in the Hague. An English school group arrived, pushing me to one side as Group and their guide started to unravel the secrets of the image. I looked around and sure enough, few were listening; some were lost in thought, others talking to their friends, some looking at others in the group and gallery, one trying to work his camera and so on. Rembrandt was showing us how inefficient the lecture was 350 years ago!

Drucker - leadership training is dangerous nonsense

Brilliant podcast from the great Peter Drucker. Deaf now, the questions had to be written down for him to reply, but he's as sharp and incisive as ever.

He lamblasts the current cult of leadership and leadership training. "All that talk about leadership is dangerous nonsense - it is a cop-out, forget about it", he urges. "We should be suspicious of leaders and their charisma", he adds. Finally, "If this makes me very unpopular, I hope I am."

Of course, he's absolutely right. The training world leapt onto the 'leadership' bandwagon with dozens of different and contradictory theories, then thought that 'courses' on leadership would be our saviour. It's all based on narcissism; cocky managers commissioning their own training departments to flatter them. In practice, most of these courses are messy quilts patched together and served up as a comforting cover for middle managers who want to dream that they're budding Ghengis Khans. There is surely nothing more laughable than seeing the guy with the combination lock briefcase on the 7.15 Brighton to London train reading "Sun Tzu and the Art of Business: Six Strategic Principles for Managers".

http://www.onpointradio.org/shows/2005/08/20050802_a_main.asp

PLEs

Oh PLEase!
Here we go again. Just as we are getting over the LMS, LCMS. MLE, VLE and a dozen other acronyms for systems that want to command and control learning, we have another; PLE (Personalised Learning Environment). Just as we realise that learning is a highly personal experience, we want to can it, label it and sell it top-down in the straightjacket of a piece of software.
Another top-down initiative
To be fair this is a genuine attempt to look at software from the learner's perspective, all of the previous systems were really top-down, organisational and institutional control mechanisms. However, in this new debate we already have the top-down, middle-out and bottom-up camps.

On this one I'm firmly in the bottom-up camp. We already have our PLE - it's called the internet. I have a desktop, browser, bookmarking, a couple of blogs, and can easily organise sources and tools for my personal learning. In fact, it is important that I stay in this environment as it gives me the necesssary freedom to add, delete and modify in a real and instantly accessible environment. With Firefox and Flock it's even easier - just make your browser a tuned-up learning resource. I do have some sympathy, however, for the middle-out, personalised 'learning' or 'knowledge' home pages. Even this is easy to do - there's lots of tools for personalised home page construction (without the need for any programming).

Death of learning-specific software
What this move does signify is that the first wave of top-down learning-specific software is now in terminal decline. Why buy an LMS, virtual classroom or other learning-specific piece of software when the web has loads of better stuff for free. What we're seeing is the death of top-down, expansion of middle-out and explosion of bottom-up approaches to learning.

Think Tank's Shock Report

Malaise
Saw this headline in Schipol airport, had a read in the bookshop – and was duly shocked. The ‘Centre for European Reform’, a well respected London think tank, has issued a damning report this week showing that a "grim" educational "malaise" has gripped learning in Europe.

Achievement stagnant or slipping
Most of its universities are "clearly in the second division," and at all levels—primary, secondary and universities—America and Japan significantly outspend Europe. Study after study, by the OECD and others, has shown high-school achievement as stagnant or slipping.

Education systems stuck in another age
At the heart of the problem are education systems that often seem stuck in another age with European employers complaining that "The education system is sending us people who aren't even ready to be trained." Another scathing criticism was the gulf between universities and commerce. Business-university partnership, which plays such a powerful role in America's scientific and entrepreneurial prowess, is sorely lacking in Europe.

Future is Finnish
The only high spot is Finland, ranked by the OECD as having the world's best education system. It had problems in the 60s but radically devolved devolved decision making from Helsinki bureaucrats to the schools themselves. With centralised guidelines, schools and teachers are monitored for quality, and constantly evolve in terms of curricula and methods. Old-fashioned sorting and streaming into different-level schools has been abandoned and now Finnish 15-year-olds not only score highest in a number of skills, but also show the least effect of class background on achievement, a key measure of meritocracy. The result – an economically strong Finland with high growth and low unemployment.

So, despite huge increases in education spends over the last decade we have seen, at best marginal, at worst declining, performance. The key here seems to be outdated models and methods - basically Victorian schooling. Yet the answer to bad schooling is always more schooling.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13124097/site/newsweek/

Compliance bandwagon

I’ve suddenly noticed that everyone’s jumping on the compliance bandwagon, with oodles of generic content and tracking systems. Could it be that, far from taking a strategic role in businesses, training is literally painting itself into a dark corner, where it will be increasingly ignored.

Last year’s infamous Fast Company article ‘Why We Hate HR’ predicted this, claiming that training departments will “ghettoize themselves literally to the brink of obsolescence”. Millions of sensible people are being churned and batched through patronising, often accusatory, courses that have no real behavioural impact. Even if compliance were to add vale to businesses, most of these courses are counterproductive, being largely knowledge-based. In most, you will literally lose the will to live. I have only seen one exception to this (the courses produced for Apple).

Senior managers know that this is all a big game and that it has no real business impact. It’s merely a protective immunising jab so that people can point towards some spurious LMS report showing that ‘x’ employees completed course ‘y’. This is all about attendance, not attainment; literally ticks in boxes. In fact, I’d argue that the time and resources taken to plan, design, deliver and track these courses outweigh any possible business benefits. In practice, this huge effort is likely to lower overall performance.

Learning and HR professionals complain about not getting a seat at the top table and we never will if we willingly define ourselves as delivering dull compliance programmes that have nothing to do with personal development and everything to do with the organisation protecting itself from its employees.