Arch debunker – me!

Jay Cross made me think (he always does) when he commented on my last post:

Donald, I love your debunking series, but... Having recently come under the spell of Appreciative Inquiry, I'm trying to build on strengths rather than dwell on weaknesses. Who do you like these days? Who's genuine? Inspirational? Worth a damn?

I’ve been presented as the arch debunker. It’s true that I regard education and training as being stuck in old, unvalidated, and often false theory and practice. Some of it on a par with astrology and UFO theories. If true, this is worrying, as much of our time, and more importantly that of learners, is being wasted.

However, I have also been pumping out positive research and practice. I did a quick self-evaluation here. Out of my last 94 posts:

53 quoted recommended research and practice
38 were attacks on old/bad theory and practice
3 could be regarded as neutral

Here’s a quick comparison (not exhaustive):

For
Empirical research in memory and learning, informal learning, web 2.0 tools, blogging, Big Brother, digital reformation, podcasting, YouTube, Wikipedia, games in learning (10 posts), e-learning research showing increased grades (2), art and learning, viral learning, evolutionary psychology, texting, and stickiness.

Against
Learning styles, control freak HR, BBC Jam, errors in BBC Bitesize, blended learning, ineffective compliance training, SMEs, Teachers’ TV, wasted time in classrooms, Socrates, Skinner, Bloom, Gagne, Kirkpatrick, Kolb, Vygotsky, Freud, Rogers, whole language literacy, new-age training fads, NLP, dumbness of crowds, libraries and Maslow.

Oh – I nearly forgot, also nude internet browsing and drinking champagne from shoes!

I suppose I’m a sucker for empirical research. I do think that education and training is sinking into a quagmire of faddish, non-empirical theory, more sociology than psychology. This dated and dodgy theory is mirrored in dull and dubious practice.

Sense of direction
If I have a sense of direction it's is on two fronts:

More focus on good empirical research, especially in experimental psychology and brain research. In the end we have brains which acquire, store and recall knowledge and skills. We have made huge leaps forward in the last 30 years, most of which is ignored by learning theorists.

Keeping the ‘e’ in e-learning. I do believe that the whirlwind of technology is our best hope in terms of improving the efficacy of education and training. The internet and consumer technology has given us brilliant bottom-up models of knowledge creation and sharing. Resistance is futile.

Psychology + technology = Progress

But mainly, I think that we need some serious debate around theory and practice, rather than just sleepwalking into the future with a handful of junk theory and practice.

Maslow – who needs him!

Trite training of trainers
‘Train the trainer’ courses love their dose of Maslow, who claimed to have found the secret of learning and training through his hierarchy of needs. yet it is hauled in without any reflection on it being correct, validated or even relevant. I never did find this theory remotely interesting but as it surfaced in recent conversation at a learning conference I delved a little further.

Trainers love these neat slides. I think it's the pyramid - it's easy to explain. Yet its actual relevance to learning is non-existant. Even as an explanation of human nature or behaviour it's trite.

Hierarchy of needs - let's take a look

Physiological needs
Thirst, food, sleep, warmth, activity, avoiding pain, and sex

Safety and security needs
Shelter, stability, protection, salary, pension.

Love and belonging needs
Friends, partner, children, relationships and community

Esteem needs
Respect, status, reputation, dignity. Self-respect, confidence and achievement.

Self-actualization
Aspirational need, the desire to fulfil your potential.

The first four are all ‘deficit’ or ‘D-needs’. If not present, you’ll feel their absence and yearn for them. When each is satisfied you reach a state of homeostasis where the yearning stops. How’s that for stating the obvious?

The last, self-actualisation, does not involve homeostasis, but once felt is always there. Maslow saw this as applying to a tiny number of people, whose basic four levels are satisfied leaving them free to look beyond their deficit needs. He used a qualitative technique called ‘biographical analysis’, looked at high achievers and found that they enjoyed solitude, close relationships with a few rather than many, autonomy and resist social norms.

It ain’t a hierarchy, it wasn’t tested and it’s wrong
Although massively influential in training, his work was never tested experimentally and his ‘biographical analysis’ was armchair research. The self-actualisation theory is now regarded as of no real relevance. An ever weaker aspect of the theory is its hierarchy. It is not at all clear that the higher needs cannot be fulfilled until the lower needs are satisfied. There are many counter-examples and indeed, creativity can atrophy and die on the back of success. In short, subsequent research has shown that his hierarchy is bogus, as needs are pursued non-hierarchically. In other words his periodic table for human qualities is yet another dead and over-simplistic theory hanging around in dated training courses.

If you're still not convinced, read this entry from maslow's own journal in 1962, 'My motivation theory was published 20 years ago, & in all that time nobody repeated it, or tested it, or really analyzed it or criticized it. They just used it, swallowed it whole with only the most minor modifications'. Enough said.

What were the Top 5 Global Brands last year?

What were the Top 5 Global Brands last year?

1. Google
2. Apple
3. YouTube
4. Wikipedia
5. Starbucks

Jan 2007 Brandchannel user poll

Google, the much loved brand, deserves its pole position and continues to innovate with search and web 2.0 tools that benefit learning. Apple has fuelled podcasting, another web 2.0 learning feature. YouTube could to do more for web 2.0 ‘learning objects’ than all of the previous dull repositories put together. Wikipedia – as the web 2.0 phenomenon par excellence, it has transformed the very idea of how knowledge is created, updated and distributed on the web.

Could it be that powerful, everyday ‘e-learning’ has crept up on the world, separate from all the academic and institutional noise, and in a consumerist fashion?

I don’t think we’d see Saba, Skillsoft, Blackboard or any other official learning or e-learning brand ever get into the top ten.

As for Starbucks – OK it has wireless (sometimes) and comfy chairs but I still don’t get it.

Video games save lives

Surgeons - curing and killing machines
A few years ago I met Sir Alfred Cuschieri, the pioneer of keyhole surgery. He explained how surgeons were both curing and killing machines. In the past the brightest medical students became surgeons, despite the fact that they were less likely to have the requisite manual dexterity for the job. He had designed a training simulator and found that the trainer could actually predict how good a keyhole surgeon would be on the job. This led to the training simulator being used as an assessor.

Video gaming makes better surgeons
A new study from the Beth Israel Medical Centre in New York has shown that surgeons who play video games at least 3 hours a week made 37% less errors, were 27% faster and scored 42% higher than those who had never played these games. In fact there was a direct correlation between assessed skills in gaming and laparoscopic surgery. The very best game players made 47% less errors, were 39% faster and scored 41% better overall than those in the bottom third. Impressive improvements.

Stephen Johnson’s book Everything Bad is Good for You, pointed the way for further research on video games and human activities. We are now seeing some fledgling research that shows positive results.

Libraries - in terminal decline

Are public libraries doomed?
After struggling to find anyone I knew who had used one, I went to the statistical source (LISU Annual Library Statistics - thanks Seb Schmoller) and had a look. It wasn't pleasant reading.

Expenditure up
Real expenditure on libraries has increased for the seventh consecutive year to over a billion (£1097m). One could expect that money to be spent on books and resources. In fact, over half is spent on salaries (55%) with a mere 8.7% spent on books.

Lending, stock and visits down
Despite the population having grown by 2.5% over the last ten years, over the same period we’ve seen borrowing fall by 38%, active lending stock down by 18%, and visits have fallen by 13%.

Libraries as downmarket Blockbusters
One could claim that the collapse of book borrowing is being replaced by electronic media, and this is true. The worrying thing is that audio (music) is also in sharp decline, with DVD hires showing the sharpest increase (160%).

But is this serving any useful educational purpose? Are libraries becoming downmarket Blockbusters? What will happen when this market changes and, as is already happening, movies are readily available on demand. As expenditure increases are libraries driving themselves into the rump-end of a crowded and doomed market?

Dying breed?
It strikes me that public libraries are indeed a dying breed. The website’s own comment bravely predicts, and I quote from the sites own statistical report, “if the present rate of decline continues, the adult lending library may become a thing of the past in 15-20 years.”

TheirSpace

TheirSpace, a DEMOS ThinkTank document, lies beyond the leaden prose of government department reports on schools, technology and learning.

They see the Digital generation, born in the 90s, falls into four types:

1. Digital pioneers: early adopters of anything new
2. Creative Producers: build sites, share photos, video, music
3. Everyday communicators: texters and MSN users
4. Information gatherers: google and wikipedia

School's out
‘Boxes and corridors’ schools simply batten down the hatches as kids connect, exchange and create in new ways, largely outside of schools. Schools need to recognise this learning outside of the classroom, as it’s the knowledge economy that matters in terms of future employment.

Myths
The findings from surveyed parents are particularly interesting with six myths identified:
Internet too dangerous for children
Junk culture taking over kids’ minds
No learning through digital technology
Epidemic of plagiarism
Kids disengaged and disconnected
Kids becoming passive consumers

Learners need to be not lust literate but multiliterate across a range of technologies. ‘Looking in a book just takes ages’ says a 13 year old. Look how self-motivated they are with technology. They feel ownership, purpose and learn from each other in ways schools can’t imagine, yet alone deliver.

Schools need to learn
Schools need to embrace and build on informal learning with technology. They need to fully understand the relationships with parents, families and wider social networks outside of school and ‘bridge’, not subsume, this enthusiasm into their structures. This starts with people

The world has changed so why haven't we?
Here the report strikes gold. The flow of knowledge is both ways to and from school. It requires capacity building with parents. Far too little contact is made through parents so that they can help build bridges. Bringing homework and coursework into the 21^st century is an obvious example. Reverse IT training is another excellent idea – use the skills of the kids to teach others, including teachers, as is peer-to-peer technology tuition and a cool tools monitor.

Some quibbles
Constant references to BBC Jam as an exemplar are odd – it's not. Words such as creativity and creative portfolios are also used without real grounding. The old ‘digital divide’ debate is also misleading. At one point the report says that 82% of kids had access to a computer at home in 2002. This is much higher than with access to books but we don’t hear the phrase ‘book barrier’ being bandied about. The suggestion that schools should take responsibility for getting the hardware to kids is also plain wrong. This is a parent thing.

http://www.demos.co.uk/publications/theirspace

Videogames improve eyesight

Games improve eyesight
I have what used to be called a 'lazy' eye, and had to wear a patch as a child, which didn’t work. Research summarised in Scientific American and published in the journal Psychological Science shows that playing fast-paced video games improves vision generally and improves vision for this condition. Subjects see more of those tiny letters way down the eye chart.

University of Rochester
Daphne Bavelier, of the University of Rochester claims that, "This is showing us a new path forward for rehabilitation. By combining more traditional methods for doing rehabilitation with these games, we should be in a better position to reopen the visual cortex to learning."

The study used comparative groups to see whether games would have any effect on visual improvement and the results after only 30 hours of play were surprising. "What is surprising here," she adds, "is that we see the effect of training extending beyond what the subjects were trained to do, which contradicts the current school of thought. ... These games push the human visual system to the limits and the brain adapts to it. That learning carries over into other activities and, possibly, everyday life."

If games had been around when I was a boy I may not have had a lifetime of wearing glasses.

Stickiness

Why some ideas live and others die
Malcolm Gladwell gave us the idea of ‘stickiness’ in The Tipping Point. Made to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath applies this to ideas and identifies Six Steps to Sticky Messages:

1. Simplicity: Strip ideas to their essentials
2. Unexpectedness: surpise, use counterintuitive examples
3. Concreteness: avoid buzzwords, include sensory information
4. Credibility: trusted authorities, testable by the user, believeable
5, Emotions: disgust, sympathy, resentment—they all work
6. Stories: tell a story

This is a good book and is far more useful in the design of learning experiences than Bloom, Gagne and the mechanics of instructional design. It’s also grounded in serious research. I've been watching a lot of videocasts from TED conferences and other sources and it's remarkable how closely these principels fit the presentation styles of the world's top speakers.

Once we realise we're in the 'learning experiences' game and not the 'instructional objectives' game, e-learning will be something to behold. If cognitive improvment is to happen, then ideas and skills must stick. Stickiness is, in a sense, merely retention.

YouLearn

Scary looking guy - right?
Well he's one of the most important marketing people on the planet. Read on.

Why does videocasting matter in learning? Education and training, by and large, delivers second-rate content using second-rate techniques at top-dollar rates. But why settle for second best when you can have the best content using great teachers for free?

I’ve spent some time recently on YouTube, Google Video, Revver etc. and boy, even though it’s in its infancy, it’s getting good. I’ve seen the best speakers in the world deliver fantastic talks on the subjects I love. I can pause, fast forward, repeat and take notes. It’s been a series of intense learning experiences.

(They also made me reflect on why Gagne and his crew are so wrong on the creation of educational content. These short talks are very powerful yet don’t conform to any over-engineered idea of ‘9 steps of instruction’. The internet, thankfully, is killing Gagne, and outmoded instructional design, stone dead.)

The TED talks are among the best. Every year some of the best brains in the world get together in Monterey in the US. These are fantastic.

Here’s a couple of my favourites:

Marketing at Google by Soth Godin (an insider talk at Google – fascinating)

http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-6909078385965257294&q=seth

Education doesn’t work by Ken Robinson

http://www.ted.com/tedtalks/

It cost $4000 to go to a TED conference – these are free.

Dumbness of Crowds

This phrase from Kathy Sierra has been bouncing round the blogosphere and it’s so applicable to the fad for learning ‘communities’ and ‘collaboration’.

The Wisdom of Crowds
If you’ve read Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds you’ll know that he didn’t mean groups of people working collaboratively. He extols the virtues of INDEPENDENCE, diversity and decentralisation in crowds. It’s the fact that they DON’T collaborate that makes them powerful and wise.

Learning 2.0 and Web 2.0 not collaborative

As for the Learning 2.0 idea, that collaborative user-generated learning and content works, we need to examine its parent; Web 2.0 content. Most people search for something they want as an individual or 'lurk' free-riding on the veiws of others. Blogs are written, by and large, by individuals, as are YouTube entries and most other forms of useful content. Even Wikipedia is written by separate individuals, not collaborative groups. It’s the independent contributions and sheer scale and searchability of the content that makes it work i.e. decentralisation and diversity.

Person as portal
When the learning folks want online collaboration, they often mean centralised, moderated, teacher-like control, the opposite of almost everything Web 2.0 has to offer. In e-learning most online collaborative environments are either empty, dead or populated by comet tails of schoolboy humour. There are rare exceptions but given the amount of time and effort that has gone into these environments the returns have been meagre. Barry Wellman, the social network theorist, explains this well. The web offers networks, not communities. It's loose, exponential in growth and most people in networks don't know who most of the others are.

Collaborative learning is slow learning
I’ve never really bought the idea that I’ll learn from a group of learners who know as little about the subject as me. I don’t force my twin son to learn French from his equally poor French-speaking brother, and am now convinced that much of what passes for groupwork in primary and secondary school classrooms is just chaos. Classrooms are not all the better for learning because they have 30 plus pupils crammed in there. If that were true we’d be increasing class sizes. And in training I’ve witnessed unbelievable amounts of wasted time and effort in breakout groups and supposed collaborative efforts. Much of the time is wasted just agreeing on who will do what and hanging around.

Ultimately, I feel that deep learning is very personal. It’s one brain focusing and giving full attention to a learning experience. Collaborative learning is often like putting your right hand over your head to scratch your left ear. It just takes too long. Sociology has infected learning theory to such a degree that we no longer pay attention to the simple fact that it’s about single brains acquiring, storing and recalling knowledge and skills. The person is the portal for learning.

Freud a fraud?

I posted an attack on the scientific validity NLP in November last year and am still receiving comments, although they’re getting weirder by the day. This led me to some further reading on psychotherapy and Freud, as it wasn’t clear to me whether any of Freud’s theories are now used in modern psychology. I was familiar with Popper so started with Polayni and Nagel. All three show that Freud’s theories are largely self-fulfilling and not scientific in the sense that Freud claimed they were. So far so good. Then I tried Grunbaum which led me to Macmillan and Frank Cioffi.

What I wasn’t prepared for was the sheer scale of the debunking. Little, if any, of Freud’s work has survived the scrutiny of later research, either of Freud’s methods and data or the phenomena themselves when examined with scientific rigour. The list of debunked theories include:

Freudian slips
Free association
Id, ego and superego
Repression
Regression
Projection
Sublimation
Denial
Transference (and counter-transference)
Penis envy
Oedipus complex
Infantile sexuality

In short, Freudian psychoanalysis has been abandoned by serious, scientific psychology. It turned out to be a non-empirical mess from which nothing was salvageable. Of course, I could just be suffering from any combination of the above conditions.

Games.learning and bunking off

Bunking off

11 am at the Science Museum in the games exhibition, just a few kids either bunking off school or fed up with the duller displays outside, and who can blame them. If you're really interested in games and learning but feel you don't really know much about games give this experience a try. In a couple of hours you'll get a crash course in gaming which focuses on learning by doing, 30 years of gaming experience in one dollop. What's more, you'll get to play with the latest in gaming, the Wii and PS3.

Games and learning

Don't dismiss games as a fad or demonise them as being solitary, violent phenomena. It's a rich medium that has a real role to play (literally) in learning. I've used some great games in learning, in both education and training that offer levels of motivation, feedback, personalisation, incremental learning, contextualisation, rich media mix, safe failure, lots of practice/reinforcement and lots of collaboration.

History is junk

The show is presented largely as a timeline but then develops into themes such as simulations, actions games, sound in games, and finally the future of games. The historical stuff is great for us older guys (let's face it, it was mostly guys) who bought some of these boxes. We all started somewhere, and for me it was the Commodore 64. I programmed my first e-learning on this around 80/81 - teaching the Russian alphabet and German vocabulary. Little did I know that this would become my career. They were all there; PDP 1 from MIT, Ataris, BBC micro, Sega Dreamcast, PC Engine, Super NES, Gemeboys, playstations, PSP, Gamecube, Xbox and dozens of arcade games in their full arcade cabinets.

Games galore

But it's the games that bring back most memories. Within seconds you recall exactly what it was like to pay the game and how thrilling it was to see them develop. Over 100 playable games such as Space Invaders (including the pub table versions), Pac man, Asteroids, Super Mario, Sonic, Doom, Myst, Wolfenstein 3D, Populous, Civilisation, Zelda, Prince of Persia. I really enjoyed some of the early vector games, especially REC 2002 with its disembodied mesh avatar. Also enjoyed Tron, arcade Star Wars and a Japanese game called Go By Train (driving a train). Lost some weight on the Dance Mat.

Games design

There's a fascinating wall chart from DMC, the Scottish games developer behind Grand Theft Auto. A lot of people don't realise that this came out of Scotland, not the US. It's a huge whiteboard with coloured post-it notes denoting epidodes, intros, training, rewards and closes. This was used as the meta-design for the game and allows the team to get one large overview. Reading from left to right shows the major routes through the game. I've seen lots of these storyboard techniques before and we in e-learning could learn something from games designers. On the other hand the games industry in the UK is plagued by poor project management and quality control. They could learn from us.

Wii & PS3

Some of the big names such as Pokemon and Tomb Raider are featured here and there's a rather sad tale to be told about Eidos and its crap management. But they saved the best for last with a guitar PS2 game that allows you to hold a plastic guitar and get some metal licks going. This was projected on the wall and the sound was great. But wait for it - there's a Wii and Playstation 3, which you can try out. I had played a Wii before, and loved the boxing, but had a go at the tennis (even managing to put spin on the ball). The gyroscopic input device is fantastically addictive. The PS3 graphics were stunning.

What a fun way to spend a weekday morning. Nothing better than that other feeling I remember - bunking off school to do something interesting!

Big Brother - look and learn

Cleo and Leo
It’s fashionable to rubbish Big Brother but it’s funny how the critics always seem to have watched so much of it. I’ve been a fan from the start.

Forget those crappy soft-skills training courses. If you really want to see social conflict, class differences, homophobia, racism, sexism and ageism in action – then watch and learn. That’s not to say it’s reinforced those values. The UK show has been won by gay contestants and a transsexual.

Big Brother’s - a workplace
TV used to be such a happy place, full of smiling faces. Now it’s getting darker, more honest, and we can all learn from this. It really does get people talking about human conflict and what’s good and bad in the way people deal with each other. In this sense the house has much in common with the workplace; the daily grind, dealing constantly with people you never chose to be with, shared tasks, people leave over time and then there’s a sometimes malevolent, sometimes benevolent master/employer – Big Brother.

Collaborative learning When was the last time someone said, ‘I saw this amazing thing on a softskills training course today’. Big Brother, on the other hand, is talked about. Collaborative learning really does take place around Big Brother wherever people congregate and socialise. Why? Because it’s fascinating to watch real people deal with problems. We watch, comment, discuss, reflect and learn from this.

More webcam than TV
It also tapped into an important idea, that this generation is different – they have less propriety, less modesty and are more open, honest and candid. Interestingly Bazalgette’s book about reality TV, Billion Dollar Game, shows that it had its roots in the web with Jennicam – remember that? It’s fundamentally a webcam format, albeit with multiple webcams, with an added gameshow layer. But it’s the watching that matters. Plots, sub-plots, relationships, villains and heroes emerge over the weeks with the kite being tugged now and again to introduce some instability, which takes it even higher.

Method in madness
“Television is actually closer to reality than anything in books. The madness of TV is the madness of human life.” said Camille Paglia, so look and learn. Reality television is not the end of civilisation as we know it, it IS civilisation as we know it.