Constructivism – beware of big words

This is Tatlin's Tower, never built, a concoction of constructivist materials and forms, a monument to repudiate of traditional art and painting. It's actually a monument to folly. The idea that one could start anew - the blank slate. At the same time another constructivist, Vygotsky was doing the same for the mind, building theories of cogntive development.

But beware of big, abstract nouns. ‘Constructivism’ is one, used with abandon in education and training, yet the constructivist paradigm may be behind many of the current ills in education and training. It may have put more emphasis on the learner, but it has at the same time crippled effective learning by substituting sociology for the true science of learning.

Constructed confection
I often hear discussions of constructivism jump between cognitive theory to a theory of knowledge then educational theory or sociological theory, even philosophical theory. It’s a messy concoction, often at the level of pub-philosophy. Constructivist writing encourages this by making these giant theoretical leaps from simple observations of how knowledge is acquired to grand relativist philosophical theories. It’s a confusing confection.

Social constructivism
To say that one is a constructivist is not to say much as there are many schools making radically different claims. Social constructivism is one of the more extreme schools, where reality is constructed and therefore a function of social invention. Remember how extreme this view is – there is NO reality prior to our social construction. Even for thos who pull back into language mediated reality don't really know where the line is drawn. It is a debate that has little relevance in the practical world of teaching. Unfortunatley, it leads to the incredibly narrow assumption that learning is meaningful only when individuals are engaged in social activities, which results in an obsession with collaboration.

Is constructivism a construct?
The problem with these extreme forms of relativism, and theories of socially constructed reality, is that it is difficult to defend on the grounds of objective evidence. One cannot appeal to a ‘socially constructivist’ view as this, by its own reckoning is merely one among many. There’s no anchor.

Practice out

To get practical for a moment, one result of all this muddy thinking is the demonisation of ‘practice’, despite the fact that oodles of empirical evidence support the idea of practice as being the key to learning, it is dismissed as being of little value. The net result has been a driving out of practice and homework in schools to the detriment of some types of knowledge acquisition, especially in basic literacy and numeracy, but also in the acquisition of second languages and science.

NLP – No Longer Plausible

Bertrand Russell's famous dictum
"I wish to propose for the reader's favourable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe in a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing I true"

NLP nonsense
Sharpley’s 1984 literature review found "little research evidence supporting its usefulness as an effective counseling tool" no support for preferred representational systems (PRS) and predicate matching, then in a 1987 study states "there are conclusive data from the research on NLP, and the conclusion is that the principles and procedures of NLP have failed to be supported by those data".

Sharpley, C. F. (1984). Predicate matching in NLP: A review of research on the preferred representational system. Journal of Counselling Psychology, 31(2), 238-248.

Sharpley C.F. (1987). "Research Findings on Neuro-linguistic Programming: Non supportive Data or an Untestable Theory". Communication and Cognition Journal of Counseling Psychology, 1987 Vol. 34, No. 1: 103-107,105.

United States National Research Council
USNRC produced a report, overseen by a board fo 14 academic experts, stating that "individually, and as a group, these studies fail to provide an empirical base of support for NLP assumptions...or NLP effectiveness. The committee cannot recommend the employment of such an unvalidated technique". The whole edifice of influence and rapport techniques "instead of being grounded in contemporary, scientifically derived neurological theory, NLP is based on outdated metaphors of brain functioning and is laced with numerous factual errors".

Druckman and Swets (eds) (l988) Enhancing Human Performance: Issues, Theories, and Techniques, National Academy Press.

Neuromythology
Barry Beyerstein (1990) asserts that "though it claims neuroscience in its pedigree, NLP's outmoded view of the relationship between cognitive style and brain function ultimately boils down to crude analogies." With reference to all the 'neuromythologies' covered in his article, including NLP, he states "In the long run perhaps the heaviest cost extracted by neuromythologists is the one common to all pseudosciences—deterioration in the already low levels of scientific literacy and critical thinking in society. "

Beyerstein.B.L (1990). Brainscams: Neuromythologies of the New Age. International Journal of Mental Health 19(3): 27-36,27.

Disillusionment
Efran and Lukens (1990) stated that the "original interest in NLP turned to disillusionment after the research and now it is rarely even mentioned in psychotherapy".

Efran, J S. Lukens M.D. (1990) Language, structure, and change: frameworks of meaning in psychotherapy, Published by W.W. Norton, New York. p.122

Mutual exchange of myths
In his book, The Death of Psychotherapy, Eisner couldn’t find ‘one iota of clinical research’ to support NLP. This is in direct contradiction to the claims made by NLP practitioners, who laud it as a great leap forward in understanding the mind. To be fair Eisner doesn’t just finger NLP he also demolishes; Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, Cathartic Therapies, Recovered Memory Therapies, Humanistic Psychotherapy, Behavioural and Cognitive Therapy, Strategic Family Systems Therapy, NLP, EFT, CBT, BCBT, DHE, EMDR, Gestalt Therapy, Implosion Therapy, Palm Therapy, Person Centred Therapy, Primal Therapy, Reframing, Thought Field Therapy, Direct Exposure Therapy, Spiritual Therapy and many others. The sheer scale of clinically unproven therapies is astounding. The Myth of Psychotherapy: Mental Healing As Religion, Rhetoric, and Repression by Thomas Stephen Szasz is similarly damning. His claim is that almost anyone can sit down with anyone else, have a chat, and call it psychotherapy. The practitioners are unaccredited, or self-accredited, and the theories scientifically unsubstantiated. It is the mutual exchange of myths.

(Quick Fix + Pseudoscientific Gloss) x Credulous Public = High Income
This is the description of NLP by Lilienfield et al (2002) who conclude that NLP is "a scientifically unsubstantiated therapeutic method that purports to "program" brain functioning through a variety of techniques, including mirroring the postures and nonverbal behaviors of clients" and include it in their description "

Scott O. Lilienfeld, Steven Jay Lynn, Jeffrey M. Lohr (eds) (2004) Science and Pseudoscience in Clinical Psychology

Grandfather of CBT dismissive
Even Albert Ellis, the grandfather of cognitive behavioral therapy, famous for developing REBT (Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy) specifically identified NLP as one of those, “techniques that are avoided”. This was the one therapy he abhorred because of its “dubious validity” (Dryden & Ellis, in Dobson, 2001: 331). Then again, Ellis published a book in 1965 entitled Homosexuality: Its Causes and Cure. Psychotherapists have a habit of seeing everything as a pathological condition that can be cured by their methods.

Hanging around in HR
Von Bergen et al (1997) showed that NLP had been abandoned by researchers in experimental psychology and Devilly (2005) makes the point that NLP has disappeared from clinical psychology and academic research only surviving in the world of pseudo new-age fakery and, although no longer as prevalent as it was in the 1970s or 1980s… is still practiced in small pockets of the human resource community. The science has come and gone, yet the belief still remains"

Von Bergen, C W, Barlow Soper, Gary T Rosenthal, Lamar V Wilkinson (1997). "Selected alternative training techniques in HRD". Human Resource Development Quarterly 8(4): 281-294.

Grant J. Devilly (2005) Power Therapies and possible threats to the science of psychology and psychiatry Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry Vol.39 p.437

Heard of Eric Kandel?

Education and training largely short-term
One towering piece of theory in learning, the distinction between short and long-term memory, should be applied to everything we do in education and training. In practice we do everything to AVOID taking the distinction seriously.

We teach and train to forget
Largely, we have sheep-dip courses, cognitive overload, poor encoding, too much emphasis on facts, little in the way of spaced practice and short-term summative assessment. Net result, little long-term retention and application. We teach and train to forget.

Eric Kandel?
Kandel's one of the most important learning theorists on the planet but barely known. With a Nobel Prize for his work on learning and memory, he’s a towering figure in the science of learning.

Learning is memory
Learning, for Kandel, is the ability to acquire new ideas from experience and retain them as memories (a simple fact often overlooked). His insight was to first recognise that the functional and biochemical features of nerves and synapses in snails, worms and flies are not substantially different from humans. His work on giant marine snails uncovered not only the physiological but molecular pathways in short and storage in long-term memory through spaced practice. As it turns out, he showed that all of the early gestalt psychologists and a great many other memory theorists got this hopelessly wrong.

His work initially focused on Implicit (Procedural) memories such as habituation, sensitisation and classical conditioning skills and habits, but then moved into Explicit (Declarative) facts and events, where he made further discoveries about the molecular mechanisms in memory.

Kandel has opened up the research pathway to knowing how memory works physiologically, thus opening up the possibility not only of enhancing and curing disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease, but understanding how learning actually works, leading to significant improvements in practice.

Seems abstract but has immediate relevance
Even without Kandel's chemical and physiological confrimation, we have an abundance of psychological evidence showing that the distinction is clear. Why then is it so often ignored?

If this seems a little too abstract consider how hooked education and training is on short-term memory experiences and assessment. We know how deficient short-term memory is because there is no fundamental chemical and physiological change, whereas long-term memory does involve chemical and physiological change. This simple change in focus would radically alter almost everything we deliver.

Open simulations or page-turners?

Ever wondered if low, medium or high navigational freedom is better in e-learning? Are open games and simulations better than limited option structures or linear page turners?

Open structures lead to long-term retention
I always thought that more open, non-linear learning was better in terms of retention and had this somewhat confirmed in work by Dr Dror who, in a recent study at the University of Southampton, put students through an e-learning programme to compare all three. Although it takes more effort (cognitive load) to navigate the open structures, it resulted in higher levels of long-term retention. Interestingly, the linear group scored well in an immediate test but two weeks later the advantage of the linear group disappeared as the open students did better. So e-learning environments with high navigational freedom have better long-term retention.

Why higher retention?
Why does a higher degree of freedom encourage long-term retention? It could be the higher degrees of motivation in the learner. Witness the extraordinary levels of motivation among open structure games’ players. It may also help encode memories as a direct result of more planned and meaningful personal exploration.

So freedom to navigate is a good thing (only, of course, if well designed).

http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~id/train.html ).

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.