Habitual learning (h-learning)

Habits fuel learning
In a Pizzeria, after a visit to one of my favourite London spots (the Soane Museum) Jay Cross asked me what I thought fuelled good learning. My answer was ‘habits’. Soane was a habitual learner and collector. Strong, autonomous learners tend to have developed habitual learning, whether in reading, blogging, conversing, taking notes and so on. They all have different sets of habits, but habits they have in abundance.

Blogging as a habit
This is a good example. Some bloggers start but tail off, others work at it and keep going for years, benefiting from the opportunity to habitually structure their own thoughts, get feedback, reflect and LEARN.

7 habits of highly effective learners
Here’s a stab at what I’d say makes habits work in learning:

1. Stick with a new habit until it takes root. Habits fall away unless stuck to for some time and with some vigour.
2. Always take something to read or listen. Autonomous learners always have something in their pocket or bag in what Marc Auge calls Non-Places – trains, airports, planes, automobiles, hotel rooms etc.
3. Take notes. The best way to ensure that knowledge sticks is to write it up in your own words. Studies show between 20-30% increase in recall when you take notes.
4. Habitually encode. Habitual learners simplify and structure the stuff they want to remember in the right order.
5. Replay and recall. Effective learners voluntarily recall what they’ve learnt at intervals after the event. Recall that talk on the way home from the conference, recall your holiday on the plane back.
6. Customise habit forming feeds. Customise your home page to encourage your bountiful learning habits.
7. Kick-start new learning habits. Blog, subscribe to a new magazine, feeds from new sources, use a new tool on web – good learners are always adding learning habits to their repertoire.

Bad habits
Of course we know a lot about the power of habits, especially bad ones such as smoking, eating fatty foods and gambling. Recent research confirms that habits may form familiar neural pathways which makes it more difficult to break the pattern of behaviour. It would seem that these neural pathways get triggered if the habit cues return, hence recidivism in smoking, alcoholism, drug abuse etc. However, it is the nurture of good habits in learning that matter, and there are two interesting thinkers who see habit as lying at the core of learning, Locke and William James. Sorry to get a little detailed here, but it’s worth recalling what they said.

Locke those habits in
John Locke, the greatest philosopher of his age, laid the foundations for empiricism and the enlightenment view of knowledge, politics and education. Breaking free from medieval scholasticism, and disaffected by the educational habits of his day, he put forward a sophisticated theory of education built, not around the transmission of information, but the shaping of habits and character around wisdom and virtue. These theories, grounded in his liberal, political philosophy, are written in Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1692). The book was widely translated and became a manual for education among the upper classes for most of 18^th century.

The book is a series of very practical methods for encouraging good habits and character right down to details on curiosity, games, language learning, dancing etc. He recommends educational methods that focus on example and practice, rather than the teaching of information and principles. In this sense, it is not learning that matters, but the establishment of good habits. It is repeated practice that instils these worthy behaviours so that they become instinctive. The concrete rather than the abstract is recommended for the reinforcement of such good habits.

The learner must not be coerced into learning but made to feel as if it is in their own interest, and that they are acting from their own free will. Not that children should be spoilt. For those of a vocational bent he recommends practical skills and understanding. Beyond this, his focus is on a healthy mind that has the basics in reading, writing, arithmetic, a knowledge of literature along with the natural and social sciences. But not the arts, which he regarded as either useless or dangerous. Detailed scholarly study should be left to those who want to become scholars.

He does not recommend school for those who can afford tutors, and sets great store on the enthusiasm of parents, and the family in general. Schools, he thought, merely perpetuate bad company and bad habits of behaviour. A child is a member of both a family and nation with the individual having the right to life and liberty. It is the idea of a free mind, that uses the power of reason to become contributory, autonomous adults in a free society that mark out this educational theory based on political belief.

James: habits as basic principle in education
Like Locke, he wrote a practical book Talks to Teachers (1899), originally a series of lectures, giving practical advice to teachers. The difference is that psychology had now become, through his efforts, a science, and its principles could be used in educational theory.

It was here that he put forward his now famous theory on learning by doing. This was to heavily influence John Dewey, and the future of educational theory through to Kolb and others. The book doesn’t pretend to have all the answers, as psychology is a science; teaching an art. But some psychological principles are clear.

Education is, above all, the organization of acquired habits of conduct and tendencies to behaviour. Children should not be expected to learn by rote. Their experiences must be turned into useful and habitual behaviour through action. The learner must listen, but then take notes, experiment, write essays, measure, consult and apply. He recommends learning through work and the creation of real things or dealings with real people in a shop, to give you educational experiences beyond mere theory. He was in fact a firm advocate of vocationally oriented schools and work-based learning (relevant today or not?).

The supervision of the acquisition of habit is another of his principles. Habit is the enormous flywheel of society, and should be exercised until securely rooted. The result of almost all learning is this habitual behaviour. Association, interest, attention, will and motivation; these are James’s driving forces in education. In addition there’s memory, curiosity, emulation, constructiveness, pride, fear and love - all impulses that must be turned to good use.

This is not to say that he favoured a lazy, or what he called ‘soft pedagogics’. He recognized that learning was sometimes hard, even arduous. William James devotes chapter 4 of ‘The Principles of Psychology’ to habit and outlines some principles for the acquisition and sustainability of good habits, including; launch yourself with as strong and decided an initiative as possible, never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life, seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits you aspire to gain.

Elgg on Blackboard’s face

Some excellent folks at Brighton Univeristy (my home town) were given a glowing write up in Wired this week on the use of Myspace, blogging and other webby stuff in schools and higher education. They’re a great bunch and not at all ivory-tower, running regular e-learning talks for people both inside and outside of the university. (They’ve even had me along to speak!)

The Golden Elgg
Elgg is the software that’s creating all the fuss. Rather than keeping stuff like MySpace, Bebo, blogs and other web 2.0 tools OUT of education, they’ve folded them IN. Developed as open-source, Elgg has been designed for education (also now available for corporates). Everyone, whether they’re students, tutors or researchers gets a profile page, a blog, photo sharing and friends lists, and they can create and join on-site discussion communities.

Wired article:

http://www.wired.com/culture/education/news/2007/04/myspaceforschool

Elgg website:

http://elgg.org/

For an external view and some visuals:

aocnilta.co.uk/2006/06/23/elgg/

It's the blog's bollocks
It’s free, downloadable and has Blogging, Social networking, File repositories for individuals and communities, Podcast support, Full access controls, Supports tagging, User profiles, Full RSS support, RSS aggregator, Create communities, Collaborative community blogs, Create 'friends' networks, Import content, Publish to blog, Multilingual with Branding/customisation. It’s the blog’s bollocks!

Bottom up is new top-down
Surely this is exactly what an education institution should want – collaborative learning. They’re always banging on about the collaborative environment of a school, college or university, so why not accelerate this using the very technology that the students use anyway. The tide of web 2.0 use has flooded over the campus walls an it’s too late to stop it, so embrace it. There comes spoint where bottom up becomes so compelling that it becomes the new top-down.

Fingernails down Blackboard
So far they have 50 schools and colleges using the software round the world. This could be BIG, and a real fingernail screech down the face of arrogant Blackboard.

Naked organisations

Naked organisations
A Pew survey of internet use showed that 10% of internet users have been online while naked. In an excellent article in Wired this month there’s the idea of the ‘naked organisation’, one that opens itself up to the outside world. I tried this to a degree as a CEO, publishing as much as we could, as often as we could, free and online, to over11,000 outside subscribers, as well as attending as many external events as we could muster, think-tank dinners and other efforts at transparency. As a PLC you had to be transparent at least twice a year financially, what was more important was transparency on ideas. I even opened the company up as Fringe Arts event one year with an enormous banner above the door – this really disturbed staff and I had a barrage of internal criticism (mainly from production people who didn’t understand the value of marketing). My own view is that it was this approach that led to our success in the market. By being transparent and honest in our views, we were seen to be engaging in the debate rather than just ‘selling services’.

Naked training
An example of a naked e-learning project was the Barclays University project led by Paul Rudd and John Rodgers. They created a learning portal (remember that concept), open to all Barclay’s employees, AND THE OUTSIDE WORLD. There were some discussion forums that were confidential, but the rest was free for anyone to use – and many did. This turned out to be a remarkable idea. Not only were Barclays seen to be ahead of the pack, the benefits for recruitment and brand image were obvious. Unfortunately, the traditionalist L&D people had their way by rather ruthlessly sacking the visionaries and closing it down. Most progressive learning projects are in the end destroyed by training departments themselves rather than from the outside. It taught me that there’s strong arguments for transparent organisations to simply publish their training.

Naked blogs and wikis
Blogging is perhaps the most obvious example of naked learning and sharing. Give people a chance and they’ll whip off their corporate togs in a second. Microsoft’s Channel 9 is a good example. Mark Oehlert (check out his excellent blog) posted a wonderful summary of naked corporate behaviour within Motorola, who have about 4,433 blogs (about 40,000 blog entries), 3,300 wikis (each with often many pages), several thousand FAQs and 28,000 inquiries and responses in 2,400 forums. What made it work? It was a completely viral adoption internally, "without a single memo from upstairs". Heavily used low down in the organization to get things done, but less used and less understood as you go up the organization. Three quarters of the company participates by posting to blogs, wikis, forums, and FAQs. They thinks their statistics show that all employees with access to a computer worldwide use the system at least every week.

Save your ass
I've seen lots of companies and organisations come and go in the learning space. Many of these spent too much time discussing things privately and not enough time discussing things publicly with clients. In the end nakedness can become a competitive advantage and save your organisation from low visibility, sales and obscurity.

Happiness is dumbing-up

Laynard's Happiness
Blog book reviews are usually glowing, but I read an awful book recently, Richard Laynard’s ‘Happiness’. Despite the idea being widely rejected as simplistic by John Stuart Mill and almost every serious thinker that’s ever thought deeply on the subject, the idea that ‘happiness’ is the sole purpose of life, or even an end-in-itself, seems to have taken root in our therapeutic culture. Life is not a simple calculus of unhappiness/happiness. Even a cursory look at the complexity of feelings, emotions and behaviour make that idea seem childish. These simple distinctions; happiness=good/unhappiness=bad; positive feelings=good/negative feelings=bad, are puerile and misleading.

Happy clapping
Unfortunately government has caught a bad dose of ‘happy clapping’ and ministers have latched onto the idea that we should try to engineer this happiness. You see it in the work-life balance debate (read work=unhappy, life=happy). You also see it within organisations, as hapless HR people try to take control of the emotional welfare of employees. Self-appointed armies of coaches, counsellors, mentors and therapists are crawling all over organisations searching for the pathological. Everyday emotions and ordinary contention are diagnosed as illnesses and people with creepy ‘open questioning’ techniques come in to offer cures. By the way, is there anything more creepy than the current Pamela Stephenson series on TV. It’s patronising garbage. No wonder Billy Connolly’s no longer funny.

Furedi - Why the ‘politics of happiness’ makes me mad
Frank Furedi, one of the few sane commentators on this topic, has en excellent article in Spiked (thanks to Dan Travis), ‘Why the ‘politics of happiness’ makes me mad - If you’re unhappy with state-sponsored happiness programmes, clap your hands’.

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/311/

He objects to ministers buying the whole happiness kick, as if all would be well with regular doses of happiness counselling are the solution. He rejects the government’s attempt to raise our happiness levels with officialdom poking its nose at every juncture into our emotional welfare.

Happy sheets
What ever happened to contention? I don’t want people to fill in ‘happy-sheets’ when I speak at a conference. If anything I want to disturb them, make them think again, disrupt their existing beliefs. Why attend a conference to hear someone simply confirm what you already know and believe? If you want happiness go to a comedy club. Everyone knows you forget jokes as soon as the laughter has died down. Happiness is a dumbed-up state. This is not a plea for grumpiness, although, like most people my age I find that quality quite endearing, it’s a plea for realism and sanity before the therapeutic brigade start seeing the whole of society as an asylum full of pathological patients who need to pay for their platitudes.

Cool learning

Cool learning
Training, depending as it does on the tyranny of time and location (sending people at a specific time to a separate place to learn), has a GARGANTUAN carbon footprint. Learning psychology shows that real contexts enhance our ability to learn, recall and apply what we’ve learnt, yet we still feel the need to transport millions of people away from the workplace to learn. The rising waters of bottom-up, web 2.0 knowledge creation could maybe keep the real rising waters down. We need only accelerate this, embrace it and be explicit on dropping the need for endless, formal courses in separate locations, training ecntres and far-off places.

Carbon free training
The learning world is always beating itself up about not being heard at the top table, bemoaning the fact that ‘learning’ doesn’t the recognition it deserves. Time and time again I hear this speech from learning professionals. Perhaps we could start by aligning ourselves to the most important political and business issue of the day – climate change. We could state publicly that we will stop all off-site courses, stop all air travel for training and adopt the e-learning model. Our carbon-free training would count towards the carbon savings in annual report and could be used to generate good publicity for the organisation.

Practice what we preach
A good starting point would be a policy statement, followed by some e-learning on energy conservation in the workplace, especially around computers, standby modes, lights off and so on. Away days could be a thing of the past. European funders could insist on future European projects avoid all stupid air travel for endless meetings under the banner of collaboration. If you want to collaborate, collaborate online.

Electronic hoodies and Gutter geeks

Electronic hoodies
Big blogosphere debate on whether anonymity and vitriol damage blogs. My own view, having had my fair share of anonymous comments (usually from people working for the BBC!), even a rather strange blog stalker, is that they’re clearly harmless males from the gutter of geek culture. Why put the views of 71 million bloggers at risk, especially those who are expressing themselves within the context of a politically hostile environment, because of the actions of a few juvenile, electronically-hooded idiots?

Anonymous incorporated
Neither do I really have a problem with anonymity. There may be times when you don’t want your employer, government or other agency find out who you are. It’s also easy for people without blogger accounts to simply click that button. I rather like the robust comments, even the vitriol!

Gutter geeks
If we want freedom of expression we need to take the rough with the smooth. Let me give a personal example. Typical of the timid, geek critics is Daniel Raven, rich-kid partner of the wonderful Julie Burchill. Riding on the coat-tails of Burchill, whose essays in the book are superb, this singularly untalented writer has a chapter on new media in HER latest book, where he has a relentless go at me, and the industry he has worked in for years. The story is as tedious as his writing, and for some reason he calls me ‘Charlie’. While berating his fellow workers as ‘tossers’ and hating their ‘showing off about DJing’ (he is exactly one of those himself and pens another tedious essay on local Brighton bands later in the same book), he is typical of these powerless, geeky kids who like to have a go, but not to your face. "Anyone who's lived in Brighton longer than five minutes will tell you that what this town really needs is more plumbers," he says (but the little darling wouldn’t possibly consider being one himself – which is probably why he works in the very company he berates). However, at least he put his name to the diatribe. The point of the story is that there will always be remnants at the end of every group who are a bit inadequate in real life but use media when they want to appear brave. Fortunately, the anonymous posters and gutter geeks are all too obvious, easily spotted and easily ignored.

Me and Jerry Springer
I have also received letters and vitriol from fundamentalist Christians, who objected to me, as a board member of the Brighton Dome and Festival, agreeing with the decision to show ‘Jerry Springer the Opera’. In a debate for all parties after it was shown, you had to be there to feel the full force of their irrational wrath. Everyone on the room who was not of their ilk was lambasted as ‘Going to hell’. However, they have a right to protest, write to Board members and express their views. In this case it showed them to be the fanatics they are.

The internet is truly a bottom up medium and we need to resist those who want to see it as some sort of sterile, newspaper letters' page.

Web 2.0 Award Winners

Nothing better than just doing it. For the best possible introduction to Web 2.0, bounce around these prize winning sites to get a feel for what’s possible. It’s good fun.

Each category has a 1^st, 2nd & 3^rd place:

Blog Guides Technorati Blogniscient Bloglines

Bookmarking Blummy furl Spurl

Business LinkedIn Basecamp Side Job Track

Classifieds/Business Directories craigslist Judy's Book PageBites

Collaborative Writing Writely Rallypoint Thinkfree Office Online

Communication: Email/Chat meebo Campfire Slawesome

Digital Storage & Remote Access eSnips Avvenu YouSendIt

Mapping Wayfaring Frappr HousingMaps

Mashups & More The Supreme Court Zeitgeist Ning liveplasma

Music Last.fm MusicStrands Upto11

Peer Production News Newsvine Digg gabbr.com

Personal Organization HipCal Planzo voo2do

Photos & Digital Images Flickr Slide Zoto

Podcasts Odeo podOmatic Loomia

Real Estate Propsmart Zillow Trulia

Retail Etsy threadless Wists

Social Networking Facebook Consumating MySpace

Social Tagging StumbleUpon Blinklist Del.icio.us

Start Pages Pageflakes Google Start Live.com

Trusted Search Rollyo swicki Truveo

Video Dailymotion YouTube MetaCafe

Web Development & Design CSS Beauty Performancing Mint

Wikis (Hosted) Wetpaint Jotspot pbwiki

Google calendar and learning

My two boys have paper planners for school. Three weeks into any term they’re unrecognisable. They’ve been torn, dog eared, soaked, mashed, scored and written upon to such a degree that they look like pieces of abandoned litter.

Isn’t it about time that every child had a timetable and planner on the web? If we used Google calendar it would be FREE – yes FREE!

Timetable in the calendar
Simply assign an email address and password to every child, preload the calendar with school days and holidays for the year, INSET days etc, populate it with other events such as parent days, plays, sports events and so on.

Populate with curriculum and homework assignments
A further step would be to populate the calendar with curriculum descriptions (what the student will be learning in any given lesson) along with assignments (when they commence and when they’re expected to be handed in). This can be done at the start of the year or as it comes.

Manage, invite and remind
Calendars for the entire school or class can be managed by teachers. You can set event reminders for homework (how many times has your child failed to tell you about deadlines?) and emails can be sent from the calendar as reminders. Invitations can also be added, for example, to the school play etc. In one simple act we could revolutionise communication between teachers, students and parents.

What to do?
Get the school to set up a general calendar visible to all on the outside. The get the teachers to set up a calendar – this could be done for them in one batch. Then set one up for every pupil.

Then there's the whole Moodle+Google thing - that's another post!

Stick learning

Sticking my neck out
Laptops get far too much attention in education whereas the cheap and humble memory stick is almost forgotten. Yet many kids already have one, transferring homework and assignments to and from home and school. They’re the umbilical chord between the usually better home PC and the school ‘network’. This is not exactly an original idea but I've been astonished at how widespread these sticks have become yet how little they are formally used in schools.

Preload content and tools
We could surely preload sticks with all the necessary school/college/university documents, information for parents, holidays, timetables, planners, curriculum content and homework assignments at the start of every year, saving millions in paper and general parental angst. A main directory could be there for all the general stuff and directories for each subject would contain interactive content and links to other useful sites and content on the web. This would give student and parent full visibility of planned progress at the start of every academic year, reducing at once the parental concern about not being told what is happening in the school. The headteacher and staff could also all do a brief video piece, putting faces to names.

Cheap as chips
These sticks have plummeted in price. At cost, and in bulk, a local authority could buy one for every child for just a few pounds per child. Most parents, I suspect would willingly buy one for their child once the benefits were explained.

What to do?
Stage 1 - recognise that most students have one and use it for assignments and homework. Stage 2 – make sure that everyone has one and preload content at the start of every year. Stage 3 – make it a normal part of the school's culture.

Education - bad theatre

Closer to theatre than any other medium
Education and training is closer to theatre than any other medium, as it is largely delivered ‘live’ and not recorded. It is ‘staged’ and mostly not interrupted. We do, after all, call them lecture 'theatres'.

We know that the mind struggles with long presentations and that most of it will be forgotten, and that cognitive overload or inattention will prevent the acquisition of knowledge delivered in this fashion. The learner is cheated out of pausing or rewinding if a point is missed, or simply to rethink and reinforce the learning. So why is such a stupid model so prevalent?

Millions delivered, few recorded
Every day vast numbers of lectures and talks are given and only a very few recorded. Imagine a novelist, journalist or filmmaker who only delivered his/her work once, live, and refused to have it recorded and distributed. Education plays this 'once only' game on an unimaginable scale. It’s obvious that this is true, less obvious as to why it happens. Why is it so rarely recorded?

Why can't we see it twice or more?
Why doesn’t the learner have the simple ability to replay the talk/lecture/teaching experience? It’s not ‘intellectual copyright’, as the majority of these lectures/talks get culled from other sources and few have any resale value. It’s not because it’s difficult or expensive. Recording as audio or video is dirt cheap. It’s not because it’s against the rules. It's simply not done. The whole system is moulded to the needs of the teacher, not the learner.

This leaves only institutional sloth or fear. Is education simply stuck in a world where technology doesn’t matter? As there's no real sense in which one fails, does the system just trundle on? Can it only think in terms of theatre?

Or do they fear the fact that they may be found out? That it's all an act.

TIME waits for no man

TIME magazine had an inspired front cover on 1st January 2007. The title was ‘Person of the Year’ and it had a reflective mirror with the word YOU writ large. User-driven content was on the rise and shaping travel with user reviews, politics with blogs, education with Wikipedia. Everywhere you looked users were doing it for themselves.

It was also prophetic, as the New York Time ran a story less than there weeks later about TIME Inc losing 300 jobs in the magazine to focus on new web developments!

We’re along way off newspapers an magazines disappearing but they are being salami sliced day by day month by month as younger, less print sensitive people switch to digital media.

The classic argument is that they’ll use their brands to exploit new online models, but I have my doubts. They’re fundamentally print people and don’t really get, or more importantly, like digital media. A brand like TIME Magazine (has that awkward second word in there) is a print brand that won’t transfer easily. The only exception I can think off is WIRED. I love the magazine and feeds from the web site. The successful magazines will be the ones that embrace blogs, feeds and user-generated content, seeing it as a two-way dialogue, not push it out at them.

Mobile phone novels

Rankin rubbishes m-novels
I once asked Ian Rankin (question at a literary event) if he would ever consider publishing on the internet, even mobile phones. He thought it a 'daft and disgusting' idea. But it may not be as daft as he thinks. Book sales have been falling in Japan but ‘keitai bukai’, mobile phone novels are doing a roaring trade. There's also a healthy Manga comic on mobiles market. It would seem that this is creating an entirely new literary form.

Keitai bunkia
Written in short three minute episodes, to be read between tube stops, they are written to hook the reader into downloading the next episode. This takes skills as it depends on creating plotlines that create up to a hundred cliffhanging moments, as some have as many as 100 episodes. It's actually evolving into a new form of literary writing.

E-books bombed
E-books have failed as the devices were too big and expensive. Out of 127 million people there are 100 million with mobiles, and as the screens have got bigger, with better resolution, text has become readable. Downloads are superfast and with flat rates, you can access as many as you wish, once you’ve paid a subscription fee of around £2 per month.

Readers mainly young women
Four of the top selling paper books in Japan started as keitai bunkai. The readers are mainly young women with romance (peppered with erotica) the flavour of the month. They seem to like the idea that there’s no bookcover and that they can read in secret. Some admit they have never read a book before.

Future
This is interesting. The book is just as much a technical device as any other medium. With its shape, cover, content page, preface, chapters, paragraphs and index. Books on mobiles are just another example of the rising tide of digital content. I see a bright future for mobile access of text, especially on iPhones-like mobiles. Check out the way it automatically switches your screen when you tip it on it side from portrait to landscape.

These japanese mobile novels could be a model for the 'little and often' spaced practice learning that the psychology of learning tells us works so efficiently.

Why I love PLEs and hate VLEs (or LMSs)

Attended a great talk by Terry Anderson and it really made me think deep about the strength of PLEs. Tens of millions of people have PLE (Personalised Learning Environment). Hardly any of them see it that way – but that’s their strength:

MyYahoo – 50 million
MyMSN – 12 million
Googe personalised homepage – 10 million
Netvibes – 10 million
Etc

The personalised homepage with calendar, alerts, links, feeds, news, to do lists, weather, stockprices, gadgets and knowledge sources is fast becoming the norm. The point is that the learning is part of the doing – it’s next to your calendar and things to do list. It’s part of your everyday life.

Why do I like them?

Well they conform to my needs as a person and learner, I don’t have to conform to the system, it conforms to me. It gives me a sense of freedom and control as opposed to the sense of big brother surveillance I get with LMSs or other top-down content management systems. An LMS/VLE is teacher-centric about push and top-down control and dissemination. They’re course-centric and get bogged down in dull and destructive debates about IP. Content is no longer institutional – it’s increasingly abundant and free.

As we’re now witnessing the death of the compliant learner, learner control and freedom are essential. The contributing student is the future and PLEs along with web 2.0 can do the business.

Thanks again Terry – wonderful talk.