Flipped reading – 7 reasons why reading just got super-fast

Education often slows down learning. One reason I’m not for the current orthodoxy in social constructivism is the fact that it slows down many types of learning for many people. My efficiencies in learning over the years have come from the fact that my learning is digital by default, asynchronous by default, available to anyone, anywhere at anytime. So imagine being able to read five or more times faster. Typical experienced reading rates are between 200-400 words per minute. Can this be increased to 1000 words per minute, adding not subtracting attention and comprehension? Try it.

1. Reading shaped by old inefficient tech

We may not realise it but papyrus, parchment and paper are technologies, wasteful technologies at that, especially paper with its polluting, deforestation and landfill problems. Remember that a book is not the physical object but the text. Fact is, most of us do most of our reading online these days. That’s solved these problems but it may also solve another – speed. Reading has been shaped by papyrus, parchment and paper. They remain fixed, while your eyes have to do all the work. Now, along comes a technology that literally flips that model. The words move, not your eyes.

2. Much faster reading

Speed reading software from Spritz works because they’ve looked carefully at what actually happens when we read. We all have an optimal attention point when reading words, which is just left of centre of each word. This is the point (Optimal Recognition Point) at which the brain centres then registers the meaning of the word. The software knows this recognition point for words and presents that letter in red at exactly the same point on the screen. Your eyes don’t have to move so time and effort is saved. Try it – it’s remarkably effective.

3. Text-based learning

One basic skill is still primary in learning – reading. Let’s face it, much of our learning, even communication and collaboration is still through text. Google, Wikipedia, e-books, texting, Facebook, Twitter, email are all still fundamentally text media. Increasing this mode of learning is therefore a significant productivity win.

4. Quicker & better comprehension

They even claim quicker and increased comprehension and I can see why. The effortless focus means you can attend to meaning rather than the effort of physical reading from a page.

5. More psychological attention

The fact that you are having to do less physical work means that psychological attention is focussed. Attention is a necessary condition for learning. It wanes in lectures and wanes when reading. This massively extends your ability to sustain that attention.
6. Language learning
I could see this work well with language learning in terms of quickening up vocabulary and sentence acquisition. It should also work with Arabic if the same rules about Optimal Recognition Point apply (interesting question). It could even be used to increase early reading skills by accelerating reading and vocabulary acquisition.

7. Power up with wearables

The fact that it can be delivered on small mobile screens, Google Glass and watches. You have no scrolling, paging, contracting and expanding. In fact, it has been announced as a feature of the Galaxy S5 and Galaxy Gear 2. Now imagine it being delivered on an Oculus Rift for total psychological attention and no distractions.

Conclusion

Breakthroughs often come by flipping or reversing models. These ‘Copernican’ revolutions have changed the world forever. Thomas Khun saw this as the key driver in scientific progress but it has also been noted that it works on a smaller scale with technology. One could argue that it works particularly well in learning. The flipped classroom is just one example, flipped reading may be another.

Gang-of-four proclaim Serious eLearning Manifesto. You can’t be serious?

The ‘Serious eLearning Manifesto’ has been procaimed! Well, four people have decided that a ‘top-down’ approach, where we mere  mortals need to stand by, with baited breath, by signing-up for the ‘revealing’ special webinar on 13 March. Am I alone in thinking that this is all a bit, well, odd? 

Gang-of-four

Let me be clear, I like three of the ‘gang-of-four’ – Michael Allen, Clark Quinn and Wil Thalheimer. All are seasoned veterans with lots of great things to say. I won’t express an opinion on the fourth, Julie Dirksen, as I’ve never heard of her. What I find odd is the idea that we all need to be told by a self-appointed group what’s best for the rest of us. It goes against everything I love about the openess of the web and online learning – the fact that it should be diverse and that if you have something to say – blog it, tweet it, Facebook it and put it on your website. Don't treat us like pupils in a classroom and expect us to turn up at 2pm CST and listen.

Manifesto madness

I, for one, don’t like manifestos. Remember the last one from this forsome? They stink. They tend to be ideological, reflecting the views of the few not the many. They also tend to be fixed, prescriptive and usually don’t last the test of time. E-learning is not high politics, it’s an evolving and fluid landscape with a raft of wonderful tools used by almost everyone on the web: Google, Wikpedia, YouTube, Social Media etc. If it’s the basic modular, self-paced e-learning they want to attack, then hold on. As Bertie Bassett would say, it takes all-sorts. You can point out the weaknesses of certain forms of online learning but this is hardly a catastrophe. If they’re also having a go at the LMS, then think again, as it’s as lively and buoyant as it’s ever been and evolving. The logo maybe says it all - SERIOUSLY is this the future of e-learning design? Smacks of the 'serious' games thing and look where that concept went. I made much the same points six years ago on that concept.
Manifestos galore
It's not as if this is the first. We've had Cathy Moore's Manifesto for L&D Professionsals. I can still remember the truly awful Manifesto for e-learning from bogus Learning Light in the UK. There's the Networked Learning Manifesto from the University of Lancaster, the Educator's e-learning manifesto, even a Feminist manifesto for e-learning. There's the wonderful Manifesto for e-learning in acupuncture. You get my point.

Bullseye!

What I suspect will happen, is that they’ll fire an arrow, draw a chalk circle round it and proclaim ‘Bullseye!’ I’m involved in simulations, adaptive algorithmic learning projects, MOOCs, VOOKs, content exchanges, spaced learning on mobiles, Oculus Rift VR, wearables and see a landscape that is wide and rich. What I don't see as radical is a fixed webinar at a fixed time by a self-selected group. This is regressive not progressive.

Big world

Listen guys, I respect you all, but calm down on the drama and, tell us what you think - asynchronously. I don’t want to have to hang around to listen to a fixed webinar, timed for the US market. Just blog it. And if you do want a ‘manifesto’, at least appoint someone who is not US based. It’s a big world out here. We in Europe are having serious doubts about allowing any data to be held, no matter how virtualised, in the US, as the NSA has managed to ruin the brand.
PS
My guess is that somewhere in here, they're really plugging a book - let's see.

Miracle of mobiles delivers cued spaced-practice (ENCORE)

This tool (ENCORE) uses mobile devices to deliver cued spaced-practice for learning. In my view, tools like this are a major breakthrough in learning technology, as it is founded on a solid piece of psychological research and sound memory theory.

Mobile learning sceptic

I’ve always been a bit sceptical about the claims made for mobile learning. I’m a mobile learner, as I don’t drive, so I take trains a lot, but I don’t use a mobile phone for my mobile learning. In fact, I don’t think I’ve even seen anyone do an e-learning course on the train. However, I am a fan of using specific device affordances for learning. That’s why I’m fine with tablets in primary schools but not in secondary or FE/HE for long form writing, coding or using sophisticated tools. That’s where you need a notebook or laptop.

Mobile affordances

For mobiles the affordances are around quick, episodic events such as looking things up, quick experiences, learning games or alerts. The average time someone spends on a mobile device is seconds, and it’s getting shorter as txting on Whatsapp or whatever, overtakes voice. What seemed like a suicidal price by Facebook, now looks like a steal considering the geographic spread and ability to use Whatsapp for voice. Coming back to my point – we use mobiles for short, episodic experiences.

Forgetting curve

For years I’ve been talking about the need to move learning beyond the course in one specific way – repeated practice. It had become an obsession. Finally I got a chance to implement htis through LearningPool. Ebbinhaus in 1885 gave us the forgetting curve, showing that most of what we supposedly teach and learn is lost within minutes and hours. Learning is therefore one of the most unproductive areas of human endeavour. The trick is to look beyond the course and learning experience to the reinforcement of that knowledge and skills. To truly move learning from working to long-term memory we need to reinforce to increase retention and recall.

Miracle of mobiles

This has never really been possible in learning, as we lose the students attention as soon as they walk out of the door. Suddenly a miracle has happened, we all have the perfect device (well almost) – mobile phones. These powerful, personal and portable devices that can deliver personalised learning at anytime, anywhere to me alone. I mooted this idea with LearningPool some time ago, and with their characteristic ‘can do’ attitude they’ve come up with a tool that works – ENCORE.

Cues

ENCORE, takes the ‘cues’ from any course or learning experience and spaced them out in whatever frequency you want after the course to and end date. It may be up to the start of a new job, an exam, a product launch, whatever. This word ‘cue’ is important. It is not a matter of replaying the course but identifying key ‘cues’ like the handles of suitcases, so that the brain uses these cues to pull out the suitcases of knowledge and skills.

Tulving has shown that Episodic memories are encoded through cues that overlap the memories themselves. These cues allow retrieval. The theory therefore explains memory failure, not so much in terms of memory decay, as failure in retrieval. Research on cues and retrieval has shown that context and physical environment do improve memory, encouraging the view that learning should take place in the context in which it is likely to be used. Semantic memories may be turned into episodic memories through loci and peg systems. For examples historical sequences placed along a known route. Encoding is perhaps the one area of memory theory that has the most direct impact on learning, as understanding encoding can led to both better teaching and better learning. Tulving showed the importance of cues and when learners make the effort to identify and note down cues they improve retention (an obvious example is mnemonics). We now know the difference between maintenance and elaborative encoding strategies. (Elaborative encoding leads to deeper processing and therefore better learning.) We also know that the organisation of learning is important in terms of relating new learning to previous knowledge, emotional and context. All of this hold great promise when it comes to the sophisticated use of cues and elaboration through mobile spaced-practice.

Conclusion

My guess is as this develops significant increases in retention and productivity will be realised.  We can remind learners about tasks, activities and push snippets of learning topics to them at timed intervals. We can insert new life into previous learning with bite-size tasks and activities to help refresh the learners’ mind. We can emphasise and fortify knowledge of learning topics with catch up and repetitive learning and research shows clear benefits in the thing that really matters retention. 

Horizon Scanning – bears really do shit in the wood

Horizon Scanning is a popular sport these days. Commission a report, by people who scan for the opinions of others on the web and out pops a report that is invariably a statement of the bleedin’ obvious. You too can read that the Pope is a Catholic and that bears do indeed shit in the woods – social, mobile, MOOCs, cloud, 3D printing, wearables – ho hum. How can we avoid this?

1. Focus on starting line

Let’s not start with a distant technological horizon but change focus and first up, have a good, hard look around and ask that age old question “To what problems are these emerging technologies a solution?’ Flip the issue and ask about the top ten learning problems to which technology is a solution. This will lead, not to a predictable list, of what technologies just appear, which any fourteen year old can tell you about, to a more relevant list of technologies that could solve problems in learning.

2. Ask what inhibits learning?

How about the Top Ten specific inhibitors to learning in, say, Higher Education? Take the lecture, long-form essay, poor formative feedback, agricultural calendar, low occupancy buildings, one intake per year, crisis of costs, crisis of relevance, poor teaching, poor CPD….. these are just some of the commonly debated weaknesses in the existing model. These should be our starting points, not treating technologies like ballista balls being fired over the walls at academe.

3. Don’t see technology as disruptive i.e. dystopian

When you read between the lines, these reports betray a view of technology as ‘disruptive’, which many in education read as dystopian. Technological advances are seen as an annoying nuisance that has to be ‘coped’ with, rather than just real progress in the real world. The future is the ‘other’, to be feared rather than embraced and welcomed. In truth, education barely uses the technology of today, never mind the technology of tomorrow. Don’t horizon scan, start with what’s your students currently have and do.

4. Abandon deep-rooted conceits

The reasons for this dystopian bias lie in several deep-rooted conceits in education and training. These conceits are, 1) teaching is always good and anything that threatens teaching is bad, 2) teachers are special and that anything that threatens teachers is bad, 3) teaching is a necessary condition for learning, and 4) face-to-face contact is a necessary condition for learning. None of these are true but all are deeply held, basic assumptions, if not prejudices, in education. We need to face up to the hard fact that technology changes some of these assumptions.

5. Think of technologies that will NOT work

Really smart prophets are those who know what technologies will NOT work in learning. I’m on the side of people like Steve Rayson at Kineo who consistently derides those who see mobile learning as some sort of inevitable pedagogic force. I’ve seen reports that have gone gaga on, say 3D printing, yet when it comes down to matching this with real learning, it all seems a little lame. Don’t just scan for everything that appears, be highly selective.

6. Don’t set up a quango

Whenever ‘institutions’, ‘quangos’ or ‘ centres of excellence for technology’ are put in charge of technology in learning, the whole business gets institutionalised and yet more committees and reports get produced, with yet more dilution. The virtual world of technology is not usually well served by physical buildings and organisations.

7. Keep it simple

What’s needed, rather than endless Horizon reports, are a few hard policy decisions around mandated, online solutions, so that the system can ‘plan’. A good example is the just announced 10% online in courses by 2015/16 rising to 50% online by 2017/18 in the FELTAG report for Further Education. We could mandate minimum levels of bandwidth in educational institutions. We could stop ‘banning’ and ‘blocking’ things. This is a hard-nosed catalyst or stimulus for action, something the Principal and CFO of a college can work with and plan to. The technology will fall into place if the planning is right.

Conclusion

It is this matching of problems with solutions that can lead to good predictive policy, rather than committees, chosen not on merit but on who knows who, in government – the usual suspects, some very suspicious indeed. Think in terms of solutions to problems and stop the endless stream of Horizon reports with endless streams of isolated recommendations that remain isolated and fragmented. It’s all about decision-making and action.

Why ‘Talent Management’ is a sham

Mathew Syed was the UK No 1 Table Tennis Champion for 10 years. But here’s the killer fact: his one suburban street in Reading produced more Table Tennis Champions than the whole of the rest of the UK combined. Why? Matthew was always being told that he had innate talent, fast reactions, blessed in some way, a gift. This, he explained, was nonsense, “at best misleading at worst destructive in schools and learning… it was years of high quality purposeful practice”.

Weasel word - talent

Any teacher, trainer, lecturer, coach, mentor, parent, sports person would find his book 'Bounce' a profitable read. It’s much deeper than the usual sports' biographies as he builds his case on the psychology of learning. He is not one of those sports names who sprint round the conference circuit and give rather superficial, motivational speeches, a biographical tale peppered with a few well worn rugger-type jokes. He’s a thoughtful man who has reflected deeply on why talent is not born but made through ‘deliberate practice’ How do you get to Carnegie hall? Practice, practice, practice; relentless, deliberative practice. He's well versed in the psychology and causal effects of practice and his message is that education and employment in the UK has a deep and disastrous weasel word at its core – talent.

He was saying that so-called ‘Talent Management’ is a crock of s**t, as talent, in the sense of a gift, is misleading – it’s simply the wrong word. Our beliefs in where talent comes from affects performance. Born not bred, a gift, you need talent – this is the dominant view in western culture. In fact, it’s about effort, practice and tenacity.

US import
As an import from the US, Talent Management is yet another HR bandwagon. Once the 'Leadership Training' bandwagon had run its course, its wheels stuck in the deep mud of fashionable indifference, HR had to find another rickety old vehicle to justify increasing scepticism about their usefulness. Talent Management (really just Leadership in new clothes) is yet another reason for senior managers to spend oodles of cash on themselves . And don't think for one moment that this is an inclusive, company-wide scheme that involves ALL employees. It's really a filtering process for joining the Executive Club. Never trust those guys you see turn up to meetings, or at the airport, with their little Platinum, Gold or Silver 'Exec Club' tags hanging conspicuously on the outside of their combination-lock briefcases. They're in the same camp as those who wear mobiles on their belts or blazers with flat gold buttons on the cuffs. If Talent Management really was meritocratic, then boards would advertise openly for members (they don't - in the UK it's mostly word-of mouth) and there would be transparency from top to bottom in recruitment, rewards and promotion. The city and UK senior management is full of old duffers, still wearing their broad diagonally striped school ties (I personally think this smacks of public school pederasty).

Catastrophic problem in schools
This is a catastrophic problem, as when young people believe that ‘talent’ is the key criterion for success, the ones who feel they lack talent (most of us) fail as we simply stop. Kids who fail largely behave rationally. They are taught that talent matters and signs of failure are punished. This denigrates the idea that effort, application and persistence are what matters. Too many simply give up. This is most apparent in maths, where one tricky problem, one misguided comment by a teacher, will simply stop a child in their tracks and instil the idea that they have no ‘talent for numbers’. People disparage effort, pretend they don’t study hard for exams, but it matters. This is an ingrained feature of our schooling. And of course, this doesn’t arise from a vacuum – our culture promotes this and it is viciously self-destructive. So what are the features of a good learning environment?

Motivation

A good start is the work of Carol Dweck who relates motivation and subsequent success to mindsets on abilities. Those with a fixed mindset, often reinforced by educators, see their abilities as fixed and lose the ability to improve and pout in te effort to succeed. Those who retain a flexible mindset around effort, not ability, remain motivated and have a higher chance of success. She scotches the old myths around the ‘gifted and talented’. I’ve never yet found a middle-class parent who doesn’t think their child is one of the ‘gifted and talented’.

Failure is the driver

Acceptable failure, Syed claims, is the key to good practice. Failure is an opportunity to adapt and grow. High quality learning experiences focus on deliberate improvement. This means encouraging a culture of deliberate failure and environments where it’s acceptable and safe to fail.

Feedback matters

Aviation is a good example. With 3 billion flights last year and a tiny number of accidents and deaths (around 300), an extraordinary success. Why – they take feedback and continuous improvement seriously. Doctors and radiologists get patient data on outcomes – this matters. These professions embed rich, usable feedback at all levels. Elsewhere there’s often a lack of willingness to learn from mistakes and failure. We need learning experiences that avoid talking at people, preaching masquerading as teaching. We need detailed, frequent and constructive feedback.

Courses don’t train

The education and training world, the learning game, is obsessed by one-off courses. This goes against everything Syed said in this presentation. We ignore what the psychology of learning has been telling us for the last 150 years, certainly since Ebbinghaus laid bare the ‘forgetting curve’ and explained that it is through practice and reinforcement that anything is learnt. Improved performance not only needs repeated practice but also deliberative practice, (see Anders Ericsson). This, Syed kept stressing, is the only way to succeed in acquiring skills.  I have seen this myself in my own son. He has trained several times a week in TaeKwon-Do since he was 8 years old. That’s over 12 years, on average training 4 times a week, at 2 hours a session. He’s fitter than a whippet, as flexible as a yoga teacher and can knock you out with one targeted kick or punch. Years and years of practice make you an athlete, not courses.

Conclusion

Paul Flowers, the catastrophic leader Chair of the Co-op Bank, was hired on the back of his Myers Briggs scores but was hopelessly inept, had few skills, other than deception but promoted way beyond his abilities by an inept HR department, who thought they were hiring ‘talent’. This is just one feature of amateurish and misleading HR.  I’d like to ban two words in education, training and personnel – TALENT and LEADERSHIP. Talent is the weasel word that secretly imports a destructive false belief, that talent is what we’re after and not a meritocratic world where effort is rewarded.  It encourages shortcuts. Leadership is in many ways worse as it’s become a plague in training. Leadership training is often just management training iced over with a thin layer of superficial, non-nutritious nonsense about ‘being a leader’.  It’s really just another word that promotes the idea that ‘talent’ matters. 

Amazing 3D phone from Google (Kinect in a phone)

Google have just released details of their 3D sensor phone. It’s a sort of Microsoft Kinect in your phone.  It combines that personal, powerful and portable device with the very environment in which you live in and move through. To put it another way it automatically creates and stores context. This is much bigger, I suspect, than the promo video suggests.

Why does this matter?

Well, most people have a rather primitive view of perception and consciousness, as if our perception is some sort of x-ray vision that reaches out to the world and scans it as we move and think. The very opposite is the case. We recreate that world in our brains and re-present it in created consciousness. We recreate our environment in 3D as we perceive and move through that world. This phone does something similar – it recreates the world through which you move. How? It’s an Android phone with sensors that makes over a quarter of a million measurements every second. 

Applications

Initial applications include the use of this recreated 3D world for the visually impaired and blind. You could also use it practically for mapping your home or a room for decoration or garden for redesign. Eventually it will scan 3D objects for storage and 3D printing and so on.

Contextual learning

My interest would take things much further. I’d use it to create your own personal environments for contextual learning. We have long known that learning, specifically retention and recall are increased through context. Sit an exam in a room where you actually learnt that material and you do better in that exam. For most 'learn by doing' tasks this is especially true.

Imagine creating a lab, workshop, shop or any other physical space where that 3D model can be used to create context-specific, simulated learning. Induction (onboarding), product knowledge, sale straining, health and safety and hundreds of other business as usual training tasks could be constructed for your personal working environment. All it would take is an authoring tool with the ability to tag objects and locations, then add a learning layer. You could even use it as a memory aid, locating what you want to learn in your known locations then use the memory palace technique for practice, retention and recall.

I'm currently involved in two brilliant 3D sims in vocational learning where we're creating 3D environments for training, assessment and certification. They really do measure competences in detail and could revolutionaries this type of learning. Eventually this sort of simulation could be personally created and commonplace.

Conclusion

Boy things are moving fast in the mobile arena. It may not be robots in the home that matter after all, but our homes with robotic ability to enhance our lives. I want one…..

Imperial’s Debra Humphries hits bum note on MOOCs

Just back from a European Summit on MOOCs in Lausanne and this is one of the shortest blogs I’ve ever written but something made me mad. Debra Humphries from Imperial College London gave a keynote speech and quoted Diana Laurillard "very intelligent people leave their brains behind when it comes to technology" and quite without irony, didn’t realize that most of the audience thought this applied to her. 

I hate how this quote is being misused i.e. as a statement that really suggests ‘I know it all, you know nothing’. This is NOT what Diana meant, as she’s a considered person, as much against the lazy thinking as anyone. But it’s being used as an accusation towards people doing good things by people who are largely behind the curve or even worse haven't done their homework. In practice, the quote is probably best applied to the very people who quote it.

What also annoys me is the fact that so-called experts are being put on panels and talking about MOOCs, without having taken one or even doing the necessary research. I first experienced this at WISE in Doha Qatar, where the two people on a panel of four had not taken a MOOC and had cliched views about what they were. The same thing happened in a debate on MOOCs at Online Educa, where the two people arguing against MOOCs hadn't even looked at one. This is unacceptable, especially among academics and educators. At least do your homework.

I saw no reason for the inclusion of Debra in the programme. She was late, didn’t engage with the conference, had her head in the sand and said nothing that was either interesting or new. She claimed to be taking the strategic view (in a tone that suggested no one else was) but when asked what that was, couldn’t really say. The lively and excellent chair, Pierre Dillenbourg, lost patience and had a go at the end of her talk – “these people have paid to be here, why not tell us something”. Exactement!