Wonderful 'learning designer' pen portrait

Starting Out
by Sam Baynham (LINE Communications)

Looking back now, I knew very little about e-learning when I walked through the doors. I still don’t know how to capitalise it.

I was offered the job here at LINE about nine months ago, and I walked into LINE as an employee for the first time eight months ago. I had a worryingly blank desk that has since been strewn with about a thousand post-it notes and papers, a blank and uninviting e-mail account, and absolutely no clue what I was really getting into.

I learned quickly that the writing skills I thought I’d ’d been hired for were not the be-all-and-end-all of the job. In fact, they were only one part of the long, involved complex process that I was going to learn to be a part of.
Job one, of course, was finding the kettle. Job two was sitting down with my fellow trainees and my new line manager, Paul, to discuss the training schedule.

“Well,” said Paul, “Here’s what you’re going to learn in the next few months.”
Two hours later, he’d finished the list.
“And then of course, we can start your stage two training.”
-Stage two?
“Sure. There’s a few stages.”
Oh dear.

I don’t know quite what I’d expected, walking into a new field as a graduate trainee. I suppose I thought I’d get a few months of on-the-job training, then get on with it. As it was, I was writing course material very quickly, under the watchful eye of a senior designer, but the formal training process is still ongoing and will be for quite some time. Training sessions take place every Friday, with one of the senior designers bringing up a discussion point and the rest talking about it, arguing about it, drawing diagrams about it and generally getting stuck in.

In my first few months I learned a number of things. I learned that phrases like ‘a number of things’ are the enemy of good learning, and should be taken out the metaphorical back, stood up against the wall and shot. ‘There are a variety of…’, and ‘There are many reasons…’ are also enemies of the people, and deserve the same ruthless treatment.

These old friends of the waffling student writer have no place in learning because they don’t communicate anything, I discovered.
In fact, if I had to pinpoint the largest single thing I’ve learned in this job, it’s that writing and communicating can be decidedly different things. A learning designer must be an efficient communicator, able to file down complex information to a sharp point and present it to the learner in the leanest, most efficient form possible.
As well as all that, an LD must also be an explorer, searching the dark continents of content for the rare hooks that will engage and draw in the learner. Of course, that’s not all of what an LD is. An LD is also a scientist, and sometimes something of a detective, especially when it comes to background detail.

At this point, I know I sound a lot like I’ve drunk the corporate kool-aid, and I suppose I have to a certain extent. I’ve never had a job where people were so passionately involved in their work, and it’s infectious.
The passion doesn’t just end with the work that we’re doing at any one time, but extends to the field in general, with long discussions of the newest learning techniques.
In fact, the sheer volume of information and knowledge can be dizzying at times, but the involvement is incredible, and you can find yourself coming home at night with your head still fizzing from what you’ve learned in the day.

The things you learn are of course not limited to learning design technique.
I’ve tried a dozen times to explain to my Dad what a learning designer does, but he can’t quite believe I can write learning content about a subject of which I knew nothing a week before.

In truth, I sometimes don’t quite believe it. The absorption process for new information is one that no amount of training can really prepare you for, so you have to find something that works for you.

One week, you can be learning about correct oil rig construction, the next military weapon repair technique, or how to break into the retail banking sector. The information is diverse, and it needs to be absorbed fast, but it’s not the information that is the most essential part of the process. The subject matter experts (or SMEs) will provide you with the raw knowledge, so engaging with them is the real skill, and it’s not one that someone who’s used to writing in solitude gets used to quickly. (Obviously, the office is a lot nicer than a lonely garret. We have a coffee machine, for one thing, an entirely new addiction I’ve developed since I became a learning designer.)

SMEs, of course, want the best, but they also want to know that what you’ll produce for them will be the best representation of their work and effort. We build our courses together, pick them apart together, and often tug at loose threads from different ends. A successful project, I’ve learned, is as much about people skills as it is about learning and writing.

So I’m sitting at my desk, now looking a lot smarter and less unkempt than when I joined as a fey young student. I have the now ubiquitous cup of coffee and apple and I’m sitting at a computer that’s straining at its little virtual seams with things I’ve done or need to do. I’ve been part of the development of a new online tool for Learning Designers that has unified our knowledge, and now the Graphic Design team want one as well. One of my bosses has documents for me to proof, another has a new editing technology he needs testing. And I’m still a trainee, still a learner.

Even when I’m a full designer or even, heaven-forefend, a senior designer, I’m going to be learning for the rest of my career. This is, after all, a digital technology; It’s never going to stand still, there are going to be new technologies, new challenges and new projects, all of which I’m going to have to adapt to. Above all, there’s going to be new knowledge, new things to learn and to teach.

To be honest, even only eight months in, I don’t think I’d wouldn’t have it any other way.

'Pupils better than teachers with ICT' says Ofsted

I was going to write a piece on the recent OFSTED report, that was wildly misreported in the press, but Bob Harrison's done a far better job in this article.

I think a bnigger problem is the quality of the OFSTED inspectors. I've witnessed a few of these and the inspectors are often good, worthy but retired-out people who are somewhat distant from technology. If the pupils are better than many of the teachers, then believe me, they're a lot better than the inspectors.

The Class – a class act

French film ‘Entre les murs’ has for some reason been translated as ‘The Class’ and it’s a harrowing look at education in a French school. It’s the first French film in 21 years to win the Cannes Palme d’Or and is only bettered in its forensic examination of education, in my view, by the fourth series of The Wire. It tears into the a system that is falling apart around the ears of pupils and teachers alike, a system that is stuck in some sort of strange time warp.

Many films fall into the romanticising of education, whether it’s the Harry Potter public school genre or Dead Poets Society movies that portray teachers as superheroes. Few face up to the contemporary problems that The Class relentlessly explores. We experience nothing in the film but the claustrophobia of the classroom, staffroom or tiny concrete playground. The camera never leaves the school premises and the physical environment squeezes in on the pupils, teachers and occasional visiting parents. The school, like a prison, creates its own culture and conflicts. It is doomed to be a source of friction between all of the participants.

The pupils are far from being compliant learners. They’re feisty, questioning and don’t really see the point of the antiquated literature and teaching they’re expected to unquestioningly learn. Crushed into a tiny room, shoulder to shoulder, they’re a tough bunch to control. At the same time they’re full of life, charming, witty and certainly not stupid. The film lets the action run for nearly an hour without much in the way of narrative or plot, a brave thing to do, but it gives depth to the characters, which is the film’s strength. The kids are not mindless idiots and the teachers are not uncaring moaners or inspirational geniuses. The problem is quite simple; The Class – the claustrophobic class, is an artificial environment where people are forced to do things they don’t want to do, and inevitably clash. It leads to a tragic denouement with one of the pupils being expelled over a linguistic misunderstanding.

The film focuses on the language of learning, and classroom claustrophobia things I’ve blogged on before. The kids are eloquent about the things they know and love but monosyllabic about the things they’re being taught. Teaching seems to make them clam up. The exception is when they’re given the opportunity to express themselves on computers, using pictures they’ve taken on their mobiles. In other words, use the media they know well and they’ll flourish.

The acting, given the age of these kids, is superb and the director ping pongs between teacher and pupils to create a sense of real dialogue, conflict and sometimes respect, even admiration and love. At times it’s very moving. But don’t expect to walk out of the cinema feeling good about schools – it’s quite depressing in its analysis of a game that is almost designed to grind out to a long, drawn-out, nil-nil draw. Everyone’s gets on everyone else’s nerves. The staffroom talk is excruciating, and no doubt real. The kids go to school to watch the teachers work and the teachers grind away in a zero-sum game, where most of those in the class will not really make much progress. It’s heartbreaking to see the quiet girl, almost invisible for most of the film, comes up to the teacher at the end of the year and says she hadn’t understood anything.

Slumdog e-learning

Don't slam the Slumdog!
In early January I dared to criticise Slumdog Millionaire at a dinner, and got verbally lynched by several guests. These maulings have continued, and if you want to cause a lively argument at dinner or in the pub – slam into Slumdog. At the same time I posted a critical review of the film, interestingly, got some favourable comments about the film’s slum-porn and improbable plot, direct from India (such is the power of blogging).

E-learning inspired the story
It turns out that the inspiration for this film was Sugata Mitra’s fascinating ‘hole in the wall’ experiments. I met Sugata two years ago in Berlin, where I saw his superb presentation on computers placed in poor villages and slums in India.

Like me, Sugata Mitra told the original writer that he didn’t like the title and premise of the film and would have preferred a tale of escaping poverty through education, not the capricious and ridiculous idea of fate and a western quiz show, “that kind of plot would have been more in the spirit of my hole-in-the-wall project”. What Mitra didn't like was the celebrity culture promise of escape through luck and fame.

Mitra simply put these things in walls and let the kids get on with it, and the results are spectacular. They don’t vandalise the computers and quickly learn how to navigate and then learn English, maths and other subjects. It sounds almost surreal, but he has the video evidence to back up his findings. Delhi now has 48 computers in walls and when he asked these poor children what they wanted to do with Skype, they asked for an English grandmother to read them stories. This has now happened. That's a real fairytale and is truly inspiring, as it presents real solutions and ideas, not some sort of Mamma Mia, quiz show, feelgood fantasy.

Lessons learnt?
Technology is a liberating force in learning, especially when it is used outside of the classroom, in real world contexts. Give individuals the means to expand their own horizons and they do, even paying for the privilege. The majority of families and individuals in the developed world have paid relatively large sums from their own pockets to buy computers, internet access, mobiles and games consoles. This has led to a renaissance in communication, writing, exploration and curiosity. In the developed world we have just reached the point where the majority of people on the planet have a mobile phone. Yet education still adopts a siege mentality, keeping this stuff out side of the school, college and university gates. It’s people power that makes the difference and in the end it’s the consumer adoption of technology and content that has changed, and will continue to change, education.

Brain Rules - John Medina

Dr John Medina’s an eccentric, he’s also an academic, an American academic, and therefore not scared of getting his message out to practitioners. If only this were true in the UK. His book is readable, full of good examples and not short on serious research. All of this is supplemented by some excellent YouTube videos, a good website and blog.

12 Brain Rules

His 12 Brain Rules are a practical list of things you as a parent, learner or learning professional can immediately apply:

EXERCISE Rule 1: Exercise boosts brain power.
SURVIVAL Rule 2: The human brain evolved, too.
WIRING Rule 3: Every brain is wired differently.
ATTENTION Rule 4: We don't pay attention to boring things.
SHORT-TERM MEMORY Rule 5: Repeat to remember.
LONG-TERM MEMORY Rule 6: Remember to repeat.
SLEEP Rule 7: Sleep well, think well.
STRESS Rule 8: Stressed brains don't learn the same way.
SENSORY INTEGRATION Rule 9: Stimulate more of the senses.
VISION Rule 10: Vision trumps all other senses.
GENDER Rule 11: Male and female brains are different.
EXPLORATION Rule 12: We are powerful and natural explorers.

EXERCISE Rule 1: Exercise boosts brain power.
A sedentary lifestyle is bad for your brain and your grades. We evolved in an environment that punished sedentary activity –you’d starve or be eaten - with estimates of our ancestors walking 12 miles a day. Exercise boosts brainpower. To be specific the gold standard appears to be 30 mins of aerobic exercise, two or three times a week. He calls upon evidence from Blair, the 10,000 British Civil Servants trial and Yancey to recommend integrating regular exercise into schools and workplaces.

SURVIVAL Rule 2: The human brain evolved, too.
I’m less impressed by this rule. In fact it isn’t a rule as it’s not prescriptive, merely a description of how the brain evolved and differences in its function. Skip it.

WIRING Rule 3: Every brain is wired differently.
Our genetic inheritances and neuroplasticity mean we are all very different. This gets him back on track with some real recommendations around smaller class sizes and an education around attainment not attendance. He’s keen on e-learning, especially if it’s adaptive and provides good feedback, something that’s difficult in large classes. Finally, he goes as far as recommending a Manhattan-size research project to decide on optimal blends of teaching and technology

ATTENTION Rule 4: We don't pay attention to boring things.
Better attention means better learning. The ten minute drop off in attention in lectures/presentations should lead to lectures and presentations being bootstrapped at ten minute intervals through interaction, emotional or other attention-demanding events. Our attentional spotlight is so singularthat we DO NOT multitask. The Broadman Area 10 takes one input at a time – this is why using a mobile phone while driving is so dangerous. It is you imagining what’s going on in the other person’s head that is so dangerous. Brake onset times are slower in cellphone users than in drunk drivers! We CANNOT process multiple attention rich feeds. It’s not possible. We switch between tasks. He rubbishes the common perception that young people can multitask and damns the Mozart Effect. Interruptions can lead to it taking 50% longer to complete a task and a 50% increase in errors.

SHORT-TERM MEMORY Rule 5: Repeat to remember.
Memory is not simple. We have a variety of connected types of memory. This is important and has real and immediate implications for learning. First, realise that most learning results in forgetting if memory is not understood and strategies employed to prevent it. Encoding matters, especially elaborative encoding, the elaboration through meaning, connection, emotion and other techniques, and results in dramatic improvements in recall. The more handles you put on memories the easier they are to haul back into consciousness. Context and relevant, real-world examples have been shown to be elaborative, a strong argument, he states, for not learning in the disembodied world of the classroom.

LONG-TERM MEMORY Rule 6: Remember to repeat.
Semantic and episodic memory, along with its subset autobiographical memory, are explained but it is the recommendations around maintenance rehearsal, through spaced practice, that make this the best chapter of the book, and the best rule. Think or talk about things immediately after they’ve happened and follow Ebbinghaus and Wagner’s research in spacing out your practice. Dan Schacter’s excellent The Seven Sins of Memory gets a mention and he strongly recommends shorter learner episodes of learning, interleaved and spread across time, rather than the normal fixed, long doses. To keep it simple, repeat what was learned in the morning again in the afternoon. He would love the recent trial on spaced practice in Teeside.

SLEEP Rule 7: Sleep well, think well.
In China last year I saw children in schools put down for a nap after lunch. This was regarded as normal. Why? Sleep loss means memory loss. Offline processing during sleep matters. Sleep is needed for learning, as you will replay it over and over again. Sleep is your internal teacher. Enough said.

STRESS Rule 8: Stressed brains don't learn the same way.
An interesting chapter as it relies heavily on the work of John Gottman, and his research around parental conflict and its effect on the attainments of their children. Here, I think, he relies too much on parent induced stress and not enough on school induced stress – bullying, test pressure, peer pressure and so on. In any case, stress in harmful to learning, whatever the source, so learn in a calm, quiet environment.

SENSORY INTEGRATION Rule 9: Stimulate more of the senses.
E-learning gets a mention again through the good work of Mayer, who recommends learning content that has simultaneously presented words and pictures, not text alone, with extraneous noise excluded and multisensory lessons. I didn’t know that Starbucks bans employees from wearing perfumes – detracts from the coffee smells apparently.

VISION Rule 10: Vision trumps all other senses.
We do not see with our eyes, we see with our brains. What a great sentence. PSE Pictorial Superiority Effect is so pervasive that we can remember thousands of faces and pictures after just brief exposure. We were constantly on the move when we evolved and have sensory systems that expect this, with our attention raised in vision, preferring images and moving animation. He recommends far more pictures and animation in education, training and presentations.

GENDER Rule 11: Male and female brains are different.
This is a very strange chapter and a bit muddled. He makes a great play of differences, but doesn’t recommend different approaches to learning.

EXPLORATION Rule 12: We are powerful and natural explorers.

The brain has an evolutionary envelope and has evolved to solve dynamic problems while moving in an outdoor environment. So how would you design a learning environment? A classroom? Two interesting ideas emerge at the end of the book. First schools designed around the ‘Medical School’ example where there’s a strong theory/practice mixture. You learn through clinical practice in a real, practising hospital, as well as academically. This was an idea put forward by Dewey many years ago, and long overdue. Second, a teacher training college that focuses on brain science.

Neuroastrology

What Medina really hates is neuroastrology, the spurious use of neuroscience in learning, such as the Mozart effect, right/left brain theories and so on. Both of these are mentioned in the booklet given to parents from the school my kids attend. Teachers in education are largely in the business of brain development (the only exception is PE) yet they are strangely ignorant of most brain science and the classroom is an anti-brain environment.

"If you wanted to create an education environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you probably would design something like a classroom. And if you wanted to change things, you might have to...start over."

Head of Digital Engagement -old disengaged duffer wanted

Interesting ad for a rather odd job. Isn't this simply a resurrected 'e-envoy' job that Andrew Pindar had some years back? When confused simply invent a role, quango, project, institution, academy or whatever; launch it with much pzzaazz, then watch it produce a long unreadable, and rarely read report, that is out of date as soon as it is published, become obsessed with its own survival, until finally some future Minister says - what do these guys actually do? Then order the flowers for the funeral. Alternatively it will linger on and die a slow and painful death, sustained by a drip feed of residual funding.

In an attempt to juice up the Job Description, and 'get down with the kids', among the endless life sapping, jobsworth tasks, is the peculiar, 'Introduces new techniques and software for digital engagement, such as 'Jams' into Government'. What the hell is a ‘jam’? The last time this was tried - BBC Jam – several tens of millions were wasted. The job is doomed from the start, as it seems to focus on writing a strategy report, with all the usual bullshit about being able to liaise with ministers, civil servants, industry and so on.

Hire a maverick

To be effective they need to hire a maverick who can work within the online world, using those tools to create change; not a report writing, policy wonk. Don’t hire someone whose career has been in a big IT department or big corporate – they’re blockers not innovators. Don’t hire a luvvie from the BBC, broadcast TV or film background – that’s fatal. Don’t hire someone who wears a bad suit, with a combination lock briefcase, and feels uncomfortable not wearing a tie. Make sure they have a credible history disrupting, blogging, social networking, tweeting etc. Hire a trouble maker. No doubt we'll get some worthy or ex-corporate IT guy like Leitch or Pindar, even worse from another quango, who likes to churn out endless platitudes about globalisation in print and thinks that Twitter is a make of birdseed.

Sector Skills Councils don’t have the skills

Most of the people I know who are engaged in real delivery of learning have little or no knowledge of the Sector Skills Councils. They can’t name them and often don’t know which one represents them. What Sector Skills Council do you e-learning people belong to? What do you mean you don’t know? Let me put forward a few candidates.

Skillset – learning for luvvies

Skillset, like the media supplement of the Guardian on a Thursday, still lives under the illusion that the internet is a passing fad, and that film and TV are the ‘real’ media. Its own website always puts Film, TV, radio and animation (in that order) above that nasty upstart – web, games, etc. Its board is so dominated by TV and film types that it can’t possibly cover web-based industries.

Clive Jones GMTV, Stewart Till UK Film Council, David Blaikley Warner Bros. Distributors, Paul Brown The Radio Centre, Andrew Chitty Illumina Digital (TV), Gaynor Davenport UK Screen Association, Jeremy Dear,NUJ, Julia Dell five, Marion Edwards Red and Blue Productions (TV), Donald Emslie Scottish Media Group plc, Michael Fegan ITV News Group, Diane Herbert Channel 4, Iona Jones S4C, Ian Livingstone Eidos, Nigel McNaught Photo Marketing Association International, John McVay Producers' Alliance for Cinema and Television (PACT), Ian Morrison Carlyle Media, Christine Payne Equity - The British Actors Union, Dot Prior BBC, Mairead Regan UTV plc, Martin Spence BECTU, John Woodward UK Film Council

Is it any wonder that all of us working in what these old broadcasters call ‘new media’ are blissfully unaware of Skillset. What these people know about the web could be written on a pixel. Perhaps it should be renamed as ‘Skilluv’ with the strapline - ‘Skills for Luvvies’. 

Lifelong Learning UK Council - stops dead at 22

Licensed over four years ago, this organisation is almost invisible. Learning for these people is the antithesis of ‘lifelong’, for them it’s formal Tertiary Education. Astoundingly, it has ‘workplace learning’ in its remit, a difficult ball to juggle as there’s no serious input from employers on their board. It’s basically a bunch of University and College administrators with a couple of librarians thrown in for good measure.

As it says on its website, ‘The strategic significance of Lifelong Learning UK cannot be underestimated.’ True, it’s not underestimated: it’s completely ignored. I haven’t come across a soul in the learning industry who knows that it even exists. Apparently, ‘employers ...will look to this SSC for the standards and qualifications of the people who deliver learning in their own workforce.’ That would be good if employers knew it existed. It will also be taking, ‘strategic actions that will impact as much on the supply side as on the demand side.’ Lovely, but neither side know that it exists. So who are these people and what have they being doing for the last four years?

Lifelong learning? It’s actually about lifelong teaching, not lifelong learning, as no private sector supplier gets a look in. The board has not one person from the private sector or representing the private sector training industry. LLUK has a policy of maintaining reserves at a level which would meet the costs of maintaining and closing down the offices over a 3 - 6 month period. Now there’s an idea!

E-skills - well maybe BT skills

I had some dealings with e-skills, an outfit ridden with dissent and organisationally dysfunctional. It had the ‘Towards maturity’ campaign foisted upon it and Laura Overton is doing a grand job here, but they’re sleepwalking when it comes to e-learning and technology in learning. Its strategic plan is full of that general rhetoric one finds in all quangos – ‘emerging new world order...global economy...’ Its National Skills Academy will cost £60 million – what a waste of time and money. The National Skills Academy is fronted by Dragons' Den millionaire Peter Jones, who made loads of money for appearing in BT ads that encourage small businesses to outsource IT (the academy was launched by BT’s CEO Butler). Rather than improve the existing system, or invest in workplace learning, we invent another institution. These agencies simply spawn other entities.

Any the wiser?

The sad truth is that these organisations are not representative of employers or the supply side of the learning industry. If they disappeared tomorrow nothing would change. The solution is to simply stop all of this now. They are a million miles away from the real world of training, which is not obsessed with qualifications and largely ignores educational institutions.

These organisations are already widely believed to be ineffective and way behind the learning curve. You’d imagine that organisations specifically set up to advance the skills agenda would understand something about, well ‘skills’. Don’t believe a word of it. Their skills in terms of their core function are largely non-existent. They know little about learning and are largely ignorant of the role which technology does and can play in learning, the ‘close to retirement’ brigade who lack the agility to really innovate. They have to be relicensed by the National Audit Office, so let’s hope they have the balls to shut down the ones that aren’t working. 

Susan Greenfield - science and snobbery

Does screen-based media change our brains?

Susan Greenfield, the Topshop dressing Professor of pharmacology at Oxford, is all over the news at the moment promoting her dodgy book The Quest for identity in the 21st century. After a quick introduction to brain science through the concept of plasticity, genetics via single gene therapy, the London cabbie experiment and the piano experiment, she gets to the point – is ‘screen-based’ media changing our brains? All cognitive activity changes our brains, but the real question is - from what to what?

As a species we are unique in our ability to learn and adapt, primarily because of our brain size, which is capped due to our skulls and the need to come down the birth canal. The brain is a very plastic and dynamic organ subject to constant change, so much so that every human is unique and different from every other human in history. This seemed like a very obvious point but she makes much of it. She presents this as if it were sound science but there are many in her field who would see her explanation as leaning too far towards the ‘blank slate’ end of the spectrum. Indeed she actually uses the phrase ‘tabula rasa of the infant’ on p229, something very few scientists would dare to do. Her argument is that genes are necessary but not sufficient. This is quite simply wrong – insome cases genes are necessary and sufficient. Genetic diseases such as single-gene defects, multiple gene disporders and chromosomal defects are common. As it is the premise for her entire book, if it is false, she’s in some trouble. The mind is certainly not a blank slate, it is also shaped by genetics.

The examples she quotes are well known, and indeed fascinating. London cabbies have large hippocampuses, as they need bigger working memories. The discovery of the role of the hippocampus in memory is fascinating, with work by Kandel (Nobel Prize) and others leading the way. Just as interesting was the ‘piano practice’ research by Pasceuel et al (1995), where those that simply rehearsed piano practice in their mind showed the same brain activity as those who did the real thing. Hold on - this seems to suggest that virtual mental rehearsal, as opposed to real-life experience is just as effective in learning - the opposite of her later arguments.

Cyber-world!

You’ve got to worry when Baby Boomers like Greenfield boom out the word ‘Cyber-world’, it’s so 1980s, and a sure sign that they don’t actually know much about technology and the web. There’s much talk, but little evidence, about technology ‘softening our sense of identity’. Indeed, she’s drops unsubstantiated anecdotes like a pub raconteur. For example, on p6, ‘One particularly depressing anecdote I heard after 9/11…there were some who couldn’t really believe that the planes crashing into the Twin Towers…were actually real…so similar were the events to some games’. OMG!

This is where she literally abandons science for speculation. Her big idea is that technology, in particular ‘screen-based culture’, MAY be CHANGING young brains. She was quick to add that she ‘didn’t want to be judgemental on this, as the jury is out’. So far so good. But no, she becomes very judgemental, shifting from MAY to 'DOES' and CHANGING to 'DAMAGING'.

Her categories – Someone, Nobody, Anyone are laughable. The younger generation are in danger of becoming Nobodies, whereas she and her Baby Boomer mates are all Somebodies. This is her crude triumvirate. It’s simplistic, and even if true, her real mistake was to confuse the medium with the message. This is an exercise in crude, unscientific categorisation – and it doesn’t wash. She needs to take a first year course in philosophy.

Dodgy survey

She quotes, without reference, ‘one recent survey’ as showing that children between 8-18 spend 6.5 hours per day online. She raises this, spuriously, to 8.5 hours due to multitasking. It’s a not so recent (March 2005) US only survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation, and is certainly not a respected authority on such matters. This statistic has been used by the right wing press for some time. In fact it’s a con. The statistic includes TV (3.51 hours), radio/music (1.44) and online a mere (1.52).

The book v screen debate is another of her false dichotomie. The web is full of text; articles, blogs, wikis, journals, even books. It’s where I buy most of my many books. Her attack on all things virtual is based on a simplistic idea of what virtual experiences offer. There’s been a renaissance in literacy on the web and has she never seen an e-book reader? The whole concept of screentime is complex and reduced here to a simple abstraction.

She loves books (text is her thing) but doesn't really understand that the internet is still largely a text medium. Kids read a lot online, used sophisticated communications tools, Wikipedia, Google and so on. It is semantically rich. Her view was that the internet was episodic, all images and no words. Interestingly, she didn’t attack the Baby Boomer media of film or television, the two most dominant forms of screen based media. ‘Suspension of disbelief’ (a phrase she carefully avoids) is OK it seems, as long as it’s on the media she’s familiar with, books, film and TV.

Her solution
Her solution is a future where creativity was a primary goal. What she forgets is that the internet’ has promoted massive levels of creativity, opening up opportunities for personal creativity, user-generated content, music composition, video, personal photography, blogs (text),wikis’ (text), social networking, collaboration, sharing and so on. We are witnessing a renaissance of creativity and communication. More people are better educated and it’s about time the Baby Boomers stopped carping on about the internet, (which they all use to buy books, book their fancy holidays and generally keep the world and wealth to themselves). It’s always tempting for academics to worship the book and their world as intrinsically superior. They’d love us to believe that bookish people are, by definition, better people. I don’t buy this. They really are a smug lot!

This book by the Baroness (only in the UK do we love these feudal monikers) is actually rather rushed, and overlong on personal musings and surprisingly low on science. All pretence at objectivity goes quickly out of the door. However, it does raise interesting cognitive questions, that are probably best answered by others.

Singularity University - the twilight zone

Singularity University? De di de do, de di de do. The name seems like a bit of hubris from Ray Kurzweil (one of its founders) and the prices are astronomical at $25k for a 10 week course, but despite the economic downturn, it’s due to open in June 09. Unashamedly ‘techy’ with a focus on biotechnology, nanotechnology, computing, robotics, space, AI and so on, but curiously, it has more of a religious feel than a university, its stated goal being to solve humanity’s greatest challenges – hunger, poverty, climate change, energy and disease. In fact it has all the hallmarks of a ‘Kurzweil and Diamontis’ cult.

“Singularity University aims to assemble, educate and inspire a cadre of leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies and apply, focus and guide these tools to address humanity’s grand challenges.” All in a 3 or 10 day course.

A focused attempt to bring together top minds to solve immediate problems may sound utopian, but given the scale and number of the problems, could we give them the benefit of the doubt?

I’m afraid not. There’s several problems here. Kurzweil’s singularity concept is nowhere near a strong enough concept to act as the brand for a major educational institution. It’s not quite as bad as the Trump University, but not far off. Diamantis is a huckster, who seems more interested in private sector space travel, at whatever environmental cost, than solving global problems. In fact, when you look at the faculty, the claim that "We are reaching out across the globe...” is laughable. It’s almost all US faculty, with far too many of Diamantis’s ‘space-buddy’s’ (Robert Richards, Michael Simpson) on the Board, and faculty. Looks like a get rich quick scam.

Anatomy of a classroom: think out of the box

"If you wanted to create an education environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you probably would design something like a classroom. And if you wanted to change things, you might have to...start over." Dr John Medina

 

Out of the box At a Futurelab conference, while I waited to give a keynote talk, the organiser gave us all a piece of card, which you could fold up into a box. We were told to ‘think out of the box’, write fresh ideas on each face, then fold it up, to create ideas on the ‘outside of the box’ (geddit). My first scribble was ‘the classroom’s a box’. The other five were, ‘don’t box-in technology – keep it out of classrooms’, ‘whiteboards are blackboards’, ‘class is a soapbox’, ‘class is limiting factor’, ‘Pandora’s box – unexpected consequences’.

Just days after this event, I started a series of classroom visits, as a school governor, in my children’s secondary school. Teaching hadn’t really changed in the 30 years since I’d last been in a classroom as a boy, with exactly the same dynamic between largely distracted learners and hard working teachers. A few lessons were exemplary, but the truth was that in many others, the students were not engaged, easily distracted and learning very little, sometimes nothing at all. We need to face up to this challenge and think outside of the box that is the ‘classroom’.

Pandora’s box The class, or period, is the basic unit of currency of education. It is the formal box into which everything must be unthinkingly squeezed. But cramming people into a classroom has all sorts of unexpected consequences, not all good. In terms of learning, they are often bad. The classroom is a Pandora’s box, where dysfunctional things can happen simply because it’s a classroom. Most of the time, these problems are contained by the hard pressed teacher, but as young people become increasingly less compliant as learners, it can be depressingly ineffective, erupt into a hothouse of hostility, sometimes collapse into chaos (I witnessed all three). Yet there’s very little reflection on whether the basic classroom is the optimal location for learning. In education, most pedagogic and technological debate simply assume that the classroom should be the primary focus of learning. 

Soapbox

One of the indirect consequences of the dominance of classroom teaching, is that the teacher, by definition, becomes the focus of attention. The learners face one way, and there’s a dominant space where the teacher sits/stands. The teacher adapts to the threat of the crowd by claiming this wall, corner or space at the ‘front’ and the learners cram, as best they can, into a space that is unnaturally small for 30 plus energetic students. It’s difficult to concentrate and levels of attention are almost impossible to sustain in such a crowded, distracting environment. This pushes the teacher’s into a soapbox role. The whole dynamic is set up to encourage a forced, didactic form of teaching where teachers feel duty bound to play the role of classroom manager and lecturer. Top-down lecture methods are still the norm in universities and as degrees are required for teacher training and lectures still practiced in teacher training, so there’s enormous modelling pressure to ‘teach by lecture’ (Brightman 2007). We know that teachers do too much talking and not enough teaching. As a defence mechanism, inexperienced teachers end up keeping learners quiet by being didactic, talking at them. We know that this often results in cognitive overload for learners, a failure to differentiate and low levels of personalised feedback. Teachers get trapped in this soapbox role as their backs are against the wall.

Personal space

Classrooms are often cramped, pushing young people into uncomfortably close contact with each other, causing niggles and a never-ending series of petty distractions. They poke, kick, snigger, talk, doodle, throw things and disrupt others. Distraction is such a confined space is viral. 30+ learners in a relatively small space is a recipe for disaster. They seemed programmed to play and boxing them into tight spaces creates well know territorial problems. This is an area well studied in psychology. Hall described the ‘emotionally charged bubble of space which surrounds each individual’ and research by Felipe and Sommer (1966) showed extreme discomfort among people who have their personal space invaded. Fifty years of research have shown that this matters in terms of psychological discomfort. Classrooms break almost every rule in the book on territoriality. On top of this, to move from class to class means that the learner has no defined territory, and cannot mark and defend their personal territory. The learner is set adrift. These territorial spaces, such as one’s bedroom or favourite chair, are a feature of one’s identity. Classrooms deny almost every aspect of this basic human need. 

Boxed in

Given what we know about the brain and learning the last thing we’d design is the classroom. We evolved in the open savanna, and our brains are designed to solve problems in open environments on the move. We are have not evolved to be sedentary learners in a sealed box. Our evolutionary envelope is not that of the classroom, it is a set of cognitive dispositions that demand interest to gain our attention. The mind has its own box from which it must escape to learn. This is where we should focus our attention. Talking of attention, we need to be psychologically attentive, calm and focused to learn. This is the starting point for learning, without it, learning does not take place. As psychological attention is needed for learning, 30 other people in such a small space means that the room is crammed with distractions. For young children this means wanting to play, flee or fight with others in the room. With teenagers, there’s the powerful sexual distraction of at least fifteen or more potential mates, the other half being competition. Then there’s the windows, promising that longed for freedom. Classrooms are a cornucopia of distractions, which is why so much time and effort is put into behaviour management and not learning. The context is so unnatural that the teacher’s efforts are mostly spent on control. This is why the job is so exhausting. The children go to school to watch teachers work. Spaced practice, a proven, fundamental, scientific fact in the psychology of learning, is largely ignored because it is difficult to accommodate in timetabled, classroom structures. Dr John Medina had trialled spaced practice with mathematics, showing powerful increases in learning, by repeating practice later in the afternoon after morning sessions. A similar trial in a Teeside school showed significant improvements in GCSE grades. It works, but unfortunately it can’t be made to work within the classroom model. Timetables cripple any attempt at repeated practice and most teachers are unaware of the basics of this practice. Learners are boxed in psychologically in a classroom. It’s crowded, rushed and distracting with not enough room to focus, explore and learn. On top of this, it excludes the opportunities to apply, practice and reinforce what you’ve learnt. One has to repeat to remember. 

Madness of moving

Why do hundreds of thousands of students have to up sticks and walk to another room every hour? Can you imagine this in any other walk of life? Let’s say in companies and organisations up and down the land every employee had to stand up and march off from one box to another, every hour. The amount of time spent just packing up, rising, walking, sitting down again and unpacking is astounding. Huge amounts of time, every day, by learners, crushed into corridors, which are rife with friction and bullying. It’s madness. In fact, the one hour period, in itself, is rather odd. There’s nothing in the psychology of learning that points towards an ‘hour’ being a basic unit in learning. We only have hours because the Babylonians had a base-60 number system! We could at least have just three learning periods a day; one up to first break, the second up to lunch, and one after lunch. It can be done. I know, as we’ve implemented this in our own school.

Black boxes

Technology fits uneasily into a classroom. We’ve seen technology get smaller, faster, smarter, easier to use, wireless, connected and cheaper. It’s personal and portable, not fixed to any one location. All of this is at odds with the very idea of the classroom. Technology provides, by definition, personalised learning. There is barely a child or student in the land that doesn’t have a powerful computer, whether it be a mobile phone, PC, Mac or laptop. It is now clear that one laptop per child is a laudable aim and gets learning content, contact and collaboration into the pockets of learners. Contrast this with the rather quaint and useless Multi-user table top classroom computers being mooted at present. If you design technology to fit classrooms you get these ugly, expensive classroom-driven aberrations. Technology frees learning from the tyranny of time and location, to screw it down inside classrooms is to abolish those freedoms and advantages. Classroom geography demands a dominant wall, with a whiteboard. There is no evidence for their efficacy, other than anecdote. Indeed, Professor Frank Coffield claims that ‘the two major studies in the UK show no significant effect on learning’. Tech-savvy children feel frustrated when they see the teacher struggle with simple tasks as they are used to being in control of their online environments. It’s odd for them to simply watch online material on a large screen under someone else’s control. The blackboard was invented in 1870 and we are in danger of keeping it alive well by its sell-by date. It promotes a ‘chalk and talk’ approach to teaching which is at odds with the psychology of learning.

If technology is to be used sensibly in learning it must be embedded in the learning process, not fixed to the walls and tables in classrooms. Consumer demand for small, smart, cheap, wireless devices seems insatiable. This tells us something.

Staffroom as a box

When Malcolm Gladwell was asked what one thing would most improve education he replied, ’Abolishing teacher staffrooms’. He may have been right – a survey published in 2007 showed that teachers top the worst ‘gossips at work’ poll, with 79% talking about their colleagues behind their back. John Taylor Gatto, a National award winning teacher in the US gave up teaching quoting one of the reasons as he could no longer stand the culture of the staffroom. Teachers may lose rank among their peer group if they don’t join in the gossip (Nias 1989) and, worse, may be subjected to rumour and gossip if they shun the classroom (Rosenholz 1989). These studies show troubled teachers, in particular, being at risk. Kainan’s 1994 study of staffrooms found that they were largely simple, colourless, monotonous, devoid of clear functionality and were often split into several cliques; veteran, novice, supply and student teachers. It was a clear hierarchy. Worse than this is the Hammersly study in (1984) that found conversation about students and their parents/carers, was largely condemnatory. Is there a case for scrapping school staffrooms? No other professions have a ‘panic room’ just for managers to chill out, so why have school staff rooms? Surely that’s exactly the time when students are at their most vulnerable in terms of bullying? It’s out of the box, but interesting.

Conclusion

Being boxed in, physically and psychologically, is perhaps the primary problem in learning. It’s unnatural, cramped, at odds with the psychology of learning and a management nightmare. Teachers are overwhelmed by over-stimulated and territorially challenged youngsters, and forced into shouting, soapbox behaviour, demanding that ‘work’ be started, continued and finished. This is no way to run a learning organisation. For once, let’s think out of the box, and design learning around learners, not teachers and buildings.

I should add that I'm not arguing for the scarapping of all classrooms and all classroom learning, only appealing for a balance between this and other contexts for delivery, which include; open learning spaces, libraries, large audience events teaching hundreds at a time, e-learning, home learning, event learning, museum and gallery learning, workplace learning, outside in the sun learning and so on.

By the way, when Pandora opened her box, against the wishes of Zeus, all the evils, ills and diseases of mankind escaped, but at the very bottom there lay ‘hope’.

E-learning a winner in US Stimulus Bill

E-learning a winner in US Stimulus Bill

In a matter of days the economic stimulus plan in the US will be passed in Congress, and, barring any amendments, e-learning looks like a winner. A pile of money is being spent in double quick time, in line with the stimulus idea.

$1 billion of new funds have been added to the existing $267 million in the Enhancing Education Through Technology (EETT) program. 50% of the money will go directly to Title 1 schools and 50% through competitive grants. 25% of the money a school district receives has to be spent on professional development. The expected timescale is fast, with $500 million going to states in July 2009, to be used by September 2010, and the other $500 million in July 2010, to be spent by September 2011.

On top of this, there is $6 billion for broadband and wireless services in underserved areas to strengthen the economy and provide business and job opportunities in every section of America with benefits to e-commerce, education, and healthcare. In the Senate version there is $9 billion for the National Telecommunications and Information Administration's Broadband Technology Opportunities Program to improve access to broadband. This very likely will help school districts, especially in rural areas.

Now that is bold.

Compare it to the incredibly woolly and confused text in the Digital Britain Interim Report on Education and skills (they actually mean education, not skills) and warble on endlessly, using ten year old new labour ‘Creative Industries’ language. Cool Britannia lives on, if only in the minds of official government report writers.

Can ‘skills’ be learnt online?

Google, Wikipedia and other services are great for learning ‘knowledge’, but skills are different. A useful starting point is to replace the crude knowledge/skills distinction with a more sophisticated view of performance, based on types of memory.

Declarative – conscious recall

Semantic – non contextual knowledge

Episodic – contextualised by time and place

Procedural - skills

Prospective – remembering to remember

When the ‘knowledge/skills’ debate is unpacked like this, in terms of actual encoding and recall, it’s more complex, so this is a much better way of answering our initial question, as the web and technology is useful in all of these forms of learning. In practice skills acquisition involved knowledge acquisition.

Declarative – semantic

Semantic – non contextual knowledge

The web and technology have allowed us to develop simple skills around searching, bookmarking and retrieval, which allow us to rely less on the conscious remembering of factual knowledge. Google, Wikipedia and other more detailed and specific services, such as Google Scholar, Google Books and Amazon’s search within a book feature, all help us outsource and lessen the need for declarative, semantic memory. In this sense we have developed a set of skills – search, bookmark etc – that have replaced the need for detailed encoding and recall from long-term memory. However, knowledge still needs to be acquired. Blogging gives both bloggers and readers the reinforcement of semantic knowledge, improving their ability to learn and recall by committing their knowledge and observations to print. Facebook and other social networking increases the social contacts and encounters, strengthening one’s knowledge and recall of knowledge exchanged with friends and contacts. There’s also evidence that all of this online activity and games playing holds off dementia and other features of mental decline. . We write more, look things up more, read more and learn more, so I’d say that declarative, semantic memory has been hugely amplified, improved and enhanced since the appearance of the web and technology.

Declarative - episodic

Learning and recall, contextualised by time and place, has been similarly enhanced by the web and technology. First we capture much more of our autobiographical past through digital photographs, video and audio. Even if we don’t do it ourselves, others may be recording our talks as podcasts and so on. The tools that allow us to store these episodic memories, allow us to retrieve, alter, enhance and distribute such episodes, all the while reinforcing them in our own memories. My travel blog and photographs has greatly enhanced my ability to recall and use the things I’ve learnt from my travels. We now know that our brains have a specific module for remembering faces. This, I believe, has been enhanced through the use of social networking. Putting faces to names is something I can do much better, since I’ve become a frequent social networker, as I’m being constantly exposed to those faces, linked to their names. Visual memories are being reinforced all the time on the web as we see so many relevant visual images online, of people, places, things and events. YouTube has given me almost instant access to short pieces from opinion leaders (TED), politicians, talks, speeches and so on. I can recall dozens of useful things from theses short, episodic videos. Similarly with podcasts. They are much more memorable that TV because I’ve sought them out and they’ve had my full attention.

Procedural - skills

But this is the big one, as it’s the one most relevant to the ‘skills’ debate. The distinction between ‘knowing that’ and knowing how’ has been around since the Greeks, and recently we’ve seen the rise of the ‘How to...’ sites. These differ from the ‘Knowing that’ sites, such as Wikipedia, in that they show you how to DO things. ‘How to’ is the most commonly asked question on the web and ‘How to’ searches account for around 3% of all searches in the US. So skills acquisition has become an entire genre on the web.

An analysis of these ‘How to’ by Bill Tancer, in his book Click, show seasonal variations in the questions asked with a peak during summer and decline in winter. There’s also considerable national and cultural differences. What’s the No 1 ‘How to’ question in the US? It’s held its position for four years now; ‘How to tie a tie’. American kids don’t usually wear uniforms and ties at school, so rarely pick up the skill until they go to work. In some countries the top spot is ‘How to vote’ or ‘How to write a CV’. There’s then lots of ‘How to’ searches by teens around ‘How to kiss/have sex/make out etc’. There’s also ‘How do I find a girlfriend/flirt’ and other anatomical questions. These may sound shocking or trivial, but they’re not to a 13 year old. A whopping 17.3% of ‘How to’ searches are in this category.

YouTube and other sites are packed with skills videos on IT and software. This is increasingly shown, not as text help, but in video form, so that you can store, stop, repeat and learn. Want to know how to do something in Photoshop or make a video or podcast, there’s a video somewhere showing you how. In fact, when you explore the topic of skills, two things strike you; first the sheer range of skills, secondly their practicality. People have lots of skills deficits and need help there and then. One could call these ‘Life Skills’. This is something that education and training are notoriously bad at. Courses are often wide of the mark because they’re too knowledge-based, long-winded, inconvenient, expensive, out of date or simply irrelevant. Another feature of online skills, is the enormous scale of the direct help provided by altruistic people who have these skills to people who need help. The web is awash with willing experts on almost every subject.

If you look at the skills one can learn online, here’s 10 main categories:

1. Specific tasks

How to tie a tie

How to solve a Rubik’s Cube

How to draw

2. Sexual

How to kiss

How to have sex

How to flirt

3. Health

How to lose weight

How to deal with allergies

How to get fit/do a sport

4. Wealth

How to make money

How to get bargains

How to manage debt

5. Computer skills

How to get rid of a virus

How to remove software

How to use software

6. Careers

How to get a job

How to get promotion

How to careers advice

7. Education

How to pass a test

How to choose a course

How to teach

8. Food and drink

How to cook

How to buy wine

How to entertain

9. Home & garden

How to fix things

How to grow things

How to build things

10. Complex skills

How to write a book

How to manage a team

How to get a divorce

Prospective – remembering to remember

You need to remember to pick up your charging mobile phone before you leave tomorrow morning or take that pill. This is not remembering the past, it’s remembering to remember in the future, an amazing cognitive ability. It is tempting to see memory wholly in terms of the past, but we all have to remember to do things in the future. Learning works when it is applied. To do this our brains need cues to remind us. This is terribly important in the application of learning, where what we have learnt has to be applied in the real world. The curious thing about such ‘memories’ is that they seem to just ‘pop’ into your mind. One school of thought (attention is necessary) claims that we need to be attentive, constantly monitoring to recall the intention. Another school (multiprocess) claims that attention and monitoring is not necessary. Whatever the mechanism, an understanding of what we need to do to encourage prospective memory is important in learning. We need to know how to store learning experiences so that prospective memory is used to best effect. It would seem that deliberately designed ‘representations’ to aide prospective memory really do work and that these need to be part of the learning process.

The web and technology gives us useful tools or aide memoires to help us practically. Outlook, Google Calendar, alerts, project plans, to do lists, intelligent suggestions in Amazon, birthday reminders in Facebook, and so on. This is convincing enough in itself, but is it a skill that can be improved through the use of the web and technology. I think so. These tools promote an approach to future planning that encourage future recall by having always on cues. If I don’t actually remember, then I have the skill and access to tools that do the job for me. I know (in the sense of having a skill) to look at my calendar etc.

Conclusion

Those who claim that skills can’t be leant from the web need to look at the evidence. This avalanche of skills activity wouldn’t exist if it didn’t work. Millions now increase their skills through ‘How to’ queries, and many others seem more than willing to help. All of this is completely outside of the formal education and training system. Maybe it’s about time it was brought into the fold.