Distractions

Distractions
Circa AD 160 Marcus Aurelius writes:
"Do external things distract you? Then make time for yourself to learn something worthwhile; stop letting yourself be pulled in all directions."

Learning goes on, for sure - but it is driven by the myrid of minor challenges that gather like flies around our working day. When we ask about why people do not take time to learn something worthwhile they will generally say that 'they are too busy'. The same reason is given in large organisations the world over.

The irony, of course, is that for many organisations if a person's learning does not address some immediate challnge - then it is not, by definition, worthwhile.
I can't remember who it was who said that the problem with the modern person was that they are unable simply to endure their own, silent, company - but it does seem characteristic of our digital dwelling that we are fallen into distraction: if you take the train you notice the constant (almost frantic) fumbling between phone, i-pod and PDA - and I suppose these have become almost necessary distractions.

A world in which we learn less and use more, a world in which we contribute and consider less, endlessly distracted: hardly hyperbole - over the weekend I watched some teenagers watching sky: of all the available channels they chose to watch a music channel with text messages overlaid on the bottom part of the screen. Strange distractions.

Instruments of capture

Instruments of Capture
It strikes me that there is an interesting spectrum that lies between the passive capture of information about someone (e.g. building a profile of an individual by auditing their various activities) and technologies that enable people to contribute more proactively (e.g. where you are encouraged to complete your online profile).

Trends may be heading in the direction of the former: perhaps indexing your emails for their knowledge content would provide a more complete KM platform than forums and wikkis?
On a separate note, it never ceases to amaze me how slow the e-learning industry has been to learn: I read a blog today to the effect that we are only now to be entitled to talk about e-learning (by contrast to e-training), since our interventions to date have not been sufficiently client-centred.

God's bread! it makes me mad: learning professionals with nothing more to boast about than that they are finally grasping what their learners were doing ten years ago. We don't need to encourage student 'ownership' - they already 'own' the information because they learned how to use Google; the question is what - if any - 'ownership' remains for the learning professional. Our learners have been 'doing it for themselves' for a while now - the real questions are around what role we might have to play.

If you sit and take stock of just how much easier it is to learn these days, it is almost unbelievable: I can learn climbing techniques by video using altavista's multimedia search; I can download hours of interactive tutorials on photoshop using p2p; likewise I can learn Cantonese as I drive thanks to availability of mp3s. I can learn how a Cisco router works - infamously, how to build an atomic weapon. Offhand I can't think of anything that I can't learn about within the next few hours, given the search tools available to me.

Information Resources

Information resources
Everydayness means never asking the fundamental questions:
In his 'essay concerning technology' Heidegger more or less says that the essence of technology is seeing the world as resources.
Interesting, I think - firstly because it says that technology does not 'change the world' rather that a change in the world (a change in our way of seeing/opening the world) gives rise to technology.

So we begin to see the forest as a "standing reserve" - as a 'natural resource', we even see each other as 'human resources'. But he did not mean technology in the way that we have come to use the word today, I think - i.e. to mean information technology. Information technology, I guess, is about converting physical resources to informational resources. And here's the thing:

What do we mean by knowledge management, by wikkis and blogs, by online learning, but the conversion of intellectual resources (constained by their wetware implementation) into something more accessible and exchangeable - that is, translating what people have in their heads into what is stored and reflected on networks? Knowledge, or course, is distibuted intrapersonally and interpersonally - new starters to the BBC must therefore have 'meetings' and get to grips with the 'politics'.

I wonder what term to use to decribe peoples' un-articulated and profoundly emotional reaction to this strange new attractor, slowly sucking the flesh from their bones as the various mechanisms of capture - from CCTV to email - begin to re-articulate them in informational form. Strange echoes congealing in informational space as each of us is brought into focus with increasing clarity on the fast-evolving retinal network.
How long before googling someone is a fuller encounter than meeting them - already sometimes the case in my experience. How long before I will see myself more clearly in the audit trail left in the wake of informational travel than I do in the mirror? Stange that we ourselves are already being relocated without us really being aware of what is going on - where were we told we were going? Many of our most prized possessions simpy discarded along the way... no turning back now, I think.
Heidegger used the term 'falling' - now I am beginning to wonder if 'burning' isn't better.

Disclosure

Disclosure
Discloure: a way of saying opening that implies that what is shown was previously hidden.
An interesting conversation with John Howard. Disclosure is at the heart of what technologies work and what do not, I think. For example, text messaging works because it hides more than it reveals - because it allows us to engage in perception management.
So, the basic dynamics: the tension between what we are and what we want to be (the ideal self and self perception), the relationship between self and other. Both busy spaces, full of fractal transactions.

And the outcomes: first the familiar one - people prefer virtual conferencing to video conferencing (because they can present themselves 'in game' as their ideal self). So would we hypothesise that bloggers are 'actualised individuals' or not?
Do we classify technologies along a spectrum of disclosure: those that expose us and those that, in transforming us, hide us?

A text message is short, easily a lie. A blog is longer, and exposes us more competely. A mmorg clothes us almost completely. Who would use the general channel and risk being exposed as less than superhuman? Exposing technologies are used by the delusional, the high self-monitor, the actualised.

For the vast majority, then, technology must provide us with tools to better manage our transactions with 'the other' (a kind of perception arms race?) and with ourselves. Tools like email allow us to hold 'the other' at a distance - how many misunderstandings are fostered through email, organisational barriers and impersonality maintained? Email as a masking technology, then. Masking ourselves doubly: once from the other, once from ourselves.
Why do you not blog? Did you say you have no time? And yet you have time for email. What is the reason? Will you even ask?

GI culture

GI culture
Our challenge as learning & development professionals is to adapt to the GI (google it) culture. I think that accessibility and availability are paramount: i.e. making the best information available (and being identified as such) and making this information as accessible as possible. The 'Key Points Guides' probably provide the best examples to date. A shift in focus from courses and instructional design to tools and referenceware.

Many years ago I met with a learning 'guru' at Motorola. At the time he believed that the future of learning would be learning 'agents' - software that roamed the network, bringing relevant learning to your doorstep and all the while building a profile of your requirements.
Is this wrong? If not, why not draw the same conclusion for an on-demand world: content selected for us and downloaded to our device by an automated 'helper'? I don't think so. The nub of the argument must be that the automated system will always lag behind the decision-making process employed by users; sophisticated, contextualised decisions lie at the heart of their experience.

We expect Google to filter out irrelevant links, we like to be able to select favourite channels - but when all is said and done we like to make the choices ourselves, or to feel that we are making them within a finite and differentiated range of options: I want to select from 200 links, not 2,000,000.

Social Learning Technologies

social learning technologies
Interesting channel 4 social software conference thing here:
One of the most common feelings that I experience when attending conferences frequented by learning professionals is that we end up discussing something called 'learning' which actually has nothing to do with how people actually learn:

At school, children are first and foremost learning how to convince themselves and others that they are cool. They are not learning maths, they are not learning english. And the same is true of us adults: we want to convince ourselves and our peers that we are good at what we do. I am not learning Outlook, I am not learning HTML. And the mechanisms are the same - we observe, we copy, we learn from mistakes, we make useful friends. In this context the kind of thing that is traditionally called 'learning' is really a peculiarly special case: the things people do in classroom courses or when learning online are more often than not a suspension or distortion of natural learning mechanisms ('no talking in class').

This is why, I suppose, classroom training (at its best) is little more than a pretext for social event - where the real value is to be found in the chats and relationships that develop around the training. Likewise, the main complaint regarding online learning is valid: 'we meet no people, we have no chats' - although interesting online environments are beginning to allow you to 'bump into people' and 'strike up a conversation'.

I don't doubt that people can learn from information presentation (i.e. in a classroom or online), but both cases are similar to reading the manual for your VCR cover to cover. It's just weird.

The natural path of learning is as follows: we sit at our desks, we encounter a problem, we use the resources available to us to overcome it; we wonder how we can gain more respect, we observe people who warrant respect in our core groups, we mimic them.
The topic of yesterday's conference was social learning technologies: blogs, wikis, etc. The core issue seemed to be traditional pedagogues struggling to understand how these things relate to 'learning': 'Do I use them to circulate my powerpoints?, Do students work on documents together?'. No. They are just 'people' resources - you have a problem, there are a few more people to ask; you can check out some cool people.

Zimbardo explain Abu Ghraib

Zimbardo explains Abu Ghraib
We worshipped those guys. As young psychology undergraduates the studies we loved best of all were those of Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo - we loved them because they showed us how to be different, how to be better, how to change the world.

Milgram's conformity experiments and Zimbardo's Stanford Prison simulation held a mirror to the world in an truly unprecedented fashion. They showed precisely and irrefutably how normal well-intentioned people like ourselves could be transformed into torturers and killers like the Nazis, and the specific circumstances under which this could occur. And they were very specific - their experimental variations allowed them to document precisely the conditions required to produce lethal conformity ranging from zero to one hundred percent. But the sheer knowledge was enough to liberate us, us psychologists, from the evils of conformity to which all others were subject.

And so I was thrilled to attend the lecture on Tuesday evening entitled "The Lucifer Effect: How good people turn evil" in which Zimbardo himself, Emiritus Professor of Social Psychology, Stanford University, drew inferences from his own study to the very similar circumstances which prevailed at the time of the Abu Ghraib atrocities. He concluded with a savage indictment of the system which induced regular patriotic people to behave so abhorrently. In short, there are no "bad apples", only "bad barrels" - systemic failure responsible for individual evil.

And was at about this point that it struck me: we all remembered those experiments made famous in the 60s and 70s. Some of us went on to work in learning, some in human resources - and some of us went on to work for the CIA and the armed forces. And I happen to know for certain that those same studies have had an enourmous effect on the 'combat effectiveness' of soliders around the world - in fact, it is no overstatement to say that they provided a detailed instruction manual regarding the means of transforming a 'regular' individual into an obedient killer. I know this because I attended a lecture given by the Chief Psychologist for the American Army in which the same principles uncovered by Milgram and Zimbardo - of desensitisation, obedience, anonymity and dehumanisation - were addressed explicitly as techniques for improving combat effectiveness. You might be surprised to learn that only about 15% of soldiers were actually killing the enemy prior to the introduction of conditioning techniques aimed at desensitising the soldier and dehumanising the opponent.
And so, it seems, the very same studies which we believed would deliver us from evil have been instrumental in engineering hundreds of thousands of deaths which might otherwise not have occured and that, ironically, the very same study used to explain Abu Ghraib may have contributed to its occurence.

There was no time for questions at the end. Zimbardo signed books. Everybody seemed very happy to have met in person the man they so admired as students.
I wonder if all critics of the system, all 'outsiders', are ultimately recycled by the system, and in fact provide a most valuable service - namely that of preventing any genuine escape by providing a self-satisfied stopping-off point for those of us who might otherwise fall further from the centre.