Inflection

The history of education could be summed up as a series of failed attempts to dump knowledge into people's heads.

A bit of a generalization I know, but it irks me that where education does get something right (like project-based learning) nobody really understands why - and so the madness continues.

This madness is often most evident at conferences, where it becomes clear that many people are intending to continue in the same vein, simply applying some new technology to an old mindset - with a thick brush. Examples include: VR, AI, video and mobile.

What is "the same vein"? This vein is ‘content dumping’. Content dumping describes a transaction with which many of us who work in education are familiar: in essence we are tasked with transferring the knowledge from a document, a curriculum, or an 'expert' into the heads of our hapless learners in the misguided belief that this will alter their behavior or capability somehow (spoiler: it doesn’t since 1.they don’t retain it 2.that’s not how behavior changes). At best, they pass a test.

‘Everyone needs to know this stuff’ our clients say ‘use your funky instructional design wizardry to make it so’, and over the years an entire toolbox of alchemical techniques have sprung up to support our industry.

Only it never really worked: we took the information and dropped it into PowerPoint slides for classrooms, and when that didn’t work we dumped the information into elearning modules and webinars - all the while getting better at side-stepping the ROI question - and now it seems we will be lauding the virtues of dumping the information into ‘microlearning’ or VR classrooms, as the latest cycle in this hopeless ritual unfolds.

The error is that these are all extrapolations of the same basic mistake - a mistake in thinking, not in methodology. The technology can’t save us, after all.

‘Inflection’ describes a change of trajectory, and this is what I have been talking about for a while:

The shift that I am proposing is not a consequence of a new technology but rather a new way of thinking: instead of thinking about how we can build better courses, we think about building useful resources. Instead of trying to get people to learn more, we find ways to help them learn less. To perform better, at lower (cognitive) cost*.

A subway map is not microlearning, it is micro-unlearning: it is a resource, something that reduces my need to learn in the pursuit of getting from A to B. The GPS in your car is not a teaching device, it is a helpful device.

By building helpful digital stuff - resources that are useful and accessible - we can massively improve organisational usability, and in so doing make work better: a better experience for the employee and better performance for the organisation.

I think if we didn’t work in education this would all be common sense, so I suppose this is merely a post about our future, not the future. And so to colleagues I would like to say: it’s time to change course; it’s time to help people get stuff done.

* True, this is less about learning, more about learning elimination. For learning, see this on experience design.