aconventional

Once more with feeling

2012-02-08T17:47:00.000-08:00

I wonder if you are afraid of public speaking? Most people are. And for this reason, people who have to speak publicly prepare what they have to say very carefully – because the thought of standing in front of a group and not knowing what to say, or losing their train of thought terrifies them. And that’s usually why they are bad at it: the one thing they really need to do – to share how they feel about their topic – is the last thing that crosses their mind.

I started my career as a college lecturer, and like the countless extraordinary people who work in teaching roles, stood in front of groups of people - sometimes for several hours a day – not knowing what I was going to say. I would invite you to imagine what that is like if you haven’t experienced it at first hand: ushered into a room, rows of expectant faces, knowing only that it is your role to be their teacher for the next 80 minutes and that there is a curriculum to follow.

What do you do? As a young teacher it didn’t take me long to realise that teaching calls for much more than summarising and explaining the textbook - that this would be akin to an actor reading their lines from a script, pausing only to take questions from the audience, rather than playing their role. You know in your gut that you are on the spot, that something extraordinary is required. If you are a good teacher you will find yourself doing this extraordinary thing - and it has taken me around twenty years to figure out precisely what this is. And though there are many people who can surely do it better than I ever could, I don’t know anyone else who can explain it.

In the beginning, I thought I would find the answer in the research – in the accumulated wisdom of psychologists and cognitive scientists. I can save you the trouble – it’s not there. I left teaching after five years attempting to apply learning theory to classrooms for the chance to apply learning theory to organisations, and to earn more money. The advantage of this kind of ‘in vivo’ experimentation is that whilst it usually lacks the rigor of the laboratory, it at least has a chance to get at the truth because it looks at learning under normal conditions, without stripping away those things that – it turns out – give it its essential character. Such as ‘care’ for example.

But there were occasions when I had the chance to test theories more rigorously - and the results would usually surprise me: back in the 90s ‘learning styles’ was a watchword for hip educationalists. I was with them – talking about something I called the ‘Hear-See-Do’ model based on Honey & Mumford & Bruner’s modes of representation. Turns out it was bunkum. We took the same information and rendered it into a range of formats – from text, through audio and images all the way to flash interaction and variations in between, then tested recall after 30 mins. Your prediction?

And the result? Text won. Students remembered slightly more from the plain text (though they found the richer formats more entertaining).

Why?

It shouldn’t surprise us really: most of us will have done plenty of learning from textbooks. Few of us struggle with a textual answer to some medical condition we have googled. Wikipedia is mostly text. It turns out that learners are flexible, and that whilst there may well be slight variations in preferences this doesn’t matter in the real world – what matters is whether we want to learn. Teachers know this intuitively, but learning theory completely missed the point.

This is your cue to think ‘motivation matters’. Nope. Motivation is important, but it’s just a side-effect of the mechanism used by humans to learn. If you witness a fight on your journey home (as I did once on the BBC bus, watching a pinstriped banker brawl with a tramp, shoving him into the street) then this will stay with you for a long time. What was my motivation?

And I take the point that this is memory not learning, but learning is merely the name we give to a cultural practice in which we memorise with a view to doing something with it at a future date. It’s a semantic distinction, in other words. If I hear a catchy tune, but don’t sing it until a year later did I learn it or not? (Though it's fair comment to point out that here I am talking about episodic and semantic memory rather than procedural (muscle) memory).

So how does learning work? It turns out that we don't yet have a name for the mechanism; I have called it 'affective context' other people have called it gut instinct or 'the primitive brain' or something like that. The problem all along has been that we looked at learning through a Cartesian lens - from a rational perspective. From that angle it looked something like a computational process - like information transfer, or data storage and retrieval. But rather like archaeologists unearthing a buried city, neuroscientists have uncovered the tip of a vast system that lies beneath the superficialities of the cortex - and it looks very different. It has an operating system all of its own.

An example: the discovery of the 'mirror neuron' system means that in laymans' terms you and I are connected emotionally (unless you are a psychopath) to the people you see around you. Our systems literally mirror the feelings of others by reading their expressions and behaviours and duplicating their emotional state. When people cry we may also cry - certainly it makes us feel sad. Laughter is contagious. But consider for a minute what this means for teaching: the enthusiasm of a teacher - for their subject, for their students - is literally transferred to their students. Let me guess which teachers you remember from school: the enthusiastic ones, the ones who cared, the exciting and excitable ones (and the horrible ones - predictably). And, as Maya Angelou once pointed out, you are more likely to remember how they made you feel than what they had to say.

This simple but fundamental aspect of teaching comes as a surprise to some teachers, but I suspect is unsurprising to others: there are teachers who labour under the illusion that students require the expertise or knowledge locked away in their academic skulls. Not so. In an age where information was hard to come by this misinterpretation was easier to understand: what students really require is their teachers' enthusiasm, their zeal, their care for their subject-matter and for those that they teach. This and only this is genuinely transferred: the learning is something students do - if they too care. Today, most students learn because of exams – something they are drilled to care about.

The 'mechanics of care' are vastly more complex than we imagine. As Nietzsche once pointed out 'thoughts are the shadows of our feelings – always darker, emptier and simpler.' Mirror neurons are just one small part of an integrated system designed to process information in this seemingly alien fashion: we codify our experiences according to their affective context, and use this affective metadata to make decisions and to process comparisons - whether we are playing chess or throwing footballs (as Jonah Lehrer points out), the basic mechanism is the same. When Wordsworth pens 'I wandered lonely as a cloud' it is loneliness that allows him to bridge the semantic divide. This has little if anything to do with emotional intelligence.

When I ask people about learning their responses do not follow the pattern predicted by any of the classical learning theories. They remember the highs and lows. Learning - real learning - is usually expressed in overtly emotional terms. People tell stories. They say 'I remember this one time when...' and a story is simply information wrapped in affective metadata. In Bartlett's classic 'War of the ghosts' experiment, the finding was that the emotive feature of the tale remained whilst all else slipped away in the retelling. Human cognition is all about codifying experiences in affective terms, then using those features to make comparisons and establish schema. If I think about the train journey I used to make, I remember standing on the platform in the early morning darkness as the cold rain soaked huddled commuters. This was a low point, now it is all that remains of those countless experiences. As Milan Kundera points out, we do not remember everything - just a handful of snapshots. All of them emotionally charged.

Good teachers are enthusiastic, good teachers care about their students, good teachers tell stories and use examples, good teachers challenge students, good teachers relate learning to the lives of their students. We all know this. But all these features are predicted by affective context theory, whilst no other approach begins to explain them.

A sound approach to instructional design begins by codifying care: by mapping out those thing that concern the learner and those that do not, so that resources can be provided where the degree of concern is high, and impactful experiences constructed where it is low: flight simulators and reference manuals.

Learning. It turns out this is something I care about.

Disruption

2012-01-01T05:40:00.000-08:00

So I was in the park just now. The roots of the chestnut tree were sunk in the ground just under my bench. I couldn't remember it was a root any more. The words had vanished and with them the significance of things, their methods of use, and the feeble points of reference which men have traced on their surface. I was sitting, stooping forward, head bowed, alone in front of this black, knotty mass, entirely beastly, which frightened me. Then I had this vision. It left me breathless. Never, until these last few days, had I understood the meaning of "existence." I was like the others, like the ones walking along the seashore, all dressed in their spring finery - Sartre, Nausea

What do learning and beauty have in common? In their most essential form both are disruptive experiences. Experiences where reality crashes in upon us, disrupting our constructs, forcing us off the rails, opening us up to the possibility of being reshaped. Of course, not all learning or beauty is experienced in this way – but there is something to be learned by considering their essential character.

By now, I imagine this seems very abstract. It’s not. Consider your own experience. If you recall the milestones in your own learning trajectory. I’m prepared to bet that ‘disruptive’ is a pretty good descriptor: starting a new job, a new school, an accident, a sudden change of health, a personal comment that cut you to the core – your first child, perhaps. Of course we tend to remember distinctive events but this is hardly incidental. The distinctive, the disruptive, the ‘worthy-of-a-story’ experiences form the cornerstones of our learning and the gravitational centres of our personality and world-view. These are indeed our ‘defining moments’. These are the things with affective context.

From this perspective it is easy to frame a more vague dissatisfaction with learning experiences: not only do they often fall short of being disruptive – the opposite is true: the most common descriptor applied to school by my children is ‘boring’. I think most people probably think of elearning as boring too.

Now I am not arguing for disruption for disruption’s sake – nor should we be too hasty in conjuring up an image of what counts as ‘disruption’. An example might help: at a recent event we were all encouraged to give very direct feedback to colleagues that we had only just met - our first impressions. The experience was clearly disruptive for at least some of the people there. At school disruptive experiences are field trips and challenges . Odd, then that we use ‘disruptive’ to apply to the kinds of people we don’t want in the classroom.

Looking back, I think much of what I have been striving for in Online (at least at the ‘push’ end) is the disruptive experience – something that bursts through the protective shell of our expectations and succeeds in making someone really care about diversity… or safety… or leadership. Generally speaking, people avoid learning - they reach equilibrium, their schema suffice, they remain cognitive misers – and it seems to become harder to bring about learning as people’s attitudes harden around them. How do you pitch data protection or safety to an audience in such a way that it doesn’t merely ‘bounce off’?

We do two kinds of things, I think: as learning professionals we create disruption – for example we engineer failure in an attempt to bring about learning – or we arrange resources that help people cope with disruption. This latter activity is more commonly called ‘performance support’. The former is ‘push’, the latter is ‘pull’; but neither are at all effective without the disruption that calls for learning.

In conclusion, the role played by disruption in learning serves as a reminder of how ‘fallen’ learning presents itself – as convention. The worst fate that can befall a learning professional is to become high-priests and curators of convention; and in so doing become boring.

Work is no Game

2011-12-12T09:06:00.000-08:00

If only it were. A small group of us gathered round the headmaster as he began explaining the ‘smiley system’ that the infants school had implemented: “when the children do something good, such as opening a door or behaving well in class they get a smiley. We keep track of these and when they get a certain number they are allowed to choose something from the reward basket. We used to have a system of awards at the end of each year, but we felt this was a bit demoralising for students who were doing small things – but positive things – every day.”

Sound familiar?

World of Warcraft works like this. Every behaviour earns a variety of possible rewards – from experience points to virtual coin to honor points. There is a variable reinforcement schedule built in as well – random item drops – which help give the game its addictive nature. The trick then is to convert these rewards into something meaningful – what good are smileys after all? The big story is the rise of virtual meaning (to coin a phrase): it turns out that in a uniquely human fashion people identify with their avatars. Unless you are a Korean gold farmer the things you are playing for don’t equate to real money, instead they equate to virtual items (such as clothing or items), virtual status (such as levels), or virtual abilities (such as invisibility). Which people want.

Sure, there are social dimensions to the game but as this blog points out the true motivation is something baser, be it greed or power. Interestingly many games which have no social dimension (such as the excellent Dragon Age 2, or Fallout) still utilise the same mechanisms to great effect. The thoroughly modern craving for upgrades is greatly amplified in the virtual realm.

So the thing to note is that ‘gamification’ can mean a variety of very different things: to some people it implies making something (such as learning) ‘fun’ – through an exploratory dimension for example (some games do this). For others it means the introduction of mechanisms which provide token reinforcement. This latter class of games may well not feel like fun: if you understand the expression ‘grinding for XP’ then you know what I mean.

So what are the implications for learning?

I can think of a couple that generally tend to go unnoticed:

1) Do we want ‘token learning’? Think back to the ‘smiley’ system implemented at some schools. Does anything trouble you about this? What if it results in children who only exhibit positive behaviours in the expectation of a reward? What happens if those rewards are taken away? If we indulge in ‘gamification’ in the way that most commentators describe, the result may be to rob learning of intrinsic value – paradoxically, to make it a chore. I can easily picture a system in which people complete quizzes to score points; I’m not confident that resulting learning will be more than tokenistic.

2) Work is not a game. Maybe it should be, but right now it isn’t. This point is consistently missed by advocates of gaming mechanisms. Work differs from games at a fundamental level. Firstly your activity does not relate in any simple way to rewards (unless you work in a contact centre, perhaps). If you were to try to translate work into a game it would be a very odd sort of game. Most of the rules would not be clear. You would not move anywhere. You would guess at the correct responses to thousands of cryptic messages without ever quite knowing how you were doing. You would only ever know if you had done something very wrong. And that might turn out to be something someone else had done. Your reward would be static and monthly – or come at the end of a year, and be subject to economic conditions outside your control. One of your key attributes would be patience.

The reason that this latter point is significant is that at some point, gameification of learning would entail a translation into non-token rewards: financial, status etc. And organisations don’t work that way: if they were going to start rewarding people for the things they do or promote people for their accomplishments, then learning would probably not be where they start. Plenty of organisations have a noble aspiration to be more meritocratic – and I wholeheartedly support this; but along with the aspiration comes the tacit recognition that we are a long way from this today. To put it bluntly why would we start rewarding people for learning, when we don’t yet reward people for completing tasks or solving problems?

You might object that I am describing a narrow sense of ‘gameification’ – but what are the alternatives? Making learning fun is not exclusive to gameification. Teachers and educationalists have been doing this for years; if you’re not already thinking about how to make your learning engaging and enjoyable then you have some catching up to do. And there are lots of ways to do this. That said, ‘good’ learning doesn’t have to be fun: we all hear a great deal about learning from mistakes, and failure is rarely experienced as fun.

But I don’t think it’s all bad: I haven’t touched on ‘mastery’ as a game mechanism, and this holds out hope. Games, simulations or scenarios which allow for mastery via repetition can work well: the challenge then becomes transferability – the extent to which mastery of the game leads to mastery of something meaningful for the business. Typing games such as word invaders seem to do this well.

I do think that gameification has a bright future. Probably not in learning, though. Rather, just as performance consulting looks to provide solutions to performance problems, so gameification (used here to refer to token reward schemes) will be a tool to be used in combination with learning interventions to effect performance gains. Gameification (in the guise of immediate feedback and reward) is the complement to performance support. Starting with more junior roles, the organisation of the future will recognise and reward effective behaviours and track and remedy ineffective ones - as they happen. And gameification will more often than not remove the need for learning: take, for example the Honda Jazz, where a virtual plant flourishes on your dashboard when you drive economically. No 30 min e-learning course about sustainable living required.

Gyre and Gimble

2011-11-29T06:30:00.000-08:00

"Twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe." - Jabberwocky, Lewis Carroll

I was looking for a metaphor for learning and development and came across this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_Garbage_Patch

And this was the first time that I realised that gyre was a real word (albeit a noun rather than a verb) rather than just nonsense. It's also a pretty good descriptor of the world of learning.

Whilst working at Siemens, I carried out a modest piece of research which rejected the hypothesis that there are such things as 'learning styles': in brief, we differentiated materials according to learning style and mode of representation and found that people actually learned the most from plain text. I’ve spent quite a bit of time since then unraveling exactly why but today, twelve years later, I’m still reading articles announcing that learning styles are mumbo-jumbo.

What is remarkable about learning and development is the slow pace of change. This is probably because the area remains at the 'proto-science' phase of development; characterised by numerous 'gyres' - micro debates, conversational eddies - permitted to circulate because the industry is predominantly opinion-based. Here are some that you may recognise:

- learning styles
- NLP
- 70:20:10
- kolb's learning cycle
- blending
- right brain/left brain
- learning by doing
- the role of the line manager
- assessment/evaluation/Kirkpatrick
- the certified learning professional
- games
- mobile learning

These are the things discussed at conferences, in industry publications, and in blogs such as this one. My point, is not that these are all non-sensical, but that most of these debates have remained essentially static for a couple of decades. What little change there is in L&D has come about largely as a consequence of external influences (such as Google or Apple). While circulating in the gentle currents of these gyres is surprisingly soothing - and a temptation to which I frequently succumb - I believe that real change is driven by practice. Progress takes place when people tackle problems with an open mind and an honest appraisal of the results (I think Rob Hubbard tends to make a similar point, but then he is an engineer by nature).

It shouldn't be that way, of course: we don't build bridges on a 'suck it and see' basis, but there was a time when engineering too was a proto-science and that is exactly what people did.

We've been filming a lot of new starters recently, and it got me thinking. To anyone new to online learning I would say that it is an exciting area to work, but don't assume that anything you hear is true - and don't get distracted by the debates lest you too ‘gyre and gimble in the wabe.’

Social Media: If you build it, they won't come.

2011-11-15T06:24:00.000-08:00

As his colleague fiddled with the technology a young man shuffled nervously in his suit. These few minutes in front of the executive team were precious, but he was confident of his pitch: the internet was going to revolutionise things, was going to revolutionise learning. The ridiculous inefficiencies of classroom training were a thing of the past. Web-based training ushered in an era of anytime, anyplace, anywhere learning (he was happy to overlook the tautology on the grounds that his audience would appreciate the Martini allusion). The year was 1999, and he was surfing on the tidal wave of change. The senior team agreed a million dollar investment in a learning management system and online portfolio, based on his impressive ROI projections. Soon, everyone would be learning this way.

I wonder why we so rarely look back and wonder where we went wrong. Probably there were two problems: firstly, recognising the opportunities that technology presents is a lot easier than predicting how people will interact with that technology. Secondly, we failed to think about the implementation. We assumed that if we built it, they would come.

Four years ago, together with the Head of Creativity at the BBC Academy, I commissioned a pioneering project: it was called MOO. The project was shaped by a number of BBC visionaries - people at the bleeding edge of Web 2.0. The idea was simple: why not allow people throughout the BBC to share their ideas, their links, their creative genius. The rationale was solid: the BBC is full of people, at all levels of the organisation, with something to contribute - indeed we attract people wanting to be part of 'the most creative organisation in the world', people versed in the latest technology. People who bring new skills and perspectives to the organisation. People who craved the respect of their peers. And the BBC itself: an organisation striving to embody the principles 'creative, simple, digital, open'. We did the research, people thought it was a great idea.

So we built it - a place where people could share video, links, blog, comment and tag. A place where communities could flourish and serendipity take root. Our viral marketing campaign featured mysterious cows positioned strategically around the Beeb. We knew that only 1% of people tended to post content, but with 25,000 staff those still looked like healthy numbers. Forrester foretold a generation of participants - we needed to be ready.

But hardly anyone posted anything. It was as if we had erected a giant marquee and said 'you can do whatever you like in this space' - people came, had a look round, saw an empty marquee and left. It didn't take us long to realise that people use social media for specific things - and we didn't have a specific thing. We needed something to drive usage. Danny Cohen, then Head of BBC 3 kindly obliged: we would run a competition. 'Give us your creative idea and the best one would be made into a programme'. What a brilliant idea: the BBC short-circuiting the tired commissioning mechanisms and drawing on creativity from all around the corporation. It was a modest success: we had over a hundred entries and the winning submission 'Wu How' was made into a programme. But ultimately I got the impresion that not everyone welcomed a new, subversive, commissioning model: in fact many of the important people preferred things just the way they were. We were fighting a good fight, but probably a losing battle.

We talked about MOO at conferences. At one conference one of our visionaries - Andy Tedd - was approached by a young developer working on a similar idea for a company called BT. That was the first in a number of fruitful exchanges with Peter Butler and his team.

I continue to believe in social media for learning: if only because Twitter is my principal learning tool, and blogging encourages me to reflect and engage with the wider community. Together with my team at BP and the irrepressable Morten Bonde we are working on what I like to think is the next generation of social media for learning platform - The Hub. Social media for learning 2.0 if you like. All that really means is that we are trying to avoid the mistakes common to organisations who implement sharing platforms, only to find that nobody shares, leaving them to nurse their virtual ghost towns.

What are the common mistakes? Firstly, the consensus seems to be that you go where your people are and make yourself part of the conversation rather than trying to force them into a closed environment where you control the conversation. If your staff are on Facebook, start a Facebook group. If they are on linked in or Twitter, become part of the community and have something to say. This is now the conventional view of how to 'do' social media well.

But I believe there is a second option: focus on your content generation/harvesting strategy and implement carefully. By the time the Hub launches we will already have a couple of hundred videos, selected carefully from a bigger set that the team have filmed, and aimed at specific challenges that staff face: such as joining BP, becoming a leader or improving safety. Respected experts, enthusiastic peers and senior leaders tell stories and share best practice. Why story-telling? If you just tell people something, then you are doing comms. If you tell a story, then you are doing learning (the distinction is the affective context: one has it, the other doesn't). Initially participation is limited to rating. We plan to move to commenting in phase 2. We hope that people will come not to contribute, but because there is something worth watching. Our small production team are working with teams across BP to identify voices that need to be heard. Honeybees and flowers.

Is this 'true' social media? I argued this point with @cliveshepherd at the social media workshop we ran: it may not be, but it may be a way to get there. For sure, technology alone won't get you there in 99% of cases. My point, I suppose, is 'it's the content, stupid!'. If you a creating a social media for learning platform, where is all your content going to come from? Don't assume it will happen by magic.

In summary, I firmly believe in the value of social media for learning, just as I continue to believe in the value of elearning. But the same is true of both: they work in specific contexts, when implemented thoughtfully and most of all - they depend on good content.

Learning, culture, shoes

2011-10-10T07:19:00.000-07:00

I always try to wear smart shoes. Early on in my career I was in a meeting to discuss the sale of some elearning we had created. We were talking big numbers. I thought the meeting went well. Afterwards I turned to my commercial partner 'what did you think?' he shook his head dismissively 'Did you see his shoes?'. Nothing came of the meeting. Whether coincidence or not, it taught me that some people may judge you solely on your footwear (apologies for the pun).

On those occasions where we have the chance to talk to learners before creating learning content, I often find that there is quite a difference between what stakeholders view as the learning requirement, and the needs as described by the intended audience. This will be a familiar picture to most of us; for my part I frame the challenge as how we properly dovetail the 'top-down' requirements ('these are the things they need to know') with the 'bottom-up' requirements ('these are the things we need to know'). But over the last few months I have been wondering about the role of culture, and the learning department's relationship to culture. I think that historically learning hasn't had much of a relationship - because culture is the stuff of informal learning, and l&d activity has tended to focus on formal ('top-down') learning. But as our intention shifts to informal learning, we find ourselves encountering culture. Informal learning accounts for 85% of organisational learning - at a guess culture probably features to a similar degree in explanations of why employees do what they do.

Rather than trying to define culture, I'd like to put yourself in the shoes of a new starter: culture are the norms you observe, the stories you hear, the ways in which people present themselves and the sets of expectations implied thereby. In many cases concerns about the effectiveness of internal communication or learning can be traced back to the overwhelming influence of culture in shaping organisational behaviour. Culture is all around us, and through our innate tendency to conform it defines us. Conformity is what gives our organisations their cohesiveness. At a microscopic level whenever there is any uncertainty - second by second in meetings - social referencing guides our behaviour.

A central challenge has been to understand how learning interventions can influence culture. One thing becoming clear is that beyond observational referencing, stories and storytelling are the normal format for cultural exchange: stories which are handed down to new starters, stories which are told on Monday mornings between colleagues, stories which form the cornerstones of our life's architecture.

People develop as if governed by Newtonian mechanics: given momentum and direction during their early years then continuing on the same track unless something intervenes, knocking them into a new trajectory. These rare moments are typically characterised by emotion, and archived in story format ready for transmission: it may be something as simple as observing remarkable leadership behaviour in a line manager, or as dramatic as a life-threatening error of judgement. In each case a story forms the means of wrapping a learning point in it's emotional context. It is through stories we learn the importance of good leadership, or safety.

So often the critical error made in formal communication or learning is abstraction: conveying the message whilst stripping away the story. The 'sender' understands the significance - they know the story, after all - but in the absence of the story, the message is near meaningless to the receiver - 'data protection matters' etc. By contrast a good speaker knows the importance of stories: they are memorable, they keep our attention, they have impact. Storytelling is the stuff of childhood, since it is then that we have so much to learn. Only in a world where adults had no further need to learn, would storytelling be restricted to children.

At present my team are heavily engaged in story capture and story creation (story, scenario, simulation) - because we hope to influence behaviour, because we hope to influence culture. When we capture a story or create a story, I hope that by sharing it we augment or create attractors in cultural space - i.e. formats which will stick in people's minds, form part of their conceptual architecture, be passed on or absorbed into a model of 'how things are done around here'. We hope to take something which exerts a powerful influence at local level and share it globally - or to take the lessons of one generation and share them with the next.

Anyway, I guess by now you have looked at your shoes.

Learning as Care

2011-09-25T10:09:00.000-07:00

On page 83 of 'Being and Time', Martin Heidegger explains that what is fundamental to Dasein, i.e. what is means to be human, is 'concern'. He goes on to clarify that he is using the word 'concern' in a special sense - laying the groundwork for revealing the true nature of our essence: as care.

Whilst language and the complexities of translation shroud his work in obscurity, it is easy to convey what he is saying in more familiar terms: what sets us apart from other creatures is our ability to stand back from things and wonder about them - not just to use a table, for example, but to look at it in front of me and consider it as a table, and to wonder about it. Cats lie on tables, people ponder them. We 'care' about the table - we don't just use it.

The sad reality though is that in this sense we live most of our lives more like animals: caught up in the rush we conform, we follow norms, we do what we do because that is what we have seen others do. Even chickens have been shown to learn through observation. Heidegger doesn't actually say we behave like animals - he says we are 'fallen', meaning that we are so caught up in everyday activity and in using things that we cease to stand back and wonder or care about them. We lead 'unexamined lives'. Of course if someone were to say 'you don't really care about your life' you and I would probably object - we would cite our career, our future plans perhaps. But if this is different kind of concern than that which we would experience if we were diagnosed with a terminal illness.

A similar point in sometimes made by colleagues in learning: every once in a while someone will stop a meeting about a learning system, about a learning project, about a learning strategy to say 'do we even agree what learning is?'. I have observed that generally the reaction is to nod in appreciation of the profundity of the question then politely resume what we were doing before - planning, implementing, busying ourselves with the concerns of learning without ever being concerned about learning. Move along, no need to be embarrassed - everyone else is doing the same.

Over the last few years it has become clear to me that whilst people certainly derive much of their learning from the mechanisms that we share with animals - classical and operant conditioning, observational learning - that there is a large area of human learning that works differently, and which we will never understand until we appreciate that learning is characterised by care. To put it another way: any theory of adult learning which does not place care at its centre is simply wrong.

I have tried to sketch what this theory might look like elsewhere in this blog: the 'Affective Context Model'. But in fact is perhaps easier to get across if we just stop and reflect on learning. I routinely ask people what they remember from school and it is clear that care is the common denominator: they remember good teachers - teachers who cared about their subject, teachers who cared about their students, teachers who cared about them. They remember subjects which interested them - which they cared about. They remember friends, girlfriends & boyfriends, triumph and embarrassment. They remember exciting school trips and activities, they remember things they hated. They remember their first day.

A very similar pattern holds true of organisational learning. This is an approach which explains which Sir Ken Robinson is right to care about passion, why Roger Schank is right to insist on storytelling, why Cathy Moore is right to entreat us to orient learning around goals. This is an approach which will tell you who is a good teacher and who is not. Schools create a kind of artificial concern with tests; businesses make the flawed assumption that for everyone on a course, the topic is close to their hearts.

We naturally recoil from a definition of learning which involves care - because we have come to feel that such terms are not a proper part of a scientific theory or a businesslike dialogue. But care is foremost in my mind at the outset of every learning project: if only because if people really cared about something we would have no work to do. And if we can't make people care, then we have usually done no work. All around us, informal learning goes on - is the engine that lies at the heart of every organisation - fueled by care. People who join our organisations and find themselves 'in at the deep end', on a 'steep learning curve' - for no other reason than that they care what their new colleagues think of them. Because they don't want to embarrass themselves.

In overlooking care in our formal learning interventions we frequently make two big mistakes: we disseminate information without giving people a reason to care (indeed if we simply gave them a reason to care they would learn things for themselves), and we fail to provide learning resources to people who do care, who have an appetite for learning but are nevertheless starved of information.

In looking at the range of learning media which we intend to deploy in support of a desired outcome, only care enables us to identify the proper approach: if our target audience care about a topic (for example because it is relevant or needed for a pressing challenge) then the format can be simple, plain, text. Many years ago my team at Siemens built an immersive story-based simulation in order to train people to use their phones. A great experience - but not much help if you actually have someone on the line and need to know how to transfer a call. Then, you need a quick reference guide. I have tried to sketch roughly what I have in my head, below.

Equally, the tendency of organisations to spread mandatory messages in a top-down fashion frequently misses the mark: don't tell people what is important, tell them why, tell the story. A story or a scenario or a simulation are all effective precisely because they carry the affective context - they tell us about something and why we should care at the same time.

There will be some people who read this and think 'of course - we all know that motivation is important' - but this is not what I am saying. Motivation is a small subset of care. Care is a complex thing only partly under our control. To give an example: if two speakers at a conference were to have a punch-up on stage this is something that would stick in your memory a long time (and affect your behaviour towards the speakers), despite it not being something that mattered deeply to you in a professional sense. Our minds are designed to care about some things more than others, and we have only limited influence over this. But we do have some: I have started remembering more of what I hear about energy markets since I joined BP, and learning professionals will remember more of what is said at conferences than will the average person - because learning is something they care about. I can't recall the words from the hymns I sang every morning at school - I didn't care about them.

Still in doubt? Imagine how quickly you would learn about a serious illness if it turned out that you, yourself possessed this illness. (there is an interesting TED piece on this). So care is not simply a matter of motivation. Care is the central mechanism at the heart of all human learning - it governs both how we store information and how we subsequently use it.

On page 427 Heidegger writes "As care, Dasein is the 'between'." I know he intends something different but I quite like this image: of the careful teacher bridging the divide between what the learner is, and what she can be.

The Future of Learning & Technology

2011-07-29T05:34:00.000-07:00

This is a 25 min version of a presentation that I gave to my colleagues in the BP Leadership Learning and Development team. Best viewed at 720p, fullscreen (click play then change the option in the lower right):

Staff Trek: The Next Generation

2011-06-15T07:50:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I find myself in conversations about what the future generation will mean for businesses, and more specifically the ways in which HR may need to respond to the impending subsidence of the baby boomers in preparation for the tsunami of GenY+-ers. There’s some generalised anxiety about it, but very little in the way of specifics. But from what I’ve read* and observed there are real trends – some good, some bad – that would be worth thinking about. The biggest single trend is that GenY+ are active participants entering a world largely structured around assumptions that they will be passive recipients. By way of disclaimer, I think it is sometimes hard to distinguish the kind of commentary on ‘turbulent youth’ that has been commonplace since Plato from GenY+ characteristics – but I still think the following are worth consideration:

Baby boomer boo-boos:

Hierarchy: GenY+ doesn’t get hierarchy. They distrust it. They are networked, they trust their peers, they respect people for what they know more than how old they are. This makes increasingly good sense in a world where things change fast and expertise and experience are fleeting. So trust is hemorrhaging from top-down structures such as internal comms, traditional advertising and broadcast media and conventional management models as peer-to-peer recommendation and interaction gain ground. From a genY+ perspective a hierarchical organisation is not a meritocracy – almost by definition. A meritocracy is flat (if a little bumpy) and fluid.

Non-participative events: organisations thrive on them – classroom-style events, often called meetings or presentations, in which one person talks for most of the time, then allows a few minutes for questions. Compare this format to the forum, blogs or tweets. Stephen Fry gets 140 characters – same as the rest of us. It is up to us to decide whether to follow him or not; ultimately ownership of the space rests with us. In a forum no-one’s voice (except the moderators) carries inherent weight, instead respect must always be earned. The GenY+ attitude strikes previous generations as arrogance – but really it is a purist model of meritocracy and inclusion: ‘we will listen to everyone, but space in our attention has to be earned’. GenY+ are distinguished most clearly from GenX and earlier by their need to share what they experience online – as they experience it.

Life/work balance: this is some weird notion cooked up by GenX people who still think there is some way of distinguishing between life and work. This is surely some terrible form of bad faith: as if your work wasn’t part of your life. Ask a GenY+ ‘are you working right now?’ and they will struggle to answer a significant part of the time. And by inference inflexible working environments which simultaneously fail to acknowledge the contributions made outside working hours and the potential for sloth within them seem relics of a Victorian age. The office, a workhouse.

Unwritten rules (and to some extent rules): GenY+ expect more transparency about the rules, and have a low tolerance for task environments where the rules are not clear. In games what you can and can’t do is generally made explicit from the outset – moves permitted only f you happen to be on good terms with a certain player are not features of any game environment I know. More generally, rules are there to be explored and pushed to their limit: often the best rewards are to be found in the most inaccessible places. GenY+ are results-driven, rule averse. ‘tell me what you want done and I’ll figure out the rest’.

Being told how to do things: the wild-west of online breeds entrepreneurial, problem-solving attitudes. Typically there are many way to achieve the same outcome, and in technology anything is possible. Games are much the same, often every task can be accomplished differently, depending on your character. Organisations which set GenY+s a task, then prescribe a way to do it may leave employees feeling frustrated and undervalued.

Dis-connectivity: being in any situation where one is required to focus on a single task or disconnect from the online network which one inhabits. The problem is partly one of attention-span but principally an experiential issue: if the way that you experience the world is in terms of its currency in your networks, switching off your networks disconnects you from the event ‘If I can’t tweet, what am I listening for?’

GenY shortcomings:

Thorough consideration: GenY+ struggle to think things through carefully. Their world is awash with superficiality and instant reactions. They suffer from adult attention-deficit disorder. They tend to allocate too little time to weighing up pros and cons or considering all perspectives. Their strategic vision may be poor and they may miss the bigger picture or the long game in the pursuit of immediate achievements.

Loyalty and care: in the online world people flit in and out as the situation requires: acquaintances tagged in the same picture, brief encounters in the heat of battle, fleeting wifi-allegiances. GenY+ increasingly inhabit a world where organisations pay them by the day and they, in return, owe no debt of allegiance. Their media is organised in a bubble around them, wrapping them in a blanket of traffic which relates only to their own personal needs and desires.

Old fashioned communication skills: spend enough time exchanging text-speak chat online and the ability to put together a carefully argued white paper, or build a relationship face-to-face is going to suffer. Substantiation of this widely-shared view will have to await the longitudinal research, but a combination of factors ranging from shorter, more reflexive patterns of communication together with the egocentricity of online environments seems to me to make this highly likely.

In summary, I suspect there are significant implications for organisations looking to attract and assess good staff, for the onboarding and training process, for policy, and for the way that an organisation is structured in order to achieve short and long-term objectives.

*For example the CIPD conducted some solid research into this (http://www.cipd.co.uk/hr-resources/survey-reports/organisations-generation-y-employees-web-2.0-technologies.aspx ), and the book ‘The Kids are Alright’ (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Kids-Are-Alright-Generation-Workplace/dp/1422104354/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1308062035&sr=1-1) draws some more general conclusions based on a variety of research findings.

Learning and Identity

2011-04-29T11:45:00.000-07:00

I think I finally made sense today of something that I have been wondering about for some years: a woman on the radio said that she was attending the Royal Wedding because, as a child, her parents had taken her to the wedding of Charles and Diana.

The thing that I had been struggling to explain for a while was the observation that my daughters’ development seemed to advance noticeably as a result of new experiences; it was as if taking them on a camping trip would unlock new cognitive capacities. This might seem like common sense – but conventional development theory has it that cognitive capacities advance in stages that are more or less preset.

It struck me as odd that a person would attend a royal wedding – at considerable inconvenience – simply because they had attended it as a child. Then it occurred to me just how common this experience is: people who follow football teams because their parents took them to matches when they were younger, people whose love of theatre or fishing is rooted in their experiences as a child. It seems that people are drawn to recreate these defining experiences as moths drawn to the light; in a way similar to the Freudian notion of fixation, but more subtle and prevalent.

What I am saying is that there are experiences which really do, literally, define us. Which acts as catalysts for our development and which are thereby burned into our identity – as the fixed anchor points of who we are. These are the ‘attractors’ of our self-development; experiences whose affective context gathers our lives to them with ever increasing gravity – as we, in turn go fishing and take our own children and grandchildren fishing.

This ties together two questions for me: questions of identity and questions of learning. It seems to me that the two share the same mechanism, albeit at different scales. The experiences to which you and I will return – moth-like – and which in turn define us; are those which acted as stepping stones for our personal development. In adulthood our learning and development continues to be shaped by new experiences to the degree that our identity remains flexible. Eventually, aged and ossified, we reject new experience and cease learning. Our personality is set in stone. Our fixations with the cornerstones of our identity – be they fishing or Royalty or football – consume our personality in its entirety. The common mechanism is the affective nature of experiences – which may be so strong that in a child it draws the entire personality around it, or in an adult strong enough that these become key learning experiences. Finally, our ability to learn waning, we become creatures completely defined simply by those strong echoes, those experiences to which we can only return.

Diversity & Inclusion

2011-04-08T12:13:00.000-07:00

Mirror, mirror on the wall...

I wanted to write about Diversity & Inclusion, because it has been a very real question for me since my early teens, and because in recent years I have been fortunate enough to work with some of the leading experts in the field, and on what I hope will prove to be innovative online approaches in this area (both at the BBC and with the team here at BP).

And yet this 2008 Washington Post article cites a study of 830 US organisations implementing diversity training which broadly concludes that they harm diversity. Levels of minority group representation actually fell as a consequence of mandatory diversity training. I don’t find this surprising.

Whilst the reasons for this are unclear, I would speculate that it is because diversity training (and especially the online course) has tended in the past to fall into one of two categories:

1) The reprimand: the white male majority (of which I am a part) may easily feel that the subtext of diversity training runs something like ‘you have been treating these groups badly in the past, you must do better’. In reality guilt is generally only shouldered for so long before it is rationalised: several psychological experiments over the last few decades have demonstrated that far from feeling sympathy with victims, people tend to denigrate them. Somehow (we reason) they deserved it. Our feeling that we are, in some nonspecific way, being accused of prejudice becomes misdirected resentment.

2) The charity appeal: a related but equally damaging possibility is that training courses send the message ‘these groups need our help’. Whilst superficially well-intended, there is a real chance that this kind of approach unintentionally reinforces a stereotype of minority groups in which they are seen as in need of assistance and – by inference – less capable.

Whilst I now find it fairly easy to spot these kinds of flaws, it is less easy to know what to do about them. One interesting alternative is to ‘argue the business case’ – which is normally something along the lines ‘our customers are becoming more diverse, we must therefore become more diverse as a business’. There are a couple of problems here: firstly, if the argument is to stand up then much more needs to be said about the specifics – since at face value there are many non-diverse organisations who seem to be doing quite well. Secondly, and as Binna Kandola points out, if diversity is the right thing to do why do we need a business case at all? Would we put together a business case for behaving ethically? Have you ever seen a business case for safety?

A more recent trend, and one which I have been happy to follow, is the shift in terms of reference from diversity to inclusivity. Emerging views of diversity have noted a shift away from the conventional ‘strand-based’ conception (black, gay, female, jewish, disabled, single etc.) to a less category-oriented approach. This is helpful since it tracks the increasing complexity of the ways in which people choose to categorise or not categorise themselves. It is harder, for example, to say who is and is not middle-class – and this may not be a helpful approach in any case. In addition, there is a growing awareness of the rich psychological and cultural diversity which underlies superficial similarities. I know first-hand that some of the most pernicious forms of discrimination relate not to traditional distinctions but ones which relate to means of expression – for example male/female or working/middle class differences in language use. Speak confidently and you are heard. Speak quietly and you are dismissed. Use the right words.

Inclusivity is a much better discussion to have: not least because it is clear that a lack of inclusivity in key areas – such as decision-making – can have serious implications for the quality of decisions and associated areas, such as creativity and problem-solving. These are things which do matter deeply to businesses. A business that makes good decisions is an inclusive business. In addition, none of us likes to be left out – and this in turn is a strong argument for inclusivity, namely ‘we are all different, we all want to be respected and heard’. Though fundamentally sound there is still a problem with this approach – it can be used to rationalise the status quo: a group of middle-ages white men can sit round the table and persuade themselves that they are marvelously diverse based on their technicolor spread of MBTI ratings.

Another trend is to focus on areas such as unconscious bias and subtle exclusion. Again, I think this is a good thing: if you can get everyone to acknowledge that they possess biases, that what differentiates us is the degree to which we engage in critical self-examination, and if you can somehow embed this into everyday behavior – then I believe it is possible to make some progress. Having said this, addressing unconscious bias can also turn out to be the soft option for organisations reluctant to tackle the issues head-on: so what are people actually supposed to do differently? What is the change we expect to see as a consequence? We want to avoid merely opening the door to a new class of self-congratulatory behavior.

And this brings us to the heart of the issue: training programmes which are not coupled with specific diversity policies and programmes are unlikely to bring about change, even where they affect attitudes. Oona King, for example, has put in place a ‘Diversity Toolkit’ which spells out the specific recruiting behaviors expected of staff at Channel 4, coupled with supplier selection criteria which set out requirements around supplier diversity. If you don’t make the grade, we can’t work with you.

This point also exposes a question common to much elearning content creation: is it possible to bring about behavior change within an elearning module? My contention (in previous blogs) is that attitudes generally follow behaviors (not vice-versa), so anything aimed at attitude change alone will be largely ineffective. But what alternative is there? What I have tried to do in more recent work is to place audiences in a realistic context - one in which they are given the opportunity to decide a course of action supportive of diversity - in the hope that these virtual decisions will then provide a baseline for workplace attitudes.

But at the heart of the diversity debate there is anxiety – and this is not entirely misplaced. When I was conducting interviews with senior managers in preparation for the creation of the BBC’s diversity online programme I noticed that they would often talk about diversity in terms of ‘bravery’. ‘Managers should be more courageous in recruiting new talent.’ Why? Because for many people – people who are used to working in a familiar way with familiar people, people who best understand other people who are most similar to them - diversity represents a risk. Hiring a staff member who is a wheelchair-user or requires flexible working arrangements will present challenges – challenges which they may not have encountered before and which may require them to change or to be more flexible. They may not know what to say or how to react. And at the core of human nature is a resistance to change. Merely inclining people to be brave may not be enough. What about those organisations which are profoundly risk-averse?

But the flip-side should be encouraging: programmes such as the BBC’s Extend which facilitate placements of disabled staff across the business can help to advance the cause of diversity greatly – by breaking down preconceptions and overcoming anxieties. Diversity training should be accompanied by real opportunities to work with people different from ourselves and by policies which bring about measurable change.

The injunction ‘know thyself’ has haunted me since my days as a philosophy student. It is only now, many years later, that I have any confidence in my response – and that has only come as a result of my experience of other, very diverse, people. I cannot say that this makes for a business case – but it is one of the few things that one can really accomplish in one’s lifetime, I think.

Top ten e-learning mistakes

2011-03-09T05:04:00.000-08:00

I was looking for a summary of the top 10 mistakes people make in designing e-learning solutions. I couldn't find one (no doubt there is one, somewhere) but thought I would list my own. I am sure there are more - maybe you can help me make it a top 20!

Overlooking the implementation: there’s an important distinction between completion rates and learning. Be that as it may, completion rates are still likely to feature in an evaluation of the success of your programme – especially when it comes to compliance training. Completion rates are almost entirely determined by how you have implemented your course; more specifically the degree to which you used a combination of elements such as: marketing, reporting, administration, hard prerequisites, senior sponsors and the appraisal process. It is perfectly possible to create a mediocre course and achieve 100% completion, or a fantastic course and achieve 5% completion rates. It’s all in the implementation.
Building courses: it’s usually an illusion to think that providing information or changing attitudes will result in behavioural changes. Generally the only thing that changes behaviour is changing behaviour. As a result we often find ourselves trying to mitigate a problem instead of tackling the process that gives rise to it, and for that reason it would be better if we were more squarely engaged in performance consulting than learning consultancy. But within the area of learning there’s also a healthy shift away from the course format sweeping our profession - and which I would like to reflect here. It’s great that the conventional model of bolting a 30 minute ppt-style course onto the front of a face-to-face experience is giving way to something more sophisticated. Instead of courses we are building resources: interviews, conceptual animations, scenarios, drama, best-practice case-studies – in short a kit of parts that can be recombined as required. They may be used in advance of an event, as part of a comms or awareness-raising exercise, in classroom sessions, or by the line managers in discussion with their teams. The advantage of this format is not just flexibility (including mobile) but the ‘tone of voice’ – courses which use presenters or voice-overs or scripting to say ‘I am the teacher and this is what I want you to learn’. In this model you can still build an assessment (better still a challenge) – but as an independent asset, to be used in combination with a range of resources.
Dumping information: there’s this curious script for what happens with learning: someone important says ‘people need to know this stuff – go talk to Bob’, Bob pushes a document across the table, we employ the dark arts of Instructional Design in producing something whose effectiveness is never measured. My response to this tendency has been ‘Story-Scenario-Simulation’: our job is not merely to summarise information, but to construct experiences which make it clear why anyone should care enough to invest their precious time in learning. Forget learning styles – anyone who thinks people can’t learn from a pdf if they are of a mind to do so is living in cloud-cuckoo land. It’s the why of learning that people are struggling with, not the how.
Ignoring the audience: I still do this sometimes – time pressure and the insistence of subject-matter expert can lead us to overlook the central importance of our ultimate customers in the equation, and instead produce something that merely satisfies the expectations of our proximal stakeholders. Often this ends up being ‘on message’ but ineffective – a course which says all the right things but fails to tackle the real problems. I don’t think is simply a call for more Training Needs Analysis – there is something about understanding a particular organisational sub-culture; what calls them to learn, what challenges they face, what they like and who they respect that isn’t captured by TNA alone.
Not making use of informal learning: so by now we all realise that around 80% of the learning is happening around us, in the informal/natural learning space. Whilst this doesn’t necessarily mean there is no role for formal learning (Andrew Joly points out this may make the formal stuff even more important), it is possible to build learning programmes that blend formal and informal elements to greater effect: in the BBC’s production safety programme members of the ERastenders production team are interviewed in situ then embedded into a 3D panorama – the BBC Colleges of Journalism and Production are also good examples of learning that is more about sharing expertise amongst peers, or engagement with a community of practice. It is still easy to create isolated and isolating learning interventions which neither incorporate informal elements nor link to established informal activities. And it is not enough merely to try to create and control an informal learning space: most attempts at social media for learning fail through insufficient consideration of content-generation-strategies. Here, again learning professionals used to more formal roles have an invaluable part to play in creating an informal experience.
Failure to challenge: sometime I simply repeat the Cognitive Arts matra: ‘GOAL-FAIL-FIX’. Find out how people fail (i.e. the reason why people are doing the training), build these into a scenario/simulation (Cathy Moore has probably done the best job of expanding on this) and allow people to fail. You might even say our job is to ‘engineer failure’. Learning happens as a result of failing at these challenges, and not because we say ‘FAIL!’ but because we demonstrate the consequences of decisions that the learner takes and provide additional feedback. The Learning Design Toolkit research we undertook confirmed that learners want us to provide them with situations in which it is safe to fail, whether these be role-plays or online scenarios. One last point on this: it is the challenge element that is the distinction between ‘just-in-case’ and ‘just-in-time’ learning – we don’t always have to engineer a challenge ourselves, ideally learning is supplied to enable people to tackle a real and pressing challenge that is not one we’ve cooked up ourselves.
Not considering the emotional landscape: what is an ‘emotional landscape’? It’s what you’re describing when someone asks you ‘How was the movie?’ and you say ‘It took a long time to get started’ or ‘it dragged a bit in the middle’. In my experience 90% of courses open with something moderately entertaining (e.g. a video) then flatline for the remaining 30 minutes. There are any number of ways of avoiding this so I won’t spell them out here – but rather just say: if you had to draw a line representing the emotional landscape of your course, what would this look like? Why does this matter? I have tried to set this out in the ‘affective context’ stuff elsewhere in this blog, but broadly speaking it matters because learning is almost entirely governed by subtle emotional cues. No cues, no learning.
Outsourcing it: bit of a contentious one, this. I do believe that a well-formed online strategy is a three-tiered triangle. At the top are online resources best built by highly capable elearning suppliers. At the bottom are resources generated by learning staff and employees and shared between peers. But the middle tier should be a healthy chunk of learning content created by the organisation itself, using rapid development tools and techniques. For smaller audiences, tighter budgets or quicker turnarounds outsourcing activity is costly and inefficient and runs the risk of distancing key stakeholders from the creative process. True, quality is an issue – but relevance, timeliness, cost and client involvement are important too. I see plenty of poorly-worded emails, but am left in no doubt that we are more productive in a world without typing pools. The future of learning professionals should be a sound grasp of the techniques and tools that can be used in creating learning content – such as video skills, for example.
Shoddy visual design: users will get a sense of the quality of an online course in much the same way as they get a sense of the quality of a face-to-face course from the venue. True, this can be grossly misleading, but if you underestimate the impact of good typography, layout and design in your screens then you do so at your peril. It’s not enough to know a bit of flash, powerpoint and a smattering of instructional design principles: I often find myself wondering whether or not to use a supplier based on the standard of their graphical design expertise – because the rest can be taken care of.
Poor content management techniques: this is more of a technical shortcoming. Put simply ‘Don’t build some inscrutable tangle of flash files that we have no way of editing when the text changes or updating when our branding moves on’. There’s also a point around accessibility here, where good content-management (such as the use of XML for content) can really make a difference to users of assistive technology.

Disentanglement

2011-01-28T07:59:00.000-08:00

In learning and development there is always this curious conflation between what we are doing and what we are trying to do. Take 'performance' for example: imagine that you go to see a movie, and on the way out you are stopped by a researcher: 'how was it?' they ask 'what made it good?'

'Great' you reply 'the story was good, the characters believable - it was pacy...'

'Anything else?'

'well - I suppose I enjoyed the popcorn, the seats were comfy...'

'and will it affect your performance in future?'
'What...!?'

The face-to-face training format is generally geared towards delivering an experience - the kind about which it is entirely legitimate to ask 'did you enjoy it?' but odd to ask 'will it affect your performance?'

And this is what lies at the heart of the problems with online learning: learning professionals know how to deliver a good experience in a room (an entertaining presenter, a good venue, food, variety, enthusiasm, activities, networking etc.) but we have not yet figured out how to deliver a good experience online (at least not in a learning context). That's why elearning people keep saying 'but look at games!'. The fact that most successful games are not effective learning experiences is neither here nor there - they are engaging experiences, period. So we covet them.

Why should this matter to us? Because asked what they think about elearning most learners will, indeed say that it compares poorly to classroom learning, i.e. it is not as good an experience. (it is generally more effective learning, though - according to this US Dept for Ed. study). But the conflation here is rarely made explicit: 'was it a good learning experience?' we ask.

There are times when it really matters to training organisations that they deliver a good experience. Of course if we were really serious about performance - about changing behaviour - we have known how to do this for some time. We see it in action every time we watch 'Supernanny' (or something similar). The answer is reinforcement. Positively reinforce desired behaviours, negatively reinforce undesirable ones. By and large behaviours influence attitudes, not the other way round, so trying to address attitudes in order to bring about behavior change is largely fruitless. The best courses change behaviors by changing behaviors.

But if we're serious about performance, the format for effecting behaviour change would likely not be an event at all - online or otherwise (typically behaviors regress when Supernanny exits). It would more likely be a little widget that sits in the corner of your screen - let's call it an XP bar - that reliably and methodically rewards you for doing the right thing; or regular, timely and specific feedback from your line manager.

Finally, a parting thought: the addictive nature of many games depends not on them being 'fun' or 'engaging' in any normal sense of these words - but on carefully constructed reinforcement schedules. You do mindless, repetitive stuff and get points (it's called 'grinding'). When we get together to talk about learning, about what we are doing, about what we should be doing and how we evaluate it, often these strands swirl about without ever being disentangled.

Asking for Directions: learning a new job.

2011-01-13T03:14:00.000-08:00

Photo reproduced with permission and thanks to Pedro Cardigo

I’ve been a little quiet recently, due principally to the transition that I am making from working at the BBC to working at BP. I’ve always believed that learning – real learning – is driven by challenges, and changing jobs is one of those big challenges that most of us go through some time and subsequently highlight as a period of intense learning. So it’s been good to be reminded first-hand of how learning really works in vivo. I wanted to share a few of my own reflections about a month in:

- it’s a process not an event: it’s going to take a while for me to adapt. Possibly forever. It seems to me that I am spending quite a bit of time trying to map the new environment to familiar landmarks and ways of navigating around. Alongside this, I am trying to adapt my own thinking to quite new challenges. It seems that the Piagetian concepts of assimilation and accommodation hold true.

- It’s primarily an emotional thing: (though I admit there is room for confirmation bias here): what I mean is that all learning is oriented around meaningful, pressing goals which may not be easy to quantify – for example establishing credibility, building relationships, developing enthusiasm and trust. Also, you don’t want to look like an idiot.

- Almost all the learning is from people, about people: it seems pretty clear to me that the relative percentage of learning which is about operational stuff will vary by role; for a management role the operational environment (technology, systems etc) represents a lower level of problem-solving activity (in a bucket along with how to get to work etc.) beneath a strata of richer interpersonal learning around relationships, ambitions, personal styles. Get these wrong and you are going nowhere fast.

- Expectations are central to orientation: there is almost certainly a large amount of learning ‘beneath the water line’ in terms of tacitly absorbing norms and expectations for behaviour. But is can also help to areas where these surface and are made explicit: the emphasis placed on Safety in the BP Induction programme (reverse park, lids on hot drinks, hold handrails on stairs) can seem over-the-top, but what it really seems to communicate is a deeper, implicit norm: a zero-tolerance policy towards risk-taking. I have often felt that being able to set and identify expectations clearly plays a critical role in ‘time to competence’.

- It’s like learning to dance: this is the best analogy I can think of. It’s much more about getting into the swing of things - knowing when to take the lead and when to follow. Relaxing. You can’t learn much from a book, and there’s always the temptation to look at your feet when really you should be maintaining good eye contact. Push the paperwork to one side and listen to the person in front of you.

- It’s mainly an informal process: often, when one looks at learning events there are things that work and things that don’t – but no-one can separate them out: lectures. Are they a good thing? Donald Clark says no, but I found the lecture where he makes this point very good. But there is really no paradox here: an engaging person is good on stage, on TED, in writing. An uninspiring person poor whatever. The same is true of onboarding – for most organisations the process is largely organic, and should probably stay this way. What is generally much more difficult is identifying the bits that would be better formalised and those that wouldn’t.

- Formal learning is largely business risk management: from an on-boarding perspective (at least) this is predominantly the most valuable role played by formal learning interventions. That is not to say that a formal event might not be a worthwhile opportunity for informal learning (e.g. networking) but that this is the most easily identifiable role.

- Maybe 80 percent of learning is from the people within a 5 meter radius: I have been fortunate to have a great deal of support from the people immediately around me (you know who you are) who have politely answered the same question as if I wasn’t asking it for the 15^th time and helped me find my way around like some ageing, bewildered family member. Many of us learning professionals are acutely aware that this mechanism is the bedrock of the learning organisation: we ought to be able to do something to better quantify, support and enhance this process.

- Learning styles, hierarchy of needs – mumbo jumbo: Usually you don’t get a choice about how you are going to learn something; instead you need to be flexible. And people generally are (imagine saying – ‘it’s ok, I don’t need to meet you – just accept my linkedIn invite and I’ll go through your cv’). Secondly, everything feels very insecure at first – this doesn’t stop a person from learning, instead it provides a basic motivation for learning. I never want to see that damn triangle again.

Apologies in advance for mixing my metaphors; but I do recall advice given to me by a driving instructor: “When you find yourself in an unfamiliar place, just slow up and pay close attention to the signs. You won’t go too far wrong.”

I had better shut up now – I need to go and check BP's policy on blogging!

Things we can do differently

2010-11-04T09:32:00.000-07:00

A great deal of what I write has to do with thinking about learning – about different kinds of learning and how they work. But if I had to point to one thing about which I am confident it would be this: nobody knows what they are doing. Certainly there are people doing good things; but this is generally a matter of instinct and conviction rather than science. There are many people calling for radical change in the way we learn – Donald Clark and Sir Ken Robinson for example both point to the ineffectiveness and anachronistic nature of learning methods today. Both dream of a world where things will be done very differently.

But whilst I applaud their instincts, I cannot believe we can truly progress without a better understanding of learning itself. I have tried (elsewhere in this blog) to make my own contribution, but would like to summarise a couple of the practical implications – things that we can (and which I intend to) do differently:

1) Build Resources not Courses: there are profound distinctions between the role of courses and that of resources. Resources – be they individuals or media – have always borne the brunt of learning - today to an ever-increasing degree. Courses typically serve an entirely different function, namely proof to an authority that a test has been passed and time invested. True, the two are often intermingled, but this should not obscure a very real distinction. Both may be required, but each has very different requirements: as a rule of thumb resources satisfy a learning need and the format scarcely matters – if that were not true, Google would not be the success that it is.

2) Story, scenario, simulation: as we creep along the spectrum from resource to course it is worth remembering that as the immediate relevance to the learner fades away, the onus is increasingly placed on us to provide it. A flight simulator works well because it feels real. If it is not immediately clear to the learner why this matters then we have to adopt a format that make this abundantly clear. Three formats that work (of increasing complexity): stories, scenarios, simulation. Definitely not powerpoint.

3) Connect peers: there is an important distinction between an expert and someone who merely adopts the role of expert. The traditions of teaching – whether face-to-face or online – have led us to depend heavily on the situational norms surrounding learning. But sitting and listening is not the same as learning – and when you ask people about life’s lessons (as we have done) they rarely identify formal learning experiences. The ‘trusted peer’ or ‘respected expert’ relationships alter the nature of the learning itself, and unless we can provide these, we should question our dependence on forced learning contexts.

4) Work with the affective context: we must abandon the ‘information transfer’ paradigm. Learning never worked in that way, and learning experiences which merely recite the information to the accompaniment of illustrative media do nothing to aid the specific processing capacities of creatures who feel their way though life to a far greater extent than even they themselves are aware. Learning is generally a response to a challenging situation - one which is genuinely challenging rather than superficially challenging. Whilst our understanding of these mechanisms is in its infancy, there is already a great deal we can do.

The Value of Social Media to Learning

2010-10-03T08:49:00.000-07:00

Last week I was speaking at the World of Learning Debate ‘To what extent does social media have a place in learning?’ Clive Shepherd and I were defending social media (as if it needed defending) and Robin Hoyle was questioning the value of social media.

Some weeks prior to the event I had asked whether there would be much of a debate: ‘who would argue against the value of social media?’ I asked. Robin, apparently. So, the night before the debate I googled Robin – and was somewhat surprised to discover that he has a blog. Not only that, his most recent post was an attack on the kind of ‘evangelist’ who would ask whether or not anyone would seriously question the value of social media. Presumably the irony had escaped Robin, so I opened the debate by saying that I had read Robin’s blog, thought it was good, but definitely hadn’t learned anything from it.

But the debate wasn’t quite as lively as I would have hoped – and that’s what I really wanted to talk about:

Like it or not, I think it’s self-evident that social media can and is being used for learning. Sure, you can waste time with social media – you can waste time on the internet, but no-one would seriously argue that the internet isn’t a useful tool for learning.

Robin’s opening argument was against the ‘social’ component of ‘social media’. He put it bluntly ‘we go to work to work, not to socialise’. I have two concerns with this: firstly, we know that the vast majority of learning that takes place in organisations is informal and that much of this is social in nature. Workplaces are by their very nature social environments – the principal reason why people go to work is relationships with colleagues (not money, according to a recent HRDM survey). The social environment is to organisations what water is to fish. I recall a telecoms company that, having installed GPS locators in its field-based engineers’ vehicles, found they were all getting together for breakfast. They put a stop to this and the first-time-fix rates dropped significantly. Social is how we learn, how we work.

The second problem is that I think the attack relies on an outdated model of work. ‘Social media is a threat’ so the argument goes ‘because it distracts people from their work’. How do you know people are working? If your answer to that question is basically ‘because they are in their seat from 9 – 5’ then you were probably missing what was really going on all along. The correct answer is that you know they are working because they get the job done – how they get it done should concern us less than our ability to define and monitor performance.

Social media is not the issue; but how people use it, and we should adapt and communicate the relevant policies clearly. Clive made the point that many of our concerns about social media could equally be said of the mobile phone: people might be calling their friends, they might be sharing company information outside the firewall etc, etc. The fact that people do sometimes do these sorts of things does not make social networking an intrinsically bad thing: if I am spending work time blogging about my weekend, then maybe that’s bad. But what if I blog about work during the weekend? What if I have a large network and blog about my enthusiasm for the projects I am working on – will I be paid for any resulting sales? Have I improved the reputation of the business? If all our employees use social media do we suddenly have a vast, voluntary sales and customer service department? Certainly there is an issue of ‘employee engagement’ going on here. And how about organisations using social media to find out how their employees actually feel about the company, or what is really going wrong with the business? Isn’t that better than a once-yearly ‘employee engagement’ survey or the ‘undercover boss’ approach? As one delegate pointed out, ‘if the MOD can overcome obstacles to using social media, then we ought to be able to’.

But there is a difference between arguments which focus on social media’s inevitability and actually persuading people of the business value. I suggested two approaches we might take in the debate: we could look at case studies where organisations have successfully applied social media to learning (I was thinking of our work and BT’s Dare2Share, amongst others), or I could simply say ‘It works for me’.

It does work for me. Twitter is my no.1 learning tool these days. Not only do I learn a lot more, I am a better learner: sitting in a lecture thinking ‘what key messages would I want to pass on?’ or ‘How could I summarise this in 140 characters?’ helps greatly in processing the information. As Clive pointed out, the discipline of blogging is an excellent piece of self-development. To someone who imagines that Twitter is all about trivia, it can be hard to explain the merits. But I put the argument like this: imagine a supplier approached you with a fantastic new service. They explain that they have persuaded some of the most respected figures in your industry – visionaries, practitioners, researchers and consultants – to provide a constant daily feed of the projects they are working on, things that work, research they are doing or have found, new ideas they are exploring so that you have the latest and best information at your fingertips. How much would you pay for a service like that? How about nothing? My point is this: whatever you may feel about ‘social media’, try it out – sign up for twitter, follow someone whose views you respect, and decide for yourself if it has value. I think this is probably the best way to begin to explore the benefits of social media – but if you are reading this I am no doubt preaching to the converted.

Robin’s second argument was that social media was primarily a referencing tool rather than a learning tool. I am not going to spend any time on this, as I think it’s just semantics – learning is clearly much more than formal learning, and referencing is at the core of how we learn and perform today.

Having said all this I began to feel that Robin had been put in a difficult position: the ‘value of social media’ question is something of a straw man. The more interesting question – and I suspect the question Robin really wanted to debate – is 'can learning & development can realise the value of social media?' I think this is much less clear.

I began to feel so concerned that people might take our defense of social media as an unqualified endorsement, that at one point I actually found myself saying ‘if you implement social media within your organisation, it will almost certainly fail’. And I think this is true: there are some successful projects, but outside of the glossy presentations many of my colleagues will admit that it hasn’t worked as well as they hoped. In essence, I think this is mainly because companies think ‘we’ll introduce a social network to do x, and encourage people to use it’ rather than ‘let’s look at how our staff and customers are using social media, and then consider roles we can play’. In short, as Scott Stratten has pointed out in relation to marketing – social media approaches fail because organisations begin by assuming it is something they can somehow control. What happens is some well-intentioned person creates a wiki or blog site and says ‘come on everybody, post your stuff here’. And people think ‘why should I? I already post my stuff to facebook/twitter/blogger.’

Social media is in this regard a lot like elearning – many organisations simply introduce it on a ‘build it and they will come’ basis without thinking very carefully about the audience, the application and the implementation itself. The case studies where social media have worked well typically involve a very specific problem with measurable outcomes (such as first-time fix), the right target audience, and a cast-iron system for ensuring that staff use it.

I have often been asked how we will evaluate the success of social media. I have two answers to this – firstly, do we evaluate email? Social media is happening around us, what we are evaluating is our success as learning professionals. Secondly, evaluation may not be easy, but it will be easier than evaluating training. Most social media applications (marketing, brand awareness, customer service) are aimed directly at performance areas that are already carefully tracked. It’s a bit ridiculous of L&D to ask ‘how do we evaluate this?’ when for the most part they have yet to answer the same question for classroom training. Don’t transfer the problems with have with justifying formal learning to social media. We won’t be doing Kirkpatrick.

In conclusion, it is not so much that I am an evangelist, but an optimist: I feel that learning and development are at a crossroads: We either embrace new technologies and try to make them work for the betterment of the learning organisation - however tough that may be (and it is tough, it’s tough to make elearning work, and it’s tough to make social learning work). Or we retreat, we say we do formal training, classrooms – maybe the occasional online course. Compliance mainly. Personally I wouldn’t want to see learning & development take even more of a back seat.

Learning is Cookery

2010-09-21T04:05:00.000-07:00

For hundreds of years cooking didn't really change much.

What qualities do you have to possess in order to be a good cook? Is it something you can learn, or do you have to have certain talents to start with? If you were designing a qualification for a 'master of cookery' would you put chemistry in there? Do you know of many great cooks who know anything about chemistry? Would you trust that someone is a good cook based on a certificate? Is the best way to learn about cookery to work as an apprentice to a great cook? Actually, if you think about cooks you know, do they have certain qualifications in common?

Do great cooks really understand what is going on when they cook? Is it possible to practice something for centuries without ever understanding how it works? Does it matter if we understand how it works?

What is good food? What's the difference between food which tastes good and food which is good for you? How do you know when food is good for you - do you just taste it? Is a great cook simply someone who creates great-tasting food?

Imagine you think that you are a good cook, and someone disagrees - how do you resolve that? Maybe you sit people down, cook them something and see what they think. If everyone says 'I really enjoyed that meal' is the argument over? What if your detractor then says 'sure they liked it - but was it good for them?' Is it possible for good food to taste bad - and vice-versa? What happens to food which is indigestible?

What is the difference between a nutritionist and a great cook? Which would you want to serve up your dinner? Do you trust the pronouncements of nutritionists - and how confident are you that you know which foods are good for you?

If you were building a restaurant, which would you go for: a few dishes cooked really well or a wide variety of dishes that are pre-prepared? Would you devise set menus or let people choose freely? Do you cook to order? What about take-away food - or does that somehow detract from the 'experience'? What exactly are they missing out on?

Is it better to let people eat when they are hungry, or force them into set meal-times? Should we allow them to eat what they want, or should we be more prescriptive? How would you encourage children to really enjoy food?

What is the difference between cooking for someone and preparing a diet for them? To what extent should they be involved in the process in each case? Can you imagine what it is like cooking for the army?

I can't imagine a future without good cooks; but I do imagine that what we mean by 'good cook' and how we cook will change.

Understanding Learning: The Affective Context Model

2010-08-03T05:40:00.000-07:00

I thought I would try using video to explain the Affective Context Model and what it means for learning. It lasts just under 10 minutes. Apologies in advance for my laughably childish drawing ability... oh, and the soporific voice-over.

The Trainer of the Future

2010-07-19T00:51:00.000-07:00

A few years ago I was part of a project to define ‘The Trainer of the Future’. Together with Jonathan Stoneman and Peter Wallich we tried to sketch the profile of a learning professional some years from now, based on our experience of learning and development and the trends we could see unfolding around us.

In retrospect, I think we only began to answer the question; but the question has continued to occupy me and I think I now have a clearer picture. It’s a topic on which I have written, spoken and often seen raised elsewhere so – for what it is worth – I would like to summarise my own contribution to the debate:

1)    From Experts to Honeybees: trainers too often cast themselves in the role of expert. This was always problematic; businesses are sceptical of the idea that the trainers are the real experts – at best they are the ex-experts – and in a world where expertise is ever more volatile, trainers risk looking like dinosaurs. The very best trainers are indeed experts – experts at training. Today this means being able identify, analyse and share best practice – a very different aspiration from that of the subject-matter-expert. The expression ‘curation’ is being used a lot – but in truth this falls short of the real ambition: curation is far too passive, training professionals need to be actively hunting down the good stuff, refining it, and bringing it to the areas of the business where it is needed most.

2)    Performance consulting: in the past few years few people have impressed me as much as Nigel Harrison and Dennis Reid. Nigel Harrison’s model of performance consulting is an excellent framework for understanding what is wrong with today’s training. Too often I find myself in meetings which start ‘we need a training course on….’ Instead of ‘we need a solution to…’. Too often the questions are about what ‘learning objectives’ are to be delivered instead of what behaviours we are trying to influence. Dennis’s model is equally elegant: instead of offering training courses, he asks retailers to identify their best-performing stores. Dennis’s team analyse the stores’ performance, then introduce it (forcefully if need be) elsewhere. But whilst performance consulting is undoubtedly a better model, I am troubled by two things: do businesses really know who is performing well (outside of areas like sales)? and: if the focus was squarely on performance would there really be any need for a learning specialist?

3)    A new model of learning: the heart of learning & development’s problem is that traditional learning approaches don’t deliver. There really is no point in banging on about improving evaluation if you have no means of delivering results – it will just highlight failure. Be that as it may, learning & development will eventually have to concede that the value of ‘push-type’/’just in case’ interventions is at most that they protect the board of directors when things go wrong. What is needed is a stark and honest appraisal of the things that really effect change within a workforce. When we researched our own audience, the results were revealing: staff wanted experiences which would build their confidence and they wanted sources of inspiration. They wanted line managers who would take a genuine interest in their development, or people who would act as mentors. Learning itself was something they themselves carried out – because it mattered.

4)    Awareness and resource: it is increasingly ridiculous to think of learning as knowledge-transfer in a world where information is ubiquitous. In such a world it makes sense to refer rather than learn wherever possible. Users will ‘pull’ learning if they are genuinely motivated to do so; our role is to make them aware to the need to do so, and make the right resources accessible. Our own development model has shifted significantly towards a ‘3S’ approach – storytelling, scenario, simulation. We impress, we inspire, we make people think and sometimes we shock. Our job is not primarily to get the information across but to make people care enough to change their behaviour. In short, what matters is making it matter.

5)    Rapid development: 30 years ago managers would have someone to sort their correspondence, to take dictation and type up letters – someone to organise their diaries. Presumably it would have been asking too much of managers to expect them to learn to type.
Rapid development tools are beginning to emerge, removing technical obstacles in the way of learning professionals creating their own content. Sadly, when given this opportunity some resort to uploading deadly powerpoint presentations, which presumably exposes shortcomings in our understanding of what learning is (see 3 above). Rapid development shouldn’t be ‘more crap, quicker’ (thanks to the PWC team for this summary), rather it should be an opportunity for learning professionals to extend their repertoire, take control of the process and make their delivery more accessible.

6)    Video: learning professionals need to master the basics of directing, shooting, editing and distributing video. I have said this many times, run workshops on it – and I’m sure many people think it’s a BBC-thing. It’s not: video is a very effective and cheap way of inspiring people to learn when done well. Websites like YouTube, VideoJug, LifeHacker demonstrate how effective video can be in delivering learning. This is principally because, unlike most online courseware, video has the power to convey individual enthusiasm or personal conviction – precisely what makes a face-to-face session worthwhile. Video is ideal for capturing and sharing success stories within organisations - and learning professionals are the right people to do this.

7)    Passionate about learners and learning: you will doubtless remember the best teachers from school – we all know who they are: they were the ones brimming with enthusiasm, who were passionate about learning, who really cared about the people in their class and their development. These teachers inspired students to learn, by mastering the motivational context. I find it hard to imagine the ‘trainer of the future’ without picturing someone like this. It might seem like I am describing the ideal trainer rather than the trainer of the future – but so-called subject-matter experts can afford to be self-centered; whilst people who are trying to inspire or motivate others cannot.

8)    Connectivity: learning professionals should be well-connected, making use of networks to seek out, evaluate and spread learning (not information, but those things that inspire people to learn). This is really just a corollary of the first point.

If you are not a regular reader of this blog, then my scepticism regarding conventional training approaches will be apparent from this post alone – and it may well be that these days the ‘conventional training approach’ is a bit of a straw man. I genuinely believe that learning professionals have a central role to play in the organisations of the future. The effectiveness of such organisations will depend to an ever-increasing degree on their connectivity: being able to adapt, being able to spot good ideas and share them, being able to identify talent. There is an important role for the learning professional, if only we can demonstrate that we are ready to take it on.

Learning is a misunderstood thing.

2010-06-14T07:03:00.000-07:00

Learning is a misunderstood thing. I am regularly reminded of how much we overlook it, because of what we want to believe about it.

My two elder daughters, Anya and Nadia are 8 and 15 respectively and on Sunday mornings I pick them up from their mum’s so that we can spend the day together. As I drive, I try to make conversation - in the annoying way that parents do – and receive the kind of answers that suggest I should give up:

Me: “So – how was school last week?”

Chorus: “Fine.”

Me: “Did you do anything interesting?”

Chorus: “No”

Me: “Anything bad happen?”

Chorus: “No”

Usually I stop at this point, for fear of breaching some kind of EU legislation. But on this occasion the sheer insanity of what was being said overwhelmed me and I threw caution to the wind:

Me: “So – you’re saying you spent a whole week at school and nothing – nothing interesting happened. All week. You don’t remember anything at all that was interesting?”

Nadia: “No – it’s just boring”

Me: “Why is it boring?”

Nadia: “You just sit in a classroom and teachers write things on the board. It’s really boring.”

Me: “Don’t you have any good teachers?”

Nadia: “Our maths teacher is ok”

Me: “Why is that?”

Nadia: “She actually cares about what she’s teaching. And us. She spends time with us individually.”

Me: “Anya – how about you? Do you have any good teachers?”

Anya: “No.”

Me: “Have you ever had any good teachers?”

Anya: “Mmmm – yes. Mrs X was good.”

Me: “Why was she good?”

Anya: “She was really kind.”

Me: “How would you make your lessons better?”

Anya: “Have sweets and cake”

Nadia: “Do more stuff – like, practicals”.

Me: “So when you look back on your lessons – are there things you particularly remember?”

Anya: “When it was our teacher’s birthday.”

Nadia: “The school trip to Switzerland. Also, when we had to go out and cut up daisies with plastic scissors.”

Now this may seem like quite a mundane conversation – I’m sure similar conversations are to be had across the country – but it is its familiarity that is so shocking: our children are perfectly capable of analysing and describing what is wrong with learning, and we have learned to routinely ignore it. Personally I am staggered that my children can spend an entire week in a place of learning and not find anything interesting. Surely, it should all be interesting – or am I missing something?

Now I take the point that learning and fun are not the same thing (despite the fact that, in a curious inversion of school practice, most organisations use ‘happy sheets’ to measure the success of their learning programmes). Just because a child is bored by their classes, it doesn’t mean they haven’t learned anything (and I suspect that ‘adding sweets and cake’ is not the last word in education policy). What is clear, though, is that children best remember episodes – and that as far as they are concerned sitting in a classroom writing stuff down is just one big homogenous episode. It is not so much that people ‘learn by doing’ as that people learn stuff with ‘colour’ (Affective Context), which is why going to Switzerland with friends is more memorable than sitting in class 6B with friends. And yet – we do the opposite of making learning episodic; we try to make the conditions as confusing as possible: the same person in the same room doing the same thing…

Even more importantly, children seem to say that the teachers who were good were the ones who cared – cared about the subject, cared about the students. And here’s a question: which learning theory makes this a central feature of learning? None of them. In fact a PGCE requires teachers to endure all manner of outdated and discredited theorising (presumably in an effort to subject them to the same treatment that their students will have to suffer) without ever mentioning the most important feature of learning of all: namely that you care about your subject and your students. Perhaps this alone should entitle people to teach.

Yes, I know that this seems an alien and wishy-washy concept – but that is only because we have a completely distorted model of what learning is and how it works. If you ask children and grown-ups about teaching they remember you will find it is invariably associated with teachers who care, or with distinctive episodes. There is a complex mechanics behind this, but we have been ignoring it since Plato.

Now you might be thinking that I am confusing attitudes to learning with learning itself – that a good teacher might create positive attitudes but a bad teacher might equally get students through exams. But let’s be clear here: students pass exams because they cram. A poor teacher may put the fear of God into students, but in the long run all that stuff is lost and all that remains is a bad aftertaste. This is not learning – this is some bizarre ritual. Learning is what remains, influencing attitudes and behaviours in the long-term. This is the gift of the good teacher. And who is a good teacher? Someone who cares about their subject and students, and someone who can construct colourful learning experiences.

Anyway, I have described the Affective Context Model (below) in the hope that we will begin to understand learning, and I’m going to keep on banging on about it until then.

Ten Secrets of Successful Speaking

2010-06-05T14:04:00.000-07:00

I have heard that Sesame Street tunes are used by the CIA to torture suspected terrorists. These people are clearly amateurs; if they knew what they were doing they would be sending detainees to learning conferences. A few hours spent listening to back-to-back accounts of how learning strategy has been aligned to business objectives and they would be pulling out their own fingernails.

Superficially it might seem ironic that the vast majority of learning professionals seem unable to stand up in front of a small group of like-minded adults and hold their attention for forty minutes or so – but to be fair, most speakers are involved in management rather than delivery of learning, and in this context eliciting the response “whatever – just please God let me out of this room!” is a core skill.

I attend a lot of conferences, and have spoken at many. I can probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of presenters that I actually enjoy listening to. This is a shame, because many of my peers have done great work and have valuable experiences to share – they just haven’t figured out how to do it without making their audience feel as if they have been chained to a wall and subjected to the psychological equivalent of hand-to-hand combat. You know what I mean: they open with three slides of staggeringly tedious detail on the corporate structure and while the audience are still reeling from this body-blow follow up with a flurry of facts on the learning infrastructure - simultaneously delivering a jargon-filled monologue that leaves listeners dipping in and out of consciousness. It’s brilliant, really. By the time you get to the completion rate histograms and the ROI calculations the audience have eaten all the mints in a five yard radius in an effort to stave off psychosomatic blindness.

I read ‘Confessions of a Public Speaker’ by Scott Berkun recently – and it’s a pretty good read. A central theme is the insight that if you’re a speaker most of your audience are just hoping that you finish on time and say something funny along the way. But I don’t think you need buy the book, or that Scott covers all the important points. I do think it’s quite easy to be a good presenter by following a few simple rules:

1) Have something interesting to say: Sounds obvious, but it’s clear that most presenters haven’t really considered their audience – they have just thought about what they want to say. So what you get is their whole story – whether or not any of it is especially interesting to you – when really what you want is someone to skip the boring bits and say “We discovered three really interesting things while doing this.” I imagine that speakers assume that since they have been asked to speak, that their stuff is of interest. Not so – conference organisers and attendees have very different motivations. If you can, figure out or find out what your audience would like to get out of your presentation before you build it.

2) Give people enjoyable things to do: yes, I know we’re all serious hard-working professionals but on the basis that we’re all trapped in this airless room for the next two days enduring back-to-back powerpoint GIVE US A BREAK! – Unless you are fantastically entertaining then almost anything is better than listening to you talk continuously: watching an illustrative video clip, talking to other people, drawing pictures, checking your blackberry, exchanging amusing anecdotes. Personally, if I am speaking for forty minutes I reckon on having at least four things that I know the audience will enjoy doing and have at least some relevance to what I am saying. And here’s the important bit: this is not the same as giving people thing to do for the sake of it. Many speakers seem to think it’s fine to break after 30 minutes and say ‘Ok, I want you all to brainstorm this on your tables’, followed shortly by ‘Ok everyone – stop what you are doing – sorry we don’t have time for feedback’ which is the conference equivalent of crumpling into a ball your student’s work as soon as they have finished it. For this reason, most of us have learned to ignore the instructions and chat with people we have just met instead.

3) Remember that your feelings are transmitted directly to the audience: an odd thing about human beings is that they are hard-wired to mirror the emotions of the people around us (mirror neurons). When we look back at our school days, we often remember fondly the teachers who had real enthusiasm. Can you remember a teacher who seemed bored by their own lessons? I bet you can. What was it like for you? When you get up to present, you are performing. You need to be brimming with enthusiasm and life, passionate about the work you are doing, overflowing with energy and inquisitiveness. If you are, you might be able to hold people’s attention for ten minutes at a stretch. If you don’t believe me go and look at Sir Ken Robinson’s videos on the TED site. His videos are amongst the most popular – and his competitors are no less than the greatest minds in the world. Why is he so good? He only has a couple of interesting points to make – but it is his delivery that makes him so effective. And it’s not just ‘showmanship’ – it’s the passion and humour that carries the information and makes it memorable and convincing. How would you characterise most speakers you have seen? Anxious? Tired? Dispassionate?

4) Challenge People: constantly challenge people – right from the outset “What do you think about…?”, “Which of you has…?” – and actually listen to what people have to say, rather than just the tokenistic ‘show of hands’ technique (although this is better than nothing). Keep people on their toes, and make it clear that they are participants – that they may be required to contribute at any point. It’s not just a technique: when you get up in front of people your head swells and you can find yourself forgetting that many of the people in the audience may have something important to contribute.

5) Tell Stories: I hear a lot of people talking about the value of ‘storytelling’ but I suspect that for many it’s just a buzzword. Why? Why tell stories? The answer is simple: stories give factual information episodic and affective context. Instead of saying ‘If you press this button X will happen’ we can say ‘I remember this one time when my friend Bob pressed this button…’ and immediately we build the suspense. Human beings encode information with Affective Context (see post below) – unlike computers which encode facts. So presentations which are stuffed full of facts are like a protein diet: most of it just goes straight through. And it’s not pretty.

6) Get the text off the screen: ok - for starters if people are reading then they are not listening to you (this is explained by Baddeley’s Working Memory Model). You would have thought that by now people would have learned not to put loads of text on powerpoint slides. Not so. They seem only to have learned how to say ‘I know you can’t read this at the back’. Stop it. We’re probably only going to remember two things at best from your presentation – so if you’ve got a load of stuff on your slides then the chances are that you are only trying to impress us in some way. Again – look at the TED site. Most of the speakers have no slides whatsoever. Where they do (such as Hans Rosling’s Gapminder) it’s because the thing they are talking about is actually the thing on the screen. It’s worth asking yourself the question ‘If all my slides were taken away, could I still deliver a good presentation?’

7) Show it to us: don’t just tell us how wonderful your thing is; we’re cynical, we’ve been there, done that. Show us the thing itself – or as close as you can. Which would you rather do: go for a test drive or sit for an hour listening to the salesman go through the technical specifications? Some of the best sessions I have been to are ones where I got to play with the thing (such as Jane Hart’s – ‘top tools’ session or Sudhir Giri’s Google sessions) They actually spoke very little. But even presentations where you just get to see the work (such as Peter Butler’s Dare2Share system) are infinitely better than just hearing about the rollout and ROI data.

8) Practice: it takes time to get good, and maybe practice makes perfect – but we don’t want you to be perfect. I don’t want to listen to an automaton reciting a script, just someone who knows what they are doing, cares about what they are doing and has the confidence to share it with us. Many people new to speaking don’t realise that anxiety changes the brain and makes you forget stuff you know inside out. Those who do know this over-react and script their sessions verbatim – putting in too much content. My advice would be: know exactly what you are going to say to start, know exactly how you want to wrap up and then have bullet-points for the stuff in between. Practice your presentation – pace up and down in your hotel room and go over what you will say at each point. Once you have settled into your stride, so long as you know your stuff, you will be fine.

9) Smile and be confident: just smile. When you feel anxious, forcing yourself to smile reduces that anxiety and puts the audience at ease. Confident speakers are almost always good speakers – they are not just confident because they are good; it works the other way too. For this reason, many speakers will plan to open with an amusing anecdote. It helps us all. If you really want to be good, watch yourself on film – you will be amazed you different you seem from the audience’s perspective. Make sure you do a technical run-through before you present. I have lost count of the times a capable and well-prepared speaker has gone to pieces because the technology let them down. Have working versions of your presentation on your laptop, on a flash drive, and on Google docs. That way you are bomb-proof.

10) Have a structure, make it clear: your presentation structure will, of course, be obvious to you. But to many of your audience it may simply feel like ‘one damn slide after another’. You’re looking to avoid the following reactions “Sweet Jesus – how much more of this stuff is there?” or “What is he/she blabbering on about now?”. You may blabber on, you may have 57 slides – but at least people will know how much more they have to endure and what topic it is that you are boring them about. This will make you better than the other nine speakers. Set out a clear, simple structure at the outset and make it obvious where you are as you talk. No more than five things (headings, key points etc.) is always a good rule of thumb since short term memory is about seven items – leaving your audience room for thinking about coffee and the person they would really like to be talking to.

Well, that's it. I can't think of any more right now, but I'm hoping that you will let me know of any that I have missed. Not everyone has it in them to be great speakers, but I'm sure that most of us are capable of being better speakers. Hope this helps.

Ebbinghaus: the Parrot Sketch

2010-06-02T01:09:00.000-07:00

One of the most dispiriting things about working in learning is the lack of decent theoretical underpinnings. In such an environment it’s understandable that people will try and make use of whatever theories are available to justify a particular practice. I still attend conferences where people are using Kolb’s learning cycle, Honey & Mumford’s Learning Styles or Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to explain what they are doing. These approaches, whilst seductive, are now decades old and have been almost entirely discredited since their creation. They were all well-intentioned, but it is as if we forget that they were the first unsteady steps in a relatively new discipline.

There are some other notable additions to the usual suspects: Atkinson & Shiffrin’s ‘Stage Theory of Memory’ (1968) and Craik & Lockhart’s (1972) ‘Levels of Processing’ model. Both have intuitive appeal: the first suggests that we transfer items into long-term memory by repeating them (like we would a telephone number), the latter that processing something semantically is better than just looking at it or hearing it. But the first model predicts that if you gag a person they would be unable to remember anything, whilst the latter predicts that even a boring lecture is more memorable than being in a car accident. Both are misleading.

The study I would like to look at here, though, is that by Ebbinghaus (1885) – a study that I have been using over the last year to illustrate an important distinction between formal and informal learning (even though it’s actually completely unscientific by modern standards). Most commonly I use this work to illustrate the pattern of forgetting common to many formal learning contexts. Specifically, Ebbinghaus tried to learn completely meaningless lists of letters, then noticed that almost all of the information was forgotten very quickly.

The diagrams above illustrate two outcomes of Ebbinghaus’ experiments. The first is the well-known forgetting curve.

The second shows how many repetitions he needed to relearn the list over time. It is possible to interpret this last study to mean that regular repetition of information – or even learning by rote - is the key to effective learning. This is not merely wrong, but a dangerous interpretation, supporting the case for ‘drilling’ students or encouraging them to learn ‘parrot fashion’. I’d like to explain why this is a misleading reading:

Ebbinghaus’ study is illustrative of something interesting, but not what one might expect. For the purposes of his study he tried to memorise ‘trigrams’ – random sequences of three letters (such as DYV). Since these were deliberately meaningless the results say almost nothing about natural/normal learning, since almost everything we learn is meaningful – indeed that is how we are designed (I can guess what he would find if one of the trigrams were FBI, for example – and if he actually experimented on participants). What Ebbinghaus demonstrated is that we are cognitive misers, i.e. that the mind rejects – or spits out - anything that is not useful/meaningful much as the human digestive tract would reject something indigestible. His experiment is roughly equivalent to feeding people glass beads. It does, of course, throw a critical light on formal learning, where people are indeed routinely force-fed large amounts of stuff which is not obviously significant to them – but, as I have argued elsewhere, conventional formal learning is a strange cultural practice that has little to do with learning – and basically we should stop doing it. I heard a similar point being made by Sir Ken Robinson on the TED site.

What is interesting about his work is that he begins to touch on the way that you can add meaning to information, namely by testing people. To put it crudely: the information before you may be meaningless but if I have you at gunpoint and you have to score 60% or more to live, then it is surprising how much you can memorise. People respond well to challenges – their self-esteem may be at stake, and sometimes their standing within a group. The mere act of being threatened with a test is what keeps much formal learning afloat. Since he was testing himself, there is little doubt he knew what was coming – and given that it was he was both experimenter and subject it is hard to imagine that the results lacked any personal significance.

So I think one should be careful about a reading of Ebbinghaus. It doesn’t really demonstrate that regular repetition is the golden path to learning – but rather that tests can give even meaningless stuff a kind of significance. I do think that if organisations want their employees to remember meaningless stuff then ‘apprentice’ style challenges would be a good way to do it. But then I think they shouldn’t really be getting employees to learn meaningless stuff in the first place (that’s why informal learning is 85% of the cake, after all). Or, to put it another way, if I want to eat fish then I will learn how to fish.

It is certainly possible that going over material in some way will improve memory, but not simply through the power of repetition – if this were the case I would remember the hymns I sang at school, or my railcard ID. Some forms of repetition – especially elaboration - will almost certainly improve learning but only because they build the Affective Context of the information, not simply because one is ‘going over’ the information. Good teachers know that getting students to debate how they feel about topics is a far more effective approach than simply getting them to write it down. Most students learn most in the run-up to their exams – when they are really anxious – but effective teachers can get students to care about the subject-matter way in advance. Good learning is inspired by great teachers – and great teachers aren’t using rote learning.

There are practical reasons for making this point; with most of our training we don’t have the opportunity to force employees to rehearse it at regular intervals. I’m not sure I’d want to – imagine having to repeat the same Safety Training every month. What we try to do is make the information stick first time round, and this can be done in a whole host of ways, all of which have affective context in common (such as making it relevant, using memorable examples, delivering it in context, encouraging people to think about it and delivering it passionately and authentically). When we conducted our own research we found that the vast majority of the things BBC staff remembered were one-off experiences. One colleague will never forget the teacher who told him ‘you will never succeed at anything’. Look back at your own memories, if you don’t believe me. For my part I confess that I can no longer recall my times’ tables – despite rehearsing them thousands of times. I do recall quite vividly the time when we kept a pet crow in a school desk.

In conclusion, there is a familiar pattern at work here: if you focus only on what happens to information, instead of what learners are actually learning, then you will never understand the process. Learning is no more the transfer of information than cookery is the transfer of calories.

This parrot is definitely dead.

Towards a Working Theory of Learning: The Affective Context Model

2010-05-04T11:40:00.000-07:00

Preface:

(you can find a brief video overview of the Affective Context Model here.)

For about five years I taught psychology - including learning theory, cognitive psychology, developmental psychology and comparative psychology. One of my main reasons for leaving teaching was that I wanted to put what I knew into practice. That might seem odd, but it’s a great deal odder to find yourself in a classroom writing ‘Piaget believed learning should be exploratory’ onto a board while students obediently copy it down.

Of course there are many ways of enriching the classroom experience – but I was also experimenting with web technologies and believed that as virgin territories they offered explosive potential. The truth is that there is very little about the classroom that lends itself to learning – it is generally only the teacher’s enthusiasm that brings it to life – and that learning in this formal fashion is merely a convention, and one which runs counter to what little we know about learning. Certainly people learn a great deal at school – but mostly outside of formal environments.

I spent the next several years working with teams of developers in an ambitious attempt to apply learning theory and cognitive science to create a form of ‘super learning’ – a method which was demonstrably more effective than other forms of learning. What I eventually discovered (and confirmed experimentally) was that it was perfectly possible to apply a great many theoretical approaches (such as learning styles, modes of representation, proximal development, meta-cognitive approaches) and build something that, ultimately, was no better than reading a book. In fact, the market was full of examples of really poor elearning content which nevertheless adhered to standard ‘instructional design’ principles.

What became perfectly clear was that context rather than the content determined learning efficiency: if the organisation to which you belonged could give you a compelling reason to study (such as a life-altering test) then it hardly mattered whether they gave you content at all – let alone what format it was in. People, it turns out, are resourceful learners. I subsequently developed a deep suspicion of learning theory which on closer inspection (and with the help of people like Donald Clark) I now believe to be comprised largely of discredited musings or research artefacts with little bearing on what actually happens in everyday situations. Take Kolb’s learning cycle for example – complete tosh. It disturbed me to think of myself as a charlatan; as someone who might go through life with no real understanding of the process that lay at the heart of my profession – though I admit that this is a fairly peculiar condition.

But it’s easy to criticise. Over the last several years the question of learning has continued to trouble me, and I have tried to put together a working theory to explain those things that I have found to be true.

The Affective Context Model:
I propose that learning is the process by which people attach emotional (or affective) sense to information. It might be said that learning is the process by which people attach significance to information, but this would obscure a central point, namely that the nature of human sense-making owes a great deal to mechanisms that have evolved under different evolutionary pressures to those we experience today. I’m calling this approach the ‘Affective Context Model’.

According to this theory the storage and subsequent processing of information depends on the broader intrinsic or extrinsic affective context. Humans ‘tag’ information in emotional terms; some provided principally by the learner, others by an external stimulus. To put it crudely: sometimes it really matters to people to learn, other times someone else makes it matter. When I have asked people what they remember from school – and I have asked this often – they will remember friends, girlfriends, school food, the terrible tedium and the teachers who inspired them with their enthusiasm or by taking them seriously. This model of learning addresses these characteristics, whilst most others ignore them. And I am not confusing the motivation to learn with learning itself, I am quite deliberately stating that the mechanisms are continuous – the motivational context is what is encoded along with the information – the ‘metadata’ which determines how we store and process that information. This approach is consistent with and subsumes other areas of research – such as context-dependent memory, distinctiveness and observational learning.

The headline theory is open to misinterpretation. We have a poor vocabulary for describing what I am getting at: when one talks about affective states or emotion people imagine that this is a plea to make all learning humorous, or that somehow I am invoking theories of emotional intelligence. This is not the case: there is great subtlety to our emotional responses; for example we each have networks of ‘mirror neurons’ which automatically mirror the emotional state of the people we observe so that the model’s emotional state may be encoded along with whatever it is that they are saying . The affective context for learning is also much broader than we often recognise: at school we may be trying to impress our teacher by learning, or impress our friends by not learning. Likewise, when we start a new job we want most of all not to make a poor impression with our colleagues and managers. In addition there are elements of the emotional context which are ‘hard-wired’ – no-one will forget the teacher who collapsed mid-lecture, and some students will remember the lecture on Alzheimer’s because they have first-hand experience of a relative with the disorder. The diagram below is a rough idea of how a model might start to build.

For too long learning has suffered from a computational paradigm which equates learning with ‘information-transfer’ and implies that what a teacher does is merely to relay data from one head to another (or from textbook to head). Why else would we persist in building online courses which are little more than powerpoint presentations removed from their presenters? Some time ago, Roger Schank pointed out that stories (or ‘scripts’) are an important vehicle for effective learning and information processing – but I feel he missed the bigger picture: stories are merely one way of attaching an emotional context to information. A good storyteller is also essential, and a story without pathos is hardly a story at all.

According to the ‘Affective Context Model’ an important distinction exists between ‘pull’-type and ‘push’-type learning (illustrated below).

1) Pull Type learning: In this type the affective context is provided by the learner; the learning already means something important to the learner. This type of learning is typical of informal learning, for example the learning that takes place when a person first starts a new job. In these circumstances it is usually important that the individual does not appear foolish to the new group and they will therefore use whatever means are available to adapt quickly in a ‘steep learning curve’ pattern. It is worth noting that under these circumstances the format of the content scarcely matters – in fact more sophisticated formats (such as interaction or multimedia) may obscure the core information. A learner who is desperate to figure something out (such as how to configure a wireless connection) will be quite content with short, textual information. This format accounts for most of the learning undertaken by users of Google, for example.

2) Push Type learning: is typical of formal learning situations. In this case the learner does not provide an immediate affective context themselves – in other words, they’re not especially interested in the information. In these circumstances it makes sense to provide this affective context by, for example, storytelling, relating the context to the learner’s experience, providing dramatic illustrations, conveying the content enthusiastically and in a way which involves the learner. In his book ‘Aquarium’ Vladimir Rezun (writing under the pseudonym Viktor Suvorov) describes a short film he was shown before agreeing to join Soviet Military Intelligence. In this film a traitorous Russian Colonel was burned alive. It is clear from what follows that this information not only stayed with him but continued to influence his behaviour for many years to come. Despite this, most ‘push’ learning remains ineffective, and retention of information follows Ebbinghaus’s familiar ‘forgetting curve’. This is because learning is usually presented to the learner at a time when the importance of it is not clear or imminent to the learner – it is ‘just in case’ rather than ‘just in time’ learning.

What I would like to say, when considering these two types of learning, is that if a learner can be persuaded of the significance of something then they will engage in pull-type learning and the need to deliver large amounts of information in formal contexts (such as classroom or online courses) largely disappears. A person who has seen someone fall whilst rock-climbing will probably prepare quite carefully for their own attempt. A student who fully understands the consequences of passing or failing an examination will probably take preparation more seriously (but only if there some outcome that is meaningful in their affective context). In practice, this means that organisational learning would do better to focus more on the affective context – the reasons why the target audience might care – than the informational content itself, especially in a world where information is freely available.

The model is also strongly supportive of ‘performance support’ approaches, where learning is provided at the point of need. In this way, when learning is essentially problem-based, learners learn only when they fail, and the affective context is therefore guaranteed (assuming they want to succeed). The theory would therefore predict that learners would learn better immediately after failing. Of course the main criticism of the Affective Context Theory of learning is that it is lacks experimental support. But like most good theories it is based on observations over a period of years and is able to generate hypotheses which can be tested. One could, for example, conduct an experiment in which two groups of learners listen to the same information in the form of a story – one of which is read in dull and emotionless fashion, the other in a lively and emphatic manner (the story being identical in other regards). Students could then be tested on recall. Equally, learning performance might be compared when there is no incentive (such as a test), when learners are amongst a group of strangers (and where test results are anonymous), and where learners are competing directly with friends.

Finally, the model above is not inconsistent with operant or classical conditioning. These theories are well-supported, and explain a wide variety of human and non-human learning. What they do not do is explain the mechanism for learning in the absence of immediate reinforcement or obvious association. In summary, I am optimistic that this model has predictive power, explains some common features of learning in everyday contexts and can help professionals to identify what constitutes effective learning in a range of circumstances. It also underpins more specific pieces of work, such as the learning design toolkit previously posted on this blog, which explains in some detail how this approach to learning might be applied in practice. Please let me know what you think.

The Changing Face of Leadership

2010-04-10T09:06:00.000-07:00

Last week I was listening to someone important talking about leadership and leadership training, and the more I listened the less it seemed to make sense: it was a talk about how we were going to provide first-rate training to our top leaders in order for us to become a 'more agile, dynamic organisation'.

But who are our top leaders? The question had never really occurred to the speaker, who had simply assumed that our top leaders are the most highly paid - the people at the top of the triangle. Easy. But the kind of organisations that we most aspire to - who are nimble and innovative - do not have this kind of structure. It is not merely that they are smaller and flatter but more importantly that their leaders are emergent, so that a leader is someone who is worth following - as judged by their peers.

At Google the person who leads a major innovation is not necessarily a senior product manager; whilst at the BBC the person who introduces a great new program idea is almost certainly a senior commissioner. I believe that in a conventional, hierarchical organisation we know how to identify our leaders, but that in a world which changes more quickly we have to develop new mechanisms for identifying and supporting leaders. As organisations become more 'permeable' to their customers it makes sense to involve customers - not just peers - more closely in shaping that organisation's activities.

The same speaker was talking about a more flexible approach to our workforce to match increasingly fluidity on our requirements: specifically we are already depending more heavily on freelance and contract staff. And yet look at the pattern established for senior staff - each year they earn more, moving higher up the tree and accumulating additional responsibilities - despite the fact that their skills may no longer be relevant to a specific project or operating environment. I don't deny that they possess valuable experience, but probably best suited to a coaching role. And as we become more mercenary in our attitude towards human resources we should hardly be surprised if we see this reflected in our staff 'recognise and exploit my abilities or I will find someone else who can'.

The topic of performance-related pay was also raised, but in relation to leaders this is little more than lip-service: we don't know how to pay someone as a leader one year - when they are leading - and as a team-member the next, when this is what they are doing. Psychologically this seems strange, I admit - but I think it is because our model of leadership is based around our model of parenting: we are generally not the parent one month and the child the next. But this is precisely what is happening in a wide range of areas: we find that our children know more about some things than we do, and if we are to keep up we have to learn how to learn from them.

To put it another way, large organisations will suffer from an influx of younger generations who simply cannot believe that they are required to follow leaders who don't know what they are doing. And today this cannot simply be dismissed as arrogance; how organisations develop and sell products, how they relate to their customers, how they make money - all these things are changing. In some organisations very rapidly (thinking of Nokia here) and in others more slowly - but changing in every case.

The two diagrams below illustrate the picture quite clearly:

In times when cultural change (driven by technology) moves slowly, it makes sense to learn. Organisations work well when experienced staff are promoted, resulting in a hierarchical structure.

In times when cultural change is fast (post 1950s) then it makes sense to refer rather than learn. Organisations work well when good ideas or approaches are quickly shared and implemented resulting in a dynamic self-organising network.

In summary, there is an understandable reaction on the part of large organisations to erect defence mechanisms in order to protect the more conventional core - much like a castle sacrificing its outer walls in order to better defend the keep. However, adopting new, more flexible approaches to the workforce is a doomed strategy if the same thinking is not applied to business direction.

The Future of Schools

2010-03-19T03:42:00.001-07:00

I have spoken recently at a couple of events about rapid development and social networks for learning, and the model that I put forward in 2006 (below) still seems to me to be holding up pretty well.

There have been times where I wondered if 'Rapid Development' is a real thing at all or whether the whole picture will, in time, be swallowed up by Social Learning technologies. I think not. In fact, I think that the internet is missing 'learning' as a class of content. Let me explain: if you are an educator who wants to put some of their content online then you have a number of options: you can share a document (on Google Docs) or a PowerPoint on Slideshare. You can film a classroom session, or a piece to camera and upload it to YouTube. What you can't do is combine different media and interactions into a single experience. And this is a legitimate thing to want to do. You might, for example, want to test people's knowledge by putting them in a simulated situation - a simple scenario perhaps - then send them down a certain experiential route depending on how they perform. This route might involve the kind of exploratory learning that has made CeeBeebies so popular or the kind of video content that has made TED or 50lessons so highly regarded. Some of you out there will be thinking that it is possible to cobble this kind of thing together using different technologies - and it is - but only if you are a wizard. A simple-to-use, free tool that allows people to create learning content is yet to be built; and the web is currently missing a significant class of media.

This was brought into sharp focus for me when thinking about the public education system. Whilst I started out as a lecturer in an FE college, most of my career has been spent building online solutions for large commercial organisations. But there are times when the roles overlap - as, for example, recently when questions were raised over the BBC's public purpose in relation to the Strategy Review, specifically on the topic of its external learning sites.

It does seem to me that, in contrast to commercial organisations, public sector education is going nowhere fast. Whatever happened to the 'National Grid for Learning?'. Today there is merely a debate about who should be providing online content to support development in this area, and questions regarding whether or not the BBC should be involved (in the way that BBC Jam attempted a while ago) or whether it should be left to the private sector.

The answer seems obvious: neither. Teachers and students should be the ones creating content. They will need some encouragement and a proper review of responsibilities, but mainly they just need the tools and the space: web-based software that will allow them to create learning content that it fit for purpose and a place where this content can be shared and rated. It's staggering just how much improvement this could bring about: years ago I used to judge student projects at a school in Wellingborough. You simply would not believe the effort and creative brilliance that went into some of these pieces of work. Where are they now?

Allowing students and teachers to share what they are doing online is I think the equivalent of what Professor Stephen Heppell has done in making teaching environments open-plan. Everybody can see what every body else is doing - and everyone improves as a result.

As organisations (BBC, BT, Microsoft, Google) we are waking up to the potential that can be realised by allowing employees to share their expertise, rather than trying to centralise things unduly. This is an approach that makes sense in a world that changes rapidly. The problem is that our staff have come from environments where they weren't encouraged to contribute, or see the learning experience as a collaborative endeavor. We have to change this, and it is clear how it can be changed.

BBC Learning Design Toolkit

2010-03-09T23:43:00.001-08:00

You can find links to the BBC learning design toolkit and booklet below:

Learning Design Introductory Booklet

Learning Design Toolkit Cards

Towards the end of 2008 we began to realise that whilst learning was changing all around us, ways of thinking and behaving were not. For sure people were starting to talk about ‘learning 2.0’, ‘social networks’, ‘generation Y’ but there is always a danger with learning design that we build around our own preconceptions and practices rather than around the needs of our audiences – that is, we fail to make our designs truly learner-centered.

Mindful of some big projects on the horizon, we decided that we should look again at learning – considering it afresh - and as an experience rather than a set of conventions. We didn’t want merely to survey our learners (‘what do you like about training?’, ‘what don’t you like about training?’) because we were acutely aware that the vast majority of learning happens outside of the ‘training/learning’ social construct, and that people are probably learnng differently in a web 2.0 world. To put it another way: if you ask people about their experience of learning or training you get a very narrow range of responses around the formal experience. We wanted instead to get a picture of the experiences and behaviours that had made a difference to people – to their careers, to their sense of self, to the way that the do their job. These, after all, are what make a difference to business performance.

We worked with a service design company (Engine) on two pieces of work:
1) research that would enable us to understand more clearly the ways in which our staff were developing and how their natural patterns of development were changing
2)A learning-centered design framework, based on this research, which would help to guide the learning design process in future.
The project was led by experience designers Shane Samarawikrema and Rachel Simnett, who between them already possessed many years’ worth of experience in innovative, user-centred learning design.

The research method was unconventional: we wanted insights into the lives of our learners; the things that had affected them most deeply, and into the resources and techniques that they use informally – strategies which are integrated into their everyday lives. We handpicked our research participants from a long list of high-calibre individuals across a range of roles. We didn’t want large numbers – instead we wanted to choose people who would be representative of best practice.

The research used a number of in-depth techniques: interviews with experts, one, two and three week diaries. The diaries themselves used a variety of structured prompts, requiring each participant to document their experiences and reflect on their learning using a range of approaches and perspectives. We then spent several weeks reviewing and analysing this material (using a POINTS analysis system), looking at emerging themes, and segmenting these by ‘tribe’. The sheer volume of insightful refection and telling comments was staggering.

Based on our findings we began the construction of the Learning Design Toolkit – an iterative process involving a range of people over a period of some months. The end result is something which incorporates some familiar elements of thinking about learning, with some new approaches in a conceptual toolkit intended to guide the work of anyone involved in learning design and deployment. Whilst some elements of the work may be specific to the BBC, we hope that there are many elements which are useful – or at least of interest – to anyone involved in learning.

The toolkit incorporates ideas that you will find familiar and some that you may not. At its heart is a theory of learning that suggests that all data is stored according to complex contextual cues which are predominantly emotional in nature – without these emotional ‘markers’ information merely passes through our system. Learning is a bit like the cognitive equivalent of those hooked seeds that get caught in your clothing – or like a virus. Sometimes we attach our own markers – as when something is important to us. This is pull learning. Other times an inspiring person in our lives will make something stick.

The design wheel then reflects those elements that we have found to be important – for example in building learners’ confidence it is important to equip them with the skills they need, make the learning relevant to their lives, and nurture their belief in themselves.

Once learners have this foundation, it is important to connect them to a world of resources and peers, allowing room for experimentation (whether in the classroom or online) and inspiration. Encourage them to stumble upon things that move them.

I don’t believe that these things are specific to the BBC, indeed a key finding was that our organisation subsumes a great many cultures – or ‘tribes’ Some of our tribes only like learning from an experienced authority, for example, and some tribes are happy to learn from anyone, anywhere so long as their work is ‘cool’.

We hope that you will find this work interesting, Shane and I would welcome your feedback.

A Unified Learning Theory

2010-02-22T02:46:00.000-08:00

I recently read (can’t remember where) that any true lover of a subject is a sceptic. It’s a quote that I remember because it suggests that I have a love of learning rather than a bitter cynicism developed over decades of working in the field. Along these lines I was reading Donald Clark’s Plan B blog over the weekend. In a recent post he – yet again – trashes the notion of ‘Learning Styles’ and – yet again – savours the stinging retorts from those who make a living peddling this stuff. It actually can be quite fun stirring up the traditional learning community in this way – and Donald is fortunate, I suppose, that learning fundamentalists aren’t quite as reactive as say, religious fundamentalists (although the NLP crew seem well on the way. Only kidding!).

I’ve lost count of all the crap that regularly resurfaces in the septic tank that is learning theory: Kolb’s learning cycle, learning styles, NLP, learning by doing, Kirkpatrick… about 15 years ago I was fond of Bruner and his ‘Modes of Representation’. Accordingly, we ‘pioneered’ work on the ‘see-hear-do’ model – the idea being that if we presented information in these three ways we were not only broadening the appeal to various learning styles but over-encoding and greatly increasing the chance of recall. I spoke about it at conferences, I think. But it wasn’t enough – I wanted research to back it up – and so, in a story I have told many times, we developed the same content in five different formats of varying richness to determine just how much better our multimedia learning actually was. And – lo – people learned most from the text-only version; proving that learning is a bit like eating: you might enjoy a Super-size McBurger meal, but most of it passes through your system and your body can get all the nutrients it needs from much simpler fare. It’s all about the context.

But this is not the point I wanted to make: what really strikes me is how desperately we learning professionals crave a unified theory – something of Keynesian proportions that we can use to guide what we do and justify our existence. In reality, though, there is no theory of learning that will serve and all we have are a series of traditions – such as standing talking to people who are sitting listening – which we can’t really justify satisfactorily.

Of course there is plenty of research into learning, and some well supported general models – such as classical and operant conditioning. But these are not theories that work well in an everyday environment (take a look at Skinner’s ‘learning machine’ if you doubt this). There is also a great many solid pieces of research of interest (the mirror neurons research is especially interesting, I think) but which we struggle to keep up with, and which to date have failed to amount to an overall paradigm.

Games are interesting – I digress slightly, but the most fascinating and addictive games, such as World of Warcraft, work because they do follow simple (operant) conditioning models. You get rewarded for every little thing that you do. Gradually your experience points will add up and you will advance a level. As you advance levels you have access to new abilities and – more importantly ostentatious gear. Imagine if such a model were truly applied to our profession: for each course completion (or good test score) I would earn experience points – and perhaps for my blogs and tweets too. I might never be a level 80 learning professional, but I am guessing that by now I have levelled enough to drive a 5-series BMW and wear the Rolex that only level 40+ learning professionals get to wear. Could we really be that petty? Just sit on my train in the morning and look at the rings, bags, watches and suits….

But back to business: what we need is a theory of learning on which to base things such as instructional design models and evaluation principles. That is not to say there aren’t plenty of useful resources – over the years I have learned most of the really good stuff from colleagues such as Laura, Clive, Donald, Charles who have developed a keen sense for what works and what doesn’t. And there are also some great commonsense books – such as Michael Allen’s.Guide to E-learning. But these fall short of a grand theory.

For those of us who have lost faith in all the learning mumbo-jumbo, I think it is not enough merely to scoff at those who are still peddling it – I think we need to try and come up with something original, something that we are happy to defend. Yes, I appreciate that in all likelihood this will only result in a net contribution to the mumbo-jumbo pool – and that in the absence of sound research we are probably just building castles in the sky: but I, for one, long for more creative discussions about learning, discussions which seem to make sense of our collective experience of working in this field – after all, real science often starts with theories derived from anecdotal observations.

To this end, I have started developing my own ideas around how learning works and, together with Shane from my team and an external agency, have been doing some research within the BBC on our peculiar group of learners. Some time in the next few weeks we will complete the set of learning design tools that we have been working on for the last six months – and I hope to share this with anyone who is interested. If only so they can tell me what a load of rubbish it is.

Memes, Vemes and two cautionary tales for elearning

2010-01-15T03:11:00.000-08:00

Ideas, it seems, have a life of their own. In recent years the notion of ‘memes’, in an oddly self-referential way, has become popular and we have begun to think of thoughts in evolutionary terms. Thanks to Richard Dawkins we now understand that ideas have a life of their own, they reproduce and spread using people as hosts and may be either adaptive or maladaptive for us – assisting or hampering us in our quest for success.

The Internet has prompted the explosion of the spread of memes by providing a highly effective transmission mechanism – far better than word of mouth, newsprint or even television (although the SuBo meme was seeded on TV it spread mainly via YouTube). If you are still in the dark as to the kinds of things I am talking about, you can get a better idea here: http://knowyourmeme.com/

So it with some trepidation that I would like to lay claim to introducing the first deliberately engineered meme virus – a ‘veme’ if you like. This veme is infectious and works by altering the host’s processing of information in order to thrive and reproduce. It does not radically disrupt thinking and even has some beneficial effects. Before I proceed, though, I should caution you that if you want to avoid the risk of infection by downloading this veme you should not read below the dotted lines below. You have been warned.

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The Veme is an ‘acoustic-substitution’ type and consists of over-writing the word ‘elephants’ in sentences where the word ‘elements’ is used.

Having been infected with this veme, I now immediately substitute the word ‘elephants’ whenever I hear someone say ‘elements’. So, for example:

They say: “I need Photoshop elements on my machine”
I hear: “I need Photoshop elephants on my machine”

(There then ensues a brief, ‘Scrubs-like’ moment, where I picture elephants expert in the use of photoshop squashed into an office chair, thumping at a keyboard with their feet.)

Other examples include:
‘This project has a number of discrete elements’ – I like the idea of elephant discretion generally, or:

‘What are the key elements for success?’ – and where are they hiding? Damn those sneaky elephants.

The benefit to the host of infection by this particular veme is that it does lighten up the occasional meeting or lecture; although on the downside I have occasionally crashed mid-sentence having inadvertently used the word ‘elements’.

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In the world of training there are some familiar memes/vemes: ‘blended learning’, Kirkpatrick, virtual environments.

Two memes that are swilling around at the moment are ‘rapid development’, and ‘social networks for learning’ – and since we have pioneering development in both areas – and have shared this work quite publicly – I feel some sense of responsibility for the associated, and infectious, discussion.

What worries me is this: the cautions are being missed in the hype. In both cases (rapid dev and social networks) if you simply introduce these solutions technically into your organisation they will fail. They will fail badly and they will fail very visibly.

I have tried to explain why – for example at the #CIPD09 speech – but perhaps unsurprisingly the possibility that the bandwagon may be missing a wheel has been largely overlooked. I’d like to briefly recap the problems, based on our experience:

Rapid development: hardly anybody will produce any content and those who do will produce rubbish.

In the early days of our deployment we trained literally hundreds of enthusiastic SMEs in the use of rapid development tools for content production. Very few of these ever produced anything of a decent standard. The model now works very effectively only because we have produced standard support and coaching plans which pair enthusiastic SMEs with learning consultants who can
a) structure the project and keep it moving along,
b) help them to overcome technical obstacles,
c) ensure that the output is good visually and pedagogically.

Social Networks: you will set it up and nobody will use it (except those people you force to use it).

Just because people are using social networks, it doesn’t mean they want to use yours – in fact, the opposite is true: if they are posting stuff to Facebook or Twitter why on earth would they want to waste time contributing to your paltry Web 2.0 experiment? In brief,
1) only a small percentage of people actually post worthwhile content to the web,
2) social networks need significant critical mass to get going,
3) organisations have yet to recognise and reward activity on social networks so it is effectively tacitly discouraged.

It is possible to make social networks work, but in the near future this will involve artificially driving contribution (for example by requiring trainers to find and share best practice using them) or by incorporating existing activity into your solution (so, for example you could act as a ‘curator’, identifying the most interesting twitter feeds from respected professionals and incorporating these as a section on your intranet page – you can imagine how this might work for HR professionals, for example).

For example I was recently asked to outline how social media could be used for an ‘opportunities portal’ and suggested the following five potential applications:
1) PUSH: using, for example a twitter account to replace the ‘click here to receive email updates’ option and additional raise the profile of the sitte’s activity.
2) PULL: drawing feeds from selected social networks (such as those used by recruiters) to create a fuller and more immediate environment
3) SEX APPEAL: incorporating short video stories (by force) into the site itself to give a (false) YouTube feel – possibly allowing comments – but with the intention of making the site feel less intimidating and more easy to identify with,
4) RANKING – using a site blog to improve the ranking, (as well as the ‘homeliness’ of the site)
5) COMPANION SITE – using an existing mechanism (such as Facebook groups) to establish a companion network where interested audiences can connect in a free-for-all fashion, at arms length.

In other words – rather like the heyday of e-learning – whilst rapid development and social networks offer huge benefits, without an effective implementation strategy both approaches will almost certainly fail to progress beyond the pilot stage. And I hope the elements I have outlined above will help.

Two Worlds

2010-01-07T01:08:00.000-08:00

There’s a remarkable disparity within the world of elearning – probably common to other areas of work, but no less noteworthy as a consequence: namely, the divide between what gets talked about and what is being done. A divide between the world of the commentators and the players, if you like.

It’s easy to miss: if you spend any time reading industry publications or attending conferences you can easily get a distorted perception of what is actually happening in the world of online learning. This is mainly because the sorts of people who regularly speak at conferences are the same ones who regularly contribute to industry publications – and the vast majority of this group are not directly involved in managing elearning within organisations.

In practice this means that elearning events and magazines are something like a parallel universe – full of conversations about sexy but largely out of reach stuff: web 2.0, emotional intelligence, building learning organisation, blogs and wikis, virtual worlds, gaming, strategic alignment etc. If, on the other hand you take the time to talk to people whose job is to implement elearning their ambitions are decidedly more modest: rolling out a online induction course, improving completion rates, using simple authoring tools, introducing a basic level of ‘blending’, getting agreement to use a single LMS, finding a cheap but reliable supplier.

I confess to being in a fortunate position and therefore something of a hypocrite: I do have the luxury of being able to experiment at the frontiers of the technology, and I do regularly talk and sometimes write about these things - but I am conscious that the majority of my peers work within more severe constraints. In summary, I still think the day-to-day needs of the elearning practitioner are largely overlooked by our own chattering class, of which I am a part. Must try harder.

I saw some extraordinary films over the holidays – notably Avatar – a film which itself concerns two worlds and the conflict that arises between them. As you probably know the film concerns the identity crisis faced by a wheelchair-user living what becomes an increasingly desirable second life via the magic of technology. Aside from the fantastic setting it’s something of an allegory for the lives of the audience: just as our everyday lives are governed by attempts at a systematic reduction of risk and the unexpected, so our lust for adventure grows. I have heard it said that films are simply life with the boring bits left out – but you would be hard pressed these days to find a single episode in most people’s lives even half as exciting as those routinely strung together in a Hollywood storyline. Precisely those things which appeal to us in film are those things denied us in life.

I suppose I find it ironic that the more we control and regulate our everyday lives the further we find ourselves from the excitement and adventure that we crave. The film ‘Surrogate’ illustrates this quite nicely: in a future not far from now, an obese population lies permanently in the embrace of machines which allow them to live out their dream lives via a robot proxy – a self that, if not indestructible, is replaceable and upgradeable.

It is indeed becoming possible to separate out our thrilling virtual lives from our safe physical ones - but a problem remains: just as the classroom is now becoming a painfully boring environment for GenY, so is the modern workplace.

Back from a short trip to the future...

2009-12-08T03:44:00.000-08:00

It actually wasn’t that tough getting there (I went with the peanut butter sandwiches in the end): the hard part was finding a decent edge, once I found one it was quite easy to peel back and squeeze through. I only went as far as 2020 – I figured I might not be able to cope much beyond that.

Superficially, quite a lot of things are the same: people still take the train – no, they don’t all have jetpacks (but cars are a lot quieter). The main thing that has changed is data integration – and it’s really a massive shift. Just as the PC is the hardware that acted as a portal to the internet, the WorldView is the device that allows us to access integrated reality. WorldView is basically a head-mounted display – which sounds like some cyberpunk monstrosity but is actually about the size of those wraparound sunglasses people wear to ski in. Not everyone wears one – there are people too poor to afford one, and some older people refuse to wear them, but almost all kids and most adults do.

The headset is wirelessly connected a pocket-sized device a bit like the iphone (only with no screen). The first time I put one on I felt sick. It was a couple of hours before I could actually look and move at the same time. Basically, the thing operates in two modes: opaque and semi-transparent. When you are walking around it’s in semi-transparent mode and the effect is incredible: firstly, you can see all the information about people as they walk around; their profile is displayed around them and by shifting your eyes from one person to another the information zooms and comes into focus. It’s a bit like the Heads-Up display in Warcraft – there are colour-coded dials, scrolling boxes – you can configure it however you like – the most important feature though is matching: the system detects people with matching profile features and prioritises them in your field of view. It makes it a lot easier to find people with similar interests (unless their profile is completely restricted). And if you wanted to chat with someone in your real space and someone in integrated reality you can just pull them all together – I’ll come back to that.

The other thing you notice immediately about integrated reality is how all the surfaces come to life. Anybody with so much as a garden shed can sell the space for advertising, so as you move around you are constantly surrounded by adverts tailored to your profile. This is really, really distracting for a noob – advertisers will know, for example your favourite actress so don’t be surprised when she appears beside you and asks if you want to go for a coffee in Starbucks. It’s really quite bizarre. Depending on your subscription level you can control how much advertising you see.

But data integration is much more than targeted advertising: it’s really easy to get anywhere (sat nav is integrated into your field of view), and overall doing things in integrated reality is fundamentally different. Let me try and explain from a familiar perspective: there is still elearning, but now it is in the form of brief infomercials which raise awareness around things like the importance of diversity or safety. They carry links to more information. Now at first I worried that people wouldn’t actually ever learn anything using this approach, but in fact the process is built into the integrated reality – so if, for example, you sit at your desk and you haven’t completed a workplace self-assessment – a warning message flashes up in your visual field and you can’t continue. Likewise, when you are interviewing someone the system will prompt you for appropriate questions and screen any that you input. Effectively you ‘learn as you live’. You might think that things like ‘riding a bike’ would be exempt from this, but toddlers with WorldView can actually see the correct hand positions overlaid on their environment as they attempt to balance – the same approach works for manual procedures ranging from cooking through to boiler maintenance. The upshot is that things you do frequently you get good at, the things you do rarely you tend to rely more heavily on reference.

The opaque environment is really interesting as well: there are times when you are sitting down – at home, at work or on a train for example – and then switching to opaque gives you an immersive environment in which you can work with applications, watch a movie etc. Text input is via the thing around your neck that detects sub-vocalisation. As with the semi environment, shifting your eyes brings different areas of the screen up or down, and typically there are several active areas at any one time. Immersive gameplay is absolutely awesome – it just feels like you’re there.

I was testing this out on a train when Nick2 conferenced me in to a meeting. Again, a really weird experience – one minute I was fighting for my life against the Orc Hordes, then I noticed this icon bouncing up and down bottom left and I stared at it - the next thing I knew I was sitting on a Caribbean beach with three other people. What I hadn’t realised is that Nick2 had configured my avatar to be female as a joke, so I got quite a shock when I looked down. The others laughed at my reaction. When the message eventually flashed up saying I had reached my destination I had actually forgotten that I was on a train!

Avatars are an interesting aspect of integrated reality – people spend a lot of time customising and shaping their avatars – you can even turn them on in semi mode, so that the people’s avatars are overlaid as they walk around – it makes the whole world a bit like the bar scene in Star Wars.

Overall the toughest thing to get used to is just how much stuff people are able to juggle at any one time: I struggled just to take in the information I was seeing about people as they walked around me, but most kids will be simultaneously gaming, chatting/conferencing, working etc. by rapidly shifting focus a few times each second. I would have thought it was impossible – but they are clearly able to do it. I’m ashamed to admit I had to take the WorldView off after every few hours – I just found it emotionally and cognitively draining, and it gave me headaches if I wore it for much longer. To be fair, I did refuse the cognitive enhancers which might have helped – but apparently there are concerns over the long-term effects (although their use is now as prevalent as coffee-drinking).

The big debates are familiar: whilst the level of profile information different parties have access to is now a much more sophisticated mechanism, there is ever-increasing anxiety regarding privacy and illegal trafficking of data. The work-life balance issue is now much more than an abstract debate, as companies seek more control over the employee’s integrated reality and individuals assert their freedom to deliver performance in whatever way they wish. I suppose I find it odd that people get together in schools or workplaces – but they still do, though to a lesser extent. I also find it odd that when they are together most of there interaction will be with people or experiences that aren’t actually ‘there’ but I guess there are just parts of human nature that aren’t so easily extinguished. Success is a far more volatile thing – an individual’s creative work may suddenly earn them a significant amount of money, even while their employer vanishes overnight. Most people try to cultivate a ‘portfolio’ of revenue streams, therefore.

It was actually easier to get back than it was to get out – there were just more edges: I guess it’s because in 2020 people care less about their real environment so it’s all a bit more derelict. The problem with these trips is they leave you feeling a bit discontent and displaced – you realise that you don’t belong in the future, but now you feel really impatient with all the ridiculously primitive technology in the present: stupid little screens that you carry around with you, having to email messages, not being able to see people’s profiles – so you find yourself in a crowded room and have no idea whether or not you have anything in common with any of these people. It feels a bit like losing a sense. And I forgot to eat my sandwiches.

A Taxonomy of Trainers

2009-11-28T02:23:00.000-08:00

I am not intending to make a habit of blogging about training, but it recently struck me that people become trainers for very different reasons – and that this is reflected to varying degrees in the approach that they take to training. It might even be possible to define something like a ‘taxonomy of training types’. Donald Clark prompted me to make a start on this Linnean endeavour, in the hope that others might add their own discoveries:

Authoritative Andy: Andy is the expert. Worship his monumental expertise. Often a highly experienced practitioner, Andy sees his role as sharing the wealth of his knowledge with his hapless students. Sessions tend to be delivered as ‘information dumps’ often in a style which owes more to Andy’s quirks than the needs of learners. He’s not really a big fan of argument or alternative approaches. By slide 571 you will convinced that nobody in the world knows more about this topic than Andy.

Caring Karen: this type could equally have ended up in nursing, what they like above all is just how rewarding it is to help people – and especially to build their confidence. First and foremost what matters is nurturing the people in their care. Karen works well with people at the bottom of the personal development ladder, but evaluation is often expressed in ‘cards and flowers’ terms.

Performing Paul: wow. Is this a training session or a sales presentation? Could be either. Performing Paul is an entertainer, often with good interpersonal skills and always something of a showman. Brimming with confidence, performing Paul will leave a lasting impression – but not necessarily any lasting learning. Great at audience engagement and persuasive patter, Paul often focuses exclusively on his performance during the session, rather than that of his audience members after it.

Marathon Mark: you have to give him credit, he has overcome so many obstacles to get where he is today. For a some trainers training itself represents a personal challenge, and every session is a personal triumph of sorts. Marathon Mark delivers sessions which exact a huge toll on his energies – and sometimes leave learning and learners feeling as if they are just there to cheer.

Organised Olivia: ‘If you turn to section 4.1.3 of your colour booklet…’ you will find you are utterly overwhelmed by the sheer effort that has gone into planning and organising all this stuff. Organised Olivia is master of the training project, each element of the 427 step programme slotted into a spreadsheet and stapled carefully the night before. The terminator of the training world, brilliant at large-scale complex training rollouts, Olivia can come across as a little impersonal and fail to bring passion and enthusiasm to the table.

Look-at-me Lucy: you may feel as if you are in a scene from ‘Little Britain’: quite a few trainers clearly just like to be the centre of attention. Expect exaggerated performances and a holiday-camp atmosphere ‘let’s all have FUN!’ - and some of her sessions are, even if not in quite the way she intended. It has never occurred to Lucy to worry about learning effectiveness – the happy sheets say it all.

Evangelina: …probably knows more about training than you do. Evangelina lives, breathes and loves learning. Master of the holistic learning experience, this pedagogical Joan of Arc will seek to convert you even as you reach for your pitchfork. Capable of selfless devotion to learning, expect Evangelina’s rich and original sessions to reach parts of your shortcomings you didn’t know existed. So persuaded is she of the intrinsic value of learning that a hard-nosed analysis might be entirely unnecessarily.

Peter Pan: some people just didn’t have their natural sense of exploration and delight in learning beaten out of them whilst at school. Thankfully for us, a handful of these types have made it into training roles where they run highly learner-centered sessions buzzing with challenges and chit-chat. Peter is so at home in the classroom experience that he is unlikely ever to venture far beyond it, or sadly to achieve much influence over the training organisation.

Don’t get me wrong: this may sound very cynical, but I’ve seen trainers of every type achieve great things. And I recognise myself in at least one of the caricatures above – I only wish I had them all: I guess the perfect trainer would have just the right mix of enthusiasm and authority, a perfect balance of organisation and showmanship – equally caring and calculating in their assessment of what they do.

But if this type sounds rare, it’s been my experience that the rarest type of trainer of all is the one who can prove that they have made a difference; most will rely heavily on positive comments from delegates, some will cite impressive numbers of people trained. A very few will produce sophisticated-looking business cases promising ‘improvements in efficiency’ and ‘reductions in errors’ – promises so persuasive that nobody ever bothered to check them. It seems trainers either ‘just know’ they make a difference or can’t find a way to prove it. In my line of work the business outcome is often merely that we wasted less money – hardly something to write home about.

I do sometimes tire of the management obsession with measurement – as one wise colleague retorted ‘you don’t fatten a pig by weighing it’. True, but if you stopped feeding your pig and they didn’t lose any weight you might wonder if you were feeding them the right stuff.

What do you think – have I missed a few off the list?

Designing world-class elearning

2009-11-16T07:56:00.000-08:00

I don’t usually blog about learning, because it’s not really a topic in its own right: you don’t really learn anything interesting about learning by reading about learning – you find out interesting things about learning by looking, for example, at developments in cognitive psychology, memetics, philosophy or online trends.

But I thought I should blog some thoughts about why and how we are creating the best elearning programmes: this year we won both the top UK awards for best online content (WOLCE and elearning) and have done so a few times in the past.

1. Perhaps the first thing to say is this: forget about all the instructional design mumbo-jumbo. Most of it is patently unsupported, the rest is at best thought-provoking.

2. A good starting point is to think about the emotional journey that you want to take your learners on. Your objective is, after all, not to get information across but to make people care enough to do something differently (even if that is looking up information). You can sketch this journey as an emotional line if you like: hopefully it doesn’t ‘flatline’ like most courses, or start with a peak and peter out thereafter. A good course looks more like a mountain range. Think about great speeches you have heard, good movies, memorable plays – this is more like what you are trying to create. This applies even if what you are trying to create is a humble IT training course – I spend quite a lot of time capturing screens, and bringing this to life with commentary is a real challenge in itself. And it’s much more than ‘being funny’: is the tone right, do people feel a sense of belonging, does the course connect with their core values, does it feel real?

3. Start to think in terms of the ‘rhythm’ of your course – learn to spot those bits where it is just dull for several minutes. Try to break up the rhythm – people like surprises and exploration (insert long story about dopamine). Variety is your friend.

4. Try to look beyond tired expressions like ‘engaging’ or ‘interaction’: what you want is ‘traction’ – something that grips your audience – and things that lack interaction can have traction, just as interactions often fail to grip anyone. Expectation failure – one of the few traditional concepts I have found worthwhile – helps at the start of courses: people are often only ready to learn when they realise they have something to learn.

5. Remember that when you want to say something, how you say it is the most important thing. Nobody believes those creepy emails they get from Internal Comms. Very few people like being patronised or lectured. Probably the most powerful message is one delivered passionately and honestly (i.e. unscripted) by your colleagues – or someone you really respect. Recently I have seen some really high-budget movies that just failed to stir me: the acting was poor, the emotions inauthentic. I have also seen TED talks – with no slides – that moved me to tears (Chris Abani, for example)

6. For this reason, video is a good medium – we unconsciously mirror the emotions of the people we observe, and these feeling in turn are encoded along with the information – in fact it is largely this that gives information its sticking power. People are interested in interesting people. We remember best the enthusiastic teachers.

7. Tell stories. Ever since Schank story-telling has been a topic that bobs up and down in learning conversations – but generally people fail to question why storytelling works: it’s because it attaches emotional and contextual cues to information, and suits our natural mechanisms for information storage. Instead of thinking about pictures to illustrate the objectives you want to get across, default to thinking about where you can find someone who personifies the point you want to make, and capturing their spark.

8. Polish your work. Sadly, a big part of the perception of quality is in the design. The bad news is that if you don’t have a clue about graphic design, it is unlikely that anyone will ever think your courses are really great – the good news is that it is becoming easier by the day to learn about good design (I have some good links on delicious) and to practice it (Jane Hart’s ‘100 tools’ will get you off to a flying start). In truth, our suppliers often deserve credit for this (they rarely miss an opportunity).

9. Get the text off the screen (as much as possible). Why does news have a newsreader? Why not just bullet-points? (I’m sure you can complete the rest of the argument). Try to create a rich visual experience. Human brains are devoted in large part to processing visual data, and making sense of things in 3D environments. Learning in its basic form is contextualised – so ideally learning should be in the form of a ‘journey’ – where you go different places and learn different things (some interesting research on chimp learning around this).

10. Know your tribes. Connecting with your audience means getting to know them. You may well be able to make a good guess, but you won’t always know what they will respond best to unless you find out more about the experiences they naturally gravitate towards.

Broadly, there are two classes of learning: the stuff that people want to know, and the stuff you want them to know. These principles apply to the latter – in a world where people can hunt down skills and knowledge if they care enough there is a diminishing demand for ‘push’ learning – but all the more need for it to hit the mark.

slots

2009-10-23T02:53:00.000-07:00

I spent the last couple of days in Brussels. I have always liked travelling, especially those parts where you drink in the strangeness of a city – not especially the fragile chain of arrangements required to get you there. I have wandered the streets of Rome at night, Munich in the snow, Chicago, Berlin… and what I like best is the vertigo, the visceral fairground-like feeling of so much strangeness.

But I am not sure that I have really fully understood the appeal until now: it is not the city that is strange but me. Walking aimlessly around whatever part of a city you find yourself in is something which happens in dead time – time which is not part of the ‘itinerary’, which is perhaps after the conference and before the dinner. Time which is not part of the plan. And for this time there is no routine, no familiarity – not like home where all time has its routines, its well-worn shape. Loose in a strange place in smooth space: time with no particular purpose, where you have no role to play or script to guide you, like the actor who leaves the stage and comes face-to-face with their own dizzying unfamiliarity and shapelessness. At such times you see that you are almost nobody, undefined and undifferentiated.

I had been reading William Boyd’s ‘Ordinary Thunderstorms’ on the plane: the story of a man who finds his life suddenly disrupted, and falls from the coherent career of a climatologist into a shapeless, homeless struggle for existence, all within the space of a few hours. Around me in the twilight of an elegant European street it is clear that people are busy about their business – it is only me that has no direction. And so it is – as I say – smooth: no slot into which you fit, no rut for your wheels, a world of ice and the vulnerable uncoordinated creature that you have suddenly become.

I realise that the experience is a little sadder and a little less exhilarating now that I am older – Heidegger used the expression ‘fallen’ to refer to the human condition, fallen into a concern with the things around us – constantly and deliberately distracted. As I ride the train to work I am surrounded by the fallen – fallen into their books, blackberries, iphones, laptops and schedules. And I am one of them. But my grip on reality is, I think, less secure. I doubt that many would be troubled by an unfamiliar street – or venture out of the Hotel in search of it. What is a little sad about us is that we shall remain unacquainted with ourselves in all likelihood, and that we have lost the childlike in our everyday lives.

Digital Obesity

2009-04-22T00:53:00.000-07:00

Digital Obesity

The US and UK seem to have a well-reported problem with obesity - I remember hearing that one in four kids is now clinically obese. Many of the rest are fairly fat. Why have people become obese? Because they have far more choice than they used to, and given a choice people prefer things that are bad for them. This might sound a little counter-intuitive, but our taste systems are designed for a rougher, tougher environment - one in which fatty, calorific foods are the best sources of energy. It's a biological system that we just can't 'switch off'.

But more interesting perhaps is 'digital obesity'. Go to the top of YouTube and you will see exactly the same phenomenon reflected psychologically - people are consuming stuff that is bad for them - stuff which their psychological systems crave but which is damaging in large amounts: sex, violence, freakishness, sensationalism, the amazing, the bizarre. The enormous choice that the internet offers is not entirely a good thing - it exposes our most basic instincts and feeds them. The whole thing has moved with a speed that hasn't allowed for long-term studies into the effects - instead we will see the effects over time. If I had to take a guess at what these might be I would suggest the following: poor attention span, nervous distractability, poor memory, depression, aggressiveness, reduced self-control.

I suppose this might sounds a little puritanical - don't get me wrong, I like pizza as much as the next guy - it just strikes me that we are in an era not unlike the early years of smoking, when people didn't fully understand the risks.

The answer to all this is pretty predictable, I suppose - I guess there is such a thing as a psychologically 'balanced diet' and the occasional mental workout. The responsibility for guarding their mental fitness will rest largely with the individual, whilst the government picks up the tab for increased crime and mental health costs and runs awareness campaigns.

The end is in sight...

2009-04-18T05:43:00.000-07:00

The end is in sight...
The other day an adult told me, in all seriousness, that they believe in heaven.
These days, when one encounters people who profess a belief in heaven, they get a similar reaction to that if they were to express a sincere belief in Father Christmas: it hardly seems sporting to argue, there are so many obvious objections. Here is a simple reductio ad absurdam, that occurred to me: each of us is imperfect, sins, and has a propensity to evil. Do we carry these imperfections with us to heaven? If so, do people occasionally get mugged or deceived in heaven? If not, are we somehow ‘cleansed’ of our imperfections? In what sense would we then be the same person – I suspect I would be unrecognisable without mine.

In the World of Warcraft there is no heaven – you die and are returned to where you left off. This might seem unrealistic – but the world has features which make it very realistic - hyper-real in fact. What is real? There is considerable consensus in the philosophical community that we know the world to be real (as opposed to, say, a dream) because it ‘kicks back’. The world may not be what we perceive it to be (as in the Matrix) – but we know that it is real because it does not always do what we want it to do and often responds in unexpected or frustrating ways.

In this sense Warcraft is at least as real as my daily routine: it is peopled with other players and computer-generated characters and environments which challenge me, which ‘kick back’. In fact, the virtual world presents far more immediate challenges than does my physical world.
And there is another related sense in which Warcraft is hyper-real: it has a point. In fact it has many points. In Warcraft one is not working towards heaven, one is gradually working towards level 70 - and self perfection. With every few hours there is tangible progression; new skills, talents to acquire. You see exactly how your every action contributes to the sum of your experience, and with each new level there are new abilities, new areas to explore and items to purchase. Our digital settlers devote vast amounts of time to their virtual selves – some will spend more hours per day in the digital world than the real world. And who can blame them: their digital lives are so much more rewarding than their physical lives – no need for a heaven, then. In their digital worlds settlers are finally able to achieve what they could not achieve in the real world: the creation of themselves in their own image.

It is not surprising then that for many millions of adults Warcraft is the real world – their meaningless daily grind a poor second, a shadow by comparison. Those people who see this as simply an ‘addiction’ have not the faintest idea: such feelings are not comparable to the physiological or psychological dependencies that one might have on drugs. The closest comparison I can imagine is that of a work-colleague who simply does not return from their holiday, deciding instead to remain in the sunshine albeit with a very different role. It is a Nietzschean ‘No’ to the world – a turning of one’s back on things. You probably assume that settlers are ‘geeks’ and low-self esteem types – on the contrary, some of the brightest and best people I know have already relocated. In short virtual worlds expose much about how we, as human beings, find our worlds meaningful. How paradoxical, how very post-modern then that something as ultimately ‘meaningless’ as an online world should surpass our historical world in meaning: but ‘explanations have to end somewhere’ and, after all, there are still people who believe in heaven.

There are two practical implications that interest me: why are most organisations so utterly inept at creating anything like a sense of progression or reward for their employees and, secondly, if Warcraft – probably merely a precursor of worlds to come – has such compelling appeal how much longer before the bright and successful depart the physical world altogether?
On the former point – how about adding a ‘rating’ bar to emails in which one could rate the usefulness of colleagues’ responses: we accumulate points according to our useful responses – and points are linked to holidays, progression or financial bonuses. We might also be allocated an annual quota of ‘recognition points’ – which we could distribute to those people who have been helpful or delivered projects on time. Would it rob our daily activity of its intrinsic appeal? For some, perhaps, but for the vast majority I suspect it would make it more meaningful.

Attention

2009-04-18T05:13:00.000-07:00

Attention
A meeting with Dr Peter Scott from the OU's Knowledge Media Institute and Nic Price two days ago. I'm keen to introduce two technologies - flashmeeting and hexagon - to the BBC.
We chatted on the return trip to Milton Keynes about media use generally. I have a question: when you attend a meeting or seminar, do you give your undivided attention to the proceedings or do you allocate your attention as you see fit?

One of the applications of Peter's technology - flashmeeting - effectively enables you to turn up late to virtual meetings and quickly skim through what has happened so far. He referred to such people as 'power users'. In a not dissimilar vein, I feel it is perfectly appropriate to deliberately dip in and out of meetings or seminars, using a blackberry or laptop, when the topics drift in terms of relevance.

However, I am aware that many people still frown on this - probably sharing the same sentiments as teachers monitoring texting by students during their classes. But aren't the two situations different? Aren't we simply dealing with an overextended norm? As a 'responsible adult' my attention is a precious resource - it equates to cognitive effort. Quite apart from the fact that I do, indeed, seem to be getting bored more and more easily, I feel uncomfortable if I am devoting my attention to something which has no discernible relevance to my role.

On the other hand are issues of respect, normality and listening skills: one could take the view that if we are sufficintly attentive to those around us we are bound to learn something of value, and at a bare minimum develop our relationship with them. Where information is not pertinent then, my decision appears to come down to whether I will spend my attention developing a relationship or working on tasks.

It is symptomatic of the changes in our experiential environment that I think this way: the way in which we are presented with quick-fire, time-compressed, over-exaggerated information all points to the primacy of attention. We live in an 'attention-grabbing' age. One of the more successful learning solutions I have seen in recent years - executve summaries - takes popular management tomes and converts them to one page summaries - or five minute audio files.

A few years ago I remember attending a training session delivered by an ex-Cisco trainer to a group of Siemens Communications employees. The trainer remarked on how few of the trainees had laptops open 'that's the difference between you and Cisco people' he remarked 'if this was Cisco, they'd all be emailing like mad during the training - that's why you're getting beaten up in the market'.

For the benefit of those of us suffering from AADD (Adult Attention Defecit Disorder) I have compiled a list of useful phrases:
- Stop! Only say it if it is going to take less than 30 seconds. (This is best accompanied by the classic raised outward palm gesture)- Hey, that sounds interesting. Can you podcast it and email me the RSS feed?- Talk faster. I don't listen to slow-talking people.- What you were about to say - can you summarise it and give me the summary?- It's ok, carry on talking - I'm just checking my email.- Hmmm. Yes. Hmmm. Yeah....right. Hmmm. (with practice this will become an automatic process and will not require any attention whatsoever).

2009-04-18T05:05:00.000-07:00

aphysicality
Trees are edges. Sundays I spend with my two daughters. A favourite ritual (of mine) is the trip to Tesco's cafe where we each choose breakfast from the array of things on offer, modelling all kinds of interesting decision-making challenges.

Last Sunday I found myself waiting in line behind a large number of people at varying stages of terminal obesity. I watched them taking turns handing the plates back and forth until they were literally piled high with fried food: suasages, fried eggs, fried bread, bacon, hash browns, beans, black pudding...

Uncharacteristically, I felt a wave of fury washing over me. I stood there, wondering why. Perhaps I was getting old.

The most likely explanation seemed to be that I was experiencing that detestable form of sanctimonious rationalisation that affects people whose self-belief rests on the pride they take in their 'life decisions' - non-smokers, for example (you know the type: 'how dare you force me to breathe your smoke, etc.).

Another possibility was that this was simply a transference of my impatience, in turn a symptom of AADD (adult attention deficit disorder) brought on by a lifestyle in which every second wasted is time lost keeping pace with emails.

Moving upwards on the scale of self-acceptability, it was just possible the image of gross over-consumption and avarice triggered those sentiments towards everything that is bad about Western culture - compounded by the complicity of large corporations - such as Tesco's - acting without a hint of social responsibility. I toyed with the idea of suggesting to the cafeteria that they introduce a policy of limiting the number of fried foodstuffs to two for people who are clearly eating themselves into an early grave.

This morning I considered another explanation: I have been reading John Gray's philosophical work 'Straw Dogs' (nothing to do with the movie). It occurred to me that obesity is merely symptomatic of a more profound turn in human progress - namely that the body is becoming obsolete; we are becoming increasingly aphysical creatures. It seemed to me that we are essentially striving (and succeeding) to sever our links with the physical world - mirroring a familiar religious denial of the physical world of sin and suffering. If this sounds implausible, consider how many people now spend their time: they drive to work, at work they immediately interface directly with the world of information via email and the web and the phone. All they do is sit. They drive home. At home the virtual worlds of hollywood and video games are piped into their houses. Perhaps they now also work from home. A body is merely baggage. They play golf on their phones.

For Western societies it seems clear that we are indeed striving to marginalise the physical and to migrate to the virtual (so much more amenable) leaving the needy, cumbersome physical form behind. Who cares what happens to our bodies? 'Give us a pill that keeps it all in shape and let us get on with our lives'. The movement is a triumphant one - a transmigration, almost an ascension to heaven - finally we leave the physical world behind. Obesity is symptomatic of a curious kind of liberation, a dark departure and victory.
But trees are edges, and they will remain.

Honesty, Integrity

2007-07-23T05:33:00.000-07:00

Honesty, Integrity – dooya luv it?
Honesty can be a difficult thing because truth can be a difficult thing. Consider, if you will, the various perspectives of the scientist, psychologist and philosopher. The perspective of the scientist is perhaps most interesting because journalists are so often criticised for misrepresenting or misreporting science – as indeed, they do. But the scientist is often curiously complicit in the deception: the basic model of science – the so-called ‘hypothetico-deductive’ model – is beautiful in its naïve optimism. Broadly, it takes us from the specific to the general and back to the specific, using induction and deduction to bridge the two respective gaps. So, for example, if we see a white swan (and then another) we can use induction from these specific observations to arrive at the general theory that all swans are white. Once we have a general statement (‘all swans are white’) we can deduce the specific prediction ‘the next 10 swans I see will be white’. Of course scientists know that the first part is (logically) flawed – no matter how many white swans you see you can never be entirely sure that the next one won’t be black – but hey, get real, it’s the best you can do if you are not God. That’s why scientists are so coy about truth – because they are conscious that all they have are theories that haven’t been disproved yet. At best they might talk about their theories being ‘approximations’ to the truth – but what, exactly, is the status of an ‘approximation’ to the truth? So, scientists – good guys, defenders of truth and objectivity? Sadly, no, because scientists actually turn out to be a lot like journalists: the hidden presumption is that a scientist’s observations of the world – those specific pieces of data that lead to general theories – are accurate and unbiased, turns out to be flawed. Scientists are only human – they tend to look for the things that they want to see, and interpret them in ways which fit with what they already want to believe. Much like a journalist the scientist will tend to make the facts fit the story. This is what is meant, for example, by the term ‘experimenter bias’.

Psychologists also have a name for this general phenomenon – ‘perceptual set’ – the tendency to see what we expect to see. Or what we want to see. Truth, at a personal level, is a valuable commodity. When Charlie left the Big Brother house (albeit temporarily) she heard people cheering. Really? Everybody else heard people boo-ing. The ‘truth’ is that people will distort the world to an extraordinary extent in order to fit their version of the facts with what they believe. Elisabeth Loftus discovered that memory is almost completely malleable if it means protecting belief – witnesses to a crime can be made to ‘remember’ things that didn’t happen or forget things that did if it means fitting in with a belief about what ‘really’ happened. On a personal, day-to-day level though there is a rule of thumb that holds good: the more deeply held the belief, the more central it is to our sense of self, the more determinedly we distort reality and abuse truth. As a specific example of this general theory you find that people with very demanding images of themselves devote the most time to distorting the world around them – wanting to be a big success can make you a big liar.

Philosophers to the rescue. Actually, philosophers have been experiencing some problems with truth for a while now. The last time it looked in good shape was a long time ago, and the general consensus these days is that it is dead. The first person to notice that truth was dead (although the observation is, to some extent open to interpretation) was Nietzsche. It seems that, rather like a cold-war era Russian leader, truth may have been dead for a while before anyone noticed and despite the fact that it was supposedly in charge.
But who cares what philosophers think, anyway? The problem seems to be that news of the death of truth has been leaked and has since percolated throughout society in various guises, such as cultural & moral relativism, and the Die Hard series of movies. The upshot is that the boundaries between right and wrong, significant and insignificant, possible and impossible, true and false are far more negotiable than ever. And not just because Jade Goody became a celebrity.

In a massively interconnected world it is increasingly possible to construct a channel – a dawn-to-dusk multimedia experience – that pretty much says exactly what you want to hear: that you are good, that you are right, that you are successful. And that is the job of the entertainer, I suppose – to figure out what your audiences want to hear, want to see, and tell the stories. Of course, it is not always enough to tell stories as stories – I don’t want my personal beliefs to be insulted – I want to feel like I am really right, authentically right, righter than all those people who just think they are right. So my stories must be real stories – must be news - Like Big Brother – which is not just a bunch of actors but real people. That’s why I watch it.

Cue Baudrillard-like anxiety at this point as you notice that ‘real’ people are increasingly adopting stereotypical Hollywood-ish behaviours and thinking patterns. Reality, it seems, must now copy the movies. News must diversify and prepare itself to cover all the angles without fussing about the internal contradictions (except, of course, for appearances sake). News, entertainment – whatever. And who said that truth had to be consistent – jeesus, man, get with the program…

Personally, I think the RDF episode makes for a great story. Please can we have it as a docu-drama with a title like ‘Faking Faking It – The True Story’. Perhaps RDF could redeem themselves by producing it…

Truth & Darkness

2007-03-30T05:40:00.000-07:00

Truth and darkness
On Wednesday night I had dinner in the dark, at dans la noir, courtesy of the mind gym. It was an interesting evening.
There was a lot of preliminary claptrap to the effect that we would gain some insight into how it is to be a blind person: I suspect that sitting in the dark for two hours whilst waited on by blind waiters does not really compare in any way to life as a blind person. There is the obvious point that we were all sighted people, experiencing sightlessness as bourgeois experimentation, but more importantly I knew all the people around me were in the same position. My companions included editors from the daily mail, the times, assorted journalists and significant learning people (if that isn't a contradiction in terms).
It was utterly, completely pitch dark in there. We were guided through a series of curtains with hands on each others' shoulders, finding ourselves suddenly and disconcertingly seated in an undefined space, populated by voices to which we could not assign a face. I felt sick and thought I might have to leave.
Superficially the challenge was to figure out what we were eating - there was a quiz to this effect following the meal and lots of trepidatious patting of sticky foodstuffs. But for me the real discovery was existential: relating to people in the dark changed my perception of myself and of our relationships quite profoundly.
Firstly there was the question of identity: our space was no longer three dimensional - not even two dimensional. There was only the interplay of voices, and in this exchange it was possible to doubt which of the voices one 'was' - or even what this meant. Really, to doubt which voice I was. You and I incorporate more than one voice in our own everyday thinking, but in the darkness what was clear to me was how arbitrary the sense of identification with one voice rather than another was. Which was my voice? There were simply voices - I'm not sure I really 'owned' any of them - the only remaining clue to identity was the physical sensation of utterance.
And then there was the question of closeness - that sense of oneself as both discrete and related in physical space. In the darkness some of us felt pitifully close, achieving something that our miserably elucidated lives prohibited. There was no space between us, no personal space to be defended or intruded upon. It was a dream-like intimacy, almost a feeling of immortality - each of us rendered as warm voices, all too human, in a shared opening - not the discrete clearings, the Dasein of Heidegger - but a directness of contact mediated by absence; absence of the space that separates us.
And the darkness was truly revealing: the absolute absence of light seemed to give our voices a poetic quality - a beauty brought about by the lack of distractions - in just the same way that simple words spaced carefully on a page, like a Larkin poem, may take on a fresh charm our voices traced rich forms in the warm air. Voices variously crisp like a dry white wine, or smooth and rich like Chianti.
It was easier to talk, I felt - people attended so much more carefully, and I could devote more of my mind to what I was saying rather than how I was appearing - those tedious negotiations with eye-contact, personal space, gestures etc.
Overall, then, a point that I will not be the first to remark upon: that light plays a central role in our understanding of truth - of who we are, who others are and how it is with the world.
Not everybody felt the same way. I am a radio listener - I don't watch television. But I wondered if there was something of a spectrum of attitudes along these lines: how addicted are we to visual stimulation? People's ability to converse, to follow a train of thought has certainly been eroded in recent years - perhaps these are the people who are most afraid of the dark.

Cover Story

2007-03-26T05:41:00.000-07:00

Cover story
Breakfast in Tescos on Sunday. My elder daughter asks 'what's your favourite colour?' 'Black' I reply. 'That's not a colour, it's a tone.' she says matter-of-factly. 'I disagree, black refers to the absorption of visible wavelengths of light so really black is no colour. Anyway, your point is a technical one - in practice if you walked into a shop and the assistant said 'are you looking for any particular colour' and you said 'black' I don't think they would say 'I'm sorry m'aam, black is not a colour' or 'actually black is a tone'. She munches a hash brown 'I still think black is a tone'. 'What's a tone, daddy?' asks my youngest. 'It's like a colour' I say.

It sometimes strikes me as amusing how far the day-to-day can drift from sense - and the extent to which we take for granted the sensibility of the day-to-day. I spend my day doing silly, non-sensical things; you spend your day doing silly, non-sensical things. Sometimes we just keep quiet, other times we build up a whole world of justification. An example: instructional design, or even experience design. This is something I have spent many years concerning myself with, to the extent that respectable institutions occasionally ask me to speak on the topic, despite the fact that by and large it is has little value and arises largely from historical accident. If you work in audio or vision let me ask you: do you have experience designers for your programmes? Should we all have small teams of people called 'experience architects' who reconstruct our output on the basis of what is known about human cognition. No. Why not? Historical accident.

I suppose the argument is crudely that for the purposes of entertainment you can do whatever the heck you like on the screen or airwaves so long as it entertains, whilst in the area of learning there is science to be applied. Instructional designers do your thing. Back in the 90's some research I carried out suggested that this was basically hogwash: people take what they want from content and instructional design is at best mostly harmless. I guess that in reality online learning design is quite a lot like programme-making in other areas: there are some basic rules that are pretty much common sense and then the rest is down to hard work, experience and creative flair. The experience designers that bring so much to our programmes do so because, first and foremost, they are good programme makers - not because of any specialist area of knowledge. Equally, I would trust a good programme maker to make better instructional content than many of the instructional designers that I have known in the past. At the core of the problem lies the traditional role of the teacher, someone who was once in charge of the classroom and who now commands via proxy - wielding the arcane art of instructional design.
And so I sometimes feel a bit of a charlatan: helping to perpetuate a field of study that I know full well to be little more than a cover story. A lot like marketing, really.

Probably the most useful thing I read recently I found in a book called 'Made to stick' by Chip and Dan Heath. Drawing on a military analogy they note that the army has more or less given up the detailed planning approach, having finally realised that 'No plan survives contact with the enemy.' Which, it seems, is very much the case in the BBC: you make plans, nothing goes to plan. Instead, they substitute the notion of 'Commander's Intent': a crisp plain statement setting out the desired goal. The key idea is that teams of competent people working together will figure out how to achieve a goal, taking into account the prevailing circumstances, and that this is a far better approach than doggedly trying to execute and revise a project plan. At the risk of spoiling the book, the answer to the question 'what sticks?' are messages that are simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional, stories (SUCCESs). I can't tell if it's a book for programme-makers, marketeers or instructional designers.

filter feeders

2007-02-15T05:43:00.000-08:00

Filter-feeders
Last night, sitting with friends around the TV, I found myself in a conversation the thrust of which was that Quakers are not simply a commercial organisation obsessed with oat-based cereal products. I know that this is not the case, because I attended a Quaker school at which there was remarkably little oat-oriented activity in evidence.

Whilst not a Quaker myself, I did develop an enduring admiration for at least one aspect of Quaker life: the Quaker meeting and more specifically the appreciation of silence. Quakers, you see, are fond of sitting in groups in silence. We used to sit for an hour in silence every Thursday morning - all three hundred of us. We would regularly attend similar meetings on a Sunday, and before every meal and morning assembly for a few quiet minutes.

The silence was not enforced - if you were 'moved' to stand up and say something you could. And people sometimes did. Quite often we would sit in a circle.
Sitting in contemplative silence in this way is something which very few people do these days, and something of which very few people are capable. I am confident that this is the case because I used to ask groups of psychology students to sit for twenty minutes in silence. Some described it as one of the most difficult experiences of their course - they would laugh, fidget, pull faces and eventually become angry and frustrated.

The point is, quite simply, that this kind of silence forces one to learn to live with oneself: to become aware of oneself and to enter into dialogue with oneself.
Every day I travel to and from work on the train, and this is perhaps the most noticeable feature - that people cannot endure themselves. Instead they are absorbed in a variety of distractions ranging through i-pods and blackberries to trashy novels and portable DVD players.

It was this observation that helped me unravel Baudrillard's rhetorical question: 'Will computers take us back to a material, inhuman form of intelligence?' - a question which I took initially to be nonsensical, but which I now interpret in the following light: technology, in providing us with a constant source of external stimulus makes us less self-aware, less self-conscious. In a real sense we become more animalistic - creatures caught in an endless series of stimulus-response loops of increasing complexity. Sitting at a series of screens responding to email messages may seem like higher order behaviour - but in fact leaves very little room for genuine reflection.

You might want to take a more forgiving stance and marvel instead at our capacity to process the vast amounts of information to which we are exposed - but it is a hollow boast, I think. I am not a television viewer so I found it strange that as I had the aforementioned conversation the television played loudly in the background. I kept missing out bits of what my friends were saying as my attention was drawn to the screen - or more accurately to the commentary.
And then I noticed that they suffered no such effects - they had developed the ability to allow this information simply to 'wash over' them. So I think it is most accurate to say that we are becoming a society of filter-feeders - like jellyfish mindlessly sifting through vast amounts of information for the odd tasty morsel. The only highly-developed capability here is that of taste - we 'lick' our way around the information superhighway. Something tasty and we post it on our blog. I think bees do this.

Which brings me back to oats. Did you know they do them in small pre-flavoured, microwaveable packets now?

Natural aristocracy

2007-02-09T05:45:00.000-08:00

Natural aristocracy
Nearing the conclusion of Fukayama's book. One of the things that he sets out to achieve en route to his conclusions res. biotechnology is to establish the foundations on which human rights rest. In other words, why anybody should be entitled to rights at all, and how we should decide - broadly speaking - who is entitled to what.

At the risk of spoiling the ending for you, his answer is that there are certain traits that we share as a species (such as empathy, intelligence, sociability, language etc.) which arouse in us a sense of human dignity which in turn roughly circumscribe the domain of human rights. He is alert to arguments by exception, pointing out that 'typical' traits are only those normally shared (in the sense of a 'normal distribution' or bell curve). Roughly speaking, you get rights that rats don't because you possess these abilities to an unusual extent.

He reminds us that the idea that all humans share these traits is a relatively recent concession - supported in part by scientific evidence to the effect that just because you are, say, female or black does not imply anything about those traits fundamental to one's dignity or rights (so we should not be denied our freedom or the vote on spurious grounds).

Interestingly he reminds us that certain classes of human (such as children, criminals or the insane) are denied such rights on something like this basis; that they do not possess some of the above traits to the requisite degree. Anticipating the next question, Fukayama remarks that as for 'natural aristocracies' (societies in which rights are allocated on an individual basis according to their relevant traits) - there is no objective way to assess such traits so such a system is unworkable in practice. And he moves on.

Sitting across from me on the train is a man reading a paper, the headline of which states that new forms of brain imaging are now able to resolve our very intentions (functional MRI, presumably). And the following occurs to me: we make all manner of assumptions about how rights are distributed between animals, children, the mentally ill, criminals and generally accept these as proper. Fukayama's argument seems almost apologetic in this light. Actually, I don't think it is impossible - or even difficult - to make objective assessments of some of the traits to which Fukayama refers as being the basis for the assignment of rights. Certainly it is becoming much easier.
And on this basis his argument supports an uneven distribution of rights: I picture a world in which, say, the average Sun reader does not have the right to vote - or in which women are more likely to be able to travel freely between states than men. We balk instinctively at such ideas (because of the assumptions mentioned above) - but children, as I say, do not have the right to vote.

Of course, in reality, such a system already exists: rights and freedoms are effectively conferred in unequal measure by one special human ability - the ability to acquire capital.
On a lighter note, for those of you who, like me, are Firefox users if you don't already have 'stumble' it is an amazingly useful add-on: it records your site preferences and throws up sites that may also be of interest (based on similar people's ratings) which, in turn, you rate. The antidote to you-tube.
http://www.stumbleupon.com/

Shoes or Weapons - you decide

2007-02-01T05:46:00.000-08:00

shoes or weapons - you decide
An interesting weekend: I helped two friends to upload their video to youtubehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTA4GPQpLq4
and joined 9 million other people in the world's most under-reported conflict - the burning crusade.

It strikes me how perfectly developments in biotechnology and information technology are matched, if Frances Fukuyama is to be believed ('Our Posthuman Future'). According to Fukuyama there are three classes of biotechnology development worthy of our consideration:1) the extension of human lifespan (and the ageing population generally)2) the development and legitimisation of psychoactive drugs (citing prozac and ritalin as examples)3) the dawning ability to genetically engineer (or selectively breed) offspring
- to what end?
Perhaps so that the distractions which our bodies present may be reduced to a bare minimum in the interests of preserving an uninterrupted informational existence: bodies which require little exercise, artificially enhanced concentration and satiety at the expence of reduced sexual appetite and creativity, and all of it spread more thinly over an extended lifespan. But only for the privileged few: Fukuyama's 'Brave New World' widens the gap between the genetic underclass condemned to slave away in the real world and an engineered ruling class, experiencing new degrees of freedom in an informational universe.
I read with interest that the BBC is to open a virtual world for children. I can say with some certainty what the appeal of this environment to many children will be: to be able to manipulate and experiment with one's appearance and explore the reactions of others - in short to develop and refine impression management skills. My elder daughter is a warcraft player and it continues to impress me how central the experience of varying the appearance of characters and selecting their clothing is. But there is an important additional step to the behaviour of the adult players (given that the average player is in their 30's) - the addition of status. Items of appearance are linked to status, and much time is spent acquiring items whose appearance denotes or confers status. This, of course, represents an androcentric bias - in contrast to the BBC's proposals which are predictably shy of permitting the kinds of dominance-oriented activity which have made other virtual worlds so successful. No money, no levels, no weapons. The future of this feminist utopia will be interesting, I think. I can only hope that the creator's of the BBC virtual world have stocked the virtual wardrobes sufficiently. Shoes may well be a deciding factor.
Curiously, this all too human motivation is also at the heart of the Wii design - over the past few months I would estimate that more time has been spent creating, modifying and observing player avatars than in actually playing the games themselves. What is gathering momentum is the tendency of people to identify with their online representation - surely the first step in mass migration - for millions of people the faint realisation that their online existence might be so much more 'liberating' than their physical one.
And this is the curiously predictable oversight of technologists in general - that they overlook the significance of what Fukuyama calls 'human nature' in their designs - that they rhythmically fail to anticipate the impact of instinct: in short that technology provides merely an extrapolation of precisely those actvities being pursued one hundred thousand years ago. Who would have thought, for example, that people would purchase phones with features they are unlikely ever to use - simply because they crave the status associated with the possession of a feature-rich device.
And this is precisely why virtual environments and technological change in general is fascinating - because it is so revealing of human nature. Through it we are able to conduct a kind of 'factor analysis' - spotting in sharp relief those invariants that go to make up the enduring features of our humanity amidst the fluid transitions in our environment. It reminds me of Zimbardo's Stanford Prison experiments of the 70s - in which the renowned psychologist recreated an experimental prison in the basement of Stanford University in the interests of studying the influence of changing roles (prisoner/guard) on human personality. What he discovered was so shocking, so unexpected, that he was forced to end the research prematurely: simply by shifting roles he exposed the dark mechanics of human nature - it's fierce focus on dominance and expediency and the sheer depth of ingroup and outgroup effects - but most of all the flimsy nature of socialisation itself. But I suppose I should have realised that in any case, having been at the BBC for a little while now ;o)

The circus

2007-01-21T05:47:00.000-08:00

The circus
I attended the cirque de soleil ‘allegria’ performance on Saturday evening:
I could have done without the very French marketing balls which earnestly impels people without mouths to ‘speak’ and without legs to ‘run’ – but that aside an extraordinary and memorable show.
I liked the use of contrast: certainly some of the best gymnastic performances in the world, but the heady combination of expression, dance and song made for a dreamlike experience. The Gallic appreciation of the power of the ‘grotesque’ interested me: the beauty and grace of the performers was set against the constant accompaniment of roving fools made up to appear as disorganised, ugly and ungainly as possible. I felt that calculated effect of their disturbing presence was to heighten the perfection and beauty of the rest of the spectacle.
Also a careful admixture of fear and laughter: from high-wire acts to clowns – and hints at a postmodern deconstruction: clowning with an uneasy displacement.
Reading Solzhenitsyn’s book ‘The Gulag Archipelago’ and wondering why the hanging of Saddam Hussein is one of the most watched videos on youtube.
The common thread seems to be control: Solzhenitsyn describes the awfulness of the ‘Arrest’ – that moment when for no reason that you can understand, they come to arrest you – and of how you are suddenly plucked from the fold – of how the great ‘us and them’ divide suddenly opens and the “rabbits” look on passively as you are led away. They like to watch, just as they like to watch horror on youtube, on DVD - just as I like to watch the cirque de soleil.
We are compelled to watch those things that bring our lives into sharp contrast. There is a common pattern to our dreams: we tend to dream of those things about which we are anxious. In this way we prepare ourselves and rehearse our emotional response – in the same way we achieve some cognitive control over our environments by witnessing the misfortunes of others – at once acquainting ourselves with such extremes and reinforcing the misguided but profoundly held belief that bad things happen to other people.
And back to Solzhenitsyn – the whole first chapter of his book devoted to the dreadful catalogue of waves of mindless arrests and persecutions – millions imprisoned and put to death – and all summed up in those last few words: ‘bad things happen to other people’ – for which reason everybody stands back and observes until finally it is their turn to be observed.
And back to youtube: to hell with the story – forget stories: there is no story in sight, just emotion, emotion, emotion: an emotional outburst, a sickening event, a comic scene. No need for a story (which now looks like an increasingly tired device for tying together disparate emotionally charged content at best) - the story is now subservient to the dramatic. I wonder if this reflects a shift in our experiential narrative – i.e. in the days before technology experiences followed each other in a regular fashion dictated by real world constraints. In the informational world almost any experience can follow on from any other, in a way which subverts the traditional storyline. A circus, then.

Real Stories

2006-12-18T05:48:00.000-08:00

real stories
Milan Kundera, the Czech writer, once wrote that as we look back on our lives we recall, at best, a handful of 'snapshots' - memorable events - though we prefer to imagine that we remember it all.
I can't recall where he said that - but at a guess it would be in his 'Book of Laughter and Forgetting'. But I think he understated things slightly, though: we remember a few stories. I feel fortunate that I can recollect some interesting ones.
I was reminded of one in particular last night:
I was standing on the eastern border of Azshara, looking down along the road that leads into the country. For anyone who has not visited Azshara it is an extraordinary place - at once beautiful and terrible. The remains of a great civilisation litter its rocky territories - shattered by some cataclysmic natural disaster. The mournful cries of its long-dead inhabitants are carried on the wailing wind. It is also a dangerous place for the inexperienced traveller.
It was near midnight, and by moonlight the land was cast in shades of grey - a lonely place and a lonely time, then, and an excellent place to experience solitude and reverie to the full.
So I was surprised to spot a small character making his way hesitantly along the road, on foot. He was looking around him as if expecting to be attacked at any moment - as was, indeed, likely. As I walked towards him it became obvious that he was inexperienced, possibly lost. I approached with a smile and a cheery wave, and explained that it would be unwise to continue any further and that to do so would probably end in his untimely demise.
He paused in thought, and then responded simply 'help me', pointing down the road leading into the heart of the country. His expression said it all - he was not lost, just an explorer - determined to press on whatever the cost, driven onwards by the hope of reaching the ends of the world and an insatiable passion for the sheer extent of its beauty. And this was something that we had in common.
I laughed and nodded and together we set off. Over the next few hours we battled our way into the heart of the country, saying very little but fighting side by side the droves of wraiths and murlocs that were drawn from all around by the peculiar sight of such an inexperienced traveller.
And eventually we stood, bloodied and bruised, before the ruined capitol itself; its luminous temples still intact, its desiccated fountains curving ornately upwards as if frozen in time. Between us, an eternal tale of two adventurers sharing their wordless wonder at the world.
We remain friends to this day.
On my way, on foot, to Euston station last night I had passed a short woman by the entrance. She was utterly distraught; tears streaming down her face. She walked hurriedly - unable to hide her misery, desperate to carry it away from the crowd.
And as soon as she passed there was that awful feeling that perhaps there was something one could have done to help - a few words perhaps - buried instantly in a flurry of unanswered questions regarding what this helping thing would be, and how it might be interpreted by the person concerned, by the people around and whether or not it would be wise to 'get involved' at all.
By which time she was long gone.

The BBC - out of the game?

2006-12-05T05:49:00.000-08:00

The BBC - out of the game?
Yesterday I attended the BBC seminar 'A new future for new media' today, delivered by Bill Thompson, Samantha Smith, Richard Dawkins, Tony Ageh, Tom Loosemore, Pete Clifton. They talked about the future of technology and of the BBC.

A couple of things struck me:
Firstly, despite the in-depth research into the area of games commissioned by the BBC, the BBC at large does not understand the games community - nor does it feel it needs to. Roughly speaking the BBC sees programme making as a legitimate way of discharging the entertainment part of its charter whilst games remain an illegitimate activity. As regards the BBC's growing interest in 'online' and 'multi-platform' approaches, there is a tendency to think only in terms of 'web pages', despite the fact that for an increasing number of people 'entertainment' and 'online' are likely to be experiences delivered via a games platform. The resulting spectacle is that of an elderly organisation desperate to move boldly into the new environment, but clinging to an outdated notion of entertainment - as 'quality' programme-making. This, despite the fact that its most successful online presence (in terms of user rating) is predominantly an online gaming site (Ceebeebies)

Some of the more pertinent indicators that this is, indeed, an error are as follows:
- 59% of 6-65 year olds in the UK are gamers (26 million gamers), 48% are heavy gamers- audience-wise, there are 9 million players in the Warcraft virtual world alone (to give only one example of a game.)- gaming platforms are online - the xbox360 has its own content distribution network allowing users to get music videos download games etc. (So, for example, Ceebeebies games could currently be made available free to UK xbox users - but aren't)- even the smallest, most affordable games platforms (such as the nintendo DS) allow internet-based gaming and community functionality.- the nintendo Wii (due for release this Friday) is part of an aggressive marketing strategy to broaden the appeal of gaming to all age groups. It comes with a web-browser, flash 8 and ajax capability. It costs £180.

Games consoles (ranging from the nintendo DS to the Playstation 3) will likely become the default channel for accessing the web from home, with games consuming an increasing share of personal entertainment time (PET) as programme viewing diminishes by comparison.
Today, however, a great deal of the BBC's thinking around 'web 2.0' and the online future is skewed by a focus on the weird and wonderful developments happening in web-pages.
For my part, I like to imagine a parallel universe in which the widespread introduction of multi-functional games consoles is accompanied by an explosion of free interactive content provided by the BBC, ranging from immersive role-playing games through to gripping historical recreations.

The other thing that stuck me is how people whose background is predominantly technological (programmers etc.) over-ascribe the success of specific technologies to 'luck'. This is because they generally overlook the significance of the one constant in the equation: people. As a thumbnail sketch, what happens is that a creative programmer sees a opportunity to build something. They build it principally because the software can do it and as a consequence what people actually do with it comes largely as a surprise to them. Two examples: nobody anticipated the success of txt, and nobody foresaw the failure of video-conferencing. The key to understanding the rapidly changing technological environment, then, is to understand the slowly changing human environment. What seemed surprising to me was that whilst the BBC is working furiously to understand and make use of a vast range of new media technologies, there seems only to be a cursory or implicit analysis of what people are going to want to do with it - with the likely result that technological commentators will rationalise the success or failure of a given technological venture as 'chance'. In sum, the BBC's approach to new media appears to be founded on trial and error and ignores the most significant area of expansion in the entertainment sector.

The final thing that occurred to me is that, in the days when I had a television, I loved that moment when Patrick Stewart leant forwards in the captains chair and, with a bold gesture of his hand, uttered the words 'engage'. Now I hate the bloody word.
The original charm of the phrase had much to do with its mechanical connotations, I think. In this context to 'engage' might mean to connect the idling engine to some kind of driveshaft via a clutch mechanism (the star ship enterprise actually employed a similar mechanisms to that of early type ford fiestas), the significant feature of a clutch being the two interfaces, one of which spins the other of which is stationary - that is until the two are brought together and friction is sufficient to transfer the rotational momentum from one to the other.
And I think maybe this is what people mean when they talk about 'engaging' content - there has to be friction at the interface, something in programmes that 'catches' with audiences and moves them. Interactive content aims at interpenetration, at meshing, whilst 'bumpy' content has emotional peaks or dramatic turns - surface features that work with the emotional receptiveness of audiences.

I found Pete Clifton to be engaging, and a comment that he made stuck in my mind: that in the self-service news environment two of the biggest stories of the year had been the bear chased up a tree by a cat, and a man who married a goat. It made me wonder how much more there is to discover about how to engage audiences.
In any case, I am happy to announce the successor to engaging content - 'alien' content. This is content that literally bursts from your screen and attaches itself to your face. Over the course of the next few days it actually hijacks your nervous system, eventually subverting your entire body for its nefarious ends - at which point it bursts free from your stomach ready to infect some new host. The rough cuts look promising.

Think fast

2006-11-08T05:51:00.000-08:00

Think fast
Back at Tescos on a Sunday with my two daughters choosing sausages.
Approached as we sit by a large lady in a paper hat "would you mind filling in a questionnaire?" she asks rhetorically as I take from her the card-sized form.

Almost as soon as I open it up, it occurs to me that I have nothing to write with. I turn, expecting to be able to ask for a pen, but she is gone. The following happens:1) I think that it is thoughtless to hand out a questionnaire in a cafe without offering pens as well. Fortuitously my daughter's BBC magazine has crayons attached to the cover, so I casually remove the green one without her noticing.2) I see that the questionnaire, though printed on quality paper, has completely incongruous fields: 'department' and 'extension'. I comment to this effect on the form.3) I write in the 'suggestions' box "I suggest that Tescos limit the number of fatty food items to people who are clearly overweight.' I liked the last bit because it meant I could envisage conversations like this:

"I'm sorry sir, but you can only have two sausages""Why?""Because you can only have three fatty foods and you have a piece of fried bread""But she's got three.""Yes sir, but she's not overweight -""Are you saying I'm fat?""Your stomach is hanging over your trousers, sir""They're tight trousers...you want me to wear baggy trousers?""No sir"etc.,etc.
One of the trends that I have noticed - and I guess you have noticed - is a shift in the nature of peoples' thinking. Their thought patterns are regressing at a cultural level, increasingly taking the fom of short, crude, selfish, scripted exchanges -typically emotive responses to concrete events. One American commentator has summed this up by saying we are 'thinking shorter'. Wittgenstein has famously said that the lits of our labguage are the limits of our world - and I suppose that as our language tends more and more towards the stunted txt form used on mobile devices, so our thinking follows suit. I don't think it was always this way - I think that as our world becomes more complex, the interface with it necessarily becomes simpler, and our cognitive structures correspondingly so. The previous day I was reading a famous passage from David Hume to a friend:

"Suppose a person, though endowed with the strongest faculties of reason and reflection, to be brought on a sudden into this world; he would, indeed, immediately observe a continual succession of objects, and one event following another; but he would not be able to discover anything farther. He would not, at first, by any reasoning, be able to reach the idea of cause and effect; since the particular powers, by which all natural operations are performed, never appear to the senses; nor is it reasonable to conclude, merely because one event, in one instance, precedes another, that therefore the one is the cause, the other the effect. Their conjunction may be arbitrary and casual. There may be no reason to infer the existence of one from the appearance of the other. And in a word, such a person, without more experience, could never employ his conjecture or reasoning concerning any matter of fact, or be assured of anything beyond what was immediately present to his memory and senses."
His basic point - that there is no such thing as cause and effect - he makes over and over again, emphatically. But as I read the words out loud it stikes me how much like complete gibberish they would sound to most people today. I find that quite a few things in modern life are counter-intuitive in this way; we are working far harder than our hunter-gathering ancestors (who probably only put in a couple of hours hard graft each day), and we are becoming increasingly unhealthy, selfish, and incapable of complex thought with each passing day. Just look at any ancient greek text for confirmation. On a more positive note, can I be the first to propose that we have a target duration for all BBC meetings of just 10 minutes? Just think how much more we could get done...

Whatever. I finished filling in the questionnaire (obviously I omitted the David Hume piece, in consideration of the fact that I was armed only with a green crayon) and then noticed that there were no instructions on the questionnaire regarding what to do once you had completed it. The lady had gone, there were no return boxes. It remains in the back pocket of my jeans.

Ikea, friends and interrogation

2006-10-10T05:52:00.000-07:00

Ikea, Friends & interrogation
I did two things for the first time over the weekend: I watched an episode of 'Friends' and I went shopping to Ikea.
I was struck by the similarities between the two. Baudrillard talks about shopping centres as being places where you are interrogated, subjected. Whilst this may sound (yet again) like a philosophical abstraction, it was not: I went there with the vague intention of buying something and was eventually spat out of the vast machine having bought nothing but instead realised that I had no clear picture of what kinds of things I wanted to buy - I just hadn't realised how many questions there could be about 'homeware' - and it was clear to me that I had no answers to any of the questions about 'lifestyle' that Ikea presented me with. I felt as if I was going to have to go away and re-evaluate my whole approach to living space.

The other remarkable thing was the uncanniness of the 'user experience' - a long journey through fragments of fictitious lives - bisected kitchens, bedrooms, studies - sliced open like some Damien Hurst work to reveal the perfectly harmonious internals of some absent Swede. Each vignette exquisitely crafted by a team of designers - each one like a mould for a person - open the cupboards and (hey presto!) there are their clothes, open the drawers and you share their vision of cutlery selection. Rifle through their belongings while they are out at work... all in all a strangely voyeuristic and inauthentic experience. 'Sit in each house and decide what you want to be'. This is a place where you go to be defined.

And the same with Friends: deep fried friends. Dripping with something that you just know is bad for you, will probably clog your arteries, but is nevertheless gratifying in a sickly sort of way: a series of scenes, fragments of fictitious aspirational lives from which to choose - which in turn pose questions about which character you wish to be - and leave you with a vague feeling that your life is somehow less comical, less stylish, less exciting (jesus - what is that thing with them all getting together on a sofa in a coffee shop - how did I manage to miss out on that?).

I am sure such comments must seem naive, but to someone seeing these things for the first time this is how I am struck.
Incidentally, I did see something I liked in the end (but didn't buy): I was helping someone to shop for tiles - amongst all the ceramic and lino flooring there were some large, natural 'riven slate' tiles: each one a fantastic relief, each one a glorious mix of colour and texture. I thought I would like to frame them and put them on a wall. I hadn't seen anything like that in Ikea, but I may still do it.

On a separate note, those people who do not yet understand Warcraft could do worse than click here:
southpark & warcraft episode 1 southpark & warcraft episode 2 southpark & warcraft episode 3

Observations

2006-09-25T05:06:00.000-07:00

Observations
On the way to work, walking from Euston to MHS:
a passerby - a girl wearing a faded t-shirt bearing the faded illustration of a crown and the words 'King of Love'. For some reason I picture myself shaking her vigorously by the hand 'your Majesty', I say 'it is an honour to meet you... I am a loyal subject of the Kingdom of Love - I haven’t spent as much time in love as I would like, but I would like to thank you for making it such an excellent place.'

I wonder what it means to wear a t-shirt saying 'King of Love' - because it seems to me a new thing in a human history that words should be quite so completely transvalued. It is not a new thing to note that words depend for their meaning on their context - but it seems a distinctly 'postmodern' thing that words can be so completely traced by their context - that their location can erase them in such a way. I start to notice a kind of gradient of significance around me with words sliding downwards across the faces of slippery marketing materials.

My colleague and I pass a photographer who we regularly see resting against the railings on the Euston road, long lens cradled in one hand, coffee in the other. We stop and ask what he is doing. He responds brightly - an unashamed, practised response, I think 'waiting for Dr. Death - this is the GMC building... he's going to be walking along here - probably looking around a bit nervously...'.

We wish him luck in his hunt for Dr. Death and continue our walk to work, eager to once more join the fray in the battle of good against evil.

Conformity & Creativity

2006-09-01T05:07:00.000-07:00

conformity & creativity
Wikipedia defines conformity so:
'the degree to which members of a group will change their behaviour, views and attitudes to fit the views of the group.' As a psychological definition it is understandably couched in behavioural and observable terms - and fails to get to the heart of the matter, I think.
Something stronger, along the lines 'The degree of conformity of a unit is proportional to its residual frustration with the normal system' is more interesting to defend.

Clearly conformity is not merely 'doing what most people do' - nobody would describe military personnel as a non-conforming group of individuals - it is more like the degree to which people are satisfied by the available options. A person may 'fit in' with the '9 to 5' existence but privately feel frustrated long for something different - in this sense they are conforming only superficially, complying but not truly conforming. If, however, they go home, watch a sitcom about how laughable office life is, and return next day with a smile on their face, ready to face life with a new perspective; then they may be conforming. Conformity works in mysterious ways.

Any existence will offer a number of alternatives, simply as a way of inmproving the degree of conformity and reducing the degree of frustration within the system as a whole.
So the internet is an interesting thing: at an abstract level you would guess that increasing the degrees of freedom of a system (i.e. the total possible way in which all the units can be related together) is most likely to cause the system as a whole to settle on a new attractor - shifting to a new, more all-inclusive pattern. At an abstract level, then, the internet is a vast conformity-engine.

This seems counterintuitive, because the internet is superficially so diverse - and certainly you would predict that the medium-term impact will be massive disruption (as above). But from a wider perspective a different picture emerges: you can become quite frustrated and unconventional with only four options (or four 'channels') - but with vastly more options (or 'channels') almost everybody can be captured by the system considered as a whole.

Nobody need be frustrated - within the internet there is a norm to which to conform for all. In this way the internet fosters diversity to the extent that it creates conformity. Rather than four groups of people with many non-conformists we arrive at a thousand grups of people with hardly any non-conformists. What do people watch on youtube? They watch what everyone else watches - they start by sorting by most watched and watch the most watched.
Why should anyone care? It's as much a gut-feeling as anything: the sense that this 'frustration' and unconventionality is essential to something - to creativity, perhaps. That despite appearances to the contrary, the 'net'-result will be the substitution of variety for creativity.

2006-08-29T05:09:00.000-07:00

Autistic media
A book by Peter Hobson - called 'The Cradle of Thought: Exploring the Origins of Thinking' looks at the development of thought. At its core is the hypothesis that thought (and language) arises largely from our instinctive emotional connection with others.
The relationship of emotion to information has been largely overlooked - indeed, news reports seem to strive towards being dispassionate (in distinction from being objective) - but it seems that it is central to the way that we (humans) store, retrieve and process information.

As you might expect of a creature honed by evolution, our memories are designed to retain information with strong emotional tags - 'bad thing', 'good thing' etc. But as social creatures, we assume these tags from others i.e. when we observe another person their facial expressions, tone of voice etc. it automatically elicits an 'emotional echo' - which gives the emotional 'flavour' to the information they impart. It also seems the emotional 'tags' we attach to information may be intrinsic or extrinsic - our news presenter attaches the requisite jollity or gravity, but when we are looking for a solution to a medical problem on the web we know the answer is important.

So what? So I suppose this is why we have news presenters. I suppose this identifies some of the missing ingredients in much online learning - the teacher we all remember, who was passionate about their subject and who inspired us. I suppose this provides a simple model for much advertising, where the trick is to attach a strong emotional tag to the target information. Some adverts (such as the ones against drink-driving) I find quite unforgettable. It is also an interesting element of the debate regarding whether or not reporters should 'personalise' their reports; it seems they should.

I heard a dismissive analysis of youtube's popularity on R4 the other day, to paraphrase 'I suppose Americans are just interested in weird stuff' - but it's a very personal, emotional media - not the kind of stereotyped 'autistic' media or 'super-emotional' media (e.g. EastEnders) that we are used to. What people are saying on youtube is important at an emotional level. At this level a teenager's bedroom post can easily be more imporant than a news story about Israeli/Palestinian conflict.

I would imagine that in an era of 'information overload' we will become increasingly dependent on our emotional responses to guide us.

2006-08-23T05:10:00.000-07:00

work/life vs work/play
I hear about ‘wok/life balance’ quite regularly now. But to me it seems an outdated notion – something for the older generation, used to a regular nine-to-five existence, troubled by the fact that their correspondence now seems to follow them wherever they go.
I don’t really believe in the work/life balance dichotomy either: work is a big part of your life – if it isn’t then you should consider getting a meaningful job. Frankly I feel vaguely insulted by the opposition.

I think a more interesting distinction is work/play: the impact of technology and changes in lifestyle (24/7, globalisation, mobility etc.) has been that play and work are with us wherever we go. The same device we use for work we may also use for play. For those people of a generation that increasingly do not draw artificial boundaries between work and life, or between work and play, the interesting questions are around this blend. In this context youtube is a workplay (put it in your dictionary) resource - watching tv is not something we do in big chunks after work, it is something we do in little bits all day long.

A picture: from the moment you wake up to the moment you sleep you are confronted by a variety of activities classifiable somewhere along the work-play continuum: some of these fall within the boundaries of your ‘job’ – but precisely which is unlikely to be clear. The things you do range from tedious work to relaxing fun – your objective is to manage the balance of activity during the day, so that you complete your work whilst involved in as much play as possible. The most satisfied individuals will say ‘it’s great to get paid for doing something I enjoy doing anyway’, and in response to the question ‘are you working or playing?’ they will say ‘I don’t know’.

Office environments have probably always comprised a mix of work and play – but technology adds a new dimension: more control over work and play. Now, you can catch up on some much-needed play during a boring meeting, or return an email while you watch football. In the online world virtual characters may be doing exactly the same things, however one may be taking a break from work, whilst another may have been employed to develop th e virtual character – so they are at work.

In summary, then these seem to be more interesting questions to me: How can we make work play? How can we balance work and play? What is the optimum mix?

A question of skin...

2006-06-25T05:35:00.000-07:00

A question of skin...
Over the weekend I reached level 70. Ding. The sense of achievement is also accompanied by a sense of relief. Some of you may be wondering just how much of one's time one needs to invest in order to reach level 70, but the likelihood is that most of you are not. Fortunatley for the curious few, Warcraft tracks this information: 30 days (720 hours). This is roughly equivalent to a full-time job for a five month period. Alternatively, for a few hundred pounds, you could pay someone from a developing country to do it for you (the proper expression is 'power levelling service').

I have attended a couple of conferences recently, speaking at some. Conferences attendees are mostly older people and, predictably, they just don't get it. 'Dogs bark at what they don't understand' Jaques Derrida famously remarked in response to his critics - and there is certainly lots of barking at such events. Rationalisations range in sophistication from the bald outburst that information technology is little more than a passing fad, to the lengthy piece penned by Jenny Diski in which she concludes that 'second life' is little more than a pale imitation of the real thing, for example.

My daughter, who is twelve, did not want to go with us on the walk around the lake, even though I promised it would take no longer than half an hour. She was busy - very busy. She divided her time roughly between three activities, each more deeply social in nature than anything pre-dating information technology: she played warcraft, she used MSN and Bebo, and she created two more 'skins' for her web-page. In the latter case, she had some fairly ambitious ideas so with a little help from me she learned to use photoshop. Each of these activities boils down to the same thing: extended experimentation with self-presentation, but in a world which has many more degrees of freedom. In Warcraft she spends much of her time 'sculpting' - creating, skinning and perfecting characters, then interacting with others - a kind of role-play or iterative experimentation if you like. Likewise with MSN and Bebo the goal is to make and remake one's self-image, forever developing forwards, social refencing violently: cutting, pasting, linking, embedding.
And so it is that the technological self is cut, pasted, linked and embedded - just as before but so, so much more.

And this is the crux, I suppose - as Deleuze and Guattari point out: qualitative diffences are spawned by quantitative differences - the morphogenesis of the human body begins with a few simple chemical gradients - differences in 'intensity'. So whilst it is true (as Diski and others are so quick to point out) that the online world often merely extends the same activity to be found in the offline world - the difference in intensity is precisely what is significant, because that is all that ever is. That is all that is needed for morphogenesis.

Another tack: Jenny makes much of the 'pink economy' - in second life she is approached by characters who offer to remove their clothing in exchange for 'credits'. How damnable. News recently reported on the scandal of teenagers, using facebook and web-cams to make money in exchange for indecent exposure - undoubtedly a disturbing thing. But what of the comparison between the two cases? What of virtual selves - is it all a question of skin? Who are these strippers in sexual life? Ageing ex-miners? Teenagers? Grandmothers at a loose end? Inhabitants of the third world, eeking out a living? Is it a good thing or a bad thing that in second life nobody cares what you really look like?

Another tack: why did facebook explode, I wonder? A large number of people who I haven't spoken to in years - school chums, ex-girlfriends, colleagues - are now brutally resurrected, plugged back into my ever-extending social map. There is an ominous feeling - a presentiment - it's like watching someone run thousands of cables through your home as you sit watching TV, connecting every device to each other, then running the cables through to your neighbours. You just can't help wondering what will happen when it's all re-wired.
Another tack: whilst the BBC's approach to diversity is laudably progressive, the general attitude mirrors that in most white liberal organisations, roughly 'if you're black we'll cut you some slack'. Neurological research, on the other hand, suggests that one individual's brain differs dramatically from the next - overall by as much as 40%. In other words, we inhabit an offline world which tends to make a big deal out of superficial differences and suppresses some very dramatic differences. The offline world tells us that we are either more different or more similar than we actually are, based on our superficial features. Is it all a question of skin?

Social selection and the english mind

2006-06-15T05:36:00.000-07:00

social selction and the english mind
The most striking thing about group selection theory, as opposed to individual selection, is the possibility that we internalise rules which benefit us as a group rather than as an individual - in plain english: if we contribute poorly to the group, we punish ourselves.
Evidence for this approach is surprisingly easy to come by - most notably people who are unsuccessful in relationships are prone to depression, which in turn enhances the likelihood that they will become socially isolated. This then sparks a positive feedbck loop; depressesing their immune system, creativity, sex drive and chances of becoming gainfully employed. A similar outcome results in 'learned helplessness' - Seligman's discovery that creatures unable to exert influence over their environments become depressed and listless. Peculiarly, the phenomenon is akin to 'thanatos', Freud's hypothesised 'death drive'. It's a very interesting thing, I think, this tendency which we have to 'self-destruct' if we aren't successful - and it links us in nature to a host of lower organisms (right down to the single cell level) that are inherently designed to evolve as a group - as a collective - rather than as individuals.
In summary, it seems we are not designed to survive as individuals, but to function as components in a group. Drugs such as Prozac subvert our existence at its most fundamental level, then: by tinkering with the internal mechanism designed to weed out failure and promote success.

According to Bloom, the healthy functioning of any networked group involves the optimal balance of 'conformity enforcers' (who ensure that adaptive traditions are followed) and 'diversity promoters' (who recklessly explore new avenues of behaviour or thought). But it strikes me that we are unlikely to fall into one or other category as individuals, and that depending on how we feel our propensity to 'stick or spin' shifts - so that groups that are on the up become more exploratory and groups under siege proportionally more conservative.
My own experience is that the more stressed I am, the less creative I become.
Just finished the proof of Julian Baggini's book 'A Journey into the English Mind'. Here are some statistics that I thought striking:

Percentage of women who feel happy with their bodies 2%
National daily paper readers 60-70%Local newspaper readers 80-84%
Percentage who disapprove of homosexuals in high office 39%
Percentage of 18-30 year old young women who have been victims of sexual assault after getting drunk: 36%
Average frequency of sex: once a week
Percentage who believe the national identity should be based on Christian values: 72%
His analysis of the English philosophy left me with two memorable points: our Puritanical Protestant past has left us with a binge and purge attitude towards earthly pleasures such as food and sex. And our sense of 'fair play' rests on conservative communitarianism - "giving and getting your due is what counts"; and this means that in practice the notion of universal rights is challenged.

It is a book which will engender a sense of despair in many liberals: in general the English scorn intellectualism, have an unhealthy relationship with food, drink and sex, think of rights in terms of club membership, prefer familiarity to adventure and commonly engage in courtship as ritualised rape, legitimised on both sides by alcohol abuse.

Technology And Presence

2006-06-05T05:15:00.000-07:00

Technology and presence
Jacques Derrida "To write is to produce a mark which will constitute a kind of machine that is in turn productive... The writer's disappearance will not prevent it functioning", and "All writing, in order to be what it is, must be able to function in the radical absence of every empirically determined addressee in general... This is not a modification of presence, but a break in it, a 'death' or the possibility of a 'death' of the addressee".

I would like to paint a picture: imagine that I work from home. Unbeknown to my employer, I die. Someone with access to my emails goes back over the history of what I have said, picks up my workload, and so far as my employer is concerned I have not died.

Another: whilst a female friend is away on holiday they ask me to maintain their (female) online character (to gain experience), I log on as them and bump into one of their friends, who says 'Hi'. How do I respond? Do I maintain the illusion that I am them? Am I (simply by virtue of being that character) actually them anyway? How do I say 'I am not this person who I seem?' - isn't this eerily similar to real life?
I suppose that what I am getting at, is that in Derrida's terms, technology is an extension of writing: i.e. it is all about absence, not presence. And I suppose this represents a fundamental and subversive shift in phenomenology and meaning of the kind which prompted Nietzsche to write 'God is dead'.

Over-intellectualisation? I don't think so: podcasting is all about not 'being-there' (Dasein), homeworking is all about not 'being-there', email is all about not 'being-there'. Technology 'exists' in a way which subverts my existence so that something which we (I) took for granted - my being - is now something that can be messed with, displaced, even hijacked.

How did it become meaningful, for example, that today we can talk about 'identity theft'? Perhaps you think this has something to do with credit cards and dodgy garages? Think again: due to the crude nature of the SMTP protocol used to transfer mail, it is easy for me to send emails as you... think on it; in the next five minutes I might send emails to your friends, family, co-workers, lover, boss etc. which would unquestioningly be accepted as having come from you. Most likely this email might read '...because I am going to be working out of the office over the next few weeks, please use my email at insert_yourname_here@hotmail.com to stay in touch...'. It is a trivial task to send emails as bill.gates@microsoft.com, god@heaven.com, or even mark.thompson@bbc.co.uk.

Traditionally philosophy dealt with binary oppositions: good/evil, god/satan, being/nothingness, right/wrong - and most people still think in these terms. It has been one of the great advances of philosophy in recent years to muddy the waters, to show that there never really was clarity after all - so that, for example, even in the good old days it was possible to wonder if a person was really 'there' or if they were merely 'in disguise' or a 'ghost'. So what I am pointing to with technology is not a complete reversal in crude terms - 'suddenly absence takes the upper hand', but rather a radicalisation of absence - a poisoning of being by absence, in the way in which (Socrates reports) the egyptian god Thoth was judged to have offering his invention of writing not as a supplement but as a poison to speech. I find it interesting, I suppose, that technology - the extension of writing - has ultimately fulfilled the prophecy made in Egyptian times, that it would poison being/God, and bring about a kind of death.

If we look at future trends it is curious how being/presence is poisoned by technology; 'presence-based technologies' - such as SIP (session initiation protocol) which, combined with technology such as RFID tags, will effectively enable communication technology to locate 'you', know 'what you are doing', and adjust accordingly. Of course, in fact 'you' could be dead - so long as someone is wearing your tag and answering your emails it matters not a jot to technology.

After all, that is the beauty of txt: you can pretend to be something, you can pretend to be somewhere, you can control your presence so much more carefully. But a malicious person with your phone may cause havoc.
Not long ago many things required your presence; meetings, conversations, chairs in offices - but soon there will soon be very few things that require your presence: sex (possibly not even this), eating, the lavatory.

It is interesting also, I think to trace this corruption of being through production technologies. Begin with the live performance - trace a line through the record (sender absent in time & space), through the live broadcast (receiver absent in space), join them at the recorded broadcast (sender absent in time, receiver in space), continue onwards through film and end with the podcast (all absent in time and space) - where even the broadcast no longer requires your presence. Imagine an assasin tracing your movements: previously he might note that you always stopped to listen to the archers at five past seven, to the today programme at six thirty am. Now he notes only that you eat and sleep at roughly the same times - all else is negotiable - because its presence is negotiable. And so, ultimately, is yours.

Distractions

2006-05-29T05:18:00.000-07:00

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

2006-05-21T05:19:00.000-07:00

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

2006-05-15T05:20:00.000-07:00

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

2006-05-12T05:22:00.000-07:00

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

2006-05-10T05:23:00.000-07:00

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

2006-05-07T05:14:00.000-07:00

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

2006-05-06T05:37:00.000-07:00

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.

Play

2006-04-11T05:39:00.000-07:00

Play
“Man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays” Friedrich Schiller, 1973
“S.Diamond observed free human being who survived into our age, also in Africa. He could see that they did no work, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to say it in English. Instead he said they made no distinction between work and play.” (Fredy Perlman, 1983)

One of the curious consequences of civilisation and its attendant domestication is its power to infantilise and regress a species: I sit on the train each day surrounded by pallid, bloated, childlike creatures enfeebled by the daily grind, their self-mastery eroded to a bare minimum through a dependence relationship fostered by a world of exchange-value.

It is a common (Hobbesian) assumption that our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived short, brutish lives. In fact, until very recently, it seems that their lives were comparatively healthy and that, moreover, they lived happy and peaceable lives by today’s standards. Studies of the !Kung who still live hunter-gatherer lives people show them to be physically and mentally superior to us in most regards.

The mistake made by many people is essentially a reductionist one – they assume that what makes for a successful society, makes for happy people. On the contrary, the success and sophistication of our civilisation is largely founded on the collective misery and stupidity of its elements. The best analogy is the cancer cell: the cancerous cells come to dominate the whole organism, despite the fact that individual cells are diseased and dysfunctional.
What is clear is that modern man is warped by his environment in a reciprocal fashion: his early childhood deprives him of a sense of belonging and closeness due to the artificially imposed constraints on parenting, leaving him with an enduring sense of loneliness and alienation that he tries to remedy through religion, acquisition or the pursuit of status. As he develops through childhood his activities are slowly drained of immediate meaning, and an artificial division (‘fence’) erected between work and play. His restricted diet, unnatural groupings and over-stimulated cognitive systems leave him stressed, self-centered and aggressive – lacking creativity or the desire to share. His ability to learn is diminished.
For years I travelled with a tent and camping kit in the back of my car. I have been purchasing Ray Mears’ books for some years now and learning how to build shelters in a variety of inhospitable environments. I have no idea why I do these things, but possible explanations are as follows:1) I camped as a child, it’s a Freudian thing2) It’s some kind of instinctive impulse that just can’t be blotted out by modern life3) It stems from a prophetic sense of foreboding regarding the next thirty years4) I’m a victim of the same marketeers that persuade obese people to wear football shirts and surf wear.

Whatever the explanation, I am comforted by the knowledge that I can purify water using only a sock, charcoal and a handful of moss.
But it’s the work/play distinction that bothers me most during my daily life: if our work cannot be play, then something is very, very wrong. I am not advocating irresponsibility: precisely the same actions can be termed work or play depending on your 'attunement'. What grates is the cumulative inauthenticity, the lack of wholehearted engagement, the sense of entrapment and coercion that can undermine a healthy environment. Something that Nietzsche termed the ‘spirit of gravity’ – by which he meant people taking themselves too seriously. His point was that serious matters are best tackled with a light heart – as if at play. Some of the most successful programmes of the last few years seem to follow this pattern: for many years ‘Wake up to Wogan’ has preserved this ‘men at play’ format, something which is increasingly reflected in television programmes such as ‘top gear’ and the Saturday morning childrens shows that both ‘Ant & Dec’ and ‘Dick and Dom’ did so well.

By the way, did anyone else pick up that gaffe yesterday: a BBC editor came on Eddie Mare's radio 4 slot to extol the virtues of the BBC’s ‘glass room’ (or something like that) – and, very enthusiastically claimed that this format would make the programme ‘more opaque’ to audiences. Excellent. A glass room that makes a programme opaque.

I’m working towards a completely opaque role: nobody will know what I do, or how I do it. I will, however take myself very, very seriously and work very, very hard.

The New Brain

2006-01-07T05:13:00.000-08:00

The New Brain
The title of a book by Dr Richard Restak in which he argues that the 'modern age' is rewiring our minds.

Two things worth knowing about the brain:1) It hasn't evolved significantly in the last 100,000 years (so we aren't 'designed' to do most of the things we actually find ourselves doing these days)2) It is remarkably malleable in response to our external environment (so we can adapt as individuals if not as a species)

This much said, there are a couple of interesting research conclusions:
- We can't multi-task: "actually our brain can only work on one thing at a time. Rather than allowing us to do two thing s at te same time efficiently, multi-tasking actually results in inefficient shifts in our attention". There are some exceptions (such as listening to music whist woodworking etc.) - but only where there are no overlaps in neurological functionality whatsoever.

- Hallowell & Ratey believe that the impact of overwhelming media is an adult form of Adult Attention-Defecit Disorder (AADD) characterised by some of the following symptoms:- a sense of underachievement, not meeting one's goals- difficulty getting organised- chronic procrastination or difficulty getting started- many simultaneous projects, but trouble with follow-through- a tendency to say whatever comes to mind without due consideration- a frequent search for high stimulation- intolerance of boredom- easy distractability- impatient
(there were more but I got bored of typing).

Restak comments on how the reciprocal relationship: as we breed generations of more attention-deficient individuals, the media follow suit - shorter bursts of time-compressed information, multiple channels of infomation presented on a single screen, highly emotive, simplified imagery etc., etc.

Authenticity

2006-01-06T05:17:00.000-08:00

Authenticity
Two events that have struck me over the last couple of days:- a conference on 'Creating Learning Organisations' held at the Dept. of Health- a short essay by Alain De Botton entitled 'authenticity' on how he struggled to be 'natural' on a date with a girl he fancied.

Both seem to suffer from two different types of inauthenticity - an ontology of inauthenticity, if you like. One type of inauthenticity is disclosed, paraded - but only as a means of hiding the deeper level: a bit like the token military trials surrounding Iraq which somehow are meant to imply that wanton destruction of civilians isn't business as usual.

On Alain's date, he grapples with the familiar problem of trying to be yourself at the same time as you are trying to impress someone. This is interesting, I think, because it raises questions as to the extent in which in any situation we are 'ourselves' against a more constructivist perspective that we 'are' no more than self-presentation. However, I end up feeling that he misses a more fundamental point - that this is basically not how attraction works, that he has over-intellectualised the phenomenon and as a consequence missed what is going on entirely - like someone who is given a book and does no more than admire the intricate binding.

The conference was not dissimilar: the same strange (almost desperate) focus on 'learning styles' and on intellectualising the processes of learning (presumably to reassure ourselves that we are, still, in a frightening potent world the 'experts') - but almost a turning away from what is really happening in the world of learning - indeed, has been happening for some time. A ghastly presumption that there would be a role for us all in the future... at the very end, and after some reflection, I thought it would be worth asking the question...
and predictably the same familiar mantras 'we will be facilitators, and enablers of the future / there will always be a need for classroom training / technology can't replace people'.
Nietzsche wondered if philosophy was no more than an series of inept attempts to win a woman (using woman as a metaphor for truth whilst poking fun at his contemporaries). And the common problems are evident in this light: we do not take things for what they are, instead we over-interpret and idealise. We imagine that what we think is more important than it is, and we fail to connect with or understand that level at which things are important - of praxis. A point made by Wittgenstein about language.

Here's a practical example: when people want to know something, they ring people up, or ask the person across the desk. What are we doing about that?