Lasher on Learning

It makes me smile just to type this short blog, but one I have to report.

In China if you work in the service industry, (that’s anyone from the three staff in every public bathroom to the 4 people at the door of the restaurant who bow and say ”huanying” as you enter and ”xièxiè” pronounced ShiShi as you leave) you have to have a name that can be pronounced by foreigners. 

Foreigners? Not very PC, well when you arrive in China the two lines say  Citizen of China and Foreigners.

So these English sounding names, how do they get them? For some when they are 100 days old they are given an English name at a very posh ceremony, for some individuals they take an English name or phrase because it sounds good. Some of these are names of pop stars, of a favourite band or even the name on the favourite packet of biscuits. Others get their name from HR, they are given the name when they start work with an explanation of it’s meaning.

Two such names were sported by the waitresses working the bar in our hotel. The first was ‘Sherry’, as she explained from the Spanish drink.  The second was ‘Echo’, she spent some time expraining to us that it was a famous name from Engrand. Maybe I should visit Engrand some time and look up Echo!

The one however that had us all smiling and created the most discussion was the poor Training Manager who gave me his name card and in astonishment I saw his name was Peter Pan. He was about 6 foot tall (very tall for Chinese), he had no green outfit or pointy hat and even though I looked I could not see the fairy ‘Tinkerbell’ anywhere.

So just to let you folks know, Peter Pan is alive and well, hiding in normal clothes in Shanghai. And he cannot fly!

Despite much research on human learning, little is known about cultural conceptions of learning.

I realised while researching the subject of how the brain deals with data it receives that the whole subject of conceptualisation is somewhat placed on the back burner by designers of some learning programmes, especially those delivered by eLearning.

I was side tracked to reading about Kim Peek, the real ‘Rain Man’ who despite his advanced abilities to read and soak up data has no idea or knowledge of how to conceptualise any of it. He can read two pages of a book in 23 seconds (average 4 minutes for the rest of us). One page with his left eye the other with his right, simultaneously! To make matters worse (or better) he then has all the information buried in his brain for future recall.  He remembers everything he ever read like this, 40 or 50 years worth.

Living in Salt Lake City he spends much time in the library, he reads on average 20 books a day. The human Google.

The issue he has is Agenesis of the Corpus Callosum (ACC) is a rare birth defect in which there is a complete or partial absence of the corpus callosum. Agenesis of the corpus callosum occurs when the corpus callosum, the band of tissue connecting the two hemispheres of the brain, fails to develop normally, typically in utero, resulting in disconnected brain hemispheres neurological links that have formed in place are quite unique, making him a super savant.

However he can’t tie his shoes, brush his teeth or understand when he is standing too close to another person invading their personal space. 

What he has is a method to link items together. Beethoven’s 5th, di di di dah, the letter “v” in Morse code, and V for Victory in the famous speech by Winston Churchill. What he lacks is any way to use this information other than to answer questions in one of many high level speaking roles his father arranges for him. Not too dissimilar to the freak shows of the turn of the 19th century, even if they are held at places like Oxford University.

The conceptualisation of the data is completely missing. 

Kolb highlighted conceptualisation in the learning cycle process, calling the stage Abstract Conceptualisation, the time where we make sense of what we have heard or read or done, prompting questions so that we can make even better sense of the material at hand.

It is this conceptualisation stage that is so important in learning, especially in eLearning that are missing and fail to help the learner understand how to use the information and they will surely discard it at the first opportunity.

Many have tried to fix what they think is broken in eLearning. You may have been party to discussion or a conference presentation that suggests eLearning has failed but the latest technology will make it better. The truth is whatever technological gimmick you are offered will not fix the issue of the basics of conceptualisation.

It seems sad to think that this month may be the last ‘opinion’ column I write for HCM, the paper-based magazine is coming to an end.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank Mike Randal the magazine editor in chief  and publisher for his tireless work to publish this magazine as he has done every other month for as long as I can remember.

A piece of history lost forever? No not really, just another of the many changes we are seeing in the world around the way we distribute the written word.

The last couple of years have seen more changes than have been seen in history, especially over the last 500 years. I am talking about the ‘word’, the physical written notations we use to communicate.

Consider the Corpus (the complete set of definitions of words used in our language, created by comparing and by reading thousands of texts and identifying the words of our language). You may or may not be aware but the Oxford English Dictionary is based upon an electronic Corpus, and this has been in electronic format since its inception in 1961. Previously to this everything had been on paper.

In its first iteration the Corpus had 1 million words and each year it has grown substantially. Today it holds an amazing 2 billion words and is growing at the astonishing rate of 350 million words a year. The English language ain’t what it used to be.

Why such an explosion?  The web of course! As the web grows and new words are brought into daily acceptance, the language explodes into new forms each commanding new methods of delivery. The ‘printed on paper’ word will probably never be extinct, but electronic delivery systems are far outpacing the need for the paper based word, and as such the casualties are magazines such as this. Webzines seem to be more powerful media; the link (tag) to other data has taken over. Today’s ‘indecision makers’ (the new generation) need something to click, someone to ask, someone to take the decision for them.

Of course this new ‘print’ has brought with it a new set of words for the language. The Blog for instance now has 340 derivatives. Words like ‘Blogstipation’ have replaced the old fashioned ‘writers block’. ‘Bloggocks’ is the new term for a blog containing a ‘load of rubbish’ and Blogarrati is the new term for the big-wig bloggers who write in the new Blogosphere.  Keeping up with the new language is a full time job, ensuring you don’t use a word that is passé is just as difficult.

You may also wish to consider how many of these 2 billion words we actually use. There is the top 100, a list of the most common words in our language. These make up almost 50% of what we use.  Of course what we write and what we say are very different, however many say that texts written in the way we speak are easier to read and understand. The ‘street speak’ in our language is obviously a great learning tool. All eLearning developers take note!

So what of the future?  It seems more and more we are turning to the electronic world for or reading material. Amazon and Sony are the leaders in the electronic hardware for e-book market, Audible and ITunes amongst many others plying their wares for the content.

As for the demise of the paper based magazine market, maybe it is just another new day for this changing world in which we find ourselves. 

I had the most interesting conversation with a psychologist the other day. Never actually thought that it would be possible without them sending me home with a bottle of pills.  “There, there, take three of these a day and the worlds financial worries will just fade away”…..  World’s financial worries? Did I miss something? Has there been a problem? Interestingly it has been almost impossible not to see a single TV broadcast or turn on the radio without hearing doom and gloom. You would never consider there is a downturn in my office, seems like everyone has decided now is the time to get highly focused learning.

The psychologist told me a fascinating story after we had been talking for quite some time about experience and learning. She crashed trolleys in the supermarket with another shopper who was laden with a small child and lots of shopping. A child’s bag of toys fell off the bottom of the trolley and she stopped, gathered up all the debris from the accident and started to place it back under the trolley for the other shopper. The small child watched her with wide eyes, so she said, “hello, what’s your name”. The child never answered but her brother who had now just arrived on the scene said “Michelle and she is a pain”.  The boy was dressed in a Superman outfit and had been seen earlier running up and down the aisles with his arm outstretched above his head and yelling “Superman”.

The psychologist turned to him and said, “that’s a nice outfit, what’s your name”. The response came with a snarled face and look of bewilderment, “ Superman, silly”.

But of course, who else.

Our conversation underlined the discussion about believing in yourself. If you believe you can do something, then you will probably achieve it. If you have the confidence to know you will succeed, you probably will. Look around yourself and tell me if any of the people who always say it is ‘too hard’ or ‘an issue’ or ‘just too much trouble’, actually succeed and move forwards. Whilst the salesman who goes out with the confidence to make a sale, often comes home with an order.

Often I hear the four stages of learning referred to. Starting with Unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence and finally unconscious competence. It is said you can only reach the final stage with experience.

Maybe a different use of the word ‘Experience’?  In this case they are referring to having had time to use the learning over and over to perfect its use without thought? Bit like learning by rote?

However today’s modern instructional design thinkers will tell you there are different types of experience. Examples are using experience to create a deep association for memory? Or using an alternative experience to gain an understanding of how process works without actually using the process we wish to learn.

Alternative uses of experience to get the brain to awaken to learn something, is an alternative method of learning, one so powerful that those who actually go through this process find it hard to believe they have learned so much while doing something they did not expect.

In the current financial turmoil it is time to focus our learning on gaining higher efficiency for our training budgets and ensure our staff, all of our staff, are working together for a single focussed goal. Maybe using experiential learning as a starting point.

The alternative of course is to wait for Superman to come and sort it all out for us!

Our trip to Shanghai to attend and keynote at Learning Enterprise China, contained many funny moments, to recall them all I could probably blog for the next month and we were only there for five days…

I was surprised at the lack of begging on the street, my memories from working in Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Guangdong many years ago is one of many children always pulling at your coat, begging for money. Never let one carry your bag as they always asked ‘hey mister, carry your bag, one dollar’, the stories you hear are that if you do, they will take off very fast and you will never catch them, or see your bag again.

What I did see in Shanghai were many people on street corners that as you approached them would pull a horrible old worn out mobile phone from their pocket and try to sell it to you. Why on earth they would think a ‘Rich Westerner’ (I think that is how they see western people) would want a second hand phone that looked like a group of Chinese had played football with it, I have no idea. They were polite though and when you said ‘no thanks’ they put it back in their pocket and often gave you a toothless grin.

I mentioned in an earlier blog some of the others who were at ‘Enterprise Learning China’, the reason for my trip, they included a very funny Roger Olsen from the USA and Tim Neill from TNA in the UK.

Tim went shopping on our second day, all by himself down to the metro and off to the ‘old’ part of the city to taste the ‘delights’ of China.

The story he told on his return he will dine out with for many years to come..

Walking the streets considering his presentation to the learning community Tim was approached by a very enterprising lady. (he did omit to tell us any more about this lady, so you have to make your picture in your mind) She had grabbed him by the right arm and asked him ‘you want to buy Rolex?’

Tim thanked her very much and politely said no, she persisted and Tim persisted in his polite manner. After the third of fourth attempt she gave up. Two minutes later she was back on his right arm. ‘ you want to buy shirt?’ Now she had a handful of shirts in many colours. No thank you declined Tim, still not losing patience. ‘Many colours and sizes?’ Tim now mildly agitated thanked her and politely said no and she went away.

Just a moment later she was back on his right arm, ‘ you want to buy tie’. Tim now at the end of his patience said a single ‘NO’ and she went away.

Relieved, Tim continued down the street a few paces until all of a sudden she was now on his left arm, no bags, no product, sidled up very close and asked Tim, ‘you want sexy massage?’

For those of you who know Tim Neill from TNA, you can only imagine his face. I for one would like to have had a camera and been a fly on the wall.

This was China, very enterprising with many products in stock!

I have spent the last week in the company of Roger Olsen, Tim Neill (TNA) , Sally-Anne Moore and other well known faces from around the world of learning at ‘Learning Enterprise China’ in Shanghai.

I have had a week of non stop fun, belly laughing most of the time and meeting some very interesting people in the learning world in China.

Roger and myself were ‘International Keynote’ speakers.  Very grandiose. With Tim the ‘big’ speaker on day two. (Although we were worried from his shopping trip, see Rolex, Shirt and Sexy Massage, that he may not make day two)

A number of other well know UK and European ‘players’ in the e-learning market were on the bill to attend but sadly never appeared, cancelling at the last minute, blaming the economy, which made the expo part of the conference slightly light on International Experts.

For those of us who were there I can certainly tell you it was a trip worth making, even of the flight lasts forever.  One of those trips that you get on the plane, have a drink, have a meal (if you can call it a meal), watch a film, have a nap…  Then wake up and find you are only just half way there.

The conference was of very high quality, the delegates from the top Chinese International companies and many with huge staff numbers. It is going to take a lot of following up but the Chinese are serious about learning and making change. If you had considered making the trip and never did so, don’t miss this one next year.

The fun started from the moment Tim and I  landed at a new, super huge airport at Pudong. The limo driver was nowhere to be found but thousands of others milling around hoping to earn a quick buck. After our first interesting phone call in very broken Chinese with the driver, whose total English could be written on the side of a postage stamp, with our collated Chinese written on the other side, we found he was at the wrong terminal. I am not sure if it was downhill or actually uphill from there….

Great hotel, great service, magnificent food and a wonderful time in Shanghai with full marks to GL Events for putting on the first Shanghai Learning event. 

See my two other blogs on Shanghai, ‘Rolex, Shirt and Sexy Massage’ and ‘ A night in Shanghai’.

Arnold Schwarzenegger was heard to say that money does not change your life.

He can feel no difference now it is claimed he has $50m from when it was claimed he only had $48m

Wishful thinking!

As a specialist in Instructional Design, every so often something happens in the learning world that makes me sit up and think about the process of learning I have employed.

My thanks are due to Jessica Marshall, a science writer based in Saint Paul Minnesota, who in a recently published article highlighted me to some research into a fairly new condition known as ‘hyperthymestic syndrome’.  This syndrome is where people have an affliction of remembering everything.

Yes: an affliction? Trainers would love everyone to remember everything they say, but these poor people remember every detail of their life in extraordinary detail.

The most well know case is of a woman who is only known as AJ, mention any date back to the 1980’s and she can picture where she was, what she was doing, and what was in the news on that day. The problem she has, is one we never really consider, she does not know how to forget.

Research is being carried out on a number of subjects in California all suffering from the same issues. Initial tests have found that she was able to correctly identify the days and dates of every Easter for the last 24 years and exactly what she was doing on those dates. Results were verified against diaries she keeps.  Even worse for her she can also identify the day of the week for any date since 1980 and the correct dates for most unforgettable events such as the date of the ‘Who shot JR?’ episode of the TV soap Dallas.

The root of the issue appears to be in the way people with hyperthymestic syndrome encode the data they see and hear carrying out the tasks of encoding memory at a much higher level and in much more detail than most of us.

There are many items most of us just forget as we do not need them any longer, such as the phone number of the house you lived in 10 years ago, what you had for breakfast last Thursday etc.

What is interesting is the lifestyle and other comparisons these sufferers have, a number of the test group also have some form of obsessive disorder. More than one has a collection of TV guides going back many years and they also keep extraordinarily detailed diaries going back 30+years. So the questions being asked now is not if these people know how to encode the data more effectively than most but if they are just much better at recalling information.

Michael Anderson at the University of St Andrews has the opinion that AJ may actually have some disorder in unconscious control mechanisms that normally block the recovery of memory. This is a fascinating study that when they know more may open up so many channels for us to understand how people can control what they will or will not commit to long term memory…  or is everything is in long term memory and we just don’t know how to control the non-exclusion of this information.

We have spent much time working to improve our minds, the invention recently of the ‘Brain Game’ to keep our minds active is playing a big part in helping many improve performance and speed of using the brain.

Just remember that next time you can’t remember where you are supposed to be today, or what time your next appointment is, your brain may actually doing you a favour.

In the meantime for this group undergoing research it’s not learning how to remember, but learning how to forget.

Some years ago I attended a specialist medical practitioner’s office in London. His speciality was identifying allergies and he did this with the most interesting item of test equipment I had ever seen.

He evaluated my sensitivity by connecting a stainless steel tube to my big toe and another similar tube to my thumb, both connected with a wiring harness to a machine with flashing lights and a big dial. Then he placed a small quantity of the material he believed I might be sensitive to in a glass vial and dropped it into a small receptacle in the machine. Pushing buttons and turning knobs, the machine began to wail and the needle on the dial danced madly up and down the scale. I could not tell the difference in the wailing between water and whisky.

We laughed all the way home and have dined out many times on the story of the allergy clinic. While I found out I was sensitive to an excess of alcohol, I would have paid twice the amount to see someone else’s report to compare the findings, or see if it was generic.

I often wonder about Dr Wood’s machine ( I now know it was an early version of the Vega test machine) could be used, in today’s turbulent world, to measure other things - like performance, for instance? How great would it be to hook a delegate to some machine, place the intervention (either in note form, maybe a video or on a disk) into a machine and measure the outcome before spending any money trying to deliver it. The more the machine wails the better the result…

Evaluation of performance has become one of those subjects that every conference discusses. Both HR and L&D people have differing views on the importance of performance and methodology of the evaluation. In many of the conferences I have attended in the last six months, the discussion ends up trying to define what performance is and how you recognise it. Some even try to assess the best way to deliver it, as if it was a commodity.

I believe that performance is best improved through the training department, using every available technique we have in the box: coaching, mentoring, training and learning.

The rapid development of e-learning has become one of the latest ‘fads’ to try to deliver learning (not training) in a quicker manner, where speed to the end user and price per moment of learning has pushed aside the importance of quality and instructional design.

Speed

The age of speed has been with us for some time. We have far less patience than the generation that preceded us.  Look at the differences between generations X and Y. Look at their expectations, tolerance levels and patience towards speed of technologically delivered services and you will see how fast we expect results in everything and how much it has speeded up as the generations evolve.

Price

There are two guaranteed sales in the world today: the cheapest on the market, and the most expensive. Everything in the middle has to make excuses for why it is cheaper than the competition but still worth buying, or, why it is more expensive than the competition and the reasons why it is worth paying more.

The bottom end of the market is the one that will have most long-term affect on training. To make it ‘cheap’ and ‘quick’ you have to cut out something. The old love triangle still is in play:

You can only have two of the points of the triangle.

·      If you want it quick and cheap, you can’t expect high quality.

·      If you want it fast and in high quality, it will cost more.

·      If you want quality but want it cheap, don’t expect it quickly.

Rapid Development tools are trying to break this triangle that has been accepted for so many years: offering cheap, quick e-learning and purporting to be high quality. How would these courses score on the ‘Dr Wood wail test’?

We want to reduce the time to market and we want to maintain the high quality and efficiency of the courseware we are delivering and, of course, we claim to have no budget. 

If you, like me, are not sure if there are answers, you could always buy one of the machines I may be offering early next year that wails when you have a good intervention - or maybe the more the delegate wails, the better the result!

You have a box of ‘bits and pieces’ and after using some items from the box you are left with just one item…

Would it be a ‘bit’ or a ‘piece’