The belief that working in teams makes us more creative and productive is so widespread that when faced with a challenging new task, leaders are quick to assume that teams are the best way to get the job done . . .
. . . Contrary to conventional wisdom, teams may be your worst option for tackling a challenging task. Problems with coordination, motivation, and competition can badly damage team performance. Even the best leaders can’t make a team deliver great results. But you can increase the likelihood of success—by setting the right conditions. – Harvard Business Review May 2009.
I stumbled across the article Why Teams Don't Work by Daine Courtu. Having been a coach, team-teacher, team-leader and also team member in many successful (and some unsuccessful) teams, I immediately pounced on the pages and scanned the content.
Courtu interviews J. Richard Hackman, Edgar Pierce Professor of Social and Organisational Psychology at Harvard University, and author of the book, Leading Teams.
Hackman, a notable expert on teams with a lifetime of experience in studying and working with teams, has an authoritative opinion that makes a lot of sense to me. He comes over as a straight thinker who cuts to the chase when it comes to matters about the worth of teams.
Hackman’s stance is that teams can generate magic (didn’t we always believe that?) though we shouldn’t always count on every spell working the way we’d like. In his book Leading Teams, Hackman rationalises five critical conditions governing the balance between success and failure:
"Teams must be real. People have to know who is on the team and who is not. It’s the leader’s job to make that clear.
Teams need a compelling direction. Members need to know, and agree on, what they’re supposed to be doing together. Unless a leader articulates a clear direction, there is a real risk that different members will pursue different agendas.
Teams need enabling structures. Teams that have poorly designed tasks, the wrong number or mix of members, or fuzzy or unenforced norms of conduct invariably get into trouble.
Teams need a supportive organisation. The organisational context – including the reward system, the human resource system, and the information system – must facilitate teamwork.
Teams need expert coaching. Most executive coaches focus on individual performance, which does not significantly improve teamwork. Teams need coaching as a group in team processes – especially at the beginning, midpoint and end of a team project.”
Dean Shareski’s post, How The Book Destroyed Community, embeds a video of Rory McGreal who posits that the book is the biggest destroyer of human community, especially learning commmunities. While I agree with Dean’s reflective stance on this matter and respect his discretion, I found McGreal’s cover hard to digest.
McGreal maintains that the book first caused people to learn without the aid of community - that when the book first came into its own as ‘the portable book’, people found they no longer needed community to help them learn about things - that they could easily pick up a book, and without the community, learn all they needed to know on their own. He maintains that because of the book 'no community is necessary'.
Shred of truth
While there are some threads of truth in these ideas, McGreal delivers a sermon, not unlike that of a preacher who wishes to admonish the book with a controlled restraint on the fire and brimstone. I wonder he's ever thought of how the book came to be published in the first place. Is the arrival of a brand new book the effort of a single person working on his or her own, composing, writing, printing, bookbinding and distributing? Is it true that 'no community is necessary'?
William Blake would have come close to achieving this amazing feat. Blake was an engraver, artist, craftsman and poet who also published his own writing. But he was an exceptional person.
Books are rarely written, printed, bound and distributed by the authors, never mind the paper making, unless perhaps as a community activity in school where the book becomes an agent of learning in more ways than one.
A book of verse
In 1994, I published a collection of verse on a limited budget. The book displayed the publisher’s name, Linneth, a composite of my wife’s first name and mine. There was no way I could publish the book entirely on my own. I approached a printer in town, who made a living through the support of local communities. The printer employed some of these people, but did not own a paper factory. So paper had to be bought from a manufacturing company employing people from communities in another town.
My good friend, Kevin Meehan, who had a small part-time printing business supported by friends and acquaintances, helped me print the cover. A book-binding company in town assisted me to get the pages bound with the book-cover. This firm was also supported by communities as some of their members were employees.
These processes involved some industrial involvement, some cottage industry and some amateur effort. None of that industry could have existed on its own, and all of it contributed to community. The amateur practice was me, for I wrote the 72 pages of verse in the first place. I supplied the printer with a Word file of the text typed by me, saved on a floppy bought new from the local electronic store.
Much of the verse I wrote was about my family and of the communities around Wellington where they live. Without community, much of the writing in the book would never have happened, let alone have been published. As well, most of what I had learnt that took me out to these community industries came from books, including the phone numbers of key people involved.
Communities everywhere
This story of my little book of verse is not unique. But it gives small mention of the library communities within a country and throughout the world that are supported by the book.
I come from Dunfermline where I was raised as a child. It is also the birth-town of Andrew Carnegie who gave away most of his fortune to fund the establishment of many libraries, schools, and universities throughout the world. While Carnegie's money was for building libraries, he never paid for a single book. He believed that books should be provided by the communities through the work of local councils.
So I wonder how 'the portable book' could possibly be charged with the destruction of communities. It seems that it’s doing the exact opposite by supporting communities, allowing them to come together, and providing the basis for community activity and input as well as offering a reason for networking to grow and exist within these communities.
What I’ve described here are aspects to do with the book that not only foster community activity but also bring communities together in the same way the production of many other technological artefacts do. There are many other aspects to the book that contribute to communities and how they exist, function and grow. Just ask anyone from Fair Isle what contribution the book makes to that community today. It is hardly one that’s on a road to destruction caused by the book.
Biting the hand that fed
Sadly, McGreal’s approach is typical of a view shared by some people. In the long past history of the book, people with similar dispositions burned bibles, books and booklets by the billion. Not only do they eschew and denigrate the technology that brought them to where they are, they also wish to forget how it got there in the first place.
That they are so embittered about what the book did or did not give them is sad. Biting the hand that fed gets a little sympathy from me if only for their state of mind. I’m powerless to do anything about that. Nor can I do much about their understanding of causality.
What I challenge, however, is the way that some of them seek to persuade others to share their same jejune and narrow point of view.
And I thought the word ‘metacognition’ was too heady and ghastly sounding for the blogosphere. I felt guilty about referring to this ugly term in my Middle-earth posts.
Now we have a full blown discussion about it half-way round the Globe! Tony Karrer spawned a debate on what he refers to as metalearning. As usual, he made me think, but not specifically about what he was posting about. Matacognition
cognition about cognition, or knowing about knowing. It can take many forms; it includes knowledge about when and where to use particular strategies for learning or for problem solving.
I had a strong hunch that metacognition was closely related to, if not the same as metalearning. I’ve since discovered that metalearning is a more specific term, though it has a range of meanings.
Meatalearning in education
When it comes to educational aspects, Wikipedia quotes Donald B. Maudsley, defining metalearning as,
the process by which learners become aware of and increasingly in control of habits of perception, inquiry, learning, and growth that they have internalized.
The above description explains the brand of metalearning I’ve become more familiar with.
Metalearning in teams
Wikipedia makes a distinction when metalearning is used in the context of performances of teams and relationships:
(T)he dynamic process whereby a system (relationship, or organization) manages to dissolve limiting dynamics such as point attractors and limit cycles that impede effective action and evolve liberating and creative dynamics represented by complex attractors whose trajectories in phase space, by never repeating themselves, can portray creative and innovative processes.
If you can make sense of that on first reading, you’re a genius!
Having spent half an hour at least, thinking and researching the meanings behind these words and phrases, I found they took me back to a topic I’ve revisited several times on this blog in the last year. Complexity seems to find its way into everything I look at to do with successful teams and sustainable communities.
After unpacking the seemingly garbled sentence, I found that it offered a lot to do with thinking and learning involving teams and relationships. It seems that metalearning is a well established study, applied to the way teams and organisations perform.
Losada
Formerly initiated by Marcial Losada, metalearning is the study of how groups of individuals in a team contribute to its performance. Metalearning does this in a way that enables a team's thinking to evolve uninhibited, so that new ideas can emerge.
By understanding and controlling the balance between the external and internal references to do with that thinking, the results can lead to high performance in business teams. I began to wonder if this is really what Tony Karrer had in mind when he wrote his post.
The Losada Zone
The various ratios of positivity and negativity involved in human interaction that can exist, lies within what’s called the Losada Zone. Negative feedback can act as a warning signal, whereas positive feedback encourages the status quo. Losada found that high performance teams have a so-called P/N (positivity/negativity) ratio that is high (5.6), medium performance teams have a lower ratio (1.9) and low performance teams come in with a still lower ratio (0.36).
Such a ratio is a measure of and is related to the connectivity potential within a team. The Losada Line (at 2.9) signifies the lower limit, separating people who have the potential to achieve a complex understanding of others from those who have a lesser ability to do this. Those who succeed are said to be above the Losada Line, and those who fall short lie below it. The terms ‘flourish’ and ‘languish’ are used to describe the two states.
Frequent innovation
High performance teams possess creativity and are capable of recurrent innovation. They tend to work along the lines of complexors. Coined by Marcial Losada, the complexor describes the form of outcomes of successful teams in the recursively intricate way they emerge and evolve. Intimately mapped on to complexity theory, the characteristics of complexors resemble fractals, elaborately regenerating themselves.
Point attractors, though not the exact opposite of complexors, are outcomes that are akin to the fate of a wind-up toy. Effectively they refer to performances that decay, lead to inaction and go nowhere.
Where to from here?
It appears that metalearning applies to and can be applied to the performance behaviour of teams. Becoming aware of the need for openness and being receptive to new ideas in a way that permits these to be advantageously and constructively considered is something that, presumably, can be learnt by members of a team or community.
Is it possible that by managing and applying specific learning processes, a better performance can be reached in teams that are already partly on the way to attaining success?
Does this special type of learning lie within the province of the individual's control?
Can this sort of ‘management’ be controlled and executed by a manager?
If the answers to these questions are in the affirmative, perhaps we can use metalearning to help our world.
Ever get irritated using your favourite browser? Are you often not able to find what you’re looking for? WolframAlpha could be your solution.
My son, Jack, kept me in the loop with this new development:
WolframAlpha a thoroughly intuitive machine that does more than just the thinking for you. Still in its infancy, WolframAlpha is a powerful computational engine as well as an intuitive tool - less content, more computational.
Stephen Downes describes it as not the sort of thing people will browse through, or even use as a search engine, but if you want the miscellanea formerly found in the World Almanac, this is your source.
Stephen Wolfram, scientist, inventor, author and business leader, created WolframAlpha to make the world’s knowledge computable. Check out Stephen Wolfram’s introduction to WoflramAlpha. It is impressive!
The brain is a really complex organ. It has an astonishing ability to learn, and the speed of this is often taken for granted.
Yesterday I read a series of articles on wine tasting and how the nose can quickly become sensitised to the subtleties of aromas present in wine bouquets. One paper from RealScience gave us this:
“You don't need wine-tasting classes to detect subtle differences between pinot noir and cabernet sauvignon. Just pour yourself a couple of glasses and sniff. Your brain itself will quickly make you a modest wine expert. And you can drink the lesson plan. A new study (2006) from Northwestern University shows that the brain learns to differentiate similar smells through passive experience. This sheds light on how we learn to identify thousands of smells from birth.”
The long and the short is that by sniffing specific wines, the nose can become acutely sensitive to a particular aroma and can learn to recognise it in just a few minutes. What’s even more astonishing is that the memory of the bouquet can be retained for 24 hours or more with little or no effort.
Apparently this is all due to a special part of the brain called the orbitofrontal cortex, which is to do with sensing smells, as well as emotion and motivation.
It's all in the nose
So what’s so special about sniffing wine? It’s all to do with learning. What’s more, it seems that this particular type of learning is extremely fast and facile, being rapidly updated by further sensory experience.
In a brief discussion with Stephen Downes on knowledge and learning, we came to the conclusion that it was too easy for a learner to get stuck in a habitual rut. It required some considerable acumen and strength of thinking to lift oneself out of that into a facile learning mode. "Learning is practice and reflection", said Stephen.
But with the old orbitofrontal cortex, it would appear that updating according to change, from whichever way the wind blows, happens almost instantly. Learning anew and quickly is customary for that part of our brain. Perhaps the rest of it that’s to do with thinking and learning could learn a thing or two from sniffing the bouquet from a glass of cabernet sauvignon!
Hiv U evr wundird wot it wiz lyk B4 dikshinariz? Wen da wurdz wiz spelt NA way U lyk? An ya cud spel wurds difrint onda sem payj an nobdy nyu ye cdnt spel? Sumtyms a git emale letirs frm da kidis in skule an dey ryt lyk dis. Sumtyms i git txts frm da kidis onda cell an dey txt jis lyk dis. Its frendly cos dey txt jis lyk dey tok. Sumtyms i repli da sem wey an i gits a frendly txt back. Das kyewl. Dat makes me feel wun o dey kiddis. Das kyewl 2.
So what’s with txt language? I notice that the e in ‘text’ is now dropped when referring to txting on a mobile, even in formal texts. The word is nearly new and is appropriate.
I sit close to several teachers of English in the office at work. They are cool people and although some are boomers like me, they all agree that language and how we write it is evolving all the time.
I have a special interest in language. It is so relevant to thinking and learning in a subject. It’s the bricks and mortar of being able to think.
When I was very young my reading and writing was atrocious - I’d no chance of spelling that word correctly either. My spelling was shoking. My mother, who was concerned about her son’s literacy, tried valiantly to entice me to read. She bought me novels. I read some but not much. I preferred to read comics. My mother disapproved of comics.
My grandmother, who was experienced and knew what her grandchild liked, would secrete a bundle of comics under the bedspread in my room for me to enjoy. She knew the worth of comics. She knew that ANY reading was better than none. She knew that it was the mind that needed the skill to lift the letters and words off the page and understand - that it didn’t matter if it wasn’t approved high school reading.
My reading skill was improved by me reading comics. Eventually I graduated to reading short stories and novels and hundreds of books on Science for that was my interest. Books have always been a part of my life since then. Linda and I read books, and our house is often a mess with them. Both our daughter's are avid readers.
My daughter Catriona, barely 3 years old and well before she could read, would take her favourite book down from the shelves in the hall.
She would sit and turn the pages. Sometimes she would sniff them. Sometimes she’d hold the book upside down when pretending to read it, for there were no pictures. That didn’t avert her fascination. It was one of my little books of poetry, the smallest book on the shelves. Catriona identified it as her book because of its tiny size. She never tore a page and always returned it to the shelf when she was finished playing with it.
When our children were both primary school age, our living room floor was always littered. In our house you could take your life in your hands by trying to walk across the living room floor in the dark. It was always littered - with books.
When Catriona was older, I would sometimes find her reading under the blankets with a torch when she was really supposed to be asleep. I just left her to it. She’s 15 now and has read every Harry Potter book published, some of them twice.
She has also read Tolkien’s Lord Of The Rings trilogy. I've seen the movies, but I've never read the Lord Of The Rings books. I found them hard to read.
Catriona uses txt language on her mobile all the time, yet she writes in near perfect English when she does her assignments for school. Her spelling’s not bad either. There’s a lesson to be learnt here.
I applauded his innovation for contemplating its possible existence. It has been discussed a lot in the blogosphere recently, some of it spawned by ideas associated with so-called digital-natives.
Though I don’t really ascribe to the digital-native idea, and I’m also sceptical about there being ‘new ways of learning’, I have to admit to believing that there are probably many billions of ways of learning, if not an infinite number. If this is coming over as a contradiction, read on.
Thinking and learning are intertwined. While I’m not contemplating a discussion on the chicken-and-egg nature of their relationship, it’s likely that in any new-born child the thinking is there, if only in a primal form, before the learning begins. Studies show that there are numerous developmental stages wherein thinking skills develop in the young child as it grows.
Higher thinking skills
We contemplate the higher thinking skills that children at school may develop. Presumably these skills have to be learnt too. So you might understand why I mentioned about the chicken-and-egginess of thinking and learning.
Beyond a certain elementary stage of learning, it becomes difficult to say whether the learning progresses because of development of thinking skill, or the thinking develops because of learning.
It's unique
There are several schools of thought that believe human thinking, despite all its multiple facets, is quite unique. For instance, bees think differently than humans. It has been shown that bees exhibit a consciousness, and that validates the idea that they also think. Regardless of their different plane of thinking, they have organisational skills which in many ways appear to be superior to humans. A characteristic of human thinking is its diversity. While every human mind has its own opinion in some form, a feature of the humanness of the thinking behind that opinion is that it is likely to be different from others who hold an opinion on the same topic or idea.
However small the variation is between one opinion and that of others of the group, the fact that there are differences is a manifestation of that humanness. No two human minds think exactly alike - on any topic.
It takes a willingness to comply and a considerable amount of training for any significant number of humans to enter into community work with the dedication and single-mindedness exhibited by a colony of bees. Humans just don’t think that way. Some might say that they are too diverse in their thinking to be like bees. Here lies my point. Humans think like humans. Bees think like bees.
I posit here that no matter how much we learn about bees, we will never be able understand how bees think, let alone be able to think like a bee, no more than a bee could ever think like a human mind. The same could be said about human thinking in relation to that in other animals. Take me to your leader
What sort of thinking does an alien possess? Just imagine an alien watching two humans in conversation. Let’s assume that the alien is input-fed by some mysterious and unlikely contraption that transmits understanding about the conversation with all the relevant and important features being conveyed.
A human witnessing the same conversation might understand the significance of dress code and how it influences the way one person might view the other. Or it might be accent, or culture, or just simply difference of opinion and background. All of these may be subliminally registered by a human observer because that observer thinks like a human.
The human observer knows what a raised voice means or may even be familiar with a nuance in cultural dialogue. What I’m suggesting is that the alien would not/could not possibly understand the significance of these hidden codes even if they are observable. To the alien they would make no perceptible contribution to the discourse between the two conversationalists. To the human observer, they could convey some of the most significant messages. Humans think like humans. Aliens think like aliens.
Our Sci-fi aliens
The likelihood is that the alien would not be able to comprehend the significance of much of the conversation never mind the subliminal messages. The frame of reference of an alien in understanding everyday human things, ideas and concepts, let alone cultural idiosyncrasies, would be too far removed from the environment familiar to humans here on earth.
Our conception of aliens tends to be groomed by science fiction, and how that depicts how aliens will appear. Did aliens write the Sci-fi? No. The vision transferred to us from Sci-fi is how another human thinks aliens might appear and how they might think. I posit we will find that aliens, when they arrive, will not think like humans at all.
Artificial intelligence and the rest
We are on the brink of discovering what true artificial intelligence (AI) can offer. I wonder at how we will regard the AI when it is developed to the stage when we can truly and appropriately compare it with human intelligence, and that time is close. It’s not so strange that the intelligence of computer minds has, in the past, been judged by comparison with what is expected in response from a human mind, the most highly developed intelligence that we know. What else could we use as a comparative when observing intelligence? This situation is both inevitable and unfortunate.
I’ve no doubt that there are an infinite number of ways of thinking that are different than human ways. If they were understood, they would certainly be ‘new ways of thinking’. But it is also just as certain that they will be ways of thinking that we can neither conceive of nor understand. The likelihood of human-made AI being significantly different from our own is small. Can it also be said that learning by artificial intelligence is unlikely to be significantly different from what we know of learning in humans?
Have you ever thought why models are so often used in teaching and learning? They formed part of what used to be called teaching aids, more recently termed learning resources.
In the high school that I attended, we had a resource room. Senior students were given access to this room for study purposes and when helping a teacher prepare lessons. The day I was permitted into the resource room I could not stop thinking about the amazing things I saw stored there. It was only years later when I became a teacher that I realised why my teachers had guarded the room and its content so vigilantly and with such reverence.
Effecting learning
I recently ran my blog through Wordle. The result at the head of this post shows what has obviously been the most important thing on my mind when I wrote recent posts. It also made me think that despite my familiarity with the word, learning and how it is brought about is not always looked upon as common ground when discussed in depth with others in the field. Tony Karrer’s recent post has hosted a debate on ways of learning and associated ideas, a follow up to his post on Learning Goals.
Learning by association
The renowned scientist, Dr Jacob Bronowski, who was also an intellectual, expert code-cracker, mathematician and author, gave celebrated lectures on BBC TV in the 1960s. During one of his lectures, he demonstrated how a feat of memory through association could be performed, and he displayed this both by his own memory acumen and with the help of a trained member of his audience.
The 'trick' involves some preparation. A list of (say) 20 commonly known items, personal to the memoriser, is committed thoroughly to memory so that not only the list order can be recalled but also the position in that list of any of its component items.
Once this is accomplished, the memoriser is then shown a series of up to 20 new items in sequence, such as cards drawn randomly from a full pack of playing cards. For each new item shown, the memoriser simply ticks it in the mind by association with each of the previously memorised personal items in sequence.
When complete, the memoriser is asked to name an item by its number in the list and knows what the item is. As splendidly amazing as this act appears when first seen, it is based on learning by association. While it is true that this method has limited application to some learning, it shows how rapid and facile the mind and memory can be in the simple act of learning content.
Models and their place in learning
Learning by association is not a new idea. It is the working part of how learning is assisted when a model is used. It is called upon when a map is used in learning geography or an elaborate digital model is used in learning the function of interior parts of a plant cell. Models work by drawing on previous experiences and learnt ideas, and relating to these when learning something new.
Often the simplest models are the best, even when they may relate to a complicated theory, concept or phenomenon. Though elaborate models may look fascinating, they rarely convey useful learning to the beginner. Learners need to be already familiar with parts of the model itself. As intricate and captivating as the Watson, Crick and Wilkins model of DNA may be, it conveys nothing about its chemistry to those who have never learnt elementary Chemistry.
It is well known that before any skill can be acquired learning a second language, knowledge of vocabulary is fundamental. It is also becoming recognised by educators that the language of a subject, and knowledge of vocabulary in particular, is required for the learner to be able to think in terms of the subject and also to converse about it with others.
Without the vocabulary of a hitherto unknown subject it is impossible for a beginner to acquire any useful subject skill. Motor skills have similar fundamental elements when it comes to the first time learner picking up the ropes of a new skill.
There is no evidence to suggest that the memory required while learning and remembering a vocabulary (content learnt by association) is fundamentally different from that needed to learn and remember the higher skills. When concepts or skills to be learnt become more complicated as the learner progresses, a stage is invariably reached where the learner has to work at them to make the leaps. Once made, these too can be learnt and remembered. Higher thinking skills are required to be learnt to continue to progress. This is often forgotten by the expert who is addressing learning in the subject, the so-called cognitive apprenticeship theory.
Learning is recursively elaborate
A concept, idea or formula learnt in one discipline can find a use in another that’s seemingly unrelated. A child who recognises the relationship between similar patterns of learning in two distinct disciplines makes a cognitive leap. Intelligence is intimately linked with the ability to connect patterns in this way.
The animated equations depicted here are of elementary algebra. They show how the same basic tactic can apply to two distinct areas of learning in Science. A child who masters the simple algebra relevant to this also learns the skill to work within an unbelievably large number of its applications. The scope for it is huge, and it finds use in many common everyday tasks, from a simple calculation in an expenses return to estimating how long a car journey is likely to take.
This recursive application of algebra is by no means a unique feature in learning, for there are many millions of patterns that cross seemingly unrelated disciplines. The ability to understand and recognise these patterns is one that is familiar to the compilers of intelligence tests. It was believed that such tests, according to various scales, could be used to classify and measure cognitive ability. Though there may well be some merit in the idea of pattern recognition being linked to cognitive ability, the means created to measure this fell short of something useful, never mind fairness.
Cutting corners
The recursive nature of learning often compels us to take short cuts that sometimes lead to a misunderstanding that a concept has been learnt. It may even suggest that it doesn’t need to be learnt; the word content springs to mind. I’ll use an example from elementary Chemistry to demonstrate this.
Finding the chemical formula for a simple compound, such as aluminium oxide, can be done a number of ways, all of which have the potential to yield the same answer:
use Google - provided the student can apply the search routine and recognises a reputable site when one is brought up, the correct formula might be found,
recall the chemical symbols for the elements oxygen and aluminium, and that oxygen has a valency of 2 and aluminium has a valency of 3, then apply the recalled rule for writing correct chemical formulae,
referring to the periodic table of the elements (or just simply knowing it) the student uses the atomic number of oxygen to write the electron configuration of its atom - having used a similar process to write the electron configuration of aluminium, the student may determine the common valencies of both elements and then apply method 2.
Understanding how the formula is found is part and parcel of understanding so-called ‘valency theory’ in Chemistry. Learners who can Google the formula for any simple chemical compound don’t really need to know much chemistry. While method 2 barely touches on some of the principles involved in valency theory, knowledge of how to use method 3 takes the learner closer towards how to apply that theory and to understanding why chemical compounds form between elements in the first place.
Most students who go on to study Chemistry in senior school will learn both methods 2 and 3. They may become so proficient at writing chemical formula using method 2 that they can write several correct formula in the time it takes another student to type in the Google search criteria in following method 1, let alone what’s needed to choose a suitable trustworthy site to browse.
All of the above methods for finding a formula can be learnt and each method has its merit depending on the need. But to say that all a learner needs to know is how to use an Internet search engine to find the formula of a simple chemical compound is not actually learning any Chemistry. Yet this is often used as an argument for not teaching content. There comes a time when the learner just has to face learning some content, and this applies to many distinct disciplines.
Models can be conflicting
One of the many curious phenomena studied in secondary school Science is that of the behaviour of light. This well studied topic requires a series of models to explain how light can behave in different circumstances. A feature of two celebrated models for light, that of the particle or photon and that of the wave, is that neither model explains all the observable properties of light.
While both these models can be used to explain and predict the behaviour of other phenomena not directly related to light, it takes an enlightened learner to understand that they are just models. This peculiarly useful awareness is a higher learning skill. It allows the learner who is very familiar with models used within a discipline to understand their limitations and permits recognition of when a particular model is applicable and when it is not. Recognising that a model and the phenomenon it mirrors are not the same things is extremely important in Science.
The lesser analogy
Unlike the model, an analogy is not trying to depict in any way how the thing or concept exists. It is a direct mapping between unrelated elements of one idea and another. There is no need for there to be any true resemblance between the thing or concept and its parallel used in analogy.
Unfortunately, analogies are often used erroneously as models. For the learner, the analogy is far more involved, the behaviour of one thing being considered while thinking of the associated behaviour of another.
It calls for the most use of imagination, being a parallelism that’s left mainly up to the ingenuity of the thinker. As they are necessarily specific, analogies are severely limited in their broader application. Facile in association
The mind seems to be facile in the way it can link seemingly unrelated things and learn by association. Perhaps this is why the model enjoys its time honoured place in learning at all levels, for it is so successful.
Models enable a direct mapping of what is seen onto what is being learnt. Good models permit this to be assimilated easily by the learner so that they can apply what’s learnt. Through pattern recognition learners can find further application of what they have learnt.
The enlightened learner, who also understands the difference between the model and the idea, concept or phenomenon that it is mirroring, can flip between models used to reflect these. Introducing the learner to this important difference between the model and what it reflects is the province of good teaching.
This week's Day in a Sentence is shaping up to be a real Toondoo follow-the-leader event. And what a leader! Kevin Hodgson led the scene with a fantastic idea in a comic:
that unfortunately put him on the Moon and the blast probably didn't do anything for Jo Hawke's SOL testing for he said this,
"Those cartoons are great! I tried to make one for mine, but it lagged too bad, and I got frustrated. So I'll write it out instead:
Students were in and out of class all week for SOL testing, and the only way to figure out who was *really* absent was to spend a good quarter of a class sorting through multiple PDF attachments of rolls and then checking the list of students who didn't actually show up -- for all three sessions each day! And we get to do it again all this week, too!"
"I wish that I could design a cartoon that would make visible the two-way tug many teachers must feel because they are torn between "test-prep" pressures and the desire to offer their students 21st century venues for learning."
Here's my best effort Gail. Maybe you could improve the captions at Make Beliefs Comix.com.
Kevin Hodgson (aka Dogtrax) is having a week off DIAS. He is great at writing and designing comics.
Let’s have a rave-up while he’s out!
So let yourself go!
Put on your funniest persona, and write your side-splitting
Comicin aSentence!
Get your giggle-pot bubbling, chuckle out your day in a sentence, and post your words in a comment here. Your hilarious product will be posted E O T W.
(For those who'd like to follow Kevin's innovative example, here's the link to ToonDoo).
Do have a virtual slice of my blog’s birthday cake.
One year has passed since I made the decision to attempt a spot of blogging. It has been colourful and worthwhile. So has the learning, which is great, for learning is still my goal. I have Michele Martin to thank for all this for it is she who enticed me into taking part in the Comment Challenge in May 2008.
During this past year I published 193 posts on newMiddle-earth Blogspot. According to Google Analytics, people from 73 countries visited Middle-earth in the last month – a total of 1352 visitors. The most visits came from USA (529) followed by New Zealand (342) of which 325 came from Greater Wellington. The actual numbers shown here indicate relative estimated ratios rather than actual visits, since I didn’t collect data on RSS use. I have 10 loyal followers from countries throughout the world. I got a lot of help, and by different means, from many of the visitors to Middle-earth. ‘Visitors’ means YOU!
I take this opportunity to thank you for following this blog and for your support. What have I learnt?
It is difficult to say, even at this stage, precisely what has been the most useful thing learnt. A lot of that learning has been about me, and I don’t mean that in a navel-gazing way. Nevertheless, there are observations that I feel are notable and I’ll list those here. Google Analytics and PostRank
I was introduced to Google Analytics (GA) and later to PostRank (PR) and found that, as expected, data gathered from GA on the popularity of posts correlates well with ratings gathered from PR. While there are differences, these two data gatherers complement each other. I learnt that the popularity profile of a post created a tail over time and that the fatness and length of that tail bore some relation to the ongoing interest that visitors had for the content of the post.
Blog persona I came across the Web2.0 application Typealyzer and learnt that posts I’d written had the persona of a thinker. There was a lot of discussion throughout the blogosphere on the worth of Typealyzer.
I found that most who knew about it misunderstood what it was reporting. I learnt they held the erroneous belief that Typealyzer was analysing their personality type rather than the persona of what they wrote and posted on their blog.
Telling a story
I learnt the merit of telling stories in posts and found that among the most popular posts were those that tell stories for they had the longest and fattest tail in their popularity profile. Posts that do this invariably reach a high rating on GA and PR often within a few days.
I was introduced to the concept that writing can have a quality known as reading ease according to the Flesch scale. So I researched the use of Flesch Reading Ease in Word. I later analysed the writing of other bloggers who, incidentally had favourably high Flesch ratings and prodigiously popular blog sites.
90:9:1 rule and so-called community
The rather contentious 90:9:1 rule seems to be obeyed quite well on newMiddle-earth Blogspot. From a total of 1352 visitors in the past month, a count of 13 visitors submitting 25 comments closely follows the order expected from the 90:9:1 rule. Other similar periods examined using GA yield comparable ratios.
While this may seem trivia to some, for me it represents confirmation of the difficulty involved in soliciting participation in so-called communities, notably those that are referred to as learning communities. Anyone who has followed my posts on themes to do with communities will perhaps understand that it is not by coincidence that this theme is threaded through my posts from the first month I began blogging. Who are the commenters?
A significant observation about my commentsphere is that, almost without exception, commenters are also bloggers. The supposition is that people who do not have their own blogs will visit and read rather than participate in discussion. However, it’s also improbable that all visitors who do not leave a comment are not themselves bloggers.
Post topic and content
I found that posts about my commentsphere and the people that are likely to contribute to it, also reached predictable high ratings. This was one of the first observations I made when I set up GA on my blog. I can predict with an unerring accuracy that a post about the commentsphere will soar in its ratings.
Elearning - an exceptional topic
I was delighted to find that posts specifically about elearning, carry substantially high ratings in both GA and PR. A giant among those is The Elearning Apprentice, posted in October 2008, which has a fat tail that pulls a rating matching that of recent also-rans.
Another extraordinary post in terms of its popularity characteristics is Working With Online Learning Communities, which has such an amazingly even visitor rating from day to day, it has not varied significantly since the tail first took shape.
Highly complex
As absorbing as all this gathered data is to me, I am still quite unable to make logical sense of the characteristics of ‘my part’ of the blogosphere. I suspect that it is highly complex and likely to be even more so because of the varied nature of the post topics that I choose to write about. I concede that my range of topics is eclectic enough to cause me a considerable headache if I try to make too much sense of some ratings. Why am I interested in ratings?
My original intention was to study communities in the blogosphere with the purpose of understanding more about what engages learners. I’ve never lost interest in that study. I’d always hoped that post ratings in GA, PR or other such analytical data gathering tool would provide me with avenues for studying community engagement. They do provide some of these, but the data is far more complex than I first envisaged.
The more I observe and learn about community engagement, the more absorbed I become in it. Communities and their complexity are fascinating things. An exceptional opportunity
What I find is fascinating about my commentsphere is the huge variety of personalities and the backgrounds of the people who I regularly commune with, either through their comment on my blog or on their own blog. They range from colleagues who, like me are interested in sharing ideas on teaching and learning to business managers, from academics working at faculty in universities to CEOs of companies, from consultants in elearning to school principals.
Within those groups of wonderful people are blog-colleagues who I first met in the blogosphere when on the Comment Challenge in May last year. Among them:
Virginia Yonkers, who is one of my most frequent commenters and a great blogging companion, Kevin Hodgson, who emailed me yesterday to ask if I’d mind hosting a Day In A Sentence on my blog again. It’s an opportunity not to be missed. It’s all about people.
Informal learning happens in many ways. Brent Schlenker’s post Is There No Room For Informal Learning? highlights the variety and usefulness of avenues through conversation. Tony Karrer spoke of ‘conversation learning’ in an earlier post and developed this in his Conversation on Conversations.
A recent discussion with Zoë Westhof on the problems that authors encounter when writing their thoughts made me consider how people might go about voicing their ideas during a face-to-face conversation.
Ideas a priority
For the author of a twitter line or a blog comment, the same conflict of prioritisation of ideas can occur than if it’s a company report that’s being drafted. The author may have several ideas waiting in the mind when the first phrase is unfurled in writing. During this time, a shuffling of ideas in the mind of the author may occur; some of those may dissolve while new ones emerge.
These thoughts may not necessarily be ones that would make any sense to the reader if expressed consecutively. A good writer understands this conflict and goes about the editing process during thinking and on the written script at appropriate times throughout the writing process.
Arena for spoken ideas
But speaking in conversation can be different than all of this. While the author may have to wrestle with an array of thoughts when writing, the conversationalist has also to accommodate the intervening audible ideas of others. In particular, the spoken conversation has the additional and sometimes limiting factor of time and the mandatory aspect of personality.
Any spoken conversation is an arena for the participants' competing thoughts. The personality composition of any conversation is a major controller of the outcome of that exchange, whether it is between reunited friends in the corridor at a conference, a heated discussion between members in a board room, or an audio conference during a radio interview.
Clearly, the personality make-up of any group discussion is a significant outcome-determining factor for that event. The time honoured book I’m OK You’re OK describes ranges of possible personality controlled situations that may occur during conversation.
That capricious window of opportunity to voice an idea during a spoken conversation can often elude the conversationalist and leave the thought unsaid. An important idea may not be heard, let alone thought about by the other participants, and it remains for its owner to wait for another opportunity to put the idea. Similar circumstance may occur in a chat room environment but the window of opportunity is less capricious and is usually always there. Down to earth digital
For the conversationalist who chooses to chat in a twitter exchange or on a wiki, or who opts for the more leisurely terrain of a blog post, less urgency exists to prioritise thoughts before voicing them. What may be lacking for some in that environment is the rush of adrenaline to push to be heard, to prioritise to a fine arrow-point the words and phrases that are to be voiced and to wait for the opportune moment to thrust the gist forward. The phrase, ‘making a point’ summarises this situation.
For those like me who can summon that urgency at keyboard or txt-pad, the time to do the saying and the personalities of participants do not necessarily present barriers. What’s lacking is the opportunity to speak directly and with style to the faces of chosen conversationalists.
section from the Ranginui Door, Te Papa Museum, Wellington
Tell me and I'll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I'll understand. - Chinese proverb
There have been a few recent posts on an artefact known as the Learning Object - in particular, two by Karl Kapp, Library of Learning Objects and Learning Object Interview.They gave me confidence that what I'd learnt and worked with for the past ten years was not entirely forgotten by others in the field.
The Reusable Learning Object (RLO) or (learning object) was born out of pedagogy, imagination and the technology of the 20th century. It soared almost triumphantly into the 21st century, only to run out of airspeed, stall and nosedive to almost virtual oblivion.
True to the original intensions of its inventors, the RLO has been metaphorically dismantled and rebuilt in different forms. Many of these revamped objects were renamed ‘learning object’.
Others were satisfied to bear the term ‘learning resource’ or other such derivative, such as ‘digital learning resource’, for fear of being associated in some way with the crashed and, as some would have it, disgraced Learning Object.
All this happened a few years before I wrote this article, first published on Futurelab in April 2008. The article was given a favourable review by Stephen Downes. The review, article and its host site were severely criticised, I believe unfairly, by a postmodernist who really didn’t appreciate what the article was attempting to offer.
Here is the text, for those who may be interested to read the history and development of the digital learning resource. Some links to resources are now no longer current.
Have you ever learned how to activate a setting on a mobile phone by studying one of its animated tutorials? Did you at one time make use of online instruction to learn to touch-type or increase your typing speed? Perhaps you were once privileged to operate the controls of a flight simulator as part of the training to become an aircraft pilot. If your answer to any of those is yes then you have benefited from using a learning object.
The learning objects referred to here, and others like them, owe much of their success to one common aspect of their design: feedback that is relevant to the immediate circumstance of the learner - the hallmark of a good learning object. This discussion paper is about the learning object, its design, development and appropriate use as one of the many components in the portfolio of applied e-learning tools and strategies available to the 21st century teacher[1].
Early last century simple mechanical devices were invented to help with learning. The 1960s saw computers assist with traditional learning methods such as face-to-face language instruction. A sophisticated blend of technology and pedagogy was developed for this - computer assisted language learning or CALL[2] - that is still in use today.
In the late 1970s it was recognised that digital learning devices could be precision designed to afford specific and objective learning in many areas within a huge range of educational topics. Provided the fabric of their construction was carefully designed, such devices could be accessed almost anywhere at any time and on a variety of electronic media.
A device fitting some or all of these descriptors is broadly termed a digital learning object. It came into its own with the advent of the internet in 1992. Use of the fundamental principles behind learning objects has been raised to a level of maturity through the work of organisations such as MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching)[3], a free and open resource involving a large online community in the development of learning objects for higher education hosted by the California State University System.
The question of what a learning object should consist of has been a matter of considerable discussion over the years and there are various prescriptions for this[4]. A learning object can be described simply as any digital resource that can be used to support learning. It includes anything from a digital photograph to an elaborate combination of components that instructs and provides practice examples.
David Wiley put forward a taxonomy for classifying learning objects and proposed an instructional design theory for their construction and application[5]. The individual components of learning that together lead to the desired learning outcome have characteristics that can be used to choose a possible learning pathway. Instructional design theory deals with the essential links between what isto be learned and how to select the most appropriate pathway for the learning.
Wiley proposed three constituents of effective learning object implementation:
an instructional design theory
a learning object taxonomy
prescriptive linking material.
The latter defines the relationship between the instructional design theory and the taxonomy and by this means permits the selection of suitable learning objects. His pithy summary for this is, “for this type of learning goal, use this type of learning object”. Wiley details these strategies in his dissertation on learning object design and sequencing theory (LODAS)[5].
Learning objects can be transportable and reusable
The perception that a learning object could be designed to be used in a number of contexts initiated the idea that it should also be made so that it is transportable. A device so built is termed a reusable learning object or RLO. Warren Longmire summarises the content of a reusable learning object[6]:
In an environment in which context is scalable and adaptive, the ideal RLO content is:
modular, free standing and transportable among applications and environments
nonsequential able to satisfy a single learning objective accessible to broad audiences
coherent and unitary within a predetermined schema so that it is easy to catalogue the main idea or essence of the content
not embedded within formatting so that it can be repurposed within a different visual schema without losing the essential value or meaning of its content.
He describes the RLO as having two necessary factors, content and its metadata tag, the latter being a collection of information important to the cataloguing of the RLO for subsequent storage in a way that permits its ready identification and retrieval from a repository. Longmire also suggests the need to contextualise learning objects, for without context they can become “confusing, misleading, or utterly meaningless”, and he proposes a series of strategies for doing this[6].
A good learning object is like a well-made brick. It has components, each providing a quality to the overall function, prepared according to defined standards so that their combination can fit an objective purpose within a defined context. If designed correctly it can be used in a related context without the need for alteration, hence the term reusable. While this ideal is important to the life and application of the RLO, the fashionable preference is that it can be repurposed or contextualised when used within diverse contexts.
Cisco Systems used a schematic approach to describe the structure of the RLO, defining the reusable information object (RIO) as a component that has similar properties to the RLO[7]. The RIO consists of static, animated and interactive content including text, diagrams, pictures and videos as well as practice examples and assessment items. Each RIO is built sothat it supports the objective of the RLO. Cisco's RLO has a structure that fits Longmire's summary. Cisco also developed a strategy for building and implementing the RLO - the primary learning approach is identified to determine what the RLO should contain and this prescription then serves as a plan for its design and construction. Suggested optimum componentry includes an overview, summary and assessment - between five and nine RIOs, though this range may vary widely in practice. A series of RLOs can be constructed according to a pedagogical strategy to form part of a course, or to build a compound RLO.
The smallness of each component part, and the number of these incorporated into the whole, relates to what is called the granularity. Though the term is widely used in the context of RLO design and development, there appears to be no clear-cut definition for it. Collis and Strijker describe granularity as “just one of many issues related to learning objects that have different meanings and implications in different organisational contexts”[8].
Granularity has administrative implications when considering matters related to the cost of production and also the data retrieval of each part. In relation to the size of the RLO, granularity has also pedagogical implications especially if it has insufficient componentry to be considered a suitable unit of learning. The RLO should be neither too large in comparison to the size of its components nor too small to perform the pedagogical function in meeting its learning objective.
Simplicity of design applies as much to the construction of a good learning object as it does to folding a well-made paper dart; size and functionality need to be optimally balanced for the learning object to be on target.
For a learning object to be stored and later retrieved easily, it must be catalogued or labelled using metadata, essentially data about information. Criteria for defining metadata and the number of related attributes within it vary according to the specification used. The label or tag, known as the metadata tag, contains digital information that identifies all the important properties of the learning object.
When a learning object is selected from a repository its many parts are brought together according to the attributes chosen from its metadata tag. In this way the appearance of the object when displayed may be tailored within the limits of the metadata criteria and according to selected preferences on retrieval. Learning objects that form part of a programme of learning are stored in a repository or repositories accessible by a learning content management system (LCMS)[9] suitable for processing the learning object metadata (LOM)[10].
For LOM to be useful it must adhere to an unambiguous specification of which there are many, including those defined or used by Dublin Core[11], SCORM (Shareable Content Object Reference Model)[12], The Le@rning Federation[13], MERLOT[3], CLOE (Co-operative Learning Object Exchange)[14] and IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers)[15]. The IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee has established a set of internationally accepted open standards for learning object metadata adopted by other organisations.
The learning objective must be suitable for the application of a learning object, and for some purposes there are limitations no matter how well the learning objects are designed. The pursuit of such tools to meet associated learning objectives in these cases will very likely prove fruitless. For instance, it is clear that a learning object cannot be a substitute for a chat-room discussion. Nor would it be fitting to offer one as a replacement activity where the learner is required to collect data from a series of location cams, especially if the gathering process is important to the learning. The learning object employs a wide range of audio, video, animation and interactive technologies and is perfectly suited to e-learning. It is especially useful for introducing the learner to concepts difficult to present in text, static diagrams or pictures, or where it is difficult or dangerous for the learner to view a particular event such as the separation of chromosomes in the dividing nucleus of a living cell[16] or the Strombolian eruption of a volcano[17].
When the learner is finished interacting with a learning object, what is important is not the impact of a clever animation or an impressively dynamic video, but the learning that's imparted, and the relevance of that to the circumstance of the learner. It must furnish the learning objective that was on its designer's notebook and it should be memorable for that alone.
Wiley recognised that interactivity is a vital attribute of an effective learning object as “engaging learners, making them active participants in the learning experience, is key to having them meet the learning objective”. Interactivity brings immediacy to the learning through instant feedback and lights the spark[18], but its importance is frequently overlooked during the design phase of a learning object.
Though it is rarely the province of a learning object to process learner activity or to perform summative assessment, theinformation that may result from these is what most teachers look for to establish if learning has taken place. Yet in potential learning situations the learner is often out on a limb wondering what, if anything, has been learned.
Authors of early textbooks realised the worth of passive feedback in questions that had answers at the back of the book, alerting the learner to the need for further study when required. Recently, metacognition – thinking about thinking – in relation to the learner thinking about learning has become a fashionable teacher consideration[19].
With respect to these matters the importance of immediate feedback to the learner on what has been learned and what needs to be learned cannot be underrated. And while it is true that opportunities for learner feedback and formative assessment do not ensure that learning happens, their presence allows the learner to evaluate learning progress and they can also stimulate engagement[20]; herein must reside one of the requisites of a well-designed learning object.
Learning object development is no longer constrained by the dictates of those with expert technical knowledge and specialist ability. The steady arrival on the market of new authoring tools permits teachers with little technical know-how to design and create learning objects for themselves. But a most important role of the experienced teacher is in the selection and application of effective learning objects.
It appears that these tasks, as well as those to do with building the resources, have fewer problems if careful thought is given at the design stages well before construction begins. Margaret Haughey and Bill Muirhead[21] found that “incorporating all accessibility features into all learning objects made the learning objects more complex to develop, more costly to create and in limited cases adversely affected the overall design of the learning object. An alternative was to develop separate purpose-built learning objects for learners with specific special needs.”
They put forward a case for developers addressing additional accessibility criteria on an object-by-object basis. Haughey and Muirhead also contend that the trend towards learner-oriented inquiry puts less emphasis on teacher pedagogical orientation and that this shift may favour a more learner-centred approach in the future use of learning objects.
Leppisaari and Vainio[22] posited that “collegialism” among those engaged in learning object development is also valuable for maintaining the pedagogical quality of object content. This opinion is also held by MERLOT[3] where resources are peer-reviewed to ensure quality standards, and by CLOE where recognition is given to the special value of peer reviews in learning object development. CLOE suggests guidelines as well as a model for the peer review process[23]. Rachel Smith offers a cornucopia of invaluable ideas, tips and advice in her comprehensive paper, Guidelines for Authors of Learning Objects[24]. She upholds the principle of learner choice, maintaining that “an object that presents content in an appealing setting, inviting learners to explore at will, is more interesting than a single-path, linear, 'click here to proceed' format. If the only choice is when to click the 'next' arrow, it is difficult for learners to feel ownership of the learning process.”
She gives sound planning suggestions for building cohesive, well-integrated learning objects: Offer multiple paths or branches for learners to explore. Allow learners to choose which path(s) to follow rather than forcing them down a particular path. Draw a conceptual map of the learning object showing relationships between ideas, content, or sections. As you create the object, make sure those connections are available as path choices. Smith suggests various avenues for presenting learning objects including “a single learning object to reinforce or provide practice for a topic; sometimes several conceptually related learning objects are provided to explore a topic from different angles or in greater depth. A common way to 'combine' learning objects is to provide an assignment that includes a list of links to the different objects and guidance as to the order in which they should be accessed. Learning objects may also be integrated into a course using a learning management system (LMS) to create and manage the links between objects.”
Checking out the future While the popularity of computer gaming continues to grow and interest deepens in the use of computer games as legitimate means for learning[25], new avenues open for the RLO to continue its development as an e-learning tool. There is no reason, for instance, why games can't be designed to meet all the desired attributes of RLOs.
There is also scope for e-books to provide platforms where RLOs can exist as aptly as coloured pictures do in printed books, perhaps fulfilling some of Pithamber Polsani's hope for the development of the e-book to move “beyond the text-centric approach and concentrate on designing participatory environments”[26].
Here the potential is rich for the RLO to establish its niche, illustrating pages of learning in interactive and engaging ways never to be found in traditional textbooks. Who knows? Games designed as learning objects may soon find their way onto portable play-stations, MP4 players and even mobile phones.
![\SENTENCE\](http://static.toondoo.com/public/k/e/n/kenallan/toons/cool-cartoon-760780.png "\SENTENCE\")
![\My Day in a Sentence\](http://static.toondoo.com/public/d/o/g/dogtrax/toons/cool-cartoon-751643.png "\My Day in a Sentence\")
![\DAY IN A TOON\](http://static.toondoo.com/public/p/o/u/poulingail/toons/cool-cartoon-751710.png "\DAY IN A TOON\")
![\Toon\](http://static.toondoo.com/public/i/l/l/illyac/toons/cool-cartoon-754903.png "\Toon\")
![\Dover's DS!\](http://static.toondoo.com/public/b/l/k/blkdrama/toons/cool-cartoon-759829.png "\Dover's DS!\")
![\Digital music\](http://static.toondoo.com/public/m/u/r/murcha/toons/cool-cartoon-759845.png "\Digital music\")
![\Toon\](http://static.toondoo.com/public/k/e/n/kenallan/toons/cool-cartoon-759849.png "\Toon\")
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