coComments related to WhiteboardDave

I see two streams running to (

2009-02-10T18:45:02.123+01:00

I see two streams running to (or from) this. In the first, as it becomes easier to digitize books, more people will digitize one--maybe only one, or only a chapter, a favorite of theirs. Just like thousands of people make a single edit to a Wikipedia page. The knowledge is additive. The Library of Congress is trying to recreate the physical library that Thomas Jefferson sold to Congress to replace the one burnt in the War of 1812. Mostly that's of historic interest, but a look at Jefferson's notes shows the range (and present obscurity) of works he valued. The second stream is context. With physical books from times past, you need to read more widely to get a sense of what the author (and the intended audience) likely knew. (It's the challenge, and the reward, of studying Shakespeare.) Digital books open the door to hyperlinks and to useful tagging/annotation. It's not either/or; we can have both bits and atoms. A physical book is random access, highly portable, not subject to head crashes (its own head, anyway).

I hadn't been back in Cape Bre

2008-11-13T00:25:29.520+01:00

I hadn't been back in Cape Breton for nearly thirty years. Things had changed, but bye jaysis, Cape Breton's a moveable feast. If you've never been, then Song for the Mira or The Island can sound awfully sentimental. If you have been, you know they understate things.

Laurie: I noticed above you w

2008-10-18T17:59:37.443+02:00

Laurie: I noticed above you were interested in how the brain processes music. Have you read Daniel Levitin's engaging, informative This is Your Brain on Music? Levitin started off in the music business but ended up with a PhD and teaches at McGill U. in Montreal (his page there). A post I wrote based on one short section of his book is one of the most popular on my blog: "...10,000 hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert — in anything." That doesn't mean "don't bother if you don't have 10,000 hours," of course -- but for me it made a useful distinction between competence and expertise.

An interesting angle. One que

2008-10-15T21:24:39.631+02:00

An interesting angle. One question I have: assuming it's true that nearly 50% of the population has astigmatism, wouldn't many (most) of them have corrected it? I've seen an estimate that 25% of American adults are myopic to at least -1.00 diopters; does that mean "make the letters bigger?" References cited in the Wikipedia article on astigmatism suggest a prevelance closer to 30%. One of those references points out that refractive errors, including astigmatism, vary significantly among children in four ethnic groups, even controlling for age and sex.

Tom, an interesting insight.

2008-09-24T13:33:03.998+02:00

Tom, an interesting insight. Your comments about the perceptions of adults hint at a kind of carnival of misperception mirrors: Except for those heavily tied into social software, it's my hunch that most adults aren't especially skilled technologically either. It's more like the commuter's dumbbell-shaped knowledge of the world between home and a new job: you know around your house, you know a little around the new workplace, and everything else is just the skinny handle of the dumbbell. So, most working adults (again, my hunch) may use some software -- browsers, email, a few other applications -- but aren't blogging, aren't creating wikis, certainly aren't programming. So they're not at high strength at seeing what young people are really doing. Similarly, those of us familiar with skilled young people have a tendency to mis-extrapolate... but, in my case, a visit to the nearest branch of a county library shows kids using the public-access computers for ordinary purposes. (That's an observation, not a critique.)

Haven't there been enough blan

2008-09-24T01:04:57.071+02:00

Haven't there been enough blank checks, and collateralized checks, and debt-swap checks, and everything except Slovakian checks? If Paulson doesn't know what to do (and he doesn't), Congress is crazy to pass this. if Paulson does know what to do, passing it would be even crazier. The only possible way to make this worse would be to have Dick Cheney made Treasurer-for-Life.

Hutch: thanks for including th

2008-09-04T13:57:33.960+02:00

Hutch: thanks for including the sources of the research (though the MSNBC people couldn't be bothered detailing their source). One minor quibble: "groupthink" is perhaps not a very positive term -- "a pattern of thought characterized by self-deception, forced manufacture of consent, and conformity to group values and ethics." I absolutely get your point that at some point a group needs to be united in its thinking -- people have to know and agree on the overall strategy, even if they disagree with some elements. But you don't want blind compliance, especially within the team.

As usual, I agree with a lot o

2008-08-28T21:03:23.683+02:00

As usual, I agree with a lot of what you're saying, Harold. The world of performance at work has been on a long journey for nearly fifty years, from do-as-I-do to do-as-schools-do to Mager's behavioral objectives to performance and performance support. And both organizations and individuals are at many different points along that journey. I think it's an oversimplification to say that "a complex work environment" means "innovation is more important than following established procedures." Manufacturing and processing, while deal with atoms as well as bits, aren't going to disappear. If they do, say goodbye to your computer, your vitamins, your medication, your power grid, your bicycle. Of course innovation matters. To see what happens when it stops, take a look at Detroit, where Chrysler's market share has dropped below 10% and GM has managed to lose more market share than Ford ever had. At the same time, both manufacturing and processing increasingly depend on precision, which demands standardization, which demands procedures. The individual worker, even on the pharmaceutical packaging lines I worked at recently, can and will come up with effective ways to alter, expand, or replace procedures. But that individual can't implement them at will. That worker would, however, be grateful to have some help in makign more rational her company's current methods for helping her acquire new skills and apply new procedures.

I recall a conversation with J

2008-08-28T20:02:40.470+02:00

I recall a conversation with Joe Harless, who coined the term 'front-end analysis' and who believed strongly that training was something you did when you ruled out virtually all other possibilities. His Job Aid WorkShop emphasized that a great deal of "essential" knowledge could be stored outside the learner's head, reducing the time and effort required to produce worthwhile results. Joe asked me if I could explain an EPSS in one sentence. I said, "It's a job aid with chips."

To paraphrase a great instruct

2008-08-22T19:16:31.804+02:00

To paraphrase a great instructional designer, "Stupid is as stupid does." I agree with your pragmatic approach -- accommodate what people are likely to do (like power browse), put critical points in focus -- and especially with the notion of putting the learning into the real world. People use "stupid" as a label to mean many things, some of them contradictory:

And there are times when technology can't easily provide the feedback necessary for someone to learn. I've been practicing my French by voice-chatting in Second Life. One of my online friends is trying to do the same, but he's just started learning French. He doesn't seem to have much patience for study, and hasn't yet developed much of an ear. So, for example, he's missing the difference between jouer (to play) and jouir (to enjoy, but also "to have an orgasm"). None of this is to disagree with your overall point. Rather, the real-world discussions and real-world activities get their focus from understanding what the performer needs to be able to do in a given circumstance. And some of the time, the goal is to equip him or her to respond as well as possible to a new situation. As in a well-managed real-life situation, if the performance falls short, the response will be "you did pretty well; let's talk about how to improve that next time."

Janet, this sounds like an ide

2008-08-16T03:22:24.858+02:00

Janet, this sounds like an idea with a lot of potential. I like the workplace learning focus -- different enough from other collections, specific enough to not need much explaining in advance.

I think "trivial competence" i

2008-08-13T17:28:24.269+02:00

I think "trivial competence" is an excellent distinction. I used to talk about "chimpanzee programming," a "skill" of my own. I'd copy a chunk of job control language that I knew would accomplish X, and modify it so it'd do Y (a variation on X). Other than three arguments I knew how to change, I had no idea whatsoever what the rest of the code did. At the same time, reinforcing your larger point, the first few times I did this and my modified code ran correctly, I could feel my synapses sit up and take notice. Hey, that really will produce this week's report, not last week's. It's how the loops gets closed -- or, better, how the cycle completes one revolution -- in the approach you recommend. Rather than show and tell, it's go and show.

Jason, you've got a real (and

2008-07-08T16:39:16.454+02:00

Jason, you've got a real (and longstanding) challenge. One drawback to the mandatory training you mention is that all too often it's one size fits all: there's a single slab of 'training,' like a cubic foot of tofu, plopped onto every cognitive plate. My own experience with a software firm suggests it's easy for the insiders to see the product as a cluster of features, rather than as a set of tools that make sense only in terms of some particular job. On the one hand, you may have a small percentage of clients who handle admin/control functions with the software. They're likely to have specific, detailed things they want to know how to do in the new release. (I remember bitterly trying to figure out what happened to Excel's "database" features that without warning because "lists.") On the other, you may have the end-user people within the client organizations, whose range of ability and need-to-know is far less. The same is true within your own organization. It may (emphasis on "may") help the first-line support people to know something of the big picture, but the real issue for them is deciding when to refer a problem to the second level. The real point is: these things are needed anyway. One-size-fits-all training inevitably leaves the specificity out, which means the organization is depending on Seelou training. ("See Lou? Do what Lou does.")

Always glad to see news of Ste

2008-06-29T19:25:37.402+02:00

Always glad to see news of Stewart Brand, too. (P.S. -- you've got a typo in the link to Long Now -- "og" instead of "org".)

"Scan" works for me; it implie

2008-06-21T05:00:14.133+02:00

"Scan" works for me; it implies a searching, like a radar scan or the horizon scan. Quick reading is skimming, though I suppose skimming could be part of how you scan. One blip on my radar, by the way, is a question like "Do we try to change that attitude?" Whose attitude are you trying to change? And has that person actually asked to be changed? Going back to the fitness or healthy eating analogy, what successful approaches are going to get the non-exerciser to work out more? The unhealthy eater to adopt new patterns? Another perspective: if as you say the average knowledge worker doesn't do much scanning, yet presumably keeps on doing whatever that knowledge work is, is it possible that scanning activities are ones some knowledge workers prefer?

I'll join the scanning chorus.

2008-06-20T14:34:19.462+02:00

I'll join the scanning chorus. One obstacle may be that scanning typically has little direct connection to the work at hand. Ton's distinction between "scan" and "search" makes sense here. A lot of people search on the job -- trying to figure out what "lean six sigma" or "vendor-managed inventory" or "SOAP" means, for example. They've got some immediate need, a (typically small) gap to close. Search here is like planning a dinner party and deciding on a menu when you want to try all new things. Scanning as a habit is like regular exercise. No one trip to the gym is going to make any real difference -- it's the habit. You can get better at scanning, just as you can learn to work out more effectively. But the person who gets to the gym three times a week, doing nothing more that walking on the treadmill, over time will develop far more fitness than the same person will without that level of practice. To adapt my own saying about best practices, everyone's baptized in the religion of fitness, but not many people go to church.

Kevin, I have in my quotation

2008-06-02T13:19:35.715+02:00

Kevin, I have in my quotation collection this gem, which seems to track with your cartoon: "People used to believe that a million monkeys at a million keyboards would produce the works of Shakespeare. Now, with the internet, we know that's not true."

Light, I think those are all v

2008-05-31T18:52:28.994+02:00

Light, I think those are all valid points. If I understand your mode-switch correctly, I think the same thing likely applies whenever people are changing between native-language and second-language mode. My notion (and that's all it is) is that the mental wiring for your native language is so deep and so internalized that it seems like the natural way to speak. A second language learned after childhood is almost guaranteed to be not be so deeply wired. So your Mandarin speakers who've been using English in an English-speaking area do have to make a shift. In a much simpler area, I've driven standard-transmission cars for nearly 30 years. Of course, I can drive an automatic as well -- but in semi-automatic situations, I find myself reaching for the clutch or the gearshift, because those are the skills most deeply wired. I do think there must be compensations or considerations that the average person allows when dealing with a non-native speaker of that person's native language. Does that help close the social distance a bit?

When I talked about three link

2008-05-31T18:39:54.063+02:00

When I talked about three links out, increasing my subscriptions wasn't even imagining the possibility of thinking about considering whether to cross my mind. I'd have to know how many I had, and I'd have to believe I knew how to attract more. I can't speak for anyone else, but I easily fall into habits -- some of them bad, most neutral, few good. Good habits for me require more conscious effort. So when I find I'm only reading the same blogs or sites, regardless of quality, I know I'm getting a bit too comfy or running low on curiosity. There's nothing magical about three links, but clicking three means you end up at the four link in the chain, and by then you and Toto are at least not in the same part of Kansas. I don't have five top lessons, but I do have a few notions: "Think and do." In other words, even with a brief comment, preview it. Many sites don't have preview buttons, which I think is unfortunate. If I've got a few things to say and there's no preview, I'll sometimes write my comment in a text editor so I can look at the whole thing. "Assume good faith." This is one of Wikipedia's edit guidelines, and makes a lot of sense. The online world's a reasonably safe place to be hyperbolic, snarky, scathing, or bellicose. When I find myself strongly reaction to what I read, that's the "reptilian brain" light flashing on my mental dashboard.

My notion is that most people

2008-05-25T15:29:01.513+02:00

My notion is that most people move from the specific to the eneral, rather than the reverse. What that means in SL terms, I think: Newcomers think of SL in terms of their real-world experience. That explains building with walls and doors (and roofs) in a place where it doesn't really rain and when you can force the sun to be at noon whenever you want. That explains auditoriums with chairs, and avatars for the most part politely sitting in the chairs. That explains the ubiquitous dancing: it gives your avatar something to do while you're chatting to others. If you've been in other virtual worlds (World of Warcraft, D&D, what have you), then you've got another set of personal experiences from which to extrapolate. But if you haven't been, you don't. The stuff that more experienced people take for granted (like turning avatar titles on or off) is not usually intuitive (try finding where to shut off the bouncing-hands typing animation). Even trying to frame your question is hard, like someone who doesn't speak French thinking that librarie means "libary" (it's "bookstore"). Kathryn's analogy (the IBM Selectric typewriter versus a word processor) is apt. The clunkiness of early software (I learned on WordStar) combined with a whole new infrastructure (formatting codes, file names) imposed significant barriers -- as did, I suspect, the introduction of the telephone. ("If I got one of these, who would I talk to? I don't know anyone with a phone.") None of this is to write off the concept of virtual worlds. SL is probably as good an intro as any. As with the early days of online computer-based training, though, stuff isn't good because it's in SL. The chicken/egg problem is on the one hand seeing your training/learning challenges and on the other learning enough about a virtual world to find a creative and effective way to combine the two, the way Alan Levine suggested here.

Orlando, can you say something

2008-05-23T12:42:02.046+02:00

Orlando, can you say something about what the categories are (e.g., French as category two)? I'm interested in the 500-hour rule of thumb for languages that are like English. (I've recently posted about This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin, who points to research suggesting that expertise in many fields requires about 10,000 hours. That's not to dispute what you're saying; I see the two numbers as pointing in the same direction. I'm pondering my own training in French -- four years in high school, plus a year of "culture and civilization" in college. Maybe 500, 600 in-class hours; at best 400 outside. I didn't use French much for decades, but in the past six months have found myself chatting (in text and in voice) with native speakers in Second Life. My vocabulary isn't great, and neither is my grammar, but I think I benefit from having started at 13 and having built some neural pathways -- even if they haven't been cleared in a long, long time.

For the mildly curious: Pedro

2008-05-23T12:10:09.861+02:00

For the mildly curious: Pedro Carolino's 1855 book, The New guide of the Conversation in Portuguese and English, was apparently intended as a guide for Portuguese speakers traveling in English-speaking countries. Mostly, it reads as though Carolino had a Portuguese-French dictionary and a French-English dictionary, but almost no useful knowledge of English. It's available via Google, though I treasure my Dover Press edition as the greatest value I've ever gotten for $2.95. Today being the 23rd, here's the text from p. 23: For to wish the good morning. How does your father do? He is very well. I am very delight of it. Were is it? I shall come back soon, I was no came that to know how you are. For make a visit in the morning. Is your master at home? Yes, sir. Is it up.

Karyn: in thinking about socia

2008-05-22T12:09:00.640+02:00

Karyn: in thinking about social software, I saw a parallel with movement from "how to train" to "how to improve performance." For me the social is and always has been more important than the software; it's just that the software can both ease and expand the opportunities for the social. I hear some of that in Stephen Downes's reply: early on, he was involved in grad-school face-to-face discussions, early BBS, MUDs. The software made it possible; the connections made it dynamic.

Viplav, look at the connection

2008-05-22T00:10:12.375+02:00

Viplav, look at the connection we have between us. One blogger suggested I get onto Facebook; someone invited to the first working/learning carnival suggested Manish; he's opened the door for me to interact with people on the other side of the world. It's amusing (or distressing) to see "email" and "entire generations" in the same sentence. Wikipedia puts the dawn of email around 1965, and Ray Tomlinson developed the use of the at sign (person@domain.com) in 1971. As Alan Kay said, technology is anything that wasn't around when you were born.

Kirsti, I'm glad you find some

2008-05-21T11:34:42.947+02:00

Kirsti, I'm glad you find something worthwhile in the three-clicks-out idea. For me it's a good way to get out of my usual haunts (useful or enjoyable though they may be). Sometimes the third click doesn't turn up much, but then you miss all the balls you don't swing at.

Anamika, I've been thinking ab

2008-05-20T13:53:47.703+02:00

Anamika, I've been thinking about the word "tool" as an analogy. A hand saw is a tool, as is a laser-guided, electrically-powered table saw. So in a sense face-to-face meetings and conferences, together with the phone, have been a kind of networking tool. Then first-generation developments like discussion boards and listservs extended your ability -- you could do some of the things you did with the earlier tools, and you could do some things you couldn't before, like easily retrieve the history of the conversation. Current social software both adds power to what was done through other tools and adds capability. As a tool, it seems to me we have to fit it to the work we want to do. (Of course, some people just like puttering around in their digital workshop, having fun with the tools for the tools' sake.)

I agree with Michael's comment

2008-05-18T19:24:05.879+02:00

I agree with Michael's comment about output (which I read as "speaking and being understood") as the thing taht engages us in a new language. Obviously, that's tied closely to "hearing and understanding," and both imply either a topic or a setting that matters. For myself, I find that in live conversations with French speakers, I become energized and animated when the person just seems easy to talk with, and also when we share a genuine interest in the topic(s). I simultaneously plunge ahead (not worrying too much about the ideal vocabulary and grammar) and seem to retrieve better what I've learned. As to the relevance you mention, Ken, there's nothing like interaction with native speakers to help a learner figure out that no one really says X in situation Y. Are you familiar with the incomparable English as She is Spoke? As Pedro Carolino himself said, "He speak the french very well. Tough he is German, he speak so much well italyan, french, spanish and english, that among the Italyans, they believe him Italyan, he speak the frenche as the Frenches himselves. The Spanishesmen believe him Spanishing, and the Englishes, Englishman. It is difficult to enjoy well so much several languages."

"People would rather have a

2008-05-02T15:43:28.758+02:00
"People would rather have a simple line of text on a plain white screen that gives them meaningful information, than play yet one more long and drawn out Jeopardy game." Bless you, my son. The infestation of Jeopardy and its ilk stems in part, I think, from people not believing they can be original. If you know what's important for the learner to do, often you'll find it's not "answer in the form of a question." Your deconstruction idea is excellent. Look at models like the free stuff that Thiagi has on his web site... and he's just one example.

I did see this as ten tips,

2008-04-29T12:43:50.602+02:00
I did see this as ten tips, not ten commandments. If I were going to squeeze one in, it would be: be yourself. For me, of course, that means I don't always manage to be brief. I agree that (usually) it's a blog, not a dissertation; on the other hand, your own interests and passions will come across. Another tip: not everything you can count, counts. In other words, don't get in a tizzy about Technorati or Google rank. The higher a blog appears in such places, the more it's a sign of of other people pointing to it -- not necessarily of its meriting that pointing. And there's the advice from the pre-computer blogger, Hillel the Elder: If not for myself, who is for me? If for myself alone, who am I? And if not now, when?

Ulises, I hope it was clear I

2008-04-09T15:40:02.942+02:00
Ulises, I hope it was clear I was speculating, not telling you how to do the experiment. I liked the structure, especially given your goals and the timeframe.

Ulises, I'd be very interested

2008-04-09T12:52:56.534+02:00
Ulises, I'd be very interested in hearing what the results of the game tend to be. At first glance, my hunch is that people would seek attention because that might be easier to attract. Is that the case? And do they move to seeking recommendation? Given the timeframe of an hour, I'm assuming they're not really making posts. I wonder what would happen if the students were able to post to actual blogs and read each other's work over, say, three weeks? I'm glad I came across this (that's attention), and I'll be posting about it myself (recommendation).

I like this approach much more

2008-03-27T20:08:32.634+01:00
I like this approach much more than the endless thermometers or gauges. One client, in a dry financial field like mortgage processing (or like mortgage processing used to be) had wanted to award points for sections completed. Nothing else, just points. Which I guess is okay, but my idea was to start with a Bob Cratchit character in a tiny Victorian office; mastery of the various skills would update Bob's surroundings... electric lights, a pen instead of a quill, a computer instead of a paper ledger. A lot like furnishing that house, but more accounting-like. The client, alas, didn't have quite that sense of whimsy.

Did you know that if you look

2008-03-22T05:43:34.387+01:00
Did you know that if you look for Mommy, Why is There a Server on Amazon, you find reviews?

I read Harold's meaning that t

2008-03-20T17:58:22.251+01:00
I read Harold's meaning that technology becomes invisible in the sense of being taken for granted. Stewart Brand years ago predicted that computers were about to disappear from view the way motors had. "No one called the automobile...a personal railroad, but that's what it was....then motors got smaller and disappeared into...toothbrushes, wristwatches..." I think most people assume now that other people have email and mobile phones. If like me someone has a land line, he'll say, "This is my cell phone," otherwise not. It's just how you call him. Facebook and similar tools are still pretty new to many people, but I'm sure the St. John parent or one of her allies readily helps the newcomer put Facebook to use. "All you do is sign up, create an idea, and then..." In fact, I think that's how this sort of tool moves into the midrange of the bell curve: people have a specific need/problem/opportunity ("keep the language immersion) and get the tool for that specific purpose. Success breeds confidence breeds extension to other realms in a person's life.

Christy, while Ian has some po

2008-01-29T15:01:20.120+01:00
Christy, while Ian has some points to make, the railroad-gauge analogy is a myth, as Snopes among other sites points out. Varying railroad gauges were widespread in the U.S. throughout the 19th century. In Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow, Dee Brown describes "compromise cars," rolling stock with wide wheels intended to run between lines with slightly differing gauges.