My mother’s kitchen

As an adult, I’d go back to visit my mother’s house, and one of our biggest arguments was over her kitchen — more specifically, the organization of her kitchen. I could never find anything — which is not unusual for a visitor, but more importantly I couldn’t learn how to find anything and had to ask her for help every single time. Drove me bananas.

The cooking oil would be under the sink. The spices would be with the pots. There was nothing useful in the pantry. The flour, sugar, eggs (she had 2 fridges) and baking trays would be in a different room. What kind of logic was this??? I would reorganize her kitchen. She would get furious. Arguments would ensue. After a few times, I gave up.

Only just recently, I realized her logic — the mental model of her kitchen.

You see, I organize according to category — like things with like things. Dry food items here, spices there, pots under there, vegetables here. She organized according to function.

What function would require cooking oil under the sink? Well, she had a huge burner ring outside for deep frying large batches of stuff. The burner was outside on the patio, the kitchen window served as a pass-through, the kitchen sink was under the window. It was easier to have the cooking oil there rather than walk across the kitchen to get it (she also had bad knees.)

Her spices were close to the stove, where she cooked, with the pots because she could reach them there. When my brother remodeled the kitchen, he made the upper cabinets too high. She’s 4’10″.

The sugar, flour, eggs, baking items — well, she didn’t use them that often. And when she did, she baked huge batches of stuff, which meant she needed more room than what was in her kitchen, so she had another room set up for that.

The organization of her kitchen increased her efficiency. That was her mental model.

It was not one I shared.

Learning mental models

When I first moved down to the United States of America, I had a job as a writer. I was to help people learn about information technology at a University. At that time, the SysAdmin folks dictated how we thought about things. I was new, I followed along. The documentation we wrote was organized according to categories: accounts, email software, SSH, FTP, and other stuff. It was mostly useless. Why?

People did not think in those SysAdmin categories. We let the inmates run the asylum. I realized how useless it was after I left that position, then tried to access my email and change my password. I looked in the book that I had written to remember how to do this. I couldn’t find the information under email. I searched and searched and finally called the Help Desk in frustration. The information was under the Accounts section — but who would have ever thought of that?

We never bothered to learn the mental models of our learners. Not even at the most basic level. How did they organize their thinking about “that stuff they do online”?

But wait…we can’t figure out what everyone is thinking!

True, you cannot figure out the mental models of every single individual. No one is asking that. But we can figure out patterns. First question — is about functionality or categories? Do they really need to know how a domain is organized in order to do their work? Yes, it might help them in the long run, but realistically, that’s not the goal of most people. They just want to get their work done. Help them do that. Where are your learners currently at and where do they or you want them to go?

Shared understandings

Sometimes we have to create common or shared understandings. And individual mental models may get in the way. So what do we do — assuming we are talking about adults?

• Treat people as adults
  • They have survived in the world so far using the mental models they have been using, don’t demean their understanding of the world. Work to understand it. Break it down.
• Set a common, agreed upon goal — a destination.
  • Unless you can agree upon why things need to change (the marketplace has changed, more than one person needs to use this kitchen, there’s been a merger) you will not get people on your side.
• Propose a new mental model
  • How will this effect people in their work?
  • What specific behaviors will have to change? Why?
• Talk about people’s fears and uncertainties
  • Create a safe environment to discuss fear and uncertainty
  • Allow people to vent
• Experiment and play with new behaviors
  • Make the learning playful but serious (experiential learning)
  • Engage people in finding resolutions to the change
  • Disrupt existing behaviors – have learners reflect on why they did what they did
• Make a plan to make it happen (action plan)
• Follow-up (metrics)

I realize these are large bullet points and the struggle is still “how”. It’s hard work to figure out where your learners are currently at and how to change. The specific context matters. Doing the research and analysis matters. Figuring out how to measure the impact of changing mental models matters — what’s the business outcome and how do you measure it?

If I were to ever spend a significant amount of time in my mother’s kitchen, I would start with a conversation that would go something like this: “if we’re going to work together in this space, mom, it would help to make some changes on where you keep things.” I would not, ever again, stomp in there and simply start changing things. She would rightly be furious and resistant.

Imagine the emotional impact on the learners.

Then take it one step at a time.

If you’re all alone in this it helps to brainstorm with friends and colleagues. FYI – I’m always willing to play.

Learning a complex new subject matter often takes extensive practice. Development of expertise requires many hours of practice. Malcolm Gladwell in his recent book Outliers emphasizes how it takes about 10,000 hours of practice to achieve mastery in a field. The research behind this claim comes  from studies done by John Hayes who found that geniuses in various fields produce their best work after 10 years of apprenticeship (which works out to about 10,000 hours); and by Ericsson, Krampe and Tesch-Romer (1993) which found that the best violinists practiced 7,000 hours before coming to a Berlin music academy, whereas the good violinists practiced only 5,000 hours. It takes about 3 years for London taxi drivers to acquire the “knowledge” of London in order to expertly navigate through the streets. It takes time to learn to learn the patterns, rules and problem-solving strategies for a domain of knowledge.

Deliberate practice – feedback

It is not any kind of practice that will help you become an expert – but deliberate practice. In this type of practice you are not just performing, but trying to learn how to do it better. Learners are usually highly motivated so when given feedback on their performance, and they carefully monitor their work to reduce differences and master the performance.

Julia with mallet - beware!

Part of deliberate practice is making mistakes and adjusting. I put this picture of Julia Child here as an inspiration. She is someone who learned to cook and become and expert in her field, through trial and error — doing it over and over again. And every meal was a test, and her diners without doubt gave her feedback. We should all be so fearless.

Test at regular intervals with feedback

Learners forget new information with time, very rapidly within the first day, and then less so over time. Testing learners has shown to help improve retention and recall. Therefore tests can be used not just for assessment, but as a study mechanism.

In studies by Landauer and Bjork (1978) they found that testing individuals  after a delay creates a sufficient level of difficulty that requires learners to work harder, thus improving their recall of an series of items. However, this was followed up Karpicke and Roediger (1979), who found that yes, creating a delay helped, but what helped more was giving people feedback after testing, therefore one could test at regular intervals, and provide feedback, and it would have the same effects.

It should be remembered that many of these experiments were done in the laboratory, on recall and retention of word pairs, so although likely useful in the “real world”, I have not seen field research verifying these experiments.

Practice, give feedback, test, give feedback and practice again. This guideline, like many of the others I have written about, should intuitively make sense. Perhaps in a context where compliance is an issue, the testing, practice, feedback cycle will be helpful (hopefully one can make it fun and not too onerous!) But being motivated, deliberate practice is the key to deep learning and expertise.

Upon reading the first chapter of this book I wanted to jump with joy — here was someone articulating my ideas about the kind of skills, mindsets and thinking that is needed in a newly competitive, flat world — where anything that can be digitized will be outsourced.

This new kind of thinking – what he calls “right-brain” thinking has six key aptitudes as described in the Introduction:

1. Design – “to create artistic and emotional beauty”
2. Story – “to craft a satisfying narrative”
3. Symphony – “to combine unrelated ideas into a novel invention” & “to detect patterns and opportunities”
4. Empathy – “ability to understand the subtleties of human interaction”
5. Play – “find joy in one’s self and elicit joy in others”
6. Meaning – “to stretch beyond the quotidian in pursuit of purpose and meaning”

Part of this book is focused on describing, defining and supporting each of these definitions. Half of each chapter on aptitudes is devoted to describing the skills to practice in order to become this kind of person – how to create a Portfolio to become more of a right-brain thinker.

What’s important to understand is that Pink does not advocate that we lose our analytical, left-brain thinking in order to become completely creative, right-brain thinkers — but rather we must be both and find an equilibrium between the two.

In the argument for right-brain thinking, there were a couple of  research/studies that I found of interest:

• (25) UCSF Professor Paul Ekman, famous for creating the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) – tested facial expressions all over the world, and these expressions were interpreted similarly by a majority of the people in a group, whether that was in New Guinea or amongst Bay Area college students.
• (52) students who study painting excel at noticing subtle details about a patients condition (from the Yale School of Medicine). So yes, a student has to know their medical stuff, but studying painting makes them better doctors.

What was also insightful was his description of design – that good design is a combination of utility and significance (76). The iPhone designers, of course, got this right. They realized that the cellphone had changed from being a logical device about speed and specialized functions, to being an emotional device — about being able to be expressive and customize, fanciful (81).

Stories help us make sense of the world — and in a world full of facts, what matters is putting these facts in context with emotional impact (101). A wonderful quote from this section is from Alan Kay (famous interface designer) – “scratch the surface in a typical boardroom and we’re all just caveman with briefcases, hungry for a wise person to tell us stories” (107).

Being able to blend concepts to put together two existing ideas non one else thought to create, being a systems thinker, a pattern recognizer is the essence of the symphony aptitude. Techniques to enhance this skill include keeping a metaphor log (what metaphors do you hear daily) or trying to create a 5-line self-portrait.

On the importance of Empathy I’ve written about before in this blog. Research of interest – one study of aphasics (those with damage to the left-side or analytical side of the brain) are exceptionally good lie-detectors, getting about 70% of the lies. In the Porfolio section, he directs us to a website to practice our EQ = empathy quotient.

When writing about Play and Meaning, Pink’s writing seems to become shallower as nothing he writes really grabbed me in these two sections other than we should play and have meaning in our lives. Perhaps I became tired of the writing, or perhaps I’d read too many book on play and meaningful work that nothing seemed new here.

My main criticism of the book is that it peters out toward the end. And the organization of the book breaks the narrative of the reading (he really is a good writer). The Portfolio or skill-building reference sections are disruptive to the reading. Overall though, I find this a good book, quick read and useful. The Portfolio sections contain many good techniques to jump start your creativity. For this alone, I think the book is worth reading. And without a doubt, what Pink gets right is that anything that can be outsourced cheaper and more efficiently will — what stays will be those who can be imaginative and unique  in the world.

Whether the world will reward the skill sets of creative wonks remains to be seen. I think we are still very much in transition from the Information Age of knowledge workers, to what he calls the Conceptual Age of creators and empathizers. All I can do is keep true to my path of trying to create works of beauty, empathy, utility and significance and hope that others are also moving in the same direction.

Second definitions of aptitudes (65-66):

1. Not just function but also DESIGN
2. Not just argument but also a STORY
3. Not just focus but also SYMPHONY
4. Not just logic but also EMPATHY
5. Not just seriousness but also PLAY
6. Not just accumulation but also MEANING

Happy Brains

Last night I uploaded a slidecast of Learning Design for the Brain – Multimedia Learning Principles.

This is a deck that I’ve been working on for some time — I created it back in August to better understand all those rather confusing and repetitive multimedia principles. It’s rather technical and academic in nature, but I’m hoping it will be useful, if only for the checklists at the end.

You can view the slidecast at my portfolio page or at SlideShare.net. Also available is a Checklist (PDF download) of  multimedia principles – this is helpful when designing.

Some notes  on creating slidecasts:

• if you’re doing this for the first time, use a short slide deck
• creating a separate audio file and synching online via the slidecast feature takes time! it’s a Flash-based system – very cool and easy to use but a little slow and painful for large files
• Slideshare does not export your animations – it flattens them. I realized this AFTER creating the audio. What a pain and workarounds to get that they way I imagined. Still not quite right.

So enjoy.

At it’s essence this article says a very simple thing — asking learners hard questions before engaging with the content, (i.e., by giving them a test) challenges learners to come up with an answer before they read the material or listen to a lecture, thereby improving recall of the material. That means not giving people the answer before they engage. That means expecting them to get it wrong, expecting them to fail.

Instructional designers often do the opposite. Give people the model or the answers, then test them. What if we were to test them first with hard questions? That would force people to think! To generate and hypothesize for themselves and begin to engage with the material. But that’s not what ID’s are suppose to do, right? It’s our material and instructional design that shows the way to enlightenment. How can learners be expected to know the answer before they see the material. They will probably get it wrong — and that’s ok. Getting it wrong helps people learn — people learn from their mistakes.

The author’s suggest the following study tactic:

Students might consider taking the questions in the back of the textbook chapter and try to answer them before reading the chapter. (If there are no questions, convert the section headings to questions. If the heading is Pavlovian Conditioning, ask yourself What is Pavlovian conditioning?). Then read the chapter and answer the questions while reading it. When the chapter is finished, go back to the questions and try answering them again. For any you miss, restudy that section of the chapter. Then wait a few days and try to answer the questions again (restudying when you need to). Keep this practice up on all the chapters you read before the exam and you will be have learned the material in a durable manner and be able to retrieve it long after you have left the course.

The technique they describe above is similar to the PQ4R (preview, question, read, reflect, recite, review) method for study materials – except they suggest: preview, question, test, then the 4R’s. The key difference being the test. It’s also similar to asking “why” questions to get people to engage with the material.

This research makes sense but elicits a bit of a “duh” response (“I needed research to tell me that?!?”).

What this research does not address is motivation and relevance  — people can go through the motions of taking a test, of asking “why” questions and still not really engage. Challenging test questions may get some students to engage, but is not panacea. It is a simply method that may work in certain circumstances — what would be really helpful to better understand those circumstances.

My takeaways:

• test before you teach to challenge learners
• use hard questions
• allow learners to get the wrong answers
• let them find the right answers
• test again

• Keep it simple
• Remove extraneous detail
• Pare the learning down to essential components
• Clearly explain how these components relate to one another
• Help learners focus on what’s important.

The capacity for the brain to hold new information is limited.

• By the capacity of working memory (sometimes called short-term memory)
• By the how complex the material is to the learner

So, when learning try to communicate new knowledge:

• no more then 2-4 elements at a given time (i.e. per slide)

Knitted Brain

Some background information and research in case you want to know:

• When introducing new knowledge, the constraints of working memory limit how much information can be processed in a given time frame. Miller, 1950′s discovered the rule of 7 — no more than 7 items could be kept active in short term memory.
• However, when you’re trying to understand something, relate components of an concept, compare and contrast, then you want no more than 2-4 elements in working memory. (Sweller’s cognitive load theory).
• Interference  can limit recall of information. Recall is worse the more facts you learn about a concept. Interference literally knocks the old information out of your brain when attaching new facts to a concept, if the facts have no intrinsic relationship to each other. It interferes when the memory one is trying to create. This is why extraneous information is often not advised. (Anderson, 2006).
• Fan effects – the more facts or links associated with a concept, the longer it will take to recall any one fact.
• Redundancy effects, as opposed to interference,  can help with recall. Especially when the pieces are linked appropriately.

• • Example of irrelevant facts that INTERFERE:
    • Locke was unhappy as a student at Westminster.
    • Locke felt fruits were unwholesome for children.
  • Example 2 of REDUNDANT facts that help in recall.
    • Mozart made a long journey from Munich to Paris.
    • Mozart was intrigued by musical developments coming out of Paris.
• People use redundant facts to infer the target concept.

For more information, read up on Sweller’s cognitive load theory, and Mayer’s theory of Multimedia Learning.

Example: Ways of framing a problem (from IDEO – The Art of Innovation book p.57):

• Spill-proof coffee cup lids - to narrow and assumes an answer
• Bicycle cup holders – too dry and product focused
• Helping bike commuters to drink coffee without spilling it or burning their tongues – GOOD framing – does not unduly limit the possible solutions

from christophniemann.com

The cognitive concept of functional fixedness is about how we develop a narrow view of the objects and tools in our environment. The classic example of functional fixedness is the “candle problem” used by Duncker in a 1945 experiment (see Wikipedia). We create a tool for a specific purpose and we cannot see other purposes for the tool. Or as Marshall McLuhan observes (borrowed from Christopher D. Sessums blog.):

We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us – Marshall McLuhan

So when we encourage people to think outside the box to solve a problem, be aware of how you describe the box, and how you position all the things inside of the box.

Boxing in people – a story: I once suggested to a senior executive that our company only promotes people with MBAs or PhDs. He quickly reframed the issue and asked “Do we only promote people with advanced degrees or is there something about people who seek advanced degrees that get them promoted?” He succinctly reframed the issue from one of having the right credentials to an individual’s innate abilities, shifting the problem space from organizational issues to individual issues. Therefore, in seeking solutions, an individual looks within themselves rather than to the organization as a whole. (For the record, the answer pissed me off because I felt the shift in problem space at the time, although I could not articulate it.) As result, if one could not get promoted, it was because you could not demonstrate the abilities required — such as reframing your skills. Therefore, one becomes pigeon-holed.

How you frame a problem, and how you frame yourself, matters. Be aware of the box.

I’m creating a series of Guidelines posts based on my reading of cognitive brain research — specifically taking about the underlying research and theories, so you can see how I extrapolated into a learning guidelines.

Help learners imagine a specific context

• The learning context matters – people remember things better when you create a learning context similar to the context where the knowledge or skills will be used.
  • For example, research into teaching divers terms taught the memorization of terms either on dry-land or underwater. Then, when learners were asked to recall the terms underwater, those who learned the terms underwater had significantly better recall of terms (Godden and Baddeley, 1975). Wet learning, wet recall performed better – imagine implications for diver training.
  • The flipside is that those who learned in wet environments performed much worse when recalling in dry environments (compared to dry learning/wet recall)
  • Others had inconclusive results when looking for context dependence.
  • However, further research suggested that learners did better when asked to imagine the context in which terms would be used. (Eich, 1985)
  • How well the learners encodes context depends on how much the learner is able to imagine and thus integrate the context with memories.
  • Simulations can be effective if they make it easier to imagine where the learning takes place.

Help learners create meaningful interpretations by asking why

• Understanding why one is learning a concept allows learners to create meaningful elaborations.
  • Answering why questions about the learning, the better the recall (Pressley, McDaniel, Turnure, Wood, & Ahmad, 1987).
  • The more a learner elaborates or embellishes on a concept when trying to remember an item, the better the recall.
  • The more a learner generates their own elaborations, the better.
  • However, sometimes it helps to create elaborations that constrain the material being learned (B.S. Stein & Bransford, 1979).
  • In general, the more a learners engages with an concept, defines or limits the concept in their memory, the better they will be able to remember it.

Next post – frameworks.