Clive on Learning

I’ve been having a play with this little tool from i3Logic. It acts as an Articulate plug-in, allowing customers, reviewers and subject-experts to make comments on Articulate projects that are in development or early stages of implementation. The comments are stored in a simple database on the server of your choice.

By allowing collaboration in testing, CommentCatcher does a good job of bridging the gap between desktop and online authoring tools. It doesn’t allow authors to share resources or work together on the actual development, but it’s a start.

You wouldn't hire an interior designer only to inform.them that you've already chosen all the colour schemes and furnishings; you wouldn't engage an accountant and then explain to them the way you wanted them to process your figures; you wouldn't employ a fitness trainer and then tell them what to include in your workout; you wouldn't buy a dog and then insist on doing all the barking.

So why, then, do we continue to encounter situations in which line managers tell the guys from l&d exactly what they want in terms of learning interventions, with the expectation that the they'll simply take those instructions and run. You'd like a 6-hour e-learning package to train customer service staff to sell over the telephone? A 2-day workshop to teach all aspects of a new company system to all employees, regardless of whether or not they will be using it? A one-hour podcast to teach manual handling skills? No problem. That's what we're here for, to meet your requirements.

Hang on a minute. This isn't an encounter between a professional and a client, it's simply order taking.

When asked to jump, a professional doesn't say "how high?". They say, "Let's talk about this a little, because jumping may not be the best solution in this situation." If this doesn't work and they are told in no uncertain terms that jumping is the only acceptable option, the professional has two choices: either they resign and get another job where their role as a professional is valued; or, because resigning is not such a good option right at the moment, they agree to go ahead, but only after having expressed quite clearly in writing that jumping is against their best advice.

Learning and development isn't common sense; it isn't intuitive. If it was then experts wouldn't lecture at novices for hours on end; they wouldn't insist on passing on everything they know, however relevant, however comprehensible. That's why we have l&d professionals, so they can explain, in terms that the lay person can clearly understand, how people acquire knowledge and develop skills, and how best to support this process. If they don't hear this advice, they will assume that the people in l&d are just the builders, not the architects; and, if no-one seems to be offering architectural services, they'll do it themselves.

I've heard far too many feeble excuses from l&d people about the reasons why their courses are so dull and unengaging. "Don't blame me", they say, "it's what the management wanted." OK, but you've taken the courses in order to obtain the qualifications that enable you to put those magic letters after your name. You've obtained professional status, with the associated salary and status. But, I'm sorry but that's not enough. To be a professional, you also have to behave like one.

Last night I saw Malcolm Gladwell speaking at the Brighton Dome. I’ve read The Tipping Point, and currently have Outliers on my pile of books to read, so I was keen to see how Gladwell shaped up as a speaker. I wasn’t disappointed. He spoke for one hour without visual aids and with no more than a cursory glimpse at his notes. He was the very epitome of calm, confidence and charm.

Apart from a lesson in public speaking, Gladwell also delivered a fascinating treatise on the fallibility of experts. Attempting to explain how so many brilliant minds in the banking industry managed to make such a complete mess of things, he drew on a number of historical, mainly military, examples, including Chancellorsville, Gallipoli and the recent Iraq war. He showed how expertise in one domain can lead experts to over-confidence, to the ‘delusion of control’ - the belief that their dominance extends to all domains.

As Gladwell said: “Incompetence annoys me. Over-confidence scares me.” Rather than building up our experts so they have an exaggerated view of their own abilities, perhaps we should be encouraging them to show a little humility.

Followers of this blog will know that I have been reviewing John Medina's book Brain Rules chapter by chapter over the past three months. This has proved a rewarding experience for me, as it has forced me to explore the implications for each of John's main recommendations with much more thoroughness than would have been the case if I was skipping through the book for my own benefit - it's a bit like John set me twelve homework assignments! As a result, I have built up quite a collection of my own conclusions that I believe I can apply usefully to workplace learning and, in particular, the online variety. In this posting I have attempted to summarise these conclusions. Remember that your conclusions might be quite different, so blame me, not John, if you disagree in any major way.

Rule 1: Exercise boosts brain power

We have a problem if we expect learners to thrive sitting down for hours at a time in a classroom. If you're stuck with this format, do your best by using energisers, the more physical the better. Perhaps it would also help if the coffee machine and the toilets were some distance away, maybe 5 miles! Schedule lots of breaks and encourage participants to take a walk. On residential courses, don't schedule evening work, instead encourage people to use the gyms and other facilities.

Rule 2: The human brain evolved too

The bottom line of this chapter is that relationships matter when attempting to teach human beings. When it comes to the classroom, we typically get who we get and have to lump it, which puts a considerable onus on those who select and train teachers to make sure they do a good job. To some extent the same applies if we learn collaboratively online - without good facilitation/moderation, there is a risk of relationships breaking down, perhaps because one person tends to dominate or behave aggressively.

Alternatively, avoid teachers altogether and concentrate on self-study; but beware because research shows that people treat computers, TV and new media like real people and places - if what they see or hear seems impolite or unfriendly, they turn off.

Rule 3: Every brain is wired differently

Keep class sizes small, so teachers/trainers stand a better chance of understanding and reacting to the differences inherent in every student. Hire teachers/trainers with proven empathetic ability.

We need to place a renewed emphasis on the development of adaptive, intelligent learning materials. For best results, combine adaptive teaching with adaptive software.

Rule 4: We don't pay attention to boring things

You'll achieve nothing if you haven't captured the attention of your audience. The best way to capture attention is with an emotionally-arousing experience of some sort - perhaps an anecdote, a surprising fact, a scenario, an activity - that is relevant to the point you will be making.

Even if you do manage to capture the audience's attention, you'll have lost it within 10 minutes if you don't stimulate a fresh emotional arousal. Start with an overview and provide regular progress updates. In each 10 minute block, concentrate on a single, very general key point.

Rule 5: Repeat to remember

The key point here is that information is remembered best when it is elaborate, meaningful and contextual.

If you want people to remember something, make sure they understand it. Teachers/trainers should make liberal use of relevant, real-world examples.

Retrieval works best when the environmental conditions at retrieval mimic the environmental conditions at encoding. If this is true, then the most effective environment in which to learn would be on-the-job.

Rule 6: Remember to repeat

Don't place too much faith in assessments delivered immediately after learning. Just because details are remembered at this point, doesn't mean they will be later.

Where possible, build on the learner's prior knowledge, rather than presenting new information in isolation.

Provide opportunities for reflection and/or discussion immediately following new learning.

Limit the amount of new information that you provide in one session.

Present important information repeatedly over time, elaborating on it as you do so.

Rule 7: Sleep well, think well

So, getting the right amount of sleep is critical to the brain's functioning, including learning; we differ in how much sleep we need and this varies at different times in our lives; we could all do with a nap in the afternoon. The implications? Ideally we'd allow time for a nap in the afternoon, although of course this won't happen except in Spain.  Perhaps all we can do is encourage learners to make sure they get enough sleep.

Rule 8: Stressed brains don't learn the same way

There's no real harm in a a learning intervention causing a little stress in learners, so long as this is very moderate and short-lived. A small degree of peer pressure would be a good example.

What we don't want is to stress our learners out. I reckon that a great many classroom events, particularly those that are highly interactive, stress out learners too much because the degree of peer pressure is too high - the learner may be terrified of embarrassing themselves. Lots of people tell me that role-play is their least favourite learning activity for that very reason. Synchronous learning events may also be stressful because they attempt to cover too much information too quickly and the learner simply cannot keep up.

E-learning materials may be stressful in other ways, perhaps because the learner can't figure out how to use them, maybe they get lost in a maze of menus, or worst of all the system records their progress incorrectly or loses their scores.

Rule 9: Stimulate more of the senses

Medina draws heavily on the work conducted by Richard Mayer on the link between multimedia and learning. At the most simple level, Mayer concluded that "students learn better from words and pictures than from words alone." I can't argue with this.

Where I am not convinced is that it pays to stimulate as many of the senses as possible, even when those senses are not relevant to the context in which the skill will be applied. The obvious example is the use by Accelerated Learning enthusiasts of stress balls, pot-pourri, Mozart and the like. Perhaps I'm biased because these senses are not normally stimulated by e-learning.

Rule 10: Vision trumps all other senses

Visual aids are not an optional extra, in many cases they will function as the substance of a presentation, lecture, webinar, handout or e-learning module.

It matters what pictures you use - different types of information require different types of visuals to convey meaning most clearly.

While more abstract information is harder to convey pictorially, it is worth the effort. However, better no picture than one that just fills a space and conveys an inappropriate meaning.

Rule 11: Male and female brains are different

I tend to agree with John's conclusion that "we could have environments where gender differences are both noted and celebrated, as opposed to ignored and marginalised." However, in my experience, gender differences are of relatively minor importance in adult learning.

Rule 12: We are powerful and natural explorers

When it comes to more formal learning interventions, we sometimes seem to conspire to minimise the possibilities for exploration and reflection - the dominant strategy continues to be structured instruction, regardless of the suitability to the requirement. Guided discovery is more engaging and more rewarding, particularly when the participants have plenty of experience to draw upon and share. Probably learners would like a balance between the two. They appreciate the opportunities to reflect and explore, particularly collaboratively, but they also quite like to be able to draw upon expert experience from time to time.

My postings on Brain rules #1, Brain rules #2, Brain rules #3, Brain rules #4, Brain rules #5, Brain rules #6, Brain rules #7, Brain rules #8, Brain rules #9, Brain rules #10, Brain rules #11, Brain Rules #12

The Brain Rules book

The Brain Rules website

Thanks to Jim Potts of the Defence Academy, who drew this cartoon while I was ranting about pop psychology learning theories at the British Institute of Learning and Development conference last Thursday:

Rule 12: We are powerful and natural explorers.

Now be honest. You didn't expect I'd see this through to the end, now did you? Well I'm glad I did, because rule 12 is such a good one. As usual, some extracts:

• "We are natural explorers, even if the habit sometimes stings us. The tendency is so strong, it is capable of turning us into lifelong learners."
• "Hypothesis testing is the way all babies gather information. Make a sensory observation, form a hypothesis about what is going on, design an experiment capable of testing the hypothesis, and then draw conclusions from the findings."
• "When we came down from the trees to the savannah ... our survival did not depend upon exposing ourselves to organised, pre-planned packets of information. It depended upon chaotic, reactive information-gathering experiences. That's why one of our best attributes is the ability to learn through a series of increasingly self-corrected ideas."
• "It is a scientific learning style we have explored literally for millions of years. It is not possible to outgrow it in the whisper-short seven to eight decades we have on the planet."
• "Some regions of the adult brain stay as malleable as a baby's brain, so we can grow new connections, strengthen existing connections, and even create new neurons, allowing us to be lifelong learners."
• "We must do a better job of encouraging lifelong curiousity, in our workplaces and especially in our schools."
• "Some people have tried to harness our natural exploratory tendencies by using problem-based or discovery-based models. These models have both strong advocates and strong detractors."
• "The greatest brain rule of all is the importance of curiousity."

Looking from the perspective of how we learn at work, it is quite clear that most of what we do learn is incidental rather than deliberate; we reflect on our experiences, or the experiences of others around us, and we draw conclusions that guide our future action. The employer, or their agents in the learning and development department, do not have to intervene to make this learning happen. On the other hand, they may choose to speed up the process a little, by providing the employee with new experiences (through projects, job rotation or job enrichment) or more structured opportunities for reflection (performance appraisals, project reviews, mentoring, action learning, etc.). Employees can also accelerate the experience themselves, not least by blogging!

When it comes to more formal learning interventions, we sometimes seem to conspire to minimise the possibilities for exploration and reflection - see my recent post Compliance or competence: you choose. The dominant strategy continues to be structured instruction, regardless of the suitability to the requirement. Which is not to say that instruction does not have its place, particularly when employees are novices and don't know what they don't know. After all, the process of exploration can be a dangerous one for the first-timer and also very frustrating. One of the benefits of teaching is surely that it bypasses a great deal of wasteful trial and error.

On the other hand, we also know that those things we learn for ourselves are more likely to be retained; and didn't Carl Rogers once say that nothing that can be taught is worth knowing? Guided discovery is more engaging and more rewarding, particularly when the participants have plenty of experience to draw upon and share. To be sure, discovery learning requires very different skills of the facilitator, who has to adopt many of the skills of the non-directive counsellor, asking questions and avoiding offering advice (which is particularly difficult if you're also a subject expert).

Probably learners would like a balance between the two. They appreciate the opportunities to reflect and explore, particularly collaboratively, but they also quite like to be able to draw upon expert experience from time to time. The problem is with the almost ideological stances of the two camps, which makes sensible compromise more difficult to achieve.

My postings on Brain rules #1, Brain rules #2, Brain rules #3, Brain rules #4, Brain rules #5, Brain rules #6, Brain rules #7, Brain rules #8, Brain rules #9, Brain rules #10, Brain rules #11

The Brain Rules book

The Brain Rules website

Rule 11: Male and female brains are different

In chapter 11 of Brain Rules, John Medina enters that domain that wise people usually find it safer to avoid - gender differences. I am no more comfortable with this issue than John and have no intention of leaving myself wide open to all sorts of unnecessary confrontation. So I'll just pass on some highlights:

• "Men's and women's brains are different structurally and biochemically - but we don't know if those differences have significance."
• Men and women do behave differently. "Given the influence of culture on behaviour, it is overly simplistic to invoke a purely biological explanation. And given the great influence of brain biology on behaviour, it is also simplistic to invoke a purely social explanation. The real answer to the nature-nurture question is 'we don't know'."
• "We could have environments where gender differences are both noted and celebrated, as opposed to ignored and marginalised. Had this been done earlier, we may might have more women in science and engineering now. We might have shattered the archetypal glass ceiling and saved companies a lot of money."

Right. Moving on ...

My postings on Brain rules #1, Brain rules #2, Brain rules #3, Brain rules #4, Brain rules #5, Brain rules #6, Brain rules #7, Brain rules #8, Brain rules #9, Brain rules #10, Brain rules #11, Brain Rules #12

The Brain Rules book

The Brain Rules website

Last week I did something I do very rarely. I completed an e-learning programme, as a student, not as an e-learning specialist running their eye over someone else's work. At least that was the situation at the time. A few days later, having had the chance to reflect on the experience, I can't resist making a few comments. I'm not going to tell you what the programme was or who it was made by. but I will say it was a compulsory piece of training, completion of which was required if I was to be able to go ahead with some work with a client. Contrary to much compliance training, the subject in this case was inherently interesting and gave an insight into the lives of people who work in much more demanding environments than south east England. All in all it was competently produced and lively in its presentation. At this point you're expecting a 'but' and I don't intend to disappoint.

There were some relatively minor annoyances:

• the on-screen text was mirrored by audio narration you couldn't turn off; as I could read much faster than it took to listen to the narration, the two were always out of synch and I had to resort to turning the sound down on the computer;
• there was no clear indication of what was really important to remember and what was nice to know;
• there was far more information than any human being could possibly hope to absorb; much of this would have been better presented as auxiliary reading materials;
• the assessment tested what was easy to assess rather than what was really important;
• the scoring of multi-answer questions was far too harsh - if you missed one option from a 'which of the following ...' question, you scored nothing.

My main concern is the effect that compulsion has on the learning process. In fact, it's clear to me now that compliance changes everything. Knowing that I had not only to complete this course but pass an assessment to demonstrate the fact, made all the difference to me. The content itself took a back seat, because I became fixated with picking out the key points that I thought would be tested, skipping through any material that I suspected was superfluous, and getting on to the assessment as fast as possible before the material had dissipated from my mind. I achieved this. True, I missed the 80% pass rate by 3% the first time, but I noted down the answers to the questions I got wrong and simply took it again. No problem second time. Job done. Material already largely forgotten. Move on.

Except this material was important - indeed it could easily have been life-saving - and it was fascinating. I would have enjoyed exploring it in detail and probably would have done if the end objective had been my competence (or at very least enhanced awareness) rather than simple compliance. It seems you can't effectively combine the two, at least not when compliance takes the leading role.

Today sees the launch of onlignment, a new blog focusing on the use of web conferencing and similar tools (from instant messaging to telepresence) for learning and business communications. I am joined in this venture by two well-respected colleagues, Phil Green and Barry Sampson, who share my belief that the move from face-to-face to online real-time communications is currently poorly supported with advice. knowledge sharing and training.

There's no doubt that, something like ten years after their initial launch, web conferencing and other synchronous communication tools are now enjoying a huge surge in popularity. In part this is due to the current economic climate and the constraints this is placing on business travel; it also reflects the increasing time pressure that we are all experiencing at work, making it harder to justify getting together face-to-face for routine meetings; yet another influence is our growing awareness of the damage that we do to the environment by unnecessary travel. New technologies help us respond to these pressures without sacrificing the benefits of real-time communication; and with the greater availability of broadband connectivity, we can accomplish these goals using rich media and engaging interactivity. Web conferencing’s time has come.

Communicating using web conferencing is not difficult, but does require some readjustment. While it bears many resemblances to face-to-face communication, there are some real obstacles to overcome, as well as exciting opportunities to be exploited. We’ve set up onlignment to help individuals and organisations manage the transition, build capability and take full advantage of the possibilities of real-time online communication.

The onlignment blog

June's Big Question on the Learning Circuits Blog asks a personal question: How much time do you spend and how do you find the time for reading blogs, twitter, social networks, etc.? What are you doing less of today than you were 3-5 years ago? Do you have less of a life with all these new things?

First of all, I do realise that you probably have no interest at all in how I spend my time. On the other hand, in the context of a whole load of people responding to the question, some patterns might emerge that affect us all. Who knows? Perhaps we're all too different.

I'm a consultant, so there is no regular pattern to my day. If I'm running a workshop, attending a conference or meeting a client, then each day is unqiue. When I'm working at home, however, which tends to be for 2-3 days a week, then there are some routines. First of all, in the absence of an unusual emergency, I don't work long hours: I start around 9 and finish around 6.30, with roughly 45 minutes for lunch. I take time off for going to the gym, taking a walk, etc. at least twice a week. I don't work longer because I don't want to and I don't have to.

So how do I fit in all these web 2.0 activities, none of which were even remotely on the horizon for me five years ago? Let's start with blogging. Well, as far as I'm concerned this is an integral part of my work, not an optional extra. I've established a routine of posting at least twice a week and of writing fairly long pieces, say 300-500 words. This could be regarded as a treadmill that I've created entirely for myself and that I could get off any time; but I quite like this treadmill and have no intention of getting off just yet. Blogging is a very sensible way of passing the time for consultants, particularly if you enjoy writing, which I do; it gets your name around and helps you to build a network of contacts. Most importantly, it encourages exploration, inquisitiveness and reflection, all key ingredients in professional development. A one hour train journey is about right for me to make a posting, so we're talking two hours a week. Not such a big commitment.

Facebook and Twitter are much less important for me professionally, but are part of my overall commitment to engaging with my network. I really value my Facebook and Twitter friends, even though there are many of them I have never met. I just know we would get on great if we were to meet. As someone who works largely alone, having an active network is vital; if I was working in an office with hundreds of others, it may be less so. But, unlike many people, I don't commit much time to social networking. When Twitter enters my consciousness (and Twitteromg isn't an automatic behaviour as yet) then I'll rattle off tweets whenever I come across an interesting resource, have a question to ask, or I'm doing something a little different. I spend nowhere near enough time reading the tweets of those I'm following, even though this can be extremely valuable. I must do better. Total Twitter time per week perhaps 30 minutes. All my tweets are redirected to Facebook, so the latter tends to get only scant attention, perhaps 15 minutes a week.

Keeping these activities under control is important. There are several skills that I've developed to help me out:

• skimming headings/messages extremely quickly to locate material that's of any relevance to what I'm doing;
• only posting / tweeting when I have a clearly formulated thought that is likely to be of value to my network;
• writing clearly but quickly.

I'll be fascinated to see how my behaviour compares, particularly with others in similar roles. If you get the chance, make your own contribution to the Big Question, and we can up the sample rate.

Rule 10: Vision trumps all other senses

In chapter 10 of Brain Rules, John Medina makes the simple but nevertheless powerful point that pictures are worth a thousand words. Some extracts:

• "We do not see with our eyes. We see with our brains. We actually experience our visual environment as a fully analysed opinion about what the brain thinks is out there."
• "If you think the brain has to devote to vision a lot of its precious thinking resources, you are right on the money. It takes up about half of everything you do, in fact."
• "Most of us can hold about four objects at a time in our visual short-term memory buffer, so it's a pretty small space. These limitations make it all the more remarkable that vision is probably the best single tool we have for learning anything."
• "The more visual the input becomes, the more likely it is to be recognised - or recalled. The phenomenon is so pervasive, it has been given its own name: the pictorial superiority effect, or PSE."
• "Text and oral presentations are not only less efficient than pictures for retaining certain types of information, they are way less efficient."
• "We pay lots of attention to colour. We pay lots of attention to orientation. We pay lots of attention to size. And we pay special attention if the object is in motion."
• "Simple, two-dimensional pictures are quite adequate. Studies show that if the drawings are too complex or lifelike, they can distract from the transfer of information."

John also recommends that teachers burn their current PowerPoint presentations (not a good idea, because its digital and your computer won't like it) and make new ones (presumably with more pictures, less text).

So, what do I take from all this?

• Firstly, that it is clearly nonsense to suggest that only some of the human race are visual learners, while others favour other senses. Everybody who is able to see, wants to see.
• Visual aids are not an optional extra, in many cases they will function as the substance of a presentation, lecture, webinar, handout or e-learning module.
• It matters what pictures you use - different types of information require different types of visuals to convey meaning most clearly.
• While more abstract information is harder to convey pictorially, it is worth the effort. However, better no picture than one that just fills a space and conveys an inappropriate meaning.

My postings on Brain rules #1, Brain rules #2, Brain rules #3, Brain rules #4, Brain rules #5, Brain rules #6, Brain rules #7, Brain rules #8, Brain rules #9, Brain rules #10, Brain rules #11, Brain Rules #12

The Brain Rules book

The Brain Rules website

In an anonymous reply to my posting yesterday on the pirating of PC software, an elearning developer asked "How do real people actually afford/justify purchasing something like the Adobe eLearning Suite?" He'd tried open source and free software but had to admit that, as far as e-learning development software was concerned, "Adobe is still king and will remain so for our foreseeable future." Adobe do make low-cost software of course, for the consumer market, and only a chronic misery guts would complain at the functionality you gained for under $100 from a product such as Photoshop Elements or Premiere Elements. But Adobe made its name primarily through the sale of professional tools to design professionals, and these products still form the basis of the Adobe catalogue. For me, the issue is not whether these products are over-priced (because, after all, there are limited numbers of design professionals in the world, and the products are finished to a very high standard), but rather how much you can really justify investing in what are essentially the tools of your trade. Before answering that I've decided to take a look at what you get for your money with the new Adobe eLearning Suite (ELS).

First off, however Adobe try to position the ELS, this is not a rapid e-learning toolkit for occasional users. True, both Captivate and Presenter are excellent rapid tools, but you won't necessarily need both, so you might as well buy them individually. The ELS is first and foremost a professional toolkit, for those whose career is centred firmly on e-learning development. That is not a complaint, because we need these tools, but you're not going to get a long way without investing a serious amount of time investigating and playing with the options. The ELS comes into its own when you you exploit the connections between the various components:

• creating multi-layered images in Photoshop and importing these as animations into Captivate;
• creating interactive widgets in Flash for import into Captivate;
• editing Captivate or Flash sound files in Soundbooth;
• using Device Central to configure Flash or Captivate projects for mobile devices;
• importing from PowerPoint into Presenter or Captivate;
• using the SCORM packager to combine Captivate, Flash and Presenter output within a single course.

Quite clearly, Captivate is now the centrepiece of Adobe's e-learning authoring efforts. No longer can Captivate be categorised as a simple, rapid screen capture tool for IT training, which can be forced, struggling into delivering other forms of content. While it does carry out its IT tasks much more elegantly and flexibly than ever before, the tool is now truly multi-purpose and high-end (particularly given its integration with Flash, Photoshop and Soundbooth). Yes, you can carry out simple IT demos or import and extend a PowerPoint presentation, but you can also build engaging scenarios or enrich an otherwise flat course with Flash animations and custom-programmed interactions.

The ELS does not have to centre on Captivate, of course: for maximum power and flexibility, you could develop primarily in Flash (importing movies from Captivate if required); for much simpler content, you could work primarily in PowerPoint and Presenter; for content that simply cannot use Flash, you could centre on DreamWeaver, with the CourseBuilder extensions.

So, is Adobe's ELS worth $1799? If you were a casual developer I'd say not. As a specialist professional who wanted the ultimate in flexibility and sophistication, then I'd have to heartily recommend it. If you take into account the cost of your computer, you're probably spending $3K-$4K all in - nothing to what you'd need to set up as a plumber or electrician. Of course your speciality may be working in virtual worlds, in which case you'd be better off with Caspian's Thinking Worlds tool and perhaps a 3D modeller such as 3D Studio Max. Of course you could always sell your car and buy both!

The following brief article appeared last week in the Economist:

"The share of software on personal computers that is pirated rose to 41% last year, according to a report by the Business Software Alliance, a trade group, and ICD, a market-research firm. A further 44% is paid for. The rest is free or open-source. Piracy rates are falling in half of all countries and stable in another third. But in countries where sales of PCs are growing fastest, the piracy rate is high. The worst offender is Georgia, where 95% of all software is unlicensed. The rate is lowest in America but even there, as much as a fifth of software is pirated. In rich western Europe, around a third of all software is unlicensed. In the big emerging markets, such as China, India and Russia, software piracy has dropped sharply in recent years."

It's getting harder and harder for consumers to reckon the value of software. As the statistics show, around 20% is free or open source (a figure which is bound to be rising) and yet not noticeably inferior in quality. Only those in specialist occupations can really justify the price attached to the fantastic levels of functionality available in purchased software. In the e-learning world, that means a select group of professional graphic designers, authors, software engineers and toy lovers, while the rest can do very nicely with the free tools. Trouble is, not all these professionals are flush with cash and a good number are adapt at hacking their way round the elaborate activation routines that come with modern software. The result of all this piracy is, of course, that the rest of us - and that includes me - pay a premium price. As it stands, I believe I just about get value for the high-price specialist software that I purchase, but the argument is getting less convincing every year.

Rule 9: Stimulate more of the senses

My review of John Medina's book continues with this exploration of the power of multi-sensory learning experiences:

• "By the time we came out of the trees, our ancestors were encountering a multisensory world and were already champions at experiencing it."
• "You might hypothesise that our learning abilities are increasingly optimised the more multisensory the environment becomes."
• "Extra information given at the moment of learning makes learning better ... Multisensory experiences are, of course, more elaborate."
• "When touch is combined with visual information, recognition learning leaps forward by almost 30% compared with touch alone." Hardly surprising, however: "These improvements are greater than what you'd predict by simply adding up the unisensory data."
• "There is no question that multiple cues, dished up via different senses, enhance learning. They speed up responses, increase accuracy, improve stimulation detection, and enrich encoding at the moment of detection."

Medina draws heavily on the work conducted by Richard Mayer on the link between multimedia and learning. At the most simple level, Mayer concluded that "students learn better from words and pictures than from words alone." For a fuller summary of Mayer's findings, see my review of e-Learning and the Science of Instruction.

Medina cites an experiment in which a group of people is shown into a room that is scented. They are given a few minutes in which to try and memorise as many of the objects in the room as possible. The group is then separated equally into two rooms and each person is asked to write down the names of those objects they can remember. One of the rooms is scented in the same way as the room in which the objects were originally encountered. The people in the scented room remembered significantly more of the objects. Interestingly, I saw this experiment replicated with the same effect on BBC prime time TV. The presence of the same scent definitely improved recall.

I'm interested in the extent to which Medina's ideas back up the claim of the accelerated learning brigade. One of the major recommendations of accelerated learning is that teachers create a multi-sensory environment for learning - that's why you'll increasingly see stress balls, posters, pot-pourri and Mozart in the classroom. It's a while since I explored accelerated learning, and I must confess to being a little worried that it's just another new age training fad based on pop psychology, but I can't argue that it echoes much of what Medina is saying. Personally I can see how it helps to learn in the same multi-sensory context in which you will be using the knowledge or skills subsequently, i.e. from a workplace learning perspective, with as many of the same sights, sounds, smells and tactile experiences as you would find in the real job. This clearly shows up a limitation of e-learning (and classrooms in many cases) for teaching those skills that have a sensory context which extends beyond the auditory and visual.

Where I am not convinced is that it pays to stimulate as many of the senses as possible, even when those senses are not relevant to the context in which the skill will be applied, e.g. with the aid of stress balls, pot-pourri and Mozart. Perhaps I'm biased because these senses are not normally stimulated by e-learning, although I suppose there's nothing to stop us supplying a pack of multisensory toys to all our e-learners ...

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This week I was lucky enough to present at the World Summit on the Information Society, hosted by the ITU, a UN agency, in Geneva. At the very last minute I was drafted into a panel discussion on 'ICT applications for a better life,' with a focus on the impact of mobile devices on many aspects of our lives, including learning. All very good, but I didn't know I'd have to make a short presentation on the subject. I don't consider myself an expert on m-learning, but I managed to improvise a few words. Here's roughly was I said:

Up until now, m-learning hasn't really happened. I wrote an article on the subject called M is for Maybe back in 2003 and this has proved to be a realistic perspective. There may be 4 billion mobile devices out there, with more than 60% of these in developing countries, but simple voice communication devices, supplemented by SMS messaging and operating at 2G bandwidth, never looked like making a major impact on learning (although their impact in other fields has been enormous). But technology has moved on apace, as it has a habit of doing, and it's now fair to say that the outlook for m-learning is much more promising. Smart phones are, of course, small computers and, in many cases, they can take advantage of broadband connection using 3G networks. This doesn't mean they take over the role of desktop and laptop computers; after all, you might watch a video on a mobile device, but you wouldn't edit it that way; similarly, you might view a budget forecast on a smart phone, but you'd use your PC to create the budget. Some activities require large screens and substantial processing power; learning (unless of course you're engaging in a 3D sim) is, by and large, not one of those.

So, given the increasing proliferation of high-power smart phones and mobile broadband, what's to stop the advance of m-learning? Partly, it's the determination by learning and development professionals to stick to the traditional delivery of highly-structured, formal learning in substantial quantities. It has taken 20 years to convince l&d pros that formal learning can be delivered successfully online rather than always f2f; there's another major cultural change required if they are to adopt a less formal approach to the use of online media, which is where mobile devices are likely to excel. Few users are going to use a mobile device to work on a lengthy, formal self-study course; but they are likely to use it view videos or slide shows, listen to podcasts, read very short articles, contribute to collaborative learning activities, ask and respond to questions, and generally to engage with their network. This is where e-learning is going, full stop. Mobile devices impose few limitations on this approach, so perhaps m-learning's time has come.

'How important is talent management when the going gets tough?' is the question in the Clare McCartney's article for the CIPD, Talent Management Under Threat in Uncertain Times. Now I haven't really been following the emergence of talent management as an approach, but I can't help but think the question should be revised to read 'How important is talent management?' Full stop.

It seems to me that talent management was born in a seller's market, when there were skill shortages and businesses may have been worried about losing their best employees. It is as plain as night follows day that we are now in a prolonged buyer's market, with high levels of unemployment and even the best employees keeping their heads down to ensure they stay in a job. So, my answer to Clare's original question is 'not very much.' Whether talent management has relevance in boom times is also open to some debate.

First of all, the name is contentious. 'Talent' is not really an appropriate word to use to describe business skills, because it is loaded with very unbusinesslike meaning, with obvious associations with artists, musicians and sports stars. And it is doubtful whether really exceptionally talented people would ever, in the long run, work for the sort of organisations who would indulge in anything called talent management, unless it was at the very top. Most large organisations don't really want 'talent' anyway; they want highly enthusiastic and competent team players - not normally the attributes of the really gifted.

There are good reasons for managers and business professionals to talk-up the level of skills and qualifications that are required to do their jobs, because it forces up salaries and keeps out the 'riff-raff'. I know investment bankers, for example, believe their huge bonuses are justified by exceptional skills, but I simply don't buy it. Unfortunately a great many knowledge worker jobs are frustratingly easy and unchallenging, and could be performed by much less qualified people (not that that is an idea that you'd want to spread around).

And even those genuinely challenging jobs (and many in learning and development are in this category) could be undertaken by a large proportion of the population if they were given a chance, because raw talent is not in such short supply and, given time, new skills can obviously be acquired. Senior management never believe that middle managers are capable of stepping into their shoes, even though they themselves did this at some stage in their careers. Yet people adapt remarkably quickly to new challenges and soon take on the persona required by the new role. This is not playing down the ability of the current incumbents, it is playing up the potential of human beings.

Rule 8: Stressed brains don't learn the same way

In this chapter, John Medina turns his attention to stress and the way this affects the brain. I've picked out a few quotes which particularly struck me:

• Our stress responses were shaped to solve problems that lasted not for years, but for seconds. They were primarily designed to get our muscles moving us as quickly as possible, usually out of harm's way.
• When moderate amounts of stress hormones build up to large amounts, or when moderate amounts hang around too long, they become quite harmful.
• Not surprisingly, people who experience chronic stress are sick more often. A lot more often.
• If the stress is not too severe, the brain performs better. Its owner can solve problems more effectively and is more likely to retain information. If the stress is too severe, or too prolonged, however, stress begins to harm learning.
• One of the greatest predictors of performance in school turns out to be the emotional stability of the home.
• The perfect storm of occupational stress appears to be a combination of two malignant facts: a) a great deal is expected of you and b) you have no control over whether you will perform well. The biggest part of successful stress management involves getting control back into your life.

From my own perspective of work-based learning, I found myself reflecting on the following:

• There's no real harm in a a learning intervention causing a little stress in learners, so long as this is very moderate and short-lived. A small degree of peer pressure would be a good example.
• What we don't want is to stress our learners out. I reckon that a great many classroom events, particularly those that are highly interactive, stress out learners too much because the degree of peer pressure is too high - the learner may be terrified of embarrassing themselves. Lots of people tell me that role-play is their least favourite learning activity for that very reason. Synchronous learning events may also be stressful because they attempt to cover too much information too quickly and the learner simply cannot keep up.
• E-learning materials may be stressful in other ways, perhaps because the learner can't figure out how to use them, maybe they get lost in a maze of menus, or worst of all the system records their progress incorrectly or loses their scores.
• It's possible that a learner has less control over what happens and when in a formal, structured classroom course than in any other activity in their adult lives. Most courses are planned in detail and pay only lip service to individual learner requirements. If this is the case, and John Medina is right about the negative impact of a loss of control, then it certainly seems like a recipe for stress.
• And finally, don't expect too much of learners who are stressed out at home or in their work. Their mind is elsewhere.

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Rule 7: Sleep well, think well

In this chapter, John Medina makes some pretty straightforward claims: that getting the right amount of sleep is critical to the brain's functioning, including learning; that we differ in how much sleep we need and this varies at different times in our lives; that we could all do with a nap in the afternoon. A few quotes:

• When the brain is asleep, it is not resting at all.
• Sleep makes us exquisitely vulnerable to predators. There must be something terribly important we need to accomplish during sleep if we are to take such risks,
• So how much sleep does a person need? We don't know. Generalisations don't work. Differs with age, gender, whether pregnant or going through puberty. Whatever amount of sleep is right for you, when robbed of that, bad things really do happen to your brain.
• Some scientists think a long sleep at night and a short nap during the midday represent human sleep behaviour at its most natural.
• If you are a public speaker, you know it is darn near fatal to give a talk in the mid afternoon.
• Sleep loss cripples thinking, in just about every way you can measure thinking.

So where does that leave us as teachers and trainers? Ideally we'd allow time for a nap in the afternoon and we'd start school later when kids are going through puberty. Realistic? Probably not. What we can do is encourage learners to make sure they get enough sleep (no staying out late drinking when on a residential course!) and do the same ourselves. A little boring perhaps, but no-one's forcing you.

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I was lucky enough to sit in on Patrick Dunn's landmark presentation last week at the eLearning Network event on creating engaging content. Patrick is an award-winning designer of interactive materials who has devoted a great deal of time and effort to understanding just what it is that makes content engaging. He described four phases through which this thinking has evolved:

1. Methods and media (tactics)

In this first phase, Patrick believed that engagement was essentially a product of the tactics employed by the designer, in particular the media and the methods that they chose to use. Some media options (video, animation, audio?) may be more engaging, some less (text?). Some methods (storytelling, scenarios, games, sims?) may do a better job of grabbing and maintaining the user's attention than others (say simple page turning). We know a lot about the way media and methods can work together to support different subject matter; we know we need to create content that has relevance, elicits an emotional response, provokes action and stimulates the senses; we have the tools we need to create pretty well anything we want; so why don't we?

2. Learning strategies

Patrick next reflected on whether what was really needed to engage the learner was a big idea, a unifying principle, a strategy based on sound learning principles that could bring about the desired change. Patrick felt that if learners could not detect a strategy, a plan that made sense to them, they would soon feel they were wasting their time and lose interest. The presence of a sound learning strategy does not negate the importance of choosing the appropriate media and methods, but it certainly underpins these choices.

3. Design processes

Still puzzled as to why we weren't seeing more engaging e-learning content, Patrick looked at how design was carried out in other disciplines. What he found was not the typical e-learning process of defining the problem, outlining the solution, designing the detail, making and deploying, and then evaluating (if you're lucky). Great designers were not starting with a specification and moving to a prototype; they were doing the exact opposite - working with users to formulate and test ever more usable prototypes, and evolving a specification in the process. Perhaps the problem was to portray design as an engineering process. Successful designers create experiences, not content, because experiences are what makes learning happen.

4. Culture and personality

So let's suppose you establish a new user-centred design process, with the aim of creating effective learning experiences, based on sound learning strategies and using the most engaging media and methods. Will that do the job? Not necessarily, says Patrick, if the culture in which the design team operates is counter-productive: "Culture eats strategy for breakfast." If the values and beliefs of the organisation are not in tune with the new design process, then it will be hard to move in the right direction. According to Patrick, the most effective design organisations are 'adhocracies,' externally-focused and highly flexible.

Patrick has been conducting informal research into the personalities of instructional designers, using the Myers-Briggs inventory. He is finding that only a small proportion conform to the profile of successful designers in other disciplines - it's not that they're not talented, they're just not that ideally suited to design work. If Patrick's right, then we have to wonder whether we're attracting the right people into the profession, and whether we are providing a supportive culture in which they can thrive. Otherwise the best processes and tools in the world aren't going to make an awful lot of difference.

See my webcam interview with Patrick Dunn from last year.

Rule 6: Remember to repeat

This chapter of John Medina's book focuses on long-term memory and the processes required if learning is to be lasting. Here are a few highlights:

• Working memory has a limited capacity and a limited duration. If the information is not transformed into a more durable form, it will soon disappear.
• At relatively early periods post-learning (say minutes to hours to days), retrieval systems allow us to reproduce a fairly specific and detailed account of a given memory.
• The passage of time inexorably leads to a weakening of events and facts that were once specific and clear.
• The brain makes sense of its world by trying to connect new information to previously encountered information, which means that new information routinely results previously existing representations.
• The solution to creating reliable long-term memories is repetition, doled out in specific,timed intervals.
• Thinking or talking about an event immediately after it has occurred enhances memory for that event.
• Memory takes an almost ridiculous amount of time to settle into its permanent form, in the process of which it is maddeningly subject to amendment.
• The probability of confusion is increased when content is delivered in unstoppable, unrepeated waves.
• Deliberately expose yourself to the information if you want to retrieve it later. Deliberately re-expose yourself to the information more elaborately if you want the retrieval to be of high quality.
• Learning occurs best when new information is incorporated gradually into the memory store rather than jammed in all at once.

So, what does this mean in the context of workplace learning? Here's what I took out of this chapter:

• Don't place too much faith in assessments delivered immediately after learning. Just because details are remembered at this point, doesn't mean they will be later.
• Where possible, build on the learner's prior knowledge, rather than presenting new information in isolation.
• Provide opportunities for reflection and/or discussion immediately following new learning.
• Limit the amount of new information that you provide in one session.
• Present important information repeatedly over time, elaborating on it as you do so.

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