Clive on Learning

I need your help. I’m working on a book about architecture, but not in the conventional sense. I’m looking at learning architects, those who design environments for learning in the workplace. I want to interview a cross-section of pioneering learning architects from across the world to try and ascertain their vision for learning and development at work and how successful they have been in implementing this within their organisations. In particular I’m interested in those who understand the importance of different forms of learning (experiential, on demand, non-formal, formal) and have been able to integrate these as a coherent and well-balanced strategy.

Who do you know who is doing (or has done) a great job of heading up an l&d team and who would not mind sharing a little of their success? I’d love to know.

In the meantime, here’s a little more explanation of what I mean by a learning architect:

A learning architect designs environments for learning. Like the architect who designs buildings, the learning architect will be responding to a specific brief:

• What is the nature of the learning requirement? What knowledge, skills and attitudes is the employer (the client) wishing to engender in the employees working within the business, division or department in question? How will this learning contribute to effective performance?
• What jobs are carried out in the target area? How many people are doing these jobs? What are these people like in terms of their demographics, prior learning, ability to learn independently, their motivation and preferences?
• Under what constraints must this learning take place? How geographically dispersed is the population? How much time and money is available? What equipment and facilities can be deployed to support the learning?

The learning architect also has a professional responsibility to their client. This requires them to be fully conversant with current thinking in terms of learning methods, acquainted with the latest learning media and up-to-date with developments in the science of learning. As none of these is intuitive and obvious, the client cannot be expected to have this expertise. And for this reason, it is neither sufficient nor excusable for the learning architect to act as order taker.

The responsibility of the learning architect is to their client. As with the architect of buildings, other motives can come into play – the desire to experiment and innovate, loyalty to the latest fads and fashions, the glamour and glitz of the awards ceremonies – but should they be tempted, they risk failing to meet the requirement within the given constraints.

'Architect' might sound like a grand title for someone other than a head of learning and development or what the Americans like to call a Chief Learning Officer, but remember that architects of buildings tackle small jobs like extensions as well as office blocks and whole housing estates. They start off working with other architects and they gain experience over time.

You don’t become a learning architect by calling yourself one; you also have to behave like one. An architect of buildings does not carry the bricks or paint the walls, although they do keep a watchful eye on these activities in case their plans need to be revised or updated. They don’t have to supervise every activity, but they do need to watch the numbers, so they can react if budgets and timeframes are being exceeded.

The learning architect does not need to directly facilitate learning or be present in all those situations in which learning might be taking place. However, they must know whether or not the learning that is occurring is in line with their plans and their client’s requirements, and that all this is happening at an acceptable speed and cost. And because the only constant in the modern workplace is change, they must be agile enough to respond to shifting requirements, new pressures and emerging opportunities.

The BBC news website describes a new Ofcom report which surveyed 1138 adults in the UK to determine how they spend their time, in particular the media they consume. The findings are startling. The statistics suggest people in the UK spend seven hours a day – almost half their waking lives - "engaging in media and communications activities".

The article goes on:

“However, the average person actually squeezes in the equivalent of nearly nine hours of media and communications by multi-tasking on several devices. Television still dominates people's media habits, with the average person spending around 3.8 hours watching television every day.”

“However, it found that most people are able to cram in even more by multi-tasking. For example, the report found that adults aged between 16 and 24 appeared to consume the least, spending just six hours and 35 minutes a day on the phone, laptop, radio or television. But by multitasking - effectively using two or more devices at once - the survey found that young adults were able to squeeze the equivalent of nine hours 32 minutes worth of consumption into that time.”

Before getting carried away, it is important to realise that there are very real doubts about whether multitasking is actually possible. See my posts:

• A challenge to the multitask assumption
• The case against multitasking is building
• More multitasking madness

My guess is that what is really happening is that people are switching their attention between a background medium – TV, radio, music on their iPod – and something more vital and urgent like texting, reading new emails, using Twitter, playing a game or social networking. And it isn’t just young adults doing this – it would not be unusual to find me checking out information on my smart phone while my wide plays a game on the iPad, as we both watch a TV programme. When the programme gets interesting, our focus will switch, because you really can’t concentrate on two things at once.

The report came up with some other interesting data:

• Radio is holding its own - "It is still a very important medium for people."
• “Despite the growth in online TV services and devices that allow people to record television, most shows were watched via traditional live broadcasts.”
• “Internet take-up has now reached 73% in the UK, the majority of which is fixed broadband.”
• “The number of people using their phone to surf the web currently stands at 13.5m people. This has almost tripled since 2008, when the figure stood at 5.7m.”
• “Much of this increase had been driven by one site - Facebook - which accounts for 45% of all mobile web use in the UK, followed by Google at 8%.”

I could be accused of being a boring old fart by suggesting that people should get out more, perhaps taking the odd walk. They should still remember to take their smart phones with them, just in case – like me from time to time - they get lost and need to rely on GPS to get them home.

In an interview with MediaBistro, Seth Godin declares that he has given up on writing books. With 12 in the bag, he no longer thinks that the traditional publishing process is “worth the effort”.

“I like the people, but I can’t abide the long wait, the filters, the big push at launch, the nudging to get people to go to a store they don’t usually visit to buy something they don’t usually buy, to get them to pay for an idea in a form that’s hard to spread,” he says.

This is timely for me because, in the last quiet week before everybody gets back from holidays and chaos again resumes, I am desperately trying to finish off some of those longer-term development jobs that I’ve been putting off for months now. One of these is a book I’ve had on the go since 2007 entitled The new learning architect. Luckily the book is not technology-centric because otherwise I would have had to completely revise it several times over this period. The focus of the book is the overall architecture for learning across an organisation, something which does not have to move in internet time, as Jay Cross likes to call it.

Anyway, Seth’s comments are unsettling, because they bring back all the doubts I have about the sense of hard copy book publishing. I know there’s no money in it unless you’ve got a broad enough topic and a big enough angle to get you into the mainstream business book best seller lists. And that leaves you with the gamble that, having your book out there with a major publisher, will somehow reflect itself on your ability to make money from other activities. This is possible of course, but there are many other ways of getting your name around which require a lot less work.

So far, I’ve concentrated on producing short handbooks which can be distributed as e-books or given away in hard copy form as freebies. This has definitely worked in the sense that many thousands of downloads and give-aways have got my work in front of a wide international audience. But handbooks are one thing; books that require a fair degree of concentrated reading and deep reflection are quite another.

Here’s what I’m weighing up:

• Go the traditional route and hand over the whole project to the professionals. After all, my shelves are filled with their products and I owe a great deal to both the authors and the publishers for sharing their work in this way.
• Self-publish using an on-demand publisher such as Lulu. No prestige in this, but a bigger share of the proceeds. On the other hand, I have to do all the marketing and layout.
• Go the formal e-book route and aim at the Kindle, the iPad and the rest. I believe there’s a good chance that professional publishing will go this way, and I reckon these devices are up to the job.

What would you do?

I've had a number of discussions today about what really matters when it comes to the design of effective learning content. What has emerged, at least from my point of view, is a greater clarity about the considerations that drive decision making in both design and development.It seems there are three key factors all competing for attention, and that it's very difficult to concentrate on them all:

1. The first major consideration is the subject matter itself. How relevant is this to the target population? How timely is this information? Is it accurate, clear, concise?
2. The second consideration is the design for learning: What learning strategy should be employed? How can interactivity be used to support this strategy? How can the subject matter best be communicated using examples, stories, cases and demos?
3. The final consideration is the level at which to set the production values. How professionally should the content be presented? How novel and eye catching should it be? How rich is the media mix?

Clearly each of these is important to some degree. Which comes out top could depend on your role in the process. If you're a subject expert then obviously your focus is number 1. If you're selling design and development services, you may well differentiate yourself using number 3. If you're a learner (and rarely are you the one paying for any of this or ever consulted in any way) then your priority will undoubtedly be number 2. My guess is that most design and development teams focus on two of the considerations, at the expense of the other. Let's hope that the learner isn't the one to miss out.

In the past when I have heard groups express their dislike (if not complete hatred) of role plays, I have been sceptical that this opinion was in some way swayed by the bad experiences of the group in question - they had clearly in some past existence been badly bitten during or as a result of a role play exercise. However, I believe I have now heard the same opinion expressed by enough groups consistently enough for this to be regarded as a valid sample. So now it’s official – people hate role plays.

What’s particularly surprising is that (1) the population expressing the greatest dislike are themselves working in l&d and that (2) when asked how they would provide opportunities for practice, feedback provision and assessment of soft skills would typically come up with – you guessed it – role plays.

The purpose of a role play is to provide safe practice, typically of an interpersonal skill, such as interviewing or selling, in an off-job environment, almost always a classroom. By ‘safe’ we mean away from real interviewees or customers, so mistakes can be made without damaging real relationships. In practice, role plays are anything but safe, because participants are (or believe they might be) in danger of suffering the worst injury that can be inflicted on any adult, i.e. embarrassment in front of their peers.

Typically, role plays are acted out at a painfully slow pace in front of other course participants functioning as observers. For the brash and more confident amongst them, this is an opportunity to show off. For all others this constitutes a terror as great as they will experience without having to speak in public (which makes the role playing of speaking in public the most terrifying of all).

When you are determined not to make a fool of yourself, the last thing you do is experiment in a quest to learn from your mistakes; you stay strictly within the confines of your known abilities. For those who are beginners in acquiring the skill in question, even this is a problem, because they may well not yet have any abilities. If there was any doubt, the single skills practice (and there is usually only ever time for one) achieves only one thing: to confirm that this skill is harder than it looks and that you are a long way from acquiring it – you’ve moved from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence. In other words, you’re much worse off than when you came into the classroom.

I believe that learners would be more positive about role plays if they were able to have lots and lots of attempts and see some real progress. Unfortunately, much of the available classroom time is taken up with abstract theory (best covered, if at all, through self-directed learning) and watching other people do their role plays. Not a good use of time.

So how else can safe practice be achieved? One answer is a computer-based simulation – not easy to accomplish for soft skills without some pretty sophisticated software and even then limited in terms of realism and in what the computer can assess. Perhaps the best answer is one-to-one coaching; you practise with the coach and then, when you’re confident enough, you practise in real-world situations with the coach watching. This is expensive as an option, but may well be worth it because (1) the practice really is safe (no peers to be seen) and (2) you can practise as often as you need to. This coaching wouldn’t have to be conducted face-to-face; it could just as easily take place online using webcams.

Here ends my rant on role plays. Am I over-stating the case? Are there are other alternatives?

FastestTube is a browser extension that currently works with Chrome, Firefox and Safari (IE version on the way). It sits in YouTube and allows you to download any video in a number of formats:

This is a really useful facility. Previously I’ve used Voobys to perform this function but, by comparison, it’s a pretty untidy process. I like to have downloaded copies of my favourite videos so I can use them in presentations and workshops without needing to be online.

So which videos have I seen fit to download?

A vision of students today

Networked student (on connectivism)

Did you know?

Drive: the surprising truth about what motivates us

Learning styles don’t exist

Shift happens (the original)

Social media in the UK 2010

Social media revolution

Tech bubble

Web 2.0: The machine is using us

The process

We think

Understanding Learning: The Affective Context Model

I was recently given a copy of Andrew McAfee’s Enterprise 2.0 (Harvard Business Press, 2009) by Martin Baker from LM Matters. I sat down to skim read it on the train – the one hour trip from London to Brighton is usually enough. I was delighted when I opened the cover to find that the job had been done for me in the form of a five-page summary produced by getAbstract. The abstract included the key 'take-aways', a comprehensive summary of the key points and a spattering of quotes. It did the job really well.

I’m still glad to have the book,so I can explore particular topics in detail when I need to, perhaps for a particular project, but the abstract gave me a valuable overview - certainly enough to know whether the book would have been worth purchasing.

Anyway, I know what the key benefits are of employing ‘emergent social software platforms' within the firewall, how to counter the most common objections, and how to make a success of implementation. I could share these with you, but that would mean creating an abstract of the abstract, and I think that with a topic of this importance that would be one level of abstraction too far.

Today I sat down, just as I did ten years ago, to write a set of checklists and standards for digital learning content as applied to the workplace. While this was, for me at least, a worthwhile and rewarding experience, and will hopefully be of value when released sometime soon to content developers and purchasers of off-the-shelf content, the process was enormously complicated by the changes that have taken place in the scope and application of digital learning content.

Ten years ago, all we had, at least as far as workplace e-learning was concerned, was interactive tutorials, very closely resembling the computer-based training materials that we had previously experienced on CD-ROM and videodisc. But with the enormous advances in bandwidth, computer literacy, the use of social media, mobile devices and much more, what counts as learning content is so much more varied:

• What learning strategy is the content designed to support? Simple exposition? Instruction? Guided discovery? Exploration?
• Is the content really designed for learning at all? Is it actually just-in-time reference material?
• Is the content interactive or passive (as with podcasts, videos, manuals)?
• Does the content stand alone or is it designed to accompany other activities or resources?
• Is this formal content with high production values, or is it just 'good enough' and rapidly-produced?
• Is this content produced by experts and professionals on a top-down basis to meet specific learning objectives, or is it user-generated. designed by employees themselves to meet the ever-changing needs of their peers?
• Is the content designed for use on a desktop computer or laptop, or for a phone or tablet?

It's clear now that, before you can assess any content for its 'quality', you really do need to know what purpose it is designed to fulfil? After all, as the Japanese taught us, quality is best defined as 'fitness for purpose'.

Writing on Mashable, Jennifer Grove announces that you can Become the Master of Any Subject with a Suite of New iPhone Apps. Using the new series of quiz apps from KnowPro, the world of learning is at your fingertips. The strategy is simple:

"Each app tutors users by testing them with quiz questions. At the beginning of each randomized quiz, you can set how many questions you want to answer. Then, for each question, you’ll be presented with four possible answers. Get a question right and you’ll advance to the next question. Get a question wrong, and you’ll need to continue guessing until you get it right."

Einstein said that "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler." Unfortunately these apps are so simple they achieve nothing - entertainment perhaps, learning no. If you get a question wrong, you guess until you get it right. No attempt is made to remedy the lack of understanding that led you to choose the right option in the first place, so you end the quiz with only a superficial knowledge of the 'right answers'.

The trouble with apps is that every one sounds brilliant in the marketing blurb. Luckily, they are usually so cheap that you can afford to take a gamble - it cost me 59p to test out the marketing claims in this case. Also luckily, some apps are so brilliant that they change everything (to steal Apple's marketing blurb).

Anyway, I'm sucked in. I can't wait to create some apps of my own. For the iPhone and iPad that means programming in Objective C on a Mac. At this stage I believe I'm prepared to go that far. Hopefully I can come up with something better than multi-choice questions with no feedback.

This great little video from SimplyZesty, an agency specialising in Online PR and Social Media based in Dublin, contains some fascinating stats about social media usage in the UK. Check the website out because they have a free e-book too.

The secret of a good debate is to choose a motion controversial enough to attract along a sizeable audience, but with enough subtleties and ambiguities that top quality speakers can explore without resort to dogmatism or play acting. After last year’s clasically contentious “This house believes that the e-learning of today is essential for the important skills of tomorrow" (90 for, 144 against), it was always going to be hard for Epic, the organisers of The E-Learning Debate, to come up with something to grab the imagination as readily, particularly now that several hundred of us have been able to experience the novelty of a debate in the Oxford Union. So, how about this?

”This house believes that technology-based informal learning is more style than substance."

The E-Learning Debate 2010 will take place at 4pm on October 6th. A prestigious speaker list includes informal learning guru Jay Cross (speaking against), author and academic Dr Alison Rossett (speaking for) and, just announced, Professor William Dutton of the Oxford Internet Institute.

Some of the arguments are predictable:

• Most of what we learn is learned informally.
• Much of our work and social lives requires us to engage with technology.
• Therefore technology-based informal learning is very much of substance.
• On the other hand, informal and social learning is a fashionable topic.
• Yet it hardly appears on the radar of the average learning and development professional.
• Therefore it is all about style.

But it’s not as simple as that is it? Act fast if you want a place at the debate and a part in the outcome.

See my report on last year’s inaugural debate.

A recent posting on Mashable reports some interesting data from Resolve Market Research based on an online survey of potential purchasers and active users of iPads, smart phones, e-readers and portable video game devices in the USA. It provides some insights into the uses early adopters are finding for their iPads and the effect this is having on competitive devices:

The iPad was initially positioned as a device for reading, watching videos and web browsing. Only 28% of prospective purchasers said their main use would be playing games. However, having got hold of the iPad, 38% then said they no longer intended to buy a portable gaming device. True, even more (49%) said they would no longer be buying an e-book reader, but that was only to be expected. Owning an iPad had a much lower impact on people’s intentions to go on and buy a netbook (32%) or MP3 player (29%).

Surprising was that, for 37% of respondents, the iPad was their first Apple purchase. When you consider the ubiquity of the iPod and the number of iPhone and MacBook users out there, this is providing Apple with a host of new potential customers for their other products.

The early adopters of the iPad are young professionals, aged 22-45, which is hardly surprising. However, the group that’s following in their footsteps is not their kids but their parents, aged 45+. This gels with my own experience – the iPad gives you much of the functionality of a general purpose computer, but it doesn’t look or act like one. For many people it will be all they want.

It’s only fair to also say that 55% of prospective and actual users stated that they regarded the iPad as an expensive toy. In my view that’s not going to stop people buying them, and if the device continues to be used in more and more imaginative ways, it may well become as indispensable as all those other gadgets we now take for granted.

Recently I got an email from 'Sean, a fellow learning theory/tool fiend... I'm also a first year student at Harvard Medical School but I just launched my own tech-heavy learning project on the side. It's called Excel Everest (http://www.ExcelEverest.com), and it's a fully interactive "book" about Microsoft Excel, but written in an Excel file. It has 41 topics, 155 exercises, 339 buttons, and 87 embedded videos.'

There's a great introductory video on YouTube.

Well I tried it and it's a wonderful resource. Learning Excel within Excel is a great idea that works; you get to try out all sorts of fancy formulae and formatting right inside the tool - not by simulation but for real. Not only that, it's written in clear, friendly English with a heavy dose of humour. And did I mention that it's also challenging? Not patronisingly easy like so much IT training.

This would get my vote for a e-learning design award. If you're an IT trainer, get this and sit back while it does the job for you.

In his posting Depressing study of L&D, Donald Clark quotes research by Coleman and Parkes in Spring of this year, which involved interviews with 100 key decision-makers at major UK companies. Apparently this showed that:

• 70% see inadequate staff skills as a barrier to growth.
• 40% see a risk of employee skills being obsolete.
• 55% claim that l&d are failing to deliver necessary training.
• 46% doubt that l&d can deliver.
• Less than 18% agree that l&d is aligned with business

Now I haven't seen this research in any detail, so I don't know how objective these results really are. But let's suppose they're true and my instinct tells me that they probably are. I'd be inclined to point the finger of blame (not a nice thing to do but hey) at the key decision-makers themselves:

• What on earth are you doing tolerating such poor performance (at least as you perceive it)?

• Would you sit back and do nothing if other departments performed so poorly?

• What direction have you been giving to your l&d team?

• On what basis did you appoint your l&d manager?

• How much do you understand about the process of learning? If not very much, then what are you going to do about this?

The reality in my experience is that many major organisations do well in spite of themselves. Most departments have their fair share of hopeless cases and it's probable that l&d has exceeded its quota. But don't blame those on the shop floor, the trainers themselves, because they're simply doing what they're told and, to be fair, what has always been done. Most are extremely dedicated and hard-working. The majority do get results at the level of the individual learner, but probably not results that are strategically important.

If there is a problem, and this survey indicates that there probably is in more companies than is acceptable, then this is a problem of management. L&d requires strong and assertive leadership, like any other business function. And it needs to start by educating those above to understand the realities of adult learning in the workplace, not the business of processing employees through courses.

A recent article in The Economist, The evolving blogosphere, clarified for me how blogs have changed over the past five years and where they now sit amongst the panoply of social media applications. Not so long ago it was thought, almost assumed, that everyone would ultimately run their own blog - it was just a question of time before we all found something to say, gathered up the courage and started spouting off our opinions to those two billion or so internet users out there. It hasn't happened, and for several very good reasons:

1. Early adoption of blogs was dominated by simple status updates, published for the benefit of friends and family. This functionality is just as  popular now and even more widespread but has shifted almost entirely to social networking sites such as Facebook and microblogging sites like Twitter.
2. Those who wanted to express themselves in more depth on a topic soon discovered that (a) this was hard work requiring a fair amount of commitment, and that (b) you will be in competition for readers with many others around the world who may have more to say and more eloquent ways of saying it than you.

Blogging is a specialist form of journalism, typically but not always aimed at a niche audience, and usually a voluntary, unpaid additon to the day job. A blog is essentially a regular column, with the added advantage that it can generate responses and a degree of dialogue. That may not be all that blogging thought it could become but it's still a very valuable addition to our online existence.

It's fashionable to sneer at the idea that a particular technology is merely a solution looking desperately for a problem to justify its existence. But I'm not so sure that a rational process always has to start with a problem and move dispassionately to a solution - the process is more dynamic and interactive than that. At the eLearning Network's Showcase last week, I had time to reflect on a number of technologies that were under discussion - the iPad, interactive PDFs (if you haven't spotted these, then these are next generation Acrobat documents that can incorporate interactive multimedia elements) and good old Second Life. The advocates of each of these could be accused of hunting for problems to solve in the world of learning technologies. As I contemplated these three technologies, I scanned all those problems currently and historically faced by any of my colleagues and clients to see whether I could find an application. Essentially, I had a bunch of solutions and I was looking for problems.

You do not have to wait until you have a new problem to solve and then sift through each of the currently available technologies to find the most appropriate solution. What about all the current solutions you have in place? Would any of these new technologies do the job better? That's why it pays to take a keen interest in each new technology and to remain as open minded as possible. It doesn't matter that the technology is launched as a solution looking for problems. And vendors often seriously misjudge what the applications for their products will be - they need the collective wisdom of many thousands of customers to come up with ideas that really work. Of course, some solutions never find problems and they disappear from view. But don't be put off because applications aren't instantly obvious - it can take quite a while for the great ideas to come forward.

So, checking existing problems to see whether new solutions will fit is fine with me. But inventing or reshaping a problem to fit a fashionable solution, now that's another thing completely.

I finally got round to reading David Wilkins lengthy and emotive post A Defense of the LMS on his Social Enterprise Blog. What struck me was not his arguments for the continuing use of the learning management system in an increasingly social media age, but his apparent desperation to get this viewpoint taken seriously when it so obviously conflicts with the current fashionable viewpoint, i.e. that LMSs have had their day, largely because top down, formal learning is soon to be obsolete.

Where I sympathise with David is that popular opinion (by which I mean among commentators on l&d, not actual practitioners) is so black and white, so polarised: what's new and fashionable doesn't just build on current practice it completely invalidates it; everything we do currently is the work of misguided dummies who have their heads firmly planted in the sand.

So, we are supposed to believe that formal learning is always wrong and informal learning always right; similarly for face-to-face v online, top-down v bottom-up, discovery learning v structured instruction, training v performance support, passive v interactive content, 2D v 3D, static v animated and so on. Any practitioner who has to run a real-life l&d function for a large organisation would laugh at the suggestion that all learning should be driven by learners, informally, as and when needed. Not only would this not work in very many cases, it would break numerous laws.

I am of course a keen supporter of social media, informal learning et al, as is David Wilkins (as he pleads time and again in his posting). I'm keen to see the balance shift away from top-down, classroom-dominated, just-in-case learning interventions. But I use the word balance advisedly. The discriminating l&d strategist will realise that it all depends on the situation, as it always does. Absolute positions are fine if you don't have to act upon them or to suffer the consequences.

I suspect that many of us find it hard to concentrate when we really need to put in a sustained effort to prepare a report or a presentation, read a document, write a script, create or edit media assets, generate code or assemble an e-learning module - in fact, all the things that e-learning people do most of the time. These tasks require single-minded concentration, sometimes over many hours, even days. How unfortunate, then, that in those times when we are less busy, we choose to install a whole load of apps that focus almost entirely on interrupting us - email, Twitter, Facebook et al.

I was amused, therefore, to read in The Economist (Stay on target, June 10) that it is now possible to buy software to protect you from other bits of software:

"Some programs fill the whole screen to keep disturbing alerts hidden; others disable specific websites, such as Facebook, or even cut off internet access altogether. The idea is similar to parental-control programs that prevent children from accessing inappropriate content: but these are controls that grown-up users deliberately impose upon themselves."

Examples include Freedom, Isolator and Think. As an example, Freedom cuts off your internet access for the number of hours that you plan to keep focussed. Once set up, the only way of over-riding this constraint is to re-boot.

Without the benefit of this software (and I'm not sure I would have the courage to turn it on, any more than an alcoholic would voluntarily go on holiday to Saudi Arabia) then there is an alternative, at least for me. I've always found trains to be the perfect places to concentrate and get things done - that's where I'm writing this post and probably a good half of all those that came before. The reason is that you tend to get really patchy cell phone coverage on a train journey, so even if you're armed with a smart phone and a 3G dongle, you'll be lucky to get more than a few periods of decent signal. Rather than let this bother you, it's easier to shut out the rest of the world and get your head down.

The Big Question for July on the ASTD Learning Circuits Blog is “Does the discussion of ‘how the brain learns’ impact your elearning design?” To emphasise the extent of this discussion, Tony Karrer lists 32 blog postings, including two of mine:

Brain rules – where does that leave us?, June 22, 2009

The art of changing the brain, May 13, 2008

The answer in my case is a quite simple ‘yes’. I have gained a great deal of benefit from what I have read on this subject and I have made every effort to integrate this into any design work I have undertaken over the past couple of years. The answer for the design community as a whole should also be ‘yes’, because this stuff has relevant and practical application, but I rather suspect that a great many designers take little time to get themselves up-to-date in their own professional discipline and are still working on the basis of the old instructional design theories from the 1950s.

Neuroscience hasn’t caused a complete rewrite of learning psychology, because in many cases it has only confirmed existing good practice. What this new focus on objective and relatively unbiased research has done is to (1) help us to recognise the pop psychology for what it is and (2) to create a bridge between the opposing forces in learning and development (the behaviourist/cognitivists and the constructivists). That is progress enough.

I've been reading The Triumph of the Airheads and the Retreat from Commonsense by Australian Shelley Gare (Park Street Press, 2006) on and off for a while. Having finally completed it (or to be more precise skimmed it, reluctant as I am to admit this to the author given the nature of her thesis), I feel somehow hesitant to comment on it publicly, as almost any endorsement of the author's views risks me being branded as a reactionary who just doesn't get it. Nevertheless I have to admit that this extended rant is not only exhaustively researched but also wonderfully written, packed as it is with entertaining quotes and anecdotes. It is also, for a rationalist such as myself, terribly depressing. Have things really got this bad? Has society been so dumbed down that intelligent and critical reflection, analysis and debate is now almost completely irrelevant, as focus shifts to celebrity worship, sensationalism, self-obsession and the relentless pursuit of maximum fame and fortune for the minimum effort?

At the root of this decline, according to the author, are some well-meaning but ultimately destructive modern perspectives, not least economic rationalism (leave it to the market to sort out) and moral relativism (there's no such thing as right or wrong, just different opinions). And in our determination to ensure that no-one misses out on the joys of self-confidence and high self-esteem, is it possible we have created a new breed of self-infatuated monster which believes that all that matters is themselves? I am never wrong or at fault; should I fail for any reason, the only important question is "who to sue?" Hard work is something to be avoided if possible; what's important is an unshakable self-belief and a loud personality (a they ay, "empty vessels make the most noise"). After all, just look at all those celebs and investment bankers.

This is clearly not a time to be shy and retiring.

Of course, the l&d profession has plenty of its own examples of airheadedness (and the author devotes a whole chapter to education and almost as much space to the sins of HR). Take learning styles, the ultimate blame shifter:

"I can't be expected to cope with all this theory, I'm an activist."

"Don't ask me to read books, I'm a visual learner."

Of course, this is just a caricature and real life is never that black and white. The majority of people I know age two and above are charming, enthusiastic and intelligent, and we're still getting on as a society quite well overall, so we must be getting something right. Quite why it is then that I find myself agreeing with large chunks of Shelley Gare's proposition I'm not so sure.

Not that what I think is of any interest to an airhead.

Like, whatever.