Black Swans - Barriers to Effective Learning

Here's an article I wrote a few weeks back for Learning Technologies magazine which has just been published. It's a fairly long post but if you make it to the end I would welcome your comments.

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When unpredictable change becomes the only constant, learning on your own terms is an essential survival skill in these turbulent times, says Lars Hyland.

The unthinkable is happening. In just a matter of months, the financial upheaval in the US, UK and the rest of the world has shaken us to the core. What we once believed to be immovable - rock solid even - reveals itself in all its brittle fragility. It could be described as a financial "black swan" (a term coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book of the same name), a large impact, hard-to-predict and rare event beyond the realm of normal expectations. A black swan being a metaphor for something that could not exist or happen since all swans are believed to be white.

While this has a certain air of Douglas Adams' infamous "Infinite Improbability Drive" there is a growing sense that the seeming randomness of change around us is just the beginning of a fundamental reappraisal of the way we do things in many areas of modern life. That includes the way we learn, both in the workplace and within our education systems.

The rate of change really does feel like it is accelerating, which means just keeping up takes new levels of determination. Crucially, if efforts are not to become all consuming, we need new strategies and tools that help us to cope and prosper. Learning using traditional methods in this increasingly turbulent climate is rapidly losing its effectiveness and for that matter its audience. Embracing and harnessing new technology is simply essential. The good news is that while old institutional structures are crumbling around us, so too are the barriers to new ways of learning, sharing, interacting with our peers, colleagues, family and friends.

So what and where are these barriers? How are they changing? And what is its impact on learning in the workplace?

E-learning benefits finally understood

So with recession ringing in our ears, the traditional cut back in budgets does not appear to be brutally focused on training cost centres in contrast to days gone by. There is an emerging trend towards more effective, longer lasting investments in e-learning and performance support where the core benefits of a consistent and persistent learning experience can be offered to a large, dispersed group of people. Multimodal learning (or blended learning if you prefer) is much more common, where different mixes of media are used to create a more varied, engaging and impactful learning experience. E-learning is a core component now rather than a novel add-on.

Attention and persuasion critical to engagement

In an "always-on" environment there is a growing risk that we are becoming increasingly "time-poor" and beginning to suffer from an ever more fragmented attention span. This has its benefits and its distractions. Increasing numbers of people are happy to manage a continuous stream of SMS, emails and voice calls that challenge the effectiveness of the traditional "course" format. So rather than persevere with models that are at odds with the way we actually cognitively assimilate and consolidate new knowledge and skills, we can now provide instant and contextualised access to learning support at the point of need, wherever that may be. Where individuals take more responsibility for their learning and development, they will vote with their feet - and rightly so - if they feel their time is being wasted. Communications are critical in persuading learners to spend their valuable time and attention on a learning experience.

The Invisible LMS

While bespoke e-learning development is on the ascent, there are still many organisations offering employees libraries of blandly designed content on systems that make it difficult to find and use. The eLearningGuild in the US commented in its LMS 360 Report 2008 that learning management systems score some of the lowest satisfaction scores they've seen in any research report. As the emphasis rightly moves towards the learning experience, the supporting platforms must become transparent - if not invisible - and present no unnecessary steps or hindrance to engaging with content, tools or people.
For more than a year, Brightwave has helped stimulate the trend amongst its clients for the provision of a learning platform that puts usability and accessibility at the forefront. This signals a move towards targeted learning portals in the workplace that can present learning content in a focused, context-sensitive manner.

Universal broadband access

Everyone in the European Union could have, by right, broadband access by 2010. The European Commission's Universal Service Obligations (USO) demand that all citizens who want them should be able to get access to basic telephone services including a fixed line of sufficient quality to "permit functional internet access". "High-speed internet is the passport to the Information Society and an essential condition for economic growth," says Viviane Reding, EU Telecoms Commissioner. But what about the other 3 billion people who have no viable access to the internet? Google, together with John Malone, the cable television magnate, and HSBC, have set up O3b Networks to put up 16 low orbit satellites connecting mobile masts to fast broadband networks, and in the process bring the cost down by 95 per cent. If these are operational in 2010 as planned, then it marks a huge step forward in ubiquitous access and for driving the use of the internet for learning and knowledge in the parts of the world with the most to gain.

In the workplace, we are already seeing the liberating effects of broadband access encouraging rapidly increasing levels of teleworking (admittedly after a slow start). According to the CBI, 46 per cent of UK businesses now offer teleworking to help with working-hours flexibility, reducing carbon footprint, downsizing pressure on corporate workspaces while at the same time increasing productivity. With more distance working comes distance learning. E-learning support and online collaboration tools are essential for workers to engage with colleagues and teams often distributed globally.

Mobile internet access gets usable

The advent of Apple's iPhone and now Google's Android mobile platform is transforming the experience of using communications devices on the move. Innovations such as an intuitive touch-based interface, large, clear screens and powerful support for a wide range of applications is bringing mobile internet use to life. Soon after its launch, O2 revealed over 60 per cent of their iPhone customers were sending and receiving more than 25 MB of data per month compared to just 1.8 per cent of their other contract customers. While mobile internet access used to be the preserve of those with a natural interest in technology, this has now changed. Most of us are pretty ambivalent about the technology we use - we just want it to work. The iPhone is a great example of technology that removes most of the former barriers through careful attention to ease of use. Google's new Android platform, while perhaps lacking the glamour of Apple, could further open up the potential of mobile services that are intuitive, fast and productive.

There have been many of us in the e-learning industry - myself included - who have been tolling the bell for mobile learning over the past five years but it appears that we are at last trudging out of what Gartner's Hype Cycle terms the Trough of Disillusionment (remember WAP?) and sliding onto the Slope of Enlightenment. With a more powerful, easy to use, standardised and open platform, the opportunities for learning on the move will grow rapidly.

Games become learning simulations

Games are firmly out of the teenagers' bedroom and are a natural part of developing experience in areas of personal and professional interest. Whether it is rearing virtual pets, performing virtual surgery or playing in a virtual rock band, whatever your interest there is almost certainly going to be an increasingly accurate simulation available for you to develop and practice your skills. Aviation led the way with flight simulators that once were £millions. Now they can be bought for little more than three thousand pounds (including cockpit controls and multiple monitors for a full 180 degree view).

More and more professions and job roles can and should be simulated. You wouldn't want to board a plane without knowing that the pilot has been through thousands of hours of practice, even though much of it on a simulator. This will dramatically accelerate the induction training period, which can often take several months before trainees become fully productive.

Mitra's self organising theories state that when learners feel empowered and self motivated, the difference in learning outcomes can be dramatic. What does this mean for the workplace? Well, similar young people are already entering the workforce and are demanding a more interactive learning experience. What works for them is an immersive, simulative solution that provides a safe, yet meaningful place to practice - and share their experiences with others.

Social Networking means we can all be reached

The move towards simpler, integrated interfaces is one facet of the wider move to Web 2.0. Social networking (whether Facebook, Bebo, MySpace, Linkedin etc...) continues to explode in its popularity and develop in its application. Recent statistics from the European Commission state that just in the past year, the use of social networks has grown 35 per cent in Europe. Over half of the European online population visited social networking sites last year and the number of regular users is forecast to rise from today's 41.7 million to 107.4 million in the next four years. That's a significant growth pattern given that we barely understood the concept three years ago.

Sharing is at the heart of the learning process and being able to reach people with the answers, advice, knowledge, stories that you need, greatly accelerates the underlying learning curve of any individual. Social networking is now an accepted part of the landscape - and that includes organisations. According to the 2008 Cone Business in Social Media Study, 93% of Americans believe that a company should have a presence on social media sites and 85 percent believe that these companies should use these services to interact with consumers. Through sheer bottom up demand companies have to embrace these communities or face being sidelined in terms of their ability to successfully recruit and retain staff as well as their relationship with their customer base.

A new scientific base for learning

While all these technologies evolve and develop around us, our understanding of how our brains acquire, process, hold and use knowledge and skills is striding forward. The unravelling of the deeper mechanisms of the mind will inform new, more robust instructional practices and support methodologies than we have at present. The fields of neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and anthropology are yielding fascinating insights into how we make decisions, how we remember (and forget), how our brain chemistry alters the effectiveness of the learning process. Who would have thought that blueberries have a positive effect on memory recall? Or that a six minute nap can boost your learning skills? (See my blog http://larsislearning.blogspot.com/ for more on this theme).
Indeed, "smart drugs" are becoming more prevalent which clearly provide users with a cognitive edge. There are growing reports from the US that students are making full use of these drugs to gain an advantage at examination time. It is a trend also known as "cosmetic neurology," a term coined by Dr. Anjan Chatterjee, a neurologist at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Cognitive Neuroscience.

In Summary

In times of rapid and radical change it is more important than ever that we find and adopt learning strategies and technologies that will allow us to adapt. The barriers to effective learning that I have listed can just as easily be thought of as frontiers. There is much work to be done but attitudes are altering at a brisk pace now that we have all embraced technology so fundamentally into our lives. In many ways it is the corporate and governmental institutions which are proving to have the slowest response to adapting to a new learning landscape. In short, be prepared, our very own "black swan" is just around the corner.

Gaming Kids More Social, Not Less

It's SATs time in the UK for primary school kids and I'm sitting writing this post while Question Time is discussing the value of testing kids at the age of 11 in this way (my own daughter being one of them). The emphasis on testing in artificial environments that are abstracted from a real world context seems to create a lot of heated debate. The issue of stress and pressure placed on kids to perform appears to be of high concern.

At the same time, there is the usual fuss over the latest Grand Theft Auto release and how it legitimises violent and illegal behaviour (despite most people missing the level of irony and sophistication of interactive narrative the game employs).

So it's intriguing to read a research study from University of California, Davis that finds the following:

"There is a lot of hemming and hawing among educators about the introduction of technology in the early grades," said Cynthia Carter Ching, associate professor of education at the University of California, Davis. "But the worst-case scenarios just don't pan out. Technology can facilitate creativity and social awareness, even when we don't design the use of it to do so. And when we do design technology activities with these things in mind, the possibilities are endless."

In two recent studies of kindergarten and first-grade students, Ching observed that children find ways to transform their experiences with technology into fun, highly organized group activities. She also found that technology-based activities can be explicitly designed to foster social reflection and advanced planning among young children.

In their first study, Ching and Wang observed children who chose to play a computer game during their free time. Though only one child could play at a time, the children negotiated turns and gave each other advice about how to play the game."Though this is hardly the ideal setting for social interaction and higher-level thinking, the children exhibited a great deal of executive planning skills and complex social negotiations without any guidance or interference from adults," Ching said.

In the second study, children were given digital cameras and told to create digital photo journals. The students displayed creativity and engaged in complex planning at every stage of the assignment, from how they framed their shots to how they chose to organize them to tell a story, Ching found."This study shows that rather than technology being something that children merely use, it can be a creative tool for increased reflection on social networks, friendships, relationships with teachers and a sense of self within the world of school," Ching said.

These findings seem to sit well with Sugata Mitra, Professor of Educational Technology at Newcastle University's findings from his Hole in the Wall experiments (see my Learning as you like it article). By literally building a networked PC into a wall accessible in an outside space (very much like a cash machine here), and providing no direction or instruction he sat and waited to watch what would happen. One child learned to browse in 6 minutes and was teaching 70 other children by the end of the day. They interacted with content that was not even in their own language – they had to self-learn English to get to the content itself. In one experiment children managed to grasp basic concepts of biotechnology and the principles of DNA! All this occurred without a teacher or classroom.

So imagine a world where SATs were not old school exams that stress and, arguably, reveal little about actual learning, and instead were embodied in one big social, highly collaborative game environment that kids where naturally motivated to play as individuals and in teams. In the process they would demonstrate the learning and cognitive performance we are looking for. The metrics we could get from such an environment would help deliver personalised coaching and tuition for each child.

A misguided fantasy? Maybe - Tell me what you think. But whatever your view we can't ignore the positive impact that technology can make to self motivate learning at all ages and it has to challenge the fundamental ways in which we educate and train.

Ching's second study will be replayed by my daughter over the next two weeks who, having sat through her SATs, will be bounding around olive groves in Spain with a camcorder making the "TV channel with lots of cool programmes" that she's been itching to do for the past month - school got in the way of that creativity.

Transfer of Learning - missing in action?

After a short break skiing in the Swiss/French Alps (the break fortunately not involving any bones), I found myself thinking further about how much (most?) training activity across the planet fails to transfer into any lasting learning.

When I learned to ski some 20 odd years ago, I started out on a dry slope which, back then, was more like skiing on a thick, plastic carpet with the consistency of lumpy porridge. However, this "simulated" environment allowed me to practice basic techniques, such as when and where to shift weight from one leg to another, position of skis in relation to the line of the slope, controlling speed (although on the slope I learned on I'm sure the top speed achievable was no more than 10 km/hour!).

When I subsequently arrived at the Alpine resort and nervously snapped into my skis at the top of a real slope with real snow, I was delighted to find it was a far easier, smoother and exciting experience - from there I was hooked. The techniques I learned did manage to transfer and I dramatically improved from that point on. In this case then, an opportunity to practice, even if a pale imitation of the real environment, can lead to better performance standards reached in less time.

So what happens when the simulated environment starts to approximate the real time experience itself? Surely this will lead to an even faster way to acquire experience that can be directly applied?

Well, for years the aviation and defence industries have recognised the power of simulation in training how to use equipment (itself often worth $millions) in stressful, life and death situations. Big budgets were (and still are) available to spend on highly innovative technology and this continues to be the case. However this visualisation and real-time interaction is going mainstream now that gaming are firmly in our living rooms and pockets.

Here's a great (if un-scientific) example of how simulation can transfer to the real environment. Wired reported:

A North Carolina man who saw an SUV flip and roll on a highway last November was able to provide medical aid to the victims with skills he learned from the America's Army, say the videogame's makers. Paxton Galvanek pulled one of the passengers out of the smoking car, then found another bleeding heavily from his hand where his fingers had been lost during the crash.

"I used a towel as a dressing and asked the man to hold the towel on his wound and to raise his hand above his head to lessen the blood flow which allowed me to evaluate his other injuries which included a cut on his head," Galvanek said in a letter to the America's Army design team. Galvanek said he learned about controlling bleeding from playing section two of the "medic" class training in America's Army, a game developed by the Army as a recruitment tool.

"I have received no prior medical training and can honestly say that because of the training and presentations within America's Army, I was able to help and possibly save the injured men," Galvanek said.

Now many may say that the knowledge applied is basic common sense, however as this great comment on the article states:

You'd be surprised how little most people know about first aid. In the Army we say "common sense is not so common". The truth is any of the supposed "common sense" things need to be learned. Just to have an order of things to check for can save lives, because the brain goes back to the training when in panic, while your "common sense" (aka. cognitive thinking) c***s its pants. Just remember this mantra:

"Really Big Boobs Should Fit Both Hands" = "Responsiveness - Breathing - Bleeding - Shock - Fractures - Burns - Head injury".

Now that's memorable (though I doubt this would get past the HR discrimination policymakers - even in the armed forces these days)!

Repetitive practice and simulation is at the heart of effective training. But this seems to only be present where the consequences can mean the difference between life and death. Too often corporate training programmes render themselves impotent and totally ineffective by failing to consider the transfer process. We should not be surprised when staff behaviour does not change.

I'll be looking at techniques that promote the transfer of learning in more depth.