OLPC and the Future of Learning

The above is a video of TechTalk given by one of the brains behind the One Laptop Per Child project at Google. Although I'm far enough into the half-life of my university learnings to have a great deal of the geektalk in the presentation go over my head, I can appreciate/understand just enough to be thoroughly wowed. I also *really* liked the context that the speaker took the time to establish in the first 5 mins regarding how the root of the project is about Learning, not Technology.

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative has been lauded and ridiculed by various groups since its inception, but it seems to be plugging along towards becoming a reality (thanks to the help of some very bright and innovative people).



All I can say is "bravo!". It's truly inspiring to see an idea as big and (potentially) groundbreaking as this grow from concept to an implemented product before our very eyes in a very short (relatively speaking) period of time. I struggle to imagine an effort that has more potential for fundamental change and empowerment than what these guys have bitten off.



I remember being deeply inspired, many moons ago, the following Apple print ad:

It's embarrassing how quickly time gets away from you and how everyday life pushes youthful aspirations to the side. Does it need to be that way? I'm not THAT old (yet), so why not embrace the old "pick battles big enough to matter but small enough to win" adage and try to make a mark (beyond "I saved company's money")?

Last weekend I attended my 4th FIRST Championship event. It was amazing as usual.

Yesterday, I emailed the guy heading up the FIRST Lego League in the Atlanta area. I'm going to do my best to "be the change I want to see in the world" (Gandhi).

Wish me luck.

Innovation, Failure, and Learning

(originally posted to Tata Interactive Systems' blog)

CNBC has started a new 5-part series on Innovation called, "The Business of Innovation".
The first episode ("Innovators and Iconoclasts") has already aired, but is available online here. It's really quite good, with interviews with many well respected figures from the business and innovation arena. Well worth the time to watch the 4 segments...

So what does this have to do with learning?

Although the series is hosted by Maria Bartiromo, she is assisted by Roger Schank, well-known educational provoker and Artifical Intelligence/Cognitive Science expert. From my perspective, he steals the show (full disclosure: I studied under Schank at Northwestern's Institute for the Learning Sciences).

Consider these snippets from the episode's opening:

• Innovators don't really fit in very well (with others)
• Nearly everyone starts out as an Iconoclast (a rule breaker) - little kids don't know the rules; they do what they want to do.
• Failure is KEY! You have to be failing and failing again.
• Big companies are always trying to hire people who were in the top 10% at Harvard, under the assumption that they are good. What Harvard graduates are good at is... Harvard.
• You want someone original from Harvard? Try the BOTTOM 10%. Those kids are smart enough to get it, then decided they weren't playin' the game.

BINGO!

The connection here (among others) is that we need to be willing to experiment and fail in order to break the mold of "what everyone else is doing" or "how it's always been done". If we aren't willing to reach out beyond what's known and assured, then we'll just get more of what we've got.

Failure has such an unfairly bad rep - companies (generally) hate it, employees (mostly) avoid it, recruiters rarely ask about it. Yet it's the home zip code of where learning occurs. If you do something and succeed, all that tells you is that what you already know works - it provides confirmation, but no growth/learning.

The primary time real learning occurs is when we do X, expecting Y, and Z occurs instead.

BOOM!

Discomfort and surprise result! Motivation to find out what the hell happened arises! A new case for your storehouse of experiences is added to your wetware! And a few new synapses are connected! - Learning has occurred!

It's exactly this kind of semi-contrarian stance that has made Roger who he is. Love him or hate him, it's tough to ignore him and the points he makes.

Do yourself a favor and do a quick Google on "Roger Schank" and read what he's written/said, as well as the responses he's generated (pro AND con). I guarantee you will find yourself shifting in your seat and thinking more deeply about some "common/accepted knowledge" than you probably have recently.

Here are a few to get you started:

• His blog on District Administrator, an online magazine for K-12 Education Leaders
• His (occasional) Educational Outrage column
• His Student Bill of Rights
• His Maxims for Learning

Shift Happens

(originally posted to Tata Interactive System's blog)



Scott McLeod, of the Univ of Minnesota, recently reworrked and posted a version of a presentation that Karl Fisch created called "Did You Know?". It's really quite good on several different levels (globalization, learning, change, the future) and is worth a view (~6 mins).

Several of the themes resonated especially loudly for me, being an eLearning specialist working for an Indian firm, as well as being the (proud) father of a six year old boy. The world we are living within TODAY is amazing and changing incredibly fast, but it all (may) look like "the good old days" to my son in the same way that today's workforce reflects upon how things were, not in the 1930's, but in the 1830's (or maybe the 1730's!).

The current day statistics and facts he cites are pretty amazing (or scary, depending on your risk profile and comfort with change). And although it's always dangerous business predicting the future (as witnessed by Charles Duell's prediction, as Commissioner of US Patent Office in 1899, that "Everything that can be invented has been invented."), even if only a portion of the forecasts in the latter portion of the presentation are just partially true, we STILL will be in for a wild ride...

(It seems like some of those predictions may have been based on Ray Kurzweil's research on "The Singularity", and how exponential change is powerful but subtle before you hit the "knee of the curve", where change becomes noticable (which is where he claims we all sit currently). He says that we'll experience a century's worth of progress in the next 25 calendar years, and 20,000 years of progress(!) in the next 100 calendar years. Hold on tight...)

So what's the relation to Learning and Development? The scent of it abounds, even if it's not explicitly stated. We must prepare to live/survive/excel in a world that will be changing more rapidly than ever. And in a world of change, it is the person who has learned how to learn who will have the advantage. We need to stop focusing on teaching fact/figures/answers, and begin to embrace the ability to analyze/sythesize/adapt. Good teaching and learning strategies will be at the core of success tomorrow, regardless of the details of what that vista ends up looking like.

In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.-- Eric Hoffer

I've been cheating...

It looks like I've failed in my New Year's Resolution a mere few weeks into '07, but it's not so... I've just been seeing another blog :-)

I've been posting to my current employer's blog recently, but have decided that I really ought to cross-post here, as well.

So, with that in mind.... Keep on reading!

TED - I wanna GO!

I guess until I start the next Google or YouTube, or win the Lotto, TED is going to be out of my price range, but a boy can dream, can't he?

I'm just happy that they've opted to open a window to the rest of the world by sharing select sessions for free. I've watch nearly every one of the posts and it has rarely left me feeling anything less than amazed and energized. It's actually a great example of (one of) the possibilities the Web offers in terms of knowledge/idea sharing.

To get a better feel for what it's all about, you can watch this news story (by David Pogue, of the NYT, for CBS).

Speed vs. Quality - Still Relevant?

January’s “Big Question” at the Learning Circuits Blog is:

What are the trade offs between quality learning programs and rapid e-learning and how do you decide?

My knee-jerk reaction is that the question makes an unspoken assumption that quality and speed are diametrically opposed – that “rapid” should be equated with “low quality”. Although that certainly may be the conventional wisdom position, I’m not sure it holds water under closer inspection.

It’s similar to asking about the trade-offs between ‘fast’ food and a ‘good’ food. Upon initial inspection, there’s a shared tacit agreement that a drive-through dinner from your local burger franchise won’t (can’t) hold a candle to the quality that would come from a multi-course meal from your favorite fancy sit-down restaurant.

But if you think more deeply about it for a moment, you may discover that (just as with most things) the “trade-offs” are intimately tied to objectives – or more simply put, “it depends”.

If you are in the midst of running a marathon, “good” and “fast” eating are defined quite differently than if you are having an anniversary dinner with your spouse. It’s only when you fully understand the needs and expectations of parties involved in a situation are you able to properly assess what (if any) trade-offs must be made to effectively/properly serve their objectives.

In the case of (e)Learning, the argument stands, as well. It’s generally accepted (in theory, at least) that one solution rarely addresses the needs of more than a few – that what is ‘fast’ and ‘good’ to one person/group isn’t the same as for another. The "value" of a solution is highly dependent upon the needs of target.

Consider, for example, the case of Google and how their primary service has been so deeply adopted into the fabric of society that their company name has morphed into a generic verb meaning “to search”. One of the more dramatic results of the service Google provides is that information on any topic at (nearly) anytime is available to anyone, all with a microsecond response time (rapid). Granted, there’s no guarantees to the quality of the information Google supplies in response to a query, but (and here’s the interesting part) that lack of guarantee also doesn’t preclude quality – it actually says nothing about it at all!

So, we are witnessing an interesting swing away from the monolithic course model, to a JIT search-browse-synthesize-apply model. In this world, ‘rapid’ and ‘quality’ can (and often do) comfortably co-exist. There’s no reason that a similar, albeit more constrained, replica of this model cannot be adopted and leveraged within individual organizations, as well. Instead of leaving the determination of ‘quality’ up to the seeker to discern (as is largely the current case when broadly searching with Google, despite the confidence their ranking algorithms is supposed to proffer), a company could create and offer a multitude of high-quality but quickly accessible & consumable ‘learning bites” on the most frequent/timely/damaging/profitable topics of interest. By aiming for succinct responses to the most leveragable “20” of the 80/20 Pareto Principle of business/sales/performance themes, it would be possible to serve the double-masters of Speed and Quality without any contradiction.

It’s important to note that one element will take precedence over the other in many cases – when the validity and comprehensiveness of information trumps the amount of time necessary to locate and understand it, or when something that half-right today is infinitely more valuable than something that is completely right tomorrow. Again, it all comes down to understanding the underlying objectives of your audience and adjusting your ‘S vs. Q’ knob accordingly.

(My response, obviously, is taking a consumption-oriented interpretation on the BQ. If one was to read the BQ to relate to production, I may have a slightly different stance in answering.

But then again, maybe not… :-) )

What's Easy vs. What's Right

I've been a member of the "eLearning" community for over 15 years now. Throughout that time, I've consistently been frustrated with the elephant in the room that no one wants to recognize:

More often than not, T&D departments and the CXO's to whom they report are more interested in going through the motions related to training than with the actual impact and effectiveness of those efforts.

What I mean by this is that there is a disturbingly large amount of money, time, and energy devoted towards getting course completion "checkmarks" for the entire employee population, regardless of whether that tornado of effort and funding actually makes any difference.

For example, why are Multiple-Choice Questions (MCQs) so entrenched in corporate (and K-12) training? Is it because they are especially effective? No. It's because they are efficient. And efficiency and efficacy are rarely related.

MCQs are a terrifically efficient way to move a large number of people through an evaluation process in a quick and easily quantifiable fashion. The problem is that most MCQs are structured in such a ridiculous way that it's often relatively easy to discern the correct answer without any actual knowledge or background in the subject. (I once took an internal "certification exam" that a client used to qualify their employees, sight unseen and with no background in the subject, and scored a passing (78%, if I recall correctly) grade.) Even if the MCQs you create don't fall in this category (and it is possible to create decent MCQs, with a little effort and creativity), the extra effort may not be justified because life and work don't often consist of selecting from menus of options. Recognition doesn't equal Recall, and neither equal Performance. And Performance is (usually) what we are really seeking.

This old saw rant of mine was recently rekindled by a terrific article by Sarah Boehle on the disconnect between L1 eval (smiley sheet) results and the actual effectiveness of that training (L3/L4).

I won't attempt to reframe her arguments, as she makes a strong and pointed case, leveraging a few folks I respect (Roger Chevalier and Will Thalheimer), but I will pull out a couple of items that had me cheering:

"Why do so many companies make this mistake? In all likelihood, they do so because the steps they must take in order to get their hands on the objective information necessary to accurately assess training effectiveness can be complex, difficult, costly and time-intensive. "

and

"From my experience talking to corporate training departments, the calculus in the field seems to be, 'Don't do good evaluations,' " Thalheimer says. "Why would anyone want to? If you evaluate at all levels, only bad things can happen. If you use Level I and get good results, then you're maintaining the status quo and everyone assumes that training is doing a good job. If you evaluate more rigorously and get bad results, however, all hell breaks loose."

There seems to be some sort of unspoken conspiracy/agreement between T&D and upper management of "don't ask, don't tell". T&D keeps shoveling meaningless stats to the boardroom that help to justify their existence, and the boardroom keeps accepting them as a means to help them feel better about the "necessary evil" that they see T&D to be. It's an easier, cleaner, and more friendly way to go about business, but it's an enormous waste of resources all around.

T&D professionals have an obligation to "get dirty" and dig into some of the hard questions and actions associated with making training *matter*. And that involves taking the road less traveled and providing some solid business rationale for why the annual budget has a line item for T&D, whether the CxO is asking for it or not. Until that happens, T&D will never be considered anything more than a "necessary evil" in the boardroom.