Onlignment Archive

Throughout 2011 we will be publishing extracts from The New Learning Architect. We move on to the third part of chapter 4:
On-demand learning is necessary because, in many jobs, it is impossible to know everything there is to know. And even if, through prolonged study and training, you were lucky enough to get to know it all, you’d soon find that most of it had changed. In the knowledge economy, it is more important to know where to look – or who to talk to – than it is to have the knowledge yourself.
According to market intelligence firm IDC, employees are, on average, losing seven hours per week searching, resolving queries and interrupting colleagues for assistance with procedures. The obvious solution, to provide some form of training, is simply not practical when the volume of information required to do your job effectively is too great or the information changes too rapidly. Formal training is arduous, disruptive and expensive and so best reserved for getting across the most critical concepts and principles, and the skills that employees use every day.
Increasingly, a better answer is to encourage learning at the point of need, when it is critical to an immediate challenge and when the employee’s motivation to learn is therefore at its greatest. As Samuel Johnson once said, “Knowledge is of two kinds: we know a subject ourselves or we know where we can find information upon it.”
Coming next in chapter 4: The need for non-formal learning
Return to Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3
Obtain your copy of The New Learning Architect

Throughout 2011 we will be publishing extracts from The New Learning Architect. We move on to the second part of chapter 4:
Experiential learning occurs whether we want it to or not, but there are good reasons why we should be supporting and encouraging it:

• Because everyday work experience is rich with opportunities for learning.
• Because we don’t always take the best advantage of these opportunities.
• Because, if something goes well, we want to repeat it.
• Because, if something goes wrong, we want to avoid it happening again.

Without experiential learning, all we are left with is the ‘doing’. We repeat the same actions over and over again, never improving and constantly at risk to every new threat that appears in our environment. Experiential learning is ‘doing’ plus an essential additional ingredient – reflection. Without reflection, we can have many years of experience and learn less than someone who is a relative newcomer but who has learned how to learn.
Coming next in chapter 4: The need for on-demand learning
Return to Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3
Obtain your copy of The New Learning Architect
 

Throughout 2011 we will be publishing extracts from The New Learning Architect. We move on to the first part of chapter 4:
Every context is a learning context, whether we are at work or play. We are born as learning machines and continue to learn until the day we die. We may not always be consciously learning, but learning is taking place whether we are aware of it or not, as we strive to make sense of and adapt to the circumstances in which we find ourselves.

Four contexts

In our working lives there are various contexts in which we can learn:
Experientially: Experiential learning is ‘learning from’ rather than ‘learning to’. It occurs consciously or unconsciously as we reflect upon our successes and failures at work and those of our acquaintances.
On-demand: On-demand learning, as with the others that follow, is a form of ‘learning to’. It occurs because we don’t know how to perform a particular task and need immediate help to acquire the necessary knowledge. On-demand learning can be regarded as synonymous with ‘just-in-time learning’ or ‘learning at the point of need’.
Non-formal: Non-formal learning is ‘learning to’ with a more relaxed timeframe. It occurs whenever we – or our employers – take deliberate steps in preparation for the tasks we will be expected to carry out in the medium to long-term future. This may cynically be referred to as ‘just-in-case’ learning, in contrast to learning that is ‘just-in-time’. Non-formal learning takes many shapes, but stops short of those interventions which are packaged up as formal courses.
Formally: Formal learning occurs through learning events or packages with clearly set-out learning objectives, pre-defined curricula, means for assessment and the award of some qualification or certificate of completion. Unless the course is entirely self-study, there will also be a designated teacher or trainer.

Two perspectives

These categories are useful, but they don’t distinguish between the learning that is planned for and supported by our employer, through the efforts of the l&d department and others (top-down learning), and the learning that we carry out on our own initiative, in work or outside, using resources that we find for ourselves (bottom-up learning). So, experiential, on-demand, non-formal and formal learning can originate in two ways:
Top-down learning occurs because organisations want their employees to perform effectively and efficiently and appreciate that this depends, at least in part, on them possessing the appropriate knowledge and skills. Top-down learning is designed to fulfil the employer’s objectives, not the employees’.
Bottom-up learning occurs because employees also want to perform. The exact motivation may vary, from achieving job security to earning more money, gaining recognition or obtaining personal fulfilment, but the route to all these is performing well on the job, and employees know as well as their employers that this depends – again, at least in part – on them acquiring the appropriate knowledge and skills.
Coming next in chapter 4: The need for experiential learning
Return to Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3
Obtain your copy of The New Learning Architect

Throughout 2011 we will be publishing extracts from The New Learning Architect. We move on to the fifth and final part of chapter 3:
According to Dror , “If learning is to take place, learners need to have the cognitive capacity to grasp the concepts and skills. However, no less important is the learner’s ability to know and be adept in higher cognitive functions, specifically to know what they know and what they do not know (metacognition), and to know how best to learn.”
Metacognitive skills are particularly important when you wish learners to be more independent in their learning, to take greater control over what they learn, when and how. They clearly cannot be effective in their independent learning if they don’t know what to focus their attention on. Metacognitive skills are hard to train, but that does not prevent trainers from helping learners to gain metacognitive insights, perhaps by some sort of diagnostic pre-test, simulation or similar exercise.
Study skills are easier to address. Experience and research shows that the following activities will greatly enhance the learner’s chances of success:

• Note-taking: The best way to make sure that new information sticks is to write it up in your own words. There is good evidence to suggest that recall improves by 20-30% when you do take notes.
• Visualisation: Many people find that it helps to create a mind map or some other form of diagram to help explain the relationships between the various concepts that they are studying.
• Teaching it: Teaching what you have learned is a wonderful way to improve your own comprehension. The very process of working out how you are going to convey something clearly and simply to others will compel you to clarify your own understanding. Scott Young suggests a more topical way of achieving this: “If you really want to learn something, I’d suggest starting a blog and then just writing about the stuff you’ve learned. Whether you are studying courses or just trying to master a discipline, writing down what you know and trying to teach it to others will dramatically increase your own understanding.”
• Using it: The familiar imperative to ‘use it or lose it’ is good advice. The more you practise, the better you get. As Clark, Nguyen and Sweller  explain: “Any task that is performed hundreds of times becomes established in long-term memory. Once automated, the skill can be performed with little or no resources from working memory. In effect, these skills are performed unconsciously.” You probably know the joke about the concert goer who asks the man in the street how to get to Carnegie Hall. The man replies with a single word, “Practise.”

References
Meta-cognition and Cognitive Strategy Instruction by Itiel Dror, a paper for Learning Light, 2007
Seven little known ways to dramatically improve your learning by Scott Young, a guest blogger at Ririan Project
Efficiency in Learning by Ruth Clark, Frank Nguyen and John Sweller, Pfeiffer, 2006
Coming next: Chapter 4 – A contextual model for learning
Return to Chapter 1
Return to Chapter 2
Obtain your copy of The New Learning Architect
 

Throughout 2011 we will be publishing extracts from The New Learning Architect. We move on to the fourth part of chapter 3:
As someone who has chosen to read this book, you presumably have more than a passing interest in helping the learning process on a little, whether directly, by training or creating instructional materials, or by introducing policies that will help learners and their managers to be more effective in their own efforts. So let’s take a break from looking at the process of learning to examine those practices that are likely to provide learners with the most effective support.
First of all, it is worth clarifying once and for all, that learners are not empty vessels into which you can pour whatever knowledge you would like them to have. As we have seen, learners are in the driving seat, not you. They determine what it is to which they pay attention; they decide whether or not to make the effort to transfer what they have learned into long-term memory; it is their mental models into which the new knowledge will be integrated, not yours. There is a massive difference between what is taught and what is learned. As Theodore Roszak explains, “Information is not knowledge. You can mass-produce raw data and incredible quantities of facts and figures. You cannot mass-produce knowledge, which is created by individual minds, drawing on individual experience, separating the significant from the irrelevant, making value judgements.”
Before you even consider delivering new information, the learner must be in the right emotional state, as Daniel Goleman reminds us: “Students who are anxious, angry or depressed don’t learn. People who are caught in these states do not take in information effectively or deal with it well.”
And with the negative emotions removed, it is just as important to work on the positive, as Berman and Brown emphasise: “It is emotion, not logic, that drives our attention, meaning-making and memory. This implies the importance of eliciting curiosity, suspense, humour, excitement, joy and laughter.”
Norman also sees the value of excitement in learning: “The most powerful learning takes place when well-motivated students get excited by a topic and then struggle with the concepts, learning how to apply them to issues they care about. Yes, struggle: learning is an active, dynamic process and struggle is a part of it. But when students care about something the struggle is enjoyable.”
He goes on: “Students learn best when motivated, when they care. They need to be emotionally involved, to be drawn to the excitement of the topic. This is why examples, diagrams, illustrations, videos and animations are so powerful. Learning need not be a dull and dreary exercise, not even learning about what are normally considered dull and dreary topics.” And how can these topics be made exciting? Well, nothing works better than by making them relevant to the lives of each and every individual student.
Even the best motivated learner is restricted by the rate at which the brain can cope with new information. Fortunately there is a great deal you can do to minimise the learner’s cognitive load, the burden on their working memory. At a relatively simplistic level you can cut back on the amount of information that learners are exposed to and are expected to acquire at any one time. More often than not, trainers and instructional designers dramatically overestimate the amount of new material that their learners will be able to assimilate. They would do better to break the content down into manageable chunks, remove all unnecessary or redundant material and focus the learner’s attention on the most critical material. Further progress can be made by taking advantage of the ability of working memory to process both visual and auditory information separately, utilising the benefits of self-paced learning, using diagrams to aid understanding, and supplying the learner with materials that they can refer to on-the-job.
Trainers and designers can also help the learner to retain what they learn, to transfer new knowledge to long-term memory. Without this help, there is a danger that much of the new information will be forgotten within hours. Dror encourages setting learners more challenging tasks: “As depth of processing increases, the material will be better remembered. As the learners interact with the material in more cognitively meaningful ways, as they consolidate it with other information in their memory, they are going to remember it better. Rather than using repetition, have the learners make judgements about the material. As the judgements are more complex, depth of processing will increase.”
As mentioned previously, transfer to memory is not enough; the knowledge also needs to be easily retrievable when the need arises. The best way to facilitate retrieval is to fashion practical exercises so they mirror the way that tasks will be carried out on-the-job. Another tactic is to provide knowledge retrieval exercises at intervals throughout the learning process. Practice, supported by specific and immediate feedback, that is managed in this way has many advantages over practice that is massed, not least because learners get the chance to detect and correct any mistakes or misunderstandings at the earliest opportunity.
It is worth reminding ourselves at this point, that the focus of this book is on learning at work, not the process of early development and education. As Bill Sawyer explains, there is a difference: “Well before our consciousness develops into a sense of ‘I’, we are learning machines. We depend upon it for our survival as both individuals and as a species. But learning grows with us. Initially, learning is virtually an automatic process. Before long it begins to take on more and more characteristics of choice. There is still learning by chance or environment, but we begin to take more control over our learning.”
Eventually, the principles of adult learning as defined by Malcolm Knowles come into full effect. As a person matures:

• their self-concept moves from being a dependent personality to a self-directed one;
• their growing experience becomes an important resource for learning;
• their time perspective shifts from one of postponed application of knowledge to the immediacy of the task at hand;
• their motivation to learn comes from within.

Also, as adults we have a significant, long-term investment in the way we are now. Learning is a change and change is a threat to the status quo, to the time, energy and other resources you have expended to become what you are. Resisting change does not make you a Luddite or a ‘difficult person’. Everybody resists some changes and this is only right and proper, because not all change is necessary or beneficial. We would be weak-minded if we simply adopted every suggestion and acted on every order, however senseless.
People don’t actually resist change, in fact we voluntarily and enthusiastically engage in all sorts of massive and highly risky changes throughout our lives. Changes like getting married, having kids, moving from one town or country to another, even changing careers. Clearly these are not trivial changes. It seems that what people actually resist is being changed, that is change that they haven’t instigated for themselves.
Learning changes the brain, for good. If it doesn’t, then it hasn’t happened. The learner is the gatekeeper to their brain and no amount of lecturing, instructing, prescribed reading or showing of videos will make any difference if the learner is not convinced that they want their brains changed. For the gates to be opened, the learner has to recognise that they have a gap in their knowledge or skills that they believe is worth filling. And they will be much more committed to the process – and the learning will be much deeper – if they have discovered the learning for themselves. The humanist psychologist Carl Rogers once said that “nothing worth learning can be taught”, which is probably going a bit far, but there’s little doubt that learning by doing, conversation, reflection, discovery and inductive (non-directive) questioning will be more effective than simply telling.
References
The Cult of Information by Theodore Roszak, University of California Press, 1994
Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman, Bantam Books, 1995
The Power of Metaphor by Michael Berman and David Brown, Crown House Publishing, 2000
Shall I remember? by Itiel Dror, a paper for Learning Light, 2006
The New Hierarchy by Bill Sawyer, a posting to The Learning Circuits Blog, May 2007
The Adult Learner by Malcolm Knowles, Butterworth-Heinemann, 1973
Coming next in chapter 3: Learning to learn better
Return to Chapter 1
Return to Chapter 2
Obtain your copy of The New Learning Architect