Jay Cross helps people work and live smarter. Jay is the Johnny Appleseed of informal learning. He wrote the book on it. He was the first person to use the term eLearning on the web. He has challenged conventional wisdom about how adults learn since designing the first business degree program offered by the University of Phoenix.
People who are told a story is controversial remember it better than those who are told it is fact. I chalk this up to my belief that “Uncertainty challenges the mind.” This delightful article from the July 2010 Scientific American Mind goes one further: too much obedience to task stunts breadth of vision.
Setting your mind on a goal may be counterproductive. Instead think of the future as an open question
By Wray Herbert
Psychologist Ibrahim Senay of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign figured out an intriguing way to create a laboratory version of both willfulness and willingness—and to explore possible connections to intention, motivation and goal-directed actions.
The difference is subtle, but the former were basically putting their mind into wondering mode, while the latter were asserting themselves and their will. It is the difference between “Will I do this?” and “I will do this.”
The results were provocative. People with wondering minds completed significantly more anagrams than did those with willful minds. In other words, the people who kept their minds open were more goal-directed and more motivated than those who declared their objective to themselves.
These findings are counterintuitive. Think about it. Why would asserting one’s intentions undermine rather than advance a stated goal? Perhaps, Senay hypothesized, it is because questions by their nature speak to possibility and freedom of choice. Meditating on them might enhance feelings of autonomy and intrinsic motivation, creating a mind-set that promotes success.
In this study, he recruited volunteers on the pretense that they were needed for a handwriting study. Some wrote the words “I will” over and over; others wrote “Will I?” After priming the volunteers with this fake handwriting task, Senay had them work on the anagrams. And just as before, the determined volunteers performed worse than the open-minded ones.
…those who were asserting their willpower were in effect closing their minds and narrowing their view of their future. Those who were questioning and wondering were open-minded—and therefore willing to see new possibilities for the days ahead.
Perhaps I should be saying that “Freedom engages the mind.”
People who are told a story is controversial remember it better than those who are told it is fact. I chalk this up to my belief that “Uncertainty challenges the mind.” This delightful article from the July 2010 Scientific American Mind goes one further: too much obedience to task stunts breadth of vision.
Setting your mind on a goal may be counterproductive. Instead think of the future as an open question
By Wray Herbert
Psychologist Ibrahim Senay of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign figured out an intriguing way to create a laboratory version of both willfulness and willingness—and to explore possible connections to intention, motivation and goal-directed actions.
The difference is subtle, but the former were basically putting their mind into wondering mode, while the latter were asserting themselves and their will. It is the difference between “Will I do this?” and “I will do this.”
The results were provocative. People with wondering minds completed significantly more anagrams than did those with willful minds. In other words, the people who kept their minds open were more goal-directed and more motivated than those who declared their objective to themselves.
These findings are counterintuitive. Think about it. Why would asserting one’s intentions undermine rather than advance a stated goal? Perhaps, Senay hypothesized, it is because questions by their nature speak to possibility and freedom of choice. Meditating on them might enhance feelings of autonomy and intrinsic motivation, creating a mind-set that promotes success.
In this study, he recruited volunteers on the pretense that they were needed for a handwriting study. Some wrote the words “I will” over and over; others wrote “Will I?” After priming the volunteers with this fake handwriting task, Senay had them work on the anagrams. And just as before, the determined volunteers performed worse than the open-minded ones.
…those who were asserting their willpower were in effect closing their minds and narrowing their view of their future. Those who were questioning and wondering were open-minded—and therefore willing to see new possibilities for the days ahead.
Perhaps I should be saying that “Freedom engages the mind.”
Best of Informal Learning Flow
July 1, 2010 to July 30, 2010
A few minutes ago, we inadvertently posted June’s articles by mistake. My goof. Please overlook it. Here’s the right stuff.
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I’ve been a tremendous fan of Flipcams, the $150 pocket-sized video cameras with an interface even a first grader can figure out. The one downside was sound. Audio is more important than picture when shooting video. Flipcams have no jack for an external microphone.
Charles Jennings showed me an awesome Kodak mini-cam that solves the problem. Check the specs of the $180 KODAK Zi8 Pocket Video Camera:
File formats
1. video: H.264 (MOV), AAC LC
2. still: JPEG
Capture modes
1. 1080p (1920 × 1080, 30 fps)
2. 720p/60 fps (1280 × 720, 60 fps)
3. 720p (1280 × 720, 30 fps)
4. WVGA (848 × 480, 30 fps)
5. Still (5.3 MP, 16:9 widescreen, interpolated)
Anyone want to buy a couple of used Flipcams?
When Jane Hart and I shared our thoughts on social learning at the Irish Learning Showcase in Dublin last week, a formal presentation would have run counter to our message.
Instead, Jane and I had an informal conversation in the front of the room. In time, others joined in.
The format enabled us change direction based on our reading of the mood in the room. I intend to propose conversations in lieu of presentations whenever the opportunity presents itself.
Published June 2010
When you talk to businesspeople, you must speak as they do. Executives only care about training as it relates to execution. Their interest is in moving the corporation forward. You should share that interest. That is what they pay you for.
A sponsor is the person who pays those bills. Sponsors are responsible for championing the case for change (i.e., the vision), visibly representing the change (i.e., walking the talk), and providing reassurance and confidence (i.e., the implementation plan).
Someone once interrupted me during a webinar when I was talking about how trainers need to be aware of corporate objectives and rate their contributions by their impact on the business. “Wouldn’t that require us to understand how the business worked?” he asked. Yes, of course. How could you do your job right without knowing how the corporation worked? Several others jumped in, essentially saying that organizational success and helping to meet strategic objectives was “not my job.”
The days when corporations were larded with layer upon layer of management whose job was to translate strategic imperatives from above into job descriptions and projects down below are long gone. Now all of us are supposed to sing from the same hymnal without the intermediaries.
There’s no cookie-cutter formula for applying metrics, but there is an underlying process.
Measure results throughout your program, not just before and after. Keep your sponsor informed. Frequency is sometimes more important than quantity. Monitoring things early on may enable you to make mid-course corrections.
The Responsibilities You Share
Peter Drucker, hailed as the father of management, is a business guru’s guru. Drucker singled out eight characteristics of effective executives:
The Metrics Cycle
There’s no cookie-cutter formula for applying metrics, but there is an underlying process.
Generally, you’ll follow these five steps to identify, agree upon, assess and use metrics. This is not rocket science. It’s the same process you already use to accomplish a lot of things in life.
Let’s briefly consider each step.
1. State the desired outcome. Results do not exist inside the training department. In fact, results do not exist within the business. Results come from outside the business. Imagine a no-nonsense businessperson, such as Jack Welch, GE’s former boss. If you can explain yourself to Jack, you’ve mastered this step.
2. Agree on how to measure. The only valid metrics for corporate learning are business metrics. Examples are increased sales, shorter time to market, fewer rejects and lower costs. How do you decide what measures to apply? You don’t. That’s the responsibility of your business sponsor, the person who signs the checks. Together you agree on what’s to be done and how you’ll measure success or failure. Once you’ve settled on the project and its metrics, get it in writing.
3. Execute projects. The projects could be training, an incentive bonus plan or more advertising. Training programs are often part of a larger scheme, and it’s fruitless to try to isolate them. In fact, savvy training directors look for major corporate initiatives they can hitch a ride on.
4. Assess the results. You must evaluate the impact of your efforts with the measures you set up back in the second step. In other words, you are not allowed to mimic Charlie Brown, who would shoot an arrow and then paint the target around it. Why stick with the measures you came up with before? Because that’s how you maintain credibility with your sponsor. You can bring up unforeseen outcomes or anecdotal evidence, so long as you follow up on those original methods first.
5. Begin anew. The only thing worse than learning from experience is not learning from experience. Your post-mortem on the completed project should include a section titled “What to do better next time.”<
Effectiveness – Jay Cross
Published April 2008
Time Is All We Have
Networks arise when isolated entities link to one another. Improvements in communications technology (e.g., the invention of language, writing, printing, mass communication, computer networks) encourage connections. The denser its linkages, the shorter a network’s cycle time. Speed begets speed.
The connections that knit us together make us interdependent. Because other members of the network impact what you do, you lose even the illusion of control. The future becomes unpredictable.
Factory workers once were paid for what they produced. In a mechanized system, the slowest worker produced only slightly less than the fastest. If workers produced one widget an hour, paying by the hour was equivalent to paying by the widget. It also was simpler to measure. Managers became accustomed to equating time with production.
For the knowledge worker, time on the job often is unrelated to output. Google’s recruiters figure that an exemplary engineer can create 200 times more value than an average engineer. Only a fool would think it fair to pay each by the hour.
Visualize the workflow of a physical job: produce, produce, produce, produce, produce, produce, produce, produce, produce.
Now visualize the workflow of a creative knowledge worker: nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, flash of brilliance, nothing, nothing, nothing.
That single moment of brilliance may be more valuable than years of production. The flash occurs in Internet time. A year of Internet time is roughly equivalent to seven years of calendar time. The term came into being because in its first year, Netscape was said to accomplish what had taken others at least seven years. (The firm has since imploded at an accelerated pace as well.) Internet time is a generalization, like a New York minute, the idea being that it’s faster than regular time.
A businessperson with a watch knows what time it is, but a businessperson with two watches does not. Most managers tell time with Industrial Age watches, acting as if Internet time does not exist and missing the prospects it offers.
Opportunities abound because the world now moves on ideas instead of things. Value has migrated from tangible assets you could see and touch to intangible assets such as ideas, relationships, patterns and reputation. Twenty-five years ago, intangible assets accounted for less than a third of the valuation of U.S. companies. Ten years later, more than 80 percent of that value was intangible.
In the world of intangibles, quality trumps quantity. You can build a relationship or develop an idea in a fraction of the time it took to build a factory. Furthermore, some efforts yield outsized rewards. As in nature, for every action, there may be an unequal and totally unexpected reaction. The butterfly that flaps its wings in the Amazon is perhaps the catalyst for Hurricane Katrina. An algorithm might give birth to the 17th most valuable company on the Fortune 500.
Chief learning officers consider themselves enlightened if they provide workers with a month of training per year. This would have been generous when the pace of business allowed for three-martini lunches and the nature of work rarely changed. Today, everyone is busy nearly every waking moment, they figure things out on their own, and they deal with increasingly complex situations. Routine tasks crowd out reflection and innovation.
Today’s managers have scenarios and possibilities, not single-track plans. This calls for new models. Some creative workers would produce more value were they required to dedicate 11 months of the year to learning and one month to innovation and decision making. Meta-learning and flexible infrastructure are becoming more important than individual topics. “Learning to be” will supplant “learning to know.”
At the dawn of the network age, managers enjoyed the luxury of annual planning. They communicated the firm’s goals to the training department, which in turn translated those goals into workshops, learning management systems and so forth. Back then, the past resembled the future closely enough that driving by the rearview mirror was feasible. Today’s rapid changes require very responsive driving skills. The road is being built a little of the way ahead, and it could take a turn we don’t expect.
In the beginning of the year, I decided to experiment with a simple learning technology developed at Harvard Medical School. Called SpacedEd, the free, cloud-based software doles out a couple of questions at a time every other day. Two minutes and you’re done. Great for basic drill.
I talked with Duncan Lennox, co-founder and CEO, who told me SpacedEd lived up to its motto, Online Learning Radically Simplified. Duncan and I swapped eLearning history stories; he’s not a newbie. The SpacedEd approach is predicated on a set of core principles:
Push Learning: The learning comes to you on a regular schedule. You don’t have to remember to do it or set aside large chunks of time.
Adaptive: The daily content adapts based on past performance automatically to drive long-term retention while requiring less time.
Immediate Feedback: Once a question is answered, detailed educational feedback is provided. Users are also given performance data (their course progress and performance relative to peers) which feeds their addiction to the course.
I wrote 16 multiple-guess questions and invited readers of this blog to give it a whirl. To-date, 173 people have enrolled. 16 of these provided feedback, usually including a one- to five-star rating.
Normally, you wouldn’t expect me to give formal, push, multiple-choice methods a second look, but sometimes people have to master explicit facts. This is a relatively painless way to do that. I enrolled in a few other SpacedEd programs and rapidly picked up what I needed. (Granted, it was frustrating. You don’t have to be a designer to construct a SpacedEd course and sometimes it shows.)
As the course progressed, I changed and clarified questions based on participant feedback. Sometimes people learned more from the discussion than from the question itself. Here’s all the feedback to-date. I’ve removed names but everything else is intact.
Current rating:
07/16/10
For a Free course, this offers a glimpse not only into Learning, but into the strengths and weaknesses of the SpacedEd approach to learning. The value of the course comes more from the discussion than the specific questions and answers. Also, I think that the Feedback on the answers evolved and became more robust and useful with the course’s development. Given that the course is limited to 16 items, you shouldn’t expect to learn a whole lot about learning. But, what Jay accomplishes in those 16 questions is reasonable for this medium.Current rating:
06/28/10
I love the delivery method. The questions are relevant to the career of Instructional Designer.Current rating:
06/15/10
I think the author of this program ‘Learning about Learning’ is asking questions that reflect his own specialist knowledge/interest, rather that trying to enhance the understanding of those who engage with the program.Current rating:
Current rating: 06/01/10
No star rating on 05/23/10
Zero stars. A self-indulgent melange of random factoids that began and ended in a wasteland of so what? I learned nothing worth learning about learning.
n 05/04/10
a few too many “who did what” questions – not bothered about who came up with an idea – moe interested in the idea itself. But an interesting intro to spaceded learningCurrent rating:
I enjoyed this course and learned quite a few new insights. Some questions are asking for factual knowledge and a bit US-centric, but apart from that, I’ll recommend this course to anybody interested in learning about learning.Current rating:
03/30/10
Current rating:
This course was an interesting first experience with this particular implementation of the SpacedEd concept. I am favorably impressed with the SpacedEd idea and believe that it has an exciting future, particularly in the emerging area of mobile learning (which some are now calling “mLearning”). Thanks to Jay Cross, the course author, for taking the time to develop the questions and monitor student responses and comments.I still have questions about how practical and influential this form of learning can be. This course consisted of 16 questions which, while interesting, were not deep enough, individually or collectively, to generate any Ah-ha moments that will influence my professional practice or general learning behavior. My experience with SpacedEd so far suggests that it is an effective way to introduce and reinforce certain facts, but it is not yet clear to me that it has the power to impact students at a level that will alter their subsequent behavior.
To explore this further the two simplest paths, in view of the technology demonstrated on the SpacedEd website, are: 1) add more questions and/or 2) formulate questions that have a more explicit link to a deeper understanding of the subject or an improved practice. (Which of these would depend on the objectives of the course.)
Another idea that occurs to me, which may be possible with the current technology with some enhancements, would be to incorporate a more immersive student experience than simply answering multiple choice or true/false questions. If questions could be designed along the lines of simple case study simulations with the opportunity for multiple answers that lead to different outcomes and feedback to the student.
I’m still questioning how powerful this very simple Q and A model can be. I plan to try out some other courses and, possibly, develop a course of my own. Now that I’ve experienced one course as a student, it would be very interesting to “walk a mile” in the instructor/designer’s shoes to see the SpacedEd concept and this implementation from that vantage point.
Current rating:
What I like most about this course: The author is continuously improving the quality of the questions and answers, and is responsive to the ongoing (and often energetic) discussions.Current rating:
Nice way of learning although the emphasis was more on actual facts (and a bit US-centric) and I expected a bit more Focus on activating questions that focused on real understanding of the subject. But Jay: thank you for offering this experience!Current rating:
ok!Current rating:
An enjoyable course on some of the core aspects of learning with some excellent discussion by the author and participants.Current rating:
NLP is ‘snake oil’?: OK, where’s the research to prove that categoric assertion.
Time after time, I repeated what I’d stated in the introduction, that this was intended as an experiment to test SpacedEd, more than a learning experience. As you can see from the comments, many chose to overlook the technology and complain that the questions were not relevant or fair.
The criticism kept on coming despite my comments that sometimes you do have to know who did what just to establish your credentials. In the field of “learning about learning,” the topic at hand, wouldn’t you expect someone to be able to identify Gloria Gery, George Siemens, and the PLATO system? Geez. I’m not ready to lower my standards on these.
Making mistakes makes participants angry. My explanation that this is when they will learn the most didn’t go over well with some participants. (Like those who want to critique the questions or the questioner instead of the methodology.)
The Learning About Learning course is still open at SpacedEd. If you take it, pay attention to the dialogue, not the multiple choice items. I spent less than an hour coming up with the initial questions; they are not that deep.
My bottom line is that SpacedEd is cool for conveying explicit information that can be boiled down to a limited number of options. It’s simple. It’s useful. It’s free. I will suggest my clients experiment with it.
Too simple? Take some of the SpacedEd courses for med students!
The University of Plymouth’s Steve Wheeler is sharp as a tack. I enjoyed this dive into the deeper future.
is hosting the European Premier of
The Working Smarter Fieldbook | June 2010 Edition
Authors Jane Hart, Charles Jennings, & Jay Cross will sign books
2:00 – 3:00 pm, Thursday, July 22, 2010 at the Guiness Storehouse
Welcome to Jay’s hangout on the web! There’s a lot underneath the hood here. I’ve been blogging more than a dozen years. Go to “coordinates” for a list of what to check out and how to get in touch. Don’t miss the Important Stuff collection.
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