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What learning is NOT:
Learning is not a process of acquiring facts. However, I used to think differently. Back in Hillsboro High School, when I used to “cram” for a test, I assumed that I could stuff a lot of facts into my head in a hurry, the night ahead of time. Then those facts would be mine and I could haul them out at appropriate times, for example, on the test the next day. This is the cognitive approach to learning, which assumes that the purpose of learning is the individual’s acquisition of “knowledge”, which is assumed to be an entity or static state. One might call it a the triumph of industrialism: the materialistic world view which reduces knowledge to a possession. Cognitivists view learning as a process of inputs, much as occurs in computer information processing, with knowledge stored in the database of short term memory, coded in symbolic mental models for long-term recall.
Neural network model, Museum of Science, Boston
What learning IS:
Learning is the structural evolution of the brain that occurs as we engage in the world
OK, so learning is NOT the process of acquiring anything. So what is it?
Much of my thinking about how people learn is founded on research on how learning comes from the structure and biology of the brain. These studies published in the past few decades in fields such as cognitive neuroscience, neurobiology, and neurophysiology, describe how memory traces are formed in the brain as a result of concrete experience, reflective observation, active testing and forming of abstract hypotheses.
According to this research, learning is a physiological process of growth of structures in the learner’s mind–growing new neural configurations as a response to being presented with new experiences.
The manifestation, as I understand it, of this physiological growth, is the evolution of structures of language, thought and reality (oooh, that’s the title of Benjamin Lee Whorf‘s fabulous book. Check it out!)
James Zull, professor of biology and biochemistry at Case Western Reserve, talks about this in his book, The Art of Changing the Brain. Knowledge is situated in the growing, evolving network configurations. Those neural configurations are activated in the future when presented with the same types of experiences, and apparently, they reconfigure and grow some more.
In the external world, outside the brain and out in the landscape of Earth, group learning is growing connections between networks. Learning occurs as learners engage in the experiences of practice and reflection, and as teachers, in whatever form, engage them in experiences of modeling and demonstrating.
As my 16-year-old son Zachary once remarked, “You can’t not learn when you’re doing something.”
Last night I got out my well-used An Introduction to Business Ethics by Joseph Desjardins, professor of philosophy at the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University in Minnesota. This was my textbook when I used to teach ethics for OntarioLearn, in Canada. From reviewing the book, I put together the following list of ethically-oriented heuristic evaluation categories, and a sample question in each category, to be used by designers of learning systems
- Sustainability: Does this system encourage responsible use of earth resources?
- Privacy: Does the user have control over what information about themselves is being collected or disclosed?
- Confidentiality: Is information accessible only to those authorized to have access?
- Disclosure: Do we provide full information about vulnerabilities in the system which may provide an attacker the ability to reduce system information assurance?
- Security of account information: Are passwords robust?
- Intellectual property: Who owns learner-generated content?
- Usage of software: How many times do we allow the learner to download this content?
- Ownership: have we protected content with appropriate copyright and trademark indications?
- Termination: Under what circumstances will we terminate a learner account?
- Enforcement: Which state or federal laws are applicable to violations of our policies?
- Safety: Does the use of our learning web site or application ever cause physical problems such as photoepileptic seizures?
- Diversity and equality: Does our site/application exclude or offer biased views of a race, ethnicity, gender, culture, etc.?
In the design of learning systems, these issues should be considered along with standard usability categories such as those described and promoted by usability guru Jakob Nielson.
“So crucify the ego
Before it’s far too late
To leave behind this place so
Negative and blind and cynical
And you will come to find
That we are all one mind
Capable of all that’s
Imagined and all conceivable
Just let the light touch you
And let the words spill through
Just let them pass right through,
Bringing out our hope and reason.”
- Tool, “Reflections”
On the Winter Solstice I offer you this reflection from the contemporary music group Tool.
For our own family celebration we made our second pre-dawn trek (in rain/sleet) with the Evanston Bike Club to the Seventeenth annual 6 am Hamid Drake and Michael Zerang Annual Winter Solstice Percussion Concert at Links Hall in Chicago. This is an hour-long ritual performance that uses percussion instruments from North Africa, the Middle East and East India, as well as western orchestral instruments. This includes the dumbek, tabla, rukk, conga, djembe and tambourine, concentrating on long rhythmic cycles and structured improvisations. It is a wonderful way to mark the turning of the seasons and the return of the light.
The photo above is from Negril, Jamaica, where we observed that Barack Obama has become a living symbol of love, light and learning for many people.
I have built a dynamic mental model of Seven Levels of Interaction which describes evolving patterns of experiential, emergent knowledge in the connections between various agents within increasingly complex nested networks, with increasing levels of knowledge thickness. For knowledge is not static, but a set of evolving structural configurations, artifacts of interactive experiences.
The theory of connectivism asserts that individual learning is literally growing new neural configurations by being presented with experiences . Those neural configurations are activated in the future when presented with the same types of experiences. A person sees the pattern. (Read Christopher Alexander on Pattern Language for more on this.) This experience of pattern recognition (the etymology says it all: re-cognition, to know again) can take a number of forms, as follows.
- One can be looking at data and recognize a pattern and thus gain information – data in formation. Data only becomes information when the energy has been structured for the receiver for which it is intended. Information evolves because each look is a new look, with a new configuration of experience.
- Experiencing patterns within information grows knowledge.
- Over time, knowledge which integrates experiences using several of our multiple intelligences flourishes into understanding. This where people start to become engaged with one another.
- Understanding crystallizes into wisdom—stories, poetry, songs, sacred texts, metaphors, myths, symbols, and archetypes. Wisdom is both personal and collective, the legacy of the past that helps us navigate the present.
- Persons of wisdom may generate a vision, the growing of a new pattern for the future. “Vision” has been called by many names—imagination, ingenuity, insight—and is the precursor of change. Einstein said, “It is imagination that gives shape to the universe.”
- People who work together to implement a vision are embodying the noösphere—being one mind, accountable to one another. “The earth and I are of one mind.” (attributed to Nez Perce Chief Joseph)
At one end of the spectrum are thin interactions, mostly between individuals or teams. At the other end of the spectrum, networks and communities of networks engage in thick interactions, which combine elements from a broad repertoire of interaction types. When interacting on many levels simultaneously, a person can take a different role (of those described by Etienne Wenger) in each level—peripheral, inbound, insider, boundary, or outbound — and the roles are fluid.
The Seven Levels of Interaction continuum is an evolution of what was originally termed the Data Information Knowledge and Wisdom hierarchy (DIKW), which has been evolved and adapted by a number of writers since the 1920s. My Seven Levels of Interaction model takes a connectivist/relationalist approach, and looks at interactions in terms of a typology of agent connection (from individuals to communities of networks).
The two panels shown above are from Brad Colbow’s comic strip, The Power of Personas, from his Think Vitamin blog.
I am including them here because I am going to take a break from all the theory I’ve been posting the last few weeks, and share a bit of what I have been doing at work. I have been developing a cognitive framework for persona development.
What, you may be asking, is a “persona”, and what use may it be to the design of learning systems?
In the world of user experience design, a persona is a mental model, or archetype, of a class or type of user. It’s a one-page psychological profile of an imaginary person who represents a distinct set of goals and the behavior patterns that may cascade from those goals. A persona is methodically crafted from a synthesis of rigorous research. Getting to know a persona is like reading a character sketch for a person in a novel. Developing personas helps my company, an international online travel booking site, focus on its users. That’s because you can relate to the persona as an individual human being.
What a persona is NOT:
- A persona is not a “role”, which focuses on tasks, and which does not incorporate goals as an organizing principle for design thinking
- A persona is not a collection of demographic information or a “market segment”
- A persona is not a representation of a niche user, such as users who prefer a specific channel such as mobile, or users who buy a specific type of package.
- A persona is not a weapon or rhetorical tool whipped out at strategic moments to make a point.
Why should learning designers use personas?
Personas were brought to the attention of user experience designers by Alan Cooper in his 1999 book The Inmates are Running the Asylum
. He pointed out that personas:
- Help team members share a specific, consistent understanding of various audience groups. Data about the groups can be put in a proper context and can be understood and remembered in coherent stories.
- Help designers propose solutions guided by how well they meet the needs of individual user personas. Features can be prioritized based on how well they address the needs of one or more personas.
- Provide a human “face” so as to focus empathy on the persons represented by the demographics.
In his 2007 book About Face, Cooper went on to say that personas:
- Determine what a product should do and how it should behave. Persona goals and tasks provide the foundation for the design effort.
- Communicate with stakeholders, developers, and other designers. Personas provide a common language for discussing design decisions and also help keep the design centered on users at every step in the process.
- Build consensus and commitment to the design. With a common language comes a common understanding. Personas reduce the need for elaborate diagrammatic models; it’s easier to understand the many nuances of user behavior through the narrative structures that personas employ. put simply, because personas resemble real people, they’re easier to relate to than feature lists and flowcharts.
- Measure the design’s effectiveness. Design choices can be tested on a persona in the same way that they can be shown to a real user during the formative process. Although this doesn’t replace the need to test with real users, it provides a powerful reality-check tool for designers trying to solve design problems. This allows design iteration to occur rapidly and inexpensively at the whiteboard, and it results in a far strong design baseline when the time comes to test with actual people
- Contribute to other product-related efforts such as marketing and sales plans. The authors have seen their clients repurpose personas across their organization, informing marketing campaigns, organizational structure, and other strategic planning activities. Business units outside of product development desire sophisticated knowledge of a product’s users and typically view personas with great interest.
- Personas also can resolve three design issues that arise during product development: the elastic user (the user is anyone you want it to be), self-referential design and edge cases.
By now you might be saying, “Ah-ha, I see how using personas could help the designer of learning systems understand users, and thus design more sensibly and empathetically.”
So I don’t really have to spell it out, do I?
What is the risk of not using personas in our work as designers of learning systems?
- We won’t understand our prototypical learners, and their goals, attitudes and behaviors
- We may be self-referential in our design
- Design teams won’t share a common understanding of various audience groups
- Feature prioritization is not based on user needs
- Other mental models will be needed to support feature development choices
- We may be way off the mark when it comes to testing with actual people
- The user becomes elastic (anyone you want it to be at the moment)
- We may have trouble defining edge cases
- We might build what users ask for instead of what they would really use
- Design cycles may be lengthened
- Product quality may be impaired
Standing Stone at Shalom Mountain Retreat and Study Center
Shalom Mountain Retreat and Study Center has been loving crafted into a New York Catskills mountainside over a period of several decades. Climb a slope steep enough to get your heart pounding, to stand in awe, in a hidden meadow, between four pink granite standing stones several stories high, spaced several football fields’ length apart. Deep in the woods, you’ll encounter a yurt meditation room, a mossy labyrinth, an outdoor mud bath, many embraceable trees, and a rambling white frame retreat center where thousands of people have come over the years to learn how to become more conscious, loving and fully alive.
To provide encouragement for these retreatants in their day-to-day world after they leave the exalted moments of the retreat setting, support groups are active in many cities in the US and Canada. They offer regional retreats, potluck dinners, heart-to-heart communication, and more. Here in Chicago, I have been a part of the formation and evolution of the Shalom Heartland support group. A group of five individuals self-selected as the “Shalom Heartland Leadership Circle”. Over the past four years I’ve observed how we coalesced, and how each one of us has manifested individual responsibility, cooperation, collaboration, and intra-organizational plasticity (one node in the network can take over work typically undertaken by another). We have engaged with one another to think about our purpose, and to create activities here in the Midwest, grow our Shalom Heartland membership, communicate with other support groups, and evolve as an organization.
Fritzof Capra has said, “In nature there is no “above” or “below,” and there are no hierarchies. There are only networks nesting within other networks.” Our Shalom Heartland Leadership Circle is one of those nested networks, within the larger network of shared leadership which is the ineffable Shalom Process.
Networks are comprised of any grouping of connected agents. The concept of agents is nicely defined by Alvaro Moreno and Arantza Etxeberria in their paper, “Agency in Natural and Artificial Systems” ( published in Artificial Life,Vol. 11, Issue 1-2 (Jan 2005)), as entities in a network which can interact adaptively with their context in order to contribute to their own maintenance.
In social networks, some of the agents are human. In social learning networks, the intent is learning.
Our Shalom Heartland Leadership circle is a prototypical social learning network. It is a complex system in that it consists of interacting units and exhibits emergent properties (properties emerge from the interaction of the parts which are not properties of the parts themselves).
Just like the human nervous structure, a network of humans interacts internally and externally by continually modulating its structure. This includes many types of social learning networks with which we are familiar: families, schools, businesses, faith-based organizations, non-governmental organizations, nations, and so on.
A healthy network is one that learns. A healthy network has characteristics necessary for life and growth, as well as for its adaption to the environment, and cognition. The nodes of the network are engaged with one another. This results in self-organization, or homeostasis and synergy. As a network self-organizes, the nodes manifest individual responsibility, cooperation, collaboration, and that very desirable feature of intra-organizational plasticity I referred to earlier. At a more complex level of engagement, the nodes in a network engage with one another in cognition, creativity and growth, distribution, and reproduction or evolution.
This, in a nutshell, is my framework for a learning theory which I call relationalism. Relationalism is similar to George Siemens’ connectivism, which situates learning in the experiential activity of the nodes in a network. Relationalism, however, is a more robust, holistic and ecological view of the interactions between the learner, the educator and the complex environment in which learning occurs.
Educational looping flows: from DensityDesign
George Siemens, Stephen Downes, Terry Anderson and Jon Dron all talk about emergent learning in social learning networks, and implicitly and explicitly discuss structural elements and their affordances.
Jon Dron asserts in his 2007 book, Control and Constraint in E-learning: Choosing When to Choose, that “The ongoing challenge for developers and users of social software in e-learning is therefore to build systems and processes in which the structures that develop are capable of being pedagogically sound and supportive of learning communities.” I do wish Dron would have used the phrase “learning experience designers” instead of “developers”. Part of the reason people don’t learn is that the environments for learning which we present have been mostly just developed, without the careful consideration afforded by using the templates, guides, processes and conceptual approaches of a design discipline. If any of you have ever used WebCT, for example, you know what I mean. Nonetheless, Dron does specify design principles which imply a structural framework for social learning which begs to be revealed and integrated with conceptual treasures in interaction design drawn from other fields.
In reviewing Dron’s work, Terry Anderson commented, “To my knowledge, these are the first attempts at extracting underlying design principles or patterns for educational social software.”
There are lots of cognitive tools out there to help LxD practictioners dive into the interdependence of social, cognitive and affective interactions of the various agents of networked systems, and the affordances of these interactions which lead to learning. We can build our understanding of that complexity on a very sturdy foundation of the proven mental models, concept maps, metaphors, and design principles of interaction design, also known as IxD.
The discipline of interaction design employs design patterns, or optimal solutions to common interaction design problems within specific contexts. “Design patterns help designers align with standards, they speed design, and they often extend or transform into new contexts or applications.” (from IxDA). The field of learning interaction design (LxD) can adapt and augment these pattern libraries.
Familiarity with fundamental works in the field of interaction design will also help learning interaction designers. Among the leaders in interaction design are the principals of the Nielsen Norman Group: Jakob Nielsen, Don Norman, and Bruce Tognazzini. Their research and publications are numerous; a seminal work was The Design of Everyday Things (1988). Jakob Nielsen’s book, Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity (2000) is the best-selling book about user interfaces, with more than a quarter million copies in print in 22 languages. In terms of interface design specifically, Tognazzini’s (2003) First Principles of Interaction Design can be a baseline for the development of principles of social learning design. The work of these three individuals has set the standards for web usability, intranet usability, email usability, and user experience for special audience segments such as users with disabilities, children, teenagers, and seniors.
On a more abstract level, Paul Hekkert has distinguished three components or levels of product experience: aesthetic pleasure (gratification of the senses), attribution of meaning, and emotional response. In his core affect theory, Hekkert particularly focuses on emotional response, or affect, as a direct response to aesthetic pleasure and the cognitive activities involved in creating meaning. Since the sixties, affect has attracted the attention in various disciplines involved in product research, such as marketing, consumer research, ergonomics, economics, and engineering.
Read Designing Pleasurable Products, in which usability expert Patrick Jordan analyzes the design properties of usable interfaces and discusses the role of pleasure in product usage, which can and should also be applied to the design of learning experiences.
This blog post is getting kind of long so I’ll cut short my roll call of interaction design gurus and just end with a list of some of the tasks before us in the field of learning interaction design:
- point out gaps in the existing research
- enable methodical and systematic interaction design for social learning
- improve the design of learning applications and platforms
- help establish a common language for social learning research and design
- assist instructional design in targeting specific audiences and competencies
- stimulate the development of design patterns for social learning
- help develop unified theories of social learning
My mother and father, Katie Funk Wiebe and Walter Wiebe, 1947
My red-haired grandmother, Anna Janzen Funk, left school after the third grade to help the family survive the Russian Revolution. During World War II, my mother, Katie Funk Wiebe, declined a scholarship to study physics and enrolled in secretarial school, partly because my grandfather knew that a physicist would support the war effort, something against the family’s pacificistic beliefs, but also because that would enable her to quickly support herself. But both my grandmother and my mother were enthusiastic life-long learners. Their context was as Ukrainian, Mennonite immigrants to northern Saskatchewan, Canada, living in close-knit small farming communities. And that’s the socio-cultural context into which I was born, and everything I have learned in my life is meaningful within that very specific matrix of people, geography, culture, cosmology, and theology.
Every shred of meaning that I cherish is inter-subjective.
How are values, beliefs and thinking manifested? Gerry Stahl describes shared meaning as an emergent property of discourse and interaction. It is NOT “just some kind of statistical average of individual mental meanings, an agreement among pre-existing opinions, or an overlap of internal representations. . . It is not necessarily reducible to opinions or understandings of individuals.” Socially shared meaning is made visible in the interactions of agents belonging the group. In other words, watch my behavior and conversations with my family, my co-workers at Orbitz Worldwide, and with my friends at Quaker meeting, Shalom Mountain Retreat and Study Center, Reba Place Fellowship, and Evanston Home Educators.
In my interactions in those venues, plenty of shared meaning is emerging all the time.
Social learning: my nephew's tool acquisition activities, with two cousins and a mom
Some may question all this noösphere stuff and argue against the existence of any such woo-woo thing as a “group mind”. You may have more of a “black box” approach, thinking that human learning is personal, kind of mysterious, and that’s it.
“Given that we have for millennia become used to taking learning and thinking as activities of individual minds, it is hard to conceive of them as primarily group activities,” says Gerry Stahl, of of the College of Information Science and Technology at Drexel University.
For a long time I’ve seen everything, everyone, as interconnected and interdependent. That is indubitably a by-product of:
- studying Tielhard de Chardin at Tabor College and Marshall McLuhan at the J-School at the University of Kansas
- going over the top with the psychedelic mushrooms and cactus in my twenties
- a lifetime of meditation
- being a Canadian Mennonite and a Quaker
- being a member of the Benjamin Barber fan club
- too many hours on Facebook
- other socio-cultural factors yet to be analyzed
So for me, social learning is not a question of ontology, but rather of methodology. I am interested in learning the how interdependent cognition works. In other words, exactly what processes are involved in developing shared meaning amongst multiple individuals? What are the various agents, and what are their possible interactions? What are the artifacts of their interactions?
As a designer of experiences for learning, I want to know what’s in my toolbox. In upcoming posts, I plan to explore those topics, of agents and their interactions in social learning.
Stahl, G. (2005). Group cognition in computer-assisted collaborative Learning. In Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, April 2005, Vol. 21 Issue 2, p79-90.
