RavingLEARNatics

Your world, your learning responsibility

"We’re entering a world that increasingly rewards individual aspiration and persistence and can measure precisely who is contributing and who is not."  -- Thomas Friedman, NYT columnist, It’s a 401(k) World.

The Learning Democracy taught us that due to a work environment and workforce that are both changing dramatically, learners want/need more responsibility and control over their learning. We want autonomy and personalization too. Let us decide when, where and how.

Shifting responsibility . . .
This changing world means, according to Friedman, "Government will do less for you. Companies will do less for you. Unions can do less for you. There will be fewer limits, but also fewer guarantees. Your specific contribution will define your specific benefits much more. Just showing up will not cut it." He continues . . . "If you are self-motivated, wow, this world is tailored for you. The boundaries are all gone. But if you’re not self-motivated, this world will be a challenge because the walls, ceilings and floors that protected people are also disappearing."

Accepting responsibility for the education you need to succeed and being self-motivated to shape, consume and apply the learning is more critical now than ever. We must ask ourselves probing questions like this one from Byron Auguste, a director at McKinsey and one of the founders of Hope Street Group "how do I build my own competencies to be attractive to employers and flourish in this world?” If we don't, we fall behind, we fall through the cracks.

So the learning responsibility shifts to learner, but companies have a responsibility too. Leadership must inspire "individuals to act on their own" according to Friedman, and companies/employers must do a better job of identifying and articulating the competencies that best enable their employees to achieve success. As Friedman says in his column,“for students and workers to take advantage of the opportunities open to them in a ‘defined contribution’ world, they will need much better information to inform their decisions. Right now it’s much easier to evaluate a choice about buying a car or picking a mutual fund” than to find the competencies employers are looking for and the best cost-effective way to obtain them." 

 

 

 

 

The capacity to innovate

The article Need a Job? Invent It by Thomas Friedman is fantastic, very Learning Democracy relevant and a must read. Some excerpts . . . 

“because knowledge is available on every Internet-connected device, what you know matters far less than what you can do with what you know. The capacity to innovate — the ability to solve problems creatively or bring new possibilities to life — and skills like critical thinking, communication and collaboration are far more important than academic knowledge. As one executive told me, ‘We can teach new hires the content, and we will have to because it continues to change, but we can’t teach them how to think — to ask the right questions — and to take initiative.’ ”

“We teach and test things most students have no interest in and will never need, and facts that they can Google and will forget as soon as the test is over, . . .”

“Every young person will continue to need basic knowledge, of course,” he said. “But they will need skills and motivation even more. Of these three education goals, motivation is the most critical. Young people who are intrinsically motivated — curious, persistent, and willing to take risks — will learn new knowledge and skills continuously. They will be able to find new opportunities or create their own — a disposition that will be increasingly important as many traditional careers disappear.”

“Finland is one of the most innovative economies in the world,” he said, “and it is the only country where students leave high school ‘innovation-ready.’  They learn concepts and creativity more than facts, and have a choice of many electives — all with a shorter school day, little homework, and almost no testing. 

Google - Rapid learning

What makes a workplace innovative? That's a question that NPR's All Tech Considered asked. This is something that companies like Google and Facebook have spent a lot of time studying. According to Fortune magazine, Google attracts some of the best minds, is ranked by as the best place to work in the country, and earns close to $1 million in revenue for each person it employs. Google uses a data-driven approach to manage its workplace and so does Facebook. According to John Sullivan, a management professor at San Francisco State University and workplace consultant "Google and Facebook are metrics machines. So if you ask them what's the average time for a promotion, what's the percentage of women being promoted, they have it to a dime."

Sullivan lists three factors to that set innovative companies apart:

1. Rapid learning - not structured classroom but self learning by casual interaction. 
2. Collaborations 
3. Fun 

"Most people just don't get that," Sullivan says. Below is the NPR piece . . . 

 

 

MOOCs

Below is a link to a great column by Thomas Friedman on massive open online courses (MOOCs) and how they are changing education . . .

"Institutions of higher learning must move, as the historian Walter Russell Mead puts it, from a model of “time served” to a model of “stuff learned.” Because increasingly the world does not care what you know. Everything is on Google. The world only cares, and will only pay for, what you can do with what you know."

"Therefore, we have to get beyond the current system of information and delivery — the professorial “sage on the stage” and students taking notes, followed by a superficial assessment, to one in which students are asked and empowered to master more basic material online at their own pace, and the classroom becomes a place where the application of that knowledge can be honed through lab experiments and discussions with the professor." 

Check it out at http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/06/opinion/friedman-the-professors-big-stage.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&_r=0

 

fun + fast = How to tie a bow tie

Here is a funny, brief video lesson on how to tie a bow tie, with of course a bigger message. The instructor is Jesse tyler Ferguson from Modern Family. How many times have you seen content like this turned into a 20 minute lesson? For so many topics fun + fast is a great formula. 

 

 

12 Cognitive Processes of Learning

I've followed Roger Schank (retired professor, consultant, education revolutionary) for many years and have read a couple of his books Coloring Outside the Lines and Lessons in Learning, e-Learning, and Training, along with countless articles, blog posts, etc. His recent blog post Teaching Minds: How cognitive science can save our schools inspired my latest cartoon the 12 Cognitive Processes of Learning . . . Click on the image to see a larger version of the cartoon. 

Instructional Designers - Exercise your Creativity

I've done enough instructional design over the years to know that occasionally when you are looking at content like SEC Rules and Regulations Updates you sometimes get a creative mental block on how to present the information. As actor/comedian John Cleese says . . . "Creativity is not a talent, it is a way of operating." 

In an effort to help pump up your creativity/imagination, I put some tips from folks like John Cleese, Dan Pink, Scott McCloud, Pixar, Seth Godin, Hugh MacLeod into a learning toon . . . Click the image to see a larger version of the cartoon and the resources supporting the information.

 

Also, here are a couple of good video clips on creativity to check out . . . 

John Cleese on Creativity (36 mins)

 

Daniel Pink: Exercise Creativity at Your Job (36 mins)

 

 

70:20:10 by Charles Jennings

CQ + PQ > IQ

“IQ - intelligence quotient - still matters, but CQ and PQ - curiosity quotient and passion quotient - matter even more. I live by the equation CQ + PQ > IQ. Give me a kid with a passion to learn and a curiosity to discover and I will take him or her over a less passionate kid with a high IQ every day of the week.” -- Thomas Friedman, The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century

Learning Obesity

We all know that the US has a fat problem, with many Americans overweight or obese. We take in too many calories, eat food that has little nutritional value, and don't do enough to use up, or burn those calories.

The same problem is happening with learning programs within most corporate learning organizations. I call it the "All You Can Eat Learning Buffet!"

Over-eating happens when you take in more calories than you need. If I need a certain amount of calories per day to sustain me, and I take in more than I need, even if the food is healthy it turns to fat that my body won't use. It makes me sluggish and slow. Over-teaching occurs when we pile more content on a learner's plates than they need to perform their job. If a learning activity isn't immediately relevant and doesn’t directly help a learner perform their job better, the learner will not retain the content and the learning turns to fat, regardless of how good the content is. Well, you say, the body stores fat for future use doesn't it? It does, but it is difficult for your body to access it and use it efficiently. And you don't need 60 pounds of extra fat hanging around. Trying to access learning that was ingested long ago is equally inefficient. 

We all know that eating 4-5 small healthy meals per day is better than eating 3 big meals. Your body processes the food more efficiently. Learning is the same. By giving learners small "bite-sized" learning nuggets, when they are hungry, they can easily digest the food and use it immediately. Whipping up these tasty learning bites can be easy. You don't want to go out to eat at restaurants for every meal when your house is filled with great food, which is what happens when learners have to wait for the learning organization to "cook" a full course. Every organization has untapped knowledge, wisdom, and experience that sits in the pantry unused. The learning organization should focus on empowering the company's experts to quickly whip up small healthy knowledge snacks at home, and efficiently share these snacks with learners. Make dining out at the restaurant a special occasion. And don't feel the need to feed everyone. If 50 people need a learning snack, why make a meal for 150? Feed the fewest number of people the least amount of relevant learning snacks, but do so as quickly as possible so the food stays warm. 

What if a snack isn't enough to curb a learner's appetite? Some people are hungrier than others, and want to explore the content further, so beyond the sustaining snack, give them the ability to dig deeper into the content to quench their appetite for more.

Finally, after many learning organizations force feed learners the all you can eat buffet, they then have them stick a finger down their throats otherwise known as taking an assessment. Do you really need to regurgitate everything that you just learned? Let's try to keep our food down and remember that the most important assessment is whether the learner's performance has improved after the learning experience.