Category: learning

Choices in Learning and Teaching: More Humane? More Engaging?

Last week I blogged a little piece on the power of inviting a human being into a learning or doing experience. The human side of it. Today I finally read the post from Ryan Tracey that a number of folks have mentioned, Collateral damage | E-Learning Provocateur.

Ryan, after acknowledging the lack of evidence that supports the theory or learning styles (yay!), brings some nuance into the conversation and tackles the contextual issues around learner preferences.

If someone is in a classroom or a job-mandated training session, they will take what you give them. They may not be happy, but the in-room environment creates more pressure to conform.

In independent, self-driven learning, we hew more to our own personal preferences. Like Ryan, I cringe when I have to learn through videos, not just because so many are bad, but I’m a fast reader and can pinpoint what I want more efficiently. I certainly CAN learn with videos, I just prefer NOT to.

Creating a space for choice seems a pretty humane thing to do. I am more likely to follow through, to say YES, if you give me the respect as an adult learner and, where practical, some choice. I’ve observed this increases engagement over time (mine and others’). I wonder if there is any data to support this?

I think back to the JIBC/UdG Guadalajara group last month and even the conversations around Adroid vs. IOS, even without their religious zeal, reflect that driving impulse to have some level of choice, both as instructors/teachers/trainers and as learners.

P.S. I enjoyed the images in Ryan’s post as well!

P.S.S. The network and Ryan have circled back and now we know the image is the work of  Allie Brosh at Hyperbole and a Half: http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com – Allie, your work rocks!

The Power of Ordinary Practices – Quotes Worth Amplifying

Well, this seems to be a fitting follow up to my last blog post.

Amabile: I believe it’s important for leaders to understand the power of ordinary practices. Seemingly ordinary, trivial, mundane, day-by-day things that leaders do and say can have an enormous impact. My guess is that a lot of leaders have very little sense of the impact that they have. That’s particularly true of the negative behaviors. I don’t think that the ineffective team leaders we studied meant to anger or deflate the people who were working for them. They were trying to do a good job of leading their teams, but lacked an effective model for how to behave.

So, I would say sweat the small stuff, not only when you’re dealing with your business strategy, but with the people whom you’re trying to lead. I would encourage leaders, when they’re about to have an interaction with somebody, to ask themselves: Might this thing I’m about to do or say become this person’s “event of the day”? Will it have a positive or a negative effect on their feelings and on their performance today?codrawing2

Amabile also calls out the rich, internal emotional lives that we all have, and how that influences our working together and collaboration.

One, people have incredibly rich, intense, daily inner work lives; emotions, motivations, and perceptions about their work environment permeate their daily experience at work. Second, these feelings powerfully affect people’s day-to-day performance. And third, those feelings, which are so important for performance, are powerfully influenced by particular daily events.

This again has resonance with last week’s #UdGAgora work where we explored the role of empathy in course design. The red threads are really showing up today. Maybe this will help me start pulling together a full post about The Agora. Alan has already started the “reflective ball” rolling.
Source: The Power of Ordinary Practices — HBS Working Knowledge

Confusiasm/Confusiasmo at the UdGAgora

Many years ago at a KM4Dev community meeting, Carl Jackson coined the word “confusiasm,” a combination of confusion and enthusiasm. This has become a way of being for me. It represents, quite simply, learning in action.

We used this concept at the University of Guadalajara Diplomate program on mobile tech for engagement the last two weeks in Guadalajara with the Agora project. There is much more I want to write, but at the minimum, I want to start curating and sharing the artifacts. Here is the first one, a Storify of the Confusiasm Twitter thread. (Edited 2/3/2020 – link is dead because Storify is dead. 🙁 )

https://storify.com/NancyWhite/confusiasm-confusiasmo-at-the-udgagora

Learning is everywhere — From Lilia on Mathemagenic

Too good not to share. Go read it. And look at her son’s amazing Kale photo. I’m not reproducing it here to tease you into clicking into her post. I’m evil that way. 😉

Learning doesn’t necessary take a lot of time. Mainly it takes a mindset of recognising learning opportunities everywhere and going for them. And a bit of practice – of observing, improvising and not making a duty out of play 🙂

via Learning is everywhere — Mathemagenic.

Ford Foundation, Open Access and Really Sharing Knowledge

inandoutKnowledge sharing can be enabled or blocked based on organizational policies and infrastructure. This is essential in sectors that are (or claim to be) for the public good, like non profits, donors and foundations, NGOs and educational institutions. I was happy to read that the Ford Foundation has added Creative Commons approach to all their work, joining the Open Society Foundations, the Packard Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the CGIAR and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Ford Foundation Expands Creative Commons Licensing for All Grant-Funded Projects

(New York) – The Ford Foundation announced today that it is adopting an open licensing policy for all grant-funded projects and research to promote greater transparency and accessibility of materials. Effective February 1, grantees and consultants will be required to make foundation-funded materials subject to a Creative Commons license allowing others, free of charge and without requesting permission, the ability to copy, redistribute, and adapt existing materials, provided they give appropriate credit to the original author.

via Ford Foundation Expands Creative Commons Licensing for All Grant-Funded Projects / News from Ford / Newsroom / Ford Foundation.

Walking the talk is harder than publishing the policy. Some people still worry that setting their knowledge free will hurt them. So we need to look at how certain professions are rewarded (or punished) when it comes to sharing intellectual property. For example, our way of educating and validating researchers and scientists (“publish or perish”) still pushes people to withhold (particularly data sets) rather than “set free.” I’d be very interested if any of you have research/data that links the benefits of sharing knowledge to professional advancement. I think we either have some myths to bust, or we have serious infrastructure changes needed.

This is resonant with another article shared with me today, from the Stanford Review on the role of including gender perspective for research breakthroughs.  Being open allows access to thinking of others, to diverse perspectives which then inform our work, decisions and results.

Doing research wrong costs lives and money. Ten drugs were recently withdrawn from the U.S. market because of life-threatening health effects – eight of these posed greater threats for women.

Clearly, doing research right has the potential to save lives and money, and this is the goal of the Gendered Innovations in Science, Health & Medicine, Engineering, and Environmentproject directed by Stanford history Professor Londa Schiebinger.

With an international team of more than 60 scientists, engineers and gender experts, Schiebinger has explored how gender analysis can open doors to discovery.

“Once you start looking, you find that taking gender into account can improve almost anything with a human endpoint – stem cell research, assistive technologies for the elderly, automobile design, transportation systems, osteoporosis research in men, and natural language processing,” Schiebinger said.

Open our databases. Open our practices. Open our minds. Open possibilities.