If What You Mean Is the Opposite of the Thing, then Yes...

This month's Learning Circuits Big Question is:

DOES THE DISCUSSION OF "HOW THE BRAIN LEARNS" IMPACT YOUR ELEARNING DESIGN?

I think there is some further parsing that's needed in the question, but in my case the answer is a simple yes, but not in the way that's implied. The details are problematic.

In instructional design there are some established best practices when breaking up content into appropriate pieces, how to handle visual presentation, the quality of narrators, as well as other considerations. All of these and others are based on responses human audiences have given to instructional events and their design. While none of the above should be taken as "gospel", many of these best practices are generated from experience and research in evaluating learning programs and their effectiveness. To this end we have discovered at least some of how the brain works (or rather, behaves), and we as professionals incorporate these success-minded considerations as we design and develop solutions.

The best practices are, at least in some cases, not directly derived from direct application of learnings from research on the brain itself. In this sense many of us are not using knowledge of brain functioning but rather knowledge of human behavior. Clark Quinn expresses a somewhat similar point of view. After all, we got pretty far into the twentieth century without knowing a whole lot about how our brains learn, and our more primitive instructional strategies were fruitful in some significant way. This is of course not to excuse or endorse bad or traditional strategies, but simply to point out that we may not know enough yet to say we're applying the concept deeply. And that's my main point in answering this month's query.

Jason McDonald explains some of my sentiment as well. I put some heavy stock in Jason's point about the disconnect between what science has actually found, and what is communicated by journalists in periodicals. Not to paint too broadly here, but scientific results are consistently mis-represented/mis-communicated in the press. An assessment of the average person's understanding of evolutionary theory's basic thrust is enough to confirm that.

My question in response to the Big Q: Do we know enough about the brain to really say we are applying the fruits of brain-based research? At the risk of sounding like a denier of the evidentiary discoveries thus far, I do not think we know enough yet for the actual science of brain functioning to impact WLP work. I think what we have gained from pure practice and evaluation, and from other sciences such as human psychology, has been and may be enough for a while.

Management and the Potential for Performance Improvement

TDblog had a posting last week citing figures from a survey conducted by Right Management about the frequency of career discussions between employees and their managers. More than a third – thirty-seven percent - of the 683 respondents reported that they never hold such discussions with their manager. Thirty percent reported doing so once a year, and around twenty-eight percent reported having career discussions two or more times annually. The numbers appear to indicate some pretty stark realities. The article however seems to indicate that only one question was asked: “How often do you engage in career discussions with your manager?” I see a potential problem here, in that the survey is remarkably short. How is the term “career discussion” defined in this survey? It appears fairly self-explanatory, butI would appreciate more detail and clarity.

Taking the results as given, it appears that several companies could be missing out on some significant performance improvement opportunities, especially if almost two thirds of them never talk to their people. A promising number however is the twenty-eight percent that have at least two discussions per year with managers. Granted this is barely more than a quarter of the companies polled according to the results given. However, pulling from a relatively small group of people this seems promising. What we don’t know is the potential size variance in the polled companies. Secondly, at what level within each company were the respondents?

The general takeaway of this story is the importance of feedback. This is Gilbert BEM Cell 1-level stuff. Thirty-seven percent of respondents is (apparently) receiving no feedback at all about their career. This contributes to wider systemic issues in a company, as employees just keep humming along doing what they’re doing and not sharing or building networks and skill sets internally to increase performance. I will have to seek more research on this question to determine the accuracy of these numbers, but in this tense economic climate, it’s as important as ever for management to keep close ties with employees and to develop resources internally, and in many cases externally with former employees.

The iPhone and mLearning

DailyTech posted a story this evening about a Forrester Research report looking into the take-up of the iPhone in the corporate space. Heretofore Apple's entry into the smart phone market has been seen as more consumer than prosumer, and as DailyTech points out, the iPhone still has many counts against it for many corporations. My most recent client had and continues to have many of the same issues cited in this story about allowing the iPhone in, regardless of how much the employees are clamoring for it.

Nonetheless, the story discusses the coming improvements for the iPhone in OS release 3.0. But the interesting part is the part about three corporations that did adopt the iPhone and allow its use in the workplace:

What the companies discovered was that by giving the employees what they wanted, the employees were more motivated to explore the phone on their own. At all three companies, active wiki communities to troubleshoot problems had been created and managed by employees. This in turn made interactions with IT less frequent and more positive, cutting cost and hassle.

This is a big deal. Through application of a dynamic tool, non-IT employees were able to solve their own problems and share knowledge as a collective. On some level it was surely already feasible that this might happen, given the preponderance of apps available for the iPhone, particularly those dealing with social networking and other Internet 2.0 fixtures like wikis. I'm definitely interested to know more details about these cases from these corporations.Time will tell, but I think the writing is already on the wall, and things are looking good for the iPhone. The smart phone wars are going to heat up to be sure, and I think this means nothing but good for the future of training and performance improvement.

InformationWeek also closes with exactly what I'm thinking: Imagine your computer as being your smart phone in the not-so-distant future. Is it possible we will see the day when we carry everything with us in a pocket supercomputer, and simply plug into hardware located wherever we go?