Ego and learning II

Reflecting quietly on the events of the weekend as I scooted in to work this morning, I returned to the idea of ego and learning. When typing the title into blogger it transpired I had written on the subject before, which only goes to show that I probably only have about seven ideas in total. Scanning my RSS Feeds once at work, I came across a nice piece by Lucy Kellaway on work at school vs work at work which added to the thought.

Yesterday I was helping my niece with her revision whilst she bounced on the trampoline with my daughter. Inadvertently we may have stumbled upon a nice way to reinforce learning. She was having fun, as was my daughter and the revision didn't seem to hurt too much. She was suitably distracted but not preoccupied.

My niece is spectacularly intelligent but also spectacularly and perversely lazy . She will devote superhuman effort into avoiding having to exert herself or actually think. This is always amusing to me as I resolutely resist telling her the answer until I believe she has really searched hard for it.

Her first approach to any homework task will always be ask you to tell her the answer, which she then immediately forgets as in her head the task is finished (the converse to the Zeigarnik effect). If you don't tell her, she will guess rather than think and try to read your reaction to see if she is right (in the interests of fairness my four year old daughter does this too as do most children). Again if you concur she will immediately forget. It is interesting that when she guesses she is quite happy to be wrong and will simply guess again.

I often deploy the Chris Tarrant defence to this strategy and ask for her "final answer". She will then vacillate and beg for the answer. Then and only then will she think. When she has given an answer to the question and it transpires that she was wrong, she will immediately say, "I knew that" when she clearly didn't.

I find it interesting that multiple guessing and being wrong doesn't affect her self image or ego at all. She doesn't feel at all bad about it or try to justify when wrong because it cost her nothing. But when she has put some effort into the task and still gets it wrong she feels the need to reshape and justify.

All this makes me think more about testing and how children acquire their reactions to tests which are often set for a lifetime thereby inhibiting future learning. I would like to know more about this...

Taking another risk...

I have long believed that being happy and healthy at work is dependant upon being in the right job. I also believe, and here I am at odds with a large number of people, that your mental health at work also depends on your job allowing you to be as close to your REAL SELF for as much of the time as possible.

Unfortunately much of work is immensely dysfunctional and does not reward this type of behaviour. Indeed it tends to reward those who can dissemble the most. Fortunately, I have a job that I love most of the time. Moreover, I have long since accepted that I would rather be myself or something close to it than pretend to be someone else in order to achieve global domination.

With this in mind, I thought I would further blur the boudaries between life and work (remember that Freud said, "Love and work") by reflecting on the biggest thing to happen in my life for some time.

Last week my wife died after 11 years fighting cancer.

I am not looking for sympathy, I already have more than enough. This is a learning blog. But this is, I think, a good time to reflect on what I have learned from Jelena in the 13 years that I was lucky to have known her.

• Persistance tends to trump talent.
• The English have got their attitudes to friendship completely arse about face - we are nicest to strangers and rudest to our closest friends. As a result we often doubt that we are loved and therefore lack sufficient confidence to take risks in life.
• Whatever you do, take some risks. They don't have to be big ones but if you don't take any, you won't learn anything new.
• Passion is a good thing. I remember Jelena jumping up and down with glee and clapping the first time she provoked me to red faced rage. That was the point where she believed there was hope for me.
• Anger is not a bad thing. Particularly if you recognise it and deal with it.
• Curiosity is perhaps the most underrated virtue in the world. People who ask questions, learn things and are remembered by those of whom they ask.
• Cultivate those who love you. Ignore those who don't. Otherwise you'll waste your time on people who are not going to help you much.
• Don't accept being taken for granted. Challenge if you think you have been short changed.
• Make sure that those you love know you love them. It is the best chance you can give them in life.

In memory of Jelena, my biggest fan.

Retail therapy - history teaches us nothing

Yesterday I was talking to a friend who runs his own training business and we were comparing notes/moans about the current state of the economy. He then told me that he was in the process of doing due dilligence on a small company he was buying.

"What fun", I replied

"Yes", he said, "Retail therapy always works"

Then a penny dropped. What if the captains of industry were no different from the rest of us? When they are feeling low, instead of going out and buying a new handbag or a nice suit or a trolley load of chocolate, they go and buy a company?

Economists have long known that companies making acquisitions often overpay because the people making the acquisition want the kudos that goes with it.

Fred Goodwin's acquisition of ABN AMRO for the Royal Bank of Scotland last year or any of the other recent over leveraged mergers are just a larger equivalent of you taking your credit card and going mad in Selfridges.

When we will ever learn?

Note to self - RSS feeds are a healthy mental breakfast

I learned quite a few things yesterday. My RSS feeds have been piling up in Google reader and I haven't quite had the strength to deal with them. But I gave myself 10 minutes or so to tackle a few of them and found energy in doing them.

I particularly enjoyed Tim Harford's piece in the FT on the collapse of macroeconomics. When I was living in Russia in the 1990's there was a marvellous quote that I am afraid I cannot attribute that, "History was closed for refurbishment". I think the same is true of economics at the moment. Tim's piece immediately took me on a tour of Wikipedia to look up "non linear stochastic general equilibrium" which in turn lead me to the "Lucas critique" which essentially states that you cant use theories drawn from historical data to make policy recommendations to government. It's no use looking at how the game has been played in the past to suggest how changing the rules might affect it as the players will adjust depending on the interpretation of the new rules.

That seems likes a very elegant way to put a large number of civil servants and academics out of a job.

Anyway my point is that this 10 minutes lead me to some interesting things which enthused me. I was subsequently more energised for an interesting meeting I had with some guys from Google which in turn lead to a number of interesting ideas.

All from 10 minutes spent on RSS feeds in the morning.

Treasure Hunt Learning

Prompted by George's response to my post last week, it occurred to me that I have never blogged about how we can and should be shaping the learners of the future.

Whilst the philosophical shift in many governments' attitudes to education which moved in the 1990s towards a more interventionist and "evidence based" approach was needed (in the UK at least the average quality of teaching had declined), I am hoping that Ed Balls's recent scrapping of SATs for 14 year olds is recognition that the pendulum has swung too far towards a culture of measurement.

As business has known for years and governments should have learned by now, people respond to the figures that they know that management are looking at. If Doctors can earn more for giving flu jabs to asthma sufferers, they will; if teachers are rewarded for delivering students with 5 A-C grade GCSEs including English and Maths, that is what they will do.

The trouble is that so much time is taken preparing students for the tests that young people are no longer taught to learn. By spoonfeeding our children we risk making them mentally obese.

But it is not as simple as returning to a false memory of the halcyon days of education where all learning was a joyful treasure hunt without end. Whilst is is true that, "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it" it is equally true that there are "Lies, damned lies and statistics" and you will get the answer to the question you ask, not the question that you think you have asked.

"In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad." Friedrich Nietzsche

Whilst I agree with Nietzsche that too many cooks often spoil the broth, I don't share his miserablist sentiment entirely. I still believe that it is still possible to retain the joyful spirit of discovery in learning present in a treasure hunt but at the same time have accountability through assessment that is both light in touch but also useful and relevant.

I Tweet Therefore I Am

Apologies to Descartes for the title of this post but I was chastised by a colleague for not Tweeting the other day despite having set up an account last June. My trouble with Twitter is that I have been unable to see the benefit of it. It strikes me as narcissistic (an interesting post on the Guido Fawkes political blog on the subject made reference to a Times article, which underlined my feelings). I explained this to my critic and suggested that he might be better off doing his job than having a pop at me for my lack of tweets. His response was that Tweeting is very narcissistic (implying that there might be little wrong with narcissism) but a lot of companies, celebrities and politicians found it a marvellous tool.

But Narcissus starved to death while looking at his own reflection...

Can Twitter be a tool which enhances productivity as opposed to a distraction which destroys it? I'm not sure.

By restricting tweets to 140 characters or less, Twitter encourages brevity, and probably clarity. It also appears to generate fast and constructive discussions in communities that form around certain threads. So I feel that it should be a great learning tool I just can't see it yet.

There can only be one way to find out and that is to try it. So we have set up a Reed Learning Twitter Account and I have set up a personal one. From the Reed Learning one we will try to produce learning tweets on how to improve aspects of your life at work. From my own account I will try and distill some of the things that we are thinking about.

No more learners

Jay Cross posted an interesting video blog the other day about changing the way we look at learning. He used the analogy of a preacher guiding a congregation, given them direction but talking down to them from a pulpit as representative of the old forms of learning. He then introduced the story of Hans Mondermann a Dutch Traffic Management expert who removed road signs to improve road safety as an indication of the new.

Mondermann's idea on traffic management is simple. To make roads safer, you must first make them more dangerous. Road users have become lazy and overdependent on signs and signals to tell them what to do. By removing most of the road signs and markings you make the road users uncertain. Result, they pay more attention to their surroundings, other road users and pedestrians.

As usual, I agree with Jay on the need to reduce our dependency on overly directed spoon feeding in education and training in favour of teaching people to think and learn for themselves. But I don't think it is as easy as just removing the signs or preachers.

I risk upsetting a lot of people here but Jay introduced the religious analogy. The reason the directed form of learning persists is the same reason that organised religion continues to flourish. Many people like to be told what to do and in some cases how to think. It provides security and certainty.

Removing the road signs only works if people have already developed the expertise to evaluate what is presented to them (be it whilst driving their car, whilst doing their job or living their lives). Hence the reasons that Mondermann's ideas have only been implemented in a few areas of the more civilized countries in Europe .

I have written before about George Siemens's insightful comment earlier in the year about information now being, "validated at the point of consumption, not creation". The trouble is I don't think it is yet. We are still too credulous and if we simply remove the prophets and the road signs, nature abhoring a vacuum as she does, they will simply be replace by other agents who will tell us what to do.


However it may be simply that Jay is in sunny Berkeley, California and I am in rain and wind lashed London so my outlook is not so bright. Perhaps I should just watch Sugata Mitra's life affirming video of how slum children in India taught themselves to use a computer without any outside help and not be so negative.