These are the 10 most important lessons I learned in 2010.
What’s on your list?
1.The brain is hardwired by evolution for learning.
2. We spend a lot of time and money disabling the hardwired learning process.
3. Learning is a social experience – We learn the best when we learn with a group of people who also need to learn what we need to learn.
4. Online learning is inherently an anti-social experience.
5. Social Media (SoMe) and Social Networking (SoNe) can help enrich and enable the online learning experience .
6. Learning in a business environment in the 21st Century needs to focus on know-how more than knowledge.
7. We need to flip online learning – especially virtual classes – upside down so they focus on performance, instead of a passing score.
8. Need to know (cognitive information) is best transferred using asynchronous learning technology.
9. Need to know-how (behavioral information) is best transferred using synchronous and social learning technology.
10. We ignore most of what we have learned about how we learn. We let habit rule, instead of adopting and adapting what we now know about enabling the learning process.
I’ve had these words to the wise pinned above my desk for awhile. I can’t remember where they were discovered. I’m not even sure who “Schuster” is. I just know he is a very wise human being.
I wanted to share them since I think they have a lot to do with learning. And time. That seems to be my definition of wisdom. Learning about life that lasts more than one lifetime for more than one person. Perhaps that’s why I like cliches so much. They capture wisdom in a few easy-to-remember words. Apple juice made from the Tree of Knowledge.
Hopefully there’s a space above your desk for these words.
May 2011 be an AMAZING year for you, filled with laughter, learning and love.
Become the world’s supreme expert in something – Schuster advises to “begin at once, at this precise moment to choose some subject, some concept, some great name or idea or event in history on which you can eventually make yourself the world’s supreme expert.”
He urges us to start a crash program immediately using the three R’s of modern education, reading, research and reflection – with the goal of establishing yourself as “one who has the most knowledge, the deepest insight and the most audacious willingness to break new ground by defining your terms and actually examining all the alternatives and consequences.”
Master the art and technique not merely of rapid reading, but creative reading and creative research – Schuster says it’s important to “learn how to use a library and how to build a home library of your own.”
He reflects how “back in 1913, high school graduates were singing the old refrain: “No more pencils, no more books, no more teacher’s saucy looks.” He points out that they were throwing away their books and saving their diplomas. He urges us to do the opposite, “Forget your diploma, or throw it away, but save your books and use them day and night.”
Learn the supreme art of getting sixty seconds out of a minute, sixty minutes out of an hour, twenty four out of a day – He reminds us that we have as much time as everyone else our age. He says to “Save it, hoard it, plug up all the leaks. If necessary, stand on the street corner, cap in hand like a mendicant, and beg all the passers-by for the seconds and minutes and hours and days they waste.”
Master the art of preparation – Do your homework (especially after your formal education). Remember the words of French chemist Louis Pasteur (1822 – 1895) who said “Chance favors the prepared mind.”
Begin now to learn the art and science of preventative medicine – In other words, take care of yourself. Exercise and eat healthy. He says we should prepare now to out-perform and outlive our doctors. He says Ralph Waldo Emerson said it best: “Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.”
Work hard, think big, and always have a dream beginning with a detailed blueprint and plan for your agenda, your priorities, your first things first – Schuster encourages us to put a firm foundation under our “castles in Spain, in the form of these step-by-step, play-by-play specifics and make your dream come true.”
Remember the following three questions: “If I am not for myself, who will be? If I am not for others, what am ‘I’? And if not now, when?” These three questions were first asked by renowned Jewish religious leader Hillel the Elder.
Work hard and opportunities will come – Schuster advises us to remember the words of noted American journalist H.L. Mencken (1880 – 1956) who said, “Most people don’t recognize opportunity when it comes along, because usually it is disguised as hard work.”
Don’t try to please everyone – Schuster counsels us to always keep in mind the maxim of U.S. editor and journalist (and the first recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for reporting), Herbert Bayard Swope (1882-1958) who said, “I can’t give you any formula for success, but I can give you a sure formula for failure – try to please everybody.”
Always remember, the time to be happy is now – The place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is to make others so.
Remember what people really want – Schuster’s last point is extremely applicable to writers who promote products and services. He says to “never forget that people never buy things or services … they buy solutions, for their problems. Your job is to help them find solutions.”
According to a recent statement by Bing, Microsoft’s search engine answer to Google, search is no longer about looking for knowledge about something. It’s about getting something done. It’s all about know-how.
According to a recent Fast Company article, “The idea behind features like this, say Bing executives, is that search is no longer simply about looking for information. It’s about getting things done: Booking reservations, buying plane tickets, researching consumer products. And Microsoft is trying to help its users get those things done as quickly as possible. It’s trying, simply put, to make search results less like a list of links and more like an app.”
So before we say goodbye to 2010, let’s say “Adieu” to The Knowledge Age and shake hands with The Know-How Era!
So what’s the problem? Well it’s kind of simple. All the tools and technology we have for learning is all still focused on knowledge, learning about something NOT learning how to do something. There’s very little built into these learning tools – from LMS to Virtual Live Classrooms – that enable practice, practice and more practice.
Everything that neuroscience and psychology, and any of the fields related to learning how we learn, all understand that to learn how to do something involves the following key elements;
Time
Practice
Failure (In a safe environment)
More Practice
And More Practice.
Learning how to actually do something means that we have adopted what we know and can do and learned enough to adapt it in a variety of real world situations. That’s what being an Expert instead of a Beginner really means.
Here’s a great and recent example: When Captain Chesley Sullenberger – called just “Sully” – rescued those 155 people on board his plane, landing it safely and improbably in the Hudson River, everyone agreed Sully was a hero. Everyone that is except Captain Sully. In his mind, he was just doing what he spent 30 years training how to do. On his own, he would often take simulator training that focused on emergencies, water landing among them.
So he was all about learning how to do something.
It calls to my mind that scene from The Matrix in which Trinity is on the roof with Morpheus and Neo. She gets programmed to expertly fly a helicopter in a matter of seconds by “jacking-in” to the database of know-how. These days acquiring that level of know-how would take years.
You can watch that scene here if you need to recall the technology. It’s very cool and I look forward to the day …
The question is how to shorten the time on that continuum between jacking-in seconds and the years of actual simulated and actual flying. And that gets us back to the initial question. If the current learning tools and technology are ‘artifacts’ from the Knowledge Age when we were all learning about something, what tools and technology can we adapt or create to really enable learning how-to do something? How do we truncate the time-to-performance between the Beginner and the Expert?
I have some ideas but I’d really like to hear yours first.
I found this surfing through cyberspace when I was looking for information on current learning research. I liked it because it distilled a lot of information into a neat 10-minute video. It also introduced me to a great new blog –aconventional – which I can add to my RSS and get my weekly personal digest.
So here’s the video and check out the blog posts. Smart, funny and spot-on.
I have given up just about anything related to play for a most enjoyable pursuit. I voraciously read, annotate, try to apply and often day and night dream about how the brain works and learns.
One of the better books – defined by the level of science and research as well as it’s readability- is a book by Gary Marcus, Kluge ..
Dr Marcus is the Director of the NYU Center for Child Language. His research, published in leading journals such as Science, Nature, Cognition, and Psychological Science, focuses on the evolution and development of the human mind. This is one of his best books to date.
If you ever wanted to find out more about why the brain works in a certain way and how it evolved and was hardwired, Kluge is a great starting point.
Here’s a piece Gary wrote for the New York Times about forgetting and remembering. Enjoy!
This is where it all happens. All that I am and will be. We’ve learned so much about how we learn and know so little. And use even less!
I love “Brain Rules” by John Medina because it translates what little we know abot how the brain learns into easy to digest and use chapters.
If you want add the current neuroscience about how the brain learns to your ability to teach any type of Knowledge Transfer to another human from birth to whenever, then please read this book and start using the lessons learned.
It seems a bit crazy to me that people who are responsible for creating educational programs for adults fail to listen and learn from the amazing work being done in the Neuroscientists and others who are discovering how we learn.
They are learning how we send ideas from our short-term to our long-term memories; why ten minutes is the maximum amount of time we can pay attention; when a lesson learned becomes part of one’s life.
… and so much more. I tried to capture some of it here. Hopefully it will shake you out of the Industrial Economy box in which all of the educational theories you hold so dear were created. To be replaced by a real understanding (and the principles, rules, methods and approaches that follow) of the miraculous ability of our brains to learn.
Chris Collison and Geoff Parcell, in their recently updated book and CD, “Learning to Fly”, have what I believe is a paradigm shifting insight into our professional lives:
“You can’t manage knowledge. Nobody can. What you can do is to manage the environment in which knowledge can be created, discovered, captured, shared, distilled, validated, transferred, adopted, adapted and applied.”
What do you think? Can we still manage knowledge, or has technology stripped the power out of our hands and given it to anyone, anytime and anywhere? And if they’re right, what new role should we take?
I’ve been giving this a lot of thought and have come to the conclusion that we need to become any or all of the following:
Knowledge Traffic Cops
Translators of Techspeak into (whatever language the non-technical folks in your country speak)
eKnowledge Librarians
Mentors
Coaches
Tutors
We are no longer the gatekeepers of knowledge.
If anything, we are the bottlenecks, the place where all the people who need to learn and to know how to do, get put into line and told when and where and how they can access what they need today, right now.
I remember Instructor Led Training programs that had waiting lists of hundreds of people who needed a certification course but had to hold off on their careers until there was an opening for them to get to the knowledge.
I think we had the impression that we ‘owned’ the knowledge … back then perhaps we did. But that’s no longer true …
I came across the following piece when I was Googling around for information about new versus old forms of learning. I thought the picture in the article was worth more than a thousand words.
It sums up the problem.
There is a pool of always and rapidly changing, ever-growing knowledge that people need to know and the “training department” or whatever name it chooses, is the bottleneck between the knowledge and the people who absolutely need to know and know how to do.
What I especially liked about this article is that it does not just list the problems, it also proposes thoughtful solutions.
When we were thinking about creating a blog, we initially had all this great stuff we wanted to share – articles, stories, parts of research papers, quotes, pictures and more. Then we stopped to think about it …
What do we provide to our customers and clients when we design and deliver education and training? Simple. Value-add. Something useful.
So we decided that what we really wanted, what would really reflect who we are and what we do, would have a purpose. And that purpose would be to provide knowledge that we have learned during years of creating education and training programs around the world.
Knowledge that moves education and training from the traditional analog Industrial Economy, to the more innovative digital Knowledge Economy.
We have seen that we can raise what we call The Corporate IQ. That means that we can improve performance, increase innovation, add real revenue to your P&L. In short, we can help make your company smarter.
And we know that in this economy – a brutal, at times downright ugly, and far and away the most competitive worldwide marketplace ever imagined – only the smartest companies will win.
So our purpose is simple. Present knowledge that adds value to what you are doing in the area of corporate education and training. Make this one of the places that you come back to again and again for ideas, examples, great links and more. A place where you can become a knowledge star.
David Grebow KnowledgeStar 