Category Archives: Blog

Literate: Skilled in using communication tools

Leave a reply

Literacy is from a Latin word meaning, “One who knows the alphabet.” From the beginning, it referred to someone who could read and write. As communication technologies have developed, the word has been applied to each new medium. “Visual Literacy” goes back at least to the 1940s, for instance. I would extend literacy from “knowing the alphabet” to mean “knowing how to use the tools of communication.”

As new media–new communication tools–appear and improve, their value will continue to change. Value, of course, is also situational. YouTube is a tremendous educational tool. It’s much less valuable, perhaps, in creating group communications. The exact opposite might be said of Second Life, or blogs or fora.

As I wrote in my paper, I find the very concept of trying to weigh one medium against another to be inherently incorrect, unless the situation is clearly defined and hard data available.

Keys

Approach to literacy

2 Replies

I’ve been asked to reflect on some readings in educational philosophy and respond to this assessment, “The distinctive contribution of the approach to literacy as social practice lies in the ways in which it involves careful and sensitive attention to what people do with texts, how they make sense of them and use them to further their own purposes in their own learning lives.”

First, though, I want to give my immediate reaction on reading the quoted sentence itself. I object to the idea that one can, “.. approach … literacy as social practice …” No. Literacy is a capability present in individual humans. It is more complex than its general usage, clearly. It is not a binary “Yes, she is literate,” or “No, he is not literate.” But it has a perfectly valid defined meaning that shouldn’t be hijacked to mean something like “fluency in social interactions.” (It is perhaps difficult for someone whose background is in the hard sciences and computers to react fairly to a treatment like the above, which owes more to the humanities.) It can certainly be extended to incorporate more than “the decoding of written texts” and I can appreciate that usage at least as a metaphor. It does not refer to “social practice.”

The first reading is from New Literacies: Everyday Practices and Social Learning (Lankshear and Knobel, 2011). The very title, of course, says that I will disagree with the authors about at least one thing. Niggling about word-meanings aside, the authors have clearly both researched heavily and thought deeply about these matters.

In the first chapter of their book, Lankshear and Knobel review the history of “literacy” as a topic of (childhood) education. It’s a very left-politics-influenced viewpoint, blaming the problems of the illiterate on a lack of class consciousness in a startlingly Marxist manner. They review the work of Paulo Freire, presenting as astonishing his integration of (textual) literacy into the rest of the curriculum. To this reader, it is jarring to read sentences like, “Within Freire’s approach to promoting literacy, then, the process of learning literally to read and write words was an integral part of learning to understand how the world operates socially and culturally in ways that produce unequal opportunities and outcomes for different groups of people.” That’s not about literacy at all.

There is also some implied criticism of non-Marxists, as in the description of “Literacy, economic growth, and social well-being” (pages 7 and 8), which refers dismissively to (essentially) non-socialist figures, notably by the use of scare quotes on page 8.

This introductory chapter ends up being primarily a summary of the history of how various people, organizations, and governments treated the concept of “Literacy” through the Twentieth Century. It consciously makes no effort to evaluate the validity of any proposition, presumably because this will be undertaken in later chapters. I might question why the authors chose not to mention that certain ideas are or were controversial (e.g. the Common Core), at the very least.

In Chapter 5, Lankshear and Knobel discuss “Blogs and Wikis.” As both a blogger myself and a longtime follower of blogs, I found the treatment to be both accurate and comprehensive, based on my own memories and readings. Of course, since I am reading the 2011 edition, it’s interesting to see some of the predictions be wrong, e.g. Technorati’s cited statement that ” … the lines between blogging, microblogging … and social networking are disappearing …” It turns out that Twitter, WordPress, and Facebook are still quite distinct, although admittedly Tumblr does emulate some functions of all 3.

Page 144, interestingly, argues that blogging is extremely flexible, presumably in comparison to other media or communication methods … but all their examples of its flexibility apply to the original meaning of literacy: reading and writing text in general. In the taxonomy that I am familiar with, blogs would be a subset of text–a very flexible one, certainly, but not quite as flexible as the superset, text itself. Again, I think my personal idiosyncrasies are showing: as a one-time biology teacher, I tend to think in hierarchical categories when classifying anything, by analogy to Kingdom-Phylum-Class.

I’m also trained, as a scientist, to distrust anecdotes. The authors spend many pages analyzing posts and comments on one particular blog and using them to illustrate what they believe to be general trends or tendencies in blogging. This of course is not presented as evidence (the authors are not in this chapter trying to prove anything) but it still reads as “off” to me.

The treatment of Wikis is again, initially both accurate and detailed. Since 2011, Wikipedia has become perhaps the best-known web site after Google, so their statement that, “… wikis remain less commonly subscribed to and are less familiar to readers at large than are blogs …” is humorous even as little as 5 years later, when blogs are still read only by a minority while everyone knows Wikipedia.

Lankshear and Knobel make use of the collaborative nature of wikis to examine the concept of “online community” in an enlightening and useful manner on page 162. I do see one key item missing (perhaps it will be in a later chapter?): the idea of “online subcultures.” Wikiculture is very different from, say, Metafilter’s forums or Chat Roulette. And I still fail to see why this is “literacy.”

Finally, the authors briefly examine collaborative creative tools, using Google Docs as an example. As an older computer user, I’m surprised they do not mention the clear pre-Internet predecessors of the collaboration features they extoll, such as Microsoft Word’s change-tracking and comments features.

We were also asked to read and comment on “Digital Literacies:  A Research Briefing by the Technology Enhanced Learning phase of the Teaching and Learning Research Programme” by Gillen and Barton (authors of the quote at the top).

The authors of this publication (not a paper, not a book, not a magazine article) approach the subject in a manner much more congenial to this reader, defining terms and not stretching “literacy” to include things like awareness of social injustice. In the introduction, they take great pains to begin with the original meaning of the word, and to show how and why it has been extended, without extending it to the breaking point.

Gunther Kress then contributes an analysis of how the use of text itself has changed in the digital context, as it becomes multimodal (combined with images, video, audio, and other sensory modalities). He further discusses how these changes complicate and enrich both the reading and creation of “texts” by requiring fluency with more media types. I believe that Kress’ work may have been the most organized, useful, and valuable of the readings.

Unfortunately (in my opinion), the primary authors spend too much time on too abstract a treatment of literacy itself. That is, the programs and philosophies they discuss tend to be about digital literacy (a phrase they are fond of). In this educator’s opinion, programs that use digital tools to teach subjects are more likely to be useful to students. This approach is not quite absent from the Briefing, but it is not the focus.

It is interesting that the final part of the Briefing, a “Response” by Fred Garnett, also strikes this reader as more interesting and better-thought-out than the primary authors’ contributions. Again, Garnett is careful to relate all theoretical points to real-world experiences and his overview lists uses of Digital Literacy (though he calls them “approaches”) rather than highly abstract idealizations of specific capabilities. He follows with a simple table showing methods that could be used to teach specific skill sets to students. This is another valuable and useful essay on the topic.

In “The Educated Blogger: Using Weblogs to Promote Literacy in the Classroom”, (2005) David Huffaker considers, not the nature of digital literacy, but the use of blogging tools to promote literacy in the traditional sense of textual communication skills. He does refer to “digital fluency,” using it in much the way the previous publication used “digital literacy.”

He does a good job of summarizing what a blog is, but statements like, “Adolescents make up a large part of the community of bloggers …” are already obsolete 10 years later, when adolescents are enormously more likely to be using Instagram than Blogger. It’s interesting that the article is aimed at an audience that literally doesn’t know what a blog is, and has never read one. This is not an assumption a writer would be likely to make in 2015, in this context. The article goes to great lengths to describe many potential benefits of using blogs in education, but cites no data supporting its actual utility. The only real-world examples given of blog usage in teaching are links to blogs that are being used. No research measuring their effects is mentioned.

Finally, I read “Literacy and the new technologies in school education: Meeting the l(IT)eracy challenge?” by Durrant and Green. As a former software developer and occasional computer journalist, I was immediately attracted to an article whose title contained the initialism “IT” (Information Technology).

The introductory portion is mostly of historical interest, being over 15 years out of date. Even its predictions only reach as late as 2007.

I think the hierarchy of literacy presented in Table 1 is quite useful, though it’s too linear–virtual reality is not “less primitive” or “more advanced” than digital/multimedia/hypertext. The various items shown as separate in the table in fact shade into each other. E.g. video literacy is not separate from “multimedia” as shown in the next line.

In general, the paper seems to be trying to provide a common vocabulary and a mental model for teachers to use as more information technology is introduced into their classrooms. It does not appear to contain specific suggestions for implementation or teaching. When a suggestion is made, it is always couched in terms of extreme abstraction, as in this sentence: “This means putting the emphasis firmly and clearly on authentic meaning-making and meaningful, appropriate action within a given community of practice.” It is notable that Durrant and Green never give specific examples of how to carry out their extremely indistinct mandates.

Looking at the readings as a whole, I have these reactions:

  • Technology, and 21’st Century culture, change too rapidly for the previous model of academic publishing, or previous models of teacher training. Even in something only 5 years old, both technology and culture have moved on enough to reduce the paper’s impact.
  • All the readings are aimed at classroom teachers of primary and secondary students. While I have taught science at the secondary level, 25 years of my career have been (and I hope, the remainder of it will be) devoted to the training of adult employees by large industrial businesses (and Soldiers of the United States Army). There are most certainly technical literacy-related problems in that area, and they are not addressed by these authors.
  • The enormous majority of the material seems to assume “traditional” classroom-and-one-teacher settings. Little mention is made of self-paced online learning, distance learning, or on-demand learning.

Coming full circle to the Gillen and Barton quote above, the closing phrase strikes me as most relevant: “… use them to further their [the students’] own purposes in their own learning lives” None of the four readings, at least to my perception, really dealt with the students “own” purposes. They implicitly assume that the teacher selects the purpose for their pupils. This can be the right attitude in a scholastic setting, but in a business setting students tend to set their own priorities and this aspect of the topic was not dealt with.

I am now very tempted to write my own overview of the topic, dealing with it from a current perspective and a scientist’s viewpoint.

Social Media vs. Social Learning

Leave a reply

I’m a huge believer in social learning. Social media, not so much.

To lay my cards on the table: I was using the Internet to communicate before Tim Berners-Lee ever came up with the World Wide Web. Back in those days we used “newsgroups” to have our asynchronous group conversations. I learned a huge amount from newsgroup participants.

From Facebook, MySpace, LiveJournal, and Tumblr … almost nothing.

The technical term for people like me is “curmudgeon”. We think the old days were better and the old ways were superior.

I don’t think that about everything, but I miss the heyday of newsgroups and find Facebook and its kin irritation.

All that personal stuff is irrelevant. Objectively, when creating a learning environment in the 201x’s, we must have a social media component, simply because so much of communication between people these days uses those media. So what is their role here in IULHD?

Mostly communication: announcements, communicating with non-students, scheduling non-company events (e.g. an Open House), and so forth. In a corporate environment, services like Facebook and Twitter are just too open. Information about our internal processes and procedures and such are confidential and must not be on those services.

Broadening the definition: social media (as opposed to social media services) like blogs and scheduled web shows and Yammer can be incredibly useful for a community like this. Web shows would tie in the video we covered in our last unit (along with the podcast, a medium I personally like a lot), while blogging allows for easy, fast publication and easy, painless subscriptions to information feeds. That’s where I plan to put  most of my emphasis. (In fact, in the real world we roll out a weekly web show some time early in 2015.)

How about social learning? The thing is, most current social media don’t allow what I think of as social learning: collaboration between students. In that context, I’ve found that Google Apps is a fantastic tool for certain types of learning and collaboration. The fact that two or more people can edit the same document, and see each others’ work updated on their screens in real time, is astonishingly useful. Combine with Google’s explicitly-social media (included) like Plus and Hangouts (formerly Google Talk), and you have a really excellent package. This may be the future of social media/social learning.

Moving Images – Learning From Video

Leave a reply

In the 21’st Century, video will be an inevitable component of almost any kind of learning. Current practice already uses video as an integral part of classroom training, e-learning, and just-in-time training. It lets the student observe situations and objects rather than just read or hear about them, and it exposes the students to situations and equipment that are either too dangerous or too expensive or too distant to actually bring into the classroom.

For instance, in an industrial setting video is a great way to introduce new technicians to potentially-hazardous tasks like pipe-fitting, or to walk them through a complex task like aligning the shafts of a motor and pump before they do these things hands-on. On the interpersonal skills side, recording actors is a great way to set up scenarios from “How to Coach Subordinates” to “Brainstorming” to “Ending Arguments Without Resentment”.

Videos must of course hold the audience’s attention. Based on instructional design principles, some ways to keep eyes on the material would include:

  • Keep it short. In my experience, anything over 5 minutes should have breaks in it for some interactive task. Longer videos result in MEGO.
  • Keep it changing. There are few things more boring than a video of one person talking for more than a few seconds. Introduce scene changes, use clip art, pan across a wider frame, but don’t leave the same unchanging image on the screen for too long.
  • Keep it relevant. There is an unfortunate tendency (especially among trainers who are also SMEs) to include everything they know about a subject in training materials, including video. This is especially bad because, unlike a written reference book, the student can’t as easily just skim or skip over deep background material that is not relevant to their actual day-to-day requirements. This is related to keep it short but has a different rationale.
  • Keep it professional. In an age where people grew up watching TV and online video, low production values are extremely visible to the student, and can decrease credibility. Something as simple and not-consciously-visible as lighting a scene badly can mark it on a subliminal level as “amateur” and prevent students from taking it seriously. Something as simple as adding instrumental music in appropriate places can make a viewer subconsciously class the video as “professional” and therefore important and worth paying attention to.

Video by itself rarely constitutes a full educational treatment. It will generally be mixed with some other media, often text, voice (in e-learnings), and instructor-led activities. It’s tempting to think of this as extra work for the designer and development team, but in the author’s educational philosophy, that is thinking of it backwards. Proper instructional design begins with the student’s needs and works from that to select media, not the other way around.

That said, development resources are often finite and as a practical matter, efficiency of their use is a factor. In online asynchronous automated training (CBT, e-learning), text is generally used interspersed with video segments. Ideally video is used where needed (for instance, to demonstrate something) where text (including voice-over) is used to emphasize key points and give the learner directions. Text is enormously less-expensive to add than video, so video utilization is minimized where possible.

In Instructor-Led Training (ILT), generally a resource book of some kind (student handbook, training manual, reference manual) is given to each student, containing the key points they need. Video is used as more of a supplement. The author is not defining this is as ideal (it is not) but describing the state of the current art. As usual, video being more expensive, its role tends to be limited to things which are difficult to teach in other ways.

Of course, video does raise questions about the disabled. A hearing-impaired or visually-impaired learner may not be able to properly learn from video clips. In the United States, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires reasonable accommodations to be made for disabled workers. This might include having alternate training forms for the disabled, or something as simple as closed-captioning any YouTube videos using Google’s excellent tools for that purpose, so that the hearing-impaired can fully appreciate them. A side benefit of captioning videos: the captions are searchable by Google and other search engines, making the videos easier to find.

Of course for non-YouTube videos, closed captions can and should (and for large businesses, often must) be added in any case.

This author tends to be skeptical of the need to consider different “intelligences” explicitly when designing a video. A video will inevitably stimulate or engage Gardner’s “Visual-Spatial” axis. Tautologically, including music will likewise involve the Musical axis, showing people interacting the Interpersonal, and so forth. However, as mentioned, this author doubts the relevancy of this concern given the strong and growing body of evidence that targeting “multiple learning styles” does not offer any benefit in the real world. See Learning Styles: where’s the evidence? for one example. Fitting the video to the material being trained seems far more relevant than trying to fit it to various groups of students.

Making this video reminded me of one thing about the process: it always takes much longer than you expected. Recording and editing the voice-over for this 8-minute video took over 2 hours! Just finding the clip art used probably took 4.

And it reminded me how much I enjoy it. I just wish I had more time for it.

Relativity, or how do my plans relate to existing art?

Leave a reply

(Continuing my science-themed post title habit.)

An interesting question is how these innovations will be accepted, and how these methods compare with standard operating practices (SOP) in the business today.

There are no standards.

The current situation at all the large businesses I have worked for, or benchmarked with, can be summarized as “hodge-podge”. There are several reasons for this:

  1. Most large businesses (including my own employer) are the results of mergers. They inherit bits and pieces of “Talent Development” (to quote the new name of the former American Society for Training and Development [ATD]) from their ancestors and try to combine them in a harmonious way. It’s difficult.
  2. There is no accepted standard for most industries.
  3. Top management, as mentioned in my previous blog post, often does not consider employee development a priority and as a corollary, the strongest leaders in management don’t tend to run the training/development group. Without strong leadership, efforts tend to be scattered.

(There are of course exceptions to every general statement above.)

This site is specifically considering management training. The closest thing to a “standard” would be the curricula of business groups like the American Management Association and the ATD. These groups tend to offer short (up to one week) classroom training sessions for managers, sometimes with online prework. They’ve begun to move into slight variations, like offering their standard classroom work as video conference instead of F2F.

Online courses exist at both organizations, but in my experience few large companies use them. (I’m restricting this discussion to large businesses.) They seem to cater to companies too small to have their own training departments–big companies will have their own course catalogs with curricular for particular job roles, and restrict employees from going outside the prescribed listings.

Neither organization seems that interested in innovation. It’s interesting that ATD’s “Learning Circuits” newsletter (for which I have written) was still treating web video as a new technology in 2012.

Almost any large company has a formal curriculum based on job title. Generally it’s economically stratified. That is, expensive classroom training that might require travel is restricted to senior management (VP or Director level), where lower-level managers and individual contributors are much more likely to be given less-expensive e-learning. The decision far too often is baldly based on money, as I have written, rather than effectiveness or appropriateness.

There’s also the fact that in most large organizations, various departments will independently create courses or initiatives that ignore the experts in the development field. For instance, Safety may decide to independently create a traffic accident avoidance course.

So to summarize: the standard for large companies is a lack of standardization. There are of course governmental and regulatory standards for specific areas (e.g. welding or accounting) but no overall standards for talent development of all employees at large organizations.

On a personal note, I work for a utility. Utilities tend to be very conservative, even compared to other large businesses. We don’t have the pressure to innovate in some ways that manufacturing or consumer businesses do, because our revenue is pre-set by the regulators.

Side note: some organizations are sterling exceptions to this generalization. Two very different companies, McDonald’s and Disney, do a tremendous jobs of making sure their employees know everything they need to and have rehearsed every skill before they are expected to do them for real, and have surprisingly good mentoring programs as well. As I say, though, they are the exceptions.

The use of the phrase “one-stop shop” on this site is key. It’s meant to imply that, with full executive support, the group running this site will handle all development requirements for the company, inclusive. Furthermore, it’s meant to imply that this group will have a single, straightforward philosophy that will apply across the board to all programs.

So the biggest innovation here might be to create a standard. None currently exists.

One thing this site (and the implied policies it embodies) would add to the corporate environment would be just-in-time support, which is sorely lacking at most non-aerospace companies. Another would be flexibility, allowing people to work on areas not covered in the formal curriculum. Finally, through time I would hope to add features like asynchronous video-based training and coaching for interpersonal skills, regular web seminars and tutorials, and user-created content and a social media component.

All old things are new again

Leave a reply

I kind of cheated. This site is not as experimental as something for a class titled “Learning With Emerging Technologies” should really be. It’s sort of an idealized version of the real Intranet and Extranet sites that I work on as part of my job. It isn’t the same as the real ones at my real company–it’s what those sites would be if I were in charge and had a big budget.

As such, I like to think I know how the target audience would react to this site, if it were actualized. They’d like it. Notice that I’ve gone out of my way not to exclude anyone. You like classroom learning? It’s available for many skills but expensive. You prefer online training? Available through the LMS. You’re an autodidact? We have lots of research materials here. You have an immediate crisis and need just-in-time support. We can do that. I plan to add links to realtime coaching as I have time.

Traditionally, managers were trained in two ways:

OJT: On-the-job training was key. It was essentially “apprenticeship for managers” (at big corporations). New supervisors would be mentored by senior ones, and as each was promoted that relationship would ideally continue.

Classroom Training: for certain items, especially more academic ones (accounting/finance) or technical (pivot tables in Excel) people would be sent to classes.

What I’m hoping to add is a wider variety of offerings. Both OJT and classroom training are indispensable and vital, but they are not sufficient and they aren’t the answer to all skill deficits. Big Business has recognized the economic efficiency of what I’ll call “second generation e-learning”, which is very largely just transferring the programmed learning of the last generation to electronic media. What will come next will be more realistic and flexible simulations including virtual environments, plus full exploitation of 21’st Century communications technology ranging from Voice Over IP (VOIP) telephone to near-free video conferencing to blogs and podcasts and IMs and whatever comes next.

The big challenge for many if not all business training initiatives like this, is the skepticism of upper management. One thing that isn’t new: we trainers tend to be perceived as a pure expense, and it’s very tempting to cut us before “operational” elements of the company whenever the stockholders need a few extra dollars.