Microwave Training

• Video Recorders
• Space Invaders
• Microwave ovens

I'm old enough to remember all of these 'when they came out'. Which one did I get most excited about?

And they were impossible to use properly...
Video recorders were neat but they felt like something we were given permission to use. Like a lot of people, my first thought about video recorders was, "Where the hell have you been?" I had audio tape cassettes so why not video? They were a marketer's cynical inversion of planned obsolescence - planned novelty.

Flows but no cigar
I loved Space Invaders. When I first discovered Csikszentmihalyi's idea of Flow my first thought was of Space Invaders. I played it every chance I got.

But they could make football matches and Daleks appear in a TV screen. Why not Space Invaders? The joystick seemed like an obvious addition. (And even then I was smart enough to realise the twitchy feeling was designed to rid me of 10p pieces.) I loved Space Invaders but it seemed right to me.

Achievement unlocked!
The day we got our first video recorder, we solemnly watched an anti-climactic Battlestar Galactica. I got to work on defeating the Space Invaders like it was my birthright. When we got a microwave, I made an egg explode.

I was older and wiser when we got our first microwave oven. Wise enough to be able to see through the fairy tales of my parents. How could you cook baked beans in one minute? I heard about the vibrating water molecules and it still seemed like witchcraft.

I made my favourite 'egg on toast' and the yolk exploded in my face - to the shock and awe of my family. I had to console my slightly sulky dad when his didn't explode a mere two minutes later. We cooked everything in the house.

We'd entered the Microwave Era.

Microwave Training
Microwaves say two things to me about managing staff and helping people to learn.

• Objectives that focus on today are boring.

Learning Objectives that solemnly state, "By the end of this course/lesson/lecture" are still essentially talking about today. I want to know how my future is going to look.

• Objectives that don't focus on me are distractions.

I want to know what my new superpower is going to be. I want to know what spells I'm going to be able to cast.

Nothing else is as important as this when you're helping people to learn.

Adults, supposedly unlike children, 'need to know the reason for learning something'. This has somehow evolved into managers and trainers reading out agendas and Learning Objectives at the beginning of workshops. This is cargo cult motivation. These are cargo cult Learning Objectives, mass-produced and often 'technically' correct - but not even wrong, they're distractions at best.

Not all learning experiences can hope to as excting as a microwave oven. But they should at least try.

Bushido: The Way of Work

"I have found the essence of Bushido: to die!"

So begins Bushido: The Way of the Samurai. It's one of those aphorisms that's open to interpretation. Some people think it means 'live as if you have nothing to lose'. Others are less coherent.

Bushido: Way of the Bunchberry
More coherent is the advice my dad (and countless others since) gave me when I started my first job:

"Make yourself indispensable."

This, of course, is errant nonsense. Sorry, dad (and countless others).

Planned obsolescence
Here's a challenge for you.

Pretty much every job should have as a top-level item on the job description:

Focus on making yourself obsolete.

Find the exceptions. I don't believe there are any. This is an important thing to recognise for people whose job it is to help other people learn, including trainers. (and, of course, unReal Trainers.)

Friday was my first ever guest post at Brain-Friendly Trainer. It's a longish post on this theme about my uncle, the bestest most cluelessest teacher ever. There'll be a lot more here on this theme.

[Image: Okinawa Soba]

The biggest toolshop in the world

Last Mango Embarrassed
I'll never forget the way Joe greeted me when he came to dinner the second time:

"I noticed last time you didn't have a mango peeler, so I've brought you one."

'Last time' was watching me make chilli and mango noodles. I'd struggled with the mangos. There'd been blood and cursing.

Joe's Australian and he's spent a lot of time in East Asia. Basically, he's spent a lot more time around mangos than I have. That night was the one and only time I've ever had a mango in the house. He'd been diplomatically silent while watching me struggle with the mango. But being a thoughtful type, had worked out a solution. Now I use the mango peeler on butternut squash.

And the odd thing is, I eat a lot more ginger now...
The other thing in the picture is a ginger grater which I bought in Japan. It turns ginger into ginger puree with almost no effort. Oddly, I consider the ginger grater and the mango peeler to be 'gadgets'. Unlike, say, a 'knife' or an electric kettle.

I have some friends from Argentina who are mad about electric kettles. If you ask them the best thing about living in the UK they will tell you about kettles. They give kettles as gifts. Apparently, electric kettles aren't common in Argentina - for them it's a 'gadget'. And they use them far more than I do. For me: kettle = tea. Note that preceding punctuation (it's a full stop). But they, for example, pre-boil water when they make spaghetti. They cook with kettles and were amazed that I didn't.

Tools help fight procrastination and fear
One thing I've learned is that where there's a problem, there's probably a tool for it. Now, whenever I'm abroad, I always make a point of visiting two kinds of shop; stationers and kitchenware. (Japan is especially good for this. Tokyo is worth visiting for the stationery alone - they have rows of stationery specifically for study and memorisation, for example.)

Anyhoo.

My point is this: helping people to learn is not 'central' to the stuff of life. By definition: nobody learns for learning's sake. We're all helping people learn in order to do something. Training and education are, necessarily, a peripheral activity.

I'm not saying it's not important, it's just not central. It's a spoke rather than a hub.

Get a bigger toolkit
unReal Trainers are promiscuous. There's a lot to learn from Training the Trainer programmes and Teacher Training but, trust me on this one, it's like maths and school. For most people, the last time they'll work with a differential equation is during their final exam.

Some of the places I've been finding inspiration* over the last couple of years are:

• Game Design
• Information Architecture
• Marketing
• Economics
• User Experience (UX) and Interaction Design
• Designers
• Computer programmers
• School teachers (NOT the same as trainers)
• Lecturers and 'presenters'
• Americans (they do things differently there)

Spread yourself about a bit. The internet is the biggest toolshop in the world.

*Have I missed any? I'm sure I have. I'm going to be posting a series on all the above. And I'm taking requests in the comments and on Twitter. I'll also be running some seminars and workshops in the new year for anybody interested in helping people learn.

NB I've made a couple of sweeping statements here in, I hope, a departure from past posts. I couldn't help myself - force of habit from years working with groups. Sometimes, when you're working with groups, it's good to come out with some half-baked ideas.

Horse Sense for Trainers

Dictionary par excellence
We had an old dictionary in our kitchen, which we used for crossword puzzles, scrabble and solving arguments. One of us bought it for pennies from a second-hand shop. It had an ex-bright red leather binding, yellowing pages and minuscule type.

And it was full of curiosities.

For instance, did you know the original meaning (or, at any rate, the meaning according to our dictionary) of 'parboil' was to 'cook thoroughly'? Whats a great example of we-the-people ignoring the instructions. Anybody involved in helping people learn will recognise this as one of humanity's most fundamental behaviour patterns.

But my favourite was the definition for 'horse':

"It is self-evident what a horse is."

I wear this breath-takingly arrogant definition like a talisman. We all say things like this all the time.

Mission Statements are often ridiculed, with good reason. As the criticism goes, if you rendered them plain text, jumbled them up in a bag and then randomly assigned each company a new one, nobody would be any the wiser. Including the employees.

But they don't have to be so awful. And sometimes they can be good.*

Ill-disguised contempt for Mission Statement
I once asked a staff team to work on a Mission Statement as part of the introduction to a workshop. Big Mistake. The resultant sarcasm and the ill-disguised contempt took me back to my teenage years. And, worse still, it was my mistake. It is self-evident what a horse is. I hadn't taken the trouble to explain anything. I knew what I was doing and why. The thought I was killing time.

I asked the staff team to write down on slips of paper what their job was in fewer than fifteen words. And then, picking somebody at random to read out what they'd written. He said:

"I make sure customers feel secure and understand their rights."

Half of the group stifled giggles and smirks convinced he was not-so-subtly mocking me by parodying my corporate-babble. Unexpectedly, he took umbrage, demanding to hear what the others had written.

"We go through all the paperwork and check it's done right."

The group, it turns out, were divided neatly down the middle along these lines:

• I help customers
• I follow procedures

Who's right? Ultimately, they both were. They both did the same job, after all. But only one of them manages to avoid the problem of the self-evident horse.

The thing about assumptions is that they're difficult to spot. This is because they're assumptions. We don't talk about assumptions because we accept them with few questions - they're hidden from us. I'm not sure about the laundry list of learning objectives for learning that trainers are so keen on.

But Mission Statements I like.

*Just in case you were wondering, here's an example of a pretty good Mission Statement from - shock, horror - a government department. Even more surprisingly, it's from Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs. Yes, the taxman has values. (HT @DavidGurteen on Twitter for the image. David has a fantastic website and leads a community of people interested in Knowledge Management - which he manages to make far less scary than the term, with its daunting Capital Letters, might sound.)

Image: sskennel/Flickr



.

Classrooms, set in stone?

Natural beauty
I keep this pretty stone on my desk. I picked it up on a beach because it had a pleasingly odd shape. Later, I realised I'd caught the stone in the act.

Stone works on a different timescale to us, so catching them in the act is hard. But this isn't an ordinary stone. If you look carefully (or, if you're an avid beachcomber, you might have already noticed) you can see the unusual curves and grooves of this pebble are due to the fact that it used to be a roof tile.

Another month (year? decade?) and this tile would look wholly natural, worn down by the sea and the elements. It would have gone native.

Högertrafikomläggningen
It doesn't take long for things to become 'natural' (even learning how to hold a pen correctly won't take me that long) and people go to extraordinary lengths to justify what feels right, even at the expense of logic and sense. Visitors to the UK feel that driving on the left is 'wrong' and many have taken the trouble to tell me this - and why. Even people from Sweden have told me this.

Some of these Swedes were alive (though probably not very old) on Hagen D, which was in 1967. Day H was the day Swedes started driving on the left. Like many countries, (and this includes much of the rest of the pre-Napoleonic Code world) Sweden had thought it natural to drive on the left. Until it wasn't.

Was it an easy switch? Of course not. For example, "many older people gave up driving rather than learn to cope with the new rule of the road." There were other casualties too. Sweden's yellow road markings had to go, changed to white to avoid confusion with the old way. You can imagine the conversation, "First, they change which side we drive on, now they're changing the colour of our road markings..."

Natural Born Classrooms
Gary Woodill's webinar, The History of Classrooms as Learning Technology at first seems like a triumph of grandiose titling (something to which I'm no stranger). Classrooms as a technology? But, it turns out, classrooms are a relatively recent invention. And the reasons they were introduced weren't always positive:

". . .classrooms captured and constricted bodies in order to render them as docile subjects. Their purpose was as much disciplinary as educational"

Life moves faster than stone. It's even harder to catch it in the act, as the artificial and the man-made goes native and starts to feel natural.

Postcript
Take two groups of right-handed right-side driving people and ask the following two questions:

1. Which is your strongest hand?
2. What's more important, gearstick or steering wheel?

For group one, ask the two questions in quick succession. For group two, ask the questions 'with a knowing look'. The second group will come up with a way of avoiding Question 2 and the first group will claim that you 'cheated.' Try it.

It's not too late to save yourselves!
It's worth noting that one of the 'reasons' given for the change from left to right in Sweden was to reduce the amount of accidents caused by Swedes driving left-hand drive cars on the left hand side of the road, apparently a fatal combination. The number of accidents remained constant after a two-year blip.

Incidentally, one of the main drivers for the change from left to right was the amount of accidents. The accident rate didn't decrease.

The preparation for the day was extraordinary. A shadow set of signs were set up and wrapped in black plastic. Government operatives roamed the streets in the darkness of the night of the change to pull the plastic off the morning before the switch.

Samoa changed from driving on the right last month (September 2009). See, it's never too late.

Zombie Trainers on PowerPoint - Up the Injunction (Pt III)

A story about a training session gone wrong:
It was the first time she had delivered a 'real' training session with a group and it was going well - too well. She'd achieved all she wanted and the group were visibly enthusiastic. But her session had flow, the learners were keen and there was still half an hour to go before 'hometime'.

Playing for time, she asked rhetorical questions but expected answers. She gave an impromptu lecture and a white board filled up with squiggles. The group were left deflated at the last half-hour's passive-agression and feedback was *cough* mixed. Why? What went wrong?

Notetaking Ninja
I take a lot of notes. I use Delicious, Google Docs, Evernote and a number of wikis. I update a Posterous and Tumblr from my phone. I even subscribe to blogs aboutTaking Notes (a "Blog on the nature of note-taking and some of its practical as well as theoretical implications.") I'm a notetaking ninja.

Or, rather, an electronic notetaking ninja. My paper notes are not quite as good. This bugged me unreasonably so I set out to cure my lame notes using Root Cause Analysis and the Five Whys. Here's what I discovered:

*I'm holding the pen wrong.

Teacher knows best
Coincidentally, I was at my four-year-old son's school seeing his teachers, who said something interesting. This year, one of their main focuses will be 'pen grip'. "The way you do it when you're seven is probably the way you'll do it when you're an adult," said one of the teachers. Don't I know it. Changing my pen grip is even more difficult than giving up sucking my thumb.

This is a bit like imprinting. You've probably heard about new-born animals who decide their keepers are their mothers and that they are, therefore, human. This is one example of imprinting, but anything you learn that's 'phase-sensitive' (ie occurring at a particular stage in life) is imprinting. You could say the way we hold our pens is imprinted at school.

Other things are imprinted at school. Not least our concept of learning.

Teachers don't only teach
The problem here is that school is not about learning, it's about schooling. And schooling involves learning, education (they're not the same),health, socialisation and, crucially, child minding.

When I've asked trainers in the situation above (it's a fairly common thing, in my experience) what they were doing in that last passive-aggressive/aimless half-hour, they've all said the same thing, "I didn't know you could let them go early."

As adults, we're imprinted on school, school teachers are our 'default setting' for transferring knowledge. But, as adults, we won't get into trouble for letting the kids get out early - we're not child-minders.

Don't do as the teacher tells you
Teachers often do the things the way they do because they have to, not because they're right. Boards (inc PowerPoint), presentation, relatively low levels of interaction, timetables and seating arrangements are determined by the social construct of school as much as any pedagogical imperative.

I've called these base assumptions 'injunctions'' and I've compared it to imprinting. Another thing to call it might be social schema. Or mental models.

Up the Injunction Pt I and II were about the difficulties they can present for the unReal Trainer. But they're not always the problem of the learner and we can all fall into default 'zombie with a PowerPoint' mode.

These things - injunctions, personas, social schemata (can anybody help with a better word?) can also be harnessed. And I'll be posting more about mental models, personas and stock characters soon.

*Post-Script
This is a demonstation of how the Five Why technique works and how I arrived at the conclusion that it was my pen grip that was the problem. The Five Why technique is a fantastic way to cure yourself of zombie-like tendencies:

Why are the notes bad?
Because I'm not very good at taking notes on paper.
Why not?
Because I don't really put any effort into it.
Why not?
Because it's neither satisfying nor fun.
Why not?
Because it doesn'f feel 'creative'.
Why not?
The notes are untidy and 'unattractive'. It feels like I'm ejecting something, not 'building'.
Why are they so untidy?
I rush notes on paper.
Why do you go so fast? Lack of time?
Because my hands hurt.
Why do your hands hurt?
I'm holding the pen in the wrong way.

If you're interested, the 'correct way' to hold a pen is such that your index finger is free to move. Like holding chopsticks. And my notes are much better now, thank you.

Artisans and Black Box Systems

Teachers (and unReal Trainers) are artisans. This means they need an intimate relationship with the tools inside the black box.

Jump Leads
When the smiling young man in the car park approached me brandishing a greasy set of jump leads, my first thought was to flee. It's not that I'm scared of jump leads, (they're just a way of connecting a flat car battery to a battery in another car and borrowing a bit of, erm, 'jump', after all) but I'd never 'popped the hood' before and had no idea how to do it.

Figuring a guy with such greasy wherewithal would know how to do this, I agreed to his request. And a mere ten minutes later we were staring at where the engine should have been. But where now there were five black plastic boxes. Even I know that you can't plug jump leads into black boxes.

Black Box Systems
Why black boxes? One clue is my ignorance. Cars, these days, are pretty good so you don't need to do much. Another clue is the lack of tinkering you see these days. As a child, it seemed like half the males on my street would be playing with their engines of a Sunday afternoon. Cars, these days, are very complicated. You put fuel in and out comes 'go' and that's all you need to know.

By coincidence (not) such things are called black box system. If you put one thing into a system and something other comes out - and you don't know or don't care what happens in between - then it's a black box.

For most people, a computer is a black box system. You don't want or need to know what happens inside them. In fact, the number of people on the entire planet who could 'build' a modern computer from scratch is vanishingly small. Hobbyists who make their own computers don't 'build' them so much as assemble them - from black boxes. (Which might not be either black or box-like, but you get my drift.)

It's a similar thing with the mail order company. You make a complaint and the person on the phone starts explaining that the truck was late because the driver was ill because her father was upset because his cat had died. Who cares? Not you, because for you the 'order' button on the website is a black box. Click goes in and out comes a reduced bank balance and a book. (Or not, in this example.)

Industrialisation means Black Boxes
Of course, there are some things where we both care and need to know what goes on inside, but we don't. Many big-company CEOs would dearly love to know what's going on in their departments and divisions and business units. But they don't. They manipulate and coordinate a string of black boxes - the divisions, the departments, units and teams - like Lego. This is what it means to be industrial.

It also gives us a clue what it means to be an artisan. Artisans can't take black boxes for granted because knowing their tools and materials intimately is part of their craft. (I'm using the word 'artisan' in a very loose sense here because I can't think of a better word - this is the kind of thing I mean.)

Learning means art, and science
Helping people to learn cannot be an industrial process. There's clearly an art to it and there should be few black boxes. Here are some, though:

• She explained the assignment to the class.
• She explained the situation to her team.
• The class learned about the historical period.
• The team learned about the new policies.

Explaining and learning are the basic tools and materials of every teacher. But what's happening inside people's heads (and, more importantly, inside their minds) while all this is going on is a black box. Professor of Pyschology, Steven Rose, has called this an explanatory gap.

Twentieth Century Cutting Edge
Here's a thread about what a 'cutting-edge' Training the Trainer course might look like. None of the suggestions (including mine!) make any reference to the mind and how it learns. There are a few references to 'understanding learners' (and, inevitably, 'Learning Styles' - watch this space for a post on that in the very near future) but that's about it.

All the teacher training I've ever done has been more about the 'big picture' than the details and opening up the black box (although I did once attend a seminar on 'Aromatherapy and Memory'). But it's the details that take competence and turn it into craft.

Time to get metacognitive
Teachers and students, managers and staff should be opening up the black box to work out where they're going to attach the jump leads. Why aren't we doing it already? And where can we go to get more help on closing our explanatory gap?

Later this week, another long one on the same theme: Grokking cognitive dissonance and the bitter disappointment of writing proper Learning Objectives.