Joe's Jottings
Jottings Number 56, by Joe Podolsky:
From: uunet!HP-PaloAlto-om4.om.hp.com!JOE_PODOLSKY
Date: Fri, 31 May 96 16:43:49 -0700
Subject: The Learning Process
The April 1996 issue of _Quality Progress_ magazine contains an article titled, "Relearning the Learning Process," by Barbara A. Cleary. Dr. Cleary is not only a teacher in Dayton, Ohio, but she is also Vice President of a company called PQ Systems and a member of the American Society of Quality Control. She raises a question that we all wrestle with: "What (are) the characteristics of environments in which learning (takes) place?" She lists these: * Lively interaction with others * A sense of teamwork * An understanding of purpose * A passion for learning * Immediate feedback * Active participation * Encouragement for risk taking * A sense of connectedness with the task and its meaning * A feeling of (mutual, teacher and student) responsibility for the outcome How often do we sit quietly in presentations (which are, of course, learning situations) where the environments are all these - NOT! - ? Worse yet, how often do we _give_ presentations like these? Cleary focuses her article mostly on schools, but the lessons are for all of us. Like it or not, we are all still learning, and most of us are still "facilitating learning" in others. She offers this advice: 1. Offer students choices in what they will learn and how they will learn it. Offering choices not only provides a variety of learning approaches but, more important, gives the students the opportunity to make decisions, helping them become responsible for their own education. 2. Help students evaluate what they have learned. Cleary suggests that students ask these questions, in sequence, about any subject matter: 1. Did I hear it? 2. Do I understand it? 3. Could I use it? 4. Could I explain it? 5. Could I teach it? 6. Could I grade or evaluate it? Cleary then suggests applying the Deming (Shewhart) PDSA (PDCA) model to the planning of educational experiences: * Plan - Define/describe the learning situation "system" - Assess the current situation * Do - Implement "class" (i.e., the learning experience) * Study - Evaluate the results (using the six step model above) * Act - Standardize improvements - Plan continuous improvements As an aside, in classroom situations, Cleary suggests teaching students to use affinity diagrams, flowcharting, and teamwork methods to help them better manage their learning through the PDSA process. So, how does all this apply to us IT folks? A few obvious answers. We should think about this any time we're giving a presentation or class. Given that our expectations are appropriately raised, we might even (gently) suggest these ideas to the teachers of classes we attend ourselves. We might (even more gently) try to get these ideas into our kids' schools. Not so obvious, however, is how we use these ideas in our systems. Given that our users relate to our systems as though they were people (see Jottings #52), we might design our systems to be learning facilitators. For example, what if, on a random sample basis, we asked for feedback as a person logs off the system (and had a process for collecting and learning from the feedback)? What if we designed the computer-human interface so that the users could tailor it to suit themselves? We can easily allow for cosmetic variations (as does MS Windows, for example) such as color or font size. But we might also allow the user to vary sequence of entries, choose personal defaults, customize data edits, etc. What's important is that we give users a sense of involvement, a sense of control. What examples do you have where these ideas are or are not being applied? Joe