Jotting Number 82, by Joe Podolsky:
From: joe_podolsky@hp.com
Date: October 12, 1998
Since its beginning four years ago, the BPC course has used lots of guest instructors, from both inside and outside HP. None of these have been professional teachers, some are consultants, and many are practitioners. At the beginning, the predominant presentation style was "talking head." This is the familiar process in which instructors come in with a pile of overheads (or, more recently, slides in a personal computer) and plow through them, hoping that some of the wisdom sticks to the students. We always had some exercises and breakout sections to have the students practice what they heard, but those were subordinate to the main lecture.
As we on the staff became aware of the limits of the talking head process, we tried to add and encourage more participative learning, but it's been a struggle. We recently recruited Terie Robinson from another area of HP to be the staff leader of the program specifically because of her passion for and knowledge of interactive learning methods. She has been spending time helping instructors adapt their material to be interactive or, failing that, to get new instructors who are interactive-literate.
This evolution has increased student energy and enthusiasm. Students give much higher satisfaction ratings to the interactive sections compared to the traditional forms. We on the staff intuitively feel that the class is improved, although we have little objective data to base that on.
But one major issue still pops up, both from the instructors and from the students. The problem is one of quantity versus quality. Talking heads can cover a lot of material; participative learning has depth, gained from the student literally working to absorb the material. Some people, however, on both sides of the lectern, persist in defining value as a "sage on the stage" who gives a high-speed mind-dump, aiming for a new record for number of slides shown per hour.
My thinking on this issue was jogged when I read an article in the June 1998 issue of the IEEE Transactions on Professional Communications. Written by Edmond H. Weiss, a long-time communications consultant who is now also a professor at Fordham University, the article has the unlikely title, "From Talmud Folios to Web Sites: HOT Pages, COOL Pages, and the Information Plenum." Weiss aimed the article at print and web communicators, but his message nailed me as I was thinking about training.
Weiss gets his "hot" and "cool" metaphors from Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan pointed out that, before the invention of the printing press, texts were rich in style and format. They contained varieties of fonts and colors, varying borders and spacing, and freeform graphics to supplement and emphasize the message of the words. These texts, of course, were handwritten, mostly by monks, and were very rare, seen by few people.
Gutenberg turned the written word into a mass medium, but at a price. We could get any color we wanted as long as it was black on white. Fonts were uniform, borders even, and scrollwork rare. Weiss says that McLuhan called this a "HOT page: a linear series of words, to be read silently, in order, without interruption or digression, by a passive receptacle of a reader who would then absorb the plain, unambiguous sense of the page.
Weiss observes that this was not only a change in graphical style, but in content of the materials as well. "Inherent in this HOT page model was a set of rules for authors that guide many technical communicators even to this day. The well-made verbal message should be clear, unambiguous, simple, direct, and linear. It should be free of digression, wit, and ornamentation. Its logic and sequence should be uncomplicated and transparent." That sounds to me like what the best of our talking heads are trying to do.
McLuhan contrasted the HOT page to COOL media. He focused mainly on television which he felt was COOL because of its abilities to engage both eyes and ears. McLuhan felt that, couch potatoes notwithstanding, television was more engaging than print, that it required more participation from the viewer. While many might well argue with McLuhan's preference of television over books, his point might be better made by the example of the personal computer, a medium that didn't exist in McLuhan's day but one that he surely would have called ultimately COOL.
Weiss points out that, for almost 2000 years, we have had a COOL printed text that successfully remained COOL even after being typeset. That text is the Talmud, a set of books of Jewish law and related literature that originated in an oral tradition and was written down beginning in the 2nd century CE. The format of the Talmud has the basic text in the center of the page with the commentaries of rabbis and scholars shown surrounding the basic text. As Weiss says, the pages of the Talmud (folios) "are busy, nonlinear, filled with different typefaces, graphical symbols, parallel and intersecting frames, and even multiple languages."
Weiss tells us that the usual method for studying the Talmud is itself COOL rather than HOT. "The Rabbinic tradition strongly discourages studying the Talmud alone, or reading silently. The typical mode of Talmud reading is to have two energetic students reading aloud, arguing, and interrupting from across the distance of a small table. To study the Talmud," Weiss says, "one joins the conversation (with the rabbis who wrote it)."
Weiss goes on in the article to show how these ideas can be transferred to the construction of Web pages. But his comments about COOL web pages carry powerful messages to those of us thinking about training.
In the following quotes, for example, think about "training" everywhere that Weiss says "page" or "pages."
"… Conventional … page(s) can become nonsense if read in reverse or out of order … COOL pages allow many points of entry and many legitimate logics."
"COOL pages are typically lacking in singleness of purpose; and they are not impatient to complete a theme. COOL logic is receptive to long, tangential digressions, making it conspicuously different from the economy and efficiency of ordinary books."
"A COOL page is never finished. It develops like a palimpsest (a scroll or parchment that has had layers of writing placed on it), with generations of readers embedding and overlaying new elements and commentary, or adding linking messages. Each generation of the page tends to have more on it and to absorb all the earlier versions. (The pages) grow and accumulate components and links, reflecting the preferences of users and changes in the environment."
Weiss ends his article with a philosophical insight that well applies to our discussion on training. Weiss observes that the HOT, linear model of communication comes from the Hellenistic culture, from Aristotle and Socrates. Weiss says that this Hellenistic model is one of an "information vacuum," where "the world is empty of information, and it is the task of the philosopher/communicator to introduce new knowledge into the vacuum."
"In the Talmudic model, however," Weiss continues, "the universe is a plenum that is already absolutely filled with information. In this view, all knowledge is inherent … and (is) discovered through repeated, daily study."
One question we could now ask is whether or not we believe that our instructional model should be Hellenistic or Talmudic. Another interesting question, however, is what our students think the appropriate model should be. Do our students think they are coming to class as a vacuum waiting to be filled? Or do they think they already have a great deal of knowledge and that new insights can be best gained by non-linear interactive struggle with concepts and colleagues? Which process do they (and we) think will have more lasting effect after they leave the cloister of the class?
Oh, and by the way, because of the nature of the medium, these Jottings are HOT. Only you can make them COOL by adding your comments to the conversation. Please do.
Regards,
Joe