HiredEd's blog

This summer I faced a perennial problem in adult education.  A group of twenty bright, motivated and well-intentioned employees of my organization enrolled in a blended (workshops + online) leadership development program I made and facilitated.  Some students were able to keep up with the workload, and others fell behind.  It proved harder than they had thought to fit a formal learning program into their busy lives.  In the online portion of the program, this led to the familiar pattern of having a core group of active participators, some moderate participators and some who rarely contributed at all.

I have recently published a book on the underlying dynamics that give rise to learning styles, personality styles, management styles and other similar phenomena. The learning styles covered include those defined by Kolb; Honey & Mumford; Silver, Strong & Perini; and Gregorc, among others.  The book emphasizes 4-part learning/personality etc. typologies, and if you have ever noticed that a lot of the 4-part typologies in these disciplines seem to be very similar to one another, this book is for you.  I am currently distributing it online for free at http://stores.lulu.com/lachapelle, and on scribd.com.  I'll attach a copy to this blog entry for your convenience.  It is on a Creative Commons attribution licence, which means you can do pretty much what you want with it so long as you attribute the original work to its author.  Copying and distributing, even as a profit-making enterprise, is permitted.  I hope some of you find it interesting.  Cheers!

As part of a discussion on learning theories at the University of Waterloo, I prepared an analysis of all of the learning theories from the venerable Theory Into Practice (TIP) Database of learning theories online.  I defined a three dimensional space, and situated various learning  theories in that space.  The dimensions of the space are contextual distance, conceptual distance and transactional distance (Moore).

Contextual distance refers to how remote the learning is from the lived experience of students.  Action learning would have low contextual distance, pure math would have high contextual distance.

Conceptual distance refers to how new or how remote the learning point is from what the learners already know.  The concept of scaffolding involves the provision of intermediary structures of learning in order to close conceptual distance between the learner's knowledge base and the target knowledge.

In the corporate training world, competency-based instruction and assessment is a dominant paradigm. Unfortunately, there is a distinct tendency for this kind of instructional design to drift towards content-centrism, rather than student-centrism.  If you have a list of technical competencies that learners are supposed to master by the end of the course, it becomes easy just to teach those competencies as they are laid out in the source material.  The hard work of thinking through the material from the student's perspective, what they want to learn when and why, never gets done.  This produces less-effective learning materials.

Specifying learning objectives may not rectify this matter.  It becomes easy just to re-dress competencies in learning-objective lingo.  The instructional sequence can still be quite program-centric, and the rationale given to the learners for that sequence may still be framed in terms of the structure of the material, rather than according to their needs and desires to learn.

Sex, commerce and stalking.  In recent discussions on our campus on the use of Second Life as a learning environment, these were some of the first things people noted as concerns.  Sex was a problem just because it was there to contend with - whereas it is not much of a factor in our current LMS!  It was also thought that some of the economic arguments about Second Life being an "authentic" environment (because of the real economy) were questionable; i.e. what is so "authentic" about commerce, and is that the kind of "authenticity" we want to emphasize in our courses.  And stalking is a bad thing, of course...

I did not share these concerns about Second Life.  In ways I find both reassuring and depressing, sex, commerce and stalking are all part of life on campus anyway, and in these regards Second Life does not differ much from life on our offline, physical campus (except that real sex is better and real stalking is worse than Second Life sex/stalking).

Most discussions of games in education focus on their utility as course components.  Educators rarely take a step back to look at gaming as a design discipline.  Taken together, game design and instructional design might perhaps both be considered sub-fields of engagement design - the design of engaging structured experiences.  The scope of engagement design would include interface design, graphic design, maybe even advertising and merchandizing... theme park design...  and theoretically each of these fields could cross-pollinate the others.  But for now I'm just going to look at one classic work in game design that offers an interesting framework for instructional design.

In _Rules of Play_, Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman introduce an analytical framework for thinking about game design that could be transposed to the instructional design field, supporting the creation of better courses revealing a new way of thinking about instructional design that could be used to make courses more engaging.  They suggest three cognitive schemas for understanding games:

Getting paid to do something you love can totally ruin the experience.

Odd, eh?

I am vaguely aware that there are many ways of understanding this phenomenon. Many investigators think we have more than one motivational system, and these systems compete - activating one can knock out the other.

One study I've found focuses precisely on this phenomenon. It's called Effort for Payment: A Tale of Two Markets by James Heyman and Dan Ariely, in Psychological Science (Vol15—Num11: 787-793). They were studying "homo economicus", and they wanted to see if adding compensation to a task would affect how much effort people put into a task. If humans are rational self-maximizers, they argued, then the more you pay them, the better they will perform. This is not borne out empirically. In their words: