Engaging learners

Do You Have Klout?

/ Susan Hendrich / Leave a comment

What is Your Klout Score?

Klout is the measurement of your overall online influence. Klout scores range from 1 to 100, and higher scores represent wider and stronger sphere of influence. Klout looks at 35+ variables on Facebook and Twitter to measure True Reach, Amplification Probability, and Network Score. They believe influence is “ability to drive people to action.”

Ex: True Reach = size of your engaged audience (based on followers and friends who actively listen and react to your messages). Want to learn more about Klout?

So…do I have enough Klout to get you to respond to this post?

About Klout

http://mashable.com/follow/topics/klout   

Klout is a San Francisco based company that provides social media analytics that measures a users influence across their social network. The analysis is done on data collected from sites such as Twitter and Facebook and measures the size of a person’s network, the content created, and how other people interact with that content.

Overcoming my bias

/ Susan Hendrich / 2 Comments

A few resources for you on overcoming biases. And, yes, we all have them…

Learning objective: Recognize implicit bias

  • Implicit Association Test (IAT), which has become the standard for measuring implicit bias
  • A Class Divided (The Brown eyes / Blue eyes story)
  • Johari Window (A simple and useful tool for illustrating and improving self-awareness, and mutual understanding between individuals within a group. I use the “Unknown” box to illustrate bias)
  • The Hermann Grid activity (Sometimes we see things that do not exist; First impressions are not always right) 

Learning objective: Identify specific techniques for overcoming bias

Learning objective: Describe ways to build trust

Learning objective: Explain how initial perception can create a self-fulfilling prophesy

Story on Self-Fulfilling Prophesy: “The monk and the travellers”

One day a traveller was walking along a road on his journey from one village to another. As he walked he noticed a monk tending the ground in the fields beside the road. The monk said “Good day” to the traveller, and the traveller nodded to the monk. The traveller then turned to the monk and said “Excuse me, do you mind if I ask you a question?”.

“Not at all,” replied the monk.

“I am travelling from the village in the mountains to the village in the valley and I was wondering if you knew what it is like in the village in the valley?”

“Tell me,” said the monk, “What was your experience of the village in the mountains?”

“Dreadful,” replied the traveller, “to be honest I am glad to be away from there. I found the people most unwelcoming. When I first arrived I was greeted coldly. I was never made to feel part of the village no matter how hard I tried. The villagers keep very much to themselves, they don’t take kindly to strangers. So tell me, what can I expect in the village in the valley?”

“I am sorry to tell you,” said the monk, “but I think your experience will be much the same there”.

The traveller hung his head despondently and walked on.

A while later another traveller was journeying down the same road and he also came upon the monk.

“I’m going to the village in the valley,” said the second traveller, “Do you know what it is like?”

“I do,” replied the monk “But first tell me – where have you come from?”

“I’ve come from the village in the mountains.”

“And how was that?”

“It was a wonderful experience. I would have stayed if I could but I am committed to travelling on. I felt as though I was a member of the family in the village. The elders gave me much advice, the children laughed and joked with me and people were generally kind and generous. I am sad to have left there. It will always hold special memories for me. And what of the village in the valley?” he asked again.

“I think you will find it much the same” replied the monk, “Good day to you”.

 “Good day and thank you,” the traveler replied, smiled, and journeyed on.

Hurray for brevity. Less IS more!

/ Susan Hendrich / Leave a comment

Want your learning audience to retain more and perform better?  Then lighten their cognitive load.

Cognitive load theory says that “the more a person has to learn in a shorter amount of time, the more difficult it is to process that information in working memory.” Add to this processing difficulty the fact that we retain less when overloaded with data, information, and concepts. The idea behind cognitive load theory is that reducing the volume of information to be learned to only the “need to know” level lets the learner retain more of the information and make the necessary transfer of learning to be able to perform a skill or task.   And that might just be a very good thing when it comes to designing training.

“By reducing the load on the cognitive system, summaries may enable students to carry out the cognitive processes necessary for meaningful learning.” 

From When Less Is More: Meaningful Learning From Visual and Verbal Summaries of Science Textbook Lessons, by Richard E. Mayer, William Bove, Alexandra Bryman, Rebecca Mars, and Lene Tapangco 

What does this mean about people’s desire and tolerance for information?

Twitter taught us that we’re in a sound bite zeitgeist. When it comes to information and learning, we want it short. Sweet. To the point. Quick. Rapid. Just the facts. Twitter? Yammer? What’s the matter?  

Despite growing research supporting this “less-is-more” notion, it can be hard for subject matter experts to let go of the urge to create an information dump when designing training. Experts sometimes get stuck in the mindset of, “more is more,” and struggle to see how presenting a more basic volume of information might lead to better learning. Parsing out the nice-to-know from the need-to-know is the great challenge of the instructional designer.  Having a little less-is-more research in the back pocket might just come in handy for the designer who’s trying to convince a subject matter expert to limiting content to the need-to-know level.

Check out Cathy Moore’s “Making Change” blog post about an early study that showed the positive impact of reducing the amount of text presented to a summary on the ability to retain and transfer learning.

Learning and the Pursuit of Shibumi

/ Susan Hendrich / Leave a comment

“When in doubt about do or don’t, don’t.”

That’s my my new mantra. Almost sounds lazy, doesn’t it? Well, it’s not actually.

It’s all about Shibumi.  That’s spelled, 渋み. And it’s all about editing. Refining. Reducing. Simplifying.

Shibumi: “The ability to achieve the maximum effect with the minimum means” – Rough translation of a Japanese Zen concept

Shibumi is a concept I have been consciously (and even unconsciously) searching for since childhood, although I didn’t know the name for it until recently. The concept of Shibumi refers to a particular aesthetic of simple, subtle, and unobtrusive beauty. It reflects the ability of a person (or organization, or object d’arte) to achieve effortless effectiveness, elegant simplicity, and the height of excellence.

There are five key steps to reach shibumi:

  1. commitment
  2. preparation
  3. struggle
  4. breakthrough
  5. transformation

Read this short and insightful article if you want to learn more: Learning and the Pursuit of Shibumi – Chief Learning Officer, Solutions for Enterprise Productivity.

Susan

What does the Dunning–Kruger Effect mean to you?

/ Susan Hendrich / 1 Comment

I literally stumbled upon the Dunning–Kruger effect on Wikipedia today, and it gave me an ah-hah moment. I’ll describe my moment of insight shortly, but first let’s look at the Dunning–Kruger effect:

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which an unskilled person makes poor decisions and reaches erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to realize their mistakes. The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average, much higher than it actually is, while the highly skilled underrate their abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority. This leads to the situation in which less competent people rate their own ability higher than more competent people. It also explains why actual competence may weaken self-confidence: because competent individuals falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. “Thus, the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others.   – From the “Dunning-Kruger Effect” on Wikipedia

So, let me get this straight (to the tune of the Hokey Pokey)…

You put a lack of skill in + a resulting bad decision + an erroneous conclusion = inflated self-assessment

Presence of skill + inflated assessment of others’ skill = inaccurately low self-assessment

In other words, the very people who should be seeing themselves as more skilled, actually have less confidence in their own skills and over-estimate the capabilities of others. 

What could this mean for training design and development?  That’s where my Ah-hah moment comes in. But, you’ll have to wait, because I’m not confident enough in my thought process to actually tell you about it. So, does that mean I’m encountering the Dunning-Kruger effect?

Oh, and just in case you’re wondering whether (a) these guys know what they are talking about, or (b) instead they suffer from their own posited effect, Dunning and Kruger were awarded the Ig Nobel Prizes in Psychology in 2000 for their report, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments.”