I’m an instructional designer. It’s a relatively new position for me. Previous to shifting to ISD, I was a computer network/systems support engineer, programmer, and website developer. A few years ago I decided I needed a career shift and started my journey back through university and into the world of learning and development. While I’m in the early stages of this new career and I’m certain I will never stop learning or become an expert in all aspects of ISD, I do have days where I think I’m pretty good at what I do.

Today was not one of those days.

After a few years of working with the same clients and training teams, I’ve shifted to different clients and projects over the last few months. I’m struggling with changing my mental models developed through working with the old client. No matter how frustrated I was with some of my co-workers, I was used to the way they did things and learned how to work around the roadblocks they sometimes put in place. While it wasn’t a perfect situation I was good and what I did, comfortable with the requirements of the position, and felt I could hold my own.

The new projects I’m working on are making me doubt my abilities and question whether or not I’m the best person to be working on this team. I feel like the weakest link on a team of all-stars. That said, I wouldn’t want to give up this opportunity to work with these individuals. I have learned so much from them in the few short weeks I’ve been working on this project. Despite the occasional feeling of floundering (today it was an 8 hour session) I am being inspired to work harder, search out the information I need to come up-to-speed quickly, and bring something of value to the table during our meetings.

Have I mentioned lately that I love my job?

Technorati Tags: ID, ISD, instructional design, mental models

This weekend we rented What the bleep do we know? after I’d heard a few people in the Learning & Development field discussing the movie. I should mention that we didn’t rent the original 2002 theatrical version of the film, rather the repackaged 2006 “director’s cut” titled What the bleep: Down the Rabbit Hole.

I really didn’t know what I’d be getting myself into but I was certain it couldn’t be any worse than some of the other movies we’ve rented over the past decade.

So two hours, a mini bag of popcorn, and a few beers later one thought cemented in my mind. I need to learn more about the premise behind the documentary. I also was pretty certain I’d need to watch it at least a few more times (after some time had elapsed) before I could make a judgment either way regarding how I felt about the information presented.

Strangely, while I don’t agree with the premise, I also don’t have the overwhelming urge to bemoan my loss of time spent watching it. Usually when the hubby and I watch something terrible we tend to joke about demanding the 2 hours of our lives that we spent watching a movie back from the powers that be*.

Sure, I know most of it has been debunked as pseudoscience and it’s a thinly veiled promotional piece for Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment. I also don’t see how the premise fits into my current understanding of the world and my own reality. I am, however, confused.

I’ve learned to equate my moments of confusion with the learning process. Most times when I’m confused I find I’m trying to work things out but haven’t really got a good grasp of what my final interpretation of the data is yet. Due to my current confused state, I’m having a hard time completely dismissing the film. If nothing else it’s forcing me to ask questions and seek out answers so I can build my own reality. At least that’s one thing I do feel confident about knowing. I’m firmly entrenched in the belief that anyone suggesting that we don’t built our own reality hasn’t really examined their own mental models!

For more info on the controversy surrounding this movie, read the Salon article Bleep of Faith or Annie Wagner‘s blog post David Albert: ‘What the BLEEP’ Is Wildly and Irresponsibly Wrong. Alternately, you can google the movie title to find lots of opinions (pro and con).

*We used to have a rule that we followed wherein we wouldn’t stop a movie once we’d started watching it. If we rented it, we were stuck until the end. It resulted in our seeing a large number of absolutely horrific movies over the years. We frequently wanted our 2 hours back! More recently we’ve decided that life is too short to spend watching crap. If neither of us is into a movie in the first 15-30 minutes it’s pulled out of the DVD player and we move onto something else.

Technorati Tags: what the bleep, ramtha, pseudoscience, mental models, reality

I spent a large chunk of my day today reviewing a design document and crafting lists and lists of questions. I love questions. Someday, I’m going to master the art of finding the right question to ask 9 times of out 10. Sounds like a silly goal, but I believe the entire process of learning surrounds not the answers people offer, but the questions we must ask along the way.

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve spent time visiting some of my favourite learning and education related blogs. Today I decided I needed to take a step back from work, life and grieving and spend some quality time on-line. Of course, that means I have to pop in and see what Harold Jarche is writing about these days. In Harold’s post from 10.23.06 titled Formal education needs more informal learning, he writes:

According to Marilyn Taylor [PDF see page 53 for a reference to Taylor’s model], disorientation is a natural state in formal education:

Stage 1 Disorientation: The learner is presented with an unfamiliar experience or idea which involves new ideas that challenge the student to think critically about his/her beliefs and values. The learner reacts by becoming confused and anxious. Support from the educator at this point is crucial to the learner’s motivation, participation and self-esteem.

I believe that disorientation is an almost constant state in many workplaces today, so we had better prepare learners for it. Incorporating informal learning experiences in an ever widening variety of contexts could help prepare students to be better informal learners throughout their lives.

This disorientation theory explains a lot about my formal learning experiences over the past few years. I’ve often felt off kilter in formal learning environments – even in ones of my own design. Perhaps it’s due to the roiling fear in my gut that seems to strike whenever I’m put in a room and expected to participate in group learning activities. I’m just not comfortable when someone else is directing my learning experience. I want to sit back and absorb what’s going on around me, reading or listening, then reflect before I open my big mouth (or get my typing fingers in gear).

The increased anxiety I feel in formal learning situations is likely compounded by the fact that I don’t think I received much support for my learning style. Instead of gaining the requisite support as I moved through the confused and anxious stages, I was made to feel like a sore thumb because I didn’t fall in line with the accepted ideology about adult learners enjoying small group activities and teamwork.

On the other hand, I’m not sure I can agree with Harold that the work world is a constant state of disorientation. At least, not based on my own experiences. Perhaps I’ve taught myself how to handle work related learning experiences in a manner that has resulted in my ability to handle these situations with more comfort and confidence than traditional formal (school, university, professional courses) learning experiences. Instead of feeling disoriented in these situations I feel energized and ready to dive right in.

I always knew I was a little weird…

Things to look forward to: While I was in the CACE program at the U of A one of my profs introduced me to the Up series. Theresia sent out an email this week that made me smile. I’m looking forward to heading out to the Metro Cinema to catch up on other’s lives. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the series, here’s a blurb from the notification email:

49 Up is the 7th installment in the widely celebrated series which began with the seminal film 7 Up. In 1962, Michael Apted assisted then-director Paul Almond as he interviewed a group of economically, racially and culturally diverse 7-year-olds living in England.

He asked about their lives and their hopes for the future, and caught up with them every 7 years to repeat the process. Now, over 4 decades and 6 films later, Apted returns to his subjects once again, finding them at age 49.

Devoted viewers will be happy to reunite with characters who feel like old friends – the good-natured cab driver, Tony; the soft-spoken boarding school boy, Bruce; and Neil, who at 28 was seen wandering the highlands, homeless and verging on insanity.

But the film is also a rare treat for those encountering the series for the first time, as it artfully weaves into the contemporary images footage from years past, as far back as the 1964 original, creating a potent dialogue between articulations of the past, realities of the present & projections into the future.

Technorati Tags: questions, informal learning, education, Marilyn Taylor, disorientation, Harold Jarche, Up series

Google Dale’s Cone of Experience and you’ll find a wealth of sites containing references not only to Edgar Dale’s original research, but to a series of percentages said to be associated with Dale’s Cone. For example, the .pdf file located at www.mc.uky.edu/pharmacy/edinnovation/pdf/Step%20Dales%20Cone.pdf contains a list of percentages associated with the elements in the Cone. This perpetuates a fallicy (or shoddy research practices) that is becoming more well known in recent years. Dale never assigned percentages re: effectiveness of learning activities in his work.

Will Thalheimer at Work-Learning Research delved into Dale’s Cone and discovered that:

1. While Edgar Dale indeed did indeed create a model of the concreteness of various audio-visual material back in 1946, the model contained no numbers and no research was conducted to create the model. Dale’s Cone was just a hunch, albeit an educated hunch, one that Dale warned shouldn’t be taken too literally.*
2. The percentages — ‘people generally remember 10% of what they read’ and so on — were most likely added to Dale’s Cone by an employee of the Mobil Oil company in the late 1960s. These percentages have since been discredited.**

Thalheimer’s complete report is available online at http://www.willatworklearning.com/myths_and_worse/index.html.

* and ** is from the Dales Cone Drum Corps article in the Internet TOURBUS 07/27/06 edition.

Michael Molenda of the Indiana University has witten a paper refuting the inclusion of percentages as part of Dale’s Cone of Experience. Mr. Molenda also authored a Reader Comment on an article published by Deepak Prem Subramony titled Dale’s Cone Revisited: Critically Examining the Misapplication of a Nebulous Theory to Guide Practice? in the July-August (2003) issue of Educational Technology.

Richard Crowest also wrote a dissertation titled “Making Sense. Multisensory Interpretation and the Visitor Experience“. Elements of his research focus on Dale’s original source material and indicates the lack of percentages in his work.

A number of adult educators and ID’s have written articles or blogged about this topic, some of the most relevant posts can be found at

• Visual Being: Forget What You’ve Heard About Remembering
• Infomacy: Hornswaggled: a Study in Active Learning
• Infomacy: Hornswaggled: These Data do NOT Exist
• e-Learning Acupuncture: Incorrect information in the field!
• Bogus Research Uncovered
• I Speak of Dreams: Oh my, Dale’s Cone is not a Cone but a Crock!
• Online Learning Research: Fact or Fiction

Ok, I admit it. I’m addicted to researching the phenomena of how one man’s theory becomes co-opted by others 😉 If I won the lottery I’d be spending way too much time and effort researching this.

Technorati Tags: Edgar Dale, Cone of Experience, learning retention, internet TOURBUS

Stephen Downes is blogging from an international airport again. In his entry titled How to Write Articles Quickly and Effectively, he shares his wealth of experience and passion for writing with an apparent goal of improving the lives and productivity of those around him. Consider the potential audience available through posting these techniques on the Internet. Add to that the audience garnered from Stephen’s daily newsletter (OL Daily) and futher add the audience of other bloggers who take the time to comment on Stephen’s advice, offer some of their own, and expose the concepts to an entirely new audience.

Today’s offering is a reminder not only of the immediacy and power of blogging during travel, but that nothing worth learning should be withheld.

This is the learning experience as it should be. An open dialog between many where-in ideas are shared, modified, demolished, re-built and/or dissected. In order to learn, I share with you. You, in turn, share with me. Separately, but together, we evolve our understanding of the concepts discussed.

Consider how much better the world could be if knowledge sharing was the norm rather than knowledge hoarding. Sure, we’d all like to believe that a free exchange of ideas is occuring in both the corporate and academic world, but in my experience the adage knowledge is power is as accurate and powerful today as it was in the mid-ages. In general, humans do a rotten job of sharing and working towards laying a level playing field for all who come to the table.

As for the advice provided in today’s article? All I can say is “Stephen, you’ve been holding out on me!”. I really could have used the guidance provided when I returned to university as an adult learning (10 years divorced from formal learning environments) and rusty at writing anything outside of code, reports, and random rants. While I feel I’ve slipped back into the swing of writing for an academic environment, I’ll certainly be keeping this link handy for future reference.

Technorati Tags: stephen downes, writing tips, knowledge sharing, knowledge hoarding