e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Michael Feldstein

  • Clarity on Workflow Learning

    Here’s a nice, short piece in Learning Circuits summarizing Sam Adkins’ take on workflow learning. One point of clarification that I found particularly helpful:

    How does workflow learning differ from electronic performance support systems (EPSS)? Unlike EPSS, workflow learning

    • is iterative and evolves as work processes evolve
    • has a strong bi-directional interaction
    • has robust measurement, monitoring, and modification feedback loops.

    Workflow learning applications integrate with enterprise applications-for example, ERP or CRM systems-to link worker performance with organizational data, business intelligence, and productivity metrics.

    While I’m not sure that all EPSS gurus would agree, Adkins lays out clear, cogent, and credible points of distinction.

  • A Thousand Affordances in Your Pocket

    Yup. I finally broke down and got myself an iPod. Kathy has had one for about two years now but I was holding out for two more developments. First, I wanted enough disk space–at least 20 gigs–to carry a significant amount of data as well as my music, since I intended to use it as my cross-platform portable hard drive. Second, I wanted the 20 gig size not to be the biggest iPod available so I didn’t have to pay a premium for getting the biggest baddest. With the release of the new version, where the bottom-of-the-line 20-gig is only (“only”!) $300, I figured it was time.

    Boy, does this baby solve a lot of problems for me. I was thinking about getting a Treo 600 now that Verizon offers it but now I’ll hold off. I can store my calendar and address book on the iPod and it’s not obvious to me that I need to be able to input information away from my computer. And since I don’t have a compelling need for email away from my laptop, the reasons for the smart phone have pretty much evaporated.

    But the most delightful aspect of the device (as any iPod owner knows) is how rat simple it is to use for its core function of playing music. There is literally no learning curve and almost no attention required to operate it. This is the essence of what Gary Dickelman and others call “Performance-Centered Design.” Rather than forcing the user to learn how to use the device, we figure out how to make the function as easy and intuitive as humanly possible first. After all, who wants to waste time and brain space learning how to use a device? What we really want to do is access our music (or trade a stock, or pick up our voicemail messages, or whatever it is we are trying to do with a piece of technology). Performance-Centered Design (PCD) pushes the priority of lowering the cognitive load on the user as much as possible first and only teaching when absolutely necessary. The iPod is a pleasure to use because I never have to think about how to use it.

    Industrial design guru and fellow e-Learn Magazine Advisory Board member Don Norman calls the things that a device makes easy to do “affordances.” If you have not read his classic book The Design of Everyday Things then run, don’t walk, to your nearest book store or library. Every human being who has to function in the modern world should read this book and try to acquire just a little bit of Don Norman’s crankiness and ornery refusal to put up with badly designed tools.

  • Book Recommendation: The Selfish Gene

    It may seem odd, given the focus of this blog, to recommend a book on evolutionary biology. But Richard Dawkins’ book The Selfish Gene lays a solid foundation for helping to understand developments in the aggregation sciences.

    Dawkins’ main thesis is that evolution is driven by the survival of the fittest genes, not organisms and not species. If it seems odd to think of dumb genes “competing” or acting “selfishly,” as the title suggests, then you’re catching on to what’s provocative about this book. If you have trouble wrapping your head around the ideas of complex adaptive systems and emergence, then take a step back and start by trying to understand selfish genes. If you can make the latter conceptual leap then the former becomes much easier to get. Dawkins helps with the learning process by giving many, many concrete examples and carefully reasoned, easy-to-follow arguments.

    If you borrow the book rather than buying it, make sure that you get the 1989 edition or later; the newer edition has two new chapters that are essential. In particular, Chapter 12, “Nice guys finish first,” is about the evolution of cooperation and has quite a bit about game theory in it. Again, if you understand game theory and its impact on a population, then other ideas in aggregation science will come a lot easier.

    One last point of interest is that Dawkins’ book is the origin of the term “meme”. If you’ve heard the term “idea virus,” then you have a sense of what memes are. (And by the way, thinking about memes is one good way to start getting a sense of why informational cascades are a potential problem in the kind of networked conversational learning that happens, for example, in a blogging community. You could argue that an “idea virus” is either a cause or a manifestation of an informational cascade.) To see an example of somebody using the “meme”…er…meme productively, see this oldie but goodie post from the Truth Laid Bear weblog.

  • New Site Theme: Aggregation Sciences

    It’s been bothering me that the only category on my site where I can put these posts about emergence is “Blogo-eroticism and Other Hype.” Since I intend to get past all this back and forth about what emergence isn’t (as quickly as possible) and start posting on what it is and how I think it could be valuable, I need a place to put those posts.

    But for me, emergence is only one piece of a larger puzzle. I’ll never forget hearing financial engineering professor Andrew Lo wax poetic about what inspired him to go into his field. As a child, he had read Isaac Asimov’s science fiction classic Foundation
    and became enchanted with the idea that human history, both past and future, could be explained and predicted if only one could find a rich enough mathematical model and deal with a sufficiently large number of people (to average out the quirks introduced by free will). Lo sees his research as very much infused with that idea.

    I believe that emergence, network theory (popularized by Duncan Watts’ excellent book Six Degrees) and certain elements of behavioral economics together can form a basis for us to understand how learning and other forms of knowledge sharing will work differently in a networked age. So I’m collectively labeling these ideas as “aggregation sciences” and giving them their own theme on e-Literate.

  • What Steven Johnson Really Said About Howard Dean

    Kathleen reminds us that Steven Johnson himself supports her analogy of the Dean campaign as an example of emergent learning. “In fact”, she tells us, “Johnson was quoted in Wired magazine as saying that ‘Dean is a system running for President.’”

    Except that, as far as I can tell, Johnson didn’t exactly say that–at least not in the way that Kathleen means.

    I had no luck finding the quote in the Wired archives. However, I did find the quote (or something close to it) in a Frank Rich editorial in The New York Times (sorry, the NYT archive requires registration and a fee to read their archives):

    ”The term blog is now so ubiquitous everyone has to use it,” says the author Steven Johnson, whose prescient 2001 book ”Emergence” is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand this culture. On some candidates’ sites, he observes, ”there is no difference between a blog and a chronological list of press releases.” And the presence of a poll on a site hardly constitutes interactivity. The underlying principles of the Dean Internet campaign ”are the opposite of a poll,” Mr. Johnson says. Much as thousands of connected techies perfected the Linux operating system’s code through open collaboration, so Dean online followers collaborate on organizing and perfecting the campaign, their ideas trickling up from the bottom rather than being superimposed from national headquarters. (Or at least their campaign ideas trickle up; policy is still concentrated at the top.) It’s almost as if Dr. Dean is ”a system running for president,” in Mr. Johnson’s view, as opposed to a person.

    What is “emergent” here? Kathleen suggests that it’s Dean’s strategy: “Dean’s strategy could be characterized as emergent because it drew its power up from the grassroots, rather then being superimposed by national headquarters.” But I read Johnson somewhat differently here. I read Johnson as saying that Howard Dean himself, as knowable figure through his campaign message, is emergent. The voice of the campaign, rather than being directed by a central force, emerges from the dialog of various participants on the campaign weblog.

    Is this an important distinction? Kathleen suggests in her post that all this language parsing is “trivial” and “misses the point” of her paper. But I think the definition of “emergence” does matter here, for the same reason that the definition of “effective” matters when Kathleen writes, “the principles outlined in Steven Johnson’s book were effective for Dean (until the meltdown).” In what sense were they “effective”? Dean got demolished in the very first primary. I would argue (and will argue in a future article) that, partly because of this highly networked grassroots system that Kathleen calls emergence, the Dean campaign believed its own hype. The media, which is also a headless social network that often runs on no more than “pattern recognition” of the most primitive sort, made the same mistake.

    So to sum up, I still don’t believe that “drawing power up from the grassroots” is the same thing as emergence, I don’t believe that Steven Johnson ever supported the idea that the Dean’s campaign’s strong grassroots support can be simply translated as emergence, and to the degree that “drawing strength from the grassroots” is what the Dean campaign did (whatever you want to call it), I don’t think it is unambiguously a good thing to be unhesitatingly imitated.

  • Emergent Emergence

    Godfrey Parkin blogs:

    In the E-literate blog, Michael Feldstein has recently had a couple of jabs at the burgeoning interest in emergent learning, as enthusiastically promoted by Jay Cross and others. I suspect that he’s overthinking it and just doesn’t get it.

    If so, it wouldn’t be the first time. However, at the risk of compounding the error of “overthinking it,” I’m going to try to parse through Godfrey’s definition of “emergent learning.” Because he’s right about one thing: I don’t get it yet.

    Godfrey claims that I’m misunderstanding the conversation:

    He’s using “emergent” in the Steven Johnson sense of the increasing collective smartness of dumber parts, as in smart hives of dumb bees or smart brains of dumb neurons. And by that rather narrow use of the term, he’s right — emergent learning is something of an oxymoron. But “emergent learning” is not used in that sense, at least I have never heard it used that way. Those talking about emergent learning are not talking exclusively about how groups of people get smarter by being connected with each other, though it’s part of the discussion. And they are certainly not talking about rapid consensus-building.

    Part of the problem is that he and I are clearly participating in different conversations. He attributes the “emergent learning” meme to Jay Cross, while I was primarily responding to Kathleen Gilroy. And I know Kathleen was talking about “emergence” in the same sense as Steven Johnson because she explicitly references his book.

    More importantly, I think Godfrey misreads Steven Johnson’s position when he claims that Johnson talks about “increasing collective smartness of dumber parts, as in smart hives of dumb bees or smart brains of dumb neurons” (though I understand where Mr. Parkin may have gotten that interpretation from reading my own post). Emergence really isn’t about smarts; it’s about behaviors. And because the emergent behaviors that are most interesting and worthwhile to study are usually adaptive behaviors, we mistake them for “smarts.” This was really my point when I said that emergent learning is an oxymoron; to the extent that we equate emergent adaptive behaviors with smarts, we are making a category mistake.

    So, given Parkin’s understanding of emergence in the sense of the scientific phenomenon, it’s understandable that he has missed Jay Cross’ hints that he, too, means to invoke the research that Johnson writes about (though possibly in a very different way than Kathleen does). In CLO Magazine, Jay writes:

    Businesses are complex adaptive systems. In a complex system, independent pieces join together to form something entirely different and unexpected.

    The best metaphor for a complex adaptive system is a living thing. Take a complex system apart, and you no longer have a complex system. As Verna Allee writes, “Cut a cow in half and you don’t have two cows. You have a mess.”

    In their book, “It’s Alive,” management theorists Stan Davis and Christopher Meyer make a compelling case that business entities are living, complex systems. Many nodes-brains-come together to form something new-the corporate body. As my friend David Grebow says, it even has a Corporate IQ and, according to author David Batestone, a Corporate Soul.

    Emergence is the key characteristic of complex systems. It is the process by which simple entities self-organize to form something more complex. Emergence is also what happened to that “utopian dream” of e-learning on the way to the future. Simple, old e-learning has combined with bottom-up self-organizing systems, network effects and today’s environment to morph into emergent learning.

    The phrases “complex adaptive systems” and “self-organize” are dead givaways; Jay is clearly invoking the same “emergence” that Johnson means and not simply the broader dictionary definition.

    So it seems we have at least three different definitions of “emergent learning;” Jay’s, Godfrey’s, and Kathleen’s. I’ve already made clear what I think about Kathleen’s definition: it’s an oxymoron. I’m not sure that I’m fully wrapping my head around Jay’s definition yet. Reading the passage above carefully, it seems he’s not necessarily talking about learning that is itself emergent. Instead, he seems to refer to the organization itself as exhibiting emergent behavior. Read this way, “emergent learning” might mean, roughly, “learning in the context of emergence” or “the learning strategies that make sense when dealing with complex adaptive systems.” I’m not sure if I’m reading Jay correctly on this; perhaps he will be kind enough to post a clarification in his own blog.

    At any rate, back to Godfrey. He writes:

    More typically, they are using emergent in the sense that most dictionaries would define it — coming into being or coming into notice. What they are looking at is how emerging technologies (and unexpected applications of them) are changing learning strategies, learning organization, learning implementation, and generally changing the way we go about learning as individuals and as organizations. Learning, and the way it is promulgated, is evolving visibly as it becomes a persistent survival skill. And we need to understand what is happening so that we can recognize it, influence those developments, or leverage any emergent opportunities. (That is, opportunities that are coming into being or becoming recognizable). One of the challenges of emergent learning (and I guess of business generally these days) is to recognize what among all of the chaos coming at us is significant and to exploit it before it is a speck in the rear view mirror

    In some ways, this is not so different from the stab I made above at interpreting Jay’s version of “emergent learning.” One of the interesting things about emergence (in the Johnsonian sense) is that it really screws up some traditional accounts of causality. You can’t really do a top-down analysis and hope to understand why some things happen. Forget about looking for that pacemaker cell directing the others; if you want to understand how slime mold cells work together, then you have to look at the behavior of each individual cell and how the whole turns out to be greater than the sum of its parts. This, in turn, seems to fit well with the theme of “unexpectedness,” which is a major point that Godfrey emphasizes, i.e., things are chaotic and moving fast; therefore, our learning strategies must enable us to recognize change and adapt to it quickly.

    Naturally, you don’t need the concept of complex adaptive systems (in the rigorously defined sense) to accept the point of view that we need to have rapid response capabilities built into our learning strategies. But without that concept, I’m not sure that there’s much left beyond an obvious assertion about the state of the world we live in. Sure, change is a constant. So what are we going to do about it? By itself, Godfrey’s definition of “emergent learning” seems to say nothing beyond “we need to deal with this.” Which is fine, as far as it goes, but it doesn’t seem to be a new kind of learning. It says we need a new kind of learning, without saying what that kind of learning is.

    It’s possible that adding the more rigorous notion of emergence into the mix will get us somewhere different. At the very least, it suggests more specific places to look for answers (theoretically speaking). But I’m not sure yet. Jay himself seems to acknowledge that we don’t have a clear idea of what “emergent learning” is at the moment:

    Emergent learning implies adaptation to the environment, timeliness, flexibility and space for co-creation. It is the future. We haven’t figured it out yet. Or, from the perspective of complexity science, it hasn’t figured itself out yet.

    As I mentioned to Jay in an email, I’m a recovering philosophy major. I don’t do well with fuzzy definitions. So yeah, Godfrey is right. I don’t get it yet.

  • The Revolution Will Be…Printed?

    With all the hype and hoo-ha about the conventions being blogged, there is a quieter, less sexy revolution going on that nobody seems to notice, probably because it’s old tech. I think it’s amazing that printed copies of the 9/11 Commission report were available to be purchased online within minutes of the report’s release and that copies seem to be flying off shelves (both virtual and actual). I haven’t been able to find any up-to-the-minute sales figures, but apparently Norton printed an initial run of 600,000 copies and had to immediately print more when book stores ordered half a million up front.

    This is a report that, if it is as widely read as it appears it will be, could transform not only America’s safety and anti-terrorist policies but also our fundamental ways of interacting with government. The level of transparency is unprecedented. And we can thank on-demand printing, Amazon’s e-commerce system, and good old FedEx (remember…they drive them horseless carriage thingamabobs).

    I can’t wait to get my copy.