Lisa Neal and I have a new piece on attention and interactivity up on the eLearn home page. This is the first of what I hope will be many collaborations with Lisa.
Tag: eLearn-Magazine
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New Article on Informational Cascades
My new article just came out in eLearn. It started out wanting to be about “emergent learning” but, once I realized that I still have no idea what emergent learning actually is, I removed all references to it in the article. At any rate, I feel pretty good about the piece.
The question will arise whether the arguments I make contradict optimistic pieces like this Cialdini article in HBS Working Knowledge that has been making the rounds on elearning blogs lately.
Nope. Not at all.
You can believe that properly functioning groups can arrive at better judgments than their smartest individual participants and still believe that problems such as informational cascades can derail performance. That’s why studying these problems is so important; we can learn the weaknesses of group processes and shore them up to produce more reliably positive results. Ain’t science grand?
Please feel free to use the comments section on this post to add your thoughts and feedback regarding the article.
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More Emergence Hoo-Ha
I got an email this morning calling my attention to the existence of something called the “Emergent Learning Forum.” I don’t know this group and I don’t know what they mean by “emergent learning”; my previous posts on emergence were in response to articles that have appeared in eLearn and the echoes of them that I have seen in the blogosphere. For the record, I’m quite open to the possibility that the concept of emergence can be used fruitfully to improve our efforts at organizational learning and other forms of knowledge sharing. However, emergence is also a particularly hard concept to wrap one’s head around, and that the conversations about it that I have seen so far haven’t yet gotten to the heart of the idea.
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The Problem with "Emergent Learning:" Informational Cascades
I just submitted an article to eLearn Magazine that starts to get at one of the reasons why I am skeptical about emergent learning as a panacea. I’m not going to give away too many of the surprises here (unless eLearn decides not to publish the article, in which case I will post it here), but let’s just say that you can find the roots of the argument in the article Conversation, Learning, and Informational Cascades [PDF]. From the abstract:
We offer a model to explain why groups of people sometimes converge upon poor decisions and are prone to fads, even though they can discuss the outcomes of their choices. Models of informational herding or cascades have examined how rational individuals learn by observing predecessors’ actions, and show that when individuals stop using their own private signals, improvements in decision quality cease. A literature on word-of-mouth learning shows how observation of outcomes as well as actions can cause convergence upon correct decisions. However, the assumptions of these models differ considerably from those of the cascades/herding literature. In a setting which adds ‘conversational’ learning about both the payoff outcomes of predecessors to a basic cascades model, we describe conditions under which (1) cascades/herding occurs with probability one; (2) once started there is a positive probability (generally less than one) that a cascade lasts forever; (3) cascades aggregate information inefficiently and are fragile; (4) the ability to observe past payoffs can reduce average decision accuracy and welfare; and (5) delay in observation of payoffs can improve average accuracy and welfare.