 When you
spend a decade working in Knowledge Management, you can't help thinking
a lot about how people learn. The book that first helped me understand
the learning process was Nancy Dixon's The Organizational Learning
Cycle. Nancy was writing about 'collective learning', a subject I was
already skeptical about even then: I was, and remain convinced that
learning is an intensely personal, individual experience, and that we
all learn differently.
The graphic above is adapted from Nancy's book. It says that, in
general, we learn as follows:
- We take in information through our sensory receptors.
Already there is a dreadfully low signal/noise ratio: If we aren't
paying attention, if we're not good listeners, if our senses are dulled
or distracted, a large part of the potential learning from the person
or scene we're 'taking in' is already lost.
- We next filter and 'process' this information through our
personal mental models or 'frames'. This is a function of the neuron
structures in our brains, which were to some extent set at birth, and
to some extent were formed early in childhood as we first began to
learn and to acquire language and other information processing tools to
help us learn. Here are two quotes from yesterday's post on 'laws' that
describe this 'internal knowledge management' process:
Frames
trump facts. All of our concepts are organized into conceptual
structures called "frames" (which may include images and metaphors) and
all words are defined relative to those frames. Conventional frames are
pretty much fixed in the neural structures of our brains. In order for
a fact to be comprehended, it must fit the relevant frames. If the
facts contradict the frames, the frames, being fixed in the brain, will
be kept and the facts ignored. [George Lakoff]
Because people understand by finding in their memories the closest
possible match to what they are hearing and use that match as the basis
of comprehension, any new idea will be treated as a variant of
something the listener has already thought of or heard. Agreement with
a new idea means a listener has already had a similar thought and well
appreciates that the speaker has recognized his idea. Disagreement
means the opposite. Really new ideas are incomprehensible. The good
news is that for some people, failure to comprehend is the beginning of
understanding. For most, of course, it is the beginning of dismissal.
[Roger Schank]
- Next, we store the filtered, processed, regurgitated,
parsed 'learnings' in our 'working memory', the brain's RAM, where they
continue to be molded, considered, and amended until we have
essentially 'decided what they mean'. Then it gets filed away in
long-term memory, to be accessed and extracted if and when it is ever
needed again. If it is not used for a considerable time, it is
'forgotten', making room in the memory for other, newer learnings that
may be more useful.
You may think this description is unduly negative. I arrived at it,
from reading at least a dozen books on the subject since I read Nancy's
work, from interviewing co-workers after they attended presentations
and seminars to de-brief with them what they said they had learned (try it -- you'll be astonished at the results), and from thinking about-- not how people learn -- but why people learn.
The purpose of learning is ultimately Darwinian -- we don't learn just
for learning's sake, or because it is fun. We learn, and learn the way
we do, because it helps us to survive. In most situations, the recall
and application of past learnings is far too slow and unreliable to
keep us alive in critical situations, so to survive we rely much more
heavily on instinct. Instinctive 'knowledge' is hard-wired into us, as
it has been for us and our primordial ancestors since life first made
its appearance on Earth. Intellectual and moral learnings are a back-up
system, for when we have the luxury of time and the opportunity to
apply more complex situational knowledge to a survival problem (such as
planning a date, keeping a job, or designing a hydrogen fuel cell).
Bernd Heinrich, in Mind of the Raven,
probes the sharp, massive (relative to body size) brains of corvids,
the brightest species of birds. He describes the raven's capacity for
ruse (when hiding food so it won't be found by others) and
sophisticated memory of place (for finding the food again). He also
describes a simple IQ test for animals that most ravens pass with
flying colours: A thick string is hung from a tree-branch, to which is
attached a well-wrapped morsel of a favourite food. It cannot be
reached from the branch or the ground, and cannot be extracted by
grabbing it in flight. Ravens quickly appreciate that the answer is to
sit on the branch and pull the string up, claw over claw, until the
food can be reached and unwrapped. There is no trial and error
involved. The abstract reasoning is well within the raven's
considerable intellectual capabilities. Like us, they simply reorganize
the accumulated learnings in their brains to fit the new problem's
context.
Heinrich surmises that the raven's large and sophisticated brain evolved because it had to, to survive. Ravens do not possess the tools to kill their prey, so, like man, they began as carrion eaters. But
then, they 'learned' to collaborate with wolves and other killers of
large animals. Now they fly overhead and find the meal, and then buzz
the wolves, flying circles between the wolves and the prey until the
wolves, too, 'learn' what the ravens are 'saying', make the kill, and
share the spoils with their avian scouts.
In Experiential Learning, David Kolb describes a four-phase learning 'cycle': Experiencing, Reflection/Observation, Conceptualization, and Experimentation/Application.
If this is indeed how we learn, it is not surprising that 'on-the-job'
learning trumps 'book' learning. If we learn by doing, it is hard to
imagine a worse learning environment than the classroom or boardroom.
And it also explains how stories, which are so engaging, so
participatory, are such effective teaching tools: You are sharing your experience
in the story, not merely your observations and conceptualizations. It
also explains the popularity of Case Studies in the classroom and Best
Practices in the workplace, though both of these are extremely poor
substitutes for first-hand learning. Kolb describes four basic
'Learning Styles':
- Diverging: most learning comes from experiencing and reflection
- Assimilating: most learning comes from reflection and conceptualization
- Converging: most learning comes from conceptualization and application
- Accommodating: most learning comes from application and experiencing
His research suggests that women tend to prefer experiencing while men
prefer conceptualization, but he hypothesizes this may be culturally
learned behaviour rather than anything innate. There are of course many
other models that parse learning styles differently, and different
activities (note-taking, summary writing, reading vs. listening,
graphics vs. text, oral recapitulation etc.) that enhance learning for
each of us differently during each of the four phases of the learning
cycle.
One of the things I have observed in watching people in social
gatherings and in more formal meetings is that almost all multi-person
social activities are essentially sequences of distinct two-party
conversations. It is almost as if the signal/loss ratio is so poor in
conversations, which are not really shared experiences but rather
'playbacks' of one individual's (the talker's) experiences and
learnings for the supposed benefit of the other individual (the
listener), that a simultaneous 'bandwidth' of two people is all we can
manage. Perhaps the reason why we even tolerate these abstract social
activities is that we hardly ever do anything together
anymore. The job of the typical specialized 'knowledge worker' today
(despite the prevalent and somewhat fraudulent hype about collaboration
and work 'teams') is mostly individual, solitary activities and
experiences. And social and family discourse often centres around the
passive and individual watching of television or films or listening to
music. We often don't even eat together anymore, the primeval, original
social activity of all species.
All of this got me thinking about the constraints
to learning, and why, in this 'information age', there seems to be less
learning occurring going on rather than more. Here is my list of the
top 10 constraints to learning in our modern culture:
- We don't allow ourselves (and society doesn't allow us) enough time for wonder.
- Our workplace activities and our home routines are often repetitious and stimulus-poor.
- We don't do anything together anymore.
- We get too much of our life experience second-hand (from books & movies, and online).
- We suffer from imaginative poverty -- we won't let ourselves imagine, and now we've largely forgotten how to imagine.
- Our lives are too organized and too scheduled to allow serendipitous experiences and hence serendipitous learning.
- In this world full of terrible knowledge and awful
realities, we are becoming afraid to learn. We cannot bear too much
reality, too much bad news, and we don't want to accept the awful
responsibility that knowing and learning brings with it.
- Everything about the current Western educational system impedes and discourages learning.
- The media have addicted themselves, and us, to facts rather than meaning.
- We have 'desensitized' ourselves -- we process everything mainly with our left brain, so we no longer really see, really hear, really smell, really taste, really feel.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
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