How would Steve Jobs Do Training and Education?

Friday, July 13, 2012 0

I was asked by a certain company a question. How would Steve Jobs do training and education?

The New Old Software Development
My first answer is the bottom right of the three charts. In terms of software (and hardware) development, the simplest answer is 1) Create tools that don't need training. Use skeuomorphic designs. Provide rich feedback. Use icons and other visuals well.

Then, because that is not always possible, 2) Provide just in time context support for specific features, such as bubble help. For real-world hardware, this will also increasingly include a layer of just in time training that can be triggered by tags (such as barcades or QR Codes) or even shapes (an airplane maintenance worker takes a photograph on a mobile device (including Google Glasses) of a broken part, and this triggers the material on how to fix it).

The third aspect is "The Tool is the Philosophy." The development of software assumes and codifies processes on how to do a task outside of simply using the software. So increasingly the best way to learn a subject (even at a deep and philosophical level) is around engaging the tool.

One way to learn project management is to master a tool on project management. Math curricula for most non-Math majors should be shaped almost entirely by a modern spreadsheet. Similarly, new tools bring forth, not just capture, new philosophies. The existence of Facebook and Tumblr changes what MBA students need to know. Finally, certain technologies update skills. The skill of spelling is less important in the era of spell checkers.

The New Old Training
Having said that, there is plenty of training that happens (or should happen) outside the use of tools. For these, I submit the model of The New Old Training. Here (depicted on the bottom left of the three models), training organizations produce three types of content for which iPhones, iPads, and iPods have been optimized .

The first is sims (simulations and serious games), using today's casual games as a guide for scope and production values. I might look at PopCap as a model vendor here, with such games as Plants vs. Zombies. These are easy to engage, slick, with humor and other forms of personality. These will not just teach competence but more importantly conviction.

The second "deliverable" from the new old training group would be a Kahn Academy-esque video and podcast library. Here, low production value, short videos and MP3s (some user submitted) on a range of relevant area can be made available (and, on occasion, pushed out).

Finally, communities, such as modeled by StackOverflow.com, provide places for people to engage around both shallow and very deep issues.

All three of these New Old Training models use tracking methods, including awarding of achievements and other gamification techniques. The methodologies used to put hard certifications on soft activities (badges for status in a chat room) allow organization to measure and prescribe a wider range of activities.

The New Old Education
Finally, all learning has to happen in a context (hopefully intrinsically motivating, but often not). The New Old Education (upper middle diagram) is a complete reversal of the current industrial model. Education systems (K through College) should be dedicated to helping students:

find out at what skills they are better than almost everyone else, and
identify what their personal missions are (what problems in the world they find most motivating).

Any functioning education system would then help students connect their unique gifts with their mission by:

enabling authentic opportunities to hone and test themselves and finally
identify pathways to an appropriate career. (See education is individualistic and learning to be questions.)

The more people are self motivated, the less broad training is needed. But "best practices" communities and other deep content are still critically important.

It is impossible for me to answer the question, "How would Steve Jobs do training?" But it is easy to imagine the future of education being much richer than the past.

Schools that don't encourage "genuine play" in a subject-matter sacrifice both competence and conviction

Thursday, July 12, 2012 Category : Citations for the Rules 0

Unschooling Rule 26 (#unrules26) is: Biologically, the necessary order of learning is: explore, then play, then add rigor.

There is so much consensus on the critical role of play, from the ground-breaking work of Jean Piaget to a recent CNN Opinion piece: Want to get your kids into college? Let them play. Despite the compelling case made, an entire generation of school kids has already gone through middle school and high school since Dr. Gee's What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy came out.

Funnily enough, the most successful academic use of "play" is not, as one might expect, the extension of successful socializing and educational play from kindergarten to subsequent first and second grades. In fact, we are seeing the opposite here, with more directive style content and approaches being pushed down to younger ages.

Rather, the biggest use of "play" in academics is coming at the graduate school level, where "simulations" and "role-plays" are being used, almost inevitably media-assisted, to develop skills in the next generations of doctors, business people, and lawyers, just to name a few. In other words, the closer to the point of the real use of content, and the more sophisticated the content, the more play is encouraged.

This is because competent graduate schools understand that the goal of learning is: Competence + Conviction = Comfort

Competence is a pretty well understood idea. It is the ability of a learner to apply the right skills.

But developing conviction in a student for any subject matter is even more important. Conviction is the enduring understanding and drive in the learner to do the right thing.

I look at the conviction level by gauging:

How do people actually behave when no one is watching, and/or when stressed?
Can people improvise to appropriately adapt learned approaches to situations not explicitly covered in the material?

Ultimately, comfort comes from the combination of the two. And comfort, unlike the awareness of facts, lasts for decades. Comfort is reinforced and made stronger by the productive world.

As an aside, all of the identified "non-universals" of society require conviction, and include:

Model Based Science
Equal Rights
Democracy
Focus Culturally on Similarities over Differences
Slow Deep Thinking
Legal System over Vendetta
Perspective Drawing
Theory of Harmony
Agriculture over hunting and killing

From my own work, I have framed out a design approach to begin the conviction developing process using simulations:

Allow students to experiment with their traditional behavior. Allow them to do what they would naturally do. Then show not only the immediate, apparent, and high-probability consequences (which are often positive) of their traditional behavior, but also the long term, hidden, and/or "unlikely" but possible consequences (which can be devastating). Allow the player to experience emotionally the direct devastating consequences.
Visualize the "invisible system" - the flow of events that people can't normally see, but leads to any devastating outcomes.
Allow students to repeat the scenarios (which means they can't be too long, or rely too much on linear content), and then "discover" for themselves the right way of doing things.
Include the little feedback signs to teach players what are signs in the real world that indicate a straying into risky behavior.
Put the student in novel situations that require improvising based on their earned knowledge.
Present tailored, not generic, after action reviews/debriefings.

Play is the oldest form of education. And any parent that relies on, or any organization that hires from, institutions that don't use play will get people with only brittle, superficial, and transient knowledge at best.

See also:
Unschooling Rules 26. Biologically, the necessary order of learning is: explore, then play, then add rigor.

A simple IR experiment to prove that the North Carolina Sea Level Rise Bill is just flat wrong

Thursday, July 5, 2012 Category : convection, Heat transfer, IR 0

Last month, North Carolina's Senate passed a bill that would have required the state's Coastal Resources Commission to base predictions of future sea level rise along the state's coast on a steady, linear rate of increase. This has sparked controversies across the nation amid the record heat waves in many states.

If the lawmakers had done our very simple IR experiment on visualizing thermohaline in a cup, published in the July issue of last year's Journal of Chemical Education (see the image to the left), they would have had a better understanding about the possibility of the nonlinear acceleration of ice shelf melting: The less salty the seawater is, the faster the ice shelf above it melts. And the faster ice melts, the less salty the seawater will become. This creates a positive feedback loop that accelerates the melting process. If the speed of ice melting in systems as simple as a cup of saltwater is not as nice as the "steady, linear" rate some of the lawmakers would like to see, who can be sure that systems as complex as the Earth would follow a "steady, linear" trajectory of change?

If you bother to read on, this experiment uses just a cup of tap water, a cup of salt water, and some ice cubes. The two cups are placed next to each other on a table for comparison. (a) An IR image right after an ice cube was added to a cup of freshwater (left) and a cup of saltwater (right). (b) An IR image taken after four minutes showing a downwelling column in the freshwater. (c) An IR image taken after nine minutes showing the tabletop was cooled significantly near the freshwater cup. (d) An IR image taken after 16 minutes showing that the bottom of the freshwater cup became cooler than the top whereas the bottom of the saltwater cup remained warmer than the top.

To see the entire process caught under an IR camera, you can watch the embedded YouTube videos in this blog post. Feel free to send these videos to your representatives if you happen to live in the coastal area of North Carolina. Or send to a science teacher in North Carolina in the hope that the bill will be revised in the future to consider the possibility of nonlinear acceleration.

Note that these videos do not represent any political view and should not be considered as in support of any agenda, my purpose is only to provide a humble scientific demonstration to prove that things do not always go smoothly as we wish.

Investigating thermoimaging in augmented multisensory learning about heat transfer

Monday, July 2, 2012 Category : Heat transfer, IR 0

Jesper Haglund from Linköping University presents a poster about our Sweden-US collaborative research on thermal visualization at the 2012 World Conference on Physics Education held in Istanbul, Turkey. Below is the abstract of the poster:

"Infrared (IR) thermal imaging is a powerful technology which holds the pedagogical potential of ‘making the invisible visible’, and is becoming increasingly affordable for use in educational contexts. Science education research has identified many challenges and misconceptions related to students’ learning of thermodynamics, including disambiguation of temperature and heat, and a common belief that our sense of touch is an infallible thermometer. The purpose of the present study was to explore how thermal imaging technology might influence students’ conceptual understanding of heat and temperature. This was carried out by investigating three different conditions with respect to students exploration of the thermal phenomena of different objects (e.g. wood, metal and wool), namely the effect of students’ use of real-time imaging generated from a FLIR i3 IR camera, students’ interpretation of static IR images, and students’ deployment of traditional thermometer apparatus. Eight 7th-grade students (12-13 years old) worked in pairs across the three experimental conditions, and were asked to predict, observe and explain (POE) the temperature of a sheet-metal knife and a piece of wood before, during and after placing them in contact with their thumbs. The participants had not been exposed to any formal teaching of thermodynamics and the ambition was to establish if they could discover and conceptualise the thermal interaction between their thumbs and the objects in terms of heat flow with minimal guidance from the researchers. The main finding was that a cognitive conflict was induced in all three conditions, as to the anomaly between perceived ‘hotness’ and measured temperature, with a particular emotional undertone in the real-time IR condition. However, none of the participants conceptualised the situation in terms of a heat flow. From the perspective of establishing a baseline of the understanding of thermal phenomena prior to teaching, extensive quantities, e.g. ‘heat’ or ‘energy’, were largely missing in the participants’ communication. In conclusion, although an unguided discovery or inquiry-based approach induced a cognitive conflict, it was not sufficient for adjusting the students’ conceptual ecologies with respect to the age group studied here. Future research will exploit the promise of the cognitive conflict observed in this study by developing a more guided approach to teaching thermal phenomena that also takes full advantage of the enhanced vision offered by the thermal camera technology."

If you happen to be at WCPE 2012, drop by his poster: Session - 1.04, Date & Time: 7/3/2012 / 13:00 - 14:00, Room: D406 (3rd Floor).

If you don't know what thermal visualization is, visit our InfraredTube website.

Investigating the Kármán vortex street using Energy2D

Saturday, June 30, 2012 Category : computational fluid dynamics, Energy2D 0

Run this simulation.

The Kármán vortex street is a repeating pattern of swirling vortices caused by the unsteady separation of flow of a fluid over bluff bodies. It is named after the great scientist Theodore von Kármán who co-founded NASA's JPL. This effect is observable in nature like in a stream, but you need some luck since it requires some picky conditions that are not always there for you.

Now, with our online simulation program Energy2D you can create and investigate the Kármán vortex street in your browser without depending on Mother Nature to give you an opportunity window.

For example, you can test how big an obstacle should be in order to produce this effect. You will find that an obstacle must be large enough to create a steady vortex street. If the shape of the obstacle is not streamlined, what will you see?

If you stick a thermometer in a thermal vortex street, you should see that the temperature will swing pretty regularly between a high value and a low value (see the image to the right). This means this effect could be used to warm and cool an array of things periodically. Could there be some engineering use of this?