E P I C   T H I N K I N G

Issue 30: May 2004

This month:
1. New white paper: Personalisation and e-learning
2. Show report: Learning Solutions 2004
3. Book review 1: The Fifth Discipline by Senge
4. Book review 2: E-learning in the 21st Century
by Garrison & Anderson
5. Article: Only 10% of brain used - a training myth
6. News: Adult Learning drops, BBC to use
Creative Commons licenses

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WHITE PAPERS

 1. Technology is getting really personal. We have gone from personal computers to personal stereos, mobiles and digital jewellery in a very short time indeed. Technology is now truly personal and pervasive with concepts like wearable and even paintable computing.

Looking even further into the future, cameras embedded in a necklace, your clothing or glasses may record everything you see. This data may be saved off wirelessly and be available for recall through a search engine. Every learning experience could be recalled, every lecture, book you’ve read, conference attended. The limitations of memory overcome forever. Now that’s what I call a personalised e-portfolio!

In this new white paper, Donald Clark discusses how technology can personalise your learning experience and reviews some research into initiatives that have already taken place.

White Paper: Personalisation and e-learning

To get your free copycontact us

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SHOW REPORT

2. Learning Solutions 2004, 25th & 26th May 2004

The Learning Solutions 2004 show took place on 25 - 26 May 2004 at the Business Design Centre in Islington. It is billed as "Europe’s leading event for business learning innovation" and is
sponsored by AON Consulting.

The show combines a conference programme of seminars with a selection of exhibitors. Disappointingly, there were not as many exhibitors as advertised in attendance, with the majority offering LMS systems and training programmes but an interesting selection of seminars based around three topics - implementing learning; management development and promoting training - proved to be worthwhile.

Read more

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BOOK REVIEW 1

3. E-learning in the 21st Century, RoutledgeFalmer, January 2003

Author: DR Garrison & Terry Anderson

Review by Donald Clark, Epic.

Don’t be fooled by the grandiose title. What this book actually does is promote the rather dated and blinkered view that e-learning is the sole preserve of higher education. In fact, it can be argued that e-learning is at its most primitive in Higher Education where Blackboard, WebCT and other tools have produced heaps of course notes but little in the way of sophisticated content and/or learning. Higher Education has much to learn from other areas of education as well as corporate training.

Read the review

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BOOK REVIEW 2

4a. The Fifth Discipline, Currency Doubleday, 1990

Author: Peter Senge

Review by Donald Clark, Epic.

The Fifth Discipline was a book that promised not to predict, but shape the future. I’m with Glenn Hoddle, when he famously said, "I don’t make predictions, and I never will." Of course,
reviewing a book 14 years after it has been published (1990) gives the reviewer the advantage of hindsight. One can assess whether the ideas actually took root, or not. In the case of the ‘learning organisation’ we’d be hard pressed to name organisations that lived up to the promise. Way back then, the ‘learning organisation’ was on the lips of every training manager. Conferences were full of it and gurus like Arie de Geus, from Shell, took up the idea with fervour. The phrase and the dream have now faded. Such is the faddish nature of management theory.

Read the review

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ARTICLE

 5. Do we really use only 10 percent of our brains?

A brilliant article in Scientific American by Barry L. Beyerstein of the Brain Behavior Laboratory at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, debunks this great training myth. One must always
be careful with a round statistic like 10%, in itself a figure that is statistically unlikely.

The two common sources for the myth are Albert Einstein and the preface to one of the best-selling self-help books of all time, Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. Further investigation shows that Einstein never said any such thing, and Carnegie's claim was quite simply fictional. Yet the 10% myth is perpetuated by trainers up and down the land in workshops and courses on time management, innovation, improving performance and leadership. It's no more than one of those claims that refuses to die because it repeated in workshops and workbooks. Much as we'd all like it to be true - it's false.

From an evolutionary perspective it would be astounding that our brains, which are costly metabolically to grow and run, were so inefficient. The very existence of such a massively underutilised organ would be a great counter-example to the theory of evolution.

Clinical neurologists also scoff at the idea. Which 90% would you like to lose? Losing even a tiny fraction of brain tissue has dire consequences. Most head traumas and strokes in all parts of the
brain result in a functional deficit.

Then there's the evidence from neurosurgery that shows that there is no part of the brain that is dormant in the sense of having no accompanying emotion, perception or movement when stimulated. Amazingly, you can do this with live patients, as the brain has no pain receptors.

EEGs, magnetoencephalographs, PET scanners and functional MRI machines are another fine source of demythologising data. We can look at activity in the brain in realtime and the evidence is clear; no quiet areas have emerged. The entire brain is being used.

Do we really use only 10 percent of our brains? Only those who think it's true!

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NEWS

 6a. Adult learning drops

Despite huge attempts to tease adults back into learning, they remain resistant to the charms of educational initiatives and institutions. As the report states, ‘participation levels overall are
stubbornly unresponsive’ apart from those with internet access.

This is the news from NIACE who have just published their regular survey on Adult Participation in Learning for 2004. This has always been a useful source of real data about what adults are actually doing in relation to learning, as opposed to what the Government tells us they’re doing.

• 19% of adults report they are currently learning (lowest participation figure since before Government came to power)
• 4% fewer adult learners than in 1996
• sharp reverse of the growth in the combined totals of current and recent learners
• higher-paid workers - in professional and managerial or white-collar occupations - showed a quite marked increase in participation in the late 1990s, which has now tailed off
• learning divide widened from 1996 to 2004, participation rates falling among all but the highest socio-economic groups, and participation among the poorest (DEs) declining from 26% to 23%
• participation in the three years leading up to the survey among 65-74-year-olds down from 19% in 1996 to 14% in 2004. The only good news was the correlation between
  adult learning and internet access
• 53% of adults with access to the internet are current or recent learners, against 21% among those with no internet access

The survey continues the series documenting adult participation in learning in the UK. Using responses of around 5,000 adults in the UK, it offers key findings, breaking down participation, trends in participation and future intentions to learn by gender, socio-economic class, age, employment and the regions. It provides up-to-date data as well as a valuable means for comparison over time.

http://www.niace.org.uk/Publications/B/Business-intro.htm

6b. BBC to use Creative Commons licenses

Larry Lessig has been named to a BBC advisory board and that the BBC's Creative Archive project (which aims to put the BBC's archives online for non-commercial re-use) will use
Creative Commons licenses:

Professor Lawrence Lessig, chair of the Creative Commons project was clearly excited: "The announcement by the BBC of its intent to develop a Creative Archive has been the single most important event in getting people to understand the potential for digital creativity, and to see how such potential actually supports artists and artistic creativity." He went to enthuse "If the vision proves a reality, Britain will become a centre for digital creativity, and will drive the many markets - in broadband deployment and technology - that digital creativity will support."

This good news for those who want to use the BBC archive for learning.

For a look at Larry’s brilliant new book Free Culture, check out:

http://free-culture.org/freecontent/

Other Epic news this month:

Epic develop blended learning for MOD
Epic blends the rules for BAE systems

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