At the same time, reinforcing your larger point, the first few times I did this and my modified code ran correctly, I could feel my synapses sit up and take notice. Hey, that really will produce this week’s report, not last week’s.

It’s how the loops gets closed — or, better, how the cycle completes one revolution — in the approach you recommend. Rather than show and tell, it’s go and show.

Online, I there is a lot of pressure to provide cheap reusable training. This leads to a form of mechanical interactivity from multiple choice quizzes, drag and drop etc which is simple to do and to grade. While these can be written to test students’ ability to apply, evaluate and synthesize ideas rather than just regurgitate them, they tend to lead to fairly simplistic dead ends which might well not make sense to learners.

The other extreme is the online learning community, where reflexive learning is supported by co-learners or a tutor or probably from both. The learning in this situation is through discussion and participation if not collaboration. This requires skilled, committed facilitators, which will make the course less ‘re-usable’ and more expensive. It is also more difficult to assess. No more “you got 67% correct, now print out your certificate”!

I’d be interested to learn how successful people have been in bridging these two extremes and to what extent the first can be made be useful.

Karyn, I agree that one reason we use information dumps is so we can check items off our list and dodge responsibility: “We told them not to push the red button. It’s not our fault if they didn’t listen.” To some degree, it is our fault. If minor changes would make our materials more effective but we don’t make those changes, then we can’t really blame our learners for following our example and failing to change as well.

If we don’t show learners at least some alternatives and let them see why they should be ruled out, our learners can’t wing it in the real world, where the alternatives are infinite.

From Minsky’s paper I ended up at another paper, where I got this quote: “Conceiving competence as the ability to solve problems, Heid distinguishes between trivial and non-trivial competence. A case of trivial competence occurs when individuals succeed in solving a task without really knowing why. In contrast, non-trivial competence means to be able to repeatedly bring about success, because one knows about the reasons and conditions under which it is achieved.”

If any blog readers want to see the original Minsky piece, here’s the full text of “Negative Expertise”:
http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/NegExp.mss.txt

And here’s a paper that considers how ideas like negative expertise can be applied to professional development:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/wv488100m9u44378/fulltext.html

I think the fact that our jails are full to overflowing answers that question!

I share your frustration with the idea that dumping information on people is going to produce results. Then again, if the result we want is to be able to demonstrate that “we did our bit – just look at look at all those neatly checked boxes” then maybe we are achieving our goal!

Can’t you just picture it… “Well the problem can’t be with the training – we’ve given them all the information they need and we’ve tested them on it. The problem must lie somewhere else. Maybe they’re just lazy!”

The point I am trying to make is that the scenario presented by Cathy makes for effective learning because of the grey areas in it, Sometimes, “showing” learners what not to do works much better than just “telling” them what to do. This is “Negative Knowledge” as described by Marvin Minsky in his article “Negative Expertise.”

Laura, I (obviously!) agree that practicing in a safe place, and being free to make mistakes, is the best way to learn. The more wrong notes I hit, the closer I get to the right one–and the more I learn about the tradition I’m trying to play. If someone just tells me what note to play, I’ve learned almost nothing.

Since elearning is all about efficiency, we don’t want to just throw learners into the deep end and watch them figure out how to swim–that takes too long. We can, however, give them a short, focused scenario to play with, along with guidance that quickly moves them to the right answer.

Robin, I think people fall back on “tell, then test” because it’s familiar and easy. It’s familiar because most of us went to schools that used that approach. And it’s easy because thinking of a story takes a few minutes longer than just writing, “Always do X.”

The cool thing is that the more you make yourself write stories, the easier they are to write.

This approach could also make us talk on a different level with our SMEs. In addition to getting the information we need, we can ask them for case studies or real-life examples. This gives us a deeper insight into the content as well as giving us ideas for scenarios.