LANCELOT Trainer

My learning highlights at the LEARNTEC 2008

Februar 6th, 2009 Posted in LEARNTEC, Live Online Conference, Allgemein

There have been many learning highlight and many great conversations on Wednesday at the LEARNTEC in Karlsruhe. The following is a list of my personal learning highlight about the power of a simulcast, a learning conversation, the power of learning through images and last but not least my experience with motion sickness in Second Life.

After landing in Rome just prior to our simulcast, Robin Good picked Jay up from the airport. Little while later, Jay joined our conversation online and mentioned that his contribution to this event was highly informal. He recited this amazing discovery about learning patterns of the aboriginies in Australia and eventually switched on his webcam. He was talking about this discovery whilst sitting on the back seat of Robin’s BMW. A big thanks to Robin for making this WLAN connection possible.

The power of a simulcast

This simulcast we did at the LEARNTEC was so awesome. The finest guest speakers, a great international audience and additional benefits through using Elluminate. This mix of a local presence in a conference room in Karlsruhe at the LEARNTEC and a virtual room full of visitors from around the world, what a powerful simulcast.

  1. Simulcasts can be recorded. Think of the Online Educa, which is the world’s largest elearning conference and takes place beginning of December in Berlin. A complete 6 weeks program cramped into 2 days with up to 16 parallel sessions, none of which is recorded. What a waste of knowledge! 2000 partcipants from 91 countries are to listen to about 600 presentations to share their insight on learning with technology and only a few key-note sessions are recorded. This is a crime. Our simulcasts has been recorded and please come back to this post where you will find the link for it soon.
  2. Simulcasts are free. In the beginning of December 2008, I watched the UStream of LeWeb2008 and it was free. Regular entrance fee at LeWeb costs 1500 EUR and they had no internet and it was cold. I sat at home, enjoyed close-up camera angles, hopped between rooms and networked on twitter. Yay.
  3. Simulcasts are flexible. Last minute change of plans when 3 out of 4 panelists seemed to drop out do not turn out desastrous. We would have even been able to even hear George Siemens or Jonathan Finkelstein if it wasn’t such short notice. Both unable to make the timing, but ready to do it. We also changed our theme in the last minute from "Virtual Collaboration" to "Informal Learning" since Chris, Nancy, Jennifer and Jay are informal learning experts.
  4. Simulcasts are glocal. We were able to connect to Ecuador and Kenya, how wonderful to hear their work. Sadly the LEARNTEC management did not promote our efforts, did not send us any journalists nor featured our program, but I think this was due to ignorance. They said, that if people hear that we offer the same program live online, then people will not bother to come to Karlsruhe and will not pay entrance fee. Interesting thinking but once they hear about our global participants, I am sure they will revise this thinking.

The power of a learning conversation live online

Yes, I am a fervent worshipper at the altar of conversation (check out Nancy’s blog on the LEARNTEC event) and I am an evanglist for doing such conversations at a distance.

And I think it is time that we let this water freely flow to our offices, to your homes or to a conference room. It is time that we stop going to the well.

But, hang on, haven’t we been enjoying the waters of knowledge flowing freely through the pipelines called Internet for a long, long time? Why do you say that it is about time to turn on the tabs? It is because we are still going to the well! Yes, we are. We go to the Online Educa to listen to presentations and great keynote speakers, we go to the University to listen to professors, we go to the school to learn a language. It is high time to change this through learning conversations, lectures or presentations live online.

The power of visuals

Having bought the book ‘Informal Learning’ by Jay Cross when it came out, I must admit that I have not actually read it until now. So, glad about the motivation to read it for the simulcast, I came across this paragraph.

"We learn almost twice as well from images and words as from words alone. Visual lanague engages both hemispheres of the brain. Pictures translate across cultures, education levels, age group. Yet the majority of the content of corporate learning is text. Schools spend years on verbal literacy but only hours on visual literacy…"

end of quote (page 238, Appendix A Informal Learning by Jay Cross, (Pfeiffer).

Sorry to say Jay, but this is wrong. It is not twice as fast but ‘guestimates’ of study results in Second Life actually suggest it to be 10 times as much and even faster than that. This idea of picture translations across cultures is beautiful and echos Nancy’s story on how farmers in India were able to learn from far afield by watching videos on dry seed storage from an African country.

How important the eye is in learning becomes so apparent when you listen to Dr. Thomas Simoncini, author of the book "Cancer is a fungus". In his interview with Doug Kaufman in the TV show ‘Know the Cause’ he shows that decades of cancer research and untold written information about this subject, which Simoncini studied as oncologist, were superseded or outweight when he was actually able to look at a cancer tumour with a miniatur camera.

Prior to that he had seen many cat scans of cancer and they show cancer up as being black and when he went into the body with a microscopic camera he was suprised to see that cancer was indeed white. His insight into this subject finally was triggered by looking at dermatitis on a hand which equally was white and then he put two and two together to formulate his theory that cancer is a fungus. His huge success in treating cancer with anti-funghi drugs (bicarbonate soda) seems to suggest that his theory holds true.

Motion sickness in Second Life

I was due to present our new EU funded project AVALON a second time in a day and this time and finally we had internet. So, I decided to show the audience the island of Moya in Second Life. Patrick Moya who is a contemporary pop-artist in France has turned an island in Second Life into the most wonderful thing I have come across. A whole island full of inspirtion and creation. Moya himself is such a character with his colorful suit, the wings and the little children. Last time he took us in the car around the island showing us all the great pictures and replica of real life art pieces. This was truly magic and please read up again on the blog I wrote about the car joy ride.

This time, he offered to take me around the island in a hellicopter. How cool is that? So preparing this trip, recording it and checking whether the screensharing would work, I met Moya the day before and he took me in his hellicopter, then made me walk down a 250m tall tower (going round and round and round), took me in his car (a very wobbly car ride) then the flight and a few loopings with his private jet and finally the boat, a small and wobbly rubber boat. When we finished this tour of about 20min and after I pocketed the recording, I felt sooooo sick. Mind you, even in real life I have problems with cars and boats. My tummy just does not seem to like it. But in a 3D world????? Sitting at my computer. Wow, I had no idea that this is even possible that one can feel sick. What a learning experience.

 

  1. 6 Responses to “My learning highlights at the LEARNTEC 2008”

  2. By dave cormier on Feb 9, 2009

    Hey folks,

    I would be hesitant to generalize from any research, were it even found, that suggested that it could ‘measure’ the degree to which the addition of ‘visuals’ helped learning by means of any kind of specific mathematical scale. The vagueries of the contexts of learning mean that any research, regardless of scale or attention to detail, is unlikely to reproduce itself on a global scale. I’m afraid that I wont be much help in this department either as the kind of quantitative research that would be required to make a distinction between ‘twice as fast’ and ‘ten times as fast’ would require a specific, crystalized goal for learning that is outside of my area of focus.

    I, like Nancy, see a big difference between ‘visual learning’ in that tri-partite visual/auditory/kinesthetic learning style approach and the obvious importance of the visual in learning. I wonder if having any kind of research would ever ‘prove’ the point and convince those that are currently not in agreement one way or the other. I heartily agree with your sentiments from the live discussion we had on Wednesday, but i would make a slight adjustment that I think Jay, Jennifer and Nancy (and maybe others) would agree with. The advantage of all the technology is the bring the ‘ideas’ together, not the experts. In the same line, the proof might be less important than a spirited public discussion around the topic. (which I’d be happy to facilitate if you like :) )

    cheers,

    dave.

  3. By Nancy White on Feb 9, 2009

    (note - this comment is a bit out of order with Dave’s as we were having some comment posting challenges. Now fixed!)

    I wonder if there is some confusion about the misapplication of Dale’s “Cone of Experience” with the the so called “learning pyramid. ” Often people use the pyramid to make a point about learning retention rates without consideration of either the context of the original research or even the context of the learning being critiqued. I think there was some additional NTL research, if I recall — see this post http://www.willatworklearning.com/2006/05/people_remember.html . Will’s article is very damning. I also worry that it also “throws a bit of the baby out with the bath water,” but it was a great learning moment for me when I read this ­ and have since included a caution about the generalism when I offer online facilitation workshops.

    These generalizations about “visual learning” strip away all sorts of context and this IS an issue. But it doesn’t invalidate the importance of understanding the role of the visual in learning, for whom, how and when. I suspect just now that we can do all kinds of brain imaging will we understand it better. From a practitioner’s perspective, however, the visual appears to be extremely significant in the learning cohorts and communities I work with. This is just my “field observation” and I have no formal research to present.

    That said, I don’t have nor have I done research in this area, so I can’t offer any citation. I’m not an academic.

    I also take Jay’s points in context and found them both useful and stimulating. He was reminding us not to forget what our history has taught us and use it going forward into an environment with very different and expanded opportunities to use the visual.

  4. By Nancy White on Feb 9, 2009

    Oops, I actually also forgot to mention that our comments above come out of an email conversation, so there is a bit of lost context about some push back Heike was getting about Jay’s comments on the visual aspect of learning. Nothing like confusing readers, eh? I apologize for not making that clearer.

    Here are two more interesting sources on learning and retention:

    http://www2.potsdam.edu/betrusak/AECT2002/dalescone.html

    and

    http://www.cisco.com/web/strategy/docs/education/Multimodal-Learning-Through-Media.pdf

  5. By Jay Cross on Feb 9, 2009

    Heike, regarding your request in email for evidence for my statement about visual learning that you find wrong, please read the text of Informal Learning, not the summary in the appendix. There you will find (on page 118) reference to Bob Horn’s Visual Language and reproductions of pp. 233-234 from that book which detail research and statistics by Sweller, Chandler, and the Wharton School on the effectiveness of visual language.

  6. By Nancy White on Feb 9, 2009

    I second the reference to Bob Horn - FABULOUS.

    I also want to publicly recognize something Jay brought to my attention and that I should have seen quickly myself. Will Thalheimer’s work mentioned in my first comment (http://www.willatworklearning.com/2006/05/people_remember.html ) appears to have be substantively copied by Cisco in their report with insufficient attribution, but more importantly beyond the letter of the law, without recognition of the amazing research and synthesis Will put into his work.

    I think this is a huge issue as we try and promote and open up learning — there is something about working hard to transparently and generously build upon, rather than recreate or worse, rip off the work of others. This fosters not just learning in the moment, but further development of one’s learning network into the future. And that is a place of powerful, ongoing learning.

    OK, stepping off my soap box.

  7. By heike on Feb 10, 2009

    I am glad to hear that Will exposed Dale Cone’s graph to be fraudulent because this frees the discussion to once again argue that using visuals in learning is not twice, not 10 times but even many more times as fast as learning with text.

    By studying a single image in the museum of Brisbane, Jay is uncovering the learning structure of a culture that has successfully survived thousands of years on this planet. A single image on the wall holds this ‘secret’.

    By watching the film themoneymasters.com, Obama could learn how to get rid of 54 Trillion of US Dollar debt in a few years. He probably already knows about the unprecedented power of a handful of banksters that is intentionally crippling America’s economy but he could learn how by changing the law to take away the license for a private FedReserve and by issuing interest free money, he could model this economic freedom for the rest of the world. ‘Lessons learned’ by watching a 3h film.

    By using a miniature camera, Dr. Tullio Simoncini was able to ‘learn’ that cancer is white and his subsequent research led him to formulating the theory that cancer is a fungus because all fungus is white and fungus is one of the most resillient growing organisms on this planet. By opening his eyes, Dr. Tullio Simoncini ‘learned faster’ than untold tons of medical study papers by hundreds of doctors in decades of cancer research.

    I don’t need to argue WHY we need to learn faster, do I? Cancer is currently killing 1 in 3. Animal species are already dying out and it is estimated that we have less than 10 years to learn to change human’s history but thanks to films like The 11th hour, flowthefilm.com, zeitgeistmovie.com, thesecret.tv this rate of learning can be faster and easily accelerated.

    I am not surprised why Google paid 1,7 bill US for youtube.com. They understand the power of visuals too.

Post a Comment