Deadlines and Informal Learning

I saw this wonderful senior project from Bang-yao Liu, a student at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia, and wanted to share it. The title of the video is “Deadline post it stop motion.”

But of course, this blog is about informal learning, not cool stop-motion animation.

So in keeping with the official theme of this blog, my post instead is about the derivation of the word ‘deadline.’

Wait, you say, what does the word deadline have to do with informal learning? Just this. Deadlines have a marvelous capacity to focus the learner’s mind, as I expect young Bang-yao would admit.

Informal learners could do worse than to give themselves deadlines to finish their readings, learnings, writings.

The word deadline comes from one of the darker chapters of American Civil War history, Camp Sumter, aka Andersonville. Andersonville was a Confederate prisoner of war camp, in Macon County, Georgia, about 150 miles from Savannah.

In time some 45,000 prisoners of war were housed at Andersonville over the course of its 14 months of operation. In August 1864, there were 33,000 POWs in the camp. By December 1864 100 prisoners were dying each day, mainly due to disease and malnutrition. All told nearly 13,000 POWs didn’t survive Andersonville.

The prison was set on 16 acres of land, later expanded to 26 acres. The Confederacy, stretched from war expenses, provided the prisoners no barracks or shelter of any kind from the Georgia weather, although a ‘tent city’ did arise self-provided by the prisoners. Food rations were notably meager.

The camp site was bisected by a slow moving stream called Stockade Creek. It served as both a source of fresh water for the prisoners and sanitation purposes. With so many prisoners the creek and the boggy area around it quickly became a fetid, disease-ridden swamp.

Camp Sumter was surrounded by a 15-foot stockade wall. Guards patrolled the inside of the stockade. Between them and the prisoners was a low wooden fence called the ‘dead-line.’ The name came from the rule that was associated with the fence: if a prisoner so much as put his arm over the dead-line, he could be summarily shot. About 15 men were shot and killed for dead-line infractions.

Andersonville was a horror of the highest order. Its commander, Henry Wirz, was tried and executed after the war. During the trial the prosecution and witnesses described the prison, including the malevolent dead-line and its deadly rule. The newspapers of the day ate it up.

In time, a number of personal accounts of Andersonville emerged, some of them highly dramatized (as if surviving the place needed any embellishment). Few failed to mention the dead-line.

By about 1900 or so the term was in use by printers to describe an area on the margins of paper not meant to be printed upon. By the 1920s or so it began to be used to mean a time limit.

That meaning seems to have found its fit with the word. There’s no good synonymy for deadline. ‘Target’ doesn’t convey the right urgency. ‘Zero hour’ has punch, but not much currency. ‘Crunch time’ implies a band of time rather than a terminal moment.

So thank you, Bang-yao Liu, for your clever project and reminder about the power of deadlines.

Eric Hoffer, Public Intellectual, Powered By Learner’s Journals

Eric Hoffer Kept Learner's Journals During his Whole Life as a Public Intellectual

Eric Hoffer, the longshoreman aphorist, seemed to have sprung up from the bare ground able to write penetrating psychological and sociological commentary.

Hoffer was the author of nine books, most of them critically well-received. His first book, the 1951 classic called The True Believer is probably still in 90 percent of all public libraries in the United States.

And yet, it’s hard to imagine a more unlikely public intellectual.

Hoffer was the only child of German immigrant parents. He never attended college and spent 32 years as a migrant worker and longshoreman. Before that he was an itinerant worker, mostly in California. As a young child he was blind from age five until age 15 following an accident wherein he fell down the stairs in the arms of his mother. She died two years later from the resulting injuries. By 1942 when Hoffer registered for the draft, counting the draft registration there were a grand total of two public records with his name on them; the other was his social security application. When the Army declared him 4-F during WWII, he signed up as a San Francisco longshoreman in 1943. He was 45 years old.

He was entirely self-taught, but he owned few books, and not one radio or TV. All his studies were conducted with public library books. What few possessions he owned he left to Lili Osborne, who said that, on Hoffer’s death from emphysema in 1983, it took her all of two hours to clean out his apartment.

So how to explain the uncluttered Eric Hoffer?

After the veil of his blindness parted when he was 15, Hoffer began reading voraciously to sate “a terrific hunger for the printed word.”

More than just a reader, Hoffer was also a punctilious note taker. He copied onto file cards quotations from the books he was reading. He kept file cabinets full of them. And, most notably, he kept record of his thoughts in learner’s journals or notebooks, which he always kept at hand. From 1949 to 1977 he filled 131 notebooks.

He wrote his first manuscript for the immigrant’s magazine Common Ground in 1938. It was not published, but the editor’s assistant, Margaret Anderson, kept encouraging Hoffer over the course of a decades-long correspondence. The True Believer was dedicated to Anderson.

Hoffer wrote, he said, “in railroad yards while waiting for a freight, in the fields while waiting for a truck,” dockside, on busses, and park benches.

Tom Bethell of the Hoover Institution, where Hoffer’s notebooks are archived, writes: “When not on the waterfront, Hoffer would take a regular three-mile walk in Golden Gate Park toward the Pacific Ocean, working out ideas in his head and writing down the completed thoughts in his notebooks. For perhaps 30 years, Hoffer took the same walk, returning to the center of the city by bus. ‘The words, the ideas, come to me in the park,’ he said in a 1967 interview. ‘I shape them in my head there, and I write them in my notebook. Blind people [his sight had returned in adolescence] write full sentences in their head. Sentences they can see. I still do.’ But 10 years later, when he was approaching 80, he wrote: ‘In the past I could carry a train of thought in my head for days, formulating and revising, without writing down a word until the thinking was done. At present I cannot write without pen in hand. . . . The old must break with the past and learn anew.’”

As a result of Hoffer’s thinking in advance, the journal entries “in his workingman’s hand, are polished, with few erasures or corrections, even when written on a park bench,” writes Bethell.

So now to a few of Hoffer’s aphorisms:

“Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves.”

“An empty head is not really empty; it is stuffed with rubbish. Hence the difficulty of forcing anything into an empty head.”

“In times of change learners inherit the earth; while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.”

“You can never get enough of what you don’t need to make you happy.”

And for all you Freudians out there, Hoffer was distinctly anti-Freud:

“The individual on his own is stable only so long as he is possessed of self-esteem. The maintenance of self-esteem is a continuous task which taxes all of the individual’s powers and inner resources. We have to prove our worth and justify our existence anew each day. When, for whatever reason, self-esteem is unattainable, the autonomous individual becomes a highly explosive entity. He turns away from an unpromising self and plunges into the pursuit of pride — the explosive substitute for self-esteem. All social disturbances and upheavals have their roots in crises of individual self-esteem, and the great endeavor in which the masses most readily unite is basically a search for pride.”

Mr. Spock Can’t Forget the Theme to Gilligan’s Island Either

In Newsweek magazine’s recent ‘cover package’ on the new Star Trek movie, one of the writers of Star Trek: The Next Generation named Leonard Mlodinow leads his article titled “Vulcans, Never Ever Smile” with a startling confession.

There he was at a chi-chi Hollywood party filled with actors and models and an attorney whose “outfit would have been a fair trade for my car,” Mlodinow writes.

The attorney and a model… both Trekkies, as it turns out… begin to talk about various Star Trek arcana. For a long time he feels out of his depth as the attorney tries to impress the model with his knowledge of Vulcan ‘history’ when like a shot he realizes the attorney is quoting lines from a script Mlodinow himself had written!

“The situation felt surreal,” Mlodinow writes. “Not just because I’d forgotten my own dialogue—you’d be surprised how easy it is to blank on entire scenes—but that they had remembered it and in such detail.”

Mlodinow, let me be clear, wasn’t just another professional Hollywood scribe. He was, in fact, a physics professor at Caltech when he got the call to join the writing staff at Star Trek: The Next Generation and he came aboard thinking that he was there to inject some real science into the show.

What do you make of someone who can write something so unforgettable that another man commits it to memory while the writer himself can only just recall it?

I chalk it up to the ‘Gilligan’s Island Effect.’

You know what I mean. Along with a whole generation of my peers I can remember both versions of the theme to Gilligan’s Island. But for many years every April I’d have to look up my mother’s birthday to ensure I got a card to her on time. I knew her birthday was in April, I just couldn’t remember the exact date.

That is to say, part of the answer is repetition. Unless Mlodinow is a narcissist, I’d bet that he’s seen the episode in question many fewer times than the attorney. And while I’d certainly heard the Gilligan’s Island them hundreds of times, I had only celebrated 30 of my mother’s birthdays.

But part of it has to do with what learning you take pleasure in. There are adults who can recall sports statistics for the athlete-idols of their youth with perfect clarity decades after they committed them to memory. And yet if asked to memorize something they found joyless… the thread-count of the sheets their spouse preferred, say… they would tell you that they were incapable of keeping numbers in their head.

Human memory is so friable. Unless you work at it by keeping a learner’s journal and frequently reviewing it, or using a repetition spacing software like SuperMemo, it crumbles like dust.

Keep Forgetting? Remember to Sleep!

Dimitri Mendeleev Came Up With Periodical Table During a Dream

The joke goes, writes Robert Stickgold, associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, that everyone knew memory and sleep were related except for the people who studied memory and the people who studied sleep.

Writing in the April 27, 2009 issue of Newsweek,  Stickgold says that the relationship is now very clear, even if we don’t know which way all the causation arrows are pointing. Consider this:

• In tests of the different kinds of memory… procedural, declarative, episodic… ‘sleeping on it’ after first learning the task almost always improves performance.
• Sleep deprivation experiments makes memory acquisition harder. And, the tired brain has a harder time still capturing positive memories than negative ones. That could be why sleep deprivation is so often associated with depression.
• The two memory systems, the hippocampus and the neocortex, seem to interact during sleep. Increasingly it looks like that memory between the two systems is consolidated during sleep.
• Not only memory, but connections between stored memories seem to take place during sleep. Dimitri Mendeleev (see above) fell asleep at his desk and dreamed up the Periodic Table of Elements during his slumber, for instance.

The Mendeleev anecdote has been underscored by modern research. German scientists gave game players a puzzle to solve involving seven calculations. Those that slept between game sessions were three times as likely to discover that the second calculation and the seventh gave the same answer.

Why does all this matter? Stickgold writes that some sleep researchers posit that for every two waking hours we need one hour of sleep to sort through what we’ve learned and experienced. For some people who get less than that it seems to lead to conditions like depression and post traumatic stress disorder.

The third of our life we spend  sleeping is rest for the body, but the brain remains active. “And much of that activity helps the brain to learn, to remember and to make connections,” Stickgold writes.

Not so sure? Then sleep on it and comment below.

5th Annual Games for Health Conference

An 11-session track at the 5th Annual Games for Health Conference coming up June 11-12 in Boston will feature cognitive and brain fitness topics.

The conference takes place at the Hyatt Harborside Hotel in Boston.

The conference costs $379. Register online here.  Include the code ’sharp09′ and get a 15 percent discount.

Start a Job Journal, Get a Job

To Get a Job These Days You Gotta Hustle, A Job Journal Could Help

The April 13, 2009 issue of Fortune magazine highlights successful job seekers in what everyone acknowledges is a tough job market.

Although the reporter, Jia Lynn Yang, never uses these words, the job seekers in Fortune got jobs not because they were the most or best qualified, but because they were, to a person, hustlers.

And in a long list of these job hustlers the first profiled is Rob Sparno, a high-level salesman formerly at Oracle.

When the ax fell, Yang writes, Sparno who is “methodical by nature… made a trip to Staples, where be bought a black hard-cover lined notebook. He vowed to record every day what he did, whom he talked to, how he felt, how many miles he ran. He even wrote down what he ate.”

Ten weeks after leaving Oracle Sparno was employed again, by Salesforce.com. To be fair, Sparno was well-connected, competant and hard working. His job journal, by itself, hardly got him his job.

But who can doubt but that Sparno’s job journal kept his feet to the fire? The daily review of activities and progress almost certainly kept him motivated and helped him measure himself.

Likewise, I’m certain that by the time Salesforce.com hired him, Sparno knew more about himself than he did before.

Journals not only help informal learners, but job seekers.

Doodle Your Memory

In the April 6, 2009 issue of Business Week, there’s a small item from the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology. Jackie Andrade at the University of Plymouth played a rambling voice mail to 40 people. Half were given shapes to fill in as they listened.

Result: The doodlers recalled 29 percent more of the message than those who just listened.

Money quote from Bob Lutz, retiring GM-vice chair:  “I can look at old sketches done in meetings 40 years ago and experience sudden recall of the room, the table, the voices.”

Want a Super Memory? Keep a Journal and Refer to it Often.

The Super Memory Woman, Jill Price, Keeps a Detailed Daily Journal

When I was in college taking a class in ‘new journalism’ one assignment was to write about a personal experience.

What a softball, right?

I wrote about an occurrence my senior year in high school when my honors English teacher threw me out of the class and nearly scotched my high school graduation. [That’s a long story for another time].

To protect her anonymity, in my college writing assignment I changed my teacher’s name to ‘Mrs. Rodgers.’ Now, all these years later, I can’t remember her real name without referring to my high school yearbook.

What a muddle the human memory is. It depends so much on context. It’s easily swayed by suggestion. There are memory overlaps and sudden disappearances. Add to that the puzzle of the strangely precise re-memory that happens when people grow aged.

So imagine the astonishment when university researchers University of California-Irvine came across a woman they called JP who could remember with perfect clarity the exact date of Challenger Disaster. She could easily and accurately recall names and conversations from decades before. She knows when the ‘Who Shot JR?’ episode of Dallas aired and what the weather was like on the day of the finale of MASH aired.

In the journal Neurocase, the researchers described JP’s case and gave it a name; hyperthymestic syndrome, meaning exceptional memory.

The school’s PR office sniffed out a story and with JP’s permission they released her real name to the media… Jill Price. Ms. Price quickly became a cause celebre, making the rounds at Oprah, USA Today and the Wall Street Journal.

There was even an awkward (but ultimately vindicating) moment on 20/20 in 2008 Diane Sawyer asked Ms. Price when Princess Grace died. Price replied, ‘Sept 14, 1982.’ Diane Sawyer said no, the date was Sept 10, 1982. But after 60 uncomfortable seconds, someone chimed in from off-camera that, in fact, Jill Price was correct.

How to explain the seemingly inexplicable disparity between the extraordinary quality of Ms. Price’s memory and my rather mediocre one (and, probably, yours, too)?

Into this conundrum comes Gary Marcus, PhD., a cognitive psychologist at New York University, who writes about his personal experience with Ms. Price in the April 2009 issue of Wired magazine.

For their meeting, Marcus brought with him a stack of questionnaires and very quickly discovered that Ms. Price’s memory is rather solipsistic. She remembers not so much things like how to calculate the volume of a cone or what day John Wilkes Booth was killed or even a great recipe for turtle brownies.

Instead, Ms. Price remembers things that happened to her and things she witnessed on television. He also found something that UC Irvine researchers knew about, but didn’t detail in their paper: Ms. Price keeps a meticulous journal of her life, one that she refers to frequently. That’s a sample page from Ms. Price’s journal above.

Marcus concludes with this:

But even if Price’s memory is just the byproduct of obsession, she’s still amazing. I’ve come to think of her as the Michael Jordan of autobiography. Jordan wasn’t born the greatest basketball player of all time; he became the greatest, combining considerable but not unique innate talent with an incredible amount of hard work shooting free throws and practicing jumpers long after most of his peers were out carousing. Whether intentionally or not, Price has shown the same sort of daily dedication to chronicling her own life.

Want a super memory? Do what what the ‘Michael Jordan’ of memory does. Keep a journal and refer to it often.

Verbal Acuity and the Informal Learner

Pay for teachers with advanced degrees approaches that of doctors and lawyers, but only late in their careers.

The greatest predictor of student success in school isn’t their teachers’ credentials or advanced degrees, but things like their teacher’s SAT/ACT scores, the selectivity of the colleges they attended, and their verbal acuity.

Such are the findings of Dan Goldhaber, a senior research associate at the Urban Institute and published in the Hoover Institute’s quarterly Education Next.

Duke economist Jacob Vigdor uses Goldhaber’s findings to suggest that rather than give teachers permanent raises based on credentials and advanced degrees, we should instead pay effective teachers more money earlier in their careers, since that’s when teachers show the greatest improvement in teaching ability as measured by student test scores.

Vigdor’s paper, in a recent Education Next issue, has the really cool graph above that shows that the pay for highly-educated teachers in the United States approaches that of medical doctors and lawyers, but only near the end of their careers. By contrast, MDs and JDs achieve their highest earnings in their early 40s and plateau at that level until they retire.

Read Vigdor’s interesting (and surprisingly readable) paper for all the ins and outs of his policy proposal.

Interesting, you say, but what has that to do with informal learning?

Well, informal learners are usually also self-teachers. And though Goldhaber and Vigdor might object to my extrapolating the data this far, it’s appears evident to me that informal learners with greater verbal acuity… bigger vocabularies, wider and/or deeper knowledge, writing, public speaking, or language skills… have greater capacity for learning.

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) the idiosyncratic, brilliant and oft misunderstood Austrian philosopher, said as much. “Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.” (“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”).

That is, it’s hard to think about something you don’t have a word for. My four-year-old, though brilliant, wouldn’t be able to use a word like ‘idiosyncratic’ or understand its nuanced meaning beyond the idea of ‘different.’

In fact, in order to wrap our minds around some ideas, we sometimes have to coin new words or assign new meanings to old words. The word ‘extrapolate,’ for instance, is a neologism that means ‘infer’ and was coined in the mid 19th century from the words ‘extra’ and ‘interpolate.’

What can an informal learner do to increase his or her verbal acuity? Consider the following:

• Learn another language.
• Subscribe to a ‘word-of-the-day’ service available on the Internet or buy a daily word calendar.
• Pick up a ‘strange word’ book at the bookstore or library.
• Keep a good dictionary close and refer to it when you come across an unfamiliar word.
• Keep a learner’s journal.
• Write a blog.
• Teach others.
• Polish your public speaking skills at Toastmasters.
• Join a service group like Rotary or Kiwanis, both of which have a highly international focus these days. In one fell-swoop you could thereby pick up public speaking skills and be compelled to learn another language.

The Informal Learners Toolkit

Informal learning doesn’t really require much more than a certain intellectual curiosity. Isaac Newton changed the world with not a whole lot more than just what lay between his ears.

 

But there are some things, a toolkit if you will, that enable informal learning. What follows are some of the things in my informal learning toolkit. I’m anxious to hear what’s in yours. Please comment if there’s something in your informal learning toolkit, that I haven’t listed here.

 

But first some definitions of informal learning, non-formal learning and formal learning just to give the discussion some shape. These definitions come (more or less) from ERIC, the Educational Resources Information Center, a very large US government database of all things educational.

 

Informal learning: Casual and continuous learning from life experiences outside organized formal or nonformal education. 

 

Non-formal learning: Organized education without formal schooling or institutionalization in which knowledge, skills, and values are taught by relatives, peers, or other community members.

 

Formal learning: Organized education from schools or other institutions that typically leads to some kind of academic recognition.

 

My toolkit is grouped into two categories: Stuff made of neurons and stuff made of atoms (I know, I know. neurons are made of atoms. But you get my point).

 

Atomic Tools: 

• Learner’s Journal—Really want to capture something? Write it down for the now and the forever.
• iPod—All but indispensable for informal learners on the go. Also helpful on the train or bus to tell people to bugger off.
• Recorded Books—Learning aurally really gets in your head.
• Kindle—It’s probably too soon to say for sure but increasingly it looks like Amazon’s innovations and marketing muscle have effectively whipped the electronic book bugaboo.
• Live Lectures—Still the best way to learn in the company of others.
• DVDs—Whether we’re talking documentaries, instructional offerings, or something else, a well-made video is a wonderful aid for informal learners.
• MP3 Recorder—Inspiration often strikes in the car or other places or times when a pen and a learner’s journal aren’t convenient to use. So carry an MP3 recorder or tape recorder.
• Computer
• Books and Reference Materials
• A Technique for Memory and Recall—It is possible to remember things forever with nearly 90 percent recall. But it ain’t easy.
• A Mentor or a Tutor—Wait, you say. A tutor takes this out of the scope of informal learning and into the realm of non-formal or even formal learning. Maybe. But part of what defines informal learning is how it’s rewarded. Informal learners commonly learn for the joy of learning. If you take piano lessons from a teacher because you love the piano and not because of the gold stickers the teacher may give you, you’re probably still learning informally.

 Neuronal Tools  

• A Curious Mind—“Curiosity is, in great and generous minds, the first passion and the last,” said Samuel Johnson.
•  Recognition that Knowledge is Vital to Most Successful Endeavors.
•  A Driving Purpose for Your Learning.

Informal Learning and The Learner’s Guild

More American adults will undertake some kind of informal learning this year than will attend all movies. More Americans will engage in some unofficial instructional endeavor than watched the last American Idol finale and the last Super Bowl. Americans love their entertainment but they’re almost hardwired with the desire to learn.

 

It’s a rich heritage. Benjamin Franklin was an autodidact… a self-taught student. So, too in large measure was Horace Mann, the famous educational reformer, who got his books from a small library Franklin himself had founded. As early as the 1830s the American backcountry was filled with teachers who toured the sticks teaching farmers and merchants topics both useful and arcane. Mark Twain started making his first real money not as a writer but as a lecturer in the 1860s. Later, facing bankruptcy, Twain returned to the lecture circuit to pay off his debts.

 

Nowadays according to the U.S. Department of Education 70 percent of Americans adults undertake some kind of informal learning each year… more than one and half times as many Americans who are enrolled in some kind of formal education or work training. Of those whose household income is greater than $75,000, 78 percent engage in informal learning. Among those with a graduate degree the number of informal learners is an astonishing 89 percent! Even the most educated among us realize that all education is self-education.

 

The high income and well educated understand that the power to understand ideas and express themselves clearly… which travels hand in hand with ongoing learning… correlates with almost any definition of success. Like the lab experiment that yields a reward every time the lever is pressed, the well-educated keep on pressing the education lever. And they do so consistently throughout all of life’s stages.

 

Yet informal learning almost flies under the radar. That’s because by its very nature informal learning is so broad as to defy easy categorization. Reading up on working with exotic woods is informal learning. So too is listening to language tapes or watching that documentary on penguins on the Discovery Network. Maybe there’s a goal in mind like improving your employability by learning a HTML. Or maybe you’re like Franklin and you learn just because you like to learn.

 

Into this comes, The Learner’s Guild.

 

I’ll post at least once a week on trends, products, ideas, techniques, tips, tools, and whatever else catches my eye.

 

This is my third blog. My first is now inactive, but my second blog, on the subject of ’cause-related marketing’ currently ranks either number one or two and all the major search engines.