Is Knowledge Translation In Health Too Important to Leave to Health Professionals?
Posted: April 24, 2013 Filed under: education & learning, innovation, journalism, knowledge translation | Tags: communication, health communication, health systems, journalism, knowledge exchange, knowledge integration, knowledge translation, librarians, social media, storytelling, teachers 7 Comments »
Knowledge translation — and its affiliated terms knowledge exchange, knowledge integration and knowledge mobilization — was coined to describe a process of taking what is known into what is done in health across the spectrum of science, practice, policy and the public’s health. As health issues become more complex due to the intertwining of demographics, technology, science, and cultural transformations the need to better understand evidence and its impact on health has never been higher. Questions remain: has demand met supply? How are the health professions dealing with this equation?
Translating knowledge
The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), one of the earliest champions of the concept of knowledge translation in research, define it as:
a dynamic and iterative process that includes synthesis, dissemination, exchange and ethically-sound application of knowledge to improve the health of Canadians (sic), provide more effective health services and products and strengthen the health care system.
These ideas are expanded below:
Synthesis – Synthesis, in this context, means the contextualization and integration of research findings of individual research studies within the larger body of knowledge on the topic. A synthesis must be reproducible and transparent in its methods, using quantitative and/or qualitative methods. It could take the form of a systematic review, follow the methods developed by the Cochrane Collaboration, result from a consensus conference or expert panel or synthesize qualitative or quantitative results. Realist syntheses, narrative syntheses, meta-analyses, meta-syntheses and practice guidelines are all forms of synthesis. Resources related to synthesis are available.
Dissemination – Dissemination involves identifying the appropriate audience and tailoring the message and medium to the audience. Dissemination activities can include such things as summaries for / briefings to stakeholders, educational sessions with patients, practitioners and/or policy makers, engaging knowledge users in developing and executing dissemination/implementation plan, tools creation, and media engagement.
Exchange – The exchange of knowledge refers to the interaction between the knowledge user and the researcher, resulting in mutual learning. According to the Canadian Health Services Research Foundation (CHSRF), the definition of knowledge exchange is “collaborative problem-solving between researchers and decision makers that happens through linkage and exchange. Effective knowledge exchange involves interaction between knowledge users and researchers and results in mutual learning through the process of planning, producing, disseminating, and applying existing or new research in decision-making.”
Ethically-sound application of knowledge – Ethically-sound KT activities for improved health are those that are consistent with ethical principles and norms, social values, as well as legal and other regulatory frameworks – while keeping in mind that principles, values and laws can compete among and between each other at any given point in time. The term application is used to refer to the iterative process by which knowledge is put into practice.
In short, knowledge translation is about taking what we learn and know from evidence, sharing that knowledge with others and assisting them to make useful health choices in practice and policy through KT.
This often involves communicating across contexts, disciplines, and roles between and from scientists, clinicians, policy makers and to the public alike. In a health environment that is increasingly becoming complex, the ability to communicate across boundaries is no longer an advantage, it’s an essential skill. While we may not always have the right language, we can translate meaning through stories.
But if stories are to be effective they need to be valued.
The value of storytelling
I’ve seen health professionals — scientists and clinicians — roll their eyes when you mention storytelling in a work context. It is as if the only legitimate role for stories is to communicate with children (which University of Alberta researchers are exploring as a tool for sharing health knowledge with parents). Yet, it is through stories that most people share what they know in every other context; why would it be different in health?
Perhaps it is the connotation that stories are ‘made up’ like children’s bedtime tales, but one need only look to journalism to find that we’ve been making ‘stories’ a central part of our life every day. We listen to drive-time radio for stories about the traffic conditions, we watch, download and listen to news stories filed by professional journalists and citizen bloggers alike on mainstream media, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook along with myriad sources across the web. Last week we were glued to various sources to learn stories — some of them false — and create stories about the events of the Boston Marathon bombings.
Stories are what conveys multiple information threads and puts it in a coherent context.
Stories are coherence engines.
Valuing knowledge translation
If knowledge translation is important then it should be reflected in research priorities and evidence for its impact on the system across different disciplines. Dr Shannon Scott and her U of A team recently conducted a systematic review of knowledge translation strategies in the allied health professions and found that the field was full of low quality studies that made it impossible to make firm statements on which methods were best among them . That team has recently proposed a systematic review looking at how the arts and visual methods can further contribute to KT in practice, although it likely the same issue with methodological quality might come into play here, too.
What she and her team are doing is looking at the process of sharing stories and, from a research perspective, sharing stories appears to not have been worth investing in scientifically. At least, not enough to generate a lot of studies and good evidence.
One could argue that knowledge translation is still new and that it takes time to generate such evidence. That is partly true, but it is also an easy prop for those who want to avoid the messiness that comes with communication (and its problematic research context), learning from others, and creating more equitable information spaces, which is what knowledge translation ultimately does. Knowledge translation has also been in use for almost 20 years so in that time — even with the most dismal assessment of the length of time it takes to put knowledge into practice — we should be seeing some decent research published.
KT is fundamentally about sharing. Journalists’ are rewarded for sharing — the more they share and the more people who they share with (as measured by readers, listeners, viewers etc..) the more successful they are in their work. Teachers are rewarded for sharing because that means that they are teaching people. Librarians are rewarded for sharing because that means people are checking out books and using the resources in their library.
We don’t apply the same standard to academic research, even though we have some crude metrics to measure reach and impact, and there is roughly no metric for the degree to which clinicians share among themselves. Maybe this needs to change.
I have scientific colleagues who are fierce in the face of their most strident academic critics and have delivered keynotes to auditoriums filled with researchers that are nearly paralyzed in the face of speaking to the public. This is not fear of public speaking, its fear of speaking to the public.
Should they be? I don’t think speaking to the public should be expected to be enjoyable for everyone, but neither are doing statistical calculations, completing ethics applications, or presenting posters at conferences, but we still expect scientists to do that. We still expect nurses, doctors, psychologists, medical technicians and social workers to traverse complex social problems to talk to their patients in an open and honest way.
Why is it when scientists are speaking to policy makers, clinicians to scientists, policy makers to the public, or any professional to another from another discipline, speciality or division we decide its not critical for them to make the effort?
Why don’t we do the research to support it?
Why is it OK not to do KT because its uncomfortable, awkward, difficult or confusing?
Declining interest, rising demand
It is perhaps for reasons like this that knowledge translation is so poorly understood and taken up as a focus for research. Looking at Google NGram data (which tracks mention of specific topics in books and publications) we see a steady rise in citations until about 2003 followed by a levelling off. Keep in mind that the leveling begins before social media became known. In the years after Twitter, Facebook and YouTube — arguably the most powerful communications media we have for doing knowledge translation widely (but perhaps not deeply) — there is roughly no sharp increase.
Below are the citations for the terms knowledge translation, knowledge exchange, and knowledge integration from 1996 (when the Web first started gaining wide use beyond academia and the military) and 2008, the latest year for which there is available data. Note that the numbers reflect general mentions as a percentage of overall terms, so they are relative, not absolute values.
Figure 1: Google NGram Data for KT, KE & KI: 1996-2008
Is there so much other stuff to talk about in 2013 that the relative importance of knowledge translation is diminished?
A look at Google Trend data using the same terms finds that not only are these concepts not growing, their mention is actually shrinking.
Looking at the three terms we see that all three concepts have declined over time. During these years — 2004-2013 — we saw not only the birth of social media, but the rise of Internet-enabled handheld devices to allow knowledge to be shared anywhere there is a data signal. We now have apps and nearly all of the Internets resources in our pockets and we are seeing a decline in the use of these terms.
Figure 2: Google Trend Data for KT, KE & KI: 1996-2013
Where to?
So to review: We have a body of evidence in KT that is problematic and incomplete at the same time we have a decrease in use of the terms, while at the very same time we have a sharp rise in available tools and technologies to share information quickly and a continued, steady demand for more information to make decisions for health providers, patients, policy makers and insurers.
Yes, the data presented here are not perfect. But does it not make sense that there should at least be some trend upward if knowledge translation is valued? Should we not see some shift to more research, better research evidence, and greater interest given the tools and scope of communications we have through social media?
This begs the question: is knowledge translation in health too important to leave to health professionals?
In future posts this question will be looked at in greater depth. Stay tuned.
* Blog has been updated since original post
Hacking the Classroom: Beyond Design Thinking
Posted: April 6, 2013 Filed under: design thinking, education & learning | Tags: creativity, design, design thinking, education, hacking, learning, theory Leave a comment »
Design Thinking is trending is some educational circles. Edutopia recently ran a design thinking for educators workshop and I attended two great workshops at SXSWedu 2013 on Design Thinking:
Design Thinking is a great skill for students to acquire as part of their education. But it is one process like the problem-solving model or the scientific method.
Much Ado About MOOC
Posted: February 8, 2013 Filed under: education & learning | Tags: design thinking, disruptive innovation, education, innovation, learning, MOOC, Peter Thiel, teaching, university 1 Comment »
It’s fair to imagine that one of the 2013 ‘words of the year‘ will be MOOC (which is not really a word, but an acronym that stands for Massive Open Online Course). It seems that everywhere you look in the higher education and professional development space we are seeing MOOC’s talked about and debated.
HBR editor Eric Hellwig, writing for the HBR blog, reported on a recent panel on MOOC’s held at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos with leaders like Bill Gates, Peter Thiel and Larry Summers. His report reflects the exuberance of the MOOC and the techno-deterministic spirit of much of the discourse on these tools:
The advent of massively open online classes (MOOCs) is the single most important technological development of the millennium so far. I say this for two main reasons. First, for the enormously transformative impact MOOCs can have on literally billions of people in the world. Second, for the equally disruptive effect MOOCs will inevitably have on the global education industry.
One of the panelists was Stanford professor Daphne Coller, the co-founder of Coursera, one of the largest MOOC providers offering more than 200 courses to millions of students worldwide. Coller has convinced top faculty at leading universities to provide high quality digital courses through Coursera for free and the result has surprised her.
We’re at 2.4 million students now. The biggest lesson I’ve learned on this is I underestimated the amount of impact this would have around the world. I really didn’t envision this scale and this impact this quickly.
Disrupting Education
Of these panelists, Peter Thiel may be the most controversial. He has spoken at length about the need to revamp education and sees technology and platforms like Facebook as a means to do it. (It’s worth noting that Theil was also an early investor in Facebook). He points to the multiple roles that education plays well beyond learning and suggests that when we go beyond that goal we start creating false economies of value within higher education:
You have to ask yourself, ‘What is the nature of education as a good?’ Ideally you want it to be learning. But it also functions as insurance. Parents will pay a lot of money for insurance against cracks in our society. Education as insurance has something to be said because it connects to the economy. You know computer science, you can get a job. But education also functions as a tournament. You do well if you go to a top school but for everyone else the diploma is a dunce hat in disguise. People need to understand what they’re trying to do? Is it insurance? A tournament? Learning?
Among Thiel’s biggest concerns is with the current educational system’s ability to support the kind of innovative thinking needed to make technological and scientific breakthroughs. So steadfast is he in the belief that some of the best minds are rotting in traditional classrooms that he founded the Thiel Fellowship, a scholarship fund to support promising young entrepreneurs in dropping out of school to pursue their ambitions of making social impact.
Thiel is disrupting education by taking learning away from the educational institutions charged with providing it. MOOC providers are seeking to develop a business model that puts them in the drivers seat of education and learning, drawing potential revenues away from traditional educational institutions. This will no doubt add to the pressures that universities and colleges are already facing as they rationalize ever more of what they do.
Education For All, Learning For Whom?
Free online learning of the calibre provided by Stanford University, Caltech, Harvard University, University of Toronto, MIT, and the Santa Fe Institute for anyone, anywhere sounds like a dream come true.
In some ways it is. In others, it’s an illusion.
This comes back to the metrics we use in evaluating the impact of education and asking what its point is in the first place. What do we mean by learning and are we serious about it?
It’s been suggested that less than 10 per cent of those enrolled in a MOOC complete it. And of this 10 per cent, it isn’t clear what they learn, how well they learn it, and what kind of application (if any) that content is made to issues away from the course. Online courses with video tutorials, self-organized learning and largely uni-directional teaching bring together the best of former teaching methods like instructional TV, self-help, and classroom lectures.
The problem is that this ‘best’ isn’t particularly effective. A 2000 meta-analysis of distance instructional methods found:
There does not appear to be a difference in achievement between distance and traditional learners. Of the ten instructional features that were analyzed, only three had an impact on student achievement. These three features were type of interaction available during a broadcast, type of course, and type of remote site. There was an insufficient number of studies to ascertain whether or not the education level of the distance learners effected their achievement in the course (Machtmes & Asher, 2000).
While this review was done before widespread Internet use, the methods included reflected the same list above with one- or two-way audio and video. The studies were also done on programs that were designed for credit, not voluntary non-credit courses. Research on motivation will show that optional programs are far less likely to engender behavioural shifts than those that are mandated.
So who then is benefitting from MOOC’s? We don’t yet know, but it is likely those with time to attend to the content, high levels of intrinsic motivation (< PDF), the technological tools to succeed, and the environment that is ready to support integration of content into practice. That’s a tall order.
We are in the early days of MOOC’s and its too soon to tell how successful they will be. However, theoretically there is relatively little reason to expect that they will produce the kind of results worthy of hyperbole — at east not with those already accustomed to alternatives. To offer a MOOC from a world-class university to a learner somewhere in the world where education is but a distant dream achieves a great deal. But to transfer MOOC’s to replace more interactive and engaging methods — usually face-to-face — and expect great learning is a bit implausible.
Yet, with what we are offering now to students in the form of large classes, disconnected curricula, and didactic instruction MOOC’s offer an attractive option. What it loses is the experience of learning that is not packaged in a class. This means a change to campus life, the informal and serendipitous learning that comes from being in the same physical space interacting with each other, and may seriously limit the use of thinking and creative tools that design thinking and applied creativity demand. (for a detailed look at MOOC’s and the modern university check out Nathan Harden’s essay in the American Interest).
There is much ado about MOOC’s, but is this a Shakespearian tragedy in the making for learners?
Photo credit: iStockPhoto used under license.
The Quality Metric in Education
Posted: January 15, 2013 Filed under: education & learning | Tags: cognition, complex adaptive systems, complexity, education, educational design, evaluation, graduate education, innovation, knowledge translation, learning, metrics, psychology, Sir Ken Robinson, systems thinking, teaching, university 1 Comment »
What goes on the pedestal of learning?
What is quality when we speak of learning? In this third post in series on education and evaluation metrics the issue of quality is within graduate and professional education is explored with more questions than answers about the very nature of learning itself.
But what does learning really mean and do we set the system up to adequately assess whether people do it or not and whether that has any positive impact on what they do in their practice.
What do you mean when you say learning?
The late psychologist Seymour Sarason asked the above question with the aim of provoking discussion and reflection on the nature and possible outcomes of educational reform. Far from being glib, Sarason felt this question exposed the slippery nature of the concept of learning as used in the context of educational programming and policy. It’s a worthwhile question when considering the value of university and professional education programming. What do we mean when we say learners are learning?
The answer to this question exposes the assumptions behind the efforts to provide quality educational experiences to those we call learners. To be a learner one must learn…something.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines learning this way:
learning |ˈlərniNG|
noun
the acquisition of knowledge or skills through experience, practice, or study, or by being taught: these children experienced difficulties in learning | [ as modifier ] : an important learning process.
• knowledge acquired in this way: I liked to parade my learning in front of my sisters.
This might sufficiently answer Dr Sarason except there is no sense of what the content is or whether that content is appropriate, sufficient, timely or well-supported with evidence (research or practice-based); the quality of learning.
Knowledge translation professionals know that learning through evidence is not achieved through a one-size-fits-all approach and that the match between what professionals need and what is available is rarely clean and simple (if it was, there would be little need for KT). The very premise of knowledge translation is that content itself is not enough and that sometimes it requires another process to help people learn from it. This content is also about what Larry Green argues: practice-based evidence is needed to get better evidence-based practice.
How do we know when learning is the answer (and what are the questions)?
If our metric of success in education is that those who engage in educational programming learn, how do we know whether what they have learned is of good quality? How do we know what is learned is sufficient or appropriately timed? Who determines what is appropriate and how is that tested? These are all questions pertaining to learning and the answers to them depend greatly on context. Yet, if context matters then the next question might be: what is the scope of this context and how are its parameters set?
Some might choose academic discipline as the boundary condition. To take learning itself as an example, how might we know if learning is a psychology problem or a sociology problem (or something else)? If it is a problem for the field of psychology, when does it become educational psychology, cognitive psychology, community psychology or one of the other subdisciplines looking at the brain, behaviour, or social organization? Successful learning through all of these lenses means something very different across conditions.
Yet, consider the last time you completed some form of assessment on your learning. Did you get asked about the context in which that learning took place? When you were asked questions about what you learned on your post-learning assessment:
- Did it take into account the learning context of delivery, reception, use, and possible ways to scaffold knowledge to other things?
- Did your learner evaluation form ask how you intended to use the material taught? Did you have an answer for that and might that answer change over time?
- Did it ask if your experience of the learning event matched what the teachers and organized expected you to gain and did you know what that really was?
- Did you know at the time of completing the evaluation whether what you were exposed to was relevant to the problems you needed to solve or would need to solve in the future?
- Did you get asked if you were interested in the material presented and did that even matter?
- Was there an assumption that the material you were exposed to could only be thought of in one way and did you know what that way was prior to the experience? If you didn’t think of the material in the way that the instructors intended did you just prove that the first of these two questions is problematic?
Years of work in post-secondary teaching and continuing professional education suggests to me that your answer to these questions was most likely “no”, except the very last one.
These many questions are not posed to antagonize educators (or “learners”, too) for there are no single or right answers to any of them. Rather, these are intended to extend Seymour Sarason’s question to the present day and put in the context of graduate and professional education at a time when both areas are being rethought and rationalized.
Learning to innovate (and being wrong)
A problem with the way much of our graduate and professional education is set up is that it presumes to have the answers to what learning is and seeks to deliver the content that fills a gap in knowledge within a very narrow interpretation. This is based on an assumption that what was relevant in the past is both still appropriate now and will be in the future unless we are speaking of a history lesson. However, innovation and discovery — and indeed learning itself — is based on failure, discomfort and not knowing the answers as much as building on what has come before us. There is no doubt that a certain base level of knowledge is required to do most professional and scientific work and that building a core is important, but it is far from sufficient.
The learning systems we’ve created for ourselves are based on a factory model of education, not for addressing complexity or dynamic systems like we find in most social worlds. We do not have a complex adaptive learning system in place, one that supports innovation (and the failures that produce new learning) because:
If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original. – Sir Ken Robinson, TED Talk 2006
The above quote comes from education advocate Sir Ken Robinson in a humorous and poignant TED talk delivered in 2006 and then built on further in a second talk in 2010. Robinson lays bare the assumptions behind much of our educational system and how it is structured. He also exposes the problem we face in advancing innovation (my choice of term) because we have designed a system that actively seeks to discourage wide swaths of learning that could support it, particularly with the arts.
Robinson points to the conditions of interdisciplinary learning and creativity that emerge when we free ourselves of the factory model of learning that much of our education is set up, “producing” educated people. If we are assessing learning and we go outside of our traditional disciplines how can we assess whether what we teach is “learned” if we have no standard to compare it to? Therein lies the rub with the current models and metrics.
If we are to innovate and create the evidence to support it we need to be wrong. That means creating educational experiences that allow students to be wrong and have that be right. If that is the case, then it means building an education system that draws on the past, but also creates possibilities for new knowledge and learning anchored in experimentation and transcends disciplines when necessary. It also means asking questions about what it means to learn and what quality means in the context of this experimental learning process.
If education is to transform itself and base that transformation on any form of evidence then getting the right metrics to evaluate these changes is imperative and quality of education might just need to be one of them.
Image: Shutterstock
The Knowledge Metric in Education
Posted: January 9, 2013 Filed under: education & learning, evaluation, innovation, science & technology, systems thinking | Tags: design, education, educational design, evaluation, higher education, journalism, knowledge integration, knowledge translation, learning, professional education, social innovation, teaching, universities, university 5 Comments »
Higher education is asking itself some big questions and making substantive changes to the way it sees itself and produces value for society. Education is increasingly being rationalized, which calls into question the metrics that are being used to judge how resources should be allocated. In a previous post, I looked at the jobs metric. Now, it’s time to look at the knowledge metric.
Just the facts
Education writer and teacher Will Richardson‘s TED Book Why School is a provocative read for those connected to teaching or just interested in schooling. While it focuses largely on grade school, the issues are the same for universities and colleges particularly as the primary and secondary students of today are tomorrow’s graduate and professional learners. Richardson questions the role of the school as institution in its current form suggesting that if the status quo — one characterized an information delivery warehouse — is maintained there is little need for schools to exist at all. Yet, if the education within schools is focused on asking better questions and learning when to apply knowledge, not just what knowledge to apply, there is hope.
The current trend in school reform is towards Common Core Standards, which emphasizes specific forms of knowledge, ‘facts’ and asks that students be able to recall such content when required. Under this model, the role of the teacher is one of content manager and facilitator rather than guide or mentor and students are prepped for the tests of their knowledge (memory) rather than be asked to demonstrate its application to anything outside of the test. It is this model that many proponents of online education embrace, because the Internet is a fabulous content delivery system and education can be literally programmed and delivered to students directly without the ‘noise’ that teachers introduce to the signal. Under this model, educational content can be delivered cheaply and widely to support uniform intended effects among learners.
Richardson argues for reforming schools to something closer to the alternative model that was advanced by educational reformer and philosopher John Dewey. Richardson writes:
“In this version of reform, schools and classrooms are seen as nodes in a much larger learning network that expands far beyond local walls. Students are encouraged to connect with others, and to collaborate and create with them on a global scale. It’s not “do your own work,” so much as “do work with others, and make it work that matters.” To paraphrase Tony Wagner, assessments focus less on what students know, and more on what they can do with what they know. And, as Dewey espoused, school is “real life,” not simply a place to take courses, earn grades, amass credits, and compete against others for recognition. There lies the tension.
This second path is simply not as easy to quantify as the first. Developing creativity, persistence, and the skills for patient problem solving, B.S.-detecting, and collaborating may now be more important than knowing the key dates and battles of the Civil War (after all, those answers are just a few taps on our phones away), but they’re all much more difficult to assign a score to. I’m not saying that a foundation of content knowledge isn’t still important. To communicate, function, and reason in the world, students need effective reading and writing skills, as well as a solid foundation in math, science, history, and more. But I’m convinced we must revise the overreaching coursework requirements we place on students — requirements created at a time of scarcity, by the way. And we desperately need to revisit the thinking we’ve developed around assessment that, as Harvard researcher Justin Reich says, “optimizes the measurable at the risk of neglecting the immeasurable.””
Facts vs Problems
The knowledge metric is flawed because it assumes that content solves problems. It also presumes that the curriculum teaches the right knowledge for the right problems and that those problems can be known in advance. Let’s look at these.
One need only look to cigarette smoking as an example of how knowledge alone doesn’t always solve or prevent problems. One would be hard pressed to find anyone over the age of five who doesn’t know that sticking a lit tube of anything in their mouth and sucking on it isn’t at least somewhat unhealthy (and most know it is very unhealthy). An individual’s knowledge of smoking’s effects on physical health may not be complete, but it is often sufficient to inform the decision to quit or not start the unhealthy habit. And yet, citizens in highly educated countries like the United States, Canada and the U.K. smoke more than 1000 cigarettes per year per capita (and over 2700 per capita in places like Russia). These are not countries lacking in information on tobacco and health.
Using students’ ability to recall content makes the presumption that what is contained in a curriculum is what they need to know when they leave their program of study (at least as a start). While it may be somewhat true for students in the humanities and languages, it becomes highly problematic for those in dynamic fields or emergent areas of practice, which is becoming more normal than rare. There is no doubt that a corpus of key concepts, skills and ‘facts’ is useful, but the manner in which this knowledge can and may be applied is changing dramatically. For example, social media has upended communications in ways that very few health professionals are trained for. Journalists are particularly aware of the role that Twitter and related tools have had on their profession.
It also presumes that the content itself is relatively static. Certainly, curriculum renewal is something that most learning institutions engage in, but the primacy of content itself as the driver of education also assumes that the foundation for that knowledge is solid and can be applied today in the manner it was applied yesterday. In dynamic conditions, that isn’t often true. Further, the relevance of knowledge is framed by the problems to which that knowledge is applied. Genetic information, for example, can be incredibly useful when framed against tests that have high confidence, predictability and value to people, yet without such a context it is largely useless to those non-scientists who have it.
Areas of social innovation — which are expanding dramatically in number and scope — illustrate the problem of changing context well. This is a field characterized by problems, problem solving and novelty (which is what innovation is all about). Standard approaches don’t apply easily or at all when we are faced with high levels of novelty. Thinking and re-thinking the problem frame, knowing what to find, where to find it, and the skills to integrate relevant knowledge together is something that is not captured in the knowledge metric. Yet, it is those skills that will lead innovation. Knowledge translation professionals know this and so do knowledge brokers.
Are we designing our educational programming to advance on the kind of design issues of problem framing, finding and solving that our world is facing? Or are we simply taking content that can be obtained through books, the Internet and other materials, repackaging it and creating expensive warehouses of information that take learners out of the world and out of context in the process?
I don’t suggest that universities and continuing education programs stop delivering content, but if knowledge is the metric by which they are judging their success then it behooves educational administrators and funders to justify why they can do it better than other tools. What made sense when content was a rare commodity makes little today when it is overflowing in abundance for little or no cost. Universities and post-graduate training programs have an opportunity to re-imagine education and have the tools to do it in a way that makes learning more powerful and relevant for the 21st century should they choose to change their metrics of success.
Designing education
How might we take the enormous talent trust that exists among university faculty (and their students) who co-locate (physically, virtually or in some combination) in a school and develop the skills to not only address problems of today, but prepare everyone for possible challenges in the future?
How might we integrate what we know, identify the knowledge we need, and create systems to take advantage of the talent and creativity of individuals to make universities, colleges, and post-professional training venues for innovation and inspiration rather than just content delivery vehicles?
What kind of metrics do we need to evaluate this kind of education should we choose to develop it?
These are questions whose answers might yield more learning than those focused on what knowledge students have when they graduate.
___
Image source: Shutterstock.
The Job Market Metric In Education
Posted: December 30, 2012 Filed under: design thinking, education & learning, evaluation, innovation | Tags: complex systems, complexity, contemplative inquiry, continuing medical education, design thinking, developmental evaluation, disruption, education, educational design, evaluation, foresight, jobs, journalism, learning, learning organization, mindfulness, path dependence, professional education, resilience, teaching, university 2 Comments »
Post-secondary and continuing education is continuing to be rationalized in ways that are transforming the very foundation of the enterprise. Funding is a major driver of change in this field: how much is available, when it flows, where it comes from, what is funded, and who gets the funding are questions on the minds of those running the academy.
At the centre of the focus of this funding issue is the job market. Training qualified professionals for the job market in various forms has been one of the roles a university has played for more than a century. Now that role has become central.
Let’s consider what that means and what it could do in shaping the various possible futures of the university. This second in a series looking at the post-secondary and continuing education focuses on the metrics of jobs.
“What are all these people going do?”
The employability of graduates is now the holy grail of education industry statistics. Earlier this year I was sitting on the stage at an academic convocation with a senior colleague staring out at a sea of soon-to-be-graduates when he leaned over and asked the question quoted above. Staring at a sea of masters and doctoral graduates numbered in the hundreds and knowing that this ceremony was held twice per year, the question stuck and remains without an answer.
Maybe there were enough jobs for that cohort, but this process gets repeated twice each year at universities around the world and each year that I’ve been a professor those numbers (of graduates) seem to go up. Some of our programs in the health sciences are admitting three times the number of students than they were just ten years ago. There is much demand for education (as judged by departmental applications), but are there jobs demanding this kind of education in its current form?
Yes, the Baby Boom is moving into an age of retirement and increasing needs for health services, but do we need to graduate 80+ Physical or Occupational Therapists to meet this need this year? Do we need a few dozen more epidemiologists or health promotion specialists to add to the pool? How about psychologists or social workers: how many of those do we need? The answer from my colleagues in these fields is: We don’t know.
Chasing the Wind
Jobs are a red herring. It’s one thing to have a job, but is it the job that you trained for? (And is having that job even a reasonable goal?) Being employed is not the same as building a career. What if you were trained perfectly for a job that no longer existed? Imagine a Blacksmith in the 20th century or a Bloodletter. These questions are not asked, nor is much asked about quality of education relative to the pressures of recruitment, cost-cutting and educational rationalization. Most of us don’t know what quality education is in real terms because we are measuring it (if we are measuring anything at all besides jobs) by standards set for the jobs of the past, not the future (or even the present?).
“Skate where the puck is going, not where it’s been.” – Wayne Gretzky
Jobs are living things and very few in 2013 will resemble what they did even 10 years ago. The citizens of the developing world are entering this rapidly changing job market ready for change (See also McKinsey Global Institute report on future of work in advanced economies) because they don’t have the old ways to rely on. They are primed for change and if professional education is to meet the needs of a changing world, it needs to change too. It means getting serious about learning.
If education is rationalizing itself to focus more on jobs, then it also needs to get serious about clarifying what jobs mean, defining what ‘success’ looks like for a graduate, and whether those jobs are designed for where the proverbial puck is now or for where it is going.
Disruptive Learning / Disturbed Education
“The Only Thing That Is Constant Is Change -” ― Heraclitus
I’ve pointed out that learners have an uneasy relationship with learning principally because it means disrupting things. This is a topic I’ll be covering in greater depth in a future post, but if one considers how our social, economic, and environmental systems are changing it is not unreasonable to call this the age of disruption .
Change in complex systems is often logarithmic, not linear. It may be massively punctuated like a Lévy Flight or it could be closer to a random walk. In environments with a change coefficient that is large the level of attention must be more fine-grained than 5-year reviews. It requires developmental evaluation methods and learning organizations, not just conventional approaches to generating and assessing feedback. It requires mindful attention and contemplative inquiry to guide a regular reflective practice if one is to pay attention to the subtleties in change that could have enormous impact.
For example, if journalists and news media waited every five years to assess the state of their profession, they would have missed out on Twitter and come late to blogging, two of their (now) powerful sources of competition and tools of the trade. Some have waited, which is why they are no longer around. Metrics for journalism education today might consider the amount of exposure and proficiency in social media use, digital photography, use of handheld tools for communication, and real-time reporting skills. Metrics of the past might focus on newspapers and radio broadcasting. Which mindset, skillset and toolset would you rather be trained in today?
Questions for educators, learners (and evaluators):
Whether health sciences, journalism, human services or any field, what might some questions be that can help determine the role of job training in professional education? Here are five starters:
1. What is the state of your profession right now and are you training people for existing in this state? Are you preparing people for the next evolution?
2. Where is your field of practice going? What are the possible futures for your profession in the next 5, 10, and 20 years? Will it still exist? Are you a blacksmith looking for more horses in the automobile age or Steve Jobs waiting to attract people to a new graphical user interface?
3. Is your mindset, skillset or toolset in need of re-consideration? Does it still do the job you’ve hired it to do?
4. What do people need that your skills can help with? What unfilled needs and expectations are there in the world that your mindset, skillset and toolset could solve?
5. What would happen if your field of practice disappeared? How else could you apply what you know to making the contribution you wish to make and earn a living? What other skills, tools and ways of thinking would you need to adapt?
Design thinking can greatly help shape the way that one conceives of a problem, works through possible options, and develops prototypes to address the needs of the present and the future. Foresight methods help lay additional context for design and systems thinking by providing ways to anticipate possible futures for any given field. Lastly, knowing what the state of things are now and how they got to where they are now can help determine the path dependencies that education may have fallen into.
We can’t change what we don’t see and better foresight, hindsight and present sight is critical to better ensuring that education outcomes are not imagined, but based on something that can actually improve learning.
Rationalized Education and The Futures of the University
Posted: December 26, 2012 Filed under: education & learning | Tags: disruption, education, evaluation, health sciences, jobs, learning, metrics, school, teaching, university 4 Comments »
Hallowed Halls, Empty Promises?
Next to the church, the university may be the most enduring formal institution in our society. And like nearly every institution from banking to manufacturing to healthcare and even the church, the university is facing a major disruption from social and technological change.
The church’s (simplified) purpose is to provide a place of worship, communion and education on matters of faith and spiritual guidance.
The university is a place for preparing people to be better citizens, scientists or scholars, and professionals and to advance understanding of our world and universe.
Just as many question how well the church is realizing its purpose, so too are many questioning the university and how it is faring in its mission and purpose.
CENSEmaking returns to a discussion started last year with a requiem for the dream of a university no longer experienced by someone who aspired to serve within it. Following my advice to new scholars and attempts to peel back the curtain to show more about what university looks like for those outside it, it seems appropriate to revisit that discussion to explore the state of post-secondary education as another year passes.
This is the first in a series of upcoming posts looking at the future(s) of learning and professional education.
Rationalizing Education
Universities are rethinking things in a big way led by changes to the way they are funded. Quoting from a recent article in the Globe and Mail on the state of funding for Canadian universities:
Midsize Canadian universities are starting a new kind of cost-cutting exercise as they face the prospect of prolonged austerity and sustained pressure to show their graduates are succeeding.
Administrators have tended to slash budgets equally across the board, leaving it up to each dean and department to set targets inside their faculties. Now, Canadian schools are importing a movement from the United States in which economic hardship is viewed as an opportunity to refocus scarce dollars on faculties that deliver.
If we are to parse through this language, one will see it that points to a new way of evaluating the impact of the university and how it makes decisions about what to invest in:
“Instead of making decisions based on internal political factors or you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours, or whatever else has gone on in the past, it’s time for us to shift to a culture of evidence,” said Robert C. Dickeson, the U.S. consultant at the heart of the crusade against across-the-board cuts.
Ah, evidence. This powerful concept is the bedrock of science , has transformed the way medicine is practiced and is now being applied to the ‘business’ of education. In Canada, universities are now seeking data about its product to inform its strategic decisions. Some universities are doing more of this than others in applying some form of evidence to their policy and strategy to deal with current funding challenges:
The University of Guelph has gone furthest. Facing a $32-million shortfall over the next four years, Guelph’s leaders hired Dr. Dickeson for help after an invitation to a workshop he runs landed in provost Maureen Mancuso’s inbox. He was on hand at a Guelph University town-hall meeting in late November where president Alastair Summerlee laid out the challenge: rising costs, flat government funding and capped tuition, combined with a shortage of space to keep boosting enrolment.
“People outside of our institutions are full of a rhetoric around ‘do we produce quality, a quality product?’” Dr. Summerlee told a crowd of about 300. “These things make a case for actually trying to prioritize what we’re doing. … We need to act now.”
The plan is Darwinian. Each of the university’s nearly 600 programs and services, from undergraduate biology to the parking office, has to complete a “program information report” answering 10 criteria, to be reviewed and ranked by a task force of faculty, staff and students.
Embedded in the middle of this quote is the line: ‘do we produce quality, a quality product?’
I have been involved in academic governance and policy making for 20 years first as a student representative at the undergraduate and graduate level and later as a full-time faculty member. The timing of my post-secondary life coincided with the last major shift in educational funding and rationalization that began in the early 1990′s with the first introduction of student fees and the start of philanthropic named sponsorship in Canadian universities. Prior to this time, students tuition was all they paid to access services and get an eduction and buildings, faculties and facilities were named based on criteria that was not tied to specific donations.
Despite all of this, quality was rarely a term used explicitly to shape strategy.
Money Matters and Defining Quality
I have never — not once — witnessed a major decision made on the basis of educational quality when juxtaposed against financial concerns. I’ve been a student, trainee or faculty member at five different universities and a visiting or guest lecturer or examiner at many more institutions worldwide and never have I seen quality of education trump fiscal or logistical issues on matters of great significance. Sure, there are small decisions to include particular content into a course or program or invite/disinvite a particular speaker based on perceptions of quality , but no program I’ve known chose, for example, to limit recruitment or enrolment because there were not enough resources to give a quality experience to students.
So if universities are now being judged on quality, what does this mean in practice?
Is quality about jobs? If so, then are they the jobs that students want, the ones they get (which may not be the same thing), the ones that students are trained for, or the ones that the market produces?
Is quality about what gets taught, what gets learned, or what gets applied? If it is some combination, then in what measure?
Is quality about what the market asks for or what the world’s citizens and its ecosystem (including plants, animals and oceans) demand?
Is quality about training people for jobs and roles that have traditionally existed, exist now, or may emerge in the future?
Is quality about the canon, questioning the canon, or re-discovering or creating new canons? Or all of them?
These are some of the questions worth asking if we wish to understand what the futures of the university might be and whether any of those possible futures mean not existing at all. Stay tuned.
Photo University by martybell from Deviant Art.
Reflecting on Gratitude and Going Beyond Thanksgiving
Posted: November 22, 2012 Filed under: education & learning, health promotion, innovation, psychology | Tags: gratitude, inspiration, learning, mindfulness, positive psychology, research, Robert Emmons, teaching, Thanksgiving Comments Off
Today is the day that Americans come together to celebrate Thanksgiving, a day dedicated to gratitude (in Canada, we celebrate Thanksgiving in October, to traditionally align with the harvest).
What a wonderful holiday concept: spending time focused on gratitude for what one has.
There are many good reasons for giving thanks. Psychologist Robert Emmons and other researchers working within the emergent field of positive psychology have looked intently at the psychological effects of gratitude and found it positively correlates with well-being and goal-attainment. For example, Emmons and McCullogh (2003) conducted a series of experiments comparing those with a grateful outlook to those who did not and found those who expressed gratitude more often reported higher levels of subjective wellbeing in some of those studies. (For those interested, Emmons’ 2007 book Thanks! is an accessible primer on the research on gratitude).
Giving thanks is a way of introducing a small disruption in the everyday and inspiring reflection on the present moment. Gratitude is a part of many meditiation and yoga practices, as well as mindfulness practice (PDF – example).
So in solidarity with my American friends who are giving thanks on this day and all of us who take time to express gratitude on any day, I offer a departure from the usual post and share some things I am thankful for (in no particular order):
- To Artists. Those who share their creative outputs with the world openly and encourage us to see and think differently. Artistry can be aesthetic, part of performance and innovation (says Hilary Austen), and something that Seth Godin believes we all are, when we listen to what is important. Its the writers, performers, teachers, journalists, and engaged audiences that are all part of the creative tapestry around us when they choose to make their art available.
- To those scientists and researchers who spur exploration and share what they learn widely and openly and make the world better through making their work accessible, including supporting open access of scientific knowledge. The world has too many hoarders. We are all standing on the shoulders of giants because they bent down to help us up.
- To everyone who is willing to fail, get up again, improve and work to succeed and tell others about their story so others can be inspired to fail and succeed in new ways.
- To teachers (and that doesn’t have to be the person at the front of the class). To those who take the time to help others to learn, really learn, and understand material. This could be trainers, classmates, or grandparents — anyone who cares that I learn something and tries to help myself and others toward that goal.
- To students of life. Those who are willing to be taught, to learn, to adapt and to innovate when necessary. This includes clinicians and scientists using the best evidence to make decisions and pointing out where it doesn’t exist (and taking action on filling the gaps). It’s people asking hard, but important questions — including those about their own closely held beliefs. It’s those who see learning as fun and seek to infect that sense of joy in their fellow knowledge travellers. It also includes all of those who work in knowledge translation and exchange to help the learning process along in professional and personal life.
- To the organizers, funders, sponsors and participants behind and in front of TED, Thinkr, the RSA, Google Zietgeist Minds and all the organizations and individuals out there sharing stories of success, creativity, and inspiring us all to think in new ways. It’s easy to take all this for granted so today, I am not.
- To every person that smiles freely and often (and at me!). Smiles are contagious (PDF – example)
- To everyone who takes the time to listen and seeks to understand . We all don’t agree, but if we try to truly understand each other by listening, cultivate empathy, and mindfully reflect on our impact on the world, those differences can be sources of learning and creativity than unproductive conflict, hatred and ignorance. Too much of that and in a world of the 140-character sound bite, it’s too easy to be seduced by quick outrage and self-supported misconceptions.
- To the individuals who work at inspiring others to be their best selves through compassion and creation. The diverse voices of people like Seth Godin, Jonathan Fields, Brene Brown, John Maeda, and Jon Kabat Zinn who all provide means of making sense of human life and inspiring a greater appreciation of what happens along its journey.
- To the Internet and every person and organization responsible for developing it, delivering it, and maintaining it and fighting for the rights, freedoms and responsibilities that come with having so much knowledge, information and entertainment at our fingertips. It’s easy to take this enormous treasure trove of knowledge and services for granted.
- To every administrator or department chair who marshalls power to change the structure of the workplace to make it more humane, by rewarding earnest effort while providing the space to slow time to pause and think, nurture the organization’s collective mental health, and allow everyone to genuinely learn and share their best with those they engage with. Work takes up a lot of our lifetime — imagine if it buoyed us and sustained us rather than trapped us?
- To every person who says, means and listens to the message that we are all enough. The rat race is for rats and the human race is intended for human beings, not human doings.
- To everyone who feeds us — from farm to market to fork to the earth. Most of us have little comprehension of where our food comes from, travels to, goes through, or ends up and if we did, we might act a little (or a lot) differently. We have the luxury of ignorance in North America, but should we? Spend time with a farmer and you’ll be amazed at what you don’t know about the very things that sustain us.
- To every blogger and Tweeter out there who takes the time to share their thoughts and promote positive, critical thinking about topics that inspire new thinking. Thanks to the amazing blogosphere and Twittersphere, I have made a lot of wonderful friends I’ve never met in person, but who inspire me every week.
Thanks to everyone out there making the world better. Today is the day I give thanks to all of you.
What are you grateful for?
Photo By Marjory Collins, photographer for Farm Security Administration. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Evaluating Social Innovation For Social Impact
Posted: November 15, 2012 Filed under: complexity, design thinking, education & learning, emergence, evaluation, knowledge translation, systems thinking | Tags: design, design thinking, developmental design, developmental evaluation, evaluation, evidence, Helsinki Design Lab, knowledge exchange, knowledge translation, research design, research methods, social impact, social innovation 1 Comment »
How do the innovation letters line up?
Earlier this week I has the pleasure of attending talks from Bryan Boyer from the Helsinki Design Lab and learning about the remarkable work they are doing in applying design to government and community life in Finland. While the focus of the audience for the talks was on their application of design thinking, I found myself drawn to the issue of evaluation and the discussion around that when it came up.
One of the points raised was that design teams are often working with constraints that emphasize the designed product, rather than its extended outcome, making evaluation a challenge to adequately resource. Evaluation is not a term that frequents discussion on design, but as the moderator of one talk suggested, maybe it should.
I can’t agree more.
Design and Evaluation: A Natural Partnership
It has puzzled me to no end that we have these emergent fields of practice aimed at social good – social finance and social impact investing, social innovation, social benefit (PDF)– that have little built into their culture to assess what kind of influence they are having beyond the basics. Yet, social innovation is rarely about simple basics, it’s influence is likely far larger, for better or worse.
What is the impact being invested in? What is the new thing being created of value? and what is the benefit and for whom? What else happened because we intervened?
Evaluation is often the last thing to go into a program budget (along with knowledge translation and exchange activities) and the first thing to get cut (along with the aforementioned KTE work) when things go wrong or budgets get tightened. Regrettably, our desire to act supersedes our desire to understand the implication of those actions. It is based on a fundamental idea that we know what we are doing and can predict its outcomes.
Yet, with social innovation, we are often doing things for the first time, or combining known elements into an unknown corpus, or repurposing existing knowledge/skills/tools into new settings and situations. This is the innovation part. Novelty is pervasive and with that comes opportunities for learning as well as the potential for us to good as well as harm.
An Ethical Imperative?
There are reasons beyond product quality and accountability that one should take evaluation and strategic design for social innovation seriously.
Design thinking involves embracing failure (e.g, fail often to succeed sooner is the mantra espoused by product design firm IDEO) as a means of testing ideas and prototyping possible outcomes to generate an ideal fit. This is ideal for ideas and products that can be isolated from their environment safely to measure the variables associated with outcomes, if considered. This works well with benign issues, but can get more problematic when such interventions are aimed at the social sphere.
Unlike technological failures in the lab, innovations involving people do have costs. Clinical intervention trials go through a series of phases — preclinical through five stages to post-testing — to test their impact, gradually and cautiously scaling up with detailed data collection and analysis accompanying each step and its still not perfect. Medical reporter Julia Belluz and I recently discussed this issue with students at the University of Toronto as part of a workshop on evidence and noted that as complexity increases with the subject matter, the ability to rely on controlled studies decreases.
Complexity is typically the space where much of social innovation inhabits.
As the social realm — our communities, organizations and even global enterprises — is our lab, our interventions impact people ‘out of the gate’ and because this occurs in an inherently a complex environment, I argue that the imperative to evaluate and share what is known about what we produce is critical if we are to innovate safely as well as effectively. Alas, we are far from that in social innovation.
Barriers and Opportunities for Evaluation-powered Social Innovation
There are a series of issues that permeate through the social innovation sector in its current form that require addressing if we are to better understand our impact.
- Becoming more than “the ideas people”: I heard this phrased used at Bryan Boyer’s talk hosted by the Social Innovation Generation group at MaRS. The moderator for the talk commented on how she had wished she’d taken more interest in statistics in university because they would have helped in assessing some of the impact fo the work done in social innovation. There is a strong push for ideas in social innovation, but perhaps we should also include those that know how to make sense and evaluate those ideas in our stable of talent and required skillsets for design teams.
- Guiding Theories & Methods: Having good ideas is one thing, implementing them is another. But tying them both together is the role of theory and models. Theories are hypotheses about the way things happen based on evidence, experience, and imagination. Strategic designers and social innovators rarely refer to theory in their presentations or work. I have little doubt that there are some theories being used by these designers, but they are implicit, not explicit, thus remaining unevaluable and untestable or challenged by others. Some, like Frances Westley, have made theories guiding her work explicit, but this is a rarity. Social theory, behaviour change models and theories of discovery beyond just use of Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovation theory must be introduced to our work if we are to make better judgements about social innovation programs and assess their impact. Indeed, we need the kind of scholarship that applies theory and builds it as part of the culture of social innovation.
- Problem scope and methodological challenges with it. Scoping social innovation is immensely wide and complicated task requiring methods and tools that go beyond simple regression models or observational techniques. Evaluators working social innovation require a high-level understanding of diverse methods and I would argue cannot be comfortable in only one tradition of methods unless they are part of a diverse team of evaluation professionals, something that is costly and resource intensive. Those working in social innovation need to live the very credo of constant innovation in methods, tools and mindsets if they are to be effective at managing the changing conditions in social innovation and strategic design. This is not a field for the methodologically disinterested.
- Low attendance to rigor and documentation. When social innovators and strategic designers do assess impact, too often there is a low attention to methodological rigor. Ethnographies are presented with little attention to sampling and selection or data combination, statistics are used sparingly, and connections to theory or historical precedent are absent. Of course, there are exceptions, but this is hardly the rule. Building a culture of innovation within the field relies on the ability to take quality information from one context and apply it to another critically and if that information is absent, incomplete or of poor quality the possibility for effective communication between projects and settings diminishes.
- Knowledge translation in social innovation. There are few fora to share what we know in the kind of depth that is necessary to advance deep understanding of social innovation, regularly. There are a lot of one-off events, but few regular conferences or societies where social innovation is discussed and shared systematically. Design conferences tend towards the ‘sage on the stage’ model that favours high profile speakers and agencies, while academic conferences favour research that is less applied or action-oriented. Couple that with the problem of client-consultant work that is common in social innovation areas and we get knowledge that is protected, privileged or often there is little incentive to add a KT component to the budget.
- Poor cataloguing of research. To the last point, we have no formalized methods of determining the state-of-the-art in social innovation as research and practice is not catalogued. Groups like the Helsinki Design Lab and Social Innovation Generation with their vigorous attention to dissemination are the exception, not the rule. Complicating matters is the interdisciplinary nature of social innovation. Where does one search for social innovation knowledge? What are the keywords? Innovation is not a good one (too general), yet neither is the more specialized disciplinary terms like economics, psychology, geography, engineering, finance, enterprise, or health. Without a shared nomenclature and networks to develop such a project the knowledge that is made public is often left to the realm of unknown unknowns.
Moving forward, the challenge for social innovation is to find ways to make what it does more accessible to those beyond its current field of practice. Evaluation is one way to do this, but in pursuing such a course, the field needs to create space for evaluation to take place. Interestingly, FSG and the Center for Evaluation Innovation in the U.S. recently delivered a webinar on evaluating social innovation with the principle focus being on developmental evaluation, something I’ve written about at length.
Developmental evaluation is one approach, but as noted in the webinar : an organization needs to be a learning organization for this approach to work.
The question that I am left with is: is social innovation serious about social impact? If it is, how will it know it achieved it without evaluation?
And to echo my previous post: if we believe learning is essential to strategic design we must ask: How serious are we about learning?
Tough questions, but the answers might illuminate the way forward to understanding social impact in social innovation.
* Photo credit from Deviant Art innovation_by_genlau.jpg used under Creative Commons Licence.
How Serious Are We About Learning?
Posted: July 26, 2012 Filed under: behaviour change, education & learning, health promotion, innovation, public health | Tags: behaviour change, Dan Pink, discovery, education, innovation, Jonah Lehrer, knowledge integration, learning, mindfulness, organizational change, psychology, public health, Robert Scott Root-Bernstein, social innovation, social systems, Steven Johnson, systems thinking, Toronto, University of Toronto 6 Comments »
How Serious Are We About Learning?
When journalist and book author Daniel Pink tweeted the above image the other day it provoked thinking about what real learning means and what it takes to achieve it. We produce enormous amounts of knowledge, yet struggle to put it into use, but we also teach much and learn little because the systems we’ve designed for education and experience don’t match our expressed interest and rhetoric around learning.
In my graduate course on behaviour change I would ask students on the first day why they were taking the class in the first place. Aside from the few students for whom the course was required everyone else was doing it by choice because there were many others to choose from. So why would they choose this one?
The answers would vary, but inevitably I’d hear over and again that students love learning and wanted to understand more about behaviour change, because they were interested in change and some would even say they were good at it and wanted to help others do it.
These are all well-meaning and said in a spirit that I think was honest and true. Except the reality is that it is likely a big, huge lie and one that we all share in its telling.
I would counter with two things:
- Loving the idea of learning something new is different than actually seeking out learning opportunities and that most of us love the former, but are not so enthused about the latter;
- The only people who regularly welcome change are babies with soiled diapers.
To illustrate the first point I simply ask people to consider the last conference they went to where there were options on what sessions to attend. How many of the sessions did they attend that featured content that confirmed or gently extended what they already knew versus content that was new? If you’re a health promoter doing community engagement work, sessions on Bayesian modelling for epidemics might offer far more learning than a session on working with diversity in communities (particularly if that is what you already do). Even more, how often do people go to sessions from people they know or have already seen speak? Chances are, many.
One could argue that there are subtleties that a conference presentation might offer on a familiar topic that are worth attending and while I would say that has merit, most learning that has impact is uncomfortable at some level. It extends our thinking, challenges our beliefs, or re-arranges our worldview — in ways small and large.
Wanting knowledge and living learning
Many people will say “I love change”, but that is usually in the context that everyone else is changing, not them. When I was the boss and said “things must change” it was very different than when my staff or my boss would say “things must change“. As a behaviour change educator and intervener, I need to be mindful of my own ironies and resistance to change. So should we all.
The same thing goes for knowledge. Academics are famous for ending studies with “more research is needed”. We never seem to have enough knowledge. There are two problems with this idea.
The first is that, in dynamic and evolving environments, we will never have perfect knowledge that fits like a glove, because the contexts are always novel. This isn’t to say that evidence isn’t useful, but ‘good enough’ knowledge might be a more reasonable demand than ‘best evidence’ in many of the situations where complexity is high and so is change. That’s why data gathering techniques like developmental evaluation aren’t attractive to those who need certainty.
But there is another problem with the knowledge quest and that is one of integration. In our efforts to seek more knowledge, are we integrating what we are learning from what we already have? Are we savouring the data we collect, the articles we read, the Tweets and blogs that get forwarded are way?
We quest for more, but should we quest for better?
A newly published paper synthesized research on event horizons on memory and found that shifts in activities around an event — boundaries — can prompt forgetting and recall. We remember transitions between activities, but they also prompt forgetting depending on the mindfulness associated with the act. When we are deluging ourselves with more data, more media, more everything, we are increasing the potential remember rate, but due to the volume of content, I would surmise that we are increasing the forget rate much more. Simply reflect on your high school or undergraduate education and ask yourself if you remember more than you forgot about what you learned.
We are so busy with our search for new knowledge that we interrupt opportunities to learn from what we have.
Serious learning means non-doing
Returning to the tweet from Dan Pink, it’s worthwhile considering what it means to learn and the systems we have in place to facilitate learning. The tweet links to a discussion of how German companies give their employees five days of off-site continuing education each year. This concept of Bildungsurlaub is a leave designed to allow employees to stretch their thinking and integrate something new. Not only is off-site learning important, but the time associated with integrating material is critical.
A read of the literature on innovation and research shows consistently how time off, quiet time, slow time and down time all contribute to discovery. Robert Scott Root-Bernstein’s brilliant Discovering, Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine, or Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From are all books that dive deep into creative production and show that great discoveries and innovations come from having time (with limits) to integrate material to learn. Freedom to create, explore and sit and mindfully reflect are all united concepts in the pursuit of good learning. Not everything requires this, but big concepts and bold ideas do from mathematics to science to social science and philosophy.
Yet, at an organizational and systems level, where is the support for this? Even university faculty (the tenured ones at least) who have generous vacations and sabbaticals are finding themselves crunched for time between the fight for one of the ever-fewer grants, increasing numbers of students and teaching demands, and the added push to ensure knowledge is translated. The image of faculty sitting and reading and thinking is truly an imagination. Most of my colleagues in academia do little of this, because they are out of time.
In the corporate and non-profit world this is worse. Every hour and day is to be accounted for. The idea of sending people off to learn and to think seems anathema to productivity, yet research shows incredible powers associated with taking a break and doing less and not more.
Getting serious about learning
To illustrate the scope of the problem, the University of Toronto holds one of the finest academic library systems in the world and has over 11.5 million books and 5.7 million microform materials. It is one university (of many) in one city. Add in the local Toronto public library system, the network of universities and other libraries it is connected to, local and global bookstores and all the content freely available online that is not part of this system and I challenge anyone working in social innovation or public health to say with conviction that there is a lack of knowledge out there on any important topic. Yes, we don’t know it all, but we don’t do nearly enough with what we do know because there is so much.
We will not read it all nor can we hope to synthesize it all, but we can do much with what we have. Just looking at my own personal library of physical books (not including all I have in the digital realm between books and papers) it’s easy to see that I have more than enough knowledge to tackle most of what I am facing in my work. Most of us do. But do we have the wisdom to use it? Do we have the systems — organizations and personal — that allow us to take the time and soak this in, share our ideas with others, and be mindful of the world around us enough to learn, not just consume?
When we spend as much time creating those spaces, places and systems, then we can answer “yes” to the question of whether we’re serious about learning.
Enough knowledge here?
