The smoking Chinese

Posted on December 14, 2010 by Steve Mahaley

I was a stranger in a strange land, as Leon Russell might sing it, but it wasn’t after all that strange.

This image (of the back of the airline seat) is from the back of the seat in front of me on an Ethiopian Airlines flight from Addis Ababa to Entebbe, Uganda.  Wow.

Having grown up in the south of the United States as a white male, the signs that I was indeed THE foreigner were numerous:  I was among a handful of white people on the plane, and I’m pretty sure the only American.   For some, this may seem to be a shallow reflection on the situation, but for me it is one of the ways to really know you are in a new situation – I mean, a really new situation.   Not like discovering that the corner ice cream shop changed hands and is now a coffee house.

Why was I there, in the first place?  I was making a sort of pilgrimage.  More about that in a minute.

I’ll say this –  the people with Ethiopian Airlines were quite helpful.  My plane from Addis to Kigali was delayed because they discovered that the tires were showing too much wear.  It was one of those situations where you see people gesticulating and grumbling (in a number of languages), and wonder if they’d really rather take their chances rumbling down the runway at 150 mph on worn out rubber.

Anyway, I still remember the gate assistant who went out of her way to find out when the plane might leave and arrive in Kigali – I had people waiting for me there; people I had never met, yet felt like I knew well.  My phone battery was running out – I made one last call to let Mariette know I was delayed.

I wandered around the big “O” shape of the terminal, avoiding the smoking Chinese guys who puffed with the zeal of teens testing the bounds of freedom.  I got a coffee in a shop, having finally decided that caffeine would be better than beer at this stage of the game – having hardly slept at all from the time I started this trip at the snowy train station in Skövde, Sweden some 12 hours before.

Why am I here, of all places?  Maybe this wasn’t such a great idea…

(stay tuned)

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The Dharavi slum

Posted on November 16, 2010 by Steve Mahaley

Many of you will have seen Slumdog Millionnaire, that Oscar-winning story of a young boy growing up in the slums of Mumbai, and his fall into fortune.

Traveling over to India, I didn’t know that the actual slum where that story took place was here in Mumbai.  I had already planned to go looking for some non-profits or at least get some good source material for future work with an Indian non-profit for Peace Train.  Originally I was going to meet some people and maybe get a guided tour of places, but it turns out that it is Ganesh’s birthday tonight, as well as a Muslim holiday (Id), so all offices were closed.

So I was on my own.

Well not really.  I had taken the vacation day from work, so I decided to hire a driver and just go there myself.  The driver was a little taken that I didn’t want to go to malls or to see big buildings.  Nope.  Take me to the place where a million people live.

A million.  That’s what the driver estimated.

It’s hard to put words to it.  You drive for miles along the edge of Dharavi, with children half-naked squatting on the sidewalks, people laying down on the concrete, and dark tiny passages that lead between squalid shop-fronts into the slum.  I explained to the driver what I was doing, and he obliged, taking me first to a bridge from which we could look across the maze of blue tarps, tires, bags of trash and corrugated tin that made the roof tops of the dwellings – some several stories high.

We later stopped alongside a causeway.  We got out of the car.  There was a narrow steel bridge that spanned the green water of the causeway into the slum.  I turned on the camera and went over.

Brown eyes, brown faces
Smiles and hurried feet
The boys gathered tentatively
The camera capturing them
Boys full of joy
Bursting with curiosity at the sight
Of the tall white stranger.
This maze of ladders, concrete
Hung laundry and tarps
Broken glass and empty plastic
Weathered eyes in shadowy repose
This is their home
This is their world
And they smiled.

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Learning Pyramid – fact or fiction?

Posted on October 7, 2010 by Steve Mahaley

I’ve been refreshing my knowledge of learning theories and core models for creating meaningful learning events that result in something a learner actually remembers and can do (in the case of behaviors).  And a colleague recently sent a PDF on simulations and their value as a learning method.

In that article, the familiar picture of the pyramid of learning (as it is sometimes called) appeared.  Ah yes.  Feels right, doesn’t it?  Nearly 5,000 image results on learning pyramid retention rates seem to corroborate this idea.

The Learning Pyramid

Well actually, the jury is out on the ‘rightness’ of this model.  Some years back, Cisco took it upon themselves to do a literature review around this.  This is what they came up with (pdf) and as the history of Dale’s Cone of Experience is traced, we find that academics, educators, consultants and instructional designers have made some hefty assumptions about this model over the years.

The earliest versions of the pyramid were only focused on different media types for instructional use.  At some point, an fact-free conclusion was made that learning retention rates correlated to the size of the level in the pyramid, and teaching approaches moved in on the media and interaction types (levels within the pyramid) – check out the original image included in the Cisco study.

So learning by doing isn’t a silver bullet.  How should we design educational experiences, then?

I think we need to take a few things into consideration, and remember (I love a pun) that long-term memory is what we’re after – at least in most cases – with often some behavior shift implied.

  1. Learning styles matter.  These are the preferences that individuals have in terms of how they learn things.  Reading, hands-on experimentation, discussion, seeing images, hearing a lecture or other sounds and so on.
  2. Learning outcomes matter.  If you have identified outcomes in the familiar domains of knowledge, behaviors, and attitudes, then you will choose methods and approaches that best suit those kinds of outcomes.  In other words, talking about how to have a difficult conversation is certainly not enough.  We need practice (“hands-on experimentation”).
  3. Context matters.  I admit.  This is a bucket into which a number of things have been poured:  What motivators for the learner can we tap into?  What’s going on in the business, in their lives?  Where will the learning take place – at work, elsewhere?  When do the learners need which part of the learning most?

Designing educational experiences with the above in mind should get us there.  I think it’s time for a research-based model to be propagated in the way Mr. Dale’s cone has been…

Thanks to David Jones for his very considered post on this topic.

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