If the  iceberg metaphor of the concious mind being the tip and the unconcious being the underwater mass is accurate, then our instructional designs are pretty flawed if they play only to the tip. As an eLearning Consultant, I’m usually asked to design training to improve performance,  but I rarely get to refine and move the program forward as a true opportunity to change human behaviour. So here are four ways to enlist the help of the learners’ unconcious mind and possibly maximise my one shot at helping someone develop:

1. Plant and load- This fascinating article shows how we can place ideas in a learners subconcious by asking them not to think about them. Then when the learner is placed under a heavy mental load, these ideas inevitably surface. Eg ‘Dont mention the war’, from Faulty Towers is a prime example. We are effectively assigning to the unconcious, a monitoring task – “watch out for these ideas”. In so doing we store those monitroing programs and in times of heavy mental load, they are disrupted and actually generate the idea.

This approach is easily seconded to learning design, by setting out some rules or conditions that the learner is explicitly instructed not to think about, then have them complete an intense activity, to which those rules are relevant. They will remember them and apply them. Had we just exposed them to the rules and asked them to apply them we would have been relying on their conscious mind to keep them in short term memory. Instead we have installed them in the unconscious as monitoring programs.

For example, ask the learner not to think about or judge a persons religion, upbringing, current circumstances and so on in a cultural sensitivity program, then expose them to a stressful and sensitive situation and they will inevitably think about those things. You may have just broadened their terms of reference for that situation. For example, where previously they may have consciously thought, you are from this background, you may be poor etc, by asking them not to think about various other factors, their unconscious mind may throw up, you may be poor, you may be religion X, you may be looking for a job and so on, thus a broader set of factors (albeit stereotypical assumptions;) has been brought to the learners attention.

2. Johari window – Of course there is always this classic theory that suggests a pathway for learners in moving the aquisition of new skills and knowldege from the unconscious to the conscious mind. This approach is incredibly useful for structuring pathways to mastery and even in developing ‘train the trainer’ based courses, because it recognises the different stages of learning and the inteplay between conscious and unconscious mind. This one is well known, so I won’t go into details.

3. Mirroring – This is an NLP technique, and through the discovery of mirror neurons, now has a bit more credibility. By modeling the actions, behaviours and so on we wish the learner to aquire (and assuming they have at some point executed those behaviours previously), their brain responds as if they were actually doing it themselves. You might say their conscious mind is observing us acting a certain way, but their unconscious actually thinks they are doing it. This is important for reinforcement and whilst we have been using role modelling for years, knowing that a learners unconscious mind thinks they are doing it, not watching it, offers us a new perspective on this old technique.

For example, say I’m teaching closing techniques to sales people. I might show them a couple of variants and have them practice a couple of times with each other. Knowing that my demonstration actually lights up their brain as if they were doing it themselves, I might include some pre-class video materials that show the technique many more times, to reinforce their unconscious response to seeing it. When they attend class, they will have a preframed response of “I already do this” to observing my demonstration. This could dramtically reduce their fear of the new and unknown.

4. Fast, better decisions – Several studies conducted a few years back suggested that the unconcious mind is better at decision making than the conscious mind in some circumstances. In brief, our conscious minds can over analyse multi-factorial situations, acutally impeding our ability to make good or accurate decisions. Whereas our unconscious minds are able to encompass and intergate more factors, (the counter point is that our unconsious minds also imposed lots of bias).

But if we were to mitigate these bias’ by making the learners aware of them up front and give them some tools and techniques to make snap decisions, we may help them make better decisions within specific domains. For example, lets say we are teaching learners about establishing trust with people, and flash up some images/audio for a short amnount of time and asking them to make a decision – trust or not trust. Initially we may use stereotypes to uncover and make conscious their bias’ – you trusted the person in the suit, but not the scruffy looking person. Why?

Then give them more complex examples and more time to ponder – trust or not trust, and have them explore thier bias and their conscious milti-factorial analysis. Hopefull an examination of their success rate would uncover the role of over analysis and the subconscious in making better decisions.

Finally we could return to the snap decision approach and hopefully get a better success rate, with the bias somewhat mitigated and with the outcome being that the learner now has the ability to make fast and good decisions about trusting people.

What techniques do you use to engage the learners unconscious mind?

How can we apply these 5 laws of human nature, detailed in a recent New Scientist article, to help establish and maintain a thriving collaborative community online?

For arguments sake let’s assume this community is feature rich (chat, shared calender, wiki, whiteboard, forum and so on) and is supported by online mentors/moderators. Also please note this is speculation, inspired by reading this new scientist article.

1. Parkinsons  law of triviality – the amount of time an organisation spends discussing an issue is inversely proportional to its importance. Nobody talks about important issues, in case they’re wrong – but they’re happy to talk about less important issues, as they carry less risk.

This law reminds me of Rogers’ Experiential learning theory and in particular his ideas around managing ‘threat to self’ for learners. As an eLearning consultant, I’ve found this to be a valuable touchstone over the years, especially in earlier times when learners viewed eLearning as pretty threatening. Anyway, this law may offer lessons in how to stimulate and maintain a community.

Start with less important issues, on which stakeholders are likely to have opinions, but issues on which they feel safe to comment. If you need to talk about a critical issue, work up to it, with peripheral issues, spiraling closer to the big one and hopefully creating a safe space along the way. Keep community members in check as you approach major issues to enhance learning, my minimising the external threat posed by learners to one another.

2. Student syndrome – Apply yourself to a task only at the last possible moment before the deadline, that people generally underestimate how long a task will be, and generally people miss deadlines because they leave things to the last minute.

This may helps us  in pacing the setting of tasks and the provision of resources. If your desire is to simulate a high pressure or time critical situation, then student syndrome works to your advantage.

Establish a timeline well before hand to notify students that a short deadline task is approaching, when resources will be available for the task and the deadline date, ensuring the task is assigned and the resources aavailable, only at the last minute.

This will not only help simulate the conditions of reality, but may suit the cognitive and habitual styles of the learners if they are indeed suffering from student syndrome.

3. Pareto principle -The 80/20 rule applies to many situations.

In collaborative communities, this may translate to 80% of the dicussion being generated by 20% of the learners. In recognition of this, many online communities promote these users to moderator status or some other level of recognition of their contributions. Certainly any community should recognise in some way the power and value of this 20%, they are its lifeblood.

This princple can also apply to the setting of tasks, in which the learners must determine which 20% of the task to do, to get 80% of the results desired. This is especially useful in resolving competing priorities, in which you must complete a number of tasks, but there are not the time, resources etc to do all of them.

4. Salem hypothesis – Education in the engineering disciplines forms a predisposition to creationist viewpoints.

Whilst this principle is pretty specific, there is a critical community lesson it can teach us. Know thine audience and operate (at least initially) within its worldview.  This seems a bit static and counterintuitive when part of the educators role is to challenge and expand the learners worldview, however a community that at least initially feels safe to a learner (reducing their threat to self) may be more likely to thrive in the short term. Once established, perhaps then challenges can emerge.

5. Maes-Garreau law,  – Any prediction about a favourable future technology falls just within the expected lifespan of the person making it.

Addmittedly I’m struggling to divine lessons learned for online communities from this law, but maybe it can help us with managing learners technology expecations of the features of the community? Not sure, I know its a stretch;)

Anyway, thanks for joining me as I examined online collaborative communities through the lense of New Scientists’ 5 laws. I would love to hear your ideas for how these laws may apply to online collaborative communities, corporate communities of practice and so on.

I get so much info and as a busy eLearning consultant, sometimes I feel like i’m drowning, so am thinking about a roundup approach. Despite the title, these two gems are totally unrelated;)

Research suggest you should limit items in visual change detection tasks to 3 to 4 items and perhaps limit the changes to about 2. This has impacts on learning and assessment activities that involve visual detection of difference particlarly in diagnostic and investigative training. For example, you may have a course on medical diagnosis showing 4 healthy skin images, then showing the variants on the images and requiring the learner to identify the changes/risk. This research suggests there are limits to our ability to process those visual cues.

Refresher training for physical skills may not be needed as frequently as other skills and knowledge this study suggests. Granted it is rat studies, but if we assume the same holds true for humans, then synaptic and spine (in the brain, not spinal cord spine) changes are pretty permanent. The study also  reveals that rapid, but long-lasting, synaptic reorganisation is closely associated with motor learning. When carefully considered, this could be used to breath new life and tangible value into in the ‘team building weekend’ where staff bungie jump for very ephemeral reasons! Instead we might blend the bungie jump with related cognitive activities to embed both skills into long term memory.

Came across an interesting chapter from a book that unpacks creative visualisation and its role in accessing unconcious or implicit memory . It shows that when we visualise, it stimulates our full sensory aray (touch, smell, vision etc) and that it works best in enhancing performance (up to 30% improvement over control group in physical skills!) if it is combined with physical practice, a demanding cognitive component and positive visualisation (ie successful outcome).

It also finds that our imagined experience, very closely matches the real deal, so if we are asked to walk and press a button in our imagination, it takes just as long as if we did it in real life, but moderated by our expectations (so if we erroneously expect it to take longer, then it will in our imagination, but not in real life).

So for me this is the key. Consider cognitive dissonance theory, in which we seek to tip the balance from a belief about something to another position, by undermining one and building up the other.

We can use creative visualisation to help undermine unhelpful beliefs and attitudes. If we posit a situation that is in line with their old beliefs and ask them to visaulise it, they may be so laden with  expectations (and the sensory experience is so real) about how it will turn out, that it distorts their visualisation of the situation. Resulting in a pretty unrealistic outcome or vision.

Then when we invite the learner to execute the same situation in real life, the dissonance will be so much the greater. This has really interesting implications for change management and coaching. As an eLearning consultant, I often find my pure-play eLearning solutions need a behavioural/attitudinal change component to be effective so this may be a useful tool in my kit. What do you think?

Research by Vermeulen et al. shows that the brain responds to facial expressions denoting fear and disgust quite differently. Expressions denoting fear heighten our sensory input and increase our attention to the material immediately following the stimuls, whilst a face denoting disgust throttles our sensory input and attention.

What does this mean for adult learning? Using imagery and soundscapes it would be relatively simple to stimulate fear in learners, fear of job loss, fear of poor health and so on, then follow it up with critical information to prevent these fears being realised. As an eLearning consultant, I’ve used this technique quite often, for example using disturbing case studies as an extrinsic motivator, but never with the intent of generating fear.

What about the ethical dimensions this approach? Do the ends justify the fear? Is a good scare what learners need?

Check out this interesting research in joint attention and avatars. It examines the role of leading someones gaze with your own in stimulating the reward and motivation centres of your brain. It also shows that when you follow someone elses gaze, it stimulates those parts of your brain responsible for imagining another persons thoughts.

As a consultant I have rarely advocated the use of avatars to my clients, preferring other ways of providing mentoring/advisory scaffolding. But this could be useful in developing avatars that not only form part of the learning, but also reinforce the learning. For example, an avatar could tell a story and move its eyes to lead the learner to a visual element or key points that appear on-screen to reinforce or build upon the story. In so doing it may stimulate the learner to hear what the avatar is saying and then speculate on what the additional on-screen elements mean to the story and for them personally. In effect you could use it to activate the learners imagination.

Here’s an example. An avatar is telling a story about an accident in which a worker loses an arm in a chainsaw accident. As the story unfolds, the avatar gazes to the left and an image appears of a person looking at their watch, holding a chainsaw, with a chain guard in pieces at their feet and contemplating a stack of logs. This may stimulate the learner to reflect on what caused the logger to lose an arm. Were they under time pressure and so decided not to put the chain guard on the chainsaw?

Alternatively, the avatar could be made to simulate ‘following’ the learnrs gaze, thus stimulating the learners reward and motivation sensors. Of course without retinal tracking this would be difficult, but you may be able to fake it. Imagine a game on-screen where the avatar explains the rules of the game and then begins. In the game the learner must be the first to identify the correct object out of several on screen by clicking on it.

The avatar could gaze at the various options, making comments about their thoughts on each possible answer, revealing their interior dialogue to the learner and possibly mirroring the learners thoughts (also relevant to mirror neurons and social learning). You could delay the discovery of the right answer by the avatar, so that when the learner clicks the object, the avatar’s gaze moves to the correct object and it declares that it has found the object, but the learner found it first. This tactic may engender feelings of leadership and accomplishment in the learner.

This example is a bit trite, but you get the idea. Anyway interesting stuff. Of course it’s not just limited to eLearning. Even more powerful is the conscious use of eye contact in leading and following by classroom trainers and mentors. Many opportunities abound here.

How might you use joint attention in your learning activities?

I read an interesting article about the role of sleep in learning, with evidence suggesting that relevant sounds and smells being played while we sleep enhance learning! I remember playing around with subsconscious learning tapes and CD’s years ago, with no appreciable result. As an eLearning and blended learning consultant, i’ve never  used the technique except to advice classroom learners to get a good nights sleep before and after learning. But this new research suggests the role of subconscious learning may be to reinforce conscious learning.

Further, the different stages in the sleep cycle may be suited to enhancing different kinds of learning and different learning styles. The article gives the example of playing darts being processed during REM sleep, while declarative knowldege is processed during slow wave sleep. It also touches on the role of powernaps and the proximity of sleep to learning in enhancing retention.

So how can we use this to make better learning programs? One way might be to schedule training closer to when we sleep, or to allow learners to take a nap right after learning. Another might be a take home CD with music, sounds and voice that reinforce the key learnings, to be played as they drift off that night.

What do you think? How can we use this information to enhance adult learning?