Learning styles don't exist. So stop asking me about them!

The video which anyone who works in learning/development should be made to watch. Again and again. If I get another mail from someone asking me about how my e-learning design work 'accommodates learning styles', I am likely to cry.

Intellectual Augmentation

(image by twenty questions)

I've started back at University this week and now find myself doing a semester of my MsC. in e-learning entitled 'How people learn in an online environment'. This is some 'thinking out loud' about a position paper written by my tutor which touches on a number of issues to do with cognition and learning...

I'm fascinated by the issue of "Intellectual Augmentation". As some of you will have heard me mention, I work for the Police Forces of the UK. It's arguable that 21st century policing will be about information management - which is more than just learning about the job. It's about learning how to manage information about the job.

Recently I was half-way through reading a blog on something related to work and stopped to just tag it in Delicious. I don't know why, but for once I asked myself what the actual likelihood of me going back to read this was? Minimal, I decided. And if that were so, then why am I doing this? Why not keep reading? Why stop?

Is delicious making me dumber? Is it making me lazier? Or do I actually have to hold every exact reference, citation and date in my head?

Why can't delicious just hold that information for me, freeing up valuable 'RAM' in my head to concentrate on the bigger picture? Whatever that is.

It's an interesting set of questions and one which relates back to the Task-Artefact question - observing how social bookmarking facilities change our relationship with the information that we manage and acquire, perhaps driving us towards a relationship with learning which is now mediated by machine (the semantic tagging behind delicious and diigo etc.) and which assumes that we have a different, more surface-like relationship with a field of learning and it's constituent parts which we no longer hold in our own memories but only have a loose connection with via an external database of content and semantically linked objects.

Doesn't this raise some very fundamental questions about how we define learning? Does this change how we need to examine and assess people? Does it change what we mean by mastery of a subject? Is mastery no longer the ability to recite wholesale facts and figures but rather the abiliity to categorise that subject's constituent parts - and to assimilate new objects into that field?

Is 'learning' becoming a question of ability to manage information and categorise it for later access from an external aid? And if so, where do we draw the line in what we hold inside and outside of ourselves?

Lies About Learning?

The world of e-learning/blended learning is a (relatively) new one. Often this means that a lot of folks peddle certain 'truths' about learning which are anything but. One common example is how the idea of different 'learning styles' (visual, audiotory, kinaesthetic) has been completely misunderstood by some educators and has, in some cases, led to wildly inappropriate design of learning programmes. Baroness Greenfield is on the record as saying that she considers the entire 'VAK' thing nothing more than a fad with no scientific basis. Whilst her remarks might seem harsh, anyone who saw the recent hair-raising Newsnight report on how the U.S. invented 'Brain Gym' system is colonising British schools will not be that surprised. See this blog by Donald Clark to see what I mean.

Anyway, another commonly cited myth (particularly amongst 'learning consultants') is the oft-cited 'Cone of Learning' model. The following diagram shows an example:

(taken from here)

Essentially, the 'cone of learning' myth runs as follows:

"We remember…
10% of what we read
20% of what we hear
30% of what we see
50% of what we see and hear
70% of what we say
90% of what we say and do"

I've seen this break-down trotted out a number of times by 'consultants' and e-learning salesmen. Thing is, it appears to be complete bunkum. A fascinating whitepaper by Cisco entitled 'Multimodal Learning Through Media: What the Research Says' pans this 'cone of learning' theory as pseudo-scientific nonsense. I heartily recommend the white paper for an entertaining and educational read; but on a more serious note, it also draws our attention to how certain myths take hold in our trade and then get repeated over and over, without any academic research or data to back it up.

So, can anyone else think of any other examples of 'truths' about learning which get trotted out again and again?