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Fasten your seat belt. The ride ahead will be fast and precarious.
We’re going to blast through two-dozen little chunks of advice,
wisdom, entertainment, and the author’s idiosyncratic whims, all
the while reinforcing a few philosophies that reside at the core of
learning, to wit:

1. You are in control.

Jay Cross on the These days, learners always are. Read what you want here but please
Web don’t read everything. Be selective. Read aggressively. Skip
around. Do what you like.
Internet Time Group
“each of us is at the center of the universe.
Essays and articles
so is everyone else.” — e. e. cummings

Ireland photos

Jay's purse
2. Be a skeptic.
Question everything. Ask yourself, “Is this bullshit? Do I buy it?
Cross edits What’s in it for me?” Skeptics learn; know-it-alls don’t. One
SmartForceUpdate person’s variable is another person’s constant.

3. Always apply the 80/20 rule.

He is webmaster for
Berkeley Path
Wanderers If you’re not getting enough bang for your time, skip a page. Or skip
to the next article. This is not for everyone.
He strongly
supports
Warning: Some of this material is extremely controversial. That’s just
eLearningForum
my opinion. I might be wrong.
References
Links for impatient
"The learning readers:
revolution is over"
comes from a
Words to ponder
presentation by Jon
Levy to
New-Age Instructional
eLearningForum.
The economist joke Design
was told by Nobel
Laureate Murray Weird science
Gell-Mann during a
webcast on Mirror, mirror
innovation
sponsored by Enron.
Commit to taking at least one concept from this essay. When
The Power of Mindful you find it, write it down. Put it to use. The human mind is like a
Learning, Ellen muscle. Without exercise it atrophies. Give yours a workout today.
Langer, April 1998.

Learning in Action,
David Garvin, April
2000. “Language is a cracked kettle on which we tap out crude rhythms for
bears to dance to while we long to make music that will melt the

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stars.” — Gustave Flaubert

Future Wealth by
Stan Davis and Chris “Catch on fire with enthusiasm and people will come for miles to
Meyer, March 2000 watch you burn.” — John Wesley

The story on “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” — William Yeats
students who can't
read appeared in
“Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of
Feed January 17,
2000. The report on the spoon.” — E. M. Forster
English teens who
never heard of “Learn to unlearn.” — Benjamin Disraeli
Churchill appeared in
the International “We've upped our standards. Up yours.” — Pat Paulsen
Herald Tribune,
October 30, 2000. “Learning is tolerated only when it affects immediate performance.
This attitude, of course, ultimately undercuts performance since even
optimal performance can't be maintained unless people keep
learning.” — W. Timothy Gallwey

“We don’t need no education. We don’t need no thought control.” —

Pink Floyd, Another Brick in the Wall

Treat the learner as a customer. Make it easy for the learner to

buy (learn). Use interactivity, relevance, wit, and excitement to keep
the learner/customer engaged. If the customers aren’t buying, it’s
your fault, not theirs.

The learning revolution is over. The learners won. Take control by

giving control.

Problem formulation often counts for more than problem solution.

School always gives you the formulated problem; life does not.

An economist is walking his granddaughter in the park when she spies

a $20 bill on the sidewalk. “Grandfather, can I pick it up?”

“No,” he replies. “If it were there, someone would already have

picked it up.”

(If trigonometry were there, I’d have picked it up. Actually, I did, but
then I lost it because I never found any problems it could solve for
me.)

eLearning is a philosophy, not a technology. It may include

web-based training but it needn’t involve the web at all. Trust me on
this. I was one of the first, if not the first, to use the term
eLearning.

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Take two groups of students. Tell the first group to read an essay and
answer a set of questions about it. Tell the second group to read the
same essay but tell them the material is terribly controversial.

The second group will answer more questions correctly. Uncertainty

engages the mind.

Ellen Langer writes that uncertainty challenges people to refine and

internalize their take on things. This is what learning is: mapping a
subject’s relative position in one’s personal context. In the real world,
everything flows. Nothing is certain. Meaning is relative.

Optimal learning requires the learner to be:

open to new perspectives (knowledge is provisional)

aware of personal biases (we see what we want to see)
exposed to unfiltered data (not watered-down interpretations)
humble (no one has all the answers)

“I’ve experienced a lot of things in my life, some of which actually

happened.”
—Mark Twain

Shaker Design Guidelines

Industry: Do all your work as if you had a thousand years to live

and as if you were to die tomorrow.

Honesty: Be what you seem to be; and seem to be what you really
are; don't carry two faces.

Functionalism: That which in itself has the highest use possesses

the greatest beauty.

Secrets of the New Economy

1. Everything’s connected.

2. Time matters.

3. Nothing’s ever finished.

Old paradigm New economy

Actors Interactions
Entities Relationships
Center Boundaries

Timing is everything. Duration. Sequence. Context. Antecedents.

Consequence. Awareness.

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The ROI of learning depends on the learner's degree of freedom and

performance-level. Imagine a spectrum of workers, arrayed by how
well they perform. Provide training. Often you'll receive a:

· 50% gain from a worker in the lowest 25%

· 200% gain from an average worker

· 500% gain from a worker in the top 25%

· 10,000% gain from a top 1% worker

One group of interviewers assessed job candidates in one-hour

interviews. Another assessed fifteen-second video clips of the same
job candidates shaking hands. The results were nearly the same. The
power of first impressions suggests that human beings have a
particular kind of pre-rational ability for making searching judgments
about others. “Thinking only gets in the way,” reports The New
Yorker's May 29, 2000 issue.

In the 1970s, the Navy did a study to find out how long people can
listen to other people talk. How long could they listen? 18 minutes.

Don't trust your memory. The New York Times reported on university
researchers who repeated a study asking 73 boys all manner of
questions about their lives. Only this second time was nearly four
decades later and the “boys” were an average of 48 years old.

On the most basic issues, there was often no correlation between the
two sets of answers. They had no idea what they had said the first
time.

In the 60s, for example, 28 percent of the boys said they did not like
homework or school; later, 58 percent said they did not like them. On
the other hand, while 82 percent of the boys said they were
disciplined physically, only 33 of the men said they had been.

A beautiful woman approached Pablo Picasso in a Paris cafe. She

asked him to sketch her and offered to pay fair value. In a few
minutes, the artist created a drawing—and asked for 500,000 francs.

“But it only took you a few minutes,” the tourist protested.

“No,” Picasso supposedly replied, “it took me about 40 years.”

Earlier this year, Feed described a study of 10,000 community college

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students in California. In the 18-25-year age group, just 17% of the

men could acquire information efficiently through reading text. For
the remaining 83%, the standard college textbook was little more
than dead weight to carry around in their bag! The figure for women
in the same age group is a bit higher: just under 35% can learn well
from textually presented information.

As Disney sings, “It’s a small world after all...”

Two-thirds of British young people between the ages of 18 and 24

don’t know who Churchill was. 77% don’t know what the Magna Carta
is. 80% don’t know that Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales. 81%
cannot name a novel by Charles Dickens. 93% don’t know that Milton
wrote Paradise Lost. 93% do know the name of rocker Fatboy Slim.

An editorial in The International Herald Tribune noted that, “Some

knowledge of history and literature and other subjects is vital for
making sense of the world. Without it, one wanders down streets
named after unknowns, past statues that might as well be from a lost
civilization and hears the argument of one’s countrymen as one would
the words of strangers.”

Sound and simple motion convey 90% of the content carried by

full-motion video. Personally, I often enjoy the book more than
the movie because the colors are better.

The convergence of work and learning is hardly a new concept:

“Genuine knowledge resides and proliferates where people live and

work, not in some abstract formal realm. Good tools should support
and augment that knowledge as it is rather than attempting to
'engineer' it to fit some model-theoretic framework entirely divorced
from the work itself. We desperately need more and better software
tools whose design reflects this fundamental insight, and that will
therefore aid our best people in articulating, modifying and improving
their understanding of the work environments they inhabit. Most
crucially, we need tools that will substantially assist knowledge
workers—and today this category should include nearly all workers—in
sharing their understanding across the currently rigid boundaries of
functional specialization.”

Christopher Locke, now known as the author of the Cluetrain

Manifesto, wrote those words nearly ten years ago in an article in
Concurrent Engineering.

Beware of learning that comes in same-size packages. When

you come upon a group of workshops, each precisely fifty minutes
long, you’ll probably find some filler whose only purpose is to round
out the time slot. The essence may be only five minutes worth. Let
the 80/20 rule be your guide, not the clock. Don’t waste time on
non-essentials.

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In thirty years in the training business, I’ve come upon scores of

training companies with atrocious internal training. What’s up with
that?

Jimmy Swaggart is the first cousin of screaming rock music pioneer

Jerry Lee Lewis (“Great Balls of Fire”) and shares his cousin’s frenetic
energy.

Jimmy became a Bible-belt, fire-and-brimstone tele-vangelist who

energetically exhorted his flock not to sin. Jimmy himself would have
benefited from his sermons: he was caught in a sleazy motel with a
sleazy woman doing things you don’t want to think about. (It involved
a sock.)

My father-in-law was one of the original Volkswagen mechanics yet

his own car was always breaking down. He saw his role as fixing
other people’s cars, not his own.

The cobbler’s shoeless children show up so often in business that you

can use it to discover things about others they may not be aware of.
Ask a competitor what another competitor needs to do. Many
times, the Jimmy Swaggart syndrome kicks in, and your competitor
will tell you what he needs to do.

Take this another step. Picture a close friend. What does she
need to do to have a happier, more productive life?

Consider, was that really advice for your friend? Or was it

advice for you?

Did you follow the instructions? Skip over things? Good. If you come
back to any article in this LiNE Zine, make it this one. More awaits
you.

Bookmark this article. That’s Control-D on your browser. See ya.

Jay Cross is CEO of Internet Time Group, a think tank and consultancy that helps organizations make
eLearning decisions. He has pioneered new approaches to technology-assisted learning since the Stone
Age. (At least it feels like it. "Since the early seventies" is closer to reality.) Creative despite degrees
from both Princeton and Harvard, he lives in the hills of Berkeley, California, with his tennis-playing wife,
17-year old geek son, and two miniature longhaired dachshunds. You can reach him at
jaycross@internettime.com or on the web at http://www.internettime.com/.

JCTLW122100GR

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