Rhizomatic vs Aborescent

 One of the things I find completely thrilling about being alive is that I learn new things all the time -- concepts that I had absolutely no idea about before, that I didn't know even existed. Recently I heard the term "rhizomatic". I know what a rhizome is in the garden -- it's a way plants propagate. A darn good way to propagate, too. Some of the most difficult plants to wipe out -- mint, false indigo, obedient plant, to name three -- propagate that way. They send out shoots in all directions that start plants that send out shoots in all directions that start plants.

But that's not what this "rhizomatic" means. In this case, it was using the term to describe organization of knowledge. It can be contrasted with an "aborescent" scheme. You know what aborescent means -- it means "tree shaped" and you probably use it to organize things all the time. An aborescent scheme depends on binary decisions and dualistic categories. It is linear.

A rhizomatic scheme is non-hierarchical and is said to be planar. I'm not sure what this looks like yet, but I'm working on it. I think it means that there isn't a single starting point, but there could be unlimited points of entry or exit to content. Does it mean there isn't some sort of a "founding" concept? Is there no status that is associated with being that founding concept? In a tree structure, there is status conferred, either because the first item is oldest and the "father" of all the others, or because of the dualistic nature of the structure, where things are going to devolve to good and bad, right or wrong, eventually.

I am very interested in thinking about rhizomatic structure as it applies to linguistics and language. Spoken English is said to be very linear, but American Sign Language is not. Can ASL be described as rhizomatic in structure? Could it be diagrammed by describing different parts of a particular sign as existing on different planes? Does anyone describe it this way now?

My brain is so accustomed to thinking in a linear, binary way. Even the title of this posting is binary. As a Buddhist, I recognize the limitations of dualistic thought (although just to make that that statement compares dualistic with non-dualistic thought and is dualistic!) Up until now (now, not now) I've had no model (model, no model) to see phenomena (see, not see) as non-dualistic (non-dualistic, dualistic). How can I practice seeing things from a rhizomatic view point?


I'll let you know what I find out! :-)

Information Costs and Six Sigma

Probably one of three most important concepts I learned at the Simon School was information cost. (The other two were: Buy and hold a diversified portfolio, and sunk costs are irrelevant. There -- you just got the benefit of an MBA education. Go forth and prosper!) Information cost is the costs that occur because the person making the decision is too far away from the process to understand exactly what is happening. In many organizations, not only do the misplace decision makers not know the impact of the decision, but even worse, they don't know what they don't know.

So, when applying Six Sigma to a process, one critical place where the whole thing can go south in a hurry is having someone make decisions about sensitive systems when the person doesn't truly understand the system.

Here's an example from my past. I worked for a company that made, among other things, e-learning. The courses were divided into lessons, the lessons into topics. The content was complex. If it were easy, people would have figured it out on their own. They wouldn't need us to teach them how to do it.

Typically, we worked on a lesson basis. The process started with a planning meeting, and then was written, edited, and animated. This mean that there was some time waiting in for the content to get to you, especially if the previous lesson was smaller, or for some reason you finished the work early. Management watched utilization very closely, and decided that handing off lesson-by-lesson resulted in too much waiting, and we should hand off topic-by-topic.

The problem with that is that the entire process had been built with the assumption of lesson-level hand offs. We were accustomed to moving content around in lessons, adding or deleting topics, and so forth when the lesson was edited. When we were forced to edit topic by topic, once the topic went by your part of the process, that was it. If you got to a later topic and made an edit that affected (or need to affect) something in an earlier topic, well that was just too bad. As the content reviewer, I started having to pull back early topics. This resulted in re-work all the way down the line. It was a nightmare. At first management didn't want to hear anything about going back to a lesson-level hand off system. They stubbornly clung to their decision. But eventually their own figures  on cycle time convinced them to reverse themselves. What a happy announcement that was!

The take-away is, I think, that we have to approach process improvement with humility and collegiality. We need to watch the impact of our changes, and be ready to tweak as necessary. And we need to think about the unchanged systems affected by this process. It is only by attention to these that process changes will be successful, and not include some unexpected and unhappy results!

Make it Easy, Take it Easy

One of the things that really grosses me out is a wet sponge, used and covered with little particles of food and debris, sitting in a sink. I don't like looking at them, smelling them, or touching them. Ick!

The Scene of the Ickiness

So, when I encountered a truly disgusting example in the break-room sink at work, I was faced with some options. Break-room sinks are even more disgusting than most because no one takes ownership for them, so they never are really clean. When I found our department sponge mouldering in a puddle, I wondered who would leave it there, and how could anyone wash their dishes using it?

I could have just ignored it. After all, I don't actually wash my dishes at work. I take them home. But I do occasionally wash my hands there. So I would see the sponge again.

I could have rinsed it out, squeezed it out, and put it on the counter to dry. But I would have to actually touch it (ick, ick, and double ick!) tomorrow, and the day after that. And the day after that. The prospect of becoming the icky sponge monitor wasn't appealing.

So, I did something else. I bought and installed a sponge holder. Now when the sponge is used, the user can set it in the conveniently located holder. The effort required is zero, and the sponge will tend to stay drier.

I think that people don't wake up in the morning thinking, "How can I gross Clare out today?" They just tend to follow the path of least resistance. They choose to take the alternative that seems like it benefits them the most. So my teammate sponge users didn't want to fuss around with the sponge. They just wanted to wash and go. Throwing the sponge into the sink was born for a desire to not be doing the washing anymore.

When things aren't going the way you desire, take a look at the system that behavior is a part of, and ask yourself if the system can be tweaked to give you the outcome you desire. Be careful, though. Sometimes the tweaks can result in unexpected outcomes, not all desirable. A while back I installed  edging in my garden at home. I wanted to keep the nice tillable dirt in the garden and out of the lawn. I wanted to keep the grass in the yard and out of the garden. A few dollars and several feet of pound-in edging later, I was happy. But what I didn't realize was that the area of lawn I had just isolated from the garden was the low point in my yard. And come the next rain, I had "Lake Felgert" in my back yard. By keeping the dirt in the garden and the grass in the yard, I also kept the water in the lowest point! So it's important to re-evaluate your tweaks and make sure that the result you have is the result you want.

Get Ready - It's All About to Change!

Amazing, exciting. Can't wait.

Lean Principles and Developing Instruction: Structuring Communications

One of the key principles of Lean is that communications should be structured. I wasn't really sure what this meant, exactly. So I asked my own person consultant in all things business process related (my daughter Nicole) what this was about.

What she said was pretty simple, actually. That a communications plan should be in place that specifies how and what communication is going to occur. At first I thought that there simply must be more to this than that -- but then I remembered something that happened to me a while back. 

I had attended a conference and saw a new technology that I found pretty exciting. It was software that provided a virtual desktop to computers. It would allow us to have only one desktop to maintain, not 15. It would ensure that every day a fresh instance of the standard desktop was present on the machine, so we didn't have settings being changed, software missing, etc etc etc. So I asked one of the team to install it and thought we would try it out and then I could report our wonderful success to the other department heads and we would be the toast of the University. 

And my teammate hopped to and installed the software. 

And then the nightmare began -- not for me, but for the people who were responsible for actually supporting users in the lab, people that I had completely neglected to either ask or inform of my grand plans. It was with great embarrassment that I heard about the extra work and headaches I had caused for my team. And then I asked my teammate to uninstall it and put things back the way they were.

After that experience, I find myself not only stopping and thinking, "Who needs to know this?" but also thinking, "And who ELSE needs to know? And who ELSE?" A plan for structured communications helps to prevent this sort of problem. 

Recently, when I was helping the team rolling out a new student information system by developing user training, I was able to see that my plan for every-other-day status updates did inform my teammates, stakeholders, and clients. They all knew what was going on. But more importantly, their sense of anxiety was lessened as well. They knew what was going on, and they knew  they were going to hear again from me. Their energy didn't have to go into being worried. It could go into getting the project finished.

Great New Tool: ThingLink

I stumbled across a cool new tool today -- ThingLink. This tool allows you to upload a photo or graphic, insert hot spots, and link them to video, photos, or URLs. Here's a quick one I just did -- I had a lot more trouble using iMovie than I did ThingLink!

You can see my first attempt here.

Using Brain Science to Improve Your ELearning

As I've developed my instructional design model for deaf adult learners, I've turned to brain science to understand how I should best present content. My study has centered on Cognitive Load Theory, and what implications that has for deaf folks. Of course, it isn't as simple as checking out studies on cognitive load and deaf learners. Studies that answer my questions don't seem to exist. But I have been able to find studies that I think apply. Here's a summary of my findings. 

1.     Pretraining – understanding the names of things and how components work first – reduces cognitive load.

2.     Mental Models have two parts: First A representation of how parts work, and second, causal, how the parts affect one another.

3.     Novice learners need content signals. This means they need to be signaled when there is something they need to learn appearing on the screen.

4.     Novice learners need content weeded. This means there should be no extraneous information presented to reduce cognitive load.

5.     Novice learners need video to be segmented.  They need the time between videos to move content from working memory to long-term memory.

6.     Text on screen and voiced text at the same time increase cognitive load. Obviously deaf people don't hear text. But information conveyed in sign language, the deaf person's native language, is shown by some studies to be processed similarly to voiced text.

7.   Voiced text and graphics are better that text on screen and graphics. So perhaps signed language and graphics are better than text and graphics. 

8.     Text and graphics on screen increase learning if: 
Words and pictures are shown at the same time.         Illustrations are weeded. Text and pictures are physically close to one another.  An integrated instructional format is used. This means that the explanation of parts of a illustration are actually in the illustration, not separated above or below the graphic.

9. If students verbalize about their learning, they are better able to solve novel, ill-defined problems.

10.     Retention/transfer is greater when students build their own personal, external graphical representations. This is known as “Activation.”

Sources:

Chandler, Paul and John Sweller. Cognitive Load Theory and the Format of Instruction, Cognition and Instruction: 8(4) 1991, 293-332.

De Westelinck, Katrien and Martin Valcke. The Impact of External Graphical Representations in Different Knowledge Domains: Is There a Domain Effect?

Hickok, Gregory, Ursula Bellugi, and Edward S. Klima. Sign Language in the Brain, Scientific American, June 2001.

Ibrahim, Mohamed and Pavlo D. Antonenko. Effects of Segmenting, Signaling, and Weeding on Learning from an Educational Video.

James, S. A. (2001, June 7). Magazine articles in APA format. Newsweek, 20, 48-52.

Mayer, Richard E. and Roxana Moreno. Nine Ways to Reduce Cognitive Load in Multimedia Learning. Educational Psychologist, 38(1), 43-52.

Thomas, Nigel J. T. Dual coding and Common Coding Theories of Memory, Mental Imagery, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Winter 2011 Edition.