A reflection on action research “storytelling”

What follows is a 1st person, stream of consciousness  reflection written to my mentor & committee chair.  

I describe  what it was like to record a 10 min video “telling the story” of  some preliminary findings emerging from my action research cycles into curriculum and adult learning. 

The video is hosted  at YouTube.

It will be shown at an international conference in Athens, as part of the Collaborative Action Research Network (CARN) annual conference, as part of a bundle of reports from the Future(s) of Education project, an international  participatory action research network.  

Dr Alana:  

i am just glad to get it out of my head  

i had a real out of body experience recording that one;  

i  am a very effective briefer in person, because i can read the audience pretty well.  

i have recorded hundreds of mini lectures etc for my business and for use here at the college on various topics.

i have never, ever needed more than a single take to record, decent and sometimes even inspired voice-overs  until  last night and that briefing.  

I literally needed about 30 takes to get thru it; most i stopped when less than a minute into it because the tone just didn’t feel right

 i think it has to do with being a fish out of water, and the difficulty i felt in trying to tune my story for an audience i couldn’t see, but more importantly didn’t have empathy for

because the audience characteristics still feel fuzzy to me, i couldn’t call up the right tone, voice, persona to apply  

 this caused me to have almost a split personality in the moment, when i am ordinarily dialed in

 i had a “talking part” and a “look ahead part” that is concerned with shaping the transition to the next point/slide  

but now i had a disconcerting 3rd part that was trying to anticipate the possible reactions of an unfamiliar, and hard to imagine audience  

this is what made me feel so out of sorts

 until i “wore out” the last, 3d part and was able to trust in just telling the story, and accepting the vulnerability of knowing that i couldn’t know the audience, i found i just couldn’t get thru it.  

this is the same phenomenon I spoke with Prof Mike Wesch, the digital anthropologist at Kansas State University, and world thought leader on social dynamics in social media: the camera eye represents the unlimited, unfathomable infinite future of all possible audiences across time and space who can be looking in on the “telling moment”.  

in a sense, its like coming face to face with the unblinking eye of God and wondering what she is thinking  

 it is trust that lets us get thru that moment, the accepting of vulnerability, that creates the empathy that hopefully fills the story, as told, with hope.  

that’s a clumsy way of trying to express my meaning of the risk and vulnerability to “telling” and why it can be such a powerful learning moment, and why we need to model it, embrace it, encourage it, and support it. 

Your “producer’s draft” was exactly what i needed to be able to get out of my own comfortable fishbowl; 

you gave me a bridge to the audience that i could not create on my own.  

this has become an interesting reflection to me already  

please put the video on the website, and any or all of this reflection as you deem suitable  

have a great time at the conference!

Reflections on myself as an adult learner

Who am I as an adult  learner:

I am framing the answer within the context of my “Big 5” (Strelecky, 2007). The “Big 5” focus my thoughts about self, purpose, mission and values.  In Strelecky’s work, the Big 5 are 5 things you want to accomplish in your life. My “Big 5” are all states of being, roles that I want to live with the highest quality (arête). My Biog 5 are:  father, husband,  teacher, student, warrior,

 

Student:

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator:  ENTJ  I am getting closer to the “I” as I get older which moves me from “Leader” to “Scientist” in the typology.  My scores are very high on the NT domain, which gives me a global, theoretical perspective. I notice that I am always searching for the broadest generalizations that can be made from an incident, or the widest application of an idea. It doesn’t take much for me to go off on a tangent. I am least happy when bringing a project to a conclusion, as it feels stifling and disconnected from the dynamic world around me. Finality and endings are disturbing to me, and I dislike graduation ceremonies above all else. I am much more at home in the developmental and conceptual phases of any project. I get bored easily by data gathering and have learned to offload that task to others. I am a good project manager, as I have learned to build teams of various skills and aligning tasks with strengths.

 

Kolb Learning Style Indicator:

The Kolb LSI measures self-reported preferences along 2 dimensions:  Concrete experience-Abstract conceptualization and Active experimentation-Reflective observation.  These 2 dimensions reflect how we prefer to gather our information about the world and then how we prefer to make sense of it. The intersection of these 2 dimensions establishes 4 quadrants, and can be used as a way to describe a classroom population as well as individual learners. We use this model extensively at the Command & General Staff College, and I have become convinced of its practical uses when used within reason.

In this model,  I am classified as an “Assimilator”, which combines a preference for Reflective Observation and Abstract Conceptualization. This means I don’t need to spend too long “in the moment”, fully experiencing every nuance of the moment; I am always ready to begin reflecting on its dimensions, characteristics, descriptions and classifications. As an Abstract Conceptualist, I proceed to place experiences within my larger world view, as a particular example of a class of experiences. I spend little time in active experimentation to validate the data, once satisfied that it makes theoretical sense. 

                These preferences are helpful when approaching new material where the connection to theory is strong or explicit, because it satisfies my need to be situated in the world. I am comfortable with complexity and nuance and am  competent at brainstorming and imagining future scenarios.

The downside of my preferences is that I am prone to overlook deep subtleties in experiences especially if the situation is slow moving. The idea of sitting in a duck blind for hours waiting for birds is my idea of hell on earth. I am also prone to accept theoretical justification as truth and am willing to short change practical validation of new concepts simply because of the theoretical elegance.

                As a consequence of knowing this about myself, I find it necessary to do sitting meditations to work on my mindfulness and presence in the moment, to learn to appreciate the experience simply on its own merits, without a need to explain it or frame it as part of a larger construct. On  group projects I am careful to include pragtmatists and  naysayers who will insist on evidence and results from fair trials before we adopt policy changes.

                These strengths and weaknesses, and my accommodations to the limitations of my learning preferences are an integral part of my business success as an equity trader which puts a value of new ideas, but also on backtesting and forward risk management.

 

Brainmodepower typology: AVK, global. 

I am off the chart on the audio learning, and on the globalization scale.  I have now noticed that when I am really trying to concentrate on learning I do not look at the person talking, but need to doodle in order to free my ears to hear. Doodling helps me occupy my eyes and hands (visual and kinesthetic modes). This has been a problem for others in the past when they would say “Look at me and pay attention!”  when I was doing my best to pay attention.              

2 stories from combat on this topic which reinforces the power of the insight: On a night attack, wearing night vision goggles I had high explosive rounds land near me and “whiteout” my night vision goggles, and I lost my night vision for about 15 minutes: I was able to command my company though because I could hear what was going on via the radio and I had a sense of where things were based on noise, sounds, and the volume of fire. A few days later, in the daylight, I had a hand grenade land very near to me and I didn’t have my earplugs in. I was deafened for about an  hour before my hearing returned, and it was the most frightening experience I had ever had. I felt absolutely cut off from the world and was unable to command effectively. It was terrifying, even though I could see everyone around me and could consult a map.

 

Learning techniques:

I am a fast reader and I prefer to read in burst of 10-20 minutes, rendering my notes in visual, mindmapping form.  I will generally  develop detailed cognitive maps and turn them into slides as cues for recalling detail and cognitive structure. I take semi-structured notes on standard note-taking forms that I have developed over the years to suit my style. I will often color code the notes to make structure even more apparent. When I review notes from my Masters program (15 years ago), they make perfect sense to me and I can recall the circumstances of the classroom and the moment as if no time has passed.  This form of “chunking” supports my assimilating style. 

At any given moment I may be engaged in reading up to 20 books at a time in various locations, and I follow my mood or sense of urgency for picking up the next book to read. When I find myself drifting I stop and do something else until my attention is focused, rather than trying to force concentration.

 I can concentrate for hours at a time in reading if needed, but I prefer the shorter bursts when my mind is feeling especially sticky.  Learning to crate feelings of “sticky mind” is an essential part of my practice of sitting meditation, which Buddhists call “child’s mind”.

I will rarely read a book from cover to cover, preferring to read from top down and outside in, by examining the covers, introduction and forward, table of contents, index and references and chapter summaries first, and then come back to the book after 24 hours when that has had time to digest and become embedded. I will then skim chapters based on my interests, and finally skim the whole book. I have adapted this technique from  Mortimer Adler’s “How To Read A Book” (Adler, 1940) and it has helped me integrate a lot of material from a broad array of fields.

I am not very good in free form dialogues of material, preferring to hear structured presentations that reflect deep inquiry on the part of the presenter. Lectures are excellent for me as I can listen carefully, while doodling and seeming to daydream in my own personal comfortable space.  I enjoy writing and working on a topic while having a background lecture playing, trusting that if something interesting is being said that I will tune in to it. Some of my most creative work is done in this manner in the apparent cognitive dissonance set up by 2 different information streams. I am listening to a Teaching Company presentation on Chaos by Dr Stephen Strogatz as I write this.

My biggest problem as an adult learner is procrastination and time management, since I am always eager to read one more thing before generating my final conclusions. I also find it difficult to recast my theoretical framework of information once established and will generally try to find ways to accommodate pieces of my original insight in an evolving understanding. I try to delay taking final positions in order to gather more information for this reason.

I find it amusing that despite a strong rational component, and a structured approach to learning, that my decisionmaking and sensemaking is much more intuitive than rational.  I trust my instinct far more than my conscious mind. This is a habit perhaps ingrained into me from 15 years of  being an infantryman in combat and trusting my senses in dangerous situations. This habit of mind is so odd that it is even the subject of discussion among peers who know me well and wonder how I can be so rational and yet make instinctive, intuitive decisions.

 

Teacher:

I have been teaching in the Command & General Staff College for 8 years and have reinvented my whole approach to teaching as a result of the action research inquiry while attending CTU. While I acknowledge the need for competence at the data level I also have become much more aware of the importance of the social level of learning.  I no longer think that learning and education are like filling up a pail, but are rather like lighting a fire (to paraphrase  Yeats).

                I am trying to create an educational space in the classroom, in the college, and in my professional work that encourages and supports free inquiry, a commitment to truth and academic freedom, and both a respect for and a seeking out of diverse perspectives and points of view. As a teacher in the classroom  I try to model the behavior I seek from students, by the quality of my preparation, a concern for the learning and perspectives of others, and a willingness to be vulnerable in my ongoing search for knowledge. I am encouraging as many means of formal and informal feedback as possible to help students shape their own educational programs and outcomes. I encourage and support their inquiry in my classes and through support of their independent studies. I reach out to other colleges and programs to create networks of learners and to act as a catalyst for learning.

                I respect the action research construct of multiple ways of knowing (experiential, presentational, propositional, and practical) and acknowledge the learning that can happen through 1^st person, 2d person and 3d person action research.

                I favor the connectivist learning school of thought being developed by George Siemens and Stephen Downes at University of Manitoba, as I believe it represents a realistic, sound, robust and challenging way of developing knowledge and practice to appreciate and thrive under conditions of uncertainty.  More at:  http://www.elearnspace.org/

                As part of my research I am looking carefully at how to add Voice to the environment by encouraging, supporting and promoting the diverse needs, intentions and inquiries of faculty, students and curriculum developers in a way that advocates a move away from an industrial age view of curriculum and towards one of connectivism and individuality. In this sense I have taken on an advocacy perspective that is values-based but which respects the perspectives of other members of the action research teams that make up the projects.

 

 

Father: 

My role as a father influences my role as a student. One of the important reasons for me to begin the doctoral program was to set  a personal example for my kids, who at ages 18, 15, 11 are getting to see their dad doing his homework and reading books every night as a priority.  My father set the same example for me as a kid as he went to night school to work his way up the engineering ladder from “shop rat “to full-fledged design engineer.  I’ve been trying to re-learn math and physics to be able to keep up with my son who is getting ready to go to college next year to be a physicist or an engineer, but just like in video games, I believe he has passed me for good. I am content to listen to him and get him the occasional book to feed his curiosity.

 

Husband: without my wife’s support I could not have dreamed of taking on the active role of student once more; in fact she finally told me to stop moping around and dreaming about it and just get it done. I need that boost from her to get moving at times. I want her to be proud of my work and my goals.

 

Warrior: 

I use Warrior in the eastern sense, as one who is called, by his dharma, to seek mastery of self first in order to protect the weak and promote justice and compassion in the world. This calling is well described in  Trungpa (1984). In this sense, my role as an adult learner is to focus on those things that I ought to be learning in order to improve my practice; to find worthy teachers and learn from them; to questions my own assumptions and preconceived knowledge in order to step outside what I already think I know and to follow my beliefs to their core to find the source.

Warrior learning also has a strong service component, and so the topics for inquiry, the choices for action research must satisfy the “so what” question, must be directed towards a virtuous end. For me, the choice to do action research within my college represents a way to do the right thing in support of my duty to country and soldiers whom I support. Action research’s methodology strongly supports these values, particularly when fellow inquirers are positioned as co-researchers.

 

References:

Adler, M. & Van Doren, C. (1940). How to read a book. New York: Simon & Schuster.

 

Strelecky, J. (2007). The big five for life: Leadership’s greatest secrets. New York: St Martins’ Press. 

Trungpa, C.  (1984).  Shambhala: Sacred Path of the Warrior. Boston: Shambala Publications.

Management games for deep insight

Peter Checkland’s Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) describes the use of models to help us frame questions to ask of the world, and which help us become explicit about our world views, assumptions, frames of reference, theories of cause and effect, values, and desired outcomes.

Checkland, P. (2006) Learning for action: A short definitive account of soft systems methodology and its use for practitioners, teachers and students.  Chichester, England, Oxford Press

 We’ve developed a deceptively simple Force Mgt practical exercise in the form of a card game. The complete rule set is simple; takes 5 min to scan and understand. 

Rapid rule summary:

1. Students buy forces (5 cards) from a production table (a limited deck) and in each of 5 rounds,  deploy them into 5 regions to compete for Victory Points

2. Win:  first one to 51 victory points OR most points after 5 rounds

3. Game: lasts up to 5 rounds

4. Each round has 5 hands , each hand is worth Victory Points (VP)

5. Hand 1 is worth 6 VP, hand 2 is worth 5 VP etc…

6. Player 1 buys from the red deck, player 2 from the blue deck)

7. After you buy your 5 cards, you place 1 card face down in each region (hand)

8. Once all cards are placed,  cards are flipped over and you determine results

9. If your card wins the hand you get the victory points and keep you card; if you lose the hand, you get no victory points and lose your card. If it’s a tie, you keep your card and no one gets points.

10. Each player has an identical deck to buy from.

 It turns out that the development of strategy and then fielding an appropriate force really matters, AND there are distinct choices that are meaningful, available and feasible.

If you are interested, we’d like you to review the rules, and :

• 1. Buy your first round of forces
• 2. Deploy them into the 5 regions for turn 1.
• 3. Send your “Round 1” move to long-kenneth@conus.army.mil, along with a short description of your strategy

 We are interested in examining the variety of forces and the strategy employed in round 1.  Do you, for example:

1. Buy 4 ea 10s and a Joker to kill any enemy aces and retain max budget  flexibility to see what he has remaining?

2. Buy aces early to get a lead on victory points and then protect them?

3. Buy Jacks to kill 10s while still preserving SOME budgetary flexibility?

4. How do you balance economy of force with winning victory points? (efficiency vs effectiveness)

5. Variations?

 And then tactically employing forces, do you:

1. Put aces against 6 and 5 victory point regions?

2. Put 10s against 6 and 5s to hunt aces?

3. Aim for maximum victory points each round?

4. Aim to capture 11 of the 20 available points each round? (ie bluff on 6 and 3, but try to win 5,4,2?)

 In the actual play of the game we’ll look for adaptability and learning, and how strategies change after teams have played each other a couple times etc. 

We’ve play tested it enough to know there is a rich source of insights available in the game and that it is simple to play. We’ll  play it with decks of cards in the classroom 

We prototyped the game in our Force Management elective and are satisfied that that we generate student interest and insight into broader questions of Army force management in an interesting way.

 Here are some student insights gleaned from our playtesting:

1.  Round 1 results dominate the rest of your strategic choices, so getting Round 1 is crucial.

2.  Round 1 strategies are dominated by uncertainty because you have no information about your opponent’s strategy or adaptive style yet.

3. You have to decide when you want to buy strength: early and aim for quick wins, or later after you have seen pieces of the opponents forces and strategy.

4. Forecasting your opponents moves is problematic and make this more like poker than chess or bridge.

5. Aces are like the FCS: dominating until low-cost alternatives found the weakness. It wasn’t unit Aces were developed that the 10s became meaningful, so be alert to deep flaws in complex technologies.

6. Kings are costly but dominate the field; An opponent with Kings drives you to buy Aces but make you vulnerable to 10s.

6. Jacks (J) are a low cost success strategy against 10s, but can be incrementally be defeated by other mid-weight forces.

8. The costs of transforming cards between rounds is significant but manageable and may lead to strategic advantage. Scenario: You buy Aces on the first round and are successful, opponent buys 10s to kill your aces in the second round, but you trade down to Kings which dominate, and which remain difficult to defeat in subsequent rounds.

9. Deciding where (in what regions) to selectively deploy strength

10. Tactical results can overcome strategic insights and strategic failures. Tacrtics can be game changing.

11. What if the enemy has different victory conditions? Price points? Has different rules?

12. What if new cards are introduced after the first rule set is established?

13. How much would you pay to see the opponents’ hands?

14. What if there are partial wins? Or more than 2 teams playing?

15. Simple games can be powerful learning strategies

 Conclusions: the game serves as a way to dramatize very clearly many of our force management challenges and is a useful way to create rapid, deep awareness of prime issues in this domain.

 Here are some insights from a dedicated gamer and management game modeler:

I suspect that for most people’s first play they are strongly influenced by a form of Confirmation Bias: the As are priced higher, therefore new players conduct their analysis from the assumption that As are more valuable. Depending on the goals of your concrete experience, that may be the best argument for keeping the current price structure. However, an ace of spades loses to seven cards, including four cheap ones, where a KH loses to only four cards that are both expensive and vulnerable — the KH is easily the strongest card in the deck.

I assume trade-ins are secret — in fact that for all practical purposes players are operating behind a screen during their setup phase — because knowing whether your opponent has made any trade-ins is very valuable information. You may want to specify that in the rules.

 Given the prevalence of 10s in everyone’s first turn strategies, it seems like the second-cheapest strategy is far more optimal than the cheapest — that is four tens and a jack of spades. That marginal $15 gives you a pretty good shot at a victory somewhere, and a decent chance of carrying more net capital forward.

 Here are a selection of previously submitted moves for  Round 1: (* = Joker)

Strategy 1
Region	Cards	Strategy:                  Cost:  102   Carry forward: 48
6	10h	I’m trying to kill aces while creating and deploying one, but putting it where it is unlikely to run into an ace-killer unless the other guys is trying an ace-killer strategy like mine.  I’ve got cheap on the ace I bought, which is a risk that may not be worthwhile. I’m expecting to kill an ace in either 6 or 5, win 4 outright, and lose in 3 and 2.  Expected results are thus 9.5 points to me, 10.5 points to the bad guys, I will lose approx $35 worth of cards and kill approx $70 worth.  The enemy is expected to have spent rather more than me, so I will have more cash with which to restructure in light of what I find out. Cost: 102
5	10c
4	As
3	10d
2	10s
Strategy 2
Region	Cards	Strategy:                   Cost:  150   Carry forward: 0
6	10s	10 is the ace killer on 6, then we try to overpower each successive category on the way down.  Assumes aces go to 6, which rapidly becomes a tail-chasing assumption.
5	As
4	Ks
3	Qs
2	Js
Strategy 3
Region	Cards	Strategy:                   Cost:  123   Carry forward: 27
6	Jh	Hunting the ace-killers, retaining some flexibility, winning early points
5	10h
4	Ah
3	Jc
2	*
Strategy  4
Region	Cards	Strategy:                   Cost:  150   Carry forward: 0
6	Ah	Maximum strength in every region
5	Ac
4	Qs
3	*
2	*
Strategy  5
Region	Cards	Strategy:                   Cost:  145   Carry forward: 5
6	Ah	Maximum strength in main regions, try to hunt an ace and kill 10s; accept risk in small region
5	Ac
4	10s
3	Js
2	*
Strategy  6
Region	Cards	Strategy:                   Cost:  149   Carry forward: 1
6	10s	Hunt aces and accept risk in regions 5,6, steal points with aces & J in regions 2,3,4

Reflections on Validity in qualitative research

 

Was working on my final draft for my research proposal and had the following reflection about the issue of Validity in qualitative research. Since I am aiming for transformational changes in our strong military culture, and am using individual Voice (narratives, stories , interviews etc) as the basis for describing the current situation and desirable paths for change, the concern for Validity comes not from individual stories per se, but in the comparison between my entire dataset and the “Word as it really is” in the eyes of decision-makers.

My sense is also that the quality and insights that arise from individual narrative Voice will have an authenticity that must be considered valid as a data point. The validity concern I now perceive as being a function of having the narratives and stories cast broadly and fairly enough that they represent something that will be seen as truth. The threat to validity from individual narrative will come from assertions that the stories are not representative of the whole, and not from questions of individual perspectives, which will be honored as a matter of course.

In other words, a decision-maker who may not like the reports from the street may try to say

“…all the stories you report are “True” and valid, because they are perceptions, Mr Long, but you have not covered the whole topic/school/population to give a fair reading of the Real Truth, s we will persist in our ways. Thank you for your interest in national defense…”

So, now it is clear to me that I must look to answer the issues of Validity from a methodological and sampling perspective, and not just from the rigor of individual data point collection.

 

Force Generation curriculum project update

In one of our top level curriculum review meetings yesterday, our Deputy Commandant mentioned in his concluding remarks that there was a real “buzz” in the Army among the senior leaders concerning “Force Generation”, and he attributed it to the initiative I have been describing here which is holding out a lot of promise for transformative change.

This is before I even briefed him on the next phase, which is a survey/questionaire that we designed this week with our Quality Assurance Office and CGSS. Through the survey instrument, we’ll invite 1500 current students and 3000 graduates of the last 2 years to solicit : (1) their most important questions, (2) what they know that other students should know, (3) the problems they are experiencing with the force generation process in the field, (4) their best advice for solving problems, and (5) their interest in being part of the design team to craft curriculum to address the questions and problems.

We’ve already made contact with the Army proponents for each of the top level processes that govern the Army Force Generation process: policy, materiel, personnel, funding, training, and synchronization, and they have committed to helping us answer the questions that the students generate, as well as maintaining an ongoing knowledge base in the form of a wiki and a student text that will be widely available to Army units to reflect the most current wisdom associated with this process.

I see the wiki, the student text and our college as being the infrastructure that connects the educational needs of our officers with process experts from the generating force as well as the practical expertise that resides in the action-oriented leaders of our units in the field. I expect we’ll continue the survey as an annual instrument designed to ensure that our ST, wiki, and curriculum remain as adaptive as ARFORGEN is dynamic.

By staying connected to our officers’ stated educational needs and incorporating the best knowledge from experts and practitioners we intend to be relevant and adaptive as a department and college. When the day comes we no longer get urgent questions or significant problems identified that surprise us, we may conclude that we have a manageable ARFORGEN process. (There are more than a few things in the Army that are manageable but still hard )

In a classroom study group next week with volunteer students we will begin the design of the ARFORGEN wiki and Student Text “knowledge artifacts” that will represent our current consensus knowledge on the many complexities of ARFORGEN.

We think we can distribute the survey by 1 April, receive the bulk of input by 15 April, forward bundles to proponents by 1 May, be ready to populate the wiki and STs with initial answers by our 12 May ARFORGEN worksop at Ft Leavenworth, have a robust ST and wiki by 1 Aug, be ready to support curriculum for the 10-01 class, and then continue to refine the process and product through staff work and attention to detail.

A Reflection on Personal Learning Environments, blogs and wikis

Dr John Persyn  from the Dean of Academic Operations  started up a study group to look at what InstructorNet could/should/might/ought be. He made the mistake of asking me to think out loud. If you don’t disagree with anything that follows, or at least wonder what I am smoking, then I have failed 

I take the InstructorNet working group inquiry questions to include: 

1. What should InstructorNet be and why should we care? 

2. How can we give Voice (and action) to instructors to better align resources with efforts 

3. How do we improve the connections among the members (nodes) of an Instructor Net (I am thinking of this as a utility function:  bringing electricity/water to rural areas) 3. What technologies will unleash classroom excellence? 

4. How do we eliminate the boundaries of walls, bricks, mortar and time to support lifelong learning across the force (for our demographic to begin with)? 

5. How do we shift from an Industrial Age frame of education to a Network-centric, connectivist frame? 

(a short oversimplification and misstatement of Connectivism: the knowledge resides dynamically in the network, its participants and their connections, and has a shelf-life; the network adapts its tacit knowledge much more quickly than its explicit knowledge in response to an increasingly dynamic environment, and so we need nodes of cognitive excellence creating knowledge artifacts rigorously, but connection modes and tools that facilitate making the tacit knowledge explicit AND the ability to sense educational needs and assemble rapid response teams of connected nodes from across the network, etc) (I’ll develop this definition better later) 

Useful metaphors:

1. An “InstructorNet Mall” of available resources in one spot for instructors to meet their needs 

2. A Google “Knowledge Map” of available content that’s searchable, zoom-able, and subscribe-able thru RSS so the network alerts you for items meeting your interests instead of waiting for you to craft a search every time you feel a conscious need. 

3. The Amazon/EBay “smart network” that automates the search and recommend function based on stated interests AND by remembering searches & paths 

4. Customer Service center for instructors seeking help 

5. Tour guides/Marketing Aide to demonstrate “How to use these resources” 

6. Magazine model of info mgt/distribution: a targeted demographic, whose readers shape the course of the magazine/tools (Dear Readers! We listened to you!)  Lean 6 Sigma techniques have a way of accomplishing this, and a partnership with an LSS project seems like a natural one 

Other work to be done:

1. Considering how we encourage/reward professional writing like lesson notes, course content, blog/wiki work that contributes to the practice of knowledge, in the same way we have tied promotion and retention to academic writing. 

2. An FDP that incorporates more ideas related to “Master Classes in graduate teaching” on a regular basis. Some ideas include:

                a. Group learning vs Team-Based learning.

                b. RSS in the classroom (and blogs and wikis and podcasts…oh my)

                c. Live dialogue mapping skills to frame group discussions better (Google “Compendium” for demonstrations)

                d. How about giving Voice to faculty to let them nominate classes they want to receive, or challenges they face, and target the top vote getters? 

3. An InstructorNet Mall should have a “store” that has searchable index of available, recorded FDPs with quick summaries of what’s available for the individual instructor looking to sharpen his practice. 

4. UCTV (University of California “TV”) is a branded channel on YouTube with thousands of hours of content of their best instructors delivering on their best topics. 

                a. Why don’t we have Geoff Babb’s China lectures recorded and available in a catalog of Quality? Or Chris Paparone giving his best pitch on technical rationality and ADCON? 

                b. Why doesn’t the college actively seek and reward these mini-centers of excellence?  The Foundation should give cash awards to the mini-lecture each month that has the most (downloads x the highest quality rating) (like Guitar Player of the Year) 

                c. MIT has put their entire curriculum online. We need to do a better job of finding the tacit expert knowledge and making it explicit. We have replaced the value of SME for an industrial Age approach to standardizing curriculum delivery around uniformity, discipline and control, at the expense of risk, artistry, and informed speculation (some evidence that is loosening up I assert, by looking at Dr Kem’s study group pilots, and Dr Paparone’s innovative use of the Blog of Log to engage student critical thinking and professional writing in the new milieu under control) 

                d. The students should be able to give cash awards to their picks for instructor of the Section. Or POGs redeemable for valuable cash prizes at the PX. Or student nominations for Excellence in Innovation, or for Trying Really Hard Even Though The Experiment Blew Up In The Lab But Didn’t Hurt Anybody (the TRHETTEBUITLBDHA award) 

                e. Students should be able to record a 20 second praise  for instructors or AAPs, filed by AAP and instructor to guide next cycles towards our real excellence, that is searchable only by students.  Need more emphasis on Rate Your Instructor mechanisms 

5. I think we need a DDE rep on the team to assist the inquiry 

6. I think the instructor needs survey is essential 

7. I’d like to see a process map of instructors of all forms for CGSS: an operational graphic, who, where, what, and their AO and AI. We write curriculum for them in a vacuum; they have little to no voice in our design decision-making 

8. The instructors need a persistent forum for nominating “the policy that most gets in the way of my effective teaching is…” with room for public, persistent dialogue, instead of periodically asking for feedback snippets that get lost in the OPTEMPO 

9. Personal Learning Environments (PLE):

                a. Officers and faculty should have a profile page in their Personal Learning Environment that identifies, in one place their research interests and their research offerings. 

                b. It should have links to their writings on blogs, papers, wiki’s available, with their ability to make their writings public or private from their personal page. 

                c. It should have an RSS aggregator/reader integrated that automates a wide daily search of the early bird, BCKS AKO, DKO, Joint knowledge online, Small Wars Journal; in fact a listing of highly recommended sources they can check off for inclusion in their search, with the list expanding as a function of the community-wide ratings hit a threshold. 

                d. It should have a world class search engine that truly gives us ask once, search many capabilities; unlike AKO. All you need to know about AKO search is that when you search for “FM 3.0 download”, the first link is NOT to where you can download the manual. (I have a current screen capture, but don’t make me use evidence, because I will if pushed to the limit) 

                e. The amount of information being added to the Web each day is so large that we cannot afford bad “Search” AND we cannot afford to wait for people TO SEARCH, especially since we can give them a Voice in creating their default, persistent, context sensitive, active search profile on a Personal Learning Environment 

As part of the InstructorNet workgroup, I am focusing my personal efforts on:

1. a short summary of various educational applications of wiki, blog, podcast, RSS with bibliography

2. If I can find some practical details PLE (personal learning environment)info, I’ll do that as well

3. Creating a departmental resource catalog to support the ideas noted above.

4. Encourage the shift from Industrial Age to Network Age education

 

 

4 Reflections on Design

4 Reflections on “Design” that are guiding my inquiry, inspired by thought provoking article and commentary at the School for Advanced Military Studies, which is engaged in deep think on the entire military decision making model: 

1.  The challenge of codifying artful design. I am trying to integrate these 2 statements from the article; It may simply be that we want to get the principles right as opposed to creating a checklist, template, and standard process for Good Design:   

“The Art of Design is a cognitive paradigm shift from a 20^thCentury doctrinal model that emphasized check-lists, templates and processes.” 

“Our collective goal is to codify these practices for doctrine.” 

2.  Multiple ways to Design? 

“The Design approach makes explicit what Commanders have been doing intuitively in combat as they learn from acting within complex and complicated systems.  Our collective goal is to codify these practices for doctrine.” 

We have accepted within the college that there are multiple learning styles. Action Research is a tradition of inquiry associated with discovery learning in cycles of “plan-act-observe-reflect” and which appreciates multiple ways of knowing (experiential, presentational, propositional, practical).  If the essence of the Commander’s art that we want to codify in Design  is ‘learning from action’, is there a sense that there may be more than one way to design? Particularly in light of later statements that: 

“Because conflicts are unique, they require individually tailored solutions. There is no recipe or formula to choose between competing solutions for resolving this tension, because resolution depends upon the creative application of military judgment.” 

3. The relationship between Design and the current body of knowledge of Operational Art 

 “Design provides the logical connection between strategic ends and tactical means that is the foundation for adaptive action in the face of novelty and complexity.”  

• Is Design taking the place of what we called operational art?
• Or the operational level of war which connected strategic goals to tactical means?
• If so, is it replacing the construct of operational art?
• Or being offered as an alternative?
• Or to be used in lieu of current operational planning when complexity and uncertainty make current planning models unsatisfactory?
• Is “logical connection” the right characterization of the output of design? What would “artful” or “hypothetical” or “tentative” do to the meaning of that sentence and our appreciation of what Design is engaging with? 

4. Certainty in Framing so we can proceed to Planning?

 “Creation of an adequate Systems Frame allows the commander and his design group to cognitively map their environment.  They create a relevant Problem Statement and Theory of Action for moving an unsatisfactory state of affairs to a manageable condition that is within tolerance of the political leadership or of a senior military commander.” 

I had a vision of a Commander and staff  working on their systems frame until they judge that they have a workable model that accommodates multiple points of view. I asked myself: “I wonder how they will know that this systems frame is finished? Or good enough? Or relevant? Or satisfying to stakeholders? Or representative of the current situation? Or offers enough insights to begin taking actions? 

Could this be construed as putting the cart before the horse? On what basis will the Commander’s and staff judge that their map is sufficiently like the territory that they can proceed? That their problem statement is relevant? That their Theory of Action provides the basis for informed action? That their plans will have a causal connection to a change in the state of the mess they propose to manage? 

My sense is that a situation that calls for design will not let you judge the efficacy of your design without many and continuous iterations of experimenting , and that your design will become an evolving set of continuous approximations that are informed by feedback. And because we know that the environment is dynamic, it will learn from (or at least react to) our iterative experiments, there is every reason to believe that we will not be able to “Design Once, Plan Many”, but engage in an open ended  of iterative Design/Planning cycles that are integrated and continuous; that these Design/Plan are not separable, until we have evidence that the situation has become stable enough that our existing planning doctrine is sufficient for ongoing operations. 

If this line of inquiry has merit, I would be looking to see the sense of open-ended action research cycles of “Plan-Act-Observe-Reflect”, with conclusions about our new unsderstandings, theories and concepts evolving through each cycle, with an adequate Systems Framework  and Theory of Action emerging only after much hypothesis testing in the environment we propose to manage. The very uniqueness of the situation that demands we respond with Design is unlikely to become logical and understood at the front end of  Design/Plan campaign. 

Is there such a thing, then as The Design, or only continuous “Designing” to inform planning, and that we discover that we no longer need to change the design when the environment no longer demands it but not before? And then, only for as long as the environment remains in an acceptable range of  dynamic equilibrium? 

Imagine we are at the end of a successful campaign and look back at our path.  Would we be surprised if we had a series of “designs along the way”, each good enough and relevant enough for action based on previous feedback and our then-current level of appreciation validated by stakeholders, and that as we acted/observed/reflected we gained a new appreciation of how the situation was also evolving around us, so that we had a sufficiency for action, without ever having a complete Truth, and that the working model of the world that informed our design was unique and quite different, yet strung together by our reflection and learning until we reached a state where we had something like an acceptable, stable-enough reality. 

At what point did we “know” we had it right? That we had made a “logical” connection between goals and means? That we NOW understood what was going on in the environment? My sense is that those only become clear in hindsight when we construct the narrative of the “secrets of our success” and convert the winning narrative into our next template, until the world decides to tip over our applecart. 

The commentary above about humility and learning (and we can learn a lot of things without getting closer to the Truth) is inspiring and challenging. We may be in the situation Argyris and Schoen (1974) described as “Few espoused theories but effective theories in use” in Theory In Practice: Increasing Professional Effectiveness.

Designing education for uncertainty

Being comfortable with being uncomfortable is turning out to be an essential element of our curriculum.  Our officers are routinely being put into situations where their training is not helpful or where it can even be counterproductive.  They’ll have to rely on the principles we have educated them on (rather than training) and their own on-the-spot judgment.

It is an interesting design problem to figure out how to create classroom conditions that allow us to experience planning and decision making under uncertainty, which we then cant easily assess to see if we got it right. It represents a large cultural challenge to shift to a world view that encourages us to end the class with a question mark (uncertainty and reflection) rather than  an exclamation point! (the right answer!)

It’s getting to the point that we have to be on the look out for an excessive amount of confidence in our conclusions. This doesn’t mean we dispense with professional solutions and sound judgment, only that we have to remain humble enough, and alert enough to know thelimits of any tentative conclusion or plan we develop.  we know that constant change in the world means we have to have iterative planning and decisionmaking processes, linked up to robust sensing processes that constantly evaluate the fit of our mental  constructions (plans , assumptions, world views, “successful” endstates, measures of effectiveness etc) and the world around us.

Cultural context in qualitative research: can it even be done?

  A “critical friend” in the action research process is a trusted agent who gives deep insights from the outside into the nature, quality, and path of  your introspection. They help keep you grounded, and offer triangulation points in the sense-making process as you grapple with your own questions and insights. They act as sounding boards and mirrors, acknowledging that we can’t really ever know in the scientific sense about the truth of our propositions when dealing with complex human terrain. However we can pursue quality and appreciation instead, and that’s whata  critical friend’s role is.   

A good friend, acting as one of my  ”critical friends” in my 1st person action research process offered the following for me to consider after a journal entry concerning a confrontation I had over curriculum transformation with a peer.

Ken, this journaling effort seems to carry itself in your research.  The fact that I have a military background provided me with certain comforts in reading this, but for those without the cultural insights…they may be a little lost.  If you approach your writing with a bit more cultural sensitivity, or as a “foreigner” your words of wisdom would reach a wider audience.  Military culture is very specific in communication styles, so standing in a circle outside the backdoor ***ing about directives and expectations is very NORMAL to soldiers, of which I contribute to trust among the brotherhood, but please know that many organizational structures do not support this special sharing and feeling process among its members.  You identified what is normal for a DC, so from that baseline you should be able to point to cultural inconsistencies which are now creating ripples.

 

I really like this 1st person reflection, but I feel a sprinkle of cultural unraveling/description is necessary to fully understand the phenomena. 

I replied:

I think you are exactly right Jeff.  The deeper into a subculture we go, the more unpacking and “scaffolding” we need to provide a framework of meaning for outside readers. I was thinking of a translation of a Chinese classic novel I have started to look at. It has 45 pages of dramatis personae before the opening scene and covers many generations of the family that is the central to the plot and narrative. I am exhausted by that already   I just can’t upload that much into short term memory and hold it there to make an informed reading. So I am having to nibble on it as I go. 

I wonder how much like that the study of other cultures are for researchers? The ethnography chapter describes that dilemma: the knowability of other cultures, no matter how immersive you become. Could Jane Goodall every really be “of” the apes she studied?  The French sociologist Francois Jullien wrote with a certain despair of trying to fully grasp for himself the subtle elements of Chinese thought  in his book “In Praise Of Blandness’, despite a life of scholarship. Then he considered just how hard it is, if possible at all, to communicate the essence to another culture, which he was no longer fully a part of precisely because of his immersion in the Chinese culture. He was seeing himself in a no-man’s land of “between” 2 cultures.

In another sense that’s kind of where we all are: between our sense of self and our sense of the dominant culture and other subcultures in the soup we swim around in.

I say all that simply to say that what i am trying to do on my journaling is to capture the moment as quickly and deeply as I can, without over-thinking it and the first order immediate reflection, in order to build up some snapshots in time of my own role inside of my research. Dr Alana has recommended some qualitative analysis software called Atlas/ti that should assist me in identifying and linking narrative themes connecting the snapshots in time.  I am excited to see where it goes.

It is clear to me that I need to provide an intermediate layer of context around the raw entries in order to improve the accessibility to key points and themes as they emerge.

Jullien, F. (2004) In praise of blandness: Proceeding from Chinese thought and aesthetics. 169 pages. Zone Books, New York.

 

College, teach thyself?

My commentary from a discussion thread at the CAC blogs on the topic of General Officers education and selection. I am interested in how we improve the capability of the college to support life long learningi nour student officers (and faculty). I argue that our college should be as flexible as the organizations we are telling these officers they will have to create and lead when they leave our building.

Marshall fired a ton of old guys prior to WW2 who were optimized for their peacetime positions based on their experiences and the nature of the pre-war environment. The discontinuity that was WW2, in Marshall’s judgment, required a bold shift in selection criteria for GO. It’s a young man’s game? But is there a substitute for the years of practical experience and intuition honed by the career paths of GOs prior to their promotion? Doesn’t the top leader have to go through all those formative experiences to develop the skill sets required for the thorniest problems? Perhaps, if you believe that we are looking for leadership to be contained within a single node inside the network organization.

But if you believe we are in a world of complex adaptive systems, filled with wicked problems, then the probability goes to zero you can have anticipated all the requirements the GO leader must have in place prior to the challenge emerging. You would tend to prefer selection systems that reward the kind of attitude toward learning and developing that Jim Greer describes above, where ideal GOs candidates have a record of modelling the lifestyle of life long learning and building organizations. Particularly if you believe that the solutions for or management of wicked problems are to be found in quickly framing problems and assembling the right team from the network of resources to satisfy the challenge.

In that kind of organization you would expect to see officer students inside Army schools taking on more responsibility for their own education, particularly those attending colleges that aim for graduate level education and seeking to leverage the insights and potential of soldiers fresh from the cauldron. You would expect to see a broad diversity of topics, approaches, methods and reflections, a flexibility towards learning that models the kinds of open and inquiring attitudes we say the future battlefield will require. You would expect risk to be taken within schools, rather than say, an approach of standardized curriculum, methods and assessments that aim to certify performance against an established, seductively time-tested checklist.

within CGSC, for example: do we “give students voice” to shape their personal learning environment? Are our students speaking their minds or are they waiting for permission to speak? If they aren’t speaking is it because they are certain about the probable outcome of their feedback? How much authority do they have to steer their own learning course? We see stats from student feedback in curriculum meetings but there are no students present when we make crucial decisions, and our curriculum meetings are not assessed on quality and performance like we do for every lesson, block, and graded student product. Are students satisfied with the payoff of giving feedback for themselves? Or is it really indirect, weak “feed forward”?

Are our classrooms and learning environments truly a network of learning organizations or are we a set of isolated, compartmentalized homogenized standard parts designed to teach the same things in generally the same way against a single consensus view of what’s required for the next 10 years of service?

If you’d argue that we can’t teach everything the officers will need to know in the next 10 years I’d agree, and then ask if we are helping jointly create the environment that promotes lifelong learning, providing the infrastructure to support it through reachback and the ability to adapt quickly to emerging educational requirements in whatever scope and size is required for the next surprise, rather than trying to get the curriculum “correct and stable, once and for all”.

The Romans had tribunes of the people to directly represent the people, with real authority to act in real time on their behalf. Do our officers have an equivalent voice to take on real responsibility for their education?

Could our college routinely solicit the educational needs of our newly arriving officers in August, do a needs assessment and create curriculum for learning inquiries that satisfied most of the expressed “needs to know” within 3 months? We couldn’t if you believed that each new piece of curriculum would have to be exhaustively researched, vetted and synthesized and approved for mass consumption before the first day of class, and we couldn’t if you thought every new piece of curriculum must meet the standard of “every MAJ for the next 10 years needs to know”. And yet that’s the kind of organizational flexibility and adaptability we are asking them to develop in their units upon graduation. College, teach thyself?

Chapters 25 and 27 of “The Future of the Army Profession” (2nd ed) are scholarly treatments of these issues