Blithering Purposefully: Post-Block 2 response/thoughts

I found the presentation on the coaching program in China ("Culture Club") to be particularly thought provoking, partly because I have a long-standing interest in China, and have worked there on two separate occasions – but also, and mainly, because I thought it raised some very interesting questions, both directly, and indirectly.

To take the indirect question first; if we look at the goals of the project, simply put, they were:

1. Create a blended learning program with 90% online & 10% face-to-face components
2. Implement it in China
3. Successfully train people in China
4. Be commercially viable ( it wasn’t stated, but it’s good to make it explicit)

I can only guess about the fourth – but since they are planning to go back & do it again, we can probably assume that if the program wasn’t, it soon will be. However, each of the other three goals was achieved. The only questionable result was number three, and this is what raises the question – how do we know, or how do we decide, what is successful?

What struck me was that one of the presenters said that the quality of the final assignments was particularly high – which sounds like an excellent definition of success! And yet, despite the good results, the focus was on the lack of success of the program in generating the same kind of learning behaviours as had been previously seen in Australia. I absolutely understand that – we tend to be very process focused, so an unexpected procedural twist can be quite disconcerting. But, and I stress this is purely speculation, should we be looking beyond the process to the results? At least some of the time?

Of course, it’s not that simple. If you have a program that relies on online participation, then irrespective of the results, it seems logical that improving the interaction will improve the results. Lynne raised an interesting point about “lurking” being an effective learning strategy (see below for references). It may be effective, but it’s hard not to worry that if EVERYBODY lurks, less is going to happen than with broad scale participation. And, as in any groupwork scenario, there is something of an (at least perceived) ethical question about those who only take without contributing.

In 2008-09 I worked in China rolling out a blended learning program. We had a similar issue – students were, according to our assessments, very successful. But there was a strong perception that the process was broken: the difference being that, unlike here, it was our customers who felt the process was broken, despite their apparent – to us - success. Now, unhappy customers make for a stressed organisation; but that’s a different story.

The reason that our customers were unhappy was exactly the same as one of the main issues directly identified by the Culture Club team. Our students, exactly as the CC students, valued F2F time hugely over the online participation, irrespective of the fact that F2F time was largely wasted without the online preparation. This, combined with the well-known phenomenon in language learning that subjective perception of progress, for most people, lags objective measurement (see references below), made for a very volatile situation. I was very interested to hear that this hyper-valuation of F2F time exists in Chinese customers outside the language teaching market.

Another issue that was raised during the presentation was that of the differences between China as an "high context" society, requiring a lot of unstated common ground context, and Australia, a “low context” society where social context is commonly overtly made manifest. I wonder about this (I have a friend who says you can't understand Westerners until you understand the Bible - perhaps all OTHER cultures look high context), but it’s a very interesting idea and one I shall certainly be following it up. It makes the question of providing online language learning environments (my specific filed of interest) much more challenging.

The final point that I found particularly valuable was the fact that it is wrong to just parcel up learning issues under the heading cultural differences. Irrespective of cultural differences, there are still multiple intelligences – nine by my last count, natural, visual, verbal, analytic, social, musical, kinaesthetic, existential and reflective – and these (see reference below) need to be taken into consideration. There are also personality differences; every culture has its extroverts & introverts and these traits can have a significant impact on learning outcomes. There is a multi-dimensional model of factors addressing learning success, and culture is only one of the dimensions. Too often, in mixed culture learning contexts, the cultural differences are stressed to the exclusion of other issues.

References:

Lynne's comments on lurking were motivated by:

Susan Greenfield (Baroness, no less) on research conducted at Harvard.
(http://www.visualizationfx.com/Harvard_Visualization.html)

Reported in

The Australian

June 14, 2008

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/health-science/society-hard-wired-for-a-fall/story-e6frg8gf-1111116627284

Also this conference:

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/deakin/stories/s296994.htm

and:

"Anyone who doubts the malleability of the adult brain should consider a startling piece of research conducted at Harvard Medical School. There, a group of adult volunteers, none of whom could previously play the piano, were split into three groups. The first group were taken into a room with a piano and given intensive piano practise for five days. The second group were taken into an identical room with an identical piano—but had nothing to do with the instrument at all. And the third group were taken into an identical room with an identical piano and were then told that for the next five days they had to just imagine they were practising piano exercises. The resultant brain scans were extraordinary. Not surprisingly, the brains of those who simply sat in the same room as the piano hadn't changed at all. Equally unsurprising was the fact that those who had performed the piano exercises saw marked structural changes in the area of the brain associated with finger movement. But what was truly astonishing was that the group who had merely imagined doing the piano exercises saw changes in brain structure that were almost as pronounced as those that had actually had lessons. "