tonygoodson

Cognitive Bias

Someone asked me recently “Hey Tony, what’s the best entry on Wikipedia?”  though he was probably joking, without hesitation I said “Cognitive Bias”.  He had a look and agreed with me.

So as a reminder to self, and a treat to anyone who reads this, go look at the list of Cognitive Bias on Wikipedia.  It has all the failings of human nature gathered together in one Wiki entry.

A cognitive bias is a pattern of deviation in judgment that occurs in particular situations (see also cognitive distortion and the lists of thinking-related topics). Implicit in the concept of a "pattern of deviation" is a standard of comparison; this may be the judgment of people outside those particular situations, or may be a set of independently verifiable facts. The existence of some of these cognitive biases has been verified empirically in the field of psychology.

Cognitive biases are instances of evolved mental behaviour. Some are presumably adaptive, for example, because they lead to more effective actions or enable faster decisions. Others presumably result from a lack of appropriate mental mechanisms, or from the misapplication of a mechanism that is adaptive under different circumstances.

Thanks Johnnie Moore

Learning to be a Creative Genius

Déjà Vu, I come here to write about 10,000 Hours to Become a Genius, and realised I’d already used exactly the same title when writing about exactly the same subject last November.

So let’s call this Part II.  I’ve realised recently that for 42 years I’ve been struggling.  Struggling to fit into an education and white collar working system that has a very narrow confine on what is intelligence.  And I’ve fitted in, I’ve had to, but at great cost to myself and talents.

At aged 6, I was highly mathematical, spatial, chess, sporty, but I couldn’t handwrite properly, struggled to spell, couldn’t draw well, struggled with English comprehension.  I was a classic geek, shy of girls (but loved them really), crap dancer.

My 10,000 hours of genius, didn’t go into a single subject but across a number of subjects.  Sport, Man United, Chess, Maths, Sport, Current Affairs, TV, General Knowledge, Newspapers, Encyclopaedias, Science.

That inability to write and draw, and remember language, has been a blight on me ever since.  I’ve been blessed with enough intelligence to survive it, but I shouldn’t have to survive life.

So now my oldest child has just come through being 6, and my youngest is fast approaching 6, I’m really attuned to what’s expected of them in education, and what they can and can’t do.  But here’s my own breakthrough and realisation.  Genius may not be nature.  It might be nurture.  We find our talents out early on for ourselves, or someone helps us.

I say this because, I’m noticing some things my kids aren’t learning for themselves.  That doesn’t mean they can’t do something, just that they don’t know how to.  Jay’s reading is great now he’s started school, and I should know, I taught him (proud Dad), but his handwriting and drawing are behind many of the kids in his class.  Mmm funny, but that’s me at school all over again.

Now, for the last few years, I’ve been looking for a cartooning book to help me learn to draw for when I’m training and writing on boards and flipcharts.  I made a concerted effort to find a book this week, for my sake and now for Jay’s.  And hallelujah, I’ve found it. 1001 Awesome Things To Draw.  A fantastic book.  Suddenly I’m a genius cartoonist (and so is Jay) just by following the rules.  Neither of us can naturally draw, but who can.  The untold secret is that many children and adults, learn to draw using the rules, without telling the rest of us, what the rules are.

It’s the same with Improv.  You may look at Who’s Line is it Anyway and Thank God You’re Here, and watch in wonderment at how those performers and comedians take on random situations and be so funny.  It’s rules based.  There are basic Improv rules, which if you follow with a few hours of practice, I’ll guarantee most people can get up there and perform very well.

 

And I’ve just bought a book on design and layout, How to Understand and Use Design and Layout. It’s rules based again, along with some artistic genius!  It’s taken me years to find a good book on Design and a good book on Cartooning, and now I can be an Artistic genius like the rest of you.  Now I just need to find those 10,000 hours!

10,000 Hours to become a genius

An interesting article by Malcolm Gladwell (Tipping Point and Blink) on talent and successful people, A Gift or Graft?

This idea - that excellence at a complex task requires a critical, minimum level of practice - surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is a magic number for true expertise: 10,000 hours.

The article and Gladwell’s forthcoming book suggests that a minimum of 10,000 hours practise and the opportunity of being around in the right place at the right time in history will create giftedness, genius, and riches.

Bill Joy (Sun Systems), Bill Gates, The Beatles, all had the opportunity to practise for many years.  The source of their giftedness.

It’s a Nature v Nurture argument, and I would tend towards the Nurture.  It takes over 10 years practise at 3-4 hours a day to turn my kids into sports and academic stars!

Fun with Peter and Jane!

This reading thing with Jay (aged 4) is getting serious.  It's very clear to me that he's whole word reading and not Phonic reading words.  Phonics which has been all the rage for decades it seems, breaks words down into their constituent parts, and identifies the variations in short and long vowels, as well as different sounding letters.

Jay is lapping up the individual sounds.  He wants more and more.  However, he has almost no ability to run the sounds together into words.  That's ok, he's 4 and I'm starting him a year early.

However, once I realised this, I picked a word he'd love, and let him learn that one word whole, so he has an anchor for other words.  The chosen word is...."cat".  Now he's identifying "cat" throughout the book, and of course his own name "jay" if that were in the book.

But get this, c...a...t, "Yes that's right Jay, cat.  Now this word is similar." r.....a.....t.  What do you think he read the word as after he sounded the r,a, and t? He said, "similar"!!  Very funny.  But I suddenly realised he can't see the relationship between cat and rat.  No idea, even if I rhyme them, or cover the c and r.

So I started to delve into how I learned to read.  In the UK in the 60s we had the Peter and Jane books or Janet and John, which are whole word books now out of fashion.  But get this, the research for the books was based on the fact that 12 words account for a quarter of our language, and 100 words account for half our language so it makes sense to learn those words, especially if like Jay you seem to like whole words.  I'm really tempted to buy Peter and Jane books, and Go Dog Go as a learning to read book, and let's see if he can learn in weeks as opposed to months.  I'm betting he can.  He loves it.

Let's soldier on with phonics, which to me seems easier for the teacher to teach than the reader to learn, which is maybe why it's been "successful"

Teaching Kids to Read

I'm far from being an expert on teaching kids to read, but having taught my older one Georgia, who is now 6, to read, and now starting with Jay who is 4, I noticed this article in The Guardian today, Union reading guidance to move away from phonics 

Citing mounting evidence of a crisis in children's happiness and mental health, the National Union of Teachers will today debate calls to scrap the most restrictive elements of the national curriculum and reverse a government order that literacy be taught through phonics.

The book I used to teach Georgia is Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons by Englemann Haddox and Bruner.  This is definitely a phonics book, which breaks words into their constituent sounds. It worked at first, and we got to page 300, and then Georgia gave up when the orthography was removed.  Orthography is additional signing and closing of letters together to give kids an idea of how words like "sh" sound or variation in short and long sounding vowels.

It was also very clear to me that whilst phonics is a good way for anyone to teach someone to read at the beginning, in reality we as humans use pick up "whole" words.  I can see it with Georgia, who recognised the whole word, not the breakdown of it, just like us, as adult readers.  If she or we come to a word we don't recognise, we use a number of different strategies, of which I reckon phonics is a small proportion of the tools.

So now with Jay, I've started him on the phonics book, but I'm recognising, that just like Georgia, he wants to move around the book, he has limited attention, he likes to "cheat" by memorising or guessing the whole word, which suggests that phonics isn't natural.

So my advice.  Start with phonics, and move very quickly away from it, especially if your child isn't taking to it.

The Spirit and Fun of Dance

I saw the most amazing thing today.

I was at my 6 year old daughter's dance concert in Melbourne City today, her group were on second, very cute.  But watching the other 12 groups come on stage, with varying ages up to mid teens, there was something missing.  They're not professional they're not perfect, but it wasn't that, I couldn't work out what it was, and then Something Happened!

This guy came on the side of the stage with a mic, and started talking to the audience about the next session, and then a group of people walked on stage varying from a very little kid, mostly children, teenagers, and a few adults, and they started to tap dance.  But with spirit, and fun, and freedom.  I can't explain the contrast but something special was happening in the way they were learning from each other, dancing with Grant Swift, dancing against Grant Swift, and dancing with us.

Where the previous groups were stiff and "on stage" these tap dancers had freedom.  I don't want to be too judgemental but it has the sprit of Improv, or what you see in most snowboarders, but few skiers.  A freedom of movement.

It was truly a miracle of community, and the word wasn't teaching, it was something else.  Maybe tap is easier than other dance, but most of the other dancers seemed confined, most of the tap dancer's weren't confined and you could see the joy and rhythm in their whole body.

And I am a dance expert because I watched almost all of So You Think You Can Dance 3 !

First Day at School

It's my little baby's first day at school tomorrow.

I can't believe it.  She's 5, and first day at Prep (Junior/Primary) school.  She called me today to tell me that she's just got her new uniform.  Tears welled up inside me and a few outside!!  I don't know why it gets me so much.

Such pride for me.  She's growing up.  Letting go.  I hope she'll be ok.  I think it might be my stuff that I have to deal with rather than what she has to deal with!!

It sure takes me back to my first day at school, 40 years ago.  Handforth CofE.  I remember it so clearly.  A total state of shock.  I just sat there frozen.  Neither enjoying it, nor hating it.  Frozen and invisible.  Sit back and wait and see what happens.  And that's been my pattern in meetings for the rest of my life so far!!

Oh and Stephen Taylor cried so much all day, that he was sick on the entrance step.  A chair stood over his symbol, as if to mark the first day.

Business and the Gen Y Disconnect

An interesting Blog entry (and comments) in The Age today.
Business and the Gen Y Disconnect which links to this PDF report, Working Progress - How to Connect Reconnect Young People and Organisations.

It's all about Generation Y starting work for organisations from school and University/College.
The culture shock of starting work.
But wasn't it ever so?  This is the third generation of Knowledge Workers, the Baby Boomers and Generation Xers faced the same shock of picking up the phone at work on our first day.
Maybe role-playing picking up the phone, at school, will help!!

I think there's one critical difference between Gen Y starting work today, compared with Gen X/Baby Boomers.......The Technology at home for a Gen Yer, is more advanced than at work.
Previously it was work that had all the technology, but it's work that now stops you using and communicating the way you do outside of work.  Mobiles, Text, Chat, Weblogs, Vblogs, Podcasts, MySpace, Email, Skype, Video.  Corporates want you to stop using this stuff when you come to work.
Especially those that think they have a security and governance issue.

Oh, and Corporates fear loss of productivity because you'll be yakking on the chat.
They think that implementing an intranet with some crappy search engine will give you all the information you need, not realising it's quicker to get on the chat "Hey Joan, where did you put that document?"

I don't know what the outcome will be.  You join some big bank and find that their software is 2 generations behind, and that everything is in lock down so you can't use it the way you do at home.  So if you're a GenYer why would you join some big institute that doesn't work the way you do?
It's a game of bluff.  Will you compromise yourself, or will the bank change, in order to employ you?
Will there be a job shortage or a labour shortage?

Let's not forget that these employees are also potential customers, so it doesn't take long for the market to realise that these big corporates just don't (or can't) get it, so will everything move to Skype, PayPal, and Google?

My Financial and Human Value of IQ testing

Continuing my tale of woe, especially with Doc pointing to me.
Here's my own true story on IQ testing.

In my placement in 1982, from University, I worked for ICL for 6 months, the British computer company, now part of Fujitsu.
After my placement, I went back to University to complete my degree.  In the UK, many students go on the "Milk Round" which is when the big corporates come to the Universities looking to attract graduates, and at the same time, make them perform like monkeys in tests and groups. 

If you're a good monkey you get a good job.

I had already done a reasonably good job at ICL, so I'd written to them asking for a job.
They said they'd look into it, but suggested I applied through the official channels, which meant the Milk Round and the initial IQ screening tests.  Do you think I could work out the numeric progressions this time round?  Here's the answer, never before seen (click on photo)....

which is a polite way of saying,
"Piss-Off Thicky, you failed at the IQ screening, even before we make you perform like a monkey at a tea party."
Unfortunately, the results of those who passed (and hence those who failed) were publicly published at the University, and colleagues and friends were enjoying this one, after I'd said my contacts at ICL would look after me.  I didn't even make it to the interview stage.  Too Stupid!

Fortunately, this cat usually lands on his feet, and 1 working day later, the other letter arrived from a completely different part of the company, neither realising each other's communication......

My ICL colleagues, without realising it, had come to the rescue.
And what lessons do we learn from this?
1. The best measure of how someone performs in a job, is to let them do the job.
2. On arriving at ICL and straight into the Graduate Scheme, I struggled for the first few weeks, so maybe the IQ screening was right (no way!)!
3. The two guys that probably struggled the most in those first few weeks, went on to contribute million of dollars to ICL in successful sales careers.

So whenever I see a debate about IQ and testing, I get out my two ICL letters (1 working day apart) and laugh and cry a bit to myself, because but for a twist of fate, and bitter irony, I would have been thrown on the heap.

The ability to rotate a shape, spot numeric progressions, find the word that connects the other 2 words, put words into order of preference, tells us something about the person performing these tasks, but I'm not sure what!!

Flattening the IQ Bell-Curve

I finally read Doc Searls' article, Getting Flat PartII. It's an absolute must read, as much for the referenced quotes, as for Doc Searls' views on the myth of IQ and IQ tests, and more importantly, Education.

As a Training Manager, a Trainer, and a father of 2 young kids, I have a fascination with learning.
And also my own experiences of education.  I had a very conventional education, but I had an unconventional brain, like many kids and teenagers.  I was a square peg in a round hole.
At aged 5, it all started off ok.  I could read, write, and do maths.
But suddenly other kids were getting ahead of me at being able to physically write, but I was getting ahead of them at maths.  Way Way ahead.  4 years ahead.  At aged 7-8 the teacher was having to set special questions for two of us.  But at the same time, I couldn't physically write.
So what you had was a kid, who was well advanced at maths, but couldn't write, so I got averaged out, and you're always measured on your weakest bit, not your best thing.

David learns to read at age four; Rachel, at age nine: In normal development, when both are 13, you can't tell which one learned first--the five-year spread means nothing at all. But in school I label Rachel "learning disabled" and slow David down a bit, too. For a paycheck, I adjust David to depend on me to tell him when to go and stop. He won't outgrow that dependency. I identify Rachel as discount merchandise, "special education" fodder. She'll be locked in her place forever.

And I've always had another problem.  In spite of my strengths in maths and all things spatial, I don't always do well in the tests, even numeric progressions, simply because I'm often looking for something more complex than is the answer!!  At aged 7, I sat a "little test" which unbeknown to me was an assessor for my likely progression to the main test at 11.  I did really badly.  So my parents pulled me out of that school and put me into a private school which specialised in IQ tests. 
My IQ didn't improve, it's just that I got used to taking IQ tests.  So I passed at aged 11.

And then years of suffering with my handwriting at senior school. 
Somehow I got by, and off to University.  Turns out, that I'm probably dyslexic.

Something has to be done about our archaic attitude to education, set in a Victorian workhouse, to lock up kids and educate them to all be the same and within a narrow confine of what is "intelligent".
All suggestions on how to change things quickly before Georgia goes to school in a few years time are welcome!!