I was reading a recent Will Thallheimer post about conversational writing where he referenced a great post by Kathy Sierra that says exactly what I’ve been feeling for a long time:
If you want people to learn and remember what you write, say it conversationally.
She actually references a 2000 study from the Journal of Educational Psychology that showed:
“In five out of five studies, students who learned with personalized text performed better on subsequent transfer tests than students who learned with formal text. Overall, participants in the personalized group produced between 20 to 46 percent more solutions to transfer problems than the formal group.”
This has been something that I have believed in for many years, but because I don’t have a formal Instructional Design background, I never said it very loud. When I worked on developing learning content we preferred doing scenario based learning, which placed the learner in a situation that was relevant to their jobs. Because this was usually done through a story, it would take on a conversational tone. The goal was to involve the learner and make them understand how the information was relevant to them, and what difference it would make on the job. Now at least I have some solid data to defend my position.
This is one of the reasons I like reading Will’s blog, because he focuses on research that provides actual data to back up his thoughts and opinions. While I was looking around his Work-Learning Research site I was horrified to find his article on the bogus learning chart that has been circulating, and realized that… I had used it myself!
I do believe in the basic concept of the graph, but now that I think about it, it is really odd that the numbers come out evenly. That should have been a tip off. I can’t even find the talk where I used it, but I know I was part of the problem.
So, to sum up: Informal Writing is Good, Informal Data is Bad.
Using an informal or conversational tone is effective for learning, but becoming so informal that you never bother to validate your data or sources needs to be avoided.
Un hoax pedagógico.
En junio de 2003, escribí un pequeño artículo para la newsletter de QS·media, comentando un apartado del entonces recién publicado libro de Nick Van Dam “The e-Learning Fieldbook” (McGraw-Hill 2003). El artículo era “Desarrollo de contenido…
Trackback by Alvaro Gregori, e-learning, formación on-line — December 16, 2005 @ 7:00 am
For those of you who do not read spanish well, the comment above is from Alvaro Gregori, who has a neat e-learning site. You can use Google translator to read his post in english and then poke around a bit to see what he has to say. Basically he discussed the same graph in a journal back in June of 2003.
Comment by Doug Foster — December 16, 2005 @ 9:23 am
Hi Doug,
I came to your blog (and inmediatly added it to my blogroll) from Kathy Sierra’s post on informal writing to find in horror I’ve used the same graph not only in my presentations but in some papers. And the hoax goes and goes since I’ve seen my own paper quoted serveral times.
Why do we tend to accept as true anything in the shape of a graph or statistic?
Comment by Alvaro Gregori — January 24, 2006 @ 8:54 am
Alvaro,
This is one of my concerns about the blogosphere. With all of the interconnectedness and cross posting of information, people are very quick to quote each other. Before you know it bad information can spread quickly.
I think the other problem is that in the e-Learning space, so many of us want “proof” that our concepts are right that as soon as we see data that supports our ideas we don’t bother double-checking to see if the data is valid.
I’ve been caught doing that when trying to put together a sales presentation. You desperately want to just search for data that supports your concept, rather than being rational and taking the time to validate the source and the data.
Comment by Doug Foster — January 24, 2006 @ 11:25 am