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Deductive, inductive

I always get myself into a twist (not good training practice) when I reach the part in my seminars about cultural differences in conveying information, trying to remember which method of logic is deductive and which is inductive.

Thanks to this blog entry from Chris Correa:

A teacher wrote me a letter, saying, "I found it very interesting that the Japanese teachers have students struggle with a problem before they teach them how to solve it. We never do that. We teach them how to solve it first, and then let them work on examples." She said, "I'm a very traditional teacher - I just get up and lecture - but I decided to try something after reading your book. I now start my lessons by letting students try to solve it on their own, and then give my lecture." She said this small change had worked brilliantly for her. She saw a huge change in motivation and engagement in her students.

I am prompted to remember the distinction by writing up this blog entry and also forcing myself to explain to myself that:
INDUCTIVE: is a process of reasoning by which a general conclusion is drawn from a set of premises, based mainly on experience (which is often how things are taught in Japan)
DEDUCTIVE: a systematic method of deriving conclusions that cannot be false when the premises are true - ie start with the theory and then find the examples to back it up, which is often how things are taught in the West.

Just to make absolutely sure I don't forget again, I shall mentally link 'induction' (which is what they threatened me with when my son was two weeks overdue) with 'experience' (which giving birth most certainly is).

That should do it.

Hat tip to Brian Micklethwait.

Multicultural e-learning

Some points that caught my eye from an academic article from the journal Language Learning and Technology, on the results of a study of a group of multicultural Canadians undertaking an Intercultural Studies course online.

They paraphrase Castells' The Internet Galaxy (one of those books that I have on my shelves in the hope that their contents will enter my brain by osmosis rather than actually having to read it) in saying that

'like all technologies, the internet was and is socially produced -- and all social productions are informed by the cultural values of their producers. The creators of the Internet were predominantly Anglo-American engineers and scientists "seeking quick and open access to others like themselves". Their ethnic and professional cultures value aggressive/competitive individualistic behaviours. In addition, these cultures value communications characterized by speed, reach, openness, quick response, questions/debate and informality.

They also draw attention to Genre Theory, which analyses how cultures apprentice their members in preferred genres of realizing everyday communicative acts (introductions, apologies, jokes etc) and illustrate this with the way that the students introduced themselves. One introduced herself online by describing her family and other groups she belonged to, another introduced herself by giving a potted professional resume.

They particularly noted that the aboriginal Canadians participated significantly less than other ethnic groups, and wondered if this was to do with the different attitudes towards direct communications, as shown in a study of Athabaskan communication, which found Athabaskans thought English speakers 'talk too much', 'always talk first' 'interrupt', ' ask too many questions' etc in contrast to English speakers who felt that Athabaskans 'do not speak', 'avoid situations of talking', 'only talk to close acquaintances', 'deny planning' etc.

Sounds similar to some of the comments I get about the differences in American/European and Japanese communication.

SIETAR Conference (2) Remote Cooperating and Learning

Another cameraphone picture:
Tram with the former East Berlin landmark TV tower in the background, near Humboldt University, where the conference was.

Henning Zorn and Marcus Hildebrandt's session:

Managers who are good leaders worry that they will not be able to recreate this in their online personality, so avoid using information technology. The point therefore is to coach them how to do this. In fact, computer mediated communication is sometimes hyperpersonal rather than impersonal (they cite J.B. Walther on this.

A community or user group is sustained by 'dynamic data' which shows where each member has visited, what their last ten postings etc were.

The competences for being a successful e-moderator or coach are:
1. Create a successful social presence online or in other screen to screen communication situations
2. Use intercultural and transcultural approaches for learning and coaching design

1. Social presence online comes in three categories:
(1) Affective responses (emoticons, humour, self disclosure)
(2) Cohesive responses (phatics and salutations)
(3) Interactive responses (reply features, quoting directly from transcripts, referring explicitly to the contents of other peoples' messages)

Create a transculture for the virtual team by first of all identifying the cultures present (how often people go online and how quickly they respond) and coming to a common understanding.

Being a successful online coach or moderator through creating an online social presence is hard work, so don't do it for half price just because you're at your desk.

Blended (50/50 online and f2f) is best for effective learning. Henning and Marcus disagreed on whether you can change behaviours through online interaction alone.

Some of the techniques they used:
1) Teleconferencing mixed with online chat - decisions are immediately captured in the chat stream
2) Results should be written and processes should be visuals. Don't mix the two because they are processed differently. Eg don't write 'tree' and show a picture of a tree.
3) You always need a private space in addition to the public group space for talking to individuals - preferably one that cannot be accessed by their managers
4) It's good to have push (e-mail) and pull (groupware, e-learning) on a platform. If you have people that are e-mail oriented, then use mechanisms whereby when they respond by e-mail, it is automatically posted to the public space.

The intercultural stuff - lots of complicated matrices followed, apparently they will e-mail this presentation to us (later note: the presentation is here). They chose the Power Distance, Individualism, Risk Avoidance and Masculinity/Femininity Hofstede dimensions as being the keys to analysing how to adjust online learning for various cultures. Interestingly, they seemed to have misgivings like me about the validity of the Masculinity/Femininity dimension.

Some examples:

Germany - individualistic, high achievement oriented, high risk avoidance, so learning should be self directed, on -demand, peer to peer, on the job, structured, have small early wins, focused themes and a personalised approach.

For US/Denmark - individualistic etc but lower risk avoidance, so self directed, peer to peer, multiple sourcing, possible to create own learning paths, less structured assignments, self evaluation, 360 degree evaluations

Arab cultures - high power distance, high risk avoidance, significant achievement focus, so needs to be a high profile project, with champions with high status, reward completion, supervisors are involved, structured learning path, provide small early wins, clear assignments, experts' visible involvement.

Can't share won't share

I've been wondering if anyone is looking at the cross cultural differences in e-learning and finally I've found a good, basic article on it by Patrick Dunn, an independent UK consultant and Alessandra Marinetti, of DigitalThink. They have some handy frameworks for analysing what needs to be changed in e-learning materials and delivery for different cultural preferences, including a nice story about the e-learning guru Eliot Masie creating an extra student (who was actually Eliot Masie) with whom his Far Eastern students were very willing to share their questions, being unused to asking questions of their authoritarian teachers.

At the end of the article they really got me nodding enthusiastically with the comment that "many leading thinkers in our industry are now advocating the view that the best way for people to learn is from other people. Although this hardly comes as a shock, its true impact has, we suspect, yet to be fully appreciated [...] this goes some way to explaining the current explosion of interest in communities of practice, informal learning, computer supported collaborative learning, and the rapid convergence of elearning and knowledge management." They point out that this will be a challenge for organisations founded in North American or West European cultures, because they are too individualistic, and find learning with and from others difficult. It comes back to encouraging spanners, straddlers and bridges in an organisation, as previously discussed.