By now you’ve all heard it. Heck by now you have experienced it. I’m talking about the explosion of the digital universe. IDC and EMC have been measuring the size of the Digital Universe for a few years now. This year’s study confirms our digital universe – or all the information that is available to us in a digital format – is growing even faster than we thought. In fact they expect it to grow 44 times what it is now in the next ten years.

This means we have more content available at our fingertips (literally!) than at any other time in history. For learning professionals, this should be a great thing right? We can just connect people to the Internet, where they will be able to find all the content they need.

Right?

The amount of content available is the solution and the problem

Time: Think about the last time you had to search for something you knew nothing about. For instance, right now I am very interested in learning about SOAP and REST because these technologies enable cloud applications. Problem with me: I have zero free time. At some point my itch to figure this out is going to overwhelm me, and I’ll sacrifice a few nights of sleep to learn the basics.

Where should I start looking for content? A google search for “soap rest cloud” looks promising, but returns 1,620,000 results. Just eyeballing the top results makes me think the articles will be too advanced for what I know now.  I don’t have time to sift through all of that, I just want to know the basics from a source I can trust to give solid technical content.

And are there really 1.620,000 pieces of content available? Probably not. From experience, I know many of the results will be reposts of one good blog post or web page, with some spam and non-relevant links mixed in. I have enough experience to be able to filter through most of the muck, but what if I was a complete novice?

Vocabulary: Every discipline has its own vocabulary. When you study a discipline its one of the first things you learn. Ohm’s law. The Negroponte switch. ADDIE. When you learn these terms, you have a reference for researching more about the terms, learning new things related to the discipline. If you are a total newbie, you may not know the vocabulary of the discipline. This limits how you search for information, and it may be a barrier to finding the digital content you need.

Search Engines: Many times search engines provide results in a chronological order. For example, I couldn’t find a good reference link for the Negroponte Switch, so I gave a Wikipedia link. The Wikipedia article is an orphan, which makes me question its relevance. But even thought I know what this term means, I couldn’t find an article that succinctly describes it. I learned about it in college 10 years ago, so my thought is maybe all of the articles I need are just to old to come up in the first 30 pages of Google results. My experience with the term helped me sift through the content provided, but if I was a total newbie would I have been able to do that?

So we have tons of content, we’ve all agreed on that. But can learners find content when they need it, especially can they find it at the time of a performance need? I’ll touch on that in my next post.

In my last post, I gave my review of Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers. Craig Randall, one of EMC’s Distinguished Engineers and fellow EMC blogger, asked a lot of thoughtful questions about my reaction to the book. I decided to just write another post answer all his questions. Craig is actually who got me interested in the book in the first place when he reviewed the book on his blog back in December.

Here is what he asked:

How would you describe Gladwell’s “community lens”? I’m still not sure. It’s hard for me to comprehend that it is some big revelation that class could actually have a bearing on success.  I think its safe to say Gladwell is not from a lower class background. He could have asked anyone from a lower class background if being poor has created an environment that hinders gifted people from becoming successful. Here’s the answer he would have received: DUH!
What do you mean by “native descent” (referring to Gladwell himself)? I thought that Gladwell had said in the chapter “A Jamaican story” that his great-great grandmother was native, but she was actually an Igbo tribeswoman (from Africa). So he’s not of Native, or Indigenous, descent like I am. So, my poor attention to detail tripped me up there – I just couldn’t figure out how he could have been around Native women and he didn’t understand this idea that community shapes you.

So nevermind.

10,000 hour rule: Craig said this:

In my read, I took away that it’s *deliberate* practice plus (i.e. “and” not “or”) opportunity/lucky breaks/exceptional circumstances, etc. that tend to produce “success.” For example, the body of scientific research that Gladwell references concerning the 10,000 hours strikes me as generally applicable; it’s just that some of us take more calendar time to acrue these critical hours than others. Do you agree?

I’m not sure I accept the idea that if you get to that 10K hour mark, you are going to be a success, even if you have the opportunities and right circumstances.

The work that Gladwell quotes from Anders Ericsson is not really on successful people, its about how does a person become an expert. So, is an expert automatically successful? If you are successful, are you automatically an expert? Ericsson says this about what makes an expert:

Still, devoting extensive time to improving selected aspects is only part of the deliberate practice equation, Ericsson cautions. Developed within the crucible of strategic goal setting—frequently with the help of a teacher or coach—constant self-evaluation against those goals and an ongoing discipline of refining one’s skills, deliberate practice far exceeds the mundane repetition of standard drills and baseline training techniques commonly employed by lower-level performers, he says (emphasis mine).

I think the reason people never get to that 10K time mark is that most folks aren’t doing the necessary reflecting on what they are practicing. Instead, they learn the bit they need to know and then they are done. The ones who are successful can’t let go of that one small thing that doesn’t make sense to them until they reflect, retry, manipulate, etc until they can completely understand what they are working with.

And the sad thing is that in business, this type of person (ones who are hooked into a concept) can be annoying. They can drive you crazy if you are paying them to perform one task and all they want to think and talk about is another (perhaps tangently related) task. If they don’t stay on task, they may lose their job. If they lose their job, you may be getting rid of one of these outliers who could usher in the next wave of innovation.

There are interesting discussions to be had around the work of Dr. Anders Ericsson, but I’ll leave that for another day. Maybe I convince one of my colleagues in Education Services @ EMC to join in that discussion online, we were actually discussing this today. I’ll even let him guest blog.

BTW, Dr. Ericsson is a professor at  Florida State!! Wonder if he teaches online courses…how cool would it be to take a course on expert performance from him?