Anxiety good for memory recall, bad for complex problem solving

Students, keep this in mind before that next major exam: Pre-test jitters make it easier to recall memorized facts, but that stress also makes it tough to solve more complex problems. Researchers at Ohio State University gave a battery of simple cognitive tests to 19 first-year medical students one to two days before a regular classroom exam -- a period when they would be highly stressed. Students were also given a similar battery of tests a week after the exam, when things were less hectic. This is closely related to the Yerkes-Dodson law -- A certain amount of arousal (in this case anxiety) can be a motivator toward change (with change in this case being learning). But too much or too little anxiety or arousal works against the learner. You want some mid-level of arousal to provide the motivation to change (learn). This is because too little arousal has an inert affect on the learner, while too much has a hyper affect. There are optimal levels of arousal for each task to be learned. The optimal level of arousal is:

• higher for tasks requiring endurance and persistence
• lower for more difficult or intellectually (cognitive) tasks

For more information, see arousal

Somewhere in Florida, 25,000 disembodied rat neurons are thinking about flying an F-22

Researchers at the University of Florida have created a neural network made up of 25,000 disembodied rat neurons and hooked it up to a flight simulator on a desktop computer. The neurons, which are growing on top of a multi-electrode array (MEA), are fed information about the simulated F-22's horizontal and vertical movements by stimulating the electrodes, causing them to fire in patterns that are then used to control the aircraft. "It's as if the neurons control the stick in the aircraft, they can move it back and forth and left and right," says UF professor Thomas DeMarse. The cellsrapidly begin to re-establish connectivity within a few hours of being placed on the MEA. These arrays can both record and stimulate the action potentials of neurons near each electrode (electrical signals between neurons) as they communicate within these dense networks.

CLO Dashboard Puts Learning Executives in the Driver's Seat

CLO Dashboard, a strategic reporting and decision-making system for chief learning officers, learning managers and executives, has is now in Beta production by Zeroed-In Technologies announces its flagship product. CLO Dashboard is built on a corporate performance management framework and is tailored to the learning industry with predefined Key Performance Indicators (KPI) including learning efficiency, learning effectiveness, compliance and readiness. The main page of the dashboard shows a series of odometer-style gauges for each indicator and its supported goal. Executives can drill down to reveal underlying objectives, key measures, historical and projected trends, and comparative industry benchmarks. The system also keeps track of strategic learning projects by monitoring timelines, resources, and key milestones. A recent USA TODAY Gallup Poll of U.S.executives cited more than 60 percent of their time is spent on strategic thinking and planning, and the planning of measurement and monitoring activities. "Chief learning officers must continually show the value of learning to the enterprise. Planning and measuring their strategy are crucial but time-consuming," says Chris Moore, president of Zeroed-In. "CLO Dashboard accelerates that effort and gives learning executives a single place to monitor all key learning indicators, and the business intelligence they need to make timely decisions to support or counteract trends." CLO Dashboard is 100% web-based and interfaces with other systems using Extensible Markup Language (XML) and Web Services. The system will provide built-in connectors to leading learning platforms including THINQ, Pathlore, EEDO, and Questionmark.

Workforce Planning in Complex Organizations

In 2000, the Acquisition Workforce 2005 Task Force of the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) called for the development and implementation of needs-based human resource performance plans for Department of Defense (DoD) civilian acquisition workforces. The greater need for workforce planning is expected to arise from an unusually heavy workforce turnover, itself due to a large number of expected retirements among older employees in a workforce that has not hired younger new workers in recent years, as well as from an expected transformation in acquisition products and methods in coming years. Workforce planning helps to ensure that an organization has the right mix of education, experience, etc. of personnel to advance its functional and organizational objectives. To succeed, workforce planning should answer questions regarding desired workforce characteristics now and in the future, and how organizational practices are helping maintain or develop these characteristics. Among elements needed to make workforce planning successful are active executive and line manager participation, accurate and relevant data, and sophisticated workload and inventory projection models.

Bricks & Clicks

Investors who bought the bubble-era hype about "anywhere, anytime" learning that it would quickly put an end to education as we know it lost tens of millions in the dot-com crash. A key reason -- they wildly underestimated the cost and difficulty of delivering quality E-courses. Yet now that so many hard lessons have been learned, a more subtle but perhaps just as significant shift is well underway. Even as enrollment in online distance programs nears 1 million and grows by more than 20 percent a year, according to Boston research firm Eduventures, the much bigger audience turns out to be right in the classroom building. As colleges and high schools embrace "bricks and clicks" instruction some of it in class, some of it on the Web many experts see a future in which there's no longer a divide but a spectrum: Some classes will never hold a face-to-face meeting, some will meet once a week or once a month and interact electronically the rest of the time, and some will carry on the old-fashioned way. "E-learning is going to disappear as a [distinct] concept," predicts Matthew Pittinsky, chairman of Blackboard Inc., whose course-management and other software served 15,000 students in 1998 and six years later reaches 12 million in 50 countries. Allison Rossett: "E-Learning gurus Elliot Maisie and Brandon Hall recognize the many options and encourages combined systems, which they call 'brick and click,' or 'blended.'" She continues, "But what would those combinations look like? How much brick and how much click? How do performances and need data transfer into those decisions? Will the issue be brick-ness verses click-ness or the strategies used within the particular delivery systems, a point of view that harkens back to Clark's (1983) work on strategies and media. His strong case focused attention on learning strategies over any particular medium." -- from Allison Rossett and Kendra Sheldon (2001). Beyond the Podium (2001) pp. 281-282.

How Much Information Do You Need Anyway?

If You Build It, Will They Come? At Microsoft's CEO Summit in May, the software giant's own CEO, Steve Ballmer, spoke passionately about the importance of having "digital dashboards": real-time desktop displays of key performance indicators (KPIs) that show critical business ratios such as profit per sales employee per week, customer satisfaction in dispute resolution and the status of outstanding issues with major suppliers. In other words, indicators that CEOs deem critical to running the business. CEOs who really want to take advantage of digital technologies, Ballmer declared, should have their IT folks build them KPI dashboards, empowering them to monitor what matters. On a more personal note, Ballmer observed, KPI tracking has been essential to his transition to chief executive of the world's most profitable software company. For example, Ballmer's KPIs now focus as much on internal "talent tracking" as sales. But Microsoft's CEO was apparently not preaching to the converted. The reception to KPI executive dashboards could best be described more as polite curiosity than genuine interest.

E-Learning Ecosystems: The Future of Learning Technology

An ecosystem is an ecological community that, together with its environment, functions as a unit. Extending the definition to the e-learning environment, we can define an e-learning ecosystem as the learning community, together with the enterprise, united by a learning management system (LMS). If e-learning is truly to provide greater access to education and support educational programs that reflect broader strategic business goals, many believe that the e-learning industry must take the time now to learn key lessons from its early adopters.

'Wikis' Offer Knowledge-Sharing Online

Taran Rampersad didn't complain when he failed to find anything on his hometown in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Instead, he simply wrote his own entry for San Fernando, Trinidad and Tobago. Wikipedia is unique for an encyclopedia because anybody can add, edit and even erase. And the Wikipedia is just one - albeit the best known - of a growing breed of Internet knowledge-sharing communities called Wikis.

Knowledge Management Verses Information Management

Denham Grey on knowledge and information. Much of what purports to be knowledge management is in reality information management. Just the other day I heard a rep selling scanners as a core KM technology, "essential for knowledge sharing," without which the organization was doomed to be bypassed by every other firm going down the knowledge track.

What Steve Wozniak Learned From Failure

Failure is the rule rather than the exception, and every failure contains information. One of the most misleading lessons imparted by those who have reached their goal is that the ones who win are the ones who persevere. Not always. If you keep trying without learning why you failed, you'll probably fail again and again. Perseverance must be accompanied by the embrace of failure. Failure is what moves you forward. Listen to failure.