Tag Archives: learning

Practice, Practice, Practice … or maybe not

7 Jun
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Retreating is Hard Work!

Sorry to miss last week’s post. Just as I was getting back in my Friday writing groove, we had a joint department retreat here in my library. GREAT stuff happened there, but it kept me from writing. Not from thinking, though. Oooh… have I been thinking. 

I’m in the midst of reading David Epstein’s latest book, Range. I read the NY Times Book Review about it and immediately ordered a copy. It’s a fascinating read and so very relevant to the work that we do as librarians and/or information professionals. I’m only about 1/3 of the way through, so I can’t give a complete overview of the theories discussed, but so far, I’m pretty well convinced that the argument he is making rings true.

In brief, Epstein suggests that in a world that’s becoming more and more specialized, it’s the generalists who will thrive. He builds on the work of psychologists Gary Klein and Daniel Kahneman who have studied human decision making, and in particular, how the contexts in which decisions are made affect gaining expertise in an area. Robin Hogarth, another psychologist, goes further, identifying these learning environments as either “wicked” or “kind.” In a kind learning environment, “patterns repeat over and over, and feedback is extremely accurate and usually rapid.” (p. 21) Think swinging a golf club or learning Chopin’s Prelude in E minor on the piano. Over and over and over you’ll need to practice, in order to be any good at it. 

Compare this to what’s required to become really good at addressing an ebola outbreak or finding solutions to the climate crisis or figuring out if we can really do long-term space flight. Compare it to becoming really good at helping people not only find credible facts in a sea of opinions, but also determining the difference between the two. Think about problems that have no easy answers – or any answer at all. This is much more the world we live in and our habit of relying on past experience over and over again, much like practicing a golf swing, just might not be the best for us.

Perfect example… I subscribe to and regularly read the STAT Morning Rounds newsletter that appears in my inbox daily. A recent piece on the opioid crisis highlights the work of Dr. Stefan Kertesz, a primary care physician in Birmingham, AL. Dr. Kertesz has many patients who, over time, have developed a dependency on opioids thanks to the practice of overprescribing that’s been well-documented over the last few years. In reaction to this past behavior, the CDC proposed guidelines for prescribing in 2016. The issue, as often occurs, is that guidelines quickly become mandates. It’s simply easier for agencies or insurance companies or governing bodies to enforce a mandate rather than accept a guideline.

The problem with this, it seems, is that setting hard and fast limits on prescribing is applying a “kind” solution to a very “wicked” problem. It strips the patient and all of his/her variables and uncertainties from the equation. As Dr. Kertesz states, while tapering patients off of opioids is certainly to be encouraged, these are choices that physicians need to make in conjunction with their patients. “Backing mandatory limits, he said, assumes that what’s going to happen at the systems level will effect the best clinician.” 

To bring this all back to my work as a librarian, a terrific piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education* last week spoke to the affect that Google (and other search engines, not to mention the structure of the Internet, in general) has had on our presumptions about knowledge. We’ve become so accustomed to the practice of having a question, typing it into a search engine, and receiving back a lengthy list of results, that we’ve been lulled into believing that a list of results equates to an answer to our question. As the author so succinctly states it, “Search engines have created the illusion that vastly more information exists than ever before and that this information lies just a keystroke away. Today people ‘search’ rather than ‘study.'” Spot on, I say.

*My apologies if you cannot get to the article in the Chronicle. It requires a subscription.

I’m often leery of the swooning love affair I perceive when it comes to research, science, decision-making … you name it … around the role of both big data and artificial intelligence (not as a single thing, but the two separate “Ooooooh… it’s the solution to everything” mindset attached to both). Will they bring us significant breakthroughs in complicated problems? No doubt. Will they solve everything? I’m not so sure. I find a bit more truth here:

The progress of AI in the closed and orderly world of chess, with instant feedback and bottomless data, has been exponential. In the rule-bound but messier world of driving, AI has made tremendous progress, but challenges remain. In a truly open-world problem  devoid of rigid rules and reams of perfect historical data, AI has been disastrous. IBM’s Watson destroyed at Jeopardy! and was subsequently pitched as a revolution in cancer care, where it flopped so spectacularly that several AI experts told me they worried its reputation would taint AI research in health-related fields. As one oncologist put it, ‘The difference between winning at Jeopardy! and curing all cancer is that we know the answer to Jeopardy! questions.’ With cancer, we’re still working on posing the right questions in the first place. (Range, David Epstein, p. 29)

But then, of course, Watson never played Emma the librarian in Jeopardy!, either. 🙂

Happy Friday!

 

 

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The Doctor is Out

10 Jul

Psychiatric BoothAdmit it. We all know a lot better, a lot of the time. People know that sitting around all day isn’t the best thing for one’s health, but here we sit. We know that the label says there are 6 servings of macaroni and cheese in the box, but it really divides better by 2 or 3. We know that being distracted while driving isn’t the safest thing, but we text and we do our makeup and we fiddle with the radio and we play our ukuleles while we drive, anyway. And when it comes to information and data, of course we know that it’s best to back-up our files in multiple places and formats, to name our files a certain way so that we can find things easily, and to write down instructions and practices so that we, or others, can repeat what we did the first time. Of course we know these things because let’s be honest, it’s common sense. But… we don’t.

Personally, I get incredibly frustrated at librarians who think we’re adding something important to the world of data management, just by teaching people these notions that really are common sense. I think that there’s something more that we need to do and it involves understanding a thing or two about the way people learn and the way they behave. In other words, lacking a behavioral psychologist on your research team, librarians would do well to study some things from their camp and put them to use in our efforts at teaching, providing information, helping with communication issues, and streamlining the information and/or data processes in a team environment.

I’m preparing to teach a course in the fall and thus I’ve been reading some things about instructional design. In her book, Design for How People Learn, Julie Dirksen explains that when you’re trying to teach someone anything, it’s good practice to start by identifying the gaps that exist “between a learner’s current situation and where they need to be in order to be successful.” (p. 2) Dirksen describes several of these gaps:

  • Knowledge and Information Gaps
  • Skills Gaps
  • Motivation Gaps
  • Environment Gaps

More, I believe she hits the nail on the head when she writes, “In most learning situations, it’s assumed that the gap is information – if the learner just had the information, then they could perform.” I know that I fall into this trap often (and I bet that I’m not alone). I believe if I teach a student how to conduct a solid search in PubMed, that’s how they’ll search. I show them a trick or two and they say, “Wow!” I watch them take notes. I help them set up their “My NCBI”  account. We save a search. They’ve got it! I feel like Daniel Day Lewis in the movie, There Will Be Blood, “I have a milkshake and you have a milkshake.” I have knowledge and now you have the knowledge. Success!

Now if you do any work that involves teaching students or clinicians or researchers or anyone, you know not to pat yourself on the back too much here. I teach people, my colleagues teach people, all of our many colleagues before us (teachers, librarians at undergraduate institutions, librarians at other places where our folks previously worked) teach people. We all teach the same people, yet we keep seeing them doing things in their work involving information that make us throw up our hands. How many times do we have to tell them this?! 

Well, maybe it’s not in the telling that we’re failing. This is where I think understanding and appreciating the other gaps that may exist in the situations, addressing them instead of simply passing along information, could lead us to much more success. And this is where we could use that psychologist.

Earlier this week, I tweeted that I was taking suggestions for what to rename the systematic review that I’ve been working on with my team, for it is anything but systematic. A’lynn Ettien, a local colleague, tweeted back the great new name, “Freeform Review.” I loved that. Another colleague, Stephanie Schulte, at the Ohio State University, offered up a really helpful link to a paper on the typology of reviews. But it was what my colleague, Eric Schnell, also at OSU, tweeted that led me to this blog post:

Schnell

BINGO! Every person on my team knows what the “rules” are, but they keep changing them as we go along. I spend time developing tools to help this process go more smoothly, but still get a bunch of notes emailed to me instead of a completed form. I give weeks to developing a detailed table of all of the elements we’ve agreed to look at. Except this one. Oh, and this. Oh, and should we also talk about this? I put my head down on the table.

But Eric is exactly right. This is how most people deal with information. This is how we work. And it’s not a matter at all of people not knowing something, but rather it’s a problem of people not doing something. Or better put, not doing something differently. Sometimes people do lack knowledge. Many times, people lack skills – something that a lot of practice can fix. But an awful lot of time, what we really need to address are the gaps that have nothing to do with knowing what or how to do something.

Why won’t my people use the forms I’ve created and the tables that I’ve prepared? They said that they liked them. They said they were what they wanted. So… what’s the problem? I think it’s something that each of us who works in this field of information wrangling needs to become proficient at, i.e. learning to see and address all of the gaps that exist. At least the ones we can.

And I, for one, am still learning. 

 

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Old Dogs and New Licks

1 Oct

freemandolinvideos.com

[A quick reflection.]

I went to mandolin camp this past weekend; a 3-day festival of jamming and lessons and ensemble practice. I came home with sore fingers, tired hands, and a renewed passion for sitting down every single day to practice. We’ll see how long that last one lasts. I’ve been to camp 5 years now, each time amazed at the collection of folks who sign up for the fun with me. It’s a rotating crowd. There are always a few familiar faces, but the majority of campers are first-timers. The majority are also … older.

This keeps happening to me. More and more, I go to concerts and say to my spouse, “Why are all of these old people here?” I go to mando camp and say to myself, “I’ve got to be the youngest person here.” BUT then I am reminded by Lynn OR I remember myself, I’m not 25 years old any more, either. If I stop and really pay attention, the people at the concerts are indeed older because I am older, too. Mandolin camp actually was populated by a good number of folks with a couple of decades or more on me, but as I thought about it longer, I stopped wondering what they were doing there and more, started being inspired by their being there. I can only hope that 25 years from now, I’m still heading off to camp, mandolin in tow, looking forward to late-night picking parties. What could be better in life?

For a good number of years now, we’ve been hearing the cries from our professional leadership about the aging librarian workforce and the dearth of young professionals to fill the gaps. (Note: I don’t personally buy the “dearth” argument.) At the same time, we hear the calls for existing professionals, middle-aged and/or on the downward slope to retirement, to change, evolve, become willing to accept new roles and learn new skills, regardless of one’s point in his/her career (see Julie McGowan’s piece in the January 2012 issue of the Journal of the Medical Library Association, for one of the newer reviews on the topic).

Those thoughts in mind, what I saw at  mandolin camp applies to academic and health sciences librarians today. If you have ever tried to play a musical instrument you know at least two things:

  1. It is never easy.
  2. You never master it.

There were adults of all ages 50 and up at camp, and all with different skill levels. Some folks have been playing for years. Some picked up the mandolin last week. Some know lots about music (reading it, writing it, arranging it). Others know only how to pick out a tune by ear. Some know every place on the fret board to find every single configuration of a G chord possible. Others can lay down two fingers on the E and A strings, and make do. In other words, everybody at camp had something to learn. Everybody at camp had room to grow as a player.

The same holds true for librarians. Age is a mindset, to a good degree. As is the willingness to grow and change. Maybe we need to love our work as much as campers love the mandolin, to keep coming back to it again and again and again, with a willingness to keep learning and keep changing. The good news is that most librarians that I know DO love their profession. I’m hard-pressed to think of a single colleague that I may have ever heard say, “I can’t stand being a librarian.” It’s a career that people are drawn to for many reasons, but almost all of them are rooted in some passion or love for the work. That passion, coupled with the willingness to accept that it’s not easy to change and we’ll never master our profession, will take us far.

 

 

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