E-Books and Things

Are you using an e-book yet? A local school near here just announced that they plan to buy Amazon's Kindle for all 2,100 students next year. From a technology standpoint, I couldn't be more excited. I really do think that it makes good sense and that we will see more of this to come. Don't get me wrong, there are certainly issues at stake including the fact that most colleges and universities make a decent profit from textbook sales. And if they don't make those profits, it could cause class hours to cost more. But stepping away from the issues of which device is going to be the most adopted one for education and what the cost will be, let's take a minute to think about how people learn. There's so much more to learning than the type of device the information is presented on.

I was inspired by an e-mail newsletter that a friend of mine Doug VanDyke writes. Check him out...I think you'll be as impressed as I am. In a recent newsletter, Doug spoke to one of my most challenging topics...change. Changing the way we do things in the workplace or anywhere else has to do with people doing something different, and that's always a challenge. Doug's newsletter tied in so well with the press release about the local school going to e-books, and the type of change e-books is going to create among 2,100 students, that I wanted to share his article. His article is an excerpt from his book Leadership Simplified which lays out the following statistics.

·   People retain approximately 10% of what they read
·   People retain approximately 20% of what they hear
·   People retain approximately 70% of what they experience

In talking with Doug, I learned that recent research also shows people retain only about 20% of what they read on a computer screen.

The statistics above come from a visual model developed in 1946 by Edgar Dale called the "Cone of Experience " which was meant to provide a classification of varied types of learning experiences. Even though the "Cone" has been misinterpreted, I think you'll agree the learning process as depicted seems to hold true; particularly so when adapting to new technologies.

The real key to what I'm trying to get across is that everything has to start with someone deciding to change. And note that I say, someone has to decidethe change is good; worth the effort. If you're in leadership, it's your job to get people to want to change. Yes, I think both the carrot and stick approach has merit but in order for change to occur, one needs to know what to do and how to follow directions - the new rules. That means we need to pay attention to what people hear, see and read. Take particular note that people retain about 70% of what they experience. So when implementing change, figure out a way for people to experience the new way of doing something and you'd be a lot happier with the results.

Thanks to the leadership of Clearwater High School and to Doug for reminding me there's a reason my signature remains:

The only reason people change is because they want to.
"Streamlining the Commercial Real Estate Process"

All the Best,
Brenda

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