Week 11 - Making a list, checking it twice...

 I selected "The Checklist" to read this week simply because it was published in The New Yorker.  As an undergrad, one of my English professors loved The New Yorker and we often read articles from it's pages.  Reading this article gave me a sense of nostalgia - there's something comforting about the familiar way that these articles are written.  The topic, as usual, was fascinating to me.  It discussed how using a checklist could improve outcomes for patients in ICU units in hospitals.  

Gawande introduced Pronovost, a gentleman with both a PhD and an MD that introduced this idea and did research to support it.  By using the checklist, doctors, and especially nurses, could keep track of different points of patient care.  Not only this, but they were EACH encouraged to create a checklist in one study, that identified gaps in the procedures of some and allowed a master checklist to be developed with best practices in mind to give patients the best chance at recovery.  The simple art of having tasks on paper allowed everyone to be on the same page and ensure that no steps were compromised.  

There's another example of a plane that was used by the Army - it's no secret that planes are complex machines and one crashed due to one single missed step in the process of steps.  Rather than scrapping the plane design, researchers determined that a checklist could prevent other pilots from making the same error that was made, and so the checklist became standard procedure.  

As we discuss Human Performance Technology, this is relevant - not only do humans have the capacity to perform in amazing and limitless ways, they also have the opportunity to FAIL in amazing and limitless ways, and by using simple tools as a reminder, some of this possibility for error can be countered and prevented.  The checklist have been proven successful, and I'm sure they are available for family and friends in the case of an unfavorable outcome - that the doctors did everything they could.  

Comments

  1. DreamCatApril 11, 2022 at 5:48 AM

    Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Before joining this program, I had never really thought deeply about human performace technology in education. However, in order to study Anthroposophy and increase the effectiveness of learning, we found that humans need to understand the learning mechanism.
    You mentioned the error, do you know a professor named Joe Bloaler at stanford university? This is a person who studies a growth mindset, and he also mentioned the educational effect of mistakes. In what ways do you think your mistakes have an educational effect?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Bring on the CSS! And Assessment

  Bring on the CSS! Okay, that’s much more confident than I feel, though I am not impressed with my basic and boring webpage so far, so I’m excited to add some color and style, though I still can’t “see” how this will pan out in the end. I’m looking forward to exploring templates because that will surely help me to see the final project a bit more clearly.   On another note, assessment is hard. Bloom and I spent some time together today, discussing his taxonomy. Well, really I did the talking (and griping and complaining about how my great ideas were NOT higher order) and he just kept sending me the same pyramid that’s been around for years. That guy is consistent if nothing else.   I know WHAT I want people to get from my course, but having them prove it is hard – it's been a minute since I’ve worked on the alignment piece and it’s SO important, but also doesn’t always end where I think it will. Great activities mean nothing if learners don’t do more than regur...
Read more

Week 8 - Learner Centered Instruction - Not just for Distance Learning

 Over the past few years, all students in the US and throughout most of the world have had experience learning in a virtual environment they were unfamiliar with previously.  Though this was new to most K12 students, this wasn't a new concept, and distance learning has been around for years, first with mail order options for learners, and now with Zoom and other virtual environments.   In 1995, Wagner and McCombs wrote a paper, "Learner Centered Psychological Principles in Practice: Designs for Distance Education," encouraging ALL instructors to use the tools that many distance learning instructors used to increase student engagement in their courses.  They noted that it was common belief that learner-centered instruction was necessary for distance education and that the tools and best practices related to it were used primarily in that arena.   Many of the learning principles noted in this article stood the test of time and become essential during the...
Read more

AI Personal Devices

 Several of the articles I have found surround personal device use in AI, such as Google Home or Amazon Alexa.  Today, I'm going to dig further into this to see if I want to shift to this area of thinking and focus, or learn more toward generative AI such as ChatGPT which was formerly my plan.  Chen, Y., Jensen, S., Albert, L. J., Gupta, S., & Lee, T. (2023). Artificial intelligence (AI) student assistants in the classroom: Designing chatbots to support student success. Information Systems Frontiers , 25 (1), 161-182.   Dousay, T. A., & Hall, C. (2018, June). Alexa, tell me about using a virtual assistant in the classroom. In EdMedia+ innovate learning (pp. 1413-1419). Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE).   Van Brummelen, J., Tabunshchyk, V., & Heng, T. (2021, June). “Alexa, can I program you?”: Student perceptions of conversational artificial intelligence before and after programming Alexa. In Proceedings of the 2...
Read more