Instructional and Performance Technology Faculty Publications and Presentations

The Development of Practical Wisdom: Its Critical Role in Sustainable Performance

Anthony W. Marker — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 13:02:41 PDT

We occasionally make complex decisions. Sometimes we later judge that we acted unwisely. Sometimes we judge that we acted with wisdom. Organizational leaders have similar experiences. When they decide unwisely, their organizations suffer, and so can society. Are there ways to learn how to act with greater wisdom? Neuroscientists tentatively say “yes.” Here we will explore what wisdom is, what relevant brain science offers, and what you—as a human performance technology practitioner—might do to help yourself and others gain wisdom.

Systems, Measures, and Workers: Producing and Obscuring the System and Making Systemic Performance Improvement Difficult

Donald J. Winiecki — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 14:32:40 PDT

Early in the preparation of this chapter, James A. Pershing, the editor of this volume, suggested that systems thinking in instructional and performance technology is more metaphorical than systems thinking in the physical or biological sciences and does not have the same status. In other words, for us, systems are more abstract depictions when applied to social phenomena rather than physical processes and serve as a convenient tool to think with as we attempt to learn and know things, create new knowledge, develop and control social phenomena, and analyze and try to reorient social phenomena when they do not work as we intended or when we change our minds about how we want organizations to function. Indeed, all theories are properly thought of as tools to think with. This chapter accepts that view of systems as accurate. As we continue to learn about our systems, our theories of how they function should change. Of course, this does not necessarily mean they become more true or closer to perfection, only that our theories are changed to fit what we are experiencing in the real world. In other words, systems thinking appears to do things to us, and we do things to systems thinking that changes how we know it and can use it in our work.

Hypermedia CAI with Cognitive Apprenticeship for Pre-Service Teacher Education

S. Youn Chyung et al. — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 13:33:03 PDT

Recent innovations in hypermedia computer technology permit learners to have highly individualized and interactive computerized instruction. However, adapting hypermedia computer technology to computer-assisted instruction (CAl) does not guarantee effective learning. Research studies have revealed that when learners were not fully aware of or responsible for what they needed to learn from CAl, they made poor decisions on their completion levels of learning (Kinzie & Sullivan, 1989; Kinzie, Sullivan. & Berdel, 1992; Steinberg, 1989). Therefore, consideration should be given to designing hypermedia CAl environments with appropriate instructional strategies, which guide learners to acquire necessary knowledge and skills.

Effectiveness of an Intelligently Adaptive CAI Environment with Cognitive Apprenticeship on Self-Regulated Learning Skills

S. Youn Chyung et al. — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 13:13:47 PDT

A group of cognitive psychologists identifies effective learners as self-regulated learners who are metacognitively, motivationally, and behaviorally active. This study was concerned with how to prepare computerized learning environments to help the ineffective learners become effective self-regulated learners. This study investigated the effects of two different computer-assisted instructional (CAI) environments and the effects of self-awareness of cognitive tempo styles on college students' self-regulated learning (SRL) skills and their academic achievement scores. MANOVA tests revealed that an intelligently adaptive CAI environment was significantly more effective on behavioral SRL skills than a totally learner-controlled CAI environment. This study suggests that educators and instructional designers invest their efforts in developing and utilizing CAI that serves as an intelligent partner to human cognition and that helps learners become self-regulated learners.

Instructional Discussions in Online Education: Practical and Research-Oriented Perspectives

Donald J. Winiecki — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 13:01:15 PDT

It can be argued that discussion is one of the oldest forms of instruction (Gall & Gall, 1990; Larson, 2000). Online education through asynchronous learning networks (ALNs) provides the opportunity for the development of innovations in educational practice. Although instructional discussion is not an innovation, it is an essential component of social learning, community-based learning, and other practices that are considered valuable features of online education (Harasim, Hiltz, Teles, & Turroff, 1996; McIsaac & Gunawardena, 1996; Romiszowski & Mason, 1996). Thus, it makes sense to research this blend of the old (classroom discussion) and the new (ALNs) with the aim of understanding and improving practice.

Using Narrative Strategies to Enhance Interactivity Online

Linda Lohr et al. — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 12:49:12 PDT

This chapter explores the use of narrative as an instructional strategy for enhancing interactivity in distance learning environments. The chapter describes research of three narrative strategies used during a completely distance course. Overall, students demonstrated the ability to write effective instructional narratives for all three assignments. While usability measures indicated that students found the strategies worthwhile and satisfactory, room for improvement in the design of these strategies was noted. As could be expected, interactivity increased with the complexity of the assignment and the requirement to work in groups. Suggestions for improving the design of narrative strategies from usability and interactivity perspectives conclude the study.

Keeping the Thread: Adapting Conversational Practice to Help Distance Students and Instructors Manage Discussions in an Asynchronous Learning Network

Donald J. Winiecki — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 12:24:38 PDT

This paper first describes the ways in which face-to-face conversational practices work to ensure the shared understanding of all interactions. It then describes how asynchronous interactions may violate these practices and inhibit the construction of shared understanding. Finally, it proposes methods for communicating in asynchronous interactions that adapt and preserve face-to-face conversational practices and permit students in an ALN to engage in "discursive" asynchronous learning (Laurillard 1993).

Designing Computer Software to Minimize the Need for Employee Training

Donald J. Winiecki — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 12:19:04 PDT

Knowledge workers are faced with a dizzying array of computer-based tools. In addition, new software tools are constantly introduced to enable computer users to perform their jobs faster or better. Therefore, computer users are faced with a need to continually update their skills and learn how to use new software.

This situation is aggravated by the need for computer-using knowledge workers to accomplish work very quickly. The time typically needed for retraining or relearning conflicts with the need to be productive. This forms a problem for the company or performer who must usually accept one of two conditions.

Help Desk 101: Keeping Customers Happy While Managing Conflicting Expectations and Performance Goals

Donald J. Winiecki — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 12:10:25 PDT

As products become more specialized, businesses get more competitive, and customers become more demanding, it is more difficult to attract those customers. In response, many companies are beginning to realize that customers are not an endlessly renewable resource. With this in mind, many businesses are turning their attentions inward to look for ways to keep their existing customers. They are putting more emphasis on call centers and help desks to provide ongoing support and services. As any person who has walked into a dedicated call center can tell you, they are big businesses these days, and growing bigger all the time. Companies are spending large amounts of money to engineer and install specialized hardware and software to support the demands put on call centers. For example, automated call distributors route inbound calls to a waiting agent so that a caller has to spend a minimum of time on hold, and voice processing systems (those ubiquitous numbered lists of options) are designed to allow a caller to find services quickly, without requiring a human switchboard operator.

Shadowboxing with Data: Production of the Subject in Contemporary Call Centre Organisations

Donald J. Winiecki — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 12:02:07 PDT

Tertiary labour is the fastest growing form of work in the West. Additionally, computer and telecommunication mediation of labour is increasingly prevalent. However, little research focuses on subjectivity in technology-mediated tertiary labour. Taking a Foucaultian orientation, this paper describes how desires of subjects and organisations are rendered into power/knowledge and affect subjectivity in one variant of technology-mediated tertiary labour.

"Saving the World with HPT": A Critical, Scientific, and Consultative Reflection

Donald J. Winiecki — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 11:57:06 PDT

If we aim to save the world with human performance technology (HPT), the answer, it would seem, is, "Everything." Given this, it is logical to ask if we are really prepared to handle everything.

An article recently printed in Performance Improvement reopens a discussion said to have been addressed at the 2003 International Society for Performance Improvement (ISPI) conference in Boston, Massachusetts, namely, "can HPT be used to save the world" (Andrews, Farrington, Packer, & Kaufman, 2004)?

That discussion is indeed progressive. However, despite its progressiveness, it points toward larger shortcomings within our profession that hide in plain sight and threaten the credibility of our field and proponents of HPT. In clarifying and addressing the issues, I will approach first from the standpoint of a sociologically oriented critic who seeks to deconstruct and explore the potential of HPT to legitimately solve problems that arise in social situations. Then I will take the standpoint of a technologist and consultant and offer a direction for HPT thinking and acting that may address these gaps and allow us to continuously improve our own performance.

Accidental Participation in Control, in the Small of Society

Don Winiecki — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 16:13:09 PDT

This paper draws from a longitudinal ethnographic research project in telephone call centres (Winiecki "Technology-Mediated"; Winiecki Discipline and Governmentality) to detail and describe how planned constraints and abstract potentials in the workplace are taken up and translated into other areas of life by actors such that they actually participate in the production of pieces of what might be called "control society." In so doing, this paper attempts to approach an empirical bridge between the high level and abstract reports of "control" across and between social institutions and micro- and meso-sociological accounts of social action, where participation in "control" is as much an accidental doing by subjects "in the small" of society as it may be a characteristic, if abstract, feature of late modernity.

Subjects, Subjectivity, and Subjectification in Call Center Work: The Doings of Doings

Donald J. Winiecki — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 16:09:28 PDT

In postindustrial society, paid labor is increasingly characterized as tertiary labor rather than primary or secondary labor and commonly mediated by computer and telecommunication technologies. However, there are few ethnographic studies on the production of the subject and subjectivity in postindustrial workplaces. This article reports a poststructurally informed ethnographic research in four telephone call centers, focusing on how technological and managerial practices are deployed and continuously oriented to in subjectification processes. The result, although "rational" and "real," is shown to be a construction of concerted compliance and secondary adjustments through strategic processes named shadowboxing with data. Implications for the study of subjectivity and subjectification are discussed.

Making and Maintaining the Subject in Call Centre Work

Don Winiecki et al. — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 16:05:00 PDT

This article reports an ethnographic study of call centre work. Analytics are applied enabling study of relations between power and subjectivity. Findings indicate that organisational 'truth' claims about workers are produced in a constellation of architectural, technological and managerial apparatuses. Workers orient to and reify the power of these claims, even when resisting.

The Others' Values: On the Importance of Ethnographic Ways of Looking, Seeing, Knowing, and Acting for Performance Technologists

Donald J. Winiecki — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 15:53:58 PDT

The foundational assumptions of performance improvement come from a single-mindedly economic and engineering orientation. Yet this orientation arises from a concern for maintaining and enhancing other forms of value. This other form of value, perhaps arising from cultural and social spheres, is normally unmentioned or marginalized in contemporary human performance technology. This article recovers and reintroduces this other form of value and promotes it as an important, and even essential, component of the future of performance technology.

An Ethnostatistical Analysis of Performance Measurement

Donald J. Winiecki — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 15:44:56 PDT

Within the fields of human performance technology (HPT), human resources management (HRM), and management in general, performance measurement is not only foundational but considered necessary at all phases in the process of HPT. In HPT in particular, there is substantial advice literature on what measurement is, why it is essential, and (at a technical level) how to do it. However, there is practically no critical discussion of how measurement is made possible, how it is done, and what can be done with measures once they are created. With the goal of beginning to fill this void, this article draws from a multiyear ethnography in call center organizations to report an ethnostatistical analysis of these aspects of performance measurement. Following this analysis, implications for the present and future of HPT are discussed.

Shadowboxing with Data: A Framework for Informing the Critical Analysis of Performance and Performance Measures

Donald J. Winiecki — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 15:41:02 PDT

The practice of performance improvement requires measuring before and after conditions to determine if changes have occurred as a result of an intervention. Understanding how to take, make, interpret, and use measurements can go a long way toward improving performance improvement work and improving conditions for clients. The risk of not adequately analyzing measures leads to shadowboxing with data, where performance measures may not be equated with authentic performance issues.

Taking Learning Professionals to Competent Professionals Through Performance-Based Projects

Seung Youn Chyung et al. — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 15:35:05 PDT

Competency-based learning and performance strategies have been emphasized in training and performance improvement fields. Several professional organizations, such as the International Society for Performance Improvement (ISPI), the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD), and the International Board of Standards for Training and Performance Instruction (IBSTPI), have established standards or models for promoting competency-based performance in industry. The reason why competency-based strategies are critical becomes clear by reviewing the definition of the word competency, which is a purposely combined set of knowledge, skills, and attitudes that enables one to successfully complete specific job tasks, when measured by the standards used in the field (IBSTPI, 2008; National Center for Educational Statistics, 2002)

A Sociologist in a College of Engineering: Stranger in a Strange Land?

Don Winiecki — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 15:26:31 PDT

In Robert Heinlein’s famous novel Stranger in a Strange Land, Valentine Michael Smith paid a heavy price for figuring out and influencing members of the culture that surrounded him. As a sociologist in the Boise State University, College of Engineering, one might call me a stranger in a strange land too.

EMCA in Sociology of Science, Technology, and Engineering

Don Winiecki — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 15:21:25 PDT

Obviously enough, the work of a professional sociologist can happen anywhere and it is perhaps most common for such work to happen 'out there,' in society writ large. However, for the practitioner of EMCA and its derivatives the focus is – more often than not – in the small, mundane and oftentimes (for others) inconsequential bits of interaction that make up one's (or their) day to day world. One can (and many have) make the case that society writ large is an assemblage (ad hoc, planned, semi-planned and so on) made up in and of these small bits. And that's why we do what we do – to understand social action, and in turn society, from – as they say – the ground up.