Kaplan-EduNeering Knowledge Summit Kicks off Today!

In the introduction to the event, they announced a number of cool innovations. This year they announced EduM Mobile Learning Envionment, with iPad enabled training and announced more about how they partnered with The Phoenix Group to create exciting portals feature rich, interactive web experiences. They also spoke more about explaining what they are doing with the 3D virtual world vendor ProtonMedia which provides a highly interactive 3D environment focused on solving business needs in the lifescience industries.

Lisa Clune, President of Kaplan EduNeering speaking about future directions.

Every year I look forward to the Kaplan-EduNeering Knowledge Summit both as a presenter and as an attendee, I always learn great stuff from the wonderful speakers they bring together.

The speakers this year included Thomas Goetz executive editor of WIRED magazine, Joe Hallinan who is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and Bror Saxberg, the Chief Learning Officer of Kaplan, Inc.
This year, the first keynote speaker is Joe Hallinan who is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, and he is the author of Why We Make Mistakes: How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average.

Here is a recap of some of what Joe spoke about in his keynote:

Joe Hallinan making a point at the Kaplan-EduNeering Knowledge Summit 2011

1) People make a lot of assumptions and we need to spend more time challenging our assumptions.

2) Inattentional Blindness, you can’t notice everything…that’s your assumption but you can’t. The few things that you do notice are what you are predisposed to see.

He showed the Awarness test below:
So he pointed out that we can’t always see what is right in front of us.

He also mentioned that the generally accepted error rate for the radiological detection of early lung cancer is between 20% and 50%. High rate of missing something that people are looking for.

3) It is much harder to improve than you think. He mentioned that in 50 years of free throws in college basket ball have not improved. 1965: 69% and in 2009: 68.8%. Pros 75% on average of free throws but, again, haven’t improved in 50 years. This same difficulty of improvement impacts every professions. Dr. misdiagnose fatal illnesses about 20% of the time. He said the rate of medical diagnosis hasn’t improved since the 1930s.

4) Experience doesn’t necessarily mean expertise. Even experts make mistakes. Especially about the future. Hallinan mentioned that the depressing conclusion from several released studies is that expert judgement in terms of predictions in most clinical and medical domains is no better than the predictions of novices.

Joe walking around the audience.

5) People don’t see themselves accurately and that leads to overconfidence and so we discount risk and inflate the odds of success. Overconfidence is a general feature of human psychology. One of the biggest contributors to overconfidence is “too much information.” People are twice as likely to find information that confirms their initial thoughts or idea.

Joe discussing how people become overconfident with the more information they have to make the decision but they don't make better decisions.

6) The mind takes ambiguous or confusing information and simplifies it according to rules of thumb and it is really hard to actually remember something verbatim. We tend to get the “jist” of something but not the exact part of it.

Involving the audience in "recalling" famous movie lines.

7) We are adept at looking at patterns. It gives us great speed but sometimes we trade accuracy for speed. Pattern recognition allows experts to do quickly what amateurs do slowly. People don’t read–they infer–they look for patterns which can leave you vulnerable to mistakes within the detail. Kids will often see what experts or others miss.

How to prevent errors?

1) Improve feedback-powerful way to shape human behavior. It must be clear and immediate. Provide case studies to learners and have them predict outcome and then give feedback about right or wrong.

2) Improve design. We often accidently design mistakes into products or processes. Ask “What is responsible for a mistake? not who’s responsible?”

3) Add constraints, force things to happen in a certain way. Like the lean process, Poke Yoke–fail safe measures. Checklists.

Learn more by checking out his book, filled with great items.

He also recommended a book about creating create checklists to improve performance.