Andragogy is the art and science of helping adults learn, and for most people, education continues throughout their lives. How they learn, though, is key to internalizing content and letting it transform the person.

Consider the classroom. I’m sure many of you grew up being lectured to by a teacher, who gave you assignments that were graded on a point or letter scale. Some of you may have excelled with this method. Others, however, may have wanted a more hands-on approach. I have plenty of friends who found more success in woodshop compared to world history class for just this reason. Then you have the people who seem to only learn by being part of a group where ideas and thoughts can tumble around the circle. 

Discovering what style works best for you is a personal journey as well as an organizational goal, and in an effort to be more inclusive and sensitive to your individual learning needs, we’re introducing sessions in three distinct learning styles at WEC this year. 

“Over the years, we have adjusted our tagging strategy to assist our participants in making the best educational choice for them,” said Miranda van Brück, MPI’s team leader of professional development. “We learned a lot, and the biggest learning of them all is that in the past we have often used tracks and novice/all/advanced level distinctions. While they made absolute sense in the planning process, for the actual participant they were more confusing than helpful. In talking to members and learning from other industries we moved towards our current approach which focusses on how you prefer to learn at a conference.”

The three styles are:

• Lecture (listen and learn)—If you like to listen to a speaker deliver a lecture and just absorb the information, then these sessions will definitely resonate with you. These sessions will be presented in lecture style, with a low level of interactivity. 
• Interactive (learn from experts and practice)—Hands-on learning with expert guidance—listening, moving, touching, doing and discussing. A selection of our educational sessions is designed to provide a medium to a high level of interaction. If you like to learn from experts, but also have the opportunity to discuss how this can be applied to your world, then these are not-to-miss sessions for you. If you like learning this way, also make sure to check out the WEC learning labs, which will provide a hands-on approach that allows attendees to learn, get up, touch and do, which will enhance retention of information. 
• Peer-to-Peer (learn from each other)—Participant-led sessions, with the highest level of interactivity. These are sessions where you learn from your peers through discussions and sharing of your own experiences. A facilitator will drive the process, but not the content.

We’re also providing a tag that lets you know if session content is specific to the meeting and event industry or if it comes from an outside source. 

• Inside Industry (topics specific to the meeting and event industry)—Most of the times these sessions qualify for continuing education credit on the CMP application or recertification and really provide industry specific education. 
• Outside Industry (general business topics from outside our industry, delivered by non-industry experts)—These topics and experts are selected as they bring valuable knowledge from outside into our world and have been coached on how their knowledge can be made relevant for a meeting and event professionals. 

“We still use the ‘level’ distinctions, but in line with the advice of our members, we will only point out the novice sessions and the truly advanced ones, in order to level expectations for participants,” van Brück said.

Now that you know more about the ways we’re providing education at WEC, check out the sessions, speakers and entertainment and make plans to join us in Las Vegas, July 20-23, for a truly transformational event.

I've had it in my head for the past several months to learn French. I already know a little bit of Spanish (what I remember from high school and college courses). For some reason, though, I'm being drawn to learn French. I even bought study guides and audio CDs. What I haven't afforded myself yet, however, is time. But I should focus more on that aspect, because according to a recent study, learning a language makes your brain grow. 

At the Swedish Armed Forces Interpreter Academy in Uppsala, Sweden, people with a flair for languages go from having no knowledge of a language to speaking it fluently in the space of 13 months. From morning to evening, weekdays and weekends, the recruits study at a pace unlike on any other language course.

As a control group, researchers used medicine and cognitive science students at Umeå University—students who also study hard, but not languages. Both groups were given MRI scans before and after a three-month period of intensive study. While the brain structure of the control group remained unchanged, specific parts of the brain of the language students grew. The parts that developed in size were the hippocampus, a deep-lying brain structure that is involved in learning new material and spatial navigation, and three areas in the cerebral cortex.

“We were surprised that different parts of the brain developed to different degrees depending on how well the students performed and how much effort they had had to put in to keep up with the course,” said Johan Mårtensson, a researcher in psychology at Lund University in Sweden.

Students with greater growth in the hippocampus and areas of the cerebral cortex related to language learning (superior temporal gyrus) had better language skills than the other students. In students who had to put more effort into their learning, greater growth was seen in an area of the motor region of the cerebral cortex (middle frontal gyrus). The areas of the brain in which the changes take place are thus linked to how easy one finds it to learn a language, and development varies according to performance.

“Even if we cannot compare three months of intensive language study with a lifetime of being bilingual, there is a lot to suggest that learning languages is a good way to keep the brain in shape,” Mårtensson said.

So, who wants to learn French with me, or help me practice it? 

(Story materials provided by Lund University.)

Hands-on learning and delegate-led sessions are much discussed in our industry when it comes to figuring how best to structure a meeting. We know that education from these types of sessions sticks more with attendees after the session is over, but what we don't know is why. Why is self-directed learning more beneficial to participants?

In an article published in Perspectives on Psychological Science, researchers Todd Gureckis and Douglas Markant of New York University address this gap in understanding by examining the issue of self-directed learning from a cognitive and a computational perspective.

Gureckis and Markant say that cognitive research offers many explanations that support the advantages of self-directed learning. For example, self-directed learning helps us optimize our educational experience, allowing us to focus effort on useful information that we don’t already possess and exposing us to information that we don’t have access to through passive observation. The active nature of self-directed learning also helps us in encoding information and retaining it over time.

But we’re not always optimal self-directed learners. The many cognitive biases and heuristics that we rely on to help us make decisions can also influence what information we pay attention to and, ultimately, learn.

Gureckis and Markant note that computational models commonly used in machine learning research can provide a framework for studying how people evaluate different sources of information and decide about the information they seek out and attend to. Work in machine learning can also help identify the benefits—and weaknesses—of independent exploration and the situations in which such exploration will confer the greatest benefit for learners.

Drawing together research from cognitive and computational perspectives will provide researchers with a better understanding of the processes that underlie self-directed learning and can help bridge the gap between basic cognitive research and applied educational research. Gureckis and Markant hope that this integration will help researchers to develop assistive training methods that can be used to tailor learning experiences that account for the specific demands of the situation and characteristics of the individual learner.

(Story materials via the Association for Psychological Science.)

We recently published a column by Jackie Mulligan about why downtime is critical for your conference. 

"Many people report their most creative moments come to them when they least expect it, when they just begin drifting off to sleep, when they take a shower or simply ride a bus," Mulligan wrote. "New ideas squeeze into our consciousness when our mind takes a break. This is why downtime rocks."

Another reason downtime rocks is because it reinforces newly learned information. In an article to be published in the journal Psychological Science, a publication of the Association for Psychological Science, psychological scientist Michaela Dewar and her colleagues show that memory can be boosted by taking a brief wakeful rest after learning something verbally new and that memory lasts not just immediately but over a longer term.

“Our findings support the view that the formation of new memories is not completed within seconds,” Dewar said. “Our work demonstrates that activities that we are engaged in for the first few minutes after learning new information really affect how well we remember this information after a week.”

In two separate experiments, a total of 33 normally aging adults between the ages of 61 and 87 were told two short stories and told to remember as many details as possible. Immediately afterward, they were asked to describe what happened in the story. Then they were given a 10-minute delay that consisted either of wakeful resting or playing a spot-the-difference game on the computer.

During the wakeful resting portion, participants were asked to just rest quietly with their eyes closed in a darkened room for 10 minutes while the experimenter left to “prepare for the next test.” It didn’t matter what happened while their eyes were closed, only that they were not distracted by anything else and not receiving any new information.

When participants played the spot-the-difference game, they were presented with picture pairs on a screen for 30 seconds each and were instructed to locate two subtle differences in each pair and point to them. The task was chosen because it required attention but, unlike the story, it was nonverbal.

In one study, the participants were asked to recall both stories half an hour later and then a full week later. Participants remembered much more story material when the story presentation had been followed by a period of wakeful resting.

Dewar explains that there is growing evidence to suggest that the point at which we experience new information is “just at a very early stage of memory formation and that further neural processes have to occur after this stage for us to be able to remember this information at a later point in time.”

We now live in a world where we are bombarded by new information, and it crowds out recently acquired information. The process of consolidating memories takes a little time and the most important things that it needs are peace and quiet.

Remember that the next time you attend or plan a conference. 

(Story materials via the Association for Psychological Science.)

When we’ve got a problem to solve, we don’t just use our brains but the rest of our bodies, too. The connection, as neurologists know, is not uni-directional. Now there’s evidence from cognitive psychology of the same fact. 

“Being able to use your body in problem solving alters the way you solve the problems,” said University of Wisconsin psychology professor Martha Alibali. “Body movements are one of the resources we bring to cognitive processes.”

These conclusions, of a new study by Alibali and colleagues—Robert C. Spencer, also at the University of Wisconsin, and Lucy Knox and Sotaro Kita of the University of Birmingham—are augmented by another, counter-intuitive one–even when we are solving problems that have to do with motion and space, the inability to use the body may force us to come up with other strategies, and these may be more efficient.

The findings will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

The study involved two experiments. The first recruited 86 U.S. undergraduates, half of whom were prevented from moving their hands using Velcro gloves that attached to a board. The others were prevented from moving their feet, using Velcro straps attached to another board. The latter thus experienced the strangeness of being restricted, but also had their hands free. From the other side of an opaque screen, the experimenter asked questions about gears in relation to each other—e.g., “If five gears are arranged in a line, and you move the first gear clockwise, what will the final gear do?” The participants solved the problems aloud and were videotaped.

The videotapes were then analyzed for the number of hand gestures the participants used (hand rotations or “ticking” movements, indicating counting); verbal explanations indicating the subject was visualizing those physical movements; or the use of more abstract mathematical rules, without reference to perceptual-motor processes.

The results: The people who were allowed to gesture usually did so—and they also commonly used perceptual-motor strategies in solving the puzzles. The people whose hands were restrained, as well as those who chose not to gesture (even when allowed), used abstract, mathematical strategies much more often.

In a second experiment, 111 British adults did the same thing silently and were videotaped, and described their strategies afterwards. The results were the same.

The findings evince deeper questions about the relationship of mind and body and their relationship to space, Alibali says.

“As human thinkers, we use visual-spatial metaphors all the time to solve problems and conceptualize things—even in domains that don’t seem physical on their face," she said. "Adding is ‘up,’ subtracting is ‘down.’ A good mood is ‘high,’ a bad one is ‘low.’ This is the metaphoric structuring of our conceptual landscape.”

Alibali, who is also an educational psychologist, asks: “How we can harness the power of action and perception in learning?” Or, conversely: What about the cognitive strategies of people who cannot use their bodies? 

“They may focus on different aspects of problems,” she said. 

And, it turns out, they may be onto something the rest of us could learn from.

(Story materials provided by the Association for Psychological Science.)

Lapses in memory occur more frequently with age, yet the reasons for this increasing forgetfulness have not always been clear.

According to new research from Concordia University, older individuals have reduced learning and memory capacity because their minds tend to be cluttered with irrelevant information when performing tasks. Published in The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, these findings offer new insights into why aging is associated with a decline in memory and may lead to practical solutions.

“The first step of our study was to test the working memory of a younger and older population and compare the results,” said Mervin Blair, first author, psychology Ph.D. student and a member of Concordia’s Centre for Research in Human Development (CRDH). “In our study, working memory refers to the ability of both retaining and processing information.”

Some 60 participants took part in the study: Half were an average of 23 years old, while the other half was about 67 years old. Each participant was asked to perform a working memory task, which included recalling and processing different pieces of information.

“Overall, we showed that our older population had reduced working memory than the younger population,” Blair said. “Younger adults were better than the older adults at recalling and processing information.”

The next step was to determine if there was a time frame when the ability to delete irrelevant information, known as inhibition deletion, changed. This was measured using a sequential memory task. Images were displayed in a random order and participants were required to respond to each image in a pre-learned manner. Once again, the youngsters outperformed their older counterparts. “

Analyses were conducted to determine the relationship between the ability to clear irrelevant information and working memory ability. 

“Poor inhibition predicted a decline in the recall component of working memory and it also predicted decline in the processing component of working memory,” Blair said “Basically, older adults are less able to keep irrelevant information out of their consciousness, which then impacts on other mental abilities.”

For those who are having trouble remembering, Blair suggests that focusing and reducing mental clutter may help. 

“Reduce clutter; if you don’t, you may not get anything done.”

Keeping a mind clutter-free can be more difficult as people age, especially during periods of stress when people focus on stressors, yet Blair says relaxation exercises can help de-clutter the brain. What’s more, the brain continues to function optimally into old age when it is mentally stimulated by learning a new language, playing an instrument, completing crossword puzzles, keeping an active social life and exercising.

(Story materials provided by Concordia University.)

At DigitalNow 2011, I have had the amazing opportunity to meet some very fascinating people from a myriad of backgrounds. One of these people is Dr. James Canton, president and chairman of The Institute for Global Futures, and a world-renowned futurist. 

I sat down with Dr. Canton earlier today to discuss the future of mobile and its affects on the meetings and events industry, the strategy behind mobile learning at your next event, and how to strategically select the best content for mobile devices at your next event. 

The following is a series of three videos covering these topics:

Part 1: The Future of Mobile for Meetings and Events

Part 3: Rethinking the Strategy of Learning

Dr. Canton was just one of the many content experts I interviewed while at DigitalNow. Stay tuned right here on the PlusPoint blog and in our May issue for more coverage and exclusive video interviews.