What is leadership? LO22355/ learning continum

VoxDeis@aol.com
Wed, 28 Jul 1999 08:46:00 EDT

Replying to LO22347 --

In a message dated 99-07-28 01:41:38 EDT, you write:

>You can watch the masters and
>look at the videos, but sooner or later you must step up and hit the
>ball.

This part of a recent contribution started my mental wheels rolling.

When I speak of the process of learning to people I often use the analogy
of how we learn to drive cars. My point in this contribution is about
attempting to create a visual model in the readers mind of a continum of
information processing that is very hard to track the origin of and almost
impossible to find the outer limits of "how far" the learning can go.

Back to my analogy of learning about driving cars. Since I was about three
days old I was exposed to "models" of driving -- this started on the way
home from the hospital. Actually some developmental psychologists would
say that while inside my mothers womb my vestibular system was learning
how to adjust to the motions that occur while driving, the auditory
systems to the sounds of an automobile, and my touch sensors to the
physical movements involved.

Arguably, I was exposed to thousands of real time videos, times when being
a passenger of a car driven by a licensed operator, before ever venturing
into "learning" how to drive myself at the age of sixteen.

I use this analogy for several reasons. One is that driving a very heavy
piece of machinery at speeds in excess of 50 mph. within a striking
distance of less than 20 ft. from the rear of another hurling body of
medal and flesh and having other such entities flying by at distances less
than 4 ft. away at similar speeds one after another is often considered a
common daily event for many people.

This is no "secure" task.

Its only security is in how well we all seem to coordinate the process
with numbers of loss or accident that would astound any production lines
capacity to operate.

Like with any development of expertise the variables of learning are
highly trained in the driving context, exposure, time ( amount of
driving), contextual variance (driving in many conditions...different
cars...different weather... under differing emotional and mental states...
interfering stimuli - radio - car phones - passengers...differing traffic
and road conditions etc.

I would use this example mainly in advanced statistics courses where the
students "expertise" was more on the beginning end of the scale. However
they have had exposure and practise rates with driving cars for decades.
That if they had never seen a car before, anywhere, and they attempted to
then drive and transverse the city we were in, I think they might feel
some of the similar anxious feelings they were having as students
embarking on understanding other concepts that take time, exposure, and
many many many trials and differing conditions to master.

Glen

Voxdeis@aol.com

[Host's Note: Pls sign msgs with full name. ...Rick]

-- 

VoxDeis@aol.com

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