Push and Pull
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Great post!
I’ve been reading Hagel and Brown’s latest paper and contemplating the various overlaps with learning strategy – they even cite Cisco’s elearning system as one example of pull in action.
At the bottom of the issue, though, isn’t push/pull really another just another name for another age old dichotomy – instructionist vs constructivist pedagogy?
Mark, I see part of your analogy, but I think there is more involved than instructionism and constructivism at work here. Hegel and JSB talk about a new worldview; the isms are merely learning philosophies. My research is looking at the impact of loose coupling, small chunks, interoperable networks, and other things from outside the training universe.
Whoops, I meant Hagel in the previous paragraph, not Hegel. I used to live in Heidelberg, where Hegel taught, so you’d think I’d know the difference.
It’s not constructivist vs behaviousist, I think it’s more “medium is the message”. When learners can connect with anyone, anywhere and the amount of information is doubling every few weeks, then PULL just makes sense. Unless the internet collapses, pull will be the norm.
I’m currently sitting in a traditional, government sanctioned training session and there is no doubt in my mind that any item in the right-hand column of the second table would be a quantum improvement in the “drill & fill, static knowledge, follow-the-curriculum” stuff that is being spoon-fed to the learners in this session. Yes, I’m peeved
I think Pull is great, and people who have discipline will become pull-masters. They’ll subscribe and review the incoming information. But isn’t this a little bit like losing weight, exercising more, or quitting smoking–easier said than done because the human system isn’t set up to make it easy.
Basic human thinking is mostly reactive, not proactive. So pushed globs have an advantage over pulled globs because they invade our consciousness. They get in our face and grab our attention. Pulled globs do have the advantage of being wanted–so they are more likely to engender attentional perseverence, but still, we have to be able to give them some face time. Aren’t most of us already at pull-overload?
Here’s a hypothesis: Workable pull systems will have to have voluntary push mechanisms if they’re going to work.
But push never goes away. Are you kidding me? If there’s a buck to be made, or a vote to get, or something to sell, someone’s going to try and grab some of our attentional real estate. They’ll keep trying to push stuff at us. I can’t really believe that entrepreneurs and marketing mavens will just give up.
In fact, what I see today is push with pull. Google Ads are pushed to me, but because they’re targeted based on my search, they seem like pull.
It’s all in the marketing mix. The push-pull mix.
What did I miss? (Pulling your comments, I hope).
Pull-overload, yes. I’m feeling the deluge. My strategy is to be familiar enough with the wide array of technologies so that I can recognize a potential solution–off in the fuzzy distance–any one of them offers to a problem. Then I’ll focus on that tech. E.g., I don’t have time to learn Actionscript exhaustively, but I need to know enough that I can recognize, ‘hey, Actionscript might help me here.’ Then I hit the manual. Keeping my attenae up, and up-to-date, is a lot of work. I am concerned about the time-efficiency of working on a one-off Actionscript, etc. solution when I’m not an Actionscript, etc. guru.
Funnily, I think there is something fundamental about the difference between push and pull.
* In engineering the strongest structures are those under tension, not compression, look at suspension bridges, those scale of structures are simply impossible building using compression, or push.
* Look at multiprocessing; C for example is a push language, you push instructions through the processor, the result is that trying to manage the complexity of multiple processors is basically impossibly difficult. Erlang on the other hand handles multiprocessing trivially, it is a pull language.
* Then you have command vs market economies for example. Try to predict and push commodities vs market analysis and sell what people ask you for.
I have a sneaking suspicion that in the future, companies who give both R&D and manufacturing budgets to the marketing departments will be substantially more successful than the others.
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