Researchers (Bloom & Sosniak, 1985; Bryan & Harter, 1899; Hayes, 1981; Simmon & Chase,1973) have shown it takes about ten years to develop expertise in any of a wide variety of areas, including chess playing, music composition, telegraph operation, painting, piano playing, swimming, tennis, and research in neuropsychology and topology. The key is deliberative practice: not just doing it again and again, but challenging yourself with a task that is just beyond your current ability, trying it, analyzing your performance while and after doing it, and correcting any mistakes. Then repeat. And repeat again. There appear to be no real shortcuts: even Mozart, who was a musical prodigy at age 4, took 13 more years before he began to produce world-class music. In another genre, the Beatles seemed to burst onto the scene with a string of #1 hits and an appearance on the Ed Sullivan show in 1964. But they had been playing small clubs in Liverpool and Hamburg since 1957, and while they had mass appeal early on, their first great critical success, Sgt. Peppers, was released in 1967. Malcolm Gladwell (2009) reports that a study of students at the Berlin Academy of Music compared the top, middle, and bottom third of the class and asked them how much they had practiced:

Everyone, from all three groups, started playing at roughly the same time - around the age of five. In those first few years, everyone practised roughly the same amount - about two or three hours a week. But around the age of eight real differences started to emerge. The students who would end up as the best in their class began to practise more than everyone else: six hours a week by age nine, eight by age 12, 16 a week by age 14, and up and up, until by the age of 20 they were practising well over 30 hours a week. By the age of 20, the elite performers had all totalled 10,000 hours of practice over the course of their lives. The merely good students had totalled, by contrast, 8,000 hours, and the future music teachers just over 4,000 hours.

So it may be that 10,000 hours, not 10 years, is the magic number. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) thought it took longer: "Excellence in any department can be attained only by the labor of a lifetime; it is not to be purchased at a lesser price." And Chaucer (1340-1400) complained "the lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne." Hippocrates (c. 400BC) is known for the excerpt "ars longa, vita brevis", which is part of the longer quotation "Ars longa, vita brevis, occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile", which in English renders as "Life is short, [the] craft long, opportunity fleeting, experiment treacherous, judgment difficult." Although in Latin, ars can mean either art or craft, in the original Greek the word "techne" can only mean "skill", not "art".

References

My own view is that a social bibliography, such as mine might be more useful than a stand alone bibliographic silo.

As many people know, I keep my bibliography in Zotero. Zotero also does community base groups too, such as this one on strategy as practice

David Rock, in series of articles (2006, 2009) looks at leadership and management from the perspective of neuroscience. One particular section caught my eye, in which he writes about teams; the Relating to relatedness of the title.

Fruitful collaboration depends on healthy relationships, which require trust and empathy. But in the brain, the ability to feel trust and empathy about others is shaped by whether they are perceived to be part of the same social group.... Each time a person meets someone new, the brain automatically makes quick friend-or-foe distinctions and then experiences the friends and foes in ways that are colored by those distinctions. When the new person is perceived as different, the information travels along neural pathways that are associated with uncomfortable feelings (different from the neural pathways triggered by people who are perceived as similar to oneself).

Leaders who understand this phenomenon will find many ways to apply it in business. For example, teams of diverse people cannot be thrown together. They must be deliberately put together in a way that minimizes the potential for threat responses. Trust cannot be assumed or mandated, nor can empathy or even goodwill be compelled. These qualities develop only when people's brains start to recognize former strangers as friends. This requires time and repeated social interaction.

Once people make a stronger social connection, their brains begin to secrete a hormone called oxytocin in one another's presence. This chemical ... disarms the threat response and further activates the neural networks that permit us to perceive someone as "just like us." Research by Michael Kosfeld et al. in 2005 shows that a shot of oxytocin delivered by means of a nasal spray decreases threat arousal. But so may a handshake and a shared glance over something funny.

Conversely, the human threat response is aroused when people feel cut off from social interaction.... Leaders who strive for inclusion and minimize situations in which people feel rejected create an environment that supports maximum performance. This of course raises a challenge for organizations:

This, of course, has implications for teaching, especially when teams are used (as in team-based learning). We have always known that how teams are put together is important, but this article gives us a more nuanced understanding. It also reminds me how important it is for teams to have some (structured) time to get to know one-another.

References

I was surprised by the results. First, I used google.co.nz instead of google.com (I normally use the later), and secondly the University of Auckland's referencing resource Referen©ite didn't feature at all on the first page.

I see:

• www.waikato.ac.nz
• www.aut.ac.nz
• www.fmhs.auckland.ac.nz
• library.ucol.ac.nz
• library.curtin.edu.au
• library.canterbury.ac.nz
• library.manukau.ac.nz
• www.southernoceansoftware.com
• owl.english.purdue.edu
• aut.ac.nz.libguides.com (again)

But there is no sign of Referen©cite. I wonder google doesn't refer to Referen©ite on the first page (that's a rhetorical question; I know how search engines rank sites).

My habit seems to be that for non-academic works, I tend to use hyperlinks that go to appropriate sources. This seems consistent with normal practice of web-based publishing.

For scholarly works I follow APA conventions for citing and referencing. This seems more consistent with the academic expectations and practices. In acknowledgement of the fact this is electronic or web-based publishing I use COinS to ensure there is enough information so that programmes such as Zotero or LibX can scrape/find all the information they need to quickly locate an electronic copy/source of the document.

However, I feel mildly uneasy about this situation. Should I use only APA (albeit with COinS); afterall it does have citation styles for blogs etc? Or should I only use hyperlinks; after all, this is the web? For some things, such as blog entries, APA seems entirely sensible for paper-based writings. However, for this (and other e-media), APA feels out of place. I am use to clicking hyperlinks to take to "more information". I think I can live with the mixed method of referencing. At the end of the day, I do try and acknowledge my sources, and perhaps it doesn't matter what means I do that by, providing most people recognise that I am doing it; i.e., most people recognise the practices that I am using.

The summary of the article outlines the idea of learning styles:

The term ''learning styles'' refers to the concept that individuals differ in regard to what mode of instruction or study is most effective for them. Proponents of learning-style assessment contend that optimal instruction requires diagnosing individuals' learning style and tailoring instruction accordingly. Assessments of learning style typically ask people to evaluate what sort of information presentation they prefer (e.g., words versus pictures versus speech) and/or what kind of mental activity they find most engaging or congenial (e.g., analysis versus listening), although assessment instruments are extremely diverse. The most common--but not the only--hypothesis about the instructional relevance of learning styles is the meshing hypothesis, according to which instruction is best provided in a format that matches the preferences of the learner (e.g., for a ''visual learner,'' emphasizing visual presentation of information).

The learning-styles view has acquired great influence within the education field, and is frequently encountered at levels ranging from kindergarten to graduate school. There is a thriving industry devoted to publishing learning-styles tests and guidebooks for teachers, and many organizations offer professional development workshops for teachers and educators built around the concept of learning styles.

The article, commissioned by Psychological Science in the Public Interest, goes on to question what evidence there is to support these type of practices; i.e., is there evidence that attending to learning styles has a material impact on learning?

I think my first exposure to the notion of learning styles was through Darl Kolb who gave me David Kolb's (1976) classic article to read. One take-away I had from that article was, that although we might have preferences (in our style of learning) it is generally a good thing to be able to draw on all the styles. In particular Kolb (1976, p. 30) says "When one perspective [learning style] comes to dominate others, learning effectiveness is reduced in the long run. From this we can conclude that the most effective learning systems are those that can tolerate differences in perspective". For Kolb (1976) and for Pashler et al., (2009) there is clear--if not undisputed evidence--that people have preferences as to how they learn. The question remains as to how much those preferences should be accommodated in the educational process; is learning ineffective, or less effective if learning styles are not taken into consideration?

Having considered the evidence the conclusion Pashler et al., (2009) draw is that, generally, the nature of the content should determine the style of learning adopted. For example, the Chronicle of Higher Education describes how learning about the structure of molecules is better for most students (independent of learning styles) by building ball-and-stick models. Even those students who have a preference for verbal learning will do better if taught in this kinesthetic manner (rather that catering to their preference). The Chronicle says "teachers should worry about matching their instruction to the content they are teaching. Some concepts are best taught through hands-on work, some are best taught through lectures, and some are best taught through group discussions".

The fallacy that the authors seem to uncover is the argument that "student X didn't do well because the teaching didn't accommodate their particular learning style". If the learning style matches the content (rather than the students preference) then usually the student will do better.

Returning to Kolb (David not Darl), the Chronicle of Higher Education reports that he says:

that the paper's bottom line is probably correct: There is no strong evidence that teachers should tailor their instruction to their students' particular learning styles. (Mr. Kolb has argued for many years that college students are better off if they choose a major that fits their learning style. But his advice to teachers is that they should lead their classes through a full "learning cycle," without regard to their students' particular styles.)

So whither learning styles? For me, it means that the content should determine the means of teaching.

References

The problem is so bad, and I am so keen to analyse/work with PDF files I'm thinking of changing to Atlas/ti. That programme handles PDF files in their native format ... there is no loss of fidelity when working with them.

What I can't decide is whether the learning curve/downtime is worth the change.