Gates on Malaria and Education

You may have heard already, Bill Gates received a lot of press for a stunt he pulled at the TED conference last week - In an effort to get the attention of his audience and raise awareness about Malaria, he released a "swarm" of Mosquitoes. Despite being at what has quickly become THE conference to go to if you're rich, smart, or otherwise important - filled with the greatest minds in technology and other things - Gates spoke nothing of technology. Instead he methodically outlines two great problems his foundation is trying to help address. Malaria and Education.

I can clearly tell he has received some good coaching on his presentation delivery skills - as well as his PowerPoint slide design.

In many ways I consider his talk more pragmatic than inspiring or thought provoking -- which isn't necessarily a bad thing. I think its fair to say that he is doing what he is doing because of the position he is in. I am pretty confident that if most of the people I know, ever had his kind of money - they would be doing similar work. (Gladwell argues this point of privilege thoroughly in his latest: Outliers. In which he ironically uses Gates as a case study)

That said, I think that Bill's calculating approach to problem solving will transfer well to problems of more gravity than whether vista works or not. Most important will be his ability to identify and delegate the right challenges to the right people. Maybe Bill is learning this from Warren Buffet - his largest donor.

Gates pulled and "Oprah" and gave everyone in the audience this book:Work Hard. Be Nice. Written by the founders of the KIPP schools. There is all of this talk about what do to, and how to do it. Well taking a closer look at the organizations who are already doing it, seems like a good place to start.

Check out the talk for yourself below - or on Ted.com here.




Addition: They posted the follow up QA with Chris Anderson in the TEDblog here.

I would be interested to see more data on the health and birth rate correlation.

Digital Overload

Want a distraction?

Here is a good article on how multi-tasking hurts our creativity and ability to focus

Digital Overload is Frying our Brains

What makes Measurable Objectives so difficult to get right?

Learning how to define measurable objectives has been more challenging than I thought it would be. I am now realizing first hand how vital a role measurable objectives play. In these trying times for everyone, the gap between how important objectives are - and how often they are overlooked - is getting wider. Now more than ever, there is a need to evaluate training effectiveness and Return on Investment. Evaluation is impossible without a clear, measurable target. Unfortunately, the ineffectiveness of poorly defined objectives is not realized until attempting to evaluate, and by then it's too late.

I found myself asking what makes this so difficult? Why is it so often overlooked?

In this first post I will outline my answers to these questions. In a following post I will share the tricks I have learned to writing measurable objectives.

Writing Measurable Objectives is difficult because:

1) Knowledge or understanding can not be measured. (but we like to think it can)

On some levels I think we get this, but its easy to forget because so much of our culture wants to hold onto the illusion that we can. Throughout the entire education system we are conditioned to believe that our own knowledge is being measured when it isn’t. How much does knowledge weigh? What does it look like? We can only measure what we can observe and knowledge at its very essence is unobservable. What we can observe and therefore measure is behavior. Where we make the mistake is when through measuring a persons behavior we THINK we are measuring their knowledge.

The measurement of behavior can provide valuable insight, but this insight is often used incorrectly by mistaking correlations as cause and effect. Just because its when its snowing outside its freezing, does not mean that when its freezing outside its snowing. Clearly there are additional l variables to consider. The same is true with the link between knowledge and behavior. There are an infinite number of variables that contribute to a persons behavior. Therefore, knowledge does not cause behavior.

Thomas Gilberts Behavioral Engineering Model (BEM) provides 6 main categories in which we can group the many variables that contribute to a persons behavior.
While the BEM can be used to select a strategy for influencing a persons behavior, it can not be used in reverse. The measurement of a persons behavior should not be mistaken as a measurement of anything other than behavior.