Perpetual Learning is about providing feedback to help people build their mental models. Mob Programming and Peer Programming are key tools to accelerate your team's learning using advanced cognitive psychology techniques. The shared learning opportunities of Mob Programming and Peer Programming enable contextual feedback to accelerate understanding of the work. This has been proven to accelerate learning and retention of key information or skills.

Takeaways

• Perpetual Learning is learning by example (and getting contextual feedback to better understand why). 

• Peer Programming and Mob Programming help individuals and teams to better understand the context of a domain or skill. It also provides opportunities to practise these skills and get immediate feedback.

Perpetual Learning = Machine Learning for Humans

Definition: "Perceptual Learning is a process by which the ability of sensory systems to respond to stimuli is improved through experience." 

What that actually means is Perceptual Learning is an accelerated learning technique that provides learners with constant feedback to accelerate the development of their own mental model. In other words, learning by example, in real-time. 

There are multiple examples of these techniques for learning complex tasks. One of the most famous examples of Perceptual Learning is London black cab taxi drivers who learn "the knowledge," ie. how to navigate around the streets of London. How do they do this? They spend a year completing tasks to find specific streets on a scooter. This process enables them to build their own mental model of the streets of London and gain "the knowledge."

In WWII, the British home guard tried to teach more people to recognise enemy aircraft. They tried several techniques, e.g. lectures and wall charts, which were ineffective. The British finally figured out how to successfully train new plane spotters: by trial-and-error feedback. A novice would hazard a guess, and an expert would say yes or no. Eventually, the novices became experts. 

How does Perpetual Learning work? 

At the heart of Perpetual Learning is the understanding that experts have an innate ability to complete a task with high precision. Often, these experts need help to fully explain why they can complete the tasks. This is because some of the understanding is conscious knowledge, i.e. something they can explain. And there are aspects of their knowledge that they can't explain because it's a part of their subconscious knowledge (think of these as mental models). 

This technique relies on the learner to "guess" outcomes and use the new information and expert feedback to build their own pattern matching to process the input. A way to accelerate this process is to provide many diverse examples in a compressed time period. 

How can you apply Perpetual Learning at work?

In the tech industry, there are a couple of ways to use Perpetual Learning to accelerate your team’s ability to learn new skills and domains: Peer and Mob Programming.

Peer Programming is a popular technique to accelerate the understanding and skills of juniors. A junior employee will learn and build their mental models of a domain or system by getting immediate feedback from a senior team member. 

Mob Programming is an excellent way to boost a shared understanding of a skill or domain. This shared learning experience model helps all learners add essential information to their mental models and has proven to be an effective learning technique. 

Which learning model, or combination would work best for your team?

Resources / Additional Reading

Books / Papers

• Kathy Sierra - Badass - How to make users awesome 

• Perpetual learning research NASA / UCLA - The research report that demonstrated Perpetual Learning as a accelerated learning tool

Web 

• A Guide to Perpetual Learning with links to the original research articles 

• More examples from same author on Perpetual Learning Exposure to Practice and creating a “Learning Playlist”

• Authors insights on Perceptual Exposure as Learning Technique and why Perpetual Learning should be paired with Deliberate Practice