Ascending-Descending Model

Workplace-Organizational Learning seem to be the buzzwords for training professionals today and I guess that's where your Training and Development division should be doing a lot of their thinking sooner than later. So, the thinking should be around how learning can be a part of people's day to day work-life as against limiting it to a strongly structured experience in a training room.

 It’s very nice to have efficient project teams, but it’s even nicer to see knowledge move from within project teams to the rest of the organization. The learning professional needs to think about how capabilities and innovations become more explicit across the firm; how people can avoid reinventing the wheel and how "best practice" solutions can be easily available across projects. Leveraging technology becomes a key skill here, given that face to face communication is usually not feasible. So while low-tech solutions such as Open-Spaces are excellent communication methods, it’s the technology driven solutions of podcasting, video-blogging, tagging, crowd-sourcing that overcome the limitations of time, space and distance. Again, none of these are path breaking yet putting together the right combination of technology to solve the workplace learning problem is what the learning professional can help with.

Experiments were conducted concerning fixation movements while climbing or descending the staircases at a subway station.  In climbing or descending, fixation movements differed, but tended to occur near the stairs and at occluding edges of floor or walls, and were greatly changed depending on if they were visible or not.  When climbing the staircases, fixation also changed depending on where the subject was located at the stairs, whether making a turn or walking straight at landing.  Fixation movements on the occluding edge, blocking off the turn following immediately after the stairs, inform us the danger that exists.

Visual information is critical for planning and guiding locomotion. Visual information provides advance notice about the size, composition, and location of obstacles in the environment so that we can control locomotion prospectively

National Gallery of Canada this structure is based on "impossible staircase" devised by the famed twentieth-century psychiatrist, geneticist, mathematician, and chess theorist Lionel Penrose. Escher formulated the structure so that one line of monks is continually descending the stairs while the other line is always ascending; they follow each other in a never-ending spiral that never reaches any destination.

In most cases the impossibility becomes apparent after viewing the figure for a few seconds. However, the initial impression of a 3D object remains even after it has been contradicted. There are also more subtle examples of impossible objects where the impossibility does not become apparent spontaneously and it is necessary to consciously examine the geometry of the implied object to determine that it is impossible.

The unsettling nature of impossible objects occurs because of our natural desire to interpret 2D drawings as three-dimensional objects.

The way you look at an object can affect how you see it. Sometimes there are two images in the same picture, but you can only see one at a time so your brain chooses one. Ambiguous figures demonstrates our ability to shift between figure and ground which provides the basis for the two.

They exemplify the fact that sometimes the same perceptual input can lead to very different representations. Teaching us to learn to our best, when faced with any ambiguity.