Reflection on Performance Technology

Some thoughts in class:
1. Good performance doesn't necessarily lead to good outcome. I think this happes a lot in our life. Sometimes, people don't make mistake, they act or beheve just similar as what they did in the past, but the outcome is different. As mentioned in Rosenberg's paper, this is because there are changes. "People knew what they were supposed to do and what they did didn’t change much over time." Dr. Graham said people don't get good outcome just because they don't perform well enough to achieve the satisfied goal. Then my question is: what is a good performace? How to evaluate performance? Can performance be evaluted quantitative or can we evalute it at all? If a person is making significant progress in his performance, but what he does is still far from what he is supposed to accomplish, how do we appraise this performance? Do we say he perform well or not simply based our determination on the outcome?

2. Another question is: sometimes, it is not impossible that people who do not perform well can still get a good outcome. E.g., in the stock exchange process, a person mistakenly treated a price if 9.3$ as 6.3$ and sold the stock. Then the stock price began to go down. His mistake by chance saved him money and risk. How to use performance technology to explain this kind of situation?

3. After I read "Human Performance Technology" paper by Rosenberg, I was really attracted by the "Examples of HPT in Action" Section on how HPT can help companies to improve and save time and cost. How to apply and implement HPT to realistic problems seems facinating to me. I hope we can discuss it further in our class soon. Maybe Dr. Graham can combine this problem with the IP&T job hunting and show us what we can do with a degree from IP&T.

4. It seems to me that the HPT focuses more on the business part(e.g. organization, bottom line) and more instant or immediate turnout. When doing instructional design, my understanding about it, is that even though both of theories do care about the results, the instructional design and learning theory aim at a relatively long period of time so that they can perceive a full picture on how people learn, while HPT is more technology part, which means that whatever techonology you used, as long as you finish what you are supposed to do, it is OK. Traning is just part of it(I could be wrong).

5. How to bridge the gap between what we are capabale of doing and what we are supposed to do? How to reduce the gap between what we are trained to do and what we really do? As we learned from our previous class, there is a gap from the knowledge itself and what resides in the learners' knowledge base and how the learner applies this knowledge to solve the particular specific problem. Similarly, how to make the training be reflected the right way in the learner's performance is a problem that needs my further attention.