At the mLearnCon conference, it became clear it was time to write about wearables.  At the same time, David Kelly (program director for t he Guild) asked for conference reflections for the Guild Blog. Long story short, my reflections are a guest post there.

In the course of answering a question in an interview, I realized a third quip to complement two recent ones. The earliest one (not including my earlier ‘Quips‘) was "curation trumps creation", about how you shouldn’t spend the effort to create new resources if you’ve already got them.  The second one was "from the network, not your work", about how if your network can have the answer, you should let it.  So what’s this new one? While I’ve previously argued that good learning design shouldn’t take longer, that was assuming good design in the first place: that you did an analysis, and concept and example design and presentation, and practice, not just dumping a quiz on top of content.  However, doing real design, good or bad, should take time.  And if it’s about knowledge, not skills, a course doesn’t make sense. In short, doing courses should be reserved for when they are really needed. Too often, we’re making courses trying to get knowledge into people’s heads, which usually isn’t a good idea, since our brains aren’t good at remembering rote information.  There are times when it’s necessary, rarely (e.g. medical vocabulary), but we resort to that solution too often as course tools are our only hammer.  And it’s wrong. We should be trying to put information in the world, and reserve the hard work of course building when it’s proprietary skills sets we’re developing. If someone else has done it, don’t feel like you have to use your resources to do it again, use your resources to go meet other needs: more performance support, or facilitating cooperation and communication. So, for both principled and pragmatic reasons, you should be looking to resources as a solution before you turn to courses. On principle, they meet different needs, and you shouldn’t use the course when (most) needs can be met with resources. Pragmatically, it’s a more effective use of your resources: staff, time, and money.  

It’s now official, so I figure it’s time to update you all.  I’ve taken on a role of Chief Learning Architect (a slightly better title than the one originally considered) for the Wadhwani Foundation. It’s an initial 6 month contract, so Quinnovation isn’t going to cease to exist, just have (much) more  limited availability.  I’m still passionate about the Serious eLearning Manifesto, and the Revolution message, and I’ll still be thinking out loud here and on Twitter. The Foundation’s mission is to create jobs and prepare people to take them.  They’ve started with Entrepreneurship programs to create new businesses, and are supplementing with job training to prepare people to staff them.  A third leg will be innovation grants.  It’s a noble mission, the vision of the founder. My role is to refine the learning design to increase success.  Partnerships and content development are already underway, so it’ll be a challenge to influence processes, but it’s a chance to have a real impact on something that matters.  I start today, and fingers crossed.  We’ll see if I can practice what I preach, eh?

I was asked about, in regards to the Serious eLearning Manifesto, about how people could begin to realize the potential of eLearning.  I riffed about this once before, but I want to spin it a different way.  The key is making meaningful practice.  And there are three components: align it, deepen it, and space it. First, align it. What do I mean here?  I mean make sure that your learning objective, what they’re learning, is aligned to a real change in the business. Something you know that, if they improve, it will have an impact on a measurable business outcome.  This means two things, underneath. First, it has to be something that, if people do differently and better, it will solve a problem in what the organization is trying to do.  Second, it has to be something learning benefits from.  If it’s not a case where it’s a cognitive skill shift, it should be about using a tool, or replaced with using a tool. Only use a course when a course makes sense, and make sure that course is addressing a real need. Second, deepen it.  Abstract practice, and knowledge test are both less effective than practice that puts the learner in a context like they’ll be facing in the workplace, and having them make the same decisions they’ll need to be making after the learning experience.  Contextualize it, and exaggerate the context (in appropriate ways) to raise the level of interest and importance to be closer to the level of engagement that will be involved in live performance.  Make sure that the challenge is sufficient, too, by having alternatives that are seductive unless you really understand. Reliable misconceptions are great distractors, by the way.  And have sufficient practice that leads from their beginning ability to the final ability they need to have, and so that they can’t get it wrong (not just until they get it right; that’s amateur hour). Here’s where the third, space it, can come in.  Will Thalheimer has written a superb document (PDF) explaining the need for spacing. You can space out the complexity of development, and sufficient practice, but we need to practice, rest (read: sleep), and then practice some more. Any meaningful learning really can’t be done in one go, but has to be spread.  How much? As Will explains, that depends on how complex the task is, and how often the task will be performed and the gaps in between, but it’s a fair bit. Which is why I say learning should be expensive. After these three steps, you’ll want to only include the resources that will lead to success, provide models and examples that will support success, etc, but I believe that, regardless, learners with good practice are likely to get more out of the learning experience than any other action you can take. So start with good practice, please!

In #lrnchat a couple of weeks ago on anxiety in learning, Shannon Tipton suggested that role plays are the worst.  Now, I know Shannon and respect her (we’re in synch, her Learning Rebels movement very much resonates with my Revolutionary tendencies), so this somewhat surprised me.  We debated it a bit on twitter, and we thought maybe we should make the argument more extended, so here’s my take. Her concern, as I understood it, was role plays where a subset get up and play roles in front of the room are uncomfortable.  That is, there’re roles and goals, and they’re set up to illustrate a point.  And I can see that type of role play might create a problem for a non-assertive person, particularly in an uncomfortable environment.  (She mentions it here, and see the extended explanation in the comment.) Now, a favorite model of mine is Ann Brown and Anne-Marie Palincsar’s reciprocal teaching.  In this model (generalized from the original focus on reading), everyone takes  a turn performing (including instructor) and others critique the performance.  Of course, there have to be ground rules, such as talking about the performance not the person, making it safe to share, small enough steps between tasks, etc.  However, the benefits are that you internalize the monitoring, becoming self-monitoring and self-improving. As another data point, I think of the Online Role Playing as characterized by Sandra Wills, Elyssabeth Leigh, and Albert Ip. Here, learners take roles and goals and explore virtually over time.  The original one they reference was done by John Shepherd and Andrew Vincent and explored the mideast crisis. Learners got engaged in the roles, and the whole process really illuminated the tensions underlying the topic. When I put these together, I see a powerful tool for learning.  You should design the roles and goals to explore a topic, and unpack an issue.  You should prep learners to help them do a fair job of the role. And, most of all, you have to make it safe.  The instructor should be willing to take on the challenging role, and similarly be seen to fail, or maybe everyone does it in groups so no one group is in front, then you facilitate a discussion.  I’ve done this in my game design workshop, where everyone pairs up and alternates being a SME and being an ID. I understand that performing is an area of fear for many, but I think that role playing can be a powerful learning experience without anxiety when you manage the process right.  Bad design is bad design, after all (PowerPoint doesn’t kill people…).  What say you?

All too often, when I review content, I see a recurrent interaction. And I really can’t figure out why, except a thorough lack of understanding of learning, and a determination to put interaction in regardless. Click here to learn more. It’s not just the next button I’m railing about here, but instead that, on a screen, there’ll be n things, tabs, boxes, something, with the instructions to ‘click to learn more’. The point being that information is available but not directly. It appears that the designer has a lot of content to present, and yet just presenting lots of content is obviously wrong, so we’ll make it more interactive by chunking it up and then showing it iteratively with clicks. That’s more interactive, yes?  Yes, and it’s bad. Two problems: the content, and the interactions. First, if you’ve got so much content to present, it’s a strong indicator that something’s wrong. People aren’t good at remembering large bits of information. They retain gist, not details. If you’re presenting a lot of content, you’re undoubtedly presenting too many details. Put the detail in the world if it has to be accessible. And my guess is that lots of it is ‘nice to have’, not ‘must have’. If it really has to go in the head, you are really going to have to do a lot more than just have them read it, you’ll need drill and kill. Instead, find the core model that predicts the right actions, and have them learn the model. Then give them practice in applying it, which leads to the second problem.  Reading once just isn’t going to have much impact. Learners should be having meaningful interaction. The learner should be using the content to do something. Which isn’t a click each, it’s a click the right one. It’s making a choice, taking an action, applying the knowledge in context to make a decision. What will make a difference to the organization is not the ability to recite knowledge (leave that to videos, documents, chatbots, what have you), but instead the ability to make better decisions. You can do the ‘reveal’ in certain circumstances, such as to present an example: present the initial situation, then reveal to show the complication, then reveal to show the solution, and the results. (Here’s the story: click here to see the problem that arose, click here to see the alternatives considered, click here to see the decision made, click here to see the consequences). So, it might be a somewhat engaging way to present an example, but good writing would trump that. Or you might have alternative actions and click to see the consequences of that action. Which wouldn’t make sense if there were a right answer, or you should immediately be getting them to first commit to a choice and then provide feedback. Where does this come from? I think it comes from the fact that Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) don’t have access to most of what they actually do, but they do have access to all they know, so they tend to put out information. There are processes to get around this, but designers have to have the gumption to stand up to knowledge dump on the part of the SMEs and fight to find out how that information is used. It’s not necessarily easy (though it gets easier with practice), but it is necessary. So, please, avoid the ‘click here to learn more’ and instead look for ‘click here to choose an action to take’.

In a previous post, I suggested that we should not do the ‘click to learn more’, as it was just about presenting content.  But we do need to present content, so what content makes sense?  Obviously, examples are one thing, but let me make the case that the ‘how to’, the concept, should be in the form of a model. There’s a problem in that Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) don’t have access to the what they do,but they have access to what they know, so it’s real easy to get a knowledge dump. And it’s hard work to make sense of it, sometimes, and it’s easier to just recite it. For example, expertise in many areas requires careful distinctions (e.g. such as in instructional design between the elements of learning).  However, it’s hard for learners to acquire all those careful distinctions without the underlying rationale of how they differ. Similarly, most procedures to do something are guided not by arbitrary reasons, but instead are sequenced because of inherent constraints.  These constraints guide the proper procedures.  There’s a reason you do X before Y, and then a causal relationship that explains what you look for before deciding to do W instead of Z. Too often, I see someone presenting learners with an arbitrary list of different things, when there are conceptual reasons why they differ. Similarly, I’ll see steps presented without a rationale for why. And in both cases, learners will remember better, and perform more robustly (particularly in environments with changes), if they have the model that explains what to do as well as the information.  While this might seem like more information, it’s really not, as the model minimizes the amount of arbitrary information you present. And it leads to better outcomes, so it would be worth it anyways. Models give us a couple of useful things; they help us explain what has happened, and predict what will happen (e.g. if we do A, we’ll see B).  Which makes us more flexible in our actions, a useful trait.  As an aside, models also can draw upon metaphors to facilitate developing a useful understanding. Whether it’s flows, transformations, whatever, finding a concrete equivalent in the world can help recollection and application. The problem, of course, is getting the model. It’s not always there, nor even easily inferable.  Which doesn’t mean you can ignore it.  The designer must be willing to work until they can understand it.  But it’s doable, and valuable. So, please, model your learning design on the model of good learning with models. (Ok, I went too far there :)

Jane Hart compiles, every year, a list of the top 10 tools for learning.  And, of course, it’s that time again, so here we go. I like what Harold Jarche did about tagging his list with the steps of his Seek-Sense-Share model for Personal Knowledge Mastery, so I’m adding that as well. In no particular order: 1. Word: I write most of my articles and books in Word.  The outline feature is critical for me (and the main reason I haven’t switched to Pages, it’s just not industrial strength) in structuring my thoughts, and writing is one of the ways I think out loud. Sense & Share. 2. WordPress: the other way I write out loud is on my blog (like this), and my blog is powered by WordPress. Share. 3. OmniGraffle: diagramming is the other way I think out loud, and I’m regularly getting my mind around things by diagramming. Sense. 4. Google: the core tool in my searching for answers for things.  Seek. 5. Twitter: a major source of input, pointing to things of interest.  Seek. 6. Facebook: also a source of insight. Seek. 7. Skype: continues to be the way I stay in touch with my ITA colleagues (Seek, Sense, & Share) 8. Mail: email is still a major tool for getting pointers, staying in touch, asking questions, etc. (Seek, Share) 9. Keynote: creating presentations is another way I organize my thoughts to share. Sense & Share. 10. OmniOutliner: another way of organizing my thoughts.  A different tool for the same purpose.  Sense. What tools do you use?

For many of the past 10 years, I’ve gone walkabout with some friends into the mountains to, well, many things.  It’s fun, it’s thoughtful, it’s invigorating, and it is also hard work.  I’ll paint a picture to contextualize the picture. With two friends (one I’ve known for 30+ years), we drove up into the hills, spent the night in a tent cabin, and the next morning parked and started hiking. We followed the trail up to May Lake, which is already a gorgeous high Sierra lake just above timberline. From there, my two friends had got adventurous. So, we went around the lake and took off cross country up the ridge.  This was up rock, as we were above timberline, and off trail so it was where we figured we could go. At the top of the ridge, we had the view you see in the picture, and we headed down to the left to get to the lake. We camped in some stunted trees off to the right of the lake out of the picture.  We of course had to carry our tents, stoves, water filters, sleeping bags, clothing, everything with us. And I learned a valuable lesson. I packed in a flurry of trying to get other things done, and missed just a couple of things I should’ve brought, checked, etc. I ended up ok, but forgetting the sleep pad led to some discomfort.  I could’ve been in worse shape, though my friends would’ve helped out if I didn’t have enough fuel.  If I’d used the checklist my colleague created, I’d have been better off! We day hiked the next day.  You can see small plumes of smoke in the background, as there was a ‘management fire’ going on at the time. We got a blast for about 20 minutes or so, but it cleared up so I didn’t have to panic. Right before nightfall, we saw some hovering against the wall of the ridge to the left (1000′ above us, and we were at 9000′+), and I feared that it might settle down overnight. Indeed, we woke up the last morning in smoke, and hiked back out only to find out that May Lake, Tenaya Lake, and as far as we could tell all of Tuolomne Meadows was covered.  The gorgeous views were tarnished, but we feared that the fires were not those that were being managed, and indeed so we subsequently discovered.  My thoughts to those who are suffering.  Fortunately, we got out safe and sound. The conversation we shared veered from philosophical discussions, personal details, and of course ridiculous humorous dialogs.  There were also periods of no discussion, merely contemplating and enjoying nature.  There’s something restorative about being in the wild, with vistas, wildlife, and the sounds of wind and water.  You don’t have to get out there with the level of exertion and immersion we choose, but I believe there’s something primal and necessary in getting away from the daily hustle and bustle regularly. So, how do you recharge?

In a previous post, I talked about the layers around learning design.  One of the layers that’s increasingly interesting to me is the notion of the success skills, or meta-skills that are involved.  For example, the SCANS competencies are a decent suite of skills that recognize the general skills for success that cross different disciplines. However, you really can’t focus on such skills in isolation. Like most meta-skills, they need to be applied in a domain.  As a consequence, they really need to be worked on while developing some other skills. That is, when  you’re developing a curriculum, you have opportunities to require using those skills, but they need to be explicitly included and better yet, assessed. In the field of educational software, there have been many ‘games’ that claimed "develops problem-solving skills". This wasn’t accurate, as most of them required problem-solving skills, but there was no development. Development would require assessing performance and providing feedback. And that’s what we want to do to develop these skills. So my suggestion is to layer on these requirements across the curriculum, and assess them separately.  The skills, like organizing, problem-solving, communicating, researching, etc, are naturally part of an activity-based curriculum, but need to be deliberately inserted at reasonable rates and tracked.  It’s not hard, you choose this assignment (task/activity/practice) to include a presentation, that one to require research, another to require a design task, etc.  And you assess them across assignments. So, you look at their repeated performance on each skill at each time they’re inserted.  You can provide support and gradually remove it (as you do for other skill-development practice). The point is to not only develop the learner’s ability to acquire the curricular skills, but also to acquire the meta-skills.  For instance, if you are helping people acquire job skills, you are also developing their ability to hold the job, and self-improve over time. Think of it this way.  People acquire a job by their ability to do X, but they will need to know how to work in a job context regardless of whether it’s X, Y, or Z.  Also, X will change to X+ and X++ over time, and the skills to keep up to date and move up require the meta-skills. I think of this as one of the pillars of a successful education practice; develop the learners not only in the domain, but as learners.  Developing them as people, not only as practitioners of a competency.  I think this is a practical approach, what do you think?

Having found a fun site of bad UX design, someone else followed me who had the UX Drinking Game site.  And it made me think maybe we need an LX Drinking Game.  So I started tweeting out some drinking game rules. I encourage you to join in with the hashtag #LXDrinkingGame. So, my first list of ‘drink’ cues is: if they ask for a pre-test/post-test design if the alternatives to the right answer are so silly or obvious that you don’t need to know anything if the course objectives are ‘know’ or ‘understand’ if someone says ‘use a click to see more’ if someone says, use an avatar because people like it if someone comes in and says "we need a course for this" if someone dumps PDFs and/or PPTs on you and expects a course in a few days if all they’re measuring is cost/time/seat So, what other rules do we need?  Tweets (again, #LXDrinkingGame) or comments welcome ;).

I’ll shortly be on the road going both near and far.  And it occurred to me that the distance isn’t the issue so much (aside from the time zone) as is the adaptations you face.  I’ll suggest it’s the change that you must adapt to as much as the time. Sure, first of all, there’re the time differences.  On short jaunts, the direction matters too. I (selfishly) don’t have a lot of sympathy for East Coast US folks who have to come here to the West Coast.  I find it easier to stay up later and get up later (well, I don’t really get up later, I’m a bad sleeper, brother got all the good sleeper genes) than to try to go to bed earlier (as if) or get up earlier.  (I’ve gotten my doctor to assist with the ‘going to bed earlier!).  Of course, at the end Easterners will have to go back, but that brings up a second issue. I think it’s much easier to adapt when you’re in a familiar context.  It’s easier for me to get back to schedule at home than to adjust to a different time zone in an unfamiliar environment.  There’re the regular rhythms of life at home that give you many more cues than just the clock about what’s happening.  Kid’s schedules, meals, etc.  Which makes one of my strategies for travel to give myself food cues. And that difference magnifies. I find it more exhausting overall to deal with new contexts, and that diminishes your available resources for other coping. So it’s harder to cope somewhere else than at home, and in a more similar culture than a more unfamiliar one.  I would find it easier, for example, to go to Germany (where my Mother was born) or the UK than somewhere a similar distance away (maybe Spain or France) but more foreign to my experience.  And Europe is easier than the MidEast, which in general is more different. Saudi Arabia, for instance, though a fascinating place, was quite challenging to figure out how to cope.   And despite being quite far, Australia is easy for me because I lived there for a number of years (and the culture isn’t that different regardless). Business makes it a bit easier, too.  As a somewhat common culture, you can moderate the differences in expectation. Dress and hours won’t vary too much, but there are subtle differences in discussions and negotiations.  Hofstede’s dimensions help illustrate how countries can differ.  Though even organizations can have different cultures that may need to be navigated. And this all affects some more than others.  Some people are naturally relaxed and confident, and if it’s coupled with being good sleepers, they’ll be fine. Others of us fret more about having things go trouble free (and I find as I get older that this is becoming more frequently the case :).  And, of course, the importance of the outcome can influence the degree of confidence and comfort or not.  So I invest effort in trying to get things right (and recently relearned the lesson from being too relaxed about it). So food cues, striking the balance between bringing the right stuff and traveling light, getting outside, and caffeine have been my tricks. Also reading up on new places to have some advance notice.  Books and movies too, for the travel time itself (again, not a good sleeper).  Does this make sense to you?  How do you cope?

A while ago, I argued for an activity-based curriculum.  The point was to rebel against the usual content-based curriculum, and push us to more meaningful learning. And, of late, I’ve had a chance to reexamine both the curriculum ideas, and the pedagogical implications. So I’ve been in a situation where I’ve been handed a curriculum already developed, and the content is already being fleshed out. In trying to move beyond good, albeit traditional, elearning, I’ve been working hard on the notion of what a meaningful activity (read: practice, task, etc) would be.  As context, we’re working here within a pre-class, in-class, and post-class model. As a consequence, I’m pushing an alternative to what would be content presentation pre-class, practice and group discussion in-class, and simulation and summary assessment  as post-class.  While this is not too far from traditional blended learning, I’m also trying to get better alignment with what learners will be doing after the learning experience with sufficient practice. So for each module, I’m looking for a meaningful practice.  For even a knowledge based task, I’m asking learners to develop something that requires them to integrate the knowledge, not just present and test.  And revisit the knowledge several times.  So, for example, if learners are looking at types of hacking attacks, I ask them to create a defense plan as a pre-class task.  They’ll get a chance to self-evaluate, and instructor feedback, before generating a second attempt.  In many ways, it doesn’t matter what they create as long as they’re making a suitably sincere effort, it’s the processing that matters. A colleague asked whether this meant that they’d always generate a product of learning, and my preliminary answer was yes, and then I realized that there was another way to view it. It could also be the trace of the learner in a simulation, but in some sense that’s a product as well.  The important point is to have learners perform and create an output of that performance as a manifestation of their thinking.  It’s not taking knowledge tests (if it absolutely has to be known cold ‘in the head’, you’ve got the excuse for a tarted-up drill-and-kill, but make sure it absolutely does), but processing information in meaningful ways. In-class, they’ll still be doing practice and reflection, but they should be processing and/or practicing. For example, discussing and comparing the guides, and maybe then an activity that refreshes their knowledge of the attacks.  The team came up with a game that has one side giving hints about an attack, and the other side trying to guess it. After class, it’s more elaborated practice. For instance,  they might be implementing their defenses in a sim, or refining their attacks, or…  The activities need to reinforce and build, reactivating and reapplying the knowledge in ways that mimic how it will be used in the performance context so that practice is both meaningful and spaced. I’m still working within the existing paradigm, but the work I’m inspired by is the work of Roger Schank and his team at Socratic Arts, where they’re rethinking the curriculum more comprehensively, where they get the subject matter experts (SMEs) to sit down and come up with a series of activities that are the curriculum. This is what I intended, but at this point I’m still working within an already underway curriculum. Even this small change will be better learning, and we will get to the curriculum as well ;).

In thinking through how to design courses that lead to both engaging experiences and meaningful outcomes, I’ve been working on the component activities.  As part of that, I’ve been looking at elements such as pedagogy in pre-, in-, and post-class sessions so that there are principled reasons behind the design.  So, here I’m looking at trying for guidance to align what happens in all three sections.  In this case, two major types of activities have emerged: more procedural activities, such as using equipment appropriately; and more conceptual activities such as making the right decisions of what to say and do.  These aren’t clearly discriminated, but it’s a coarse description. Of course, there’s an introduction that both emotionally and cognitively prepares the learner for the coming learning experience. So for conceptual tasks, what we’re looking to do is drive learning to content.  In typical approaches, you’d be presenting conceptual information (e.g. ‘click to see more‘) and maybe asking quiz questions.  Here, I’m looking to make the task of processing the information to generate something, whether a document, presentation, or whatever, and that the processing is close to the way the information will be used.  So they might create a guide for decisions (e.g. a decision tree), or a checklist, or something that requires them to use the information. (And if the information doesn’t support doing, it’s probably not necessary.)  As support, in a recent conversation I heard that interviewed organizations said that making better decisions were the keys to better job performance. Whereas in the procedural approach, we really want to give them practice in the task. It may be scaffolded, e.g. simplified, but it’s the same practice that they’ll need to be able to perform after the learning experience. Ideally, they’ll have to explore and use content resources to figure out how to do it appropriate, in a guided exploration sense, rather than just be given the steps. In both cases, models are key to helping them determine what needs to happen.  Also in both cases, an instructor should be reviewing their output. In the conceptual case, learners might get feedback on their output, and have a chance to revise their creation.  In the case of the practice, the experience is likely a simulation, and the learner should be getting feedback about their success.  In either case, the instructor has information about how the cohort is doing.  So… …for in-class learning, the learners should be reflecting on their performances, and the instructor should be facilitating that at the beginning, using the information about what’s working (and not).  Then there should be additional activities that the learners engage in that require them interacting with the material, processing (conceptual) or applying (procedural) it with each other and then with facilitated reflection. Finally, the learners after class should be getting given elaborative activities.  In the case of the conceptual task, coming up with an elaborated version or some additional element that helps cement the learning would be valuable.  The practice or activity should get fleshed out to the point where the learner will be capable of appropriately acting after the learning experience, owing to sufficient practice and appropriate decontextualization. The goal is for retention over time and transfer to all appropriate situations. Am I making sense here?

In addition to yesterday’s post about pedagogy, I also mentioned the need to get deeper on curriculum as well.  The notion is that we need to redefine curriculum as a way to get away from a content base, and start moving to an activity base. The focus is on creating a curriculum that has tasks at it’s core, and these tasks are tasks like the learner will be expected to be performing in the world.  These tasks can be viewed as competencies that, if the learner possesses them, there is evidence that they are prepared to perform. The goal is to choose tasks, with the final task likely being chosen first and working backwards (as in Understanding By Design) to determine what needs to be done.  From each chosen ‘task’ will be a suite of activities that comprise the pre-, in-, and post-class activities, but here we are focusing on the overall curriculum before we get into the individual pedagogy. Note that the content is subsequently chosen to support successful execution of the tasks, and is not presented to the learner but is, instead, made available to them at the time of the task.  The goal is to have them process the content in service of accomplishing the task, an approach more consonant with our cognitive architecture. We’re more likely to remember information we’ve had to process rather than information we’ve just been presented with.  Information that a learner can recite is unlikely to be activated at a relevant time ("inert knowledge) unless it’s been applied, and the focus should be on the application, not the recitation. Again, this turns out to be  very much the approach of Roger Schank of Socratic Arts as well, but emerged from my own thoughts and frustrations before I found out about the Story-Centered Curricula.  Of course, I referenced the Goal-Based Scenarios in my book on learning (game) design, but I hadn’t been aware of his curricular processes at the time of this or my Reimagining rant pointed to above. There’re more details required to fully flesh out the process here. I reckon it’d be easier to do with an employer than faculty, but even with faculty, I reckon if you can get more than one in a room, focus on decisions, and help them understand the power of activity-focused learning, it’ll work. Fingers crossed ;).

Last week’s #lrnchat (a twitter chat on learning that runs Thurs evenings for an hour 5:30 PT/8:30 ET) was on the topic of fear-mongering in Organizational Learning.  The point is that often fear-mongering happens (by definition always wrongly), but what are the reasons, impacts, and ways to avoid.  And among my responses are one that I like as a quip. I was, in particular, flashing back on the book Story Wars, that talked about how advertising has changed. This was in the context of fear-mongering as an approach to motivating behavior. In that book, they cited how advertisements in older days were designed to target your concerns. In essence, they made you worry about shortcomings as a motivation to buy remedies, whether to address your personal hygiene or appearance of success. What’s changed is that they’ve now moved on to finding out that what is more motivating is tapping into your goals.  What are you trying to achieve? Who are you and what reflects your passions?  Then they provide products that can align with your self-image.  Of course, their ability to target your market segment is much more advanced, so they know more about who you are and have more specific means of reaching you. In learning, however, this is also true. It’s far better to tap into your aspirations to motivate your learning than drumming on your fears. The latter will work some, if you’ve got legitimate concerns (e.g. losing your job), but far better is to help you understand how this will help you. So, when it comes to motivation, I’ll argue that targeting aspiration trumps targeting  trepidations. Help people understand why this is valuable or important, not fear of the consequences of failure to comply. It’s part of a better culture, and a better workplace.  And that’s something you aspire to, right? ;)

This is a name you’re not likely to know, but I can’t let his passing go without comment.  Joe was an intensely private person who had a sizable impact on the field of technology in learning, and I was privileged to know him. I met Joe when my colleague Jim "Sky" Schuyler, who had hired for my first job out of college, subsequently dragged me back from overseas to work for him at a new company: Knowledge Universe Interactive Studios (KUIS).  I’d stayed in touch with Sky over the years, and I was looking to come back at the same time he had been hired to lead KUIS’s work to be an ISP for the KU companies, but also to create a common platform.  I was brought on board to lead the latter initiative. To make a long story short, initially I reported to Sky, but ultimately he moved on and I began to report to the CEO, Joe, directly.  Sky had said that he liked working for people smarter than himself, and if indeed Joe was such this was quite the proposition, as Sky was not only a Northwestern PhD but a wise colleague in many ways. He’d been a mentor and friend as well as a colleague, and if Sky (reticent as he is) thought highly of Joe, this was high praise indeed. I got to know Joe slowly. He was quite reserved not only personally but professionally, but he did share his thinking.  It quickly became clear that not only did he have the engineering chops of a true techy, he also had the strategic insight of an visionary executive.  What I learned more slowly was that he was not just a natural leader, but a man with impeccable integrity and values. I found out that he’d been involved with Plato via his first job at Battelle, and was suitably inspired to start a company supporting Plato. He moved to the Bay Area to join Atari, and  subsequently was involved with Koala Technologies, which created  early PC (e.g. Apple) peripherals.  His trajectory subsequently covered gaming as well as core technology, eventually ending up at Sega before he convinced the KU folks to let him head up KUIS.  He seemed to know everyone. More importantly, he had the vision to understand system and infrastructure, and barriers to same. He was excited about Plato as a new capability for learning. He supported systems at Koala for new interface devices. He worked to get Sega to recognize the new landscape.  In so many ways he worked behind the scenes to enable new experiences, but he was never at the forefront of the public explanation, preferring to make things happen at the back end (despite the fact that he was an engaging speaker: tall, resonant voice, and compelling charisma). In my short time to get to know him, he shared his vision on a learning system that respected who learners were, and let me shape a team that could (and did) deliver on that vision.  He fought to give us the space and the resources, and asked the tough questions to make sure we were focused. We got a working version up and running before the 2001 crash. He continued to have an impact, leading some of the major initiatives of Linden Labs as they went open source and met some challenging technical issues while negotiating cultural change to take down barriers.  He ended up at SportVision, where he was beginning to help them understand they were not about information, but insight. Unfortunately, I didn’t have much view into what was happening there, as it was proprietary and Joe was, as I said, private. Joe served as a mentor for me.  I found him to have deep values, and under his austere exterior he exemplified values of humanity and compassion.  I was truly grateful when I could continue to meet him regularly and learn from him as he expressed true interest as well as sharing his insights. He was taken from us too early, and too quickly.  He fought a tough battle at the end, but at least was surrounded by the love of his life and their children as they passed.  Rest in Peace.

Kris Duggan spoke on gamification at the Bay Area Learning Design & Technology MeetUp. He talked about some successes at his Badging role and then his new initiative bringing gamification more intrinsically into organizations. He proposed five Goal Science rules that resonated with other principles I’ve heard for good organizations.

As a fan of comics and animations (read: cartoons) in learning, I was pleased to see a small mention of comics in a twitter discussion (triggered by this post). When I lauded the claim, I was asked what I think of machinima, and I had to think for a bit.  My feelings are mixed, so it’s probably worth it to think them through out loud. So, first, machinima are animations made by using characters in 3D virtual worlds or computer games.  They share the look and feel of whatever platform is used, which can range from cartoon-like to quite complex.  Similarly, their speed can range from quite slow to pretty fast. One particularly attractive feature, which I hadn’t really thought of, is that they may be easy ways to create animation.  As Karl Kapp (professor at Bloomsburg College and clear thinker on games, virtual worlds etc) mentioned in the exchange, they can be great for inexpensively creating animations. And that’s a good thing, if you get the animations you want to use. My concern has to do with the output of the animations. Many times, I find the complexity of computer graphics containing too much unnecessary detail.  And when surfing the web for some other examples, I found ones where the dialog was too slow (which I’ve seen in other animation forms as well, I confess).  So I worry about matching the detail of output to the need, despite the cost. Now, as Karl also mentioned, they’re good for procedural tasks. This certainly could be true, as the extra detail would help contextualize. However, is it better than a video?  Certainly if you can expand or contract the scale, so you’re seeing it at the necessary level of detail, not the only real one that video can provide. So for minute details, this would be really good! As the original respondent suggested, it’s better to be there (e.g. in game) rather than watch, and I’d certainly agree to that, as you can negotiate some of the other issues that might be confusing.  And of course social learning adds value in and of itself. So, the question is, when is machinima useful?  I wouldn’t want to use it just because of cost; if you’re not getting the right characteristics, it might be a false economy. If it’s producing output within a range of acceptability at a reasonable cost, or really capturing the affordances of virtual worlds, I think it makes sense.  And I’m willing to be wrong. What are your thoughts?  

I was just at my high school reunion, and despite initial doubts, I had a great time. And it made me wonder why.  These are people I haven’t seen in a long time (in some cases, for decades!).  How is it we could reconnect so easily and generate powerful emotions? I don’t have any obvious answers.  Now, you have to understand that this was a subset of the whole class. My graduating class was around 900 folks, give or take, and only around 200 or so were at this event, so it’s a non-representative sample.  So we had friends who brought in friends, and it consequently followed a small bit of ‘degrees of separation‘, so there was likely to be greater affinity. Second, despite being a ‘suburb’ of a major metropolitan center, my hometown has a real ‘small-town’ feel, as we’re geographically isolated and had a more focused employment situation (we were a harbor town).  And we were relatively ethnically diverse, lower on the socio-economic status (this was not Beverly Hills), and consequently shared some ‘scrappy underdog’ spirit. So what was it like?  Not just in my opinion, but in most accounts it was a great event!  People were hugging, laughing, dancing, and more.  There was sharing, and celebration or commiseration, of life’s travails.  People reconnected with friends that they’d lost contact with, and strengthened ties with those who had been less tight. We also shared thoughts for those who couldn’t join for pragmatic reasons, and memorialized those who were no longer with us. Interestingly, this was largely organized through Facebook, which despite it’s not intended use as an organizing tool, sufficed to allow us to reconnect before the event through posts to the group.  People who couldn’t come shared thoughts, others talked about their experiences.  There was a lot of preparation. And perhaps because it was this select group, the sharing was very positive.  And the effort to organize was volunteer; and the individuals doing it in that spirit set a tone for the rest of the event. I wonder, though, if one of the main reasons this worked so well as the strength of the emotional connections.  The teen age years are some of the first emotional connections you make with friends, and some of these friendships had been established earlier (e.g. the two friends I’d reconnected with had become 3 musketeers in Jr High, and I’d known once since kindergarten).  The additional emotional aspects of puberty on emotions likely only heightened it. We’d also shared the ups and downs of high school together, and as in other cases the relationships take advantage of the strengths of shared experiences.  We’d survived the high school experience together, and had ties through sports, clubs, or events that tightened the connections. It’s not clear to me that this is really replicable, though I have long advocated that there are reasons to address the emotional components of events such as learning.  Helping find shared ground, and working together to achieve goals, are both elements of team building, and we should look to them when we can.  And positive spirits shown and reflected help. High school is a tough time: bodily changes, finding one’s self, tough decisions, and more.  I suspect most of us, at least those of us with sufficient empathy to care, struggle to navigate the desire to be oneself and to be accepted.  It’s not an easy journey. The ability to successfully navigate it, and to have found others who help and share the journey, creates lifelong bonds. A true friend, to me, is one who you can not see for years or even decades, and when you’re together again it’s like no time has passed in your ability communicate with authenticity and, yes, passion.  I hope that you have or can find, if not at a reunion then somewhere, that true connection.

Last week I had the opportunity to attend the inaugural meeting of the Global Learning Council.  While not really global in either sense (little representation from overseas nor from segments other than higher ed), it was a chance to refresh myself in some rigor around learning sciences. And one thing that struck me was folks talking about learning engineering. If we take the analogy from regular science and engineering, we are talking about taking the research from the learning sciences, and applying it to the design of solutions.  And this sounds like a good thing, with some caveats.  When talking about the Serious eLearning Manifesto, for example, we’re talking about principles that should be embedded in your learning design approach. While the intention was not to provide coverage of learning science, several points emerged at one point or another as research-based outcomes to be desired. For one, the value of models in learning.  Another was, of course, the value of spacing practice. The list goes on.  The focus of the engineering, however, is different. While it wasn’t an explicit topic of the talk, it emerged in several side conversations, but the focus is on design processes and tools that increase the likelihood of creating effective learning practices.  This includes doing a suitable job of creating aligned outcomes through processes of working with SMEs, identifying misconceptions to be addressed, ensuring activities are designed that have learners appropriately processing and applying information, appropriate spread of examples, and more. Of course, developing an accurate course for any topic is a thorough exercise.  Which is desirable, but not always pragmatic.  While the full rigor of science would go as far as adaptive intelligent tutoring systems, the amount of work to do so can be prohibitive under pragmatic constraints.  It takes a high importance and large potential audience to do this for other than research purposes. In other cases, we use heuristics.  Sometimes we go too far; so just dumping information and adding a quiz is often seen, though that’s got little likelihood of having any impact.  Even if we do create an appropriate practice, we might only have learners practice until they get it right, not until they can’t get it wrong. Finding the balance point is an ongoing effort. I reckon that the elements of good design is a starting point, but you need processes that are manageable, repeatable, and scalable.  You need structures to help, including representations that have support for identifying key elements and make it difficult to ignore the important elements.  You ideally have aligned tools that make it easy to do the right things. And if this is what Learning Engineering can be, systematically applying learning science to design, I reckon there’s also a study of learning science engineering, aligning not just the learning, but the design process, with how we think, work, and learn.  And maybe then there’s a learning architecture as well - where just as an architect designs the basic look and feel of the halls & rooms and the engineers build them - that designs the curriculum approach and the pedagogy, but the learning engineers follow through on those principles for developing courses. Is learning engineering an alternative to instructional design?  I’m wondering if the focus on engineering rather than design (applied science, rather than art) and learning rather than instruction (outcomes, not process), is a better characterization.  What do you think?

Fall always seems to be a busy time, and I reckon it’s worthwhile to let you know where I’ll be in case you might be there too! Coming up are a couple of different events that you might be interested in: September 28-30 I’ll be at the Future of Talent retreat  at the Marconi Center up the coast from San Francisco. It’s a lovely spot with a limited number of participants who will go deep on what’s coming in the Talent world. I’ll be talking up the Revolution, of course. October 28-31 I’ll be at the eLearning Guild’s DevLearn in Las Vegas (always a great event; if you’re into elearning you should be there).  I’ll be running a Revolution workshop (I believe there are still a few spots), part of  a mobile panel, and talking about how we are going about addressing the challenges of learning design at the Wadhwani Foundation. November 12-13 I’ll be part of the mLearnNow event in New Orleans (well, that’s what I call it, they call it LearnNow mobile blah blah blah ;).  Again, there are some slots still available.  I’m honored to be co-presenting with Sarah Gilbert and Nick Floro (with Justin Brusino pulling strings in the background), and we’re working hard to make sure it should be a really great deep dive into mlearning.  (And, New Orleans!) There may be one more opportunity, so if anyone in Sydney wants to talk, consider Nov 21. Hope to cross paths with you at one or more of these places!

The eLearning Guild is celebrating it’s 10th year, and is using the opportunity to reflect on what learning will look like 10 years from now.  While I couldn’t participate in the twitter chat they held, I optimistically weighed in: "learning in 2024 will look like individualized personal mentoring via augmented reality, AI, and the network".  However, I thought I would elaborate in line with a series of followup posts leveraging the #lrn2024 hashtag.  The twitter chat had a series of questions, so I’ll address them here (with a caveat that our learning really hasn’t changed, our wetware hasn’t evolved in the past decade and won’t again in the next; our support of learning is what I’m referring to here): 1. How has learning changed in the last 10 years (from the perspective of the learner)? I reckon the learner has seen a significant move to more elearning instead of an almost complete dependence on face-to-face events.  And I reckon most learners have begun to use technology in their own ways to get answers, whether via the Google, or social networks like FaceBook and LinkedIn.  And I expect they’re seeing more media such as videos and animations, and may even be creating their own. I also expect that the elearning they’re seeing is not particularly good, nor improving, if not actually decreasing in quality.  I expect they’re seeing more info dump/knowledge test, more and more ‘click to learn more‘, more tarted-up drill-and-kill.  For which we should apologize! 2. What is the most significant change technology has made to organizational learning in the past decade? I reckon there are two significant changes that have happened. One is rather subtle as yet, but will be profound, and that is the ability to track more activity, mine more data, and gain more insights. The ExperienceAPI coupled with analytics is a huge opportunity.  The other is the rise of social networks.  The ability to stay more tightly coupled with colleagues, sharing information and collaborating, has really become mainstream in our lives, and is going to have a big impact on our organizations.  Working ‘out loud’, showing our work, and working together is a critical inflection point in bringing learning back into the workflow in a natural way and away from the ‘event’ model. 3. What are the most significant challenges facing organizational learning today? The most significant change is the status quo: the belief that an information oriented event model has any relationship to meaningful outcomes.  This plays out in so many ways: order-taking for courses, equating information with skills, being concerned with speed and quantity instead of quality of outcomes, not measuring the impact, the list goes on.   We’ve become self-deluded that an LMS and a rapid elearning tool means you’re doing something worthwhile, when it’s profoundly wrong.  L&D needs a revolution. 4. What technologies will have the greatest impact on learning in the next decade? Why? The short answer is mobile.  Mobile is the catalyst for change. So many other technologies go through the hype cycle: initial over-excitement, crash, and then a gradual resurgence (c.f. virtual worlds), but mobile has been resistant for the simple reason that there’s so much value proposition.  The cognitive augmentation that digital technology provides, available whenever and wherever you are clearly has benefits, and it’s not courses!  It will naturally incorporate augmented reality with the variety of new devices we’re seeing, and be contextualized as well.  We’re seeing a richer picture of how technology can support us in being effective, and L&D can facilitate these other activities as a way to move to a more strategic and valuable role in the organization.  As above, also new tracking and analysis tools, and social networks.  I’ll add that simulations/serious games are an opportunity that is yet to really be capitalized on.  (There are reasons I wrote those books :) 5. What new skills will professionals need to develop to support learning in the future? As I wrote (PDF), the new skills that are necessary fall into two major categories: performance consulting and interaction facilitation.  We need to not design courses until we’ve ascertained that no other approach will work, so we need to get down to the real problems. We should hope that the answer comes from the network when it can, and we should want to design performance support solutions if it can’t, and reserve courses for only when it absolutely has to be in the head. To get good outcomes from the network, it takes facilitation, and I think facilitation is a good model for promoting innovation, supporting coaching and mentoring, and helping individuals develop self-learning skills.  So the ability to get those root causes of problems, choose between solutions, and measure the impact are key for the first part, and understanding what skills are needed by the individuals (whether performers or mentors/coaches/leaders) and how to develop them are the key new additions. 6. What will learning look like in the year 2024? Ideally, it would look like an ‘always on’ mentoring solution, so the experience is that of someone always with you to watch your performance and provide just the right guidance to help you perform in the moment and develop you over time. Learning will be layered on to your activities, and only occasionally will require some special events but mostly will be wrapped around your life in a supportive way.  Some of this will be system-delivered, and some will come from the network, but it should feel like you’re being cared for in the most efficacious way. In closing, I note that, unfortunately,my Revolution book and the Manifesto were both driven by a sense of frustration around the lack of meaningful change in L&D. Hopefully, they’re riding or catalyzing the needed change, but in a cynical mood I might believe that things won’t change near as much as I’d hope. I also remember a talk (cleverly titled: Predict Anything but the Future :) that said that the future does tend to come as an informed basis would predict with an unexpected twist, so it’ll be interesting to discover what that twist will be.

In other fields of endeavors, there is a science behind the approaches.  In civil engineering, it’s the properties of materials.  In aviation, it’s aeronautical engineering.  In medicine, it’s medical science.  If you’re going to be a professional in your field, you have to know the science.  So, two questions: is there a science of learning, and is it used.  The answers appear to be yes and no.  And yet, if you’re going to be a learning designer or engineer, you should know the science and be using it. There is a science of learning, and it’s increasingly easy to find.  That’s the premise behind the Serious eLearning Manifesto, for instance (read it, sign it, use it!).  You could read Julie Dirksen’s Design for How People Learn as a very good interpretation of the science.  The Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center is compiling research to provide guidance about learning if you want a fuller scientific treatment.  Or read Bransford, et al’s summary of the science of How People Learn, a very rich overview.  And Hess & Saxberg’s recent Breakthrough Leadership in the Digital Age: Using Learning Science to Reboot Schooling is both a call for why and some guidance on how. Among the things we know are that rote and abstract information isn’t retained, knowledge test doesn’t mean ability to do, getting it right once doesn’t mean it’s known, the list goes on.  Yet, somehow, we see elearning tools like ‘click to learn more’ (er, less), tarted up quiz show templates to drill knowledge, easy ways to take content and add quizzes to them, and more.  We see elearning that’s arbitrary info dump and simplistic knowledge test.  Which will have a negligible impact on anything meaningful. We’re focused on speed and cost efficiencies, not on learning outcomes, and that’s not professional.  Look, if you’re going to do design, do it right.   Anything less is really malpractice!