Learnlets
Clark Quinn's Learnings about Learning

Many years ago, Australia reached their farflung learners via the School of the Air.  While they’ve now moved to internet technologies,this post on the mobile talks at the eLearning Africa conference reactivated and extended some thoughts.

In the course of  interviews for the mobile book, Bob Sanregret of Hot Lava (now part of Outstart) mentioned some work they were involved in preloading safe sex information on mobile phones for sale.  This idea is intriguing, because it avoids download issues and data plans, but still ensures that the opportunity is there for elearning content.  And, the content does not have to be voluminous, but instead the smaller and more focused the better.

I’ve been sensitized to international mobile issues from a variety of channels. I had the pleasure to meet Inge de Waard, has been active in using mobile learning in developing countries, and served as a reviewer on a draft of the mobile book.  I have been contacted about using mobile learning to support health learning in Arab countries and India.  I was asked about the killer mobile application for a high-speed network in Taiwan as well.  I’ve also heard the stories of empowerment that come from eliminating the middleman in grain sales in India.  All told, there are considerable issues in distribution of devices, and the cost of and uptake of data services, in many locales.

The interesting issue in the post is how to use mobile devices to support learning. One of my points, and I’ll point to David Metcalf’s book mLearning as the progenitor of the idea that mLearning is really about augmentation: augmentation of formal learning and augmentation of performance.  While it might be feasible to deliver a small full course (a learnlet :) on a smartphone, trying to do so on a regular cellphone would be problematic.  Delivering adequate learning resources could be difficult. Instead, the question would more likely be about how to blend mobile devices and any other resources, and what those resources could be.

Looking at the device side, internet access is dicey. I think it was Bob who told me that there hasn’t been a cellphone sold in the US in the past 2 years that doesn’t have a browser built into it (and I remember an earlier stat that 75% had them, and 75% of owners didn’t know they  had them).  However, data services might not be practical for either availability or cost issues.  What is available, reliably, is voice and SMS (text messages). This, then, becomes the channel.

The reason I was reminded of the School of the Air is that they augmented correspondence materials with shortwave radio.  What could be done, then, is to augment print materials with voice. However, the quantity of learners in remote Australian areas was small, and I think the developing world has a larger scale of need.  This suggests programmatic solutions, whether voice or SMS.  Text might be simpler in a response format, though voice could work through the keypad as well.

The problem, of course, would be the distribution of materials. One of the interesting mentions in the post is how they’re using radio to deliver content, and then other technologies to support conversation. This is an intriguing intermediate, and of course television could be used if feasible, as could mail delivery of magazines or texts.  There’s another possibility, too.

If learning is meaningful activity resourced with content and scaffolded with reflection, then maybe there’s a simplification.  Typically, we create artificial activities and supplement with rich resources since the learning activity isn’t contextually valid.  Perhaps if we could use the learner’s own environment as a source of activity we could use streamlined resource materials.  That’s the type of model I talked about in an article (PDF) a number of years ago, where I suggested we could identify the learner’s context, learning goals, and available content as a basis for intervention.

The idea is that rules governing the matching (by categorically, semantically, not hand-wired, ideally) of learner to content can create a custom learning experience.  While ideally there would be some social network as part of this (and using distance technologies like voice and SMS can accomplish this, as the article recounted at least in the case of SMS), we can create a successful learning experience for an individual.

I admit I’m not certain about having appropriate activities for individual standard K12 learning, but it’s a goal, and then we can approximate with content and designed activities.  It’s a step towards the goal I’m trying to find about taking an architecture like the diagram, and finding a flexible and powerful pedagogy that can distribute learning across our activity and life.

It’s been quite a while since I’ve blogged, and it’s not that there haven’t been learnings, it’s just that my dance card was too too full.  What with conferences, a week of radical fever, the mobile book manuscript coming due, and a week off in the woods, not to mention a full load of client work, it’s just been crazy here around the Quinnstitute.  I intend to get more organized, but let me toss off a c0uple of quick thoughts that may get elaborated more soon:

Mobile

The eLearning Guild‘s mLearnCon event was fabulous (as their events always are).  It was small and intimate, but with a palpable sense of excitement.  As I’ve mentioned before, I really think mobile is poised to be a revolution that will fundamentally affect how we use technology to support organizational performance. The conference reinforced that viewpoint significantly, with capabilities being expanded seemingly daily.

The key affordances mean you have computational power to augment your ability to do wherever and whenever you are, and that’s a big win.  Being able to do Personal Knowledge Management at the time of inspiration or need, or even of convenience, is huge.  Having your social network on tap on demand really augments your ability to work more effectively.

In short, doing mobile right means you’re more capable than without, and that’s a clear opportunity.  How do you make yourself smarter with your mobile device?

Social

The ongoing debates around social media for learning flummox me.  How can you not see that social augments formal learning (Jane Bozarth has a whole new book on the topic) as well as provides new opportunities for informal learning and performance support? Maybe you have to be ‘in it’ to get it, but then, get in it.

This is not to say that formal learning needs social learning, but rather that it supports it in many meaningful ways.  It’s also not to say it’s the only tool for meaningful performance support, but it’s a powerful one.  It’s certainly the necessary backbone for collaboration, inherently, but there’s also the somewhat ephemeral but valuable interpersonal contact, not just the information.

For example, Twitter has been a great source of information through the links people provide to interesting material, and in the ability to get questions answered. However, you can go further, as we have with #lrnchat.  There’re people I’ve met there that I’m eager to meet in person now that I know them on twitter, but even prior to that it’s valuable to have got to know them.

If you’re not already using chat (w/ or w/o video, e.g Skype), Twitter or equivalent, Facebook and/or LinkedIn, Google Docs, etc, you really do need to get that experience going to really understand the opportunities.

Business changes

It becomes ever clearer that the old way of doing business, even enlightened versions, are just not going to cut it.  The evidence mounts.  A compelling article I was pointed to today points out how and why incentives and management are contrary to optimal performance.  What the article doesn’t do, of course, is help you figure out how to make the switch.

In talking with my Internet Time Alliance colleagues, we see that you need to provide infrastructure, develop skills, modify culture, and scaffold transition.  This isn’t easy, but it’s doable.  The article cites a number of examples.  However, incrementalism doesn’t cut it, it takes a serious commitment to change.

It’s early days, but I reckon it’s time to get a jump on it. Those companies that have made the switch are seeing benefits, and I reckon that the increasing pressures will make it simply the only viable survival strategy.

Escape

I can speak first hand to the value of time away.  There is the conscious reflection, like the thoughts I want to solve that I key up before a shower or a jog, and then there’s just ‘off’ time to let things ferment on their own (I prefer fermentation to percolation or incubation since I like the outcome more).  And, if you do it right, there are side benefits.

Serendipitously, after putting the manuscript to bed for the mobile book, we were scheduled with some wilderness time. I’d booked two days of ‘meals only’ at Yosemite’s Glen Aulin High Sierra Camp, and a night at Tuolomne Meadows Lodge two nights before.  My intention was to spend one night in the wilderness on the way to the HSC, giving the lad and lass their experience of actually having to pump water and cook your own food in the wilderness.  This is part of a strategy to get them into the wilderness experience with a maximum amount of experience and an appropriate amount of effort (previously we’d twice done the 1 mile hike into May Lake HSC for meals-only, with them carrying their clothes and our superlight down bags).

Despite a hiccup that turned serendipitous (we had to take a longer route in, but it turned out to be a much less mosquito-laden trail), we had a great time. The kids had to push through a mental barrier or two each at times, but both succeeded and commented on the view and the experience positively.  The Grand Canyon of the Tuolomne is truly a spectacular spot, and Waterwheel Falls turned out as stunning as I had recalled.

The nice thing for me was being completely off the grid for 4 days. While I had my iPhone (used the GPS function a couple of time), I couldn’t get a signal and check email or twitter.  I put work essentially out of my mind and focused on family.  I came back feeling quite refreshed!  Actually, it’s hard to get back into work, but that’s ok too, as I’ll get back in gradually.

The take-home, of course, is to take some time with those significant in your life and get away from work completely.  Recharge your batteries, reflect, and have some fun!  Here’s hoping you are getting some ‘me’ time this summer.

Mimi Ito presented a deep social analysis of youth use of mobile devices to deliver four core unique mobile features.

Tomi Ahonen gave a very entertaining keynote here at the Guild’s mLearn Conference. Here’s my mind map:

It occurred to me for several reason to think about mobile from the perspective of affordances.  I’d done this before for virtual worlds, and it only seems right to do the same for mobile learning. So off to Graffle I went…

The core is portable processing power that is synced back into the environment.  On top of that, we can have ubiquitous connectivity, we can connect to sensors that can recognize the world (e.g. cameras) and our context (e.g. GPS), and we can design capabilities that provide us content and computations power.

From those, we can link the content presentation with connectivity to communicate with others, take that capture and reflect upon it or share with others for their support and mentorship, we can be connected with people in context for live support, and we can layer content upon the context as augmented reality.

These capabilities can be layered. So using interactive content could be mobile games.  When linked with augmented reality, we can start having alternate reality games.

This is a first cut, so I welcome feedback.  What am I confounding? What am I missing?

As I was booking my travel to San Diego for the eLearning Guild’s mLearning conference, mLearnCon (June 15-17), I thought about a conference focusing on mobile learning versus the regular, full, elearning conference or even a full training conference (congrats to Training magazine pulling a phoenix).  And I wondered how much this is a niche thing versus the whole deal.

Now, I don’t think all of everything needs to be pulled through a mobile device, but the realization I had is that these devices are going to be increasingly ubiquitous, increasingly powerful, and consequently will be the go-to way individuals will augment their ability to work. Similarly, increasingly, workers will be mobile.  Combining the two, it may be that support will be expected first on the personal device!  While the nature of the way the device will be used will differ, desktops for long periods of time, mobile devices for short access, the way most ‘support’ of tasks will occur will be via mobile devices.

That is, people will use their mobile devices to contact colleagues, look for answers, access materials and tools ‘in the moment’.  The benefits of desktops will be tools to do knowledge work, and there will be needs for information access, and colleague access, and collaboration, but increasingly we may want that when and where we want.

I’m thinking mobile could become the default target design, and desktop augments will be possible, versus the other way around.  While you might want a desktop for big design work where screen real estate matters.  For example, I’m designing diagrams on my iPad. I wouldn’t want to do it on my iPhone, but I am glad to take it with me in a smaller form-factor than a laptop.  I may take back and polish on the laptop, but my new performance ecosystem is more distributed.  And that’s the point.

Increasingly, we expect at least some access to our information wherever we are.  (Yes, there are some folks who still eschew a mobile phone. There are people who still avoid a computer, or even electricity!)   Mostly, however, we’re seeing people finding value in augmenting their capabilities digitally.  And so, maybe we increasingly need to view augmentation as the baseline, and dedicated capability as the icing on the cake for specialized work.

This may be too much, but I hope you’re seeing that mobile is more than just a niche phenomenon.  There are real opportunities on the table, and real benefits to be had. I’m surprised that it took so long, frankly, as I figured mobile was closer to ready-for-prime-time than virtual worlds. Now, however, while there are still compatibility problems, mobile really is ready to rock. Are you?

I’ve previously discussed the fight between Apple and Adobe about Flash (e.g. here), but I had a realization that I think is important.  What I was talking about before was the potential to create a market place beyond text, graphics, and media, and to start capitalizing on learning interactivity. What was needed was a cross-platform capability.

Which Apple is blocking, for interactivity.

Apple allows cross-platform media players, whether hyperdocs (c.f. Outstart, Hot Lava, and Hybrid Learning) and media (e.g. video and audio formats are playable). What they’re not is cross-platform for interactivity.

Now, I understand that Apple’s rabidly focused on the customer experience (I like the usability), and limiting development to content is a way to essentially guarantee a vibrant experience.  And I don’t care a fig about the claims about ‘openness’, which in both cases are merely a distraction.  Frankly, I haven’t missed Flash on my iPhone or iPad.  I hardly miss it on my browser (I have a Firefox extension that blocks it unless I explicitly open them, and I rarely use it; and I browse a lot)!

What I care about is that, by not supporting cross-platform programs that output code for different operating systems (OS), Apple is hurting a significant portion of the market.

I came to this thought from thinking about how companies should want to go beyond media to the next level. There will be situations where navigable content isn’t enough, and a company will want to provide interactivity, whether it’s a dynamic user order configuration tool, a diagnostic tool, or a learning simulation.  There are times when content or a web-form just won’t cut it.

Big companies can probably afford dedicated programming to make these apps come to life on more than one platform: Windows Mobile, WebOS, Blackberry OS, Android, and iPhone OS (they need a name for their mobile OS now that the iPad’s around: MacOSMobile?), but others won’t.

What are small to medium sized companies supposed to do? They’d like to support their mobile workers with smartphones regardless of OS, but when they’re that 1-few person shop, they aren’t going to have the development resources.  They might have a great idea for an app, and they probably have or can get a Flash programmer, but won’t have the capabilities to develop separately across platform. And no one’s convinced me that HTML 5 is going to bring the capability to even build Quest, let alone a training game with characteristics like Tips on Tap.

Worse, how about not-for-profits, or the education sector?  How are these small organizations, with limited budgets, supposed to expand the markets?  How can anyone develop an ability to transcend the current stranglehold of publishers on learning content?

Yes, the cross-platform developer might not carry the latest and greatest features of the OS forward, but they’re meeting real needs.  There are the ‘for market’ applications, and the pure content plays, but there’s a middle ground that is going to increasingly comprehend the potential, but be shut out of the opportunity because they can’t develop a meaningful solution for their limited market that just needs capability, not polish.

I get that Flash isn’t efficient.  I note that neither Adobe or Apple talk about their software development practices, so I don’t know whether either use some of the more trusted methods of good code development like agile programming, PSP & TSP, or refactoring, but I think that doesn’t matter.  While I think in the long run it would be to their advantage, I think that even a slow and even slightly buggy version of a needed app would be better received and more useful than none.

I don’t have the email address to lob this at Steve directly like some have, but I’d like to see if he can comprehend and address the issue for the people caught in the situation where delivering interactivity could mean anything from more small-to-medium enterprise success, to meeting a real need in the community, to lifting our children to a higher learning plane, but they don’t have much in the way of resources.

Quite simply, a cross-platform interactivity solution really doesn’t undermine the Apple experience (look at the Mac environment), as it’s likely to be a small market. Heck, brand it as a 2nd Class app or something, but don’t leave out those who might have a real need for an easy cross platform capability.

I’m curious: do you think that the ability to go beyond navigable content to interactivity in a cross-platform way could be useful to a serious amount of people in a lot of little different pockets of activity?

A while ago, I characterized the stages of web development as:

• Web 1.0: producer-generated content, where you had to be able to manage a server and work in obscure codes
• Web 2.0: user-generated content, where web tools allowed anyone to generate web content
• Web 3.0: system-generated content, where engines or agents will custom-assemble content for you based upon what’s known about you, what context you’re in, what content’s available, etc

It occurred to me that an analogous approach may be useful in thinking about interactivity.  To understand the problem, realize that there has been a long history of attempts to characterize different levels of interactivity, e.g. Rod Sims’ paper for ITFORUM, for a variety of reasons. More recently, interactivity has been proposed as a item to tag within learning object systems to differentiate objects.  Unfortunately, the taxonomy has been ‘low’, ‘medium’ and ‘high’ without any parameters to distinguish between them. Very few people, without some guidance, are going to want to characterize their content as ‘low’ interactivity.

Thinking from the perspective of mobile content, it occurred to me that I see 3 basic levels of interaction. One is essentially passive: you watch a video, listen to an audio, or read a document (text potentially augmented by graphics). This is roughly equivalent to producer-generated content.  The next level would be navigable content.  Most specifically, it’s hyper-documents (e.g. like the web), where users can navigate to what they want. This comes into play for me on mobile, as both static content and navigable content are easily done cross-platform.  I note that user-generated content through most web interfaces is technically beyond this level.

The next level is system-generated interaction, where what you’ve done has an effect on what happens next.  The web is largely state-independent, though that’s changing (e.g. Amazon’s mass-customization). This is where you have some computation going on in the background, whether it’s form processing or full game interaction.  And, this is where mobile falls apart.  Rich computation and associated graphics are hard to do.  Flash has been the lingua franca of online interactivity, supporting delivery cross-platform.  However, Flash hasn’t run well on mobile devices, it is claimed, for performance reasons.  Yet there is no other cross-platform environment, really.  You have to compile for each platform independently.

This analysis provides 3 meaningful levels of interactivity for defining content, and indicates what is currently feasible and what still provides barriers for mobile as well.  The mobile levels will change, perhaps if HTML 5 can support more powerful computation, interaction, and graphics, or if the performance problems (or perception thereof) go away.  Fingers crossed!

A post by Ellen Wagner got me thinking about what I’m really looking for in an interactivity solution.  She was bringing some clarity to the Adobe Flash – HTML 5 debate, pointing out that HTML 5 is not yet a standard, and emphasizing some moves by Adobe to make Flash more open.  Whether I agree or not, I realized my desire is not to choose one or the other, but instead it’s to find a solution!

The opportunity I’ve talked about before is a channel for publishers to move to a new era.  The title of my blog is learnlets, based upon a claim I made almost two decades ago: in the future there will be lots of small interactive learning experiences (learnlets) that will teach you anything you want to know, including how to make small interactive learning experiences.  That’s still a dream I have, but we’re now capable of realizing it, and there are some nuances that come from thinking about it in the current context.

Publishers produce books, but with the technology augments that they produce (ancillary or companion sites), they have most of the components needed to put meaningful problems (read: scenarios) in the mix and resource around those to create real learning experiences.  With a market channel for those learning experiences (something like an app store), where it could go out to anyone’s device (tablets would be ideal), individuals could develop their own learning path, and for formal education we’d remove the burden of books (it pains me to watch my kids lug their own weight in books off to school!) and lift the learning.

What’s necessary, besides the devices and the market (and we’re getting those) is a meaningful interactivity standard.  Flash has had performance issues, and HTML 5 may not be quite ready for prime time (and I have not yet been convinced of it’s ability to handle simulation-driven interactions).  I don’t really care which one ends up ‘winning’, I just want a standard that allows me to deliver static (e.g. text, graphics), dynamic (video/audio/animations), and interactive content in a package that I can download and interact with!  It doesn’t have to report back, we’d likely have other ways to assess outcomes (though reporting wouldn’t be a bad thing).

I think that if we can lift our learning design to match the quality of our devices, and have the market to deliver those learning experiences where and when desired, we’ll have the opportunity to lift ourselves to another level.

The Learning Circuits Blog Big Question of the Month for May is “What will workplace learning technology look like in 2015?”  This is a tough question for me, because I tend to see what could be the workplace tech if we really took advantage of the opportunities. Consequently, my predictions tend to be optimistic, as the real world has a way of not moving near as fast as one could wish.  Still, I actually prefer to think on what could be the possibilities, as it’s more inspiring.  Maybe I’ll answer both.

The opportunities on the table are immense.  Mobile technologies are taking off, we’re getting real power in technology standards (and still some hiccups), and we’re crossing boundaries between reality and virtual worlds.

Smartphones are on the rise, and new portable devices (e.g. tablets) are expanding the possibilities.  It’s highly plausible that we’ll have expanded the performance ecosystem to be location independent, and be providing the 4C’s in ways that allow powerful access, sharing, and collaboration.

Virtual worlds provide a different approach, where instead of augmenting reality, we’re re-contextualized in an artificial but enhanced space where capabilities that don’t exist in the real world are available to us.  We can build 3D models, communicate in micro or macro spaces (within molecules or between galaxies), and open up the hidden components of real spaces.  Again, we can leverage the 4C’s to go beyond courses to a fuller definition of learning.

This can be facilitated by standards.  If HTML 5 coalesces as it should, we can and should be delivering rich interactivity, not just content delivery.  Similarly, if we can move beyond ebook standards to capture interactivity, we can make easy marketplaces to deliver capability that is available regardless of connectivity. Virtual world standards are emerging too, and hopefully some convergence will have happened by 2015!

Also, if our backend systems progress as they can (and should), we should be able to move to Web 3.0 where instead of producers or users, the systems generate content.  We can use semantic technologies to do customized delivery of information, pulling together what we know about the learner (e.g. from a competency map or learning path), about the content available (from a content model), and their tasks (from a job role) and their current context (their location and what’s on their calendar) to serve up just the right information.

This is all possible.  What’s probable?  We’ll have seen major progress in mobile tools, whether companies wake up or it’s just individual initiative to accessorize the brain.  Virtual worlds will also be more prevalent, though not ubiquitous.  Social media systems will be much more integrated into the workflow, and LMS will have become just a cog in the ecosystem, not the ecosystem. The social media will be available whether you’re in-world, in the world, or at your desk.

Semantics, however, are likely to still be nebulous. People are beginning to take advantage of powerful content systems leveraging tagging and flexible delivery, but it’s still embryonic.  There’ll be more pockets, but it won’t be a groundswell yet.

I’m probably still be optimistic, but a guy can hope, and of course strive to make it so.  This is what I do and where I like to play. I welcome more playmates in this great playground of opportunity.