Learnlets
Clark Quinn's Learnings about Learning
(The Official Quinnovation blog)

I ranted a couple of weeks ago about how we need to move out of our complacency and make a positive change.  As I sometimes do, I stumbled upon a diagram that characterizes the type of change I think we need to be considering.

The perspective riffs off of the concept of the relative value of formal versus informal learning methods shift as performers move from novice to expert. (And, as I’ve previously noted, what’s considered in/formal changes depending on if you’re the performer or designer.)  And, too often, we tend to restrict our interventions to the formal side, yet there are lots of things we can be doing on the informal side.

Largely, however, I see learning and development (L&D) groups as focusing exclusively on novices, or to beginning practitioners, and leaving practitioners and experts on their own.  Even if they’re addressing these more advanced audiences, they tend to use the ‘course’ as the vehicle, when it’s not really  necessary.  These audiences know what they need to know, and just want that useful information, they don’t need the full preparation that novices do.  Novices don’t know what they need to know nor why it’s important, so we provide all that in a course model.  We can be much more telegraphic to advanced performers, and the value of social networks starts kicking in here too.

The point I’m trying to make is that we can, and should, take responsibility for the rest of the performers. We can assist their performance, hence the term we’ve been preferring in the Internet Time Alliance: performance consultant.  This implies facilitating performance across the organizational roles, top to bottom and from beginner to expert.

I’d like to suggest that L&D groups need to become focused on facilitating organizational performance, which includes but is not limited to training.  It’s going to benefit the organization, it’s going to lead to greater strategic contributions and associated value, and it’s an approach that will likely preclude a long slow march to irrelevance and extinction.  Better the folks that understand how we learn and perform (and if you don’t, what are you waiting for?) take responsibility than having it devolve by default to business units and/or IT, eh?

#itashare

A colleague recently queried: “How would you support that Jeopardy type games (Quizzes, etc.) are not really games?”  And while I think I’ve discussed this before, I had a chance to noodle on it on a train trip.  I started diagramming, and came up with the following characterization.

I separated out two dimensions. The first  is differentiating between knowledge and skills.  I like how Van Merriënboer talks about the knowledge you need and the complex problems you apply that knowledge to.  Here I’m separating ‘having’ knowledge from ‘using’ knowledge, focusing on application.  And, no surprise, I’m very much on the side of using, or doing, not just knowing.

The second dimension is whether the learning is essentially very true to life, or exaggerated in some way.  Is it direct, or have we made some effort to make it engaging?

Now, for rote knowledge, if we’re contextualizing it, we’re making it more applied (e.g. moving to the skills side), so really what we have to do is use extrinsic motivation.  We gamify knowledge test (drill and kill) and make it into Jeopardy-style quiz shows.   And while that’s useful in very limited circumstances, it is not what we (should) mean by a game.  Flashy rote drill, using extrinsic motivation, is a fall-back, a tactic of last resort.  We can do better.

What we should mean by a game is to take practice scenarios and focus on ramping up the intrinsic motivation, tuning the scenario into a engaging experience.  We can use tools like exaggeration, humor, drama, and techniques from game design, literature, and more, to make that practice more meaningful.  We align it with the learners interests (and vice-versa), making the experience compelling.

Because, as the value chain suggests, tarting up rote knowledge (which is useful if that’s what we need, and sometimes it’s important, e.g. medical terminology) is better than not, but not near as valuable as real practice via scenarios, and even better if we tune it into a meaningful experience.  Too often we err on the side of knowledge instead of skills, because it’s easy, because we’re not getting what we need from the SME, because that’s what our tools do, etc, but we should be focusing on skills, because that’s what’s going to make a difference to our learners and ultimately our organizations.

What we should do is be focusing on better able to do, moving to the skill side. Tarted up quiz shows are not really games, they’re simplistic extrinsic response trainers.  Real, serious, games translate what Sid Maier said about games – “a series of interesting decisions” – into a meaningful experience: a series of important decisions.  Practicing those are what will make the difference you care about.

In thinking about how organizations can ‘learn’, it strikes me that everyone needs to be simultaneously learning and teaching.  How does that happen?  I think it can be scaffolded, but it may also be an inherent trait.

A number of us are talking more about working out loud: Jane Bozarth and Harold Jarche talk about ‘narrating your work’, while I go on about ‘thinking out loud’ and ‘learning out loud’.  The point is capitalizing on the benefits that come from putting your thoughts out: people can give you feedback, helping you learn; and folks can learn from you.

And, as I’ve said before, conversations are the engine of business. You need to be interacting to be advancing.

The recent story of Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo, struck me as an interesting case.  Here she’s bringing in folks who’ve been working remotely, or to put it another way she’s not allowing telecommuting any more. While there are obvious downsides, I can think of two justifications for that step:

• to get everyone back on the same page in regards to mission and vision
• to have folks sharing more

Both of these would be good outcomes for Yahoo.  And I can see in both cases that it could be temporary: once you get the mission message shared, and have developed a culture of and infrastructure for sharing, folks could then again work from where they want.  Of course, I have no idea whether that will actually happen.

The interesting thing for me was to contemplate those folks who don’t share.  What to do?  I know of folks who are happy to sit at home and do their job, and aren’t necessarily interested in the larger picture.  What do you do? Sometimes these folks have useful skills.  And they may have their own methods of keeping up to date.  But if they’re not sharing, not contributing, what’s the overall picture?

And the thought occurred to me that those are folks that you bring in as contractors or consultants, but not as employees.  Particularly in the case of a ‘no fire’ policy, who do you want on board?  It seems to me that the employees you want are the ones who are continually learning and contributing to the organization’s overall knowledge.

Sure, there’s lots more you’d have to get right: safety to speak out loud, tolerating diversity, openness to new ideas, but having folks who are willing to learn together seems to me to be one criteria for an organization that will thrive.

So, is this a plausible component of a hiring policy?  Those who demonstrably narrate their work are the ones to attract, develop, and reward?

#itashare

In thinking about the coherent organization, a couple of realizations occurred to me.  One is about how those layers actually are replicated at different levels. The other is how those levels need to be aligned in the organization to the overall vision.

For one, those work teams can be at any level. There will be work teams at the level that the work gets done, but there’ll also be work teams at the management and even executive levels.  Similarly, there are communities of practice at all these levels as well.  Even the top level executives can be members of several communities, including as executives of their org, but also with their peers at other orgs.

Moreover, at each of these levels they need to be tapping into what’s happening outside the organization, and tracking the implications for what they do.  They need to feed back out as well (of course, not their proprietary information).

The two way flow of information has to be in and out as well as up and down.  Communication, for both collaboration and cooperation, is key.

A second necessary component is alignment.  Those groups, at every level, need to be working in alignment with the broader organization’s goals, and vision.  When Dan Pink talks about the elements of motivation in Drive, the 3rd element, purpose, is about knowing what you’re doing and why it’s important.  So organizations have to be clear about what they’re about, and make sure everyone knows how they fit. Then you can provide autonomy and the paths to mastery (the other two elements) and get people working from intrinsic motivation.

The integrated focus on communication and alignment are two keys to developing the ability to continually innovate, and cope in the increasing complexity which will make or break an organization.  That’s how it seems to me.

#itashare

The API formerly known as Tin Can provides a consistent way to report individual activity. With the simple syntax of <who> <did> <this> (e.g. <Clark Quinn> <wrote> <a blog post>), systems can generate records across a wide variety of activity, creating a rich base of data to mine for contingencies that lead to success. While machine learning and analytics is one opportunity, there’s another, which is having people look at the data.  And one person in particular.

As background, I was fortunate back in 1989 to get a post-doctoral fellowship to study at the Learning Research & Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh.  One of the projects that had been developed was a series of intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) that shared an unusual characteristic.  Unlike most ITS, which tutor on the domain, these three systems crossed domains (geometric optics, microeconomics, and electrical circuits, if memory serves) but the tutoring was about the systematicity in exploration. That is, the system tracked and intervened on whether you were varying one variable at a time, ensuring your data sampling was across a broad enough range of data points, etc.  This reflected work done by the Valerie Shute and Jeffery Bonar some years before on your learning strategies.

I had the further benefit to work under the guidance of Leona Schauble, a very insightful researcher.  One of her projects was with Kalyani Raghavan on working to make the learners’ paths in these systems visible and comprehensible to the learner, and they created the Dynamic And Reflective Notation (DARN, heh!) to capture and represent those paths.

Fast forward to today, and one of the big opportunities I see is for performers to reflect on their own paths of action. The granularity at which Tin Can can capture data, and systems might be instrumented to generate data, could be too small to be useful, so some way of aggregating activity to a reasonable level would be necessary, but looking at one’s own paths, and perhaps others, would be a useful way to reflect on process and look for opportunities to improve.

Reflection on action is a powerful learning and improvement process, but recollection isn’t as good as actual recording.  The power of working out loud is really seen when those tracks are left for examination.  The API has the opportunity to support more than system mining (“oh look, everyone who has this responsibility who touches this resource does way better than those who don’t”). Not that there’s anything wrong  with that, but having performers do it too is a great opportunity not to be missed. As the work on protein folding has found, some patterns are better for computer solution, and others for human. We’d be remiss if we didn’t explore the opportunities to be found.

“Education over the Internet is going to be so big it is going to make email usage look like a rounding error.” – John Chambers, CEO of Cisco

This bold pronouncement of John Chambers a number of years ago hasn’t really played out as promised.  I would argue that elearning has begun to grow, what with the rise of online education and the recent interest in MOOCs.  And if we take a performance ecosystem view of elearning, including performance support and social, we can begin to think much more broadly about the relationship.  I don’t think John thought of self-learning via Google or YouTube, or learning together via LinkedIn and Twitter, but if we give him the benefit of the doubt, we can begin to think that elearning may be of a substantial bulk in proportion to email, though not yet rounding error size.

However, I want to consider another elearning view that could propose such a relationship.  If we take a performance ecosystem view of mobile, we may well have that sort of ratio.  Think about it, mobile can claim large numbers around:

• people with mobile phones who have no email or real internet, but voice and text messages give them reach
• using and/or sharing photos or videos for help
• accessing the internet through their phones to learn and perform
• using apps to help them do things, calculating things, supporting their performance
• connecting to social networks on a variety of platforms: FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn, …
• people using context-sensitive apps to solve problems where they are and tell them what’s around
• the growth in all the above

If we consider all those (and using mobile devices for email :) we actually come up with a pretty big number!  We use mobile personally to learn and perform better in increasing ways, and we’ll start doing it more and more for work as well.  In this way, mobile learning performance is becoming the massive shift that will make email seem like a rounding error. And that is big.

Attending the SolutionsFest at the Learning Solutions conference last week, despite my earlier rant, I saw signs of hope.  A quick spot check revealed a number of approaches going above and beyond.

One direction I was pleased to see was a move to more performance support. I saw several solutions that were more focused on providing information as needed, or letting you  navigate to it, rather than thinking everything had to be ‘in the head’. This is definitely a promising sign.  They’re not hard to build, either.

The second promising sign was the use of scenarios. Several different solutions were focused on putting learners into contexts and asking them to perform. This is definitely the direction we need to see more of.  And, again, it’s not that hard to do!

One interesting takeaway was that the innovative solutions seemed to come more from small or internal groups rather than the big teams.  Which only reinforces my overall concern with the industry as a whole.  I wonder if it’s easier for small teams to adapt to advice of folks like Michael Allen (no more boring elearning), Julie Dirksen (Design for How People Learn) and Will Thalheimer than it is for big teams, who not only have to change processes but also educate their customers.

This is an unscientific sample; I did a quick tour of the displays, but couldn’t see all as there were some that were just too crowded.  I also looked at them relatively briefly and didn’t make comprehensive notes, so this is just a read of my state of mind as I finished.  It doesn’t ameliorate the overall concern, but it does provide some hope that things are changing in small pockets.

Of late, I’ve seen a disturbing trend.  Not only are the purveyors of existing solutions preaching caution and steadiness, but it even seems like some of the  ’names’ of the field are talking in ways that make it easy to think that the industry is largely doing ok.  And I do not understand this, because it’s demonstrably wrong.  The elearning industry, and the broader learning industry, is severely underperforming the potential (and I’m being diplomatic).

We know what leads to effective learning outcomes.  And we’ve known it for decades (just because MOOCs are new doesn’t mean their pedagogies are): clear models, annotated examples, and most importantly deep and meaningful practice focused on significant skill shifts (let alone addressing the emotional side of the equation).  Learners need to perform, repeatedly, with guidance, over more and more complex contexts until they achieve the level of performance they need.  However, that’s no where near what we’re seeing.

What we see are knowledge dump/test tarted up with trivial interactions.  People will pass a test, but they will not have achieved the ability to affect any meaningful business outcomes.  If it’s knowledge that performers need, create a job aid, not a ‘spray and pray’.  And facilitate people in self-helping.  As things get more complex and moving faster, there’s no way everything can be kept up with by new course development, even if it were a useful approach, and mostly it’s not.

We’re even measuring the wrong things.  Cost per seat hour is secondary (at best).  That’s ‘fine-tuning’, not the core issue.  What’s primary is business impact.  Are you measurably improving key performance indicators as outcomes?

And that’s assuming courses are all the learning unit should be doing, but increasingly we recognize that that’s only a small proportion of what makes important business outcomes, and increasingly we’re recognizing that the role needs to move from instructional designer to performance consultant.  More emphasis can and should be on providing performance resources and facilitating useful interactions rather than creating courses.  Think performance support first, and communities of practice, only resorting to courses as a last result.

Tools that make turning Powerpoint presentations into page-turning content aren’t going to fix this, nor are tools that provide prettified drill-and-kill, nor ones that let you host and track courses.  There are places for those, but they’re not the bulk of the opportunity, and shouldn’t be the dominant solutions we see. There’s so much more: deeply engaging scenarios and simulation-driven interactions on the formal side, powerful job aid tools for performance support (particularly mobile), coaching and mentoring as a better solution than courses in many (most) cases, performer-focused portals of tools, underlying powerful content management suites, and rich social environments to support performers making each other smarter and more effective.

I’m not quite sure why the easy tools dominate the expo halls, except perhaps because anyone can build them.  More worrisome is that it can let designers off the hook in terms of thinking deeper.  We need to focus first on rich outcomes, and put the tools secondary.

While the industry congratulates itself on how they make use of the latest technology, the lack of impact is leading a drive to irrelevancy.  Learners tolerate the courses, at best.  Operations groups and others are beginning to focus on the performance solutions available.  Executives are beginning to hear a message that the old approach is a waste of resources.

Hiding your head in the sand isn’t going to cut it. The industry is going to have to change.  And that means you will have to change.  But you’re a professional in learning, right?  So lead the way.  The best way to change is to take that first step.

Yvonne Camus closed the conference with a stirring talk on success under extreme circumstances as an Eco-challenge winner.

Daniel Coyle gave a wonderfully funny, passionate, and poignant keynote, talking about what leads to top performance. Naturally, I was thrilled to hear him tout the principles that I suggest make games such a powerful learning environment: challenge, tight feedback, and large amounts of engaging practice. With compelling stories to illustrate his points, he balanced humor and emotional impact to sell a powerful plea for better learning.