Learnlets
Clark Quinn's learnings about learning

We had quite the heated discussion today on a project I’m working on, and one of the emergent issues was whether ‘the expert’ dictates the objectives, or whether the developer could change them. I recognized that this is not only an issue in our process going forward (read: scalability), but it’s also a larger issue.

In this case, the design that was presented by the developer to the expert (this is a simplification, our team process is more complicated than this :) didn’t match the expert’s expectation. (This was an artifact of a bad choice of language at the beginning that confounded the issue.) However, the expert expected to present the objectives, and the game would be designed to achieve that objective. Which I would agree with, but with one caveat.

My caveat is two-fold. First, experts aren’t necessarily masters of learning. Second, they may not actually have access to the necessary objectives: expertise is ‘compiled’ and experts don’t necessarily know how they do what they do! (An outcome of cognitive science research, it’s something I talk about in my ‘deeper elearning’ talk and also my white paper on the topic, .pdf) In this case the experts will be instructors on the topic, so presumably they’re both aware of content and learning design, but we all know courses can be too much knowledge, not enough skill.

Now, as Sid Meier said, “a good game is a series of interesting decisions”, and my extension is that good learning practice is a series of important decisions. I claim that you can’t give me a learning objective I can’t make a game for, but I reserve the right to move the objective high enough (in a learning taxonomy sense). Similarly, I can see that an expert might bring in an objective that’s not appropriate for any number of reasons: too low a level, not something individuals would really have difficulty with, or not important in the coming years, and the developer might not recognize it as wrong from the point of view of domain expertise, but when mapping a game mechanic onto it would realize it’s wrong because it’s an uninteresting task (or they’re more closely tied to the audience, often being younger, more tech-savvy, etc).

So, I believe (and it’s been my experience) that there’s of necessity a dialog between the source of the domain knowledge, be it expert, professor, whatever, and the designer/developer/whatever. When it comes to objectives, once the expert understands the developer’s point, they do get the final say on the necessary task & skills, but they need to be open to the developer’s feedback and willing to work with them to produce a design that’s both effective and engaging. My book is all about why that’s a doable goal and how to, but in short the elements that make learning practice effective align perfectly with the elements that make an engaging interactive experience (and so say many authors, including Gee, Prensky, Aldrich, Johnson, Shaffer, the list goes on).

Similarly, the developer has to design the game experience around the objective, and while the expert may provide feedback about aesthetic preferences or information helping to establish the audience, at the end the developer has final say on the engagement. With good intentions all around, this will work (with bad intentions, it won’t work regardless :).

Which is, of course, where the team ended up, after an hour of raised voices and frustration. All’s well that ends well, I reckon. Are your experiences or expectations different?

I’m not quite sure how the eLearning Guild is publishing the forthcoming articles from their research reports, but I believe it is as part of the Learning Solutions magazine, and that’s certainly the case with this first piece. Ellen Wagner, a member of the mobile research team, has a major article, with a small piece by me that’s an expansion of my earlier thoughts on mobile web. You have to be a least an associate member to download it, but associate membership is free. I’ll add that I believe the Guild is probably the best way to keep up to date on practical applications of technology for learning.

Ellen’s article is a thoughtful look at mobile learning, covering the industry trends. She points out that people are equipped with mobile devices: “the mobile workers aren’t waiting”. She says that the classic top-down doesn’t make sense, and figuring out how to make a mobile learning module does; that is, just do it. On the other hand, she also says that “to have a shot at broad adoption, mobile learning applications must be an integrated part of a larger organizational vision for building capacity”. These aren’t as incommensurate as they may seem, as those in the trenches should begin experimenting with mLearning just as they did with eLearning, and at the same time managers and executives should be looking to the broader eLearning strategy incorporating mobile (as I regularly suggest).

She points out the barriers that still exist, so that even when we’re seeing essentially ubiquitous computational and network capability, we’re seeing incompatibility across providers and platforms. There are still technology barriers to cross, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t start thinking ‘mobile’. The reasons are many, including the increasingly mobile workforce. And she acknowledges the emerging consensus that mobile learning is really about performance support. That may not be the limit, but it’s certainly the low-hanging fruit.

I highly recommend her article, as Ellen’s been deeply involved in the world of content delivery through her recent stint as the eLearning guru at Adobe, and has experience and knowledge that puts her at the forefront of thinking in this space. It’s an honor to have my little piece in the same document as hers. (NB: mine is also available separately as well, PDF).  Check it out!

This month’s Learning Circuit’s Big Question of the Month is whether learning organizations should be leading the way in the use of Web 2.0 technologies. Or, to be more exact:

• Should workplace learning professionals be leading the charge around these new work literacies?
• Shouldn’t they be starting with themselves and helping to develop it throughout the organizations?
• And then shouldn’t the learning organization become a driver for the organization?
• And like in the world of libraries don’t we need to market ourselves in this capacity?

The short answer is yes, we (I’m assuming most of you are learning professionals) should be leading the way. It may seem like an odd locus for technology awareness, but it’s really about technology affordances for organizational effectiveness, not just new technology. That’s why it shouldn’t be IT, or operations, or engineering, because they’re focused on a task, not the meta-level look at how the task is being accomplished, can be improved, etc. And that’s the unique perspective that makes the learning organization the right instigator.

Learning folks have the perspective of looking at the performance needs of the organization, and are charged with helping people meet those needs, but that also gives the learning organization the opportunity to improve them. When it’s the product or servce, it’s the user experience group (that, ideally, gets in early in the design process), but internally, it’s the learning group.

Which means the learning organization can’t be just a training group, but that’s part of the strategic picture I’ve talked about elsewhere. The point being that to truly help an organization you have to move to a performance focus, moving people from novice, through practitioner, to expert, and giving them a coherent support environment. To do this, you need to know what’s available. And, consequently, the learning organization has to experiment with new technologies for it’s own internal workings to determine how and when to deploy them to organizational benefit.

To put it another way, if not the learning organization, then who? Of course, there’s the political perspective as well, demonstrating currency, but I’m more concerned about adding real value. Learning professionals need to know it, bring it to bear when it’s valuable (and skewer it when it’s not), and in general be seen not only knowing what’s what but also what’s hype.

Marketing is smart in general, but it’s not hype, it’s helping transition the perspective from a training group being an expendable cost-center to a learning capability that’s central to organizational effectiveness and performance. Which is where a learning organization should be, right?

Thanks to Harold Jarche, I tuned into this site, named for the first person to create a mall. Harold points out how it’s led to some negative reaction, but my reaction was hilarity. The site is for an Aussie telly show: “Each week two of the advertising industry’s finest agencies are pitted against each other and challenged with selling the unsellable.” The sample ads I saw were funny and effective, but what really struck me was a particular section of the site.

They’ve created a really clever web app. They provide some stock ad footage as clips for a beer, a bank, and a beauty creme, and the ability to create your own ads, with text, voiceover, or whatever. Of course, you can download the stuff and edit it with your own tools, as well. There’s a gallery, too, where what’s been created can be seen, and that’s where I was LOL.

What’s been created (at least, what I viewed) is wickedly funny, albeit occasionally crude and not Politically Correct ™ by any means. While I can see that advertising agencies might be upset, as Harold notes, there is an advertising lingo glossary and a list of ad roles which does a nice job of explaining the business and creative functions of agencies. You may know I’m interested in helping individuals buy smarter, and understanding advertising is a key.

What’s interesting is the underlying design.  By giving people differing views of the same situation, they allow people to choose how to put it together, and in doing so, they’ve given them the tools to understand.  Not that it’s guaranteed folks will learn about advertising by playing with it (tho’ clearly some have, demonstrating they’ve internalized the concepts by using the concepts to have fun), which is why we learned that we need guided discovery environments unless you can guarantee motivated and effective self-learners, but scaffolded tools are a great start to a learning experience.

So, if you’re looking for some entertaining and educational fun, have a look at the Gruen site.

In an article I was reading, they mentioned how Patagonia was tracking the environmental footprint of some of their products. The point they made, however, was that doing this was part of their ongoing experimentation/research that they were publicizing to get others to join in towards making this a more sustainable world (my inference). The phrase they used that intrigued me was the quote that they were “learning out loud”.

One of the reasons it intrigued me was that I realized that what I’m doing with Learnlets is indeed ‘learning out loud’. But I hadn’t really reflected on what that could mean, and I think there are some really interesting opportunities here. First, by learning explicitly, we can reflect on our own learning processes, looking at how we learn, essentially initiating double-loop learning.

Second, others can watch us learn, and learn with us. They can also learn to learn. Learning together, we can learn more effectively. I think this is a critical component of the Work Literacy movement looking at how to improve at work; they’re making their thinking explicit and asking for participation.

One of the Big Questions was Should All Learning Professionals Blog, and I replied. My answer then was that all should reflect, and I’ll add now that doing it publicly (blog or otherwise) is an opportunity to have others participate and even add value. Yes, there’s a risk involved, but I’ll suggest you throw ego to the wind, and take a chance on greater learning.

So I’ll keep on learning out loud, and hope to hear you, too. Let’s learn together; better, and have more fun doing it.

…when you’re up to your, er, backside in projects (paraphrasing the old alligators/swamp draining story).  It’s been a whirlwind week or so, and this is an apology of sorts for the lack of blogging. Several projects are getting busy at the same time, and we also took a trip south to see family. It’s hard to be reflective when you’re just trying to keep the wheels on.

The trip itself was a whirlwind; we had to be flexible (”willows, blowing in the wind” as my wife kept saying) to accommodate other folks plans and the extreme heat. We were making hotel reservations on the fly, night by night pretty much, and shuffling folks around trying to get people together. However, the kids got to play with their cousins, and we managed to make all the important connections (with the caveat that we missed my brother and one of his kids, as they were overseas at the time we had to come down). Saturday was ‘water play’ day; even though we’ve got water restrictions here in California, it was also too hot to go anywhere, so we got a slip-n-slide and some water guns. Note: it’s never too late to have a happy childhood, as I’ve how had the slip-n-slide experience I never got to try when I was young!

Work’s also blazing along. I had a couple of conference calls while we were on the road (not the easiest), and didn’t make much progress on projects ranging from online learning to corporate elearning strategy. Now it’s catch up time. The good thing is that together with my various partners on the projects, I think we’re adding real value to the organizations we are assisting.

Still, while various thoughts have crossed my mind, nothing’s coalesced sufficiently that I’ve been able to post, and it’s hard to justify the time away from pressing needs. Which is the case everyone faces, I know, but it’s important to take time to reflect. And I have, but it’s been about specific projects and taking a larger picture on them, which typically is not appropriate here (too specific, and of course confidential).

Still, lots of thoughts are percolating, and you can expect more soon. Hope your summer is fun and productive!

Don’t ask how my thoughts got here, but I was reflecting on the fact that the western economy is largely predicated on a free market (whether we truly achieve that is a different rant). Which, to work properly, needs consumers to be ‘optimizing’. That is, for the free market to drive improvements and fair prices, people have to vote effectively with their dollars.

Which isn’t the case. Herb Simon, the polymath who won a Nobel Prize in economics before becoming one of the world’s top cognitive scientists, coined the term ’satisficing’ for consumer behavior. That is, folks will settle for what’s good enough. Worse, they’ll settle for how they’ve been manipulated (read: advertising).

My proof is simple (though it works better in Australia where there’s more comprehension of the example): if market pressures worked, every fish and chips shop in Australia would make perfectly light, crispy fish and chips. I mean, we know what it takes to do that. Instead, it’s real easy to find greasy, soggy fish and mealy fries. Someone is buying that fish! QED.

Which is why one of the serious games I’d really like to do is have the player try to succeed in an advertising agency. (Thought I’d written about this before but couldn’t find it. Apologies if I have.) Such a game would help folks understand just how advertising works and ideally help folks become more resistant to it.

But there’s more. I suggest (educated and interested amateur speaking) that our current system doesn’t truly allow for tracking individual contributions (or good teachers would be wealthy :). There are economic systems that do this tracking, but to my understanding, the overhead is unwieldy and ultimately impractical. So, rather than try to change the system, my simple answer is to educate folks (hence my passion for learning).

Where my thinking led me was to a ‘buy smart’ campaign. I wonder what we could do if we just managed to get profile to the message that folks should research the bigger picture of your purchase: looking at maintainability, repair, longevity, ideally also including environmental and social impact (can’t help it, I’m a wilderness person :). The more we look for the right choice, not just the easy or popular choice (extraneous of the immediate price pressures we’re currently seeing), the more we end up matching the assumptions of the economic system we are using. And that’s got to be better, right?

I guess it’s just that same wisdom schtick again, thinking longer term and with broader responsibilities. Yet, I can’t help thinking raising awareness could be a small step toward a better future. You think?

I now get an occasional request from some educational organization or initiative, where they tell me about something or point me to it, and then suggest (or request) that I blog it. I generally don’t. I also get offers to link to someone educational, and they’ll return the favor. I haven’t done this, ever.

Why? First, because this site isn’t about creating a money stream (at least, not directly). This blog is about my personal learnings about learning, so unless there’s something I think is interesting or illuminating, I have nothing to communicate. It may keep this blog more ‘esoteric’, but that’s what I believe is the value proposition.

It’s also, to be perfectly honest, a way to let you know my thinking in case it’s of interest to you personally or professionally, and in the later case it’s inherently a form of marketing, but marketing for me, my thinking, and my capabilities. I haven’t thought about monetizing it, in that I haven’t considered putting ads on (not even sure how I’d do that ;).

It does mean that unfortunately there are times when I’m a little slow to keep posting, like when I’m on the road, busy, or on vacation, but that’s the tradeoff. No promises that things won’t change, but I do intend that any changes will be to make a more interesting and informative experience.  That work for you, or do you have some other suggestions?

With the caveat that I’m one of the speakers, I’d like to bring the eLearning Guild’s upcoming Summer Seminar Series to your attention. They’ve put together two back-to-back seminars that cover the latest trends.

The two seminars cover social networking, and serious games. The first seminar is led by Mark Oehlert and Brent Schenkler, who not only are fun, dynamic, individuals, but are totally into new tools. And that’s a good thing, because they’re insightful and articulate about the role these new technologies can play in organizational improvement. I track both their blogs just to keep up with what’s happening in these arenas. I’ll get to kibbitz (and learn), but they’re the two leaders of this session.

Which leaves Jeff Johannigman and myself to lead the second workshop on serious games, ILS, etc. Jeff’s got a commercially-validated track record of successful games and a consequent insight into how to create compelling experiences, and provides the perfect foil for my focus on the learning side. Of course, he’s now focused on learning, so we’ve got enough overlap to make this fun (we’ve co-presented before on games at the ILS symposium at the last Guild conference). I expect Mark and Brent will likewise kibbitz on the side in this one. We’ll augment some of the best parts of my workshop on ILS design with his insights on game design, as well as covering issues of development, corporate relevance, etc.

If you can’t tell, I’m excited about this series! I think that together, they cover some important components of acheiving the performance ecosystem: advanced ID and eCommunity. Being run by the eLearning Guild, of which I’m a fan because they do such a good job of providing value for money just reinforces the expectations that the experience will be worthwhile. So, if you’re looking to get in-depth on either topic, or better yet both, this is a great opportunity. Set your calendars for August 11-14, and definitely hope to see you there!

On Gamasutra (the game developers site), there’s an article that uses the new release of Dungeons and Dragons to inspire thoughts about improving games. What I want to note is the following quote, which nicely captures what I try to tell attendees at my game design workshop:

Being inspired by concepts is not just a good idea. When your skill reaches a high enough level, it becomes a state of mind. Start by analyzing games in similar genres for good ideas. Dissect those ideas and learn from them. Then jump to similar games in different genres. Pen and paper role playing games and board games are a great next step.

A true epic-level master of concept-yoinking like Shigeru Miyamoto can take gameplay features from abstract activities like gardening. Pay attention to everything you see, from movies to conversations with friends to patterns in the ceiling tiles. Where do designers get the inspiration for new games? It’s all thievery.

I remember when Lewis & Reimann, in their online HCI text, said something to the effect of: ‘plagiarize, as far as your lawyers will let you’. The point being not to reinvent the wheel when there’re good examples out there already. You may be the da Vinci of game design, but it’s not the way to bet. Use tried and tested solutions from the world around you; you’ll have plenty of challenge integrating them into a coherent whole without having to reinvent genres.

What I tell my learners is that they have a new, onerous responsibility: they have to start taking in lots more quantity and variety of popular culture - read more novels, watch more movies, play more games, etc (ok, so I’m joking about the ‘onerous’ part :). The reason being, they need richer grounds to mine for ideas to improve their games. They need to consciously evaluate what’s working for them, or others (even if it doesn’t work for them).

When I looked at design a number of years ago, one of the models that came out was a process of modifying (mutating) existing designs or combining elements from more than one previous design. Design is good, streamlined design is better in most instances where pragmatism holds sway, like limited resources, scope, and or schedule (”fast, cheap, or good: pick any two”). So, be an integrator, a synthesist, a problem-solver. Hey, if Shigeru is doing it, you’ll be in good company!