Learnlets

Secondary

Clark Quinn’s Learnings about Learning

Archives for October 2006

Hard work (motivation and tasks)

27 October 2006 by Clark 1 Comment

Too much hard work has kept me from blogging recently, but there’s a lesson here. David Batstone’s Right Reality newsletter the WAG, a great source of inspiration, pointed me to a report that says that hard work, not natural talent, is the key to success.

While people have often suggested it’s both, the research suggests that there’s no such thing as a natural talent for a specific thing. Moreover, the fact that some people continue on to greatness in any particular thing is due to ‘deliberate practice’: “activity that’s explicitly intended to improve performance”.

I think there’re two parts to that. One is finding or knowing the right thing to do, and the second is maintaining persistence through an increasing level of difficulty. Neither is a given. Maybe the natural talent is to figure out what you want to do and be willing to pursue it. The necessary adjunct is arranging the necessary support.

Really, that’s what I think we should be doing with good learning game design, using the story and setting the level of challenge to maintain motivation, and then ensuring that the embedded decisions are the necessary skills we want to develop.

There’s more, properly representing the concept, providing useful models of applying the concept to the context, supporting reflection to cement and extend the learning, but not only is this great news for anyone who has a passion, it’s also a boost for the value of good learning design.

Technical Communication

9 October 2006 by Clark 2 Comments

Last week I presented at the DocTrain conference on customizing information. This is a conference for technical communicators interested in documentation and training. On exhibit were a wide variety of content management systems and content development, QA, and other tools. My presentation followed JoAnn Hackos’ keynote about the importance of structure in content, and included a mention of DITA, the Darwin Information Typing Architecture which provides a way to describe the structure of content in meaningful ways that synergize with ontologies and topic maps as ways to describe what the content’s about.

JoAnn was gracious in person, and eloquent about the power of models for content. This was a great setup for my talk about how to exploit models of content, task, user, and context to create customized information delivery (Wayne Hodgins’ the Right Stuff: the right information to the right person in the right place at the right time in the right way on the right device…).

However, the message didn’t really seem to take hold (except for one gent who didn’t have a business card).

Now, I suppose this shouldn’t surprise me. I was on about games for a couple of years before I started getting traction, and the same pattern was seen with mobile several years before it took off (which is just now beginning to make headway). So maybe the idea is still ahead of it’s time?

Or maybe I didn’t seed the ground well enough at the beginning. I’m also willing to believe it may be partly my presentation, which can be a bit conceptual at times (I’m working on it, OK?). And it may not have been quite the right audience, perhaps more the communicators and the administrators instead of the managers.

So, I’m willing to let this one instance go, but not the whole idea. We can’t just trust to Jay Cross’ Informal Learning, much as that’s necessary (and Jay gets this, working with me as he has on meta-learning). We can’t just create an ecosystem of learning resources, though we need to do this too, but we also need to educate our folks about how to use the system, and we also need to optimize information flows for and to them. And we do this through models, with logic to glue them together.

Not sure where to carry this message forward, but it’s part of the push to stop the silo separation: documentation separate from training separate from support. It’s about performance, at the end of the day, and as long as we don’t have that overall perspective that integrates the elements, we’ll keep having redundant content development, proliferating portals, and confused and ineffective performers.

LCB Big Question of the Month

9 October 2006 by Clark 1 Comment

Tony Karrer & Dave Lee over at the excellent Learning Circuits Blog (where I got my start in blogging) have started a “Big Question of the Month” series which sounds like a lot of fun.

The first question is whether all learning professionals should be blogging. I think the answer is clearly no. However, all learning professionals should be systematically reflecting, and blogging is a great way to do it.

On the other hand, it’s not the only way, nor does the reflection need to be public. You could keep a journal, or make a wiki, or record podcasts. The thing is to go through the effort to be explicitly reflective.

We know that explicitly capturing our thoughts adds some rigor that we can miss when we just think. And that reviewing our thinking regularly is a valuable act in terms of learning and improving. I just don’t think everyone has to be public and in the written form. I often create graphics to capture my understanding (I’ve got to figure out how to easily add images to my blog!).

I look forward to further questions, and the dialog that goes along with it.

Slow Learning <> Lifelong Learning

4 October 2006 by Clark 2 Comments

My colleague, and Adobe’s Ambassador for eLearning, Ellen Wagner, was teasing me this morning about whether my interest in ‘slow learning’ isn’t just “lifelong learning”. Frankly, I hadn’t looked at lifelong learning, but my initial take was that it wasn’t.

So, I googled “lifelong learning” and the wikipedia entry confirmed my suspicions:

Lifelong education is a form of pedagogy often accomplished through distance learning or e-learning, continuing education, homeschooling or correspondence courses.

I realize that this is undoubtedly not all of lifelong learning, this bit elaborates a bit:

Lifelong learning sees citizens provided with learning opportunities at all ages and in numerous contexts: at work, at home and through leisure activities, not just through formal channels such as school and higher education.

Which could be what I’m talking about, but I want to be very clear about what I mean by ‘slow learning’. Not to diminish the importance of the other components, but the concept I’m talking about is not receiving sufficient attention and I want to tease it out.What I’m talking about with slow learning are little interventions dribbled out over long periods of time. The metaphor is not attending an event, but having a personal mentor guiding you throughout your life, with an intervention pattern of a small amount of content or activity at a particular moment.

While there’s a role for the course, there’re problems. Some behaviors and attitudes are not amenable to quick fixes. Other changes are really long sequences of development. We need courses, but I want to argue that a useful, perhaps necessary, adjunct is a long-term development approach.

So there, Ellen!

Organizational Consciousness

2 October 2006 by Clark Leave a Comment

As I mentioned, we were meeting on Consciousness, and Jerry Talley led us to talk about organizational consciousness. He started by mentioning the film The Corporation (which I have not seen; we have children, not a life :) and how it proposes using psychiatric assessment on the behavior of organizations (self-obsessed, ruthless, etc) and concludes that on the whole organizations are psychopaths. This, naturally, is not a ‘good thing‘, and Jerry was curious how organizations could be raised in consciousness.

Jerry proposed four critical elements necessary for corporate consciousness: perception of both the external environment and of internal states and processes, ongoing memory of corporate activity, models for shared meaning (yes!), and a capacity to experiment. I‘d tease the last part out into an ability to reflect and a willingness to act up on it. There‘s certainly an analogy between individual consciousness and organizational consciousness!

Jerry argued that most organizations have none or few of these, and was eager to hear of any one who had all of them. Scary, really. Certainly we know organizations are working on beginning to capture memory (knowledge management), and increasingly we see corporations trying to track competitive intelligence in real time. We‘re using stories to create and share understanding, and companies are beginning to realize the need to make their values explicit, though we don‘t do enough about using models (but I‘ve gone off on this enough already).

The last issue is the reflection and willingness to act on it. Of course, you can‘t do the latter if you haven‘t done the former. But that reflection doesn‘t happen. We talked about a number of large well-known organizations whose culture doesn‘t let them admit failure. We all know the managers who think that time for reflection is a waste. Even if you have ideas, the ability to take a chance is fraught with risk for many. We also noted, on the positive side, Google‘s support (mandate?) for at least their folks to spend 20% of their time on their own projects.

It was clear that our societal focus on short-term shareholder returns is in contrast to the long-term success of organizations (and for society, but that‘s another story; check out David Batstone in the meantime). If you‘re looking for the greatest short-term return, your decisions can‘t focus on other important elements like impact on society and the world, or even on long-term success (I was reminded of Akio Morita‘s (chairman of Sony) analysis of Western business in The Japan That Can Say No).

The point being here that, except for a few isolated fits and starts, our organizations are not functioning optimally (and that‘s true in the moment, not just in the long term). It‘s partly an issue of organizational culture, partly a situation that technology can help. I‘m happy if we work on both together. You really have to, after all.

Consciously Conscious

2 October 2006 by Clark Leave a Comment

On Friday I had the pleasure of gathering with some very interesting people (including the Schuylers, Betsy Burroughs, and Jeff Saperstein) at Doug Englebart‘s house to discuss Consciousness. Yassi Mogahaddam started us off asking what consciousness is. It‘s clear that any time we‘re awake we‘re technically conscious, but there are appear to be two different types of consciousness.

To illustrate, we used the situation of driving. There are times when the driving is automatic, and our minds can wander to solve problems or listen to the radio. Then there‘s the case where someone swerves in front of us and we can no longer rely on our automatized processes and we‘re in the moment. We might even get angry. All this is ‘in the moment‘ still, or what Don Norman terms ‘active cognition.

Then there are the times when we think about what we‘re doing, observing ourselves being angry perhaps, and as someone pointed out, integrating our different modes of perception. Don called this ‘reflective cognition‘, but there‘s more. Eastern wisdom tells us about being centered, and clearly there are times when we‘re consciously reflecting on our own learning and thinking (meta-cognition and meta-learning).

Of course, consciousness means many things, and more than one attendee mentioned efforts to achieve higher consciousness. I naturally had to bring up wisdom, and we talked about how we might achieve it.

We reviewed historical notions of consciousness and the development of our intelligence and attitudes (the ability of the ancient Greeks to spend time philosophizing comes in some part from their use of slaves, despite their analyses of the importance of freedom), and of points of view.

The point I want to make is that self-improvement is not necessarily a natural state, and it takes cultivation to turn people to a path of seeking more than what‘s just best for themselves. Robert Sternberg has argued that we should explicitly teach wisdom in classes, and I think it should be made intrinsic to our curriculum. And this holds true at the organizational level as well!

Clark Quinn

The Company

Search

Feedblitz (email) signup

Never miss a post
Your email address:*
Please wait...
Please enter all required fields Click to hide
Correct invalid entries Click to hide

Pages

  • About Learnlets and Quinnovation

The Serious eLearning Manifesto

Manifesto badge

Categories

  • design
  • games
  • meta-learning
  • mindmap
  • mobile
  • social
  • strategy
  • technology
  • Uncategorized
  • virtual worlds

License

Previous Posts

  • June 2025
  • May 2025
  • April 2025
  • March 2025
  • February 2025
  • January 2025
  • December 2024
  • November 2024
  • October 2024
  • September 2024
  • August 2024
  • July 2024
  • June 2024
  • May 2024
  • April 2024
  • March 2024
  • February 2024
  • January 2024
  • December 2023
  • November 2023
  • October 2023
  • September 2023
  • August 2023
  • July 2023
  • June 2023
  • May 2023
  • April 2023
  • March 2023
  • February 2023
  • January 2023
  • December 2022
  • November 2022
  • October 2022
  • September 2022
  • August 2022
  • July 2022
  • June 2022
  • May 2022
  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • February 2022
  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • June 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • December 2012
  • November 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • July 2012
  • June 2012
  • May 2012
  • April 2012
  • March 2012
  • February 2012
  • January 2012
  • December 2011
  • November 2011
  • October 2011
  • September 2011
  • August 2011
  • July 2011
  • June 2011
  • May 2011
  • April 2011
  • March 2011
  • February 2011
  • January 2011
  • December 2010
  • November 2010
  • October 2010
  • September 2010
  • August 2010
  • July 2010
  • June 2010
  • May 2010
  • April 2010
  • March 2010
  • February 2010
  • January 2010
  • December 2009
  • November 2009
  • October 2009
  • September 2009
  • August 2009
  • July 2009
  • June 2009
  • May 2009
  • April 2009
  • March 2009
  • February 2009
  • January 2009
  • December 2008
  • November 2008
  • October 2008
  • September 2008
  • August 2008
  • July 2008
  • June 2008
  • May 2008
  • April 2008
  • March 2008
  • February 2008
  • January 2008
  • December 2007
  • November 2007
  • October 2007
  • September 2007
  • August 2007
  • July 2007
  • June 2007
  • May 2007
  • April 2007
  • March 2007
  • February 2007
  • January 2007
  • December 2006
  • November 2006
  • October 2006
  • September 2006
  • August 2006
  • July 2006
  • June 2006
  • May 2006
  • April 2006
  • March 2006
  • February 2006
  • January 2006

Amazon Affiliate

Required to announce that, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. Mostly book links. Full disclosure.

We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it.Ok