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Clark Quinn’s Learnings about Learning

Archives for August 2007

Visualizing the role of visuals

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As you’ve no doubt figured out, I’m big on visuals. Someone pointed me to this site, and I like how he talks about the role models can play. He’s made a business out of creating diagrams to capture understandings and share them. Similar work is done by Dave Gray’s XPLANE, and (more with imagery than with diagrams) Eileen Clegg’s Visual Insight.

The goal is to understand someone’s models, and make them explicit in a way that captures understanding and shares it to support conversation, modification, and closure. I make diagrams myself (as I’ve mentioned before) as a way to understand things, and use them to solve problems. The visual pattern-matching channel is very powerful.

I’ve argued that we don’t use conceptual models enough in elearning, and that we should be using them to communicate the concept, show their use in examples, and highlight their predictions in practice feedback. Their practical use in communication and problem-solving also shouldn’t be overlooked!

Content, context, and experience

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In my (next to) last post, I talked about print versus screen reading, and at the end made a comment about publishers. I want to extend that comment here, and to do so I need to go to Pine & Gilmore’s Experience Economy.

I’ve talked about it before, but the premise briefly is that we’ve moved from selling services to selling total customer experiences (the pre-sales, the sale, the product or service, the support). Hence the success of Apple, which creates amazing experiences, generating great customer loyalty and satisfaction. So how does this bear on publishers?

The hoary old cliche’ is that publishers need to realize that they’re not about books, they’re about content (the analogy being to the railroad companies who suffered when they didn’t realize they were in the transportation business). On the other hand, the current discussion in industry is that now context is king. The point is that content can be customized to the immediate need. What the experience economy tells us is that the differentiator will be the overall experience. So, is experience or context king?

I want to suggest that the answer is ‘yes’. Contextualized content creates a positive experience. However, I want to argue two facets to this. Publishers do need to move to where content is semantically tagged for when there are smart systems that can contextualize it. However, I want to suggest that they also need quality information design to create a good experience even when it’s unable to be customized.

That’s come into play with educational publishers. Pine & Gilmore have argued that the subsequent economy will be the ‘transformation economy’, with experiences that transform us. I want to suggest that quality learning design will be the differentiator, and it definitely means going beyond traditional instructional design and incorporating cognitive science research and emotional engagement. I immodestly suggest that Engaging Learning is part of the solution, but the point is much bigger. It’s about reorganizing content to focus on meaningful outcomes, and then aligning the experience to achieve those. While incorporating the semantic hooks as well.

So, I’m arguing that the content business needs to look to both quality in design, and elegance in implementation, to support either or both scenarios: customized and quality experiences.

mLearning = mPSS?

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There have been some great discussions swirling around the eLearning Guild’s mobile learning 360 research report team (along with the relative merits and flaws of the iPhone ;). The question came up as to whether the fact that mobile devices focus on communication means that they can’t really deliver learning. My response to this was:

Don’t think about formal learning when you think about mLearning. As David (Metcalf) points out in his mLearning book, think of a mobile device as a learning *adjunct*. It’s a broader view of learning, where we take our learning process and augment it with mobile components. And take a performance focus: what will make people perform better!

It’s NOT about delivering an entire motivating learning experience through a 2″ screen (it *can* be, but that’s not the point). Which typically only is needed when you have a full skill-set change needed. Practitioners and experts can get away with just the facts, ma’am.

SO, we might ‘communicate’ concepts, examples, even practice (though interactivity is still the big barrier in mobile, re: the standards issue Judy (Brown) rightly raised) as *part* of a learning experience.

Or ‘communicate’ job aids/information as performance support.

It’s useful, it can lead to learning, but we need a broader definition of learning when we talk about mobile learning.

And, as the discussion re: Treo/iPhone illustrates, as we asymptotically approach the full capability of a desktop, the cognitive capability asymptotically approaches a full learning experience.

What do you think?

Print & Density

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A colleague reminds me that in my conversations with publishers and elearning types, the question or claim comes up in regards to whether print is dead. SO not. The answer why is a matter of resolution Current computer screen resolutions are around 96 dots per inch (dpi), and mobile typically maxes out at 160 dpi. Print typically starts at 300 dpi, and gets up to 1200 from even a cheap laser-printer.

I’d much rather read at 600 dpi, and regularly print out the articles I review to mark up and send my comments back to the editor. And I read real books! To be fair, on the other hand I do load papers onto my Treo, but that’s for when I want to read and am not carrying a briefcase or something else to stuff paper into. It’s that mobile affordance of convenience over bandwidth (though it’s not novels or other full books, but white papers typically in the 10-20 pages, and not when it matters).

Which isn’t to say that there isn’t a role for electronic media: currency of the information, small bits, and dynamic and interactive are very useful for learning and just content isn’t a learning solution without other things around it. Also, I check abc.net.au/news to keep up with what’s happening in the world and my second homeland, and am at Google and Wikipedia all the time. But there’s still a role for print (hey, my kids practically devour books).

The preference for print will change over time, as our technology yields higher screen resolutions and portability increases (I hear the Sony reader is pretty darn good), but until then when I need or want to comprehend text, print is still king. (Which isn’t t say that publishers don’t need to realize that they’re in the content business, and context is king.)

eLearning in Taiwan

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I learned about the Institute for Information Industries when they brought me in to Taiwan to run my game design workshop and a mobile design workshop, and lined up a couple of talks with companies as well. (It was a great opportunity; I’d welcome more such!) They’re a government-sponsored supporter of information technology in Taiwan, and their coverage area includes eLearning.

They’ve now released their 2nd eLearning Insight newsletter (even if it is labeled #1 :), and if you are interested in Asian eLearning, it looks to be worth investigating (it’s in English). There’s a link to subscribe at the bottom.

As the opinion pieces say, Taiwan’s got a burgeoning eLearning industry, and they’ve got some people doing some very interesting things.   I remain impressed with Tak-Wai Chan, one of the leaders in intelligent tutoring systems research and Director of the Research Center for Science & Technology for Learning at the National Central University.   They’re also looking at establishing and maintaining links with Korea and Japan.

Check it out!

Thinking different…

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Well, I found I posted a lot about games when writing for the eLearning Guild’s research report on Immersive Learning Simulations. Now my thoughts are turning to mlearning as we’re preparing that report for a subsequent 360 report.

It’s been fun, as I’ve had to expand my thinking on how to ‘think different‘ to accommodate mobile learning. And you really do need to think differently, as traditional instructional design won’t likely lead you to the opportunities. Yes, you might get job aids, and even distributed applications (capturing data from the field), but the whole ‘learning adjunct’ thing might well be skipped, for example.

That is, while you probably shouldn’t think of delivering a whole course on a mobile device (what I call eLearning Lite[tm]), you could and should think about how you can make a course more effective by augmenting it with mobile support. Using Allison Rossett‘s useful framework of planner and sidekick, two simple ideas are to wrap the learning experience with some awareness raising beforehand, and to provide job support during the learning experience. Of course, there’s learning follow-on (providing subsequent examples and practice over time), too.

Other ways to think differently include minimalism, “because I can versus because I’m here“, push versus pull, content versus connection, design ‘right’ versus design for reuse, and more. It’s been fun thinking through what are useful ways to break out of the traps our mental architecture provides. How do we break out of functional fixedness and set effects? We need representations, tools, and processes that keep us from prematurely converging.

mLearning has great potential: the devices are becoming ubiquitous, the tools are maturing, and the needs are increasing. The only limits, as my friend Carl used to say, are between our ears. So go forth and mobilize!