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Clark Quinn’s Learnings about Learning

Archives for 2007

Slow(ly) Learning and Wisdom update

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While I haven’t been talking much about wisdom and slow-learning of late, they’ve not dropped off my radar. Jay Cross was kind enough to loan me his copy of In Praise of Slowness, a book that tours not only slow food, but also slow health, slow cities, slow work, even slow sex! It’s an inspiring read, with a strong argument for the benefits of slowing down for individuals, families, organizations, and society. These thoughts are slowly percolating into my life (sorry, couldn’t resist).

Similarly, there was a new comment on my old Learning Wisdom post, and I see that the thoughts continue to circulate among those who are looking a little further out. It looks like I’ll be speaking at the Danish Research Network‘s yearly conference in November (let me know if you’re interested in meeting with me while I’m there), and I’m going to use the themes of wisdom and magic to weave a story about the future possibilities for learning and technology.

So, while I’m not actively promoting them (my immediate focus is elearning strategy and mobile learning), I’m still advocating and investigating slow learning and wisdom as personal and organizational goals. We learn deepest when we learn slowly, we learn best when we take time to reflect, and we become the best we can be when we look towards being wise over time, not just smart in the moment.

The Dalai Lama

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I saw the Dalai Lama in person when he was the year’s Wallace Wurth Memorial Lecture speaker at the University of New South Wales when I was there. A truly inspirational leader, he exudes wisdom and preaches practical peace. Others have noted that he’s “interested in technology, and he occasionally makes remarks about the Internet and how its communication aspects hold great hope”. However, he doesn’t have time for a blog.

Now, one’s been created for him. This blog links to writeups from some select people, and points to others. If you’re a fan, it’s the place to go.

PowerPoint, evil or just a tool?

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This month’s Learning Circuit’s Big Question is: “PowerPoint – What is Appropriate, When and Why?“. Tony Karrer’s collected some nice articles about the underlying cognitive issues, and it jives with what I’ve seen. The big complaints are too much text on the screen, too many bullet points, and overloaded graphics. That’s not a surprise. This also clearly indicates to me it’s about bad use of PowerPoint, not the tool itself.

I took a two-day ‘presentation course’, after several years of university teaching and several corporate presentations, and recall the instructions that it’s about you, not the slides, and you shouldn’t have slides except when you’re showing a diagram. That’s similarly indicated by others. However, I think you need to look at the broader context of what sort of talk it is, who the audience is, and what the setting is. I mostly talk to practitioners at different levels. In my mind, a keynote is very different from a conference session from a board presentation from a customer presentation from a… PowerPoint will have different roles.

From this point on, I’m going to talk about useful information communication: stuff that helps you make decisions. This is not a keynote, nor even a customer presentation, but more like a conference or board presentation or a training session.
Speaking of which, conference organizers ask for your slides beforehand, and ask for handouts. As an attendee, I like having handouts to make notes on. And sometimes I even try to take a copy of slides for a presentation I can’t attend, when there’s another presentation at the same time I also want to attend and I haven’t yet mastered being in two places at once (though sometimes my clients insist that I must).

As a reality check, I went back and looked at my own PowerPoint presentations (conference presentations), and I’m not squeaky clean. I do have lots of graphics (I peg the ‘visual’ and ‘conceptual’ meters; see my Models page), but I also have bullet points. But that’s deliberate.

There’re several reasons. As indicated above, I like to have a place to take notes, and want to provide the same for my audience. Yes, they could have a pad of paper, but I like providing the slides with generous white space for them to take notes. I generally don’t put a lot of prose on those slides, but only telegraphic bits that keep me from forgetting an important point and that I elaborate on, not reciting against. Instead, a reminder both for me and the audience when they come back to the slides (I know that at least *some* do).

Also, I know that one way to keep people from being able to fully interpret what you’ve presented unless they attend is to not have all the prose on the slide. So the ‘key phrases’ approach is also a way to induce people to actually stick around and find out what they unpack to (without that extra presentation, it’s pretty hard to know what’s coming there, and again that’s deliberate). It also induces extra cognitive processing, to map what I say to the phrase, which is good for the right audience.

I also understand the realities of most presentation situations: that people’s attention can be distracted by someone coming in the room, by an email or text message, by a colleague’s wry comment, whatever. Having the structure of the handout and the slides helps them reconnect. Also, I do add extra references and tools to the end of the handout when appropriate to support taking action on the presentation. And, as part of the emotional as well as cognitive component, I like context-setting through images that elaborate prose, and quotes that pithily indicate some of the background thinking.

So, my answer to the question is that what’s appropriate are diagrams, quotes, images, and limited bullet point lists, in that order, for cognitive and emotional value. My presentations may not be perfect, but I strive to provide long-lasting value (not immediate appeal), just as in everything else I do.

Tagging video and platform neutrality

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I’m not much of a video person (though I do watch TV, professional obligation ;).
I seldom have the time when I’m online, and would rather have a ‘readers digest condensed ™’ version to read when I’m on the go. However, I do recognize that capturing a presentation can be appropriate for the right audience. Say, for example, when the audience is above the novice level, and when contextualization is important (this is a model that shows my beliefs about when/how to use media).Media Properties

Before the eLearning Guild conference, I was pinged by Veotag, a video tagging company. They were kind enough to buy me a beer when I stopped by and asked some questions (the things I’ll do for beer…). Basically, it’s a web service where you can upload and manually tag videos so that they can be hosted and you can index in to any particular place. I know Avaltus Learning does this as well, though I believe they do it for you, and charge accordingly.

I tried viewing a sample video, in this case of Guy Kawasaki interviewing Steve Wozniak, and it worked just fine, being able to jump around wasn’t a problem, and I could see that this could be a learning solution.

However, when I went to their site, I was dismayed to see that it requires Windows to do the tagging (not for viewing, I could see Woz just fine on my Mac with Firefox). In this day and age I find it hard to justify having a solution that depends on a particular platform. Yes, the corporate world is still largely tied to Microsoft, so this likely isn’t a deal breaker for most folks. But for me, while I think there’s definitely a role for capturing video and making it navigable, I don’t think this is a solution I’m rapt over.

Action game mixins

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Ernest Adams, one of my favorite writers about game design, has written a piece about mixing in action game elements into other formats. Along the way, he talks about accessibility, challenge, and design principles. Now, I’ve argued in different places for not throwing in gratuitous twitch elements, based upon some instinctive reactions, but he makes a cogent case why it’s wrong in a broader context.

In short, his argument is that throwing in twitch reactions rewards the twitch gamer, and precludes other players. And, when the game genre doesn’t naturally support it, it might preclude the audience you want. For learning games, this is more the case, when you want to keep the focus on important decisions. You can still have random events, keep score, etc, but don’t require motor skill coordination unless that’s essential to the ultimate performance.

Glad to have someone else say it, with the nuanced discrimination it needs. Recommended.

Imagineering

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Last week we went down to LA to visit my Mother for her birthday, and to take the kids to Disneyland for a day (after the other trips we’ve taken for family reasons, including my Dad‘s rememberance). It was a great trip for all reasons, but the Disney experience had a lesson for me.

We had almost no lines the whole day even for top rides like the Matterhorn, Pirates of the Caribbean, Indiana Jones, etc. We caught Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride early, but late in the day went back to Fantasyland to hit Pinocchio, Snow White, & Peter Pan (none of which I’d been on in more years than I care to admit). We went on the first two, since the line for Peter Pan was substantially longer.   Finally we bit the bullet and got in line for Pan, and then I understood why people were waiting for it. Peter Pan was a substantially better ride, for important reasons.

Now, each of these rides has a ‘license’ (in the game industry, companies with ‘properties’ such as Lord of the Rings will license them to companies to make accompanying games, and no one else can make a competing game) they have to align with. The trick, then, is to make the ride a compelling experience in and of itself, as well as use the story associated with the license. With games, sometimes the experience *is* the story, that is you play James Bond in GoldenEye, and other times it’s another story with the same character (e.g. Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis).

In a ride, the experience should be good on it’s own, whether or not you know the story. So, for example, our kids never got into the Pinocchio movie and consequently don’t know the story. Nor had they seen the Disney version of Peter Pan. Yet the Peter Pan ride was just very cool: you float out over the city in a sailing ship and into the stars, before coming down and flying around Neverland. While in Pinocchio, you basically just see the events in the story (with the one caveat of being eaten by the whale, which is scary). And Snow White didn’t even have a real ending, suddenly you’re just out!

Disney’s Imagineering has done amazing things, and those rides are old, but there’s a lesson here about getting the experience right, so that not only is the story referenced, but the rider actually has an interesting experience. That holds for learning game (er, Immersive Learning Simulation) design, too, where you don’t just want cognitive practice of important decisions, but you’d like the learner to be emotionally engaged. As I tell my workshop attendees, it’s not about designing content, it’s about creating an experience! So, think wholistically and create an environment that hooks you from the beginning, creates interesting emotional trajectories, and provides a feeling of closure at the end.

iQuiz, not quite

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With the ubiquitousness of the iPod, I’ve been looking for more to do with it than just play audio and video, but Apple’s kept a tight rein on the software (my fear for the iPhone, too). I was discussing it with my colleagues over beer (there’s that blogger/learning/beer thing again ;), and Jim Schuyler subsequently pointed me to the fact that not only have they recently released iQuiz, but allowed you to create your own quizzes. In addition, Aspyr has released a free iQuiz maker, which simplifies the task (if it doesn’t get confused, which it seemed to in a trial run). iQuiz supports both true/false, and multiple choice, with scoring.

Now, this sounds really great, and it can be, but there’re some qualifications. First, while there’s feedback possible for the true/false answer, there’s no specific feedback for the multiple choice questions (which I generally like better than true/false). If you can’t give any feedback for a wrong answer, you can’t learn from the question (yes, you can be motivated to go back and learn, e.g. listen to the podcast again or go read something). Really, you should be able to provide separate feedback for each wrong answer of a multiple choice (since your alternates to the correct answer should reflect prior misconceptions).

A second level of capability that would be really cool would be conditional branching depending on your response. This would let you build branching scenarios, which could really be powerful (giving you most of the power of full learning games).

We hand cobbled together (read: wrote and programmed in Brew) both quiz questions and scenarios (non-branching, but with several stages and specific feedback) on mobile phones for a project, and I still think it’s a good idea to supplement learning, albeit not a full learning situation by itself.

It’s clear Apple’s focused on creating fun with the iPod; they have trivia quizzes available, and talk about making the same to share with and challenge your friends. However, they’re only a small step away from making a really powerful learning adjunct that could make a big draw for the corporate elearning market. And they’re just one other step away from both a whole new market of fun (scenario stories for your friends), and another majorly powerful learning adjunct.

Now with all that caveat aside, for those learning situations where you do want to drill knowledge (and we overdo it so please use it sparingly and focus on skills), and you’ve got the backstop of resources so they can quickly go back and get it right, you’ve got another learning tool available on an increasingly ubiquitous platform. And a platform that has already demonstrable learning capability of podcasts and vidcasts (I was told of one group of engineers who asked for their colleagues’ white papers be read into podcasts so they could read them on their drives; a great success!).

I’ll keep hoping that there’ll be a way for small text scenarios (or even with images; built in Captivate 2 or SimWriter or SmartBuilder?) to be loaded onto iPods, but I’ll even look forward to quizzes with feedback for the different answers.

See you in the funny papers

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I decided to elaborate a bit more on my comment that I think comics/cartoons are underused in learning, as I truly believe this. I’ve used them in elearning to serve as a motivating example, humorously exaggerating the negative consequences of not learning the material. I’ve also used them as story examples, where the character models the behavior of transforming an ill-formed statement into a well-formed statement. Why?

There are some powerful reasons to consider using cartoons and comic strips (graphic novels, manga, what have you). First, we understand the world in terms of stories, in many instances, and comic strips are a great way to communicate stories. They’re concise, and can minimize the amount of literacy required. And they’re visually appealing.

Then they elegantly simplify the context. You can include the necessary components, and allow the learner’s brain to fill in the rest. That’s true too for the transition between panels (see Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics for more). This may also facilitate the learner taking ‘ownership’ of the story, as they have to do some of the processing.

They also have one facility I really like. As Alan Shoenfeld’s work says, as I know it through Collins & Brown’s Cognitive Apprenticeship, experts need to make the underlying thought processes visible, not just the resulting steps (say, in working a problem). Thought bubbles are a great way to do this! You can do this with the ‘voiceover’ in audio and video (typically echoing slightly when it’s thoughts), but it’s easier to produce.

Comic ComicPragmatically, they can be relatively low-cost to produce, and they’re certainly low bandwidth (well, if you do it right ;). Brent Schenkler’s been talking about using ComicLife (a Mac app that lets you put speech and thought bubbles on photos) which would work as well, and then he points to tools that let you make comics! Here’s an elementary one I created with ComicLife. Not definitive, but illustrative (and doable with my limited skills).

Finally, they travel well. While humor might not (though certain types of humor should), the story will, as most if not all cultures have a form of comic strip and they’re easily comprehended. Practically, the internationalization and localization should be easy as well, as long as you leave enough room in the thought bubbles for languages like German translation (and keep all lettering in a separate layer).

I know, you have enough trouble talking about games in corporate settings, and comics may not be any easier, but think of the excitement of your audience, particularly young ones, talk about the lower cost to hit the global market and for lower-literacy employees. I even think they could be used to tell the corporate story (as has been done with novelizations).

Superman versus Batman

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As a kid, I read comicbooks (and I still think they’re undervalued as a learning tool). Naturally, I was keen on the superheroes, and given my name, Superman was probably my favorite. To fly, to be invincible, strong, and fast, well, it as too perfect for a kid who wasn’t the greatest athlete.

As I get older, I’m becoming more partial to Batman. Why (and why is this relevant to learning)? Because Superman, and so many of the other superheroes, got their powers through no particular effort of their own. Radioactive spider bites, being born on a planet with different characteristics, lab accidents, the list goes on. They don’t even stand up to scrutiny! On the other hand, Batman set his mind to becoming extremely capable. He learned science, trained in martial arts, etc. (Ok, so he started with a fortune to back him, but he didn’t have to work so hard, he chose to.) It could happen!

Informal learning only works to the extent that the informal learner knows how to learn, and is diligent in doing so. Learners have to challenge themselves, and take responsibility for ensuring what they need to know, and we shouldn’t take that for granted. I’ve found one of the keys to my own learning is to choose not necessarily the easiest path.

I’m a big fan of learning to learn, but you have to be aware and choose to learn. For example, I think we’re not doing enough in most of education to share responsibility with the learner. I think we need to support, and expect, self-learning. And I think it’s one of the greatest ROI potentials in corporate training, where the one investment gets leveraged across all areas of endeavor. So here’s to Batman and all those who set themselves goals and work hard to achieve them.

eLearning Tools?

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In my elearning strategy session at the elearning guild, I included the following graphic as a model to think about how tools can help populate a performance ecosystem (aka learnscape):

PerformanceEcosystem

The point being that different tools fit different spaces in terms of who they serve in terms of experience, and whether they’re more individual or more group. The desktop/mobile may become less clear, but still makes sense for now.

I’ve seen folks trying to understand where blogs, wikis, etc fit into the space of learning tools (and realize that some of the tools have a broad reach and I’ve tried to place them in their center of impact; maybe I need some circles or auras or something indicating reach).

So, do you think I’ve got it right? And, do you think it’s useful?