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Clark Quinn’s Learnings about Learning

Archives for February 2008

Suggestions for optimizing the conference experience?

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Being on the program committee for TechKnowledge (in San Antonio at the end of the month; hope to see you there as it should be great!), I’ve ‘volunteered’ to lead the part of the conference orientation on tips for getting the most out of the conference (among other things).

I’ve already tapped into Tony Karrer’s tips about asking good questions, and Jim Javenkoski gave me some good advice about handling the physical side (e.g. stay hydrated). I’m also thinking about the mental side e.g. attitude (positive, social). However, rather than just put up the ideas I know about and find, I’d love to tap into the wisdom of the net. So, what would you recommend as good tips and strategies for conference attendees?

Representing openness

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I was asked about my thoughts on creative commons concepts:

“free resources that are available to users but that also come with the pretense that by sharing the material openly, users will be able to perhaps improve upon the original”

This is an interesting question, and it got me thinking about shared editing. Increasingly, it’s about representations. I use diagrams, but am trying to be more visual and include photos in my presentations, and of course I’ve been textual (life as an academic). Others are looking to video. Someone recently had a presentation at the Institute For The Future (which I missed, unfortunately) on how it’s media literacy that’s important, not just traditional textual literacy, and I have to fully agree.

So, increasingly it’s going to be about using web-based tools for creation and sharing. Rip/mix/burn! Wikis are important, but so are things like Google’s tools: open spreadsheets & documents, and diagrams (e.g. Gliffy. where BTW no one’s taken me up on collaborating, well that’s a learning too). Newer representations are possible, including 3D in Second Life, audiocasts, videocasts, photos, it’s all fair game via Flick’r, YouTube, etc.

However, I don’t believe in the teaching of particular applications. For instance, if you learned PowerPoint, the new version’s rearrangement could throw you for a loop unless you’ve used lots of apps and know your, so you can figure it out. But what if you’d learned it by rote (as at least one teacher at our elementary is doing)?

So, instead, I want to teach the principles of goal-oriented collaboration, the notion of finding important questions, gathering data, creating hypotheses, conducting experiments, writing up results, and sharing. With interim question, post thoughts, share, reflect, review, at every stage. Then, have them use different tools at different times with the same goals, so they abstract the principles and can carry them forward regardless of the latest tool du jour.

What are your thoughts?

Spores of Imagination

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A wise colleague of mine pointed me to this video of Will Wright talking about his new game Spore to the TED conference (I was invited once, years ago when I was in Australia, but it was a lot of money at the time, on an academic salary with the exchange rate then…). It’s a fascinating talk, covering the game design but also the philosophy behind it.

Will Wright, in case you don’t know, is the genius behind Sim City and The Sims, two famous games. He’s revered among game designers because his games are complete leaps to a new game space, and successful. He has a talent for taking something he finds interesting, building a model (a simulation is just a model, a scenario is when you put it in an initial state and ask the player to take it to a goal state, and a game is when you tune that experience until it’s engaging), and then making the experience of manipulating the model into a game. In particular, one of the hallmarks of his work is his ability to tune it in unique and non-obvious ways (e.g. monsters coming in to smash your cities) to create a compelling and yet thought-provoking experience.

Here he talks about the game design, but couples it to important issues. How games are toys that can help us learn. It’s the final statement that resonates, about using this new game as a tool to foster long-term thinking. Really, that’s what I’m on about, using games as tools to develop new ways to think. And here’s a master. Enjoy, and reflect.

When/where ID?

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The Learning Circuit’s Blog Big Question of the Month is Instructional Design: If, when, and how much. It may seem like an odd question, but here’s an elaboration: “For a given project, how do you determine if, when and how much an instructional designer and instructional design is needed?” And this is an important question.

Partly, it depends on your definition of ID. An enlightened version is a performance system view, which includes job aids, rapid elearning, eCommunity, etc. A more typical version is a templated approach to courses. If you’re talking about this latter, it should be used when you’re designing courses, and otherwise stay out of the way (and be replaced by an enlightened instructional design that incorporates deeper cognitive understanding and emotional awareness, e.g. my two white papers on Enhanced ID and eMotional eLearning; warning, PDFs).

However, if you’re talking about the more overarching version, then I say it comes in early, makes a determination what the goal and desired resource is, and then decides whether to do a course, create a resource, let a SME loose on it (with or without a template), or leave it to the community (and sometimes take back from the community to design something anew).

I think there’s a role for strategically outlining the solution and then making a decision about how best to do it, and there’s a role for some design smarts in architecting portals, guiding SMEs, supporting communities to critical mass, etc. There’s also a time to let go, but it should be an informed decision, not an abrogation of responsibility.