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Clark Quinn’s Learnings about Learning

Archives for April 2008

Speed of Thought

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Jay Cross has an interesting post about ‘time‘ (one of his favorite topics) for business. In it, he talks about Internet Time (not surprisingly ;), along the lines of his inspired claim that:

Some creative workers would produce more value were they required to dedicate 11 months of the year to learning and one month to innovation and decision making.

I’m inclined to agree, but it made me think something else as well.

To me, business needs to move at the speed of thought. Which is not really what Jay’s claiming, as he’s talking about network and digital speeds in a different context; I agree with his post, but I’m going somewhere else. Our brains are actually much slower than electrons, and yet we rush to make decisions faster than ever. Consequently, I suggest, we’re making decisions that aren’t smart, let alone wise.

To make smart decisions, let alone wise ones, means taking time to think through the consequences. While we try to make it easier to make the right decisions, with policies and procedures and rules, with the ever increasing amount of change I think that the decisions will also increasingly be ones that we haven’t had to think about before. We’ll be facing ever new decisions that require us to be good problem-solvers, ideally even wise ones. And that’s going to take time.

Now, I’m not talking months to decide whether or not to lock the door at night, but rather taking the appropriate time to evaluate the short and long term consequences, for self, others, and society, with a sense of responsibility.   This shouldn’t hamper most decisions, but will come into play when it should.

We need to not rush to make decisions, but be willing to allow the time to make a good decision. And that’s contrary to much of management practice and organizational culture. I remember several years ago when we were pushing quite strongly on meta-learning, the push back was that “we don’t have time for reflection”. That has got to change for organizations that want to persist and succeed. (Of course, so to does the push for shareholder returns in the short term!)

Our brains are increasingly the valuable commodity, as Jay argues, so we need to foster the conditions under which they work best. That doesn’t come from speed, but from a supportive culture for experimentation, reflection, and thought. It doesn’t mean getting rid of commitments and deadlines, but setting them realistically, not politically (in the organizational sense of the term).

How do we reconcile the pressure for execution with a need for innovation? It’s an interesting challenge. A few of us are looking at how we can help organizations get a handle on it, in a collaborative way. If your organization is interested in taking this sort of step, do let me know.

Getting better

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The Learning Circuits Blog Big Question of the month is: “What would you like to do better as a Learning Professional?” Certainly a question bound to spark some introspection. Certainly, I know my weaknesses, though not all are things I’d want to change.

Some might argue I’m *too* conceptual, and I certainly do err on talking concepts rather than concrete examples. I believe being conceptual is good, in that it gives me tools for problem-solving, and I’ve demonstrated that on behalf of clients and others (I like coming up with innovative approaches to tough problems). However, I do need to recognize that I should use more examples in my presentations (and have made that a conscious act in the last few presentations I’ve created, though my legacy ones may lack a bit).

Similarly, I tend to use diagrams to communicate, and I think that’s good, but I sometimes err on not including enough context (via photos). And for someone who’s quite visually oriented, I don’t do enough with video. However, that’s at least partly due to lack of facility with the tools rather than a fundamental blindspot. I wish I was more capable of creating animations to communicate visually as well.

And I wish I could cartoon! It’s such a powerful, and underused, communication and learning medium. It’s got great value in examples in particular, and comics in particular could be valuable in helping motivate in the beginning (humorously exaggerating the consequences of not having the skills being presented is one way I recommend).

So I guess my answer is that I would like to augment my conceptual approach with visual context more effectively, for better communication. And I’m working on it!

QUINOV8

Out of my head…

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… and into the world. No, I’m not talking about the fact that I’ve the kids for the week, I’ve actually got that pretty well handled (or so I think, which probably means I’m missing something ;). Instead I’m talking about how we need to better recognize that our thinking and performing is not all in our head. I was reminded of this by a PhD student who pinged me about his thesis on mobile learning. The student wasn’t interested in context-sensitive as a core affordance and largely untapped opportunity, for whatever reason, and brought up grounded cognition. This reminded me of distributed cognition, and the concept behind both is really relevant for informal learning, mobile learning, and instructional design in general.

I wasn’t familiar with ‘grounded cognition’, though from the definitions I’ve found it’s similar to distributed cognition but without as much of the social component (though that’s not what I focus on in distributed cognition either). It’s apparently a reaction to the symbol-grounding problem from AI that Stevan Harnad carried the banner for, that the ‘symbols in the head’ needed a real-world referent.   It may seem a bit obtuse, but the point is that when we try to build smart systems, we find out that they really can’t act in the world as they’re not connected to it. But that’s not what’s important here.

The interesting thing pragmatically is that our thinking isn’t all in our heads, but distributed across external representations (e.g. the letters associated with the keys on a phones). This is similar to connectivism, in that it’s not what you know, but what you can access, that is the determinant of success. As I’ve said before, it’s certainly a fair reflection of the fact that our brains aren’t good at arbitrary fact remembering, but instead are pattern matchers (e.g. my old claim that if I make a promise to do something for you and it doesn’t get into my PIM, we never had the conversation).

The take-home for learning is that we don’t need to carry all the information in our head, but instead we should have it available. Our courses should be designed for reference as well as learning, and we should carefully examine our performance needs to see how we should distribute information between the world and our head. Heck, too much of the elearning I’ve seen is overloaded with rote memorization, and we’ve got to do better. And, obviously, this is a great application for mobile.

The student was interested in relevant theories of cognition, and it really does illustrate a need to go beyond both behavioral and traditional cognitive and look at how people really perform. John Carroll’s minimalism was effective just for the reason that he focused on the least amount of information people needed to be successful, and took advantage of what they knew. We need to extend that to take advantage of what’s in the world already, or can be.

Interim representations

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I’m working on a very interesting project right now, allowing me to partner with a variety of expertises (game design, visual design, content area expert, technical implementation, etc). We’ve come together to develop an integrating scenario for some learning. Interestingly, we started off with a bit of the ‘blind men and the elephant‘, each bringing in our own notions of what we were focusing on first (e.g. me wanting to start with the learning objectives and the expert saying he couldn’t provide objectives ’til he knew what the scenario would be like).

We worked on this finally through some ‘show and tell’, and that helped a lot. However, there is a principle that I wanted us as a team to adopt, and that was creating and sharing, early and often, interim representations of our thinking. What I mean here are ways of capturing thoughts, whether diagrams (me, use diagrams to capture models? :), mockups, tables, what have you.

I’d emphasized this early, but when someone shared one, I publicly lauded it and suggested that we continue to work towards creating those, getting real buy in since this one had helped. We’ve created a wiki site that we’ll store documents, and hopefully creatively create some of the necessary representations. Naturally, I’ve already been drawing diagrams on the boards (and creating them again in OmniGraffle for sharing). Others have created powerpoint diagrams, flash mockups, or captured in documents.

In a variety of forms of design they talk about ‘design rationale‘, capturing the decisions along the way so you don’t have to revisit them, just review them. These interim representations, aggregated, help capture some of that, but also help every stay on the same page. When someone has a way they’re thinking about something, representing and sharing helps everyone understand and accept or constructively critique, to help remove the blinders.

This is one of the heuristics I’ve found useful in design, and recommend it to you. Sharing design tips is another idea I laud, so got any of your own?