Archives for 2009

Engaging Learning

9 November 2009 by Clark 1 Comment

How do you systematically design learning experiences that effectively engage the learner?

This was the question I set out to address more than 5 years ago. Based upon years of deep investigation into learning & instruction theories and design processes, and practical experience in designing games, I wrote Engaging Learning: Designing e-Learning Simulation Games.

The book was based upon work I’d published as an academic, but was focused very pragmatically. There were already a few books out about the value of computer games to support learning, notably Marc Prensky’s prescient Digital Game-Based Learning, and Clark Aldrich’s Games and the Future of Learning was also already out. Subsequently, books by Gee, Shaffer, and others have highlighted the opportunities.

However, I thought and think that my book had a unique contribution, being quite specific around:

the principles that underpin why games are the best learning
how to modify your design processes to successfully design games

Having looked at the books out there, I still feel it does the best job of making the case.

At core was an alignment between what makes effective learning practice, and what makes engaging experiences. Looking across educational theories, repeated elements emerge. Similarly with experience design. It turns that they perfectly align. If you recognize that, and can execute against it, your learning will be greater than the sum of the parts, and will both seriously engage and truly educate. Learning can, and should, be hard fun!

The workshops I’ve run based upon the book have been very well received, reinforcing the value of the book. Similarly, the content has been solicited as a component of both Silberman’s Handbook of Experiential Learning, and the Guild’s Immersive Learning Simulation report. I’ve now heard Tony O’Driscoll talk about the design principles for learning experiences in Virtual Worlds (in his and Karl Kapp’s coming book on the topic), and they’re the same principles!

So why hasn’t the book penetrated corporate learning more than it has? There are several contributing factors. First, the work I published as an academic didn’t hit the mainstream. I was part of the international society on computers, and a member of the group specifically about learning through computers (IFIP WG 3.3). They’d just started their own journal, and I wanted to support it (and get a publication). In retrospect, it would’ve been better to publish in one of the more recognized journals on the topic. As I was overseas, the work never hit the US academic awareness.

Second, I didn’t really understand book marketing then, and trusted that the publisher did. At the time, they weren’t very pro-active in developing a joint understanding of responsibility (that’s changed), and my book fell through their cracks (and I’m not a marketing person). (Still, I’m going to be a bit more proactive on the mobile learning book, and they have promised likewise.)

I still firmly believe that the book is the best guide to designing meaningful learning experiences that are centered on deep practice, and a guide for everything from better multiple choice questions to full on simulation-driven serious games. I’ve tracked the rest of the books out there, and they do a good job of arguing why games are a powerful learning environment, why they make business sense, and more. However, Engaging Learning is still the best book out there that tells designers how to go about making them. Sure, I recommend having the workshop to actually get a chance to practice the skills (you know, get your whole team to lift their game), but many who have read it have told me they found value in the book on it’s own.

I don’t say this to generate sales; I get so little it’s not going to make a difference. I say this because I really worked hard to ensure there is a lot of value in it for you. I’m just trying to make sure there’s better learning out there, and there’s a lot more need than I can service individually. There are other good books, Michael Allen’s Guide to eLearning being one, but my book focuses specifically on helping you make more meaningful practice, and that’s a big area of needed improvement, and a major opportunity in making your learning more meaningful.

Please, wherever you draw inspiration, however you figure it out, make more engaging learning. Align the elements of effective practice and the elements of engaging experiences, and make your learning rock. For your learners’ sake, please!

Convenience vs Context

7 November 2009 by Clark 2 Comments

What are the real opportunities in mobile learning?

One of the several sessions I’m doing at DevLearn next week (in addition to a pre-conference workshop with Jay Cross, a mobile development session with Richard Clark, and another session on the future of orgnanizational learning) is a mobile learning design introduction. In thinking through it, I reflected on a distinction I make between convenience and contextualization, and as usual I got into diagramming as a way to get a handle on it.

ContextConvenience I’ve argued before that mobile is not really about learning, but about performance support. That said, there are roles for mobile in courses, either as a learning augment or even microcourses (but not putting a whole elearning course on a mobile device). In talking about mobile, I distinguish between convenience and context.

Convenience is when you access content at a time that’s not at work but you have free. So, listening to a podcast while commuting, or viewing a video while waiting in the queue at the grocery store, both would qualify. So would doing a little quiz while waiting for your flight, or reading a document on that flight.

Contextualization, on the other hand, is much more specific. Here, you’re doing something relevant to where you are. In performance support, this is a huge opportunity: providing location specific information (about this device, or this client), or event-based support (providing a quick reference sheet for a negotiation, having a reflection session afterward).

Even for learning, however, there could be specific location information (“this is where X happened”, or “an application of Y is seen here, where…”). That can be enacted by the device sensing location (GPS, RFID, etc), or by actively reading a location marker (cf QR code). Similarly, event information could be provided (“for your review meeting, remember to focus on the behavior, not the individual”).

The point is that while convenience is a win, contextualized information is the big win. It takes a bit more design, but by doing it systemically, the opportunities for really relevant learning are definitely worth considering.

Social and Semantic Web

4 November 2009 by Clark 2 Comments

Yesterday I attended the Social Web incubator Bar Camp of the W3C, focusing on issues in web support for social media. It was a small group, overall, but an interesting group, including folks keen on issues like technical underpinnings (discussion of FOAF, RDF, etc), and folks with an interest in more applied topics like enterprise, health, and journalism.

The issue on the table is what sorts of standards might be necessary or desirable to support social networking on the web in interoperable ways. One statement that resonated was a comparison between the social web and social networks as being analogous to open space versus silos. As a general rule, if someone can lock you into their proprietary approach, you are subject to their whims. If, instead, there are open standards, you’re free to approach things in different ways. For example, email took off once one email standard took hold and allowed different systems to interoperate. On the other hand, proprietary standards may provide the capital and motivation necessary to invest in the development of advanced features (e.g. the ability of Linden Labs to continue to expand Second Life capabilities as they grabbed market share).

The internet as an open standard (e.g.TCP/IP) has allowed for the development of other standards on top. If not for the http standard, we wouldn’t have have the world wide web. However, continued development is needed to meet new needs. So, for example the Salmon project was represented, which is trying to make a mechanism whereby any comment on a piece of web content, regardless of location and tool (e.g. blogging about someone’s Flickr picture) could be aggregated back to the original content to maintain the discussion.

This can be real propeller-head stuff, e.g. it was admitted that RDF’s uptake has been hampered by a difficult syntax. Even Sir Tim Berners-Lee, responsible for the http protocol, admits that the // in the protocol isn’t necessary, and regrets it. I no longer can get down in the weeds, but fortunately understand it well enough conceptually to talk intelligently about the requirements and see the opportunities.

And opportunities there are. The next generation, I believe, so-called web 3.0, is when we move to system-generated content. The discussions that occurred on pulling together useful information to the benefit of organizations, like adding valuable information as a response to your searches and discussions. Rules operating on data by description has powerful capabilities, e.g. the way Amazon provides mass customization. There are entailments, of course; taxonomies and ontologies need governance as do other content activities.

Naturally, some of it was more approachable than the geek speak, such as the fact that social engineering was as important as semantic engineering, for example that clever interface design can mitigate getting users to tag content. Similarly, problems that can arise from bad behavior may be better solved as cultural issues rather than technical ones.

The folks there were fabulously knowledge, for example a post-meeting request for ontologies around project management and pharmaceuticals were richly answered. While much of this stuff is still in development, the opportunities are coming, and having the necessary understanding on hand to capitalize on it is important. Note that these people are working to make this stuff work for all of us. Truly valuable and much to be appreciated.

My recommendation is to be aware of the possibilities and requirements. While you are likely not quite ready to take advantage of it (and there are already opportunities, seriously), you don’t want to do anything that would subsequently make the opportunities harder to capitalize on. So look into your content data engineering from a semantic point of view as well, and prepare for some truly awesome capabilities.

Extremophiles & Organizational Agility

30 October 2009 by Clark Leave a Comment

A number of years ago, I co-wrote a chapter with Eileen Clegg called The Agility Factor, that appeared in Marcia Conner & James Clawson’s excellent collection of organizational culture articles in the book Creating a Learning Culture. The focus of the book was on empowering organizations to be nimble in a context of increasing change.

Eileen’s husband is a marine scientist studying deep sea vents and the creatures that live there. In biology, organisms that can live in such extreme heat, or in bitter cold, or extreme salinity, etc., are known as extremophiles. They have a number of mechanisms that allow them to succeed, including stronger ionic bonds, sensing and reacting to changes in the environment, special proteins for extreme circumstances, inoculation mechanisms to cope with toxins, and special partnerships.

In the chapter, we talked about organizational equivalents to these extremophile mechanisms, including tolerating diversity, monitoring the environment, extreme mentoring, and more. We’re talking about it tonite at a special event, and I reread the article to see what we said then and to reflect on it in light of the subsequent years of experience. I saw several ways in which to augment the thinking we had then.

In thinking about ionic bonds, it’s not only about the diversity (polarity) adding strength, but it strikes me that it’s also about alignment. Diversity is particularly valuable when the different abilities and experiences are pulling in the same direction. It’s important to share and inspire a belief in what the vision is.

On the topic of sensing the environment, I’m reminded of the result from the CLO survey Jay Cross and I did to accompany our Chief Meta-Learning Officer article, where 60% of those who responded thought that their people weren’t talking about the outside trends that shape their business. If people aren’t aware, they can’t adapt! There must be support for individuals to not only self-improve, but to be connected the broader trends in their fields and the organization’s area of endeavor.

Starting from the heat-shock proteins that kick in when things are extreme, I’m mindful of how we need a shift from information presentation or skill-creation to learning facilitation and mentoring. Organizations can’t provide everything employees need anymore, but they can provide support for developing skills for learning, and coping. I’m reminded of how Outward Bound got started, where older mariners were surviving situations that younger, presumably healthier ones weren’t. Which reinforces the call for more ubiquitous mentoring that we argued for back then.

The inoculation approach to toxins sparks two thoughts. One, while we need to tolerate diversity in experience and skills, I suspect we can’t tolerate those who do not buy into the vision and the mission. In my own experience, I’ve seen how the naysayers can undermine organizational effectiveness. Yet incorporating new approaches can be extraordinarily valuable. As I’ve argued before, the approach to take is not to try to appropriate so-called best practices, but instead to understand and contextualize best principles.

And finally, in thinking about symbiosis, one of the revelations has been to see the benefits organizations have found by increasing their dialog not only internally, but externally with partners and customers. The advantages of more transparency and communication, if coupled with a sincere desire to truly listen and respond, are considerable.

It’s always a revelation to re-read something written several years ago and reflect on your thinking then. I’m always amazed (and, mostly, pleased) with what I find. Organizations need to reinforce their culture and learning mechanisms to make themselves more agile and more resilient, and that adaptation is possible on principled grounds.

Presenting in a networked age

30 October 2009 by Clark 2 Comments

The Learning Circuit’s Big Question this month has to do with the increasing prevalence of internet access during presentations. The context is that during presentations it’s certainly possible that your audience is multi-tasking, and the question is; what are the implications? In live presentations, the increasing prevalence of wi-fi or phone data means laptops and/or smartphones can be online, and in virtual ones there’s typically a number of other applications available at the same time.

The audience can be doing things related to the presentation, like live-blogging it, tweeting it, or taking notes (I’ve been known to mindmap a keynote a time or two). They could even be looking up words or phrases mentioned by the speaker, or the speaker’s bio, or related material. Alternatively, they can be doing other things, like checking email, surfing the web, or other, unrelated, activities. Particularly in online presentations, there could actually be live chatting going on in a side-channel.

Are these activities valuable to the listener? Are they valuable to the presenter? Certainly, note taking is (though it doesn’t take connectivity). There’re results on this, particularly if you’re re-representing the material in different ways (mind maps, or paraphrasing). Blogging is, effectively, note-taking so should be valuable too, and tweeting may also be valuable (any studies? Research topic!). Certainly looking up things you don’t know so you process the rest of the material could also be valuable if it doesn’t take too long. And the reprocessing and seeing others’ thoughts from chat could be valuable. Even playing solitaire can be an advantage to listening, if you’re taking up some extra cognitive cycles that might otherwise lead you off into related thoughts but away from the presentation (likely only true if it’s just audio).

On the other hand, it might also add an intrusive overhead. Multi-tasking has been shown to provide a performance decrement. Related activities help, but unrelated activities will hinder the ability to process. It may be that you can get so caught up in the chat, or the search to comprehend a term, that you lose the thread of the discussion. And if it’s complex, the cognitive overhead might prevent you from actually being unable to make the necessary links. Certainly the tasks that aren’t content related are an intrusion.

So what’s to do? There are possible actions on both the part of the presenter/organizer, and on the part of the audience. For the audience, it’s got to be a personal responsibility to know how you learn best, and take appropriate steps. If note-taking helps you focus and elaborate, do so. If tweeting, blogging, or mind-mapping does so, rock on. If you really need to focus: put away the laptop and phone and focus! It’s for your benefit! Really, the same is for students. Now, individuals may not be as self-aware as we may desire, but that’s a separate topic that needs to be taken care of in the appropriate context.

For the presenters or organizers, as the most onerous step they could prevent wi-fi access. However, increasingly others are benefitting from the tweets from conferences and the blogging as well. I think that’s overly draconian, an implicit sign of distrust. If the presentation doesn’t match the audience interests, they should be able to vote with their feet or their minds. As I told a medical school faculty years ago, you can’t force them to attend, taking away the internet might make them resort to doodling or daydreaming but while you can lead a learner to learning you can’t make them think. It’s up to the presenter to present relevant material in an engaging manner.

As a presenter, you can actually use these channels to your advantage. As a webinar presenter, I like having a live chat tool. I monitor it, and use it to ask questions. In the last presentation I gave, it was awkward when a moderator had to read me the questions from the audience, and I couldn’t ask a general question an just survey the stream. I realize it’s difficult to both present and monitor a chat stream, and not all presenters can do it, so having a moderator can be a benefit. But stifling that flow of discussion could be a bane to those who learn better that way.

I haven’t had a tweet stream monitor in a live presentation yet, and it could be harder to pay attention to it, so again a moderator could help. In smaller sessions you can have interaction with the audience, but in larger presentations, it might take someone to follow it and summarize, though having a monitor that the presenter could see easily could also work.

However, it seems to me that you can’t force people to pay attention with or without technology, providing a rich suite of ways for people to process the information is valuable, and it can be a valuable source of feedback during the presentation.

Which leads to the new skills: for audiences, to know how you best process presentations and take responsibility for getting the most out of it; for presenters to improve their presentation skills to ensure value to the audience and support richer forms of interaction with the audiences; for moderators to track and summarize audience feedback in various forms; and for organizers to support these new channels.

There’s no point in trying to stifle technology affordances, the real key is to take advantage of them. If we have to learn, adjust, and accommodate, it’d be awful boring otherwise! :)

Teacher preparation, and more

29 October 2009 by Clark Leave a Comment

Karl Kapp wrote a post about Bill Gates’ latest move via the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation. In it, he notes the complexities that these announcements overlook. Echoing his sentiments, I wrote a rather long comment that I decided to reproduce here (with some context in [square brackets]):

Karl, this article backs up the point about the problems of a one-dimensional focus for incentives [cf teacher bonuses for test scores].

I’d suggest, that, worse, test scores aren’t measuring the important skills (cf Jonassen on relation between school problems and real world needs, Downes and others on competencies vs knowledge, etc). [As I’ve also argued, knowledge isn’t enough, and competencies are the critical differentiator going forward.]

I’ve argued that our ‘man on the moon’ project should be an entire K12 curriculum online (which *would* be a set of common academic standards), but overall, I worry a bit when someone can wield this much influence based upon his wallet. Just because he knows how to flog software (triumph of marketing over matter), doesn’t qualify him as an educational expert, and here it may be politics trumps policy.

I agree with reform in Teacher Ed programs, but if it’s not coupled with other reforms, it still won’t work. [Like standards, administrative policies, and more]

It’s complex, and like so many situations there are solutions that are simple, obvious, compelling, but wrong. We need to go to the mat with this, not toss off homilies. Thanks for the pointers!

Mobile Learning

26 October 2009 by Clark 5 Comments

In addition to speaking on mobile design with David Metcal at the Mobile Learning Jam at DevLearn, and with Richard Clark on pragmatic mobile development, I’ve got a contract with Pfeiffer for a mobile learning book. Yep, I’m writing another book. Flat learning curve, eh?

Seriously, I’m excited about the opportunity, because I’ve been on the stump for mobile for years, and think the market is right for mobile to finally contribute to organizational performance like I’ve believed since I wrote an article on the topic back in 2001. Consequently, I’m glad that Pfeiffer thinks the time is right for a practical book on the subject.

To make it a practical book, however, I need input. I hope to talk to some of the experts in the field, but I also want to hear from you. What do you think should be covered? What are your concerns? What are your hot-button issues? In short, what would be required to make the mlearning book for those of you charged with designing learning solutions? I don’t want to write a book for the sake of writing a book, I want to provide a useful guide. Please, let me know. Comments here are welcome, or other forms of contact, are welcome as well. Thanks!

Business Significance and Best Principles

23 October 2009 by Clark Leave a Comment

Businesses need research. They may need it at the pure research level, whether following, sponsoring, or conducting pure research, but they definitely need it internally. Regularly, reliably, repeatably. And not just in core products and services, but in internal operations, core things like how organizations learn.

To be clear what I mean, organizations need to explore other ways to do things: new ideas, better processes, new tools. The continual exploration of improvements is what drives innovation, and of course, success. And what I don’t mean is pure research, it’s very much what I think of as action research.

At core, I see it as viewing a particular problem, looking at principles that provide insight how to address it, determining what would be a successful outcome, developing a draft approach, and tuning it until you either determine it’s a success (or not). At the end, you should use your learnings from the exercise to reflect back upon the principles, and refine them and your understanding.

Note that the criteria for success or not does not have to be ‘statistically significant’. When I was leading a team developing an advanced system, I said we needed “business significance”: results good enough to provide us an advantage. These were trained scientists, but they got what I meant.

Also, I’m not talking about looking at ‘best practices’, but instead proposing an approach of best principles. As I’ve previously mentioned, they may not work in your context. Now, if you look at those best practices and abstract out the underlying principles, linking them to the broader body of knowledge, then you’re using them intelligently. While practices are hard to adapt to a new context, principles, having already been abstracted, are easier to apply, and the underlying conceptualization has been performed to draw upon previously existing knowledge.

You may find it useful to bring in some expertise around those best principles to help determine a particular approach. Of course, organizations should be giving their employees time to keep up with the latest thinking, so they’re able to keep track of, and tap into, the best principles going around, but that doesn’t always happen: 60% of those who filled out our CLO survey said that their people didn’t talk about outside trends that shaped their business, and 77% admitted that their people weren’t growing fast enough to keep up with the needs of the business.

The point being, organizations should be regularly looking to principle for the problems and needs they’re facing, making experiments and tuning while testing the outcomes against their business needs, and steadily improving. Even failures, if lessons are learned (and shared) are valuable. Are you exploiting best principles to business significance, and increasing competitiveness?

Publish or Perish

22 October 2009 by Clark Leave a Comment

I wrote an opinion piece over at the eLearn online magazine on the challenges educational publishers face and some ideas about the changes in thinking (and skills) they need. I welcome your thoughts.