Archives for 2009

The Formal/Informal Continuum

21 October 2009 by Clark 1 Comment

In some client work I’m doing, I’m helping out an effort to establish a Web 2.0, social, informal, [enter your own bizbuzz phrase here] strategy. Despite the hype, this looks to be a real value proposition for them. They’ve serious needs in terms of deep knowledge retiring, acquisitions to integrate into a streamlined operation, and more.

As a consequence, I’ve been talking to folks within this large organization who are embarked on various social media efforts. Some are instituted from different organizations, like under the CIO, and others have emerged from the learning function with the organization. The interesting thing is how the actions are blurring the notion that there are tight boundaries between formal and informal.

In two separate cases, the solution emerged as a realization that the ability of the learning organization to continue to meet the growing rate of change (both in the rate of changes, and the increasing complexity), is not keeping up with the need. There’s also a recognition that empowering the users to take control is a real opportunity. In one case, they’re rolling out a wiki that they’re initially populating, but are already in the process of devolving access and the ability to contribute. In another, they’re making accessible the resources for users to choose what to film or software activity to capture, to make their own little ‘learnlets’ and make available.

Is this performance support? Is this formal learning? Is this social or informal learning? It doesn’t matter! What matters is that these are areas where the learning function can and should contribute! However, it’s blurring the line between control of learning design, responsibility for curriculum, and more. And this isn’t an abrogation of responsibility, but instead a necessary extension of the learning function scope, on principle, and a pragmatic response to a changing world.

There was a separate instance where the KM group was developing a wiki for similar needs, e.g. the growing body of knowledge. However, there were two reasons why they could benefit from the learning function as well. For one, they’re focusing on developing rich semantic underpinnings that will facilitate smart search and rule-driven complex behaviors (read: opportunistic and customized information). This is great and important work (I love this stuff, it’s Web 3.0), but they won’t actually be putting in useful information for another year! There’s an immediate need that needs to be addressed here. The second one comes from when they are ready to move forward; they’ll benefit from the learning function’s experience in both gathering knowledge and in supporting rolling out access to the learners themselves.

There was also a definite recognition that the proliferation of resources was a problem to make accessible, and to govern the lifecycle of, and to message the updates. These are clearly central roles, and require an understanding of learning. And more. I’ve argued that learning designers need to understand information architecture and information design as well, and this only reinforces that message, but, those fields share much foundational knowledge and the extension isn’t onerous.

The bigger picture is to go beyond the individual initiatives, figure out ways to scale the approaches enterprise-wide, to make the breadth of resources systematically organized, and to remove redundancies and inefficiencies. By coordinating the technical sophistication of the Information Services group with the learning function (and other strategic alliances), this organization has a real opportunity to tap into the collective intelligence of it’s employees, and get a handle on the continuous innovation that will be required in the increasingly competitive market. But it only happens by some systematic work to streamline the effort, otherwise there will still be bottlenecks to effectiveness and redundancies to hamper efficiency.

There’s still a role for formal at one end, and I haven’t really exposed the alternative mechanisms supporting the far end of collaboration, but here I wanted to focus on the gray area in the middle and the necessity of not trying to artificially create a boundary.

Game-based meta-cognitive coaching

15 October 2009 by Clark 1 Comment

Many years ago, I read of some work being done by Valerie Shute and Jeffrey Bonar that I later got a chance to actually play a (very small) role in (and even later got to work with Valerie, definitely world-class talent). They had developed three separate tutoring environments (geometric optics, economics, electrical circuits), yet the tutoring engine was essentially the same across all three, not domain specific. The clever thing they were doing was tutoring on exploration skills, varying one variable at a time, making reasonable increments in values to graph trends, etc.

Subsequent to that, I got involved again in games for learning. What naturally occurred to me was that you could put the same sort of meta-cognitive skill tutoring in a game environment, as you have to digitally create all the elements you’d need to track anyways for the game reasons, and it could be a layer on top. While this would work in a single game (and we did put a small version into the Quest game), it would be even better on top of a game engine. I even proposed it as a research project, but the grant reviewers thought that while a good idea, it was too ambitious (ahead of my time and underestimated :).

The reinterest in so-called 21st century skills, the kind Stephen Downes so eloquently calls an Operating System for the Mind, reawakens the opportunity. These skills are manifested in activity, and require an understanding of the activity to be able to infer approaches and provide feedback. In a well-defined arena like a designed game environment, we can know the goals and possible actions, and start looking for patterns of behavior.

Game engines, with their fixed primitives, make it easier to define what goals are and consequently to specify the particular goals and makes looking for patterns more generally definable. Thus, in a game, we can see whether the learners’ exploration is systematic, whether their attempts are as informative as possible, and possibly more.

This is also true of virtual worlds, although only when designed with goals (e.g. from a simulation to a scenario, whether tuned into a game or not). The benefit of a virtual world is, again, the primitives are fixed, simplifying the task of defining goals and actions.

Of course, building particular types of interaction (e.g. social), particular types of clues (e.g. audio versus visual) and looking for patterns can provide deeper opportunities. Really, such performance is initially an assessment (one of the facets of what we were doing on the Intellectricity project was building a learner characteristic assessment as a game), and that assessment can trigger intervention as a consequence. For any malleable skill, we have real opportunities.

Given that much of what is necessary are abilities to research , evaluate the quality of sources, design, experiment, create, and more, these environments are a fascinating opportunity. I’m not in a situation to lead such an initiative, but I still think it’s a worthwhile undertaking. Anyone ‘game’?

Ignoring Informal

14 October 2009 by Clark 4 Comments

I received in the mail an offer for a 3 book set titled Improving Performance in the Workplace. It’s associated with ISPI, and greatly reflects their Human Performance Technology approach, which I generally laud as going beyond instructional design. It’s also by Pfeiffer, who is my own publisher, and they’re pretty good as publishers go. However, I noticed something that really struck me, based upon the work I’ve been doing with my colleagues in the Internet Time Alliance (formerly TogetherLearn).

The first volume is really about assessing needs, and design, and it includes behavioral task analysis and cognitive task analysis, and even talkes about engagement strategies in simulation and gaming, video gaming. The second volume includes performance interventions, and includes elaerning, coaching, knowledge management, and more (as well as things like incentives, culture, EPSS, feedback, etc. The third volume’s on measurement and evaluation.

All this is good: these are important topics, and having a definitive handbook about them is a valuable contribution (and priced equivalently, the whole set is bargain-priced at $400). However, while I don’t have the book to hand to truly evaluate it, it appears that there are some gaps.

In my experience, some issues are not behavioral or cognitive but attitudinal. Consequently, I’d have thought there might be some coverage. There was a chapter in Jonassen’s old Handbook on Research in Ed Tech on the topic, and I’ve derived my own approach from that and some other readings. When they get into tools, they seem to miss virtual worlds, and they seem to have a repeat of the straw-man case against discovery environments (many years ago it was recognized that pure discovery wasn’t the go, and guided discovery was developed). It bugs me that I can’t find the individual authors, but I do recognize the names of one of the editors. But these aren’t the biggest misses, to me.

Overall, there seems to be no awareness of the whole thrust of social and informal learning. Ok, so Jay’s book on Informal Learning is relatively new, and the concrete steps may still be being sorted out, but there’s a lot there. Or perhaps it’s covered in Knowledge Management (after all, Marc Rosenberg’s been deeply involved in ISPI and wrote the Beyond e-Learning book). Yet it seems a bit buried and muddled, and here’s why:

I’m working with a client now, and one of my tasks is surveying how they’re using social media. A group responsible for technical training (and they’re an engineering organization) recognized that they weren’t able to keep up with the increasing quantity and quality of changes that were coming. Rather than do a performance improvement intervention, they realized that another opportunity would be to start putting up information and inviting others to contribute. They put up a wiki, and first maintained it internally, and then gradually devolved some of the responsibility out to their ‘customers’.

The point is, how does that fit into the traditional paradigm? And yet, increasingly, we’re seeing and recommending approaches that go beyond the categories that fit here. I wonder if their metrics include the outputs of enabling innovation. I wonder if their interventions include expertise finders and collaboration tools. I wonder if their analyses include the benefits of ‘presence’.

Times are changing, faster and faster. I think these books would’ve been the ideal thing, maybe 5 years ago. Now, I think they’re emblematic of a training mindset when a larger perspective is needed. These come into play after you’ve identified that a formal approach is needed. They use a phrase of a ‘performance landscape’, but their picture doesn’t seem to include the concepts that Jay includes in his ‘learnscape’ and I as the ‘performance ecosystem’.

Virtual World Affordances, updated

8 October 2009 by Clark Leave a Comment

VWAffordances Corrie Bergeron (@skydadddy) pointed out that I hadn’t really accounted for the ability to create a persona, a representation of yourself via avatar that reflects how you’d like to be perceived. Chuck Hamilton did have it in his list, and I thought it was implicit in the alternative to anonymity, but on reflection, I think it does deserve it’s own affordance, and implications for reputation.

Of course, you’ll have a persona regardless, if you’re present in the world, but the ability to customize one is the unique opportunity.

The question then becomes, how do you use this representation? Caroline Avey (@aveyca) presented a wide variety of uses of virtual worlds that ACS is exploring, and some are really not things that require long term personas, but are instead ways for folks to come together independent of geography for introductions of new products or other events. Similarly, other uses of virtual worlds may be better configured with other combinations of affordances. Different environments have different implementation of the affordances, or the ability to limit the capability of some (ie not have customizable avatars or not support agency) to meet particular event needs.

Understanding your virtual world goals can help determine what affordances are critical, and support your design criteria (and tool choice). That’s my intention, at any rate. I really appreciate feedback that helps me refine the models I develop, advocate, and use. Thoughts and comments always welcome.

Extending Virtual World Affordances

6 October 2009 by Clark 3 Comments

I recently attended the 3DTLC conference, as I reported before. Chuck Hamilton presented on his (IBM’s) take on affordances on virtual worlds. Given that I’ve opined before, I asked for more detail on their take, and he was kind enough to forward to me their definitions. I like what they’ve done, but it led me to try to refine what I see as some confounding (they actually separate several of their 10 into two separate ones), and try to capture what I think are core, what can be enabled, and what then arise from those capabilities.

I start with what I think are the core affordances of virtual worlds, that there’s a 3D world, that you can visit, and that’s digital. From there, I see that you can enable others to be there (social), you can enable action (agency), the world can be kept around (persistent), and it can be made accessible broadly (e.g. through the internet).

If you choose to enable those (and you should, in most cases), you get some emergent properties. Chuck talked about a universal visual language, and you certainly can both tap into, and establish, visual cues. The scale does not have to be real, but can indeed scale down to and up to any size you want, in part or all.

You can choose to be anonymous, but if you don’t and choose to have a representation that is active over time, you can establish a reputation.

By being active, you can also enable practice opportunities such as simulations, scenarios, and games. If agency includes not just interaction, but creation, and you have social, you can have co-creation (one of the most exciting opportunities for informal learning). The persistence of your activity creates the opportunity to capture traces for reflection, e.g. ‘after-action review’.

The fact that it’s digital means it can be augmented with external capability: media, applications, and more. Also, you can be at least geography-independent, if not chronologically-independent.

This is a preliminary stab at trying to trace the initial, potential, and consequently emergent affordances, by no means do I think it’s the definitive answer. Feedback solicited!

The worst of best practices and benchmarking

5 October 2009 by Clark 4 Comments

In a recent post, Jane Bozarth goes to task on ‘best practices’, which I want to elaborate on. In the post, she talks about how best practices are contextualized, so that they may work well here, but not there. She’s got a cute and apt metaphor with marriage, and she’s absolutely right.

However, I want to go further. Let me set the stage: years ago as a grad student, our lab was approached with the task of developing an expert system for a particular task. It certainly was something we could have done. Eventually, we asked what the description was for the ideal performance, and were told that the best source was the person who’d been doing it the longest. Now, people are fabulous pattern matchers, and performing something for a long time with some reflection on improvement likely could get you some really good performance. However, there are some barriers: experts no longer have access to their own performance; without an external frame of reference, they can get trapped into local maxima; and other phenomena of our cognitive architecture interfere with optimal performance (e.g. set effects, functional fixedness). I’ve riffed on this often; it’s compiled and they tell stories about what they do that have little correlation to what they actually do. We didn’t end up taking up the opportunity. So it may be the best out there, but is it the best that can be?

And that’s the problem. Why are we only looking at what the best is that anyone’s doing? Why not abstract across that and other performances, looking for emergent principles, and trying to infer what would on principle be the best? That is, if it hasn’t already been documented in theory and is available (academics do that sort of thing as a career, and in between the obfuscation there are often good thoughts and answers). The same with benchmarking: it’s relatively the best, not absolutely the best.

I’ve largely made a career out of trying to find the principled best approaches, interpreting cognitive science research and looking broadly across relevant fields (including HCI/UI, software engineering, entertainment, and others) to find emergent principles that can guide design of solutions. And, reliably, I find that there are idea, concepts, models, etc that can guide efforts as broadly dispersed as virtual worlds, mobile, adaptive systems, content models, organizational implementation, and more. Models emerge that serve as checklists, principles, frameworks for design that allow us to examine tradeoffs and make the principled best solution. I regularly capture these models and share them (e.g. my models page, and more recent ones regularly appear in this blog).

I’m not saying it’s easy, but you look across our field and recognize there are those who are doing good work in either translating research into practice or finding emergent patterns that resonate with theoretical principles. It’s time to stop looking at what other organizations are doing in their context as a guide, and start drawing upon what’s known and customizing it to your context, and then having a cycle of continual tuning. With the increasing pressures to be competitive, I’d suggest that just being good enough isn’t. Being the best you can be is the only sustainable advantage.

Let’s see: copy your best competitor, and keep equal; or shoot for the principled best that can be in the category, and have an unassailable position of leadership? The answer seems obvious to me. How about you?

CLO Symposium

30 September 2009 by Clark Leave a Comment

I’ve been attending the CLO Fall Symposium this week, and it’s been a great experience. I wrote it up as a blog post over at eLearn Mag. There is supposed to be more linkage between Learnlets and their mag real soon. Stay tuned!

Virtual Worlds: Affordances and Learning

25 September 2009 by Clark Leave a Comment

Two days ago I attended the 3D Teaching, Learning, & Collaboration conference, organized by Tony O’Driscoll. I’ve previously posted my thoughts on virtual worlds, but I had a wee bit of a revelation that I want to get clear in my head, and it ties into several things that went on at the conference.

First, let me say that the day of the conference I got to attend was great, with lots of the really involved folks there, and every evidence (including the tweet stream) that the second day was every bit as good. Tony talked about his new book with Karl Kapp, Chuck Hamilton spoke on lessons learned through IBM’s invovlement in Virtual Worlds, Koreen Olbrish chaired a panel with a number of great case studies, to name just a few of the great opportunities.

Chuck listed 10 ‘affordances‘ of virtual worlds, expanding a list Tony had previously started. There was some debate about whether affordance is a good term, since not everyone knows it, but I maintain that for people who need it, it’s the right term and that we can use some term like ‘inherent capability’ for those who don’t. I had some quibbles with Chuck’s list, as it seemed that several confounded some issues, and I hope to talk with him more about it.

Tony also presented, in particular, some principles about designing learning for virtual worlds (see slide 17 here). Interestingly, they aren’t specific to virtual worlds, and mirror the principles for designing engaging learning experiences that come from the alignment of educational practice and engaging experiences I talk about in my book. Glad to see folks honing in on principles for creating meaningful virtual world experiences!

The revelation for me, however, was linking the social informal learning with virtual worlds. Virtual worlds can be used for both formal and informal learning, they’re platforms for social action. I’ve had the formal and informal separated in my mind, but needn’t. I’ve been quite active in social learning to meet informal learning needs with my togetherLearn colleagues, but have always written off virtual worlds as still having too much technical and learning overhead to be worth it unless you have a long-term intention where those overheads get amortized.

What’s clear is that, increasingly, organizations are creating and leveraging those long term relationships. ProtonMedia even announced integration of both Sharepoint and their own social media system with their virtual world platform, so either can be accessed in world or from the desktop. There were a suite of examples across both formal and informal learning where organizations were seeing real, measurable, value.

The underlying opportunities of virtual presence are clear, it’s just not been clear that it’s significantly better than a non-immersive social networking system. Certainly if what your people need to formally learn, or informally network on is inherently 3D, but the contextualization is having some benefits.

Some issues remain. At lunch I was talking to some gents who have a system that streams your face via webcam onto your avatar, so your real expressions are represented. That’s counter to some of the possibilities I see to represent yourself in virtual worlds as you prefer to be seen, not as how nature commands, but there are some trust issues (and parental safety concerns as well).

Still, as technical barriers are surpassed, and audiences become more familiar with and comfortable in virtual worlds, the segue between formal and social networking can be accomplished in world making a virtual business office increasingly viable. It may be time to dust off my avatar and get traveling.

The 7 c’s of natural learning

18 September 2009 by Clark 7 Comments

Yesterday I talked about the seeding, feeding, and weeding necessary to develop a self-sustaining network. I referred to supporting the activities that we find in natural learning, for both formal and informal learning. The goal is to align our organized support with our learners to optimize the outcome. In thinking about it (and borrowing heavily from some slides by Jay Cross), I discerned (read: worked hard to fit :) 7 C’s of learning that characterize how we learn before schooling extinguishes the love of learning:

Choose: we are self-service learners. We follow what interests us, what is meaningful to us, what we know is important.

Commit: we take ownership for the outcomes. We work until we’ve gotten out of it what we need.

Crash: our commitment means we make mistakes, and learn from them.

Create: we design, we build, we are active in our learning.

Copy: we mimic others, looking to their performances for guidance.

Converse: we talk with others. We ask questions, offer opinions, debate positions.

Collaborate: we work together. We build together, evaluate what we’re doing, and take turns adding value.

With this list of things we do, we need to find ways to support them, across both formal and informal learning. In formal learning, we should be presenting meaningful and authentic tasks, and asking learners to solve them, ideally collaboratively. While individual is better than none, collaborative allows opportunity for meaning negotiation. We need to allow failure, and support learning from it. We need to be able to ask questions, and make decisions and see the consequences.

Similarly in informal learning, we need to create ways for people to develop their understandings, work together, to put out opinions and get feedback, ask for help, and find people to use as models. By using tools like blogs for recording and sharing personal learning and information updates, wikis to collaborate, discussion forums to converse, and blogs and microblogs to track what others think are important, we provide ways to naturally learn together.

Recognize that I’m taking the larger definition of learning here. I do not mean just courses, though they’re part of it. However, real learning involves research, design, problem-solving, creativity, innovation, experimentation, etc. We absolutely have to get our and the organization’s mind around this if we’re going to be effective. So, look to natural learning to guide your role in facilitating organizational learning.

Seed, feed, & weed

17 September 2009 by Clark 12 Comments

In my presentation yesterday, I was talking about how to get informal learning going. As many have noted, it’s about moving from a notion of being a builder, handcrafting (or mass-producing) solutions, to being a facilitator, nurturing the community to develop it’s own capabilities. Jay Cross talks about the learnscape, while I term it the performance ecosystem. The point, however, is from the point of the view of the learner, all the resources needed are ‘to hand’ through every stage of knowledge work. Courses, information resources, people, representational tools, the ability to tap into the 4 C’s (create, contextualize, connect, co-create).

Overall, it taps into our natural learning, where we experiment, reflect, converse, mimic, collaborate, and more. Our approach to formal learning needs to more naturally mimic this approach, having us attempting to do something, and resourcing around it with information and facilitation. Our approach to informal learning similarly needs to reflect our natural learning.

Networks grow from separate nodes, to a hierarchical organization where one node manages the connections, but the true power of a network is unleashed when every node knows what the goal is and the nodes coordinate to achieve it. It is this unleashing of the power of the network that we want to facilitate. But if you build it, they may not come.

Networks take nurturing. Using the gardener or landscaper metaphor, yesterday I said that networks need seeding, feeding, and weeding. What do I mean? If you want to grow a network, you will have to:

Seed: you need to put in place the network tool, where individuals can register, and then create the types of connections they need. They may self-organize around roles, or tasks, or projects, or all of the above. They may need discussion forums, blogs, wikis, and IM. They may need to load, tag, and search on resources. You likely will need to preload it with resources, to ensure there’s value to be found. And you’ll have to ensure that there are rewards for participating and contributing. The environment needs to be there, and they have to be aware.

Feed: you can’t just put in place, you have to nurture the network. People have to know what the goals are and their role. Don’t tell them what to do, tell them what needs done. You may need to quietly ‘encourage’ the opinion makers to participate. And the top of the food chain needs to not only anoint the process, but model the behavior as well. The top level of the group (ie not the CEO, but the leader of whatever group you’ve chosen to facilitate) needs to be active in the network. You may need to highlight what other people have said, elicit questions and answers, and take a role both within and outside the network to get it going. You may have to go in and reorganize the resources, take what’s heard and make it concrete and usable. You’ll undoubtedly have to facilitate the skills to take advantage of the environment. And you have to ensure there’s value there for them.

Weed: you may have to help people learn how to participate. You may well find some inappropriate behavior, and help those learn what’s acceptable. You’ll likely have to develop, and modify, policies and procedures. You may have to take out some submitted resources and revise them for better usability. You may well have to address cultural issues that arise, when you find that participation is stunted by a lack of tolerance of diversity, no openness to new ideas, no safety for putting ideas out, and other factors that facilitate a learning organization.

However, if you recognize that it will take time and tuning, and diligently work to nurture the network, you should be able to reap the benefits of an aligned group of empowered people. And those benefits are real: innovation, problem-solving, and more, and those are the key to organizational competitiveness going forward. Ready to get grubby?

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