Archives for April 2015

Activities for Integrating Learning

30 April 2015 by Clark 2 Comments

I’ve been working on a learning design that integrates developing social media skills with developing specific competencies, aligned with real work. It’s an interesting integration, and I drafted a pedagogy that I believe accomplishes the task. It draws heavily on the notion of activity-based learning. For your consideration.

The learning process is broken up into a series of activities. Each activity starts with giving the learning teams a deliverable they have to create, with a deadline an appropriate distance out. There are criteria they have to meet, and the challenge is chosen such that it’s within their reach, but out of their grasp. That is, they’ll have to learn some things to accomplish it.

As they work on the deliverable, they’re supported. They may have resources available to review, ideally curated (and, across the curricula, their responsibility for curating their own resources is developed as part of handing off the responsibility for learning to learn). There may be people available for questions, and they’re also being actively watched and coached (less as they go on).

Now, ideally the goal would be a real deliverable that would achieve an impact on the organization. That, however, takes a fair bit of support to make it a worthwhile investment. Depending on the ability of the learners, you may start with challenges that are like but not necessarily real challenges, such as evaluating a case study or working on a simulation. The costs of mentoring go up as the consequences of the action, but so do the benefits, so it’s likely that the curriculum will similarly get closer to live tasks as it progresses.

At the deadline, the deliverables are shared for peer review, presumably with other teams. In this instance, there is a deliberate intention to have more than one team, as part of the development of the social capabilities. Reviewing others’ work, initially with evaluation heuristics, is part of internalizing the monitoring criteria, on the path to becoming a self-monitoring and self-improving learner. Similarly, the freedom to share work for evaluation is a valuable move on the path to a learning culture. Expert review will follow, to finalize the learning outcomes.

The intent is also that the conversations and collaborations be happening in a social media platform. This is part of helping the teams (and the organization) acquire social media competencies. Sharing, working together, accessing resources, etc. are being used in the platform just as they are used for work. At the end, at least, they are being used for work!

This has emerged as a design that develops both specific work competencies and social competencies in an integrated way. Of course, the proof is when there’s a chance to run it, but in the spirit of working out loud…your thoughts welcome.

Got Game?

28 April 2015 by Clark 1 Comment

Why should you, as a learning designer, take a game design workshop? What is the relationship between games and learning? I want to suggest that there are very important reasons why you should.

Just so you don’t think I’m the only one saying it, in the decade since I wrote the book Engaging Learning: Designing e-Learning Simulation Games, there have been a large variety of books on the topic. Clark Aldrich has written three, at least count. James Paul Gee has pointed out how the semantic features of games match to the way our brains learn, as has David Williamson Shaeffer. People like Kurt Squire, Constance Steinkuhler, Henry Jenkins, and Sasha Barab have been strong advocates of games for learning. And of course Karl Kapp has a recent book on the topic. You could also argue that Raph Koster’s A Theory of Fun is another vote given that his premise is that fun is learning. So I’m not alone in this.

But more specifically, why get steeped in it? And I want to give you three reasons: understanding engagement, understanding practice, and understanding design. Not to say you don’t know these, but I’ll suggest that there are depths which you’re not yet incorporating into your learning, and you could and should. After all, learning should be ‘hard fun’.

The difference between a simulation and a game is pretty straightforward. A simulation is just a model of the world, and it can be in any legal state and be taken to any other. A self-motivated and effective self-learner can use that to discover what they need to know. But for specific learning purposes, we put that simulation into an initial state, and ask the learner to take it to a goal state, and we’ve chosen those so that they can’t do it until they understand the relationships we want them to understand. That’s what I call a scenario, and we typically wrap a story around it to motivate the goal. We can tune that into a game. Yes, we turn it into a game, but by tuning.

And that’s the important point about engagement. We can’t call it game; only our players can tell us whether it’s a game or not. To achieve that goal, we have to understand what motivates our learners, what they care about, and figure out how to integrate that into the learning. It’s about not designing a learning event, but designing a learning experience. And, by studying how games achieve that, we can learn how to take our learning from mundane to meaningful. Whether or not we have the resources and desire to build actual games, we can learn valuable lesssons to apply to any of our learning design. It’s the emotional element most ID leaves behind.

I also maintain that, next to mentored live practice, games are the best thing going (and individual mentoring doesn’t scale well, and live practice can be expensive both to develop but particularly when mistakes are made). Games build upon that by providing deep practice; embedding important decisions in a context that makes the experience as meaningful as when it really counts. We use game techniques to heighten and deep the experience, which makes it closer to live practice, reducing transfer distance. And we can provide repeated practice. Again, even if we’re not able to implement full game engines, there are many important lessons to take to designing other learning experiences: how to design better multiple choice questions, the value of branching scenarios, and more. Practical improvements that will increase engagement and increase outcomes.

Finally, game designers use design processes that have a lot to offer to formal learning design. Their practices in terms of information collection (analysis), prototyping and refinement, and evaluation are advanced by the simple requirement that their output is such that people will actually pay for the experience. There are valuable elements that can be transferred to learning design even if you aren’t expecting to have an outcome so valuable you can charge for it.

As professionals, it behooves us to look to other fields with implications that could influence and improve our outcomes. Interface design, graphic design, software engineering, and more are all relevant areas to explore. So is game design, and arguably the most relevant one we can.

So, if you’re interested in tapping into this, I encourage you to consider the game design workshop I’ll be running for the ATD Atlanta chapter on the 3rd of June. Their price is fair even if you’re not a chapter member, and it’s great deal if you are. Further, it’s a tried and tested format that’s been well received since I first started offering it. The night before, I’ll be busting myths at the chapter meeting. I hope I’ll see you there!

Personal Mobile Mastery

23 April 2015 by Clark Leave a Comment

A conversation with a colleague prompted a reflection. The topic was personal learning, and in looking for my intersections (beyond my love of meta-learning), I looked at my books. The Revolution isn’t an obvious match, nor is games (though trust me, I could make them work ;), but a more obvious match was mlearning. So the question is, how do we do personal knowledge mastery with mobile?

Let’s get the obvious out of the way. Most of what you do on the desktop, particularly social networking, is doable on a mobile device. And you can use search engines and reference tools just the same. You can find how to videos as well. Is there more?

First, of course, are all the things to make yourself more ‘effective’. Using the four key original apps on the Palm Pilot for instance: your calendar to remind you of events or to check availability, using ToDo checklists to remember commitments to do something, using memos to take notes for reference, and using your contact list to reach people. Which isn’t really learning, but it’s valuable to learn to be good at these.

Then we start doing things because of where you are. Navigation to somewhere or finding what’s around you are the obvious choices. Those are things you won’t necessarily learn from, but they make you more effective. But they can also help educate you. You can look where you are on a map and see what’s around you, or identify the thing on the map that’s in that direction (“oh, that’s the Quinnsitute” or “There’s Mount Clark” or whatever), and have a chance of identifying a seen prominence.

And you can use those social media tools as before, but you can also use them because of where or when you are. You can snap pictures of something and send it around and ask how it could help you. Of course, you can snap pictures or films for later recollection and reflection, and contribute them to a blog post for reflection. And take notes by text or audio. Or even sketching or diagramming. The notes people take for themselves at conferences, for instance, get shared and are valuable not just for the sharer, but for all attendees.

Certainly searching things you don’t understand or, when there’s unknown language, seeing if you can get a translation, are also options. You can learn what something means, and avoid making mistakes.

When you are, e.g. based upon what you’re doing, is a little less developed. You’d have to have rich tagging around your calendar to signal what it is you’re doing for a system to be able to leverage that information, but I reckon we can get there if and when we want.

I’m not a big fan of ‘learning’ on a mobile device, maybe a tablet in transit or something, but not courses on a phone. On the other hand, I am a big fan of self-learning on a phone, using your phone to make you smarter. These are embryonic thoughts, so I welcome feedback. Being more contextually aware both in the moment and over time is a worthwhile opportunity, one we can and should look to advance. I think there’s much yet, though tools like ARIS are going to help change that. And that’ll be good.

Why models matter

21 April 2015 by Clark 2 Comments

In the industrial age, you really didn’t need to understand why you were doing what you were doing, you were just supposed to do it. At the management level, you supervised behavior, but you didn’t really set strategy. It was only at the top level where you used the basic principles of business to run your organization. That was then, this is now.

Things are moving faster, competitors are able to counter your advances in months, there’s more information, and this isn’t decreasing. You really need to be more agile to deal with uncertainty, and you need to continually innovate. And I want to suggest that this advantage comes from having a conceptual understanding, a model of what’s happening.

There are responses we can train, specific ways of acting in context. These aren’t what are most valuable any more. Experts, with vast experience responding in different situations, abstract models that guide what they do, consciously or unconsciously (this latter is a problem, as it makes it harder to get at; experts can’t tell you 70% of what they actually do!). Most people, however, are in the novice to practitioner range, and they’re not necessarily ready to adapt to changes, unless we prepare them.

What gives us the ability to react are having models that explain the underlying causal relations as we best understand them, and then support in applying those models in different contexts. If we have models, and see how those models guide performance in context A, then B, and then we practice applying it in context C and D (with model-based feedback), we gradually develop a more flexible ability to respond. It’s not subconscious, like experts, but we can figure it out.

So, for instance, if we have the rationale behind a sales process, how it connects to the customer’s mental needs and the current status, we can adapt it to different customers. If we understand the mechanisms of medical contamination, we can adapt to new vectors. If we understand the structure of a cyber system, we can anticipate security threats. The point is that making inferences on models is a more powerful basis than trying to adapt a rote procedure without knowing the basis.

I recognize that I talk a lot in concepts, e.g. these blog posts and diagrams, but there’s a principled reason: I’m trying to give you a flexible basis, models, to apply to your own situation. That’s what I do in my own thinking, and it’s what I apply in my consulting. I am a collector of models, so that I have more tools to apply to solving my own or other’s problems. (BTW, I use concept and model relatively interchangeably, if that helps clarify anything.)

It’s also a sound basis for innovation. Two related models (ahem) of creativity say that new ideas are either the combination of two different models or an evolution of an existing one. Our brains are pattern matchers, and the more we observe a pattern, the more likely it will remind us of something, a model. The more models we have to match, the more likely we are to find one that maps. Or one that activates another.

Consequently, it’s also one of the things I push as a key improvement to learning design. In addition to meaningful practice, give the concept behind it, the why, in the form of a model. I encourage you to look for the models behind what you do, the models in what your presented, and the models in what your learners are asked to do.

It’s a good basis for design, for problem-solving, and for learning. That, to me, is a big opportunity.

Road trip(s)!

16 April 2015 by Clark 1 Comment

Several events are coming up that I should mention (“coming to a location near you!”):

If you’re anywhere near Austin, you should check out the upcoming eLearning Symposium May 7 and 8. I’m speaking on the L&D Revolution I’m trying to incite, and then offering a half day workshop to help you get your strategy going. There’s a nice slate of other speakers to help you dig deeper into elearning.

I’ll also be speaking on Serious eLearning at Callidus Cloud Connections in Las Vegas May 11-13. If you’re into Litmos, or thinking about it, it’s the place to be.

If you’re near Atlanta, I’ll be busting learning myths in an evening session for the ATD Chapter on the 2nd of June, and then running a learning game workshop on the 3rd. You’ll find out more about learning and engagement; you can and should add game elements to your learning design. I’m serious when I say that “learning can, and should, be hard fun“.

And I’ll be touting the needed L&D Revolution up in Vancouver June 11, keynoting the CSTD Symposium. There’s a great line up of talks to raise your game.

I would love to meet you at one of these events; hope to see you there (or there, or there, or there).

Cyborg Thinking: Cognition, Context, and Complementation

15 April 2015 by Clark Leave a Comment

I’m writing a chapter about mobile trends, and one of the things I’m concluding with are the different ways we need to think to take advantage of mobile. The first one emerged as I wrote and kind of surprised me, but I think there’s merit.

The notion is one I’ve talked about before, about how what our brains do well, and what mobile devices do well, are complementary. That is, our brains are powerful pattern matchers, but have a hard time remembering rote information, particularly arbitrary or complicated details. Digital technology is the exact opposite. So, that complementation whenever or wherever we are is quite valuable.

Consider chess. When first computers played against humans, they didn’t do well. As computers became more powerful, however, they finally beat the world champion. However, they didn’t do it like humans do, they did it by very different means; they couldn’t evaluate well, but they could calculate much deeper in the amount of turns played and use simple heuristics to determine whether those were good plays. The sheer computational ability eventually trumped the familiar pattern approach. Now, however, they have a new type of competition, where a person and a computer will team and play against another similar team. The interesting result is not the best chess player, nor the best computer program, but a player who knows best how to leverage a chess companion.

Now map this to mobile: we want to design the best complement for our cognition. We want to end up having the best cyborg synergy, where our solution does the best job of leaving to the system what it does well, and leaving to the person the things we do well. It’s maybe only a slight shift in perspective, but it is a different view than designing to be, say, easy to use. The point is to have the best partnership available.

This isn’t just true for mobile, of course, it should be the goal of all digital design. The specific capability of mobile, using sensors to do things because of when and where we are, though, adds unique opportunities, and that has to figure into thinking as well. As does, of course, a focus on minimalism, and thinking about content in a new way: not as a medium for presentation, but as a medium for augmentation: to complement the world, not subsume it.

It’s my thinking that this focus on augmenting our cognition and our context with content that’s complementary is the way to optimize the uses of mobile. What’s your thinking?

Defining Microlearning?

14 April 2015 by Clark 8 Comments

Last week on the #chat2lrn twitter chat, the topic was microlearning. It was apparently prompted by this post by Tom Spiglanin which does a pretty good job of defining it, but some conceptual confusion showed up in the chat that makes it clear there’s some work to be done. I reckon there may be a role for the label and even the concept, but I wanted to take a stab at what it is and isn’t, at least on principle.

So the big point to me is the word ‘learning’. A number of people opined about accessing a how-to video, and let’s be clear: learning doesn’t have to come from that. You could follow the steps and get the job done and yet need to access it again if you ever needed it. Just like I can look up the specs on the resolution of my computer screen, use that information, but have to look it up again next time. So it could be just performance support, and that’s a good thing, but it’s not learning. It suits the notion of micro content, but again, it’s about getting the job done, not developing new skills.

Another interpretation was little bits of components of learning (examples, practice) delivered over time. That is learning, but it’s not microlearning. It’s distributed learning, but the overall learning experience is macro (and much more effective than the massed, event, model). Again, a good thing, but not (to me) microlearning. This is what Will Thalheimer calls subscription learning.

So, then, if these aren’t microlearning, what is? To me, microlearning has to be a small but complete learning experience, and this is non-trivial. To be a full learning experience, this requires a model, examples, and practice. This could work with very small learnings (I use an example of media roles in my mobile design workshops). I think there’s a better model, however.

To explain, let me digress. When we create formal learning, we typically take learners away from their workplace (physically or virtually), and then create contextualized practice. That is, we may present concepts and examples (pre- via blended, ideally, or less effectively in the learning event), and then we create practice scenarios. This is hard work. Another alternative is more efficient.

Here, we layer the learning on top of the work learners are already doing. Now, why isn’t this performance support? Because we’re not just helping them get the job done, we’re explicitly turning this into a learning event by not only scaffolding the performance, but layering on a minimal amount of conceptual material that links what they’re doing to a model. We (should) do this in examples and feedback on practice, now we can do it around real work. We can because (via mobile or instrumented systems) we know where they are and what they’re doing, and we can build content to do this. It’s always been a promise of performance support systems that they could do learning on top of helping the outcome, but it’s as yet seldom seen.

And the focus on minimalism is good, too. We overwrite and overproduce, adding in lots that’s not essential. C.f. Carroll’s Nurnberg Funnel or Moore’s Action Mapping. And even for non-mobile, minimalism makes sense (as I tout under the banner of the Least Assistance Principle). That is, it’s really not rude to ask people (or yourself as a designer) “what’s the least I can do for you?” Because that’s what people generally really prefer: give me the answer and let me get back to work!

Microlearning as a phrase has probably become current (he says, cynically) because elearning providers are touting it to sell the ability of their tools to now deliver to mobile. But it can also be a watch word to emphasize thinking about performance support, learning ‘in context’, and minimalism. So I think we may want to continue to use it, but I suggest it’s worthwhile to be very clear what we mean by it. It’s not courses on a phone (mobile elearning), and it’s not spaced out learning, it’s small but useful full learning experiences that can fit by size of objective or context ‘in the moment’. At least, that’s my take; what’s yours?

Starting from the end

8 April 2015 by Clark Leave a Comment

Week before last, Will Thalheimer and I had another one of our ‘debates’, this time on the Kirkpatrick model (read the comments, too!). We followed up last week with a live debate. And in the course of it I said something that I want to reiterate and extend.

The reason I like the Kirkpatrick model is it emphasizes one thing that I see the industry failing to do. Properly applied (see below), it starts with the measurable change you need to see in the organization, and you work backwards from there. You go back to the behavior change you need in the workplace to address that measure, and from there to the changes in training and/or resources to create that behavior change. The important point is starting with a business metric. No ‘we need a course on this’, but instead: “what business goal are we trying to impact”.

Note: the solution can just be a tool, it doesn’t have to always be learning. For example, if what people need to access accurately are the specific product features of one of a multitude of solutions that are in rapid flux (financial packages, electronic hardware, …), trying to get it in the head accurately isn’t a good goal. Having people able to access the information ‘in the head’ is an exercise in futility, and you’re better off putting the information ‘in the world’. (Which is why I want to change from Learning & Development to Performance & Development, it’s not about learning, it’s about doing!)

The problems with Kirkpatrick are several. For one, even he admitted he numbered it wrong. The starting point is numbered ‘four’, which misleads people. So we get the phenomena that people do stage 1, sometimes stage 2, rarely do they get to stage 3, and stage 4 is almost non-existent, according to ATD research. And stage 1, as Will rightly points out, is essentially worthless, because the correlation between what learners think of the learning and the actual impact is essentially zero! Finally, too often Kirkpatrick is wrongly considered as only to evaluate training (even the language on the site, as the link above will show you, talks only about training). It should be about the impact of an intervention whatever the means (see above). And the impact is what the Kirkpatrick model properly is about, as I opined in the blog debate.

So, in the live debate, I said I’d be happy for any other model that focused on working backwards. And was reminded that, well, I proposed just that a while ago! The blog post is the short version, but I also wrote this rather longer and more rigorous paper (PDF), and I’m inclined think it’s one of my more important contributions to design (to date ;). It’s a fairly thorough look at the design process and where we go wrong (owing to our cognitive architecture), and a proposal for an alternative approach based upon sound principles. I welcome your thoughts!

Labeling 70:20:10

7 April 2015 by Clark 7 Comments

In the Debunker Club, a couple of folks went off on the 70:20:10 model, and it prompted some thoughts. I thought I’d share them.

If you’re not familiar with 70:20:10, it’s a framework for thinking about workplace learning that suggests we need to recognize that the opportunity is about much more than courses. If you ask people how they learned the things they know to do in the workplace, the responses suggest that somewhere around 10% came from formal learning, 20% from informal coaching and such, and about 70% from trial and error. Note the emphasis on the fact that these numbers aren’t exact, it’s just an indication (though considerable evidence suggests that the contribution of formal learning is somewhere between 5 and 20%, with evidence from a variety of sources).

Now, some people complain that the numbers can’t be right, no one gets perfect 10 measurements. To be fair, they’ve been fighting against the perversion of Dale’s Cone, where someone added numbers on that were bogus but have permeated learning for decades and can’t seem to be exterminated. It’s like zombies! So I suspect they’re overly sensitive to whole numbers.

And I like the model! I’ve used it to frame some of my work, using it as a framework to think about what else we can do to support performance. Coaching and mentoring, facilitating social interaction, providing challenge goals, supporting reflection, etc. And again to justify accelerated organizational outcomes.

The retort I hear is that “it’s not about the numbers”, and I agree. It’s just a tool to help shake people out of the thought that a course is the only solution to all needs. And, outside the learning community, people get it. I have heard that, over presentations to hundreds of audiences of executives and managers, they all recognize that the contributions to their success came largely from sources other than courses.

However, if it’s not about the numbers, maybe calling it the 70:20:10 model may be a problem. I really like Jane Hart’s diagram about Modern Workplace Learning as another way to look at it, though I really want to go beyond learning too. Performance support may achieve outcomes in ways that don’t require or deliver any learning, and that’s okay. There’re times when it’s better to have knowledge in the head than in the world.

So, I like the 70:20:10 framework, but recognize that the label may be a barrier. I’m just looking for any tools I can use to help people start thinking ‘outside the course’. I welcome suggestions!

Measurement?

2 April 2015 by Clark Leave a Comment

Sorry for the lack of posts this week; Monday was shot while I migrated my old machine to a new one (yay)! Tuesday was shot with catching up. Wed was shot with lost internet, and trying to migrate the lad to my old machine. So today I realize I haven’t posted all week (though you got extra from me last week ;)! So here’s one reflection on the conference last week.

First, if you haven’t seen it, you should check out the debate I had with the good Dr. Will Thalheimer over at his blog about the Kirkpatrick model. He’s upset with it as it’s not permeated by learning, and I argue that it’s role is impact, not learning design (see my diagram at the end). Great comments, too! We’ll be doing a hangout on it on Friday the 3rd of April.

The other interesting thing that happened is on the first day I was cornered three times for deep conversations on measurement. This is a good thing, mostly, but one in particular was worth a review. The discussion for this last centered on whether measurement was needed for most initiatives, and I argued yes, but with a caveat.

There was an implicit thought that for many things that measurement wasn’t needed. In particular, for informal learning when we’ve got folks successfully developed as effective self-learners and a good culture, we don’t need to measure. And I agree, though we might want to track (via something like the xAPI) to see what things are effective or not.

However, I did still think that any formal interventions, whether courses, performance support, or even specific social initiatives should be measured. First, how are you going to tune it to get it right? Second, don’t you want to attach the outcome to the intervention? I mean, if you’re doing performance consulting, there should be a gap you’re trying to address or why are you bothering? If there is a gap, you have a natural metric.

I am pleased to see the interest in measurement, and I hope we can start getting some conceptual clarity, some good case studies, and really help make our learning initiatives into strategic contributions to the organization. Right?