Archives for June 2018

Microlearning Malarkey

27 June 2018 by Clark 7 Comments

Someone pointed me to a microlearning post, wondering if I agreed with their somewhat skeptical take on the article. And I did agree with the skepticism. Further, it referenced another site with worse implications. And I think it’s instructive to take these apart. They are emblematic of the type of thing we see too often, and it’s worth digging in. We need to stop this sort of malarkey. (And I don’t mean microlearning as a whole, that’s another issue; it’s articles like this one that I’m complaining about.)

The article starts out defining microlearning as small bite-sized chunks. Specifically: “learning that has been designed from the bottom up to be consumed in shorter modules.” Well, yes, that’s one of the definitions. To be clear, that’s the ‘spaced learning’ definition of microlearning. Why not just call it ‘spaced learning’?

It goes on to say “each chunk lasts no more than five-then minutes.” (I think they mean 10). Why? Because attention. Um, er, no. I like JD Dillon‘s explanation: it needs to be as long as it needs to be, and no longer.

That attention explanation? It went right to the ‘span of a goldfish’. Sorry, that’s debunked (for instance, here ;). That data wasn’t from Microsoft, it came from a secondary service who got it from a study on web pages. Which could be due to faster pages, greater experience, other explanations. But not a change in our attention (evolution doesn’t happen that fast and attention is too complex for such a simple assessment). In short, the original study has been misinterpreted. So, no, this isn’t a good basis for anything having to do with learning. (And I challenge you to find a study determining the actual attention span of a goldfish.)

But wait, there’s more! There’s an example using the ‘youtube’ explanation of microlearning. OK, but that’s the ‘performance support’ definition of microlearning, not the ‘spaced learning’ one. They’re two different things! Again, we should be clear about which one we’re talking about, and then be clear about the constraints that make it valid. Here? Not happening.

The article goes on to cite a bunch of facts from the Journal of Applied Psychology. That’s a legitimate source. But they’re not pulling all the stats from that, they’re citing a secondary site (see above) and it’s full of, er, malarkey. Let’s see…

That secondary site is pulling together statistics in ways that are thoroughly dubious. It starts citing the journal for one piece of data, that’s a reasonable effect (17% improvement for chunking). But then it goes awry. For one, it claims playing to learner preferences is a good idea, but the evidence is that learners don’t have good insight into their own learning. There’s a claim of 50% engagement improvement, but that’s a mismanipulation of the data where 50% of people would like smaller courses. That doesn’t mean you’ll get 50% improvement. They also make a different claim about appropriate length than the one above – 3-7 minutes – but their argument is unsound too. It sounds quantitative, but it’s misleading. They throw in the millennial myth, too, just for good measure.

Back to the original article, it cites a figure not on the secondary site, but listed in the same bullet list: “One minute of video content was found to be equal to about 1.8 million written words”. WHAT? That’s just ridiculous. 1.8 MILLION?!?!? Found by who? Of course, there’s no reference. And the mistakes go on. The other two bullet points aren’t from that secondary site either, and also don’t have cites. The reference, however could mislead you to believe that the rest of the statistics were also from the journal!

Overall, I’m grateful to the correspondent who pointed me to the article. It’s hype like both of these that mislead our field, undermine our credibility, and waste our resources. And it makes it hard for those trying to sell legitimate services within the boundaries of science. It’s important to call this sort of manipulation out. Let’s stop the malarkey, and get smart about what we’re doing and why.

Top 10 Learning Tools 2018

26 June 2018 by Clark 1 Comment

Every year of late, Jane Hart has polled about people’s top 10 learning tools. From this, she creates a list of the top 100 learning tools. It’s a fun and valuable exercise, so as usual I’ll weigh in with mine (in no particular order). Looking at last year’s post, I see I’ve switched from Google to DuckDuckGo (privacy issues), and from Skype to Zoom (functionality). And I mention email over Slack, the former of which I may not always mention but use, versus Slack which has kind of slowed down for me.

DuckDuckGo: a search engine is my first recourse when I have questions. And not liking the tracking, I’ve switched and made DDG my default.
Twitter: drinking from the fire hose that is twitter is one way I see what other people are talking about. And share what I discover.
Mail: I still use email (yeah, I know). I talk to people that way, and respond to requests, but also get questions answered and pointers to things. (I’m bad about using the phone, mea culpa.)
GoodReader: I use GoodReader on my iPad to read longish PDFs, white papers, and things. Also to read and mark up the journal or conference submissions I review. Or for requests for colleagues.
MS Word: writing is one of the first ways I make sense of the world. Articles, columns, books. And they all get written in Word. I wouldn’t mind disentangling myself, but it’s pretty much a lingua franca and has industrial-strength outlining, which I rely on for longer writing.
WordPress (e.g. this blog): is the other way I write and make sense of the world. It gets autoposted to LinkedIn and Facebook (at least, notifications), so comments there or here are a way for me to learn.
Keynote is the presentation tool I use, and I create the stories I present at conferences in Keynote.
OmniOutliner: another tool I use to be organized is OmniOutliner. Outlines are great ways for me to think in, or even just related columns. I can’t see how to do the outline function as well in something like a spreadsheet, or I would, because the columns in OO are, well, very expensive to upgrade.
Omnigraffle: another way I make sense is to diagram. And…while I’m a bit grumbly at their support right now, OmniGraffle is still my ‘go to’ tool for this. I don’t need all the power, and it’s expensive, but I haven’t found a replacement yet that works as intuitively.
Zoom: I’ve pretty much switched to Zoom over Skype, so talking to my ITA colleagues, or having video chats with folks is most often through Zoom these days.

Please do share your list, too!

A good publisher

20 June 2018 by Clark Leave a Comment

I shot this short little video because, well, I have to say that my experience with ATD has been excellent. They’ve done what I’ve needed: listening when they should, arguing with me when they should, responding to my questions, and executing on their responsibilities professionally. They’ve gone above and beyond, and I’m pleased to have them as my publisher on my most recent tome.

If you’re going to complain about the bad things (or, at least, make fun of them :), I reckon you should highlight the good ones too. They showed their capabilities while serving as co-publisher on my last book, and now they’ve demonstrated the whole deal. Thanks, team!

A solid education platform

19 June 2018 by Clark 4 Comments

In the past couple of days, I’ve come across two different initiatives to improve education. And certainly our education system can stand improvement. However, each one had the same major flaw, and leaves open an opportunity for improvement not to occur. Over a number of engagements I’ve developed the basis of what I think is a necessary foundation for a viable education platform. It’s time to toss it out and see what you all think.

So, one initiative had a proposal of 10 different areas they wanted people to contribute in. This included AI, and personalization, and ‘out of class’ credit, and more. Which is all good, make no mistake! However, nowhere was there the option of ‘a deeper pedagogy’. And that’s a problem. It’s all too easy to chase after the latest shiny object. It makes us feel like we’re both doing something constructive and keeping up with developments. (Not to mention how much fun it is to play with the latest things.) However, gilding bad design is still bad design! We need to make sure the foundation is strong before we go further.

The other initiative has three ways to contribute: lifelong learning, a marketplace, and emerging technology. And, again, the big gap is talking about the pedagogy to begin with. With a marketplace, you might get some Darwinian selection process, but why not put it out there from the get-go? Otherwise, it’s just cool tinkering around a broken core.

So here’s where I pitch my 3 part story. Note that curriculum is broken too (I’m channeling Roger Schank: ‘Only two things wrong with education, what we teach and how we teach it’), and yet I’m not addressing that. Well, only a second layer of curriculum (see below ;). I think the choice of the first level curriculum is a big issue, but that changes depending on level, goals, etc. Here I’m talking about a platform for delivering the necessary elements of a supportable approach:

The first element is a killer learning experience. What do I mean here? I mean an application-based learning approach. Even for so-called theory classes (e.g. typical higher ed), you do something with this. And the experience is based upon minimal content, appropriate challenge, intrinsic motivation, and more. My claim: this is doable, even when you want to auto-mark as much as possible. Of course, there are still people in the loop.
Which leads to the second element, we as the provider are a partner in your success. It’s not ‘sink or swim’, but instead we’re tracking your progress, intervening when it looks like you’re struggling, and accessible at your time and place. We’re also providing the necessary resources to succeed. And we’re not interested in a curve, we’re competency-based and want everyone to get where they can be. We’re also making sure you’re getting what you need.
And that’s the third element, we develop you. That is, we’re not just developing your knowledge of the field, we’re also developing key success skills. That means we’re giving you chances to practice those skills as well, and tracking them and developing them as well. This includes things like communication, collaboration, design research, and more. So-called 21C skills.

I suggest that with such an approach, and the right curriculum, you’re providing a full suite of what education should be about. And, I suggest, we can do this now, affordably. Technology is part of the picture, learning science is part of the picture, and the commitment to do the right thing is part of the picture. Also, I think this is viable at all levels. K12, higher ed, and workplace.

And, I’ll suggest, anything less really isn’t defensible. We have the know-how, we have the tools, all we need is the will. Yet, despite some notable steps in the right direction, we’re really not there. It’s time to put a stake in the ground. Who’s up for it?

Game Results

13 June 2018 by Clark Leave a Comment

The game we designed (as I talked about yesterday), Quest for Independence, was actually a fair bit of a hit. While we couldn’t talk to kids still, anecdotally we heard that the kids were playing it. And, as the design intended, it led them to talk to the Care counselors. That was good enough, but there was more.

First, the Aussie science program Quantum had a bit on it. They even interviewed me (with a big production about bringing stuff to our house), but never used the footage. They also couldn’t talk to the kids ‘in care’, but it turns out Quest was being used by kids not in care! High schools were using it to explore life after school as well. That was a nice outcome.

Another occurrence brought new action. Sometime after the game launched, I became aware of the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) standard for the web. What this did was allowed web pages to do backend processing based upon user actions, and then programmatically change the front end. In short, web pages could react based upon what had happened before.

For Quest, this meant that we could port it to the web! That is, you started the game, the player’s actions were sent to the web, the program could calculate the outcome and render an appropriate new page, with the graphics assembled to represent the game variables, the current location, and more. This was exciting.

And, again, I had a student wanting to do a project. So the project was to take the game graphics, and the programming, and make the game web-playable. And lo, it was done; the game could be played over the web. Most wonderfully, it still can be! (Yay, standards!)

Naturally, I wrote it up (with the student; a principle I always stuck to: even if I usually ended up writing it all, they got credit for their work and ideas). And, as far as I know, it was the very first web-delivered serious game. At the least, without Flash.

The underlying principles in the game also became part of a couple of chapters, and ultimately the alignment between effective education and engaging experiences formed the core of my book on serious game design, Engaging Learning.

One final reflection is that working on this, on a project that really helped real kids, was still one of the most rewarding projects I’ve ever worked on. It’s nice to help clients deliver outcomes, but saving lives that were at risk? That’s just too good. Anyone up for some more ‘hard fun’?

Designing a game

12 June 2018 by Clark Leave a Comment

When I was a young academic in Australia, a colleague asked me if I would talk to some folks about a game. He knew that I had designed games before returning to grad school, and had subsequently done one on my thesis research. This group, the Australian Children’s Welfare Agency, had an ‘After Care’ project to assist kids who needed to live independently. They’d spent their budget on a video, comic book, and a poster, but now realized that the kids would play games at the Care centers. I had a talented student who wanted to do a meaningful honours project, and so I agreed.

Following best principles, we talked not only to the project leaders, and the counselors, but more. We weren’t allowed to talk to youth ‘in care’ (for obvious reasons), but they did get us access to some recent graduates. They gave us great insights, and later they playtested the prototype for fine-tuning.

One of the lessons from this was important. The counselors told us that what these kids needed were to learn to shop and cook. While I could have made a game for that, when we talked to the kids we learned that there was more. (My claim: you can’t give me a learning objective I can’t make a game for, though I reserve the right to raise the objective in a taxonomic sense.) They said what was important were the chains. That is, you could get money while you looked for a job, but… They wouldn’t give you money, however, they’d deposit in a bank account. BUT, to get that, you needed ID. To get that, however, you needed references. And so on. So that was the critical focus.

I taught my interface design students HyperCard, to have a simple language to prototype in. This meant that we had an environment that we knew games could be built in. My student did most of the programming, under my direction. When that wasn’t quite sufficient to finish the development, I used some grant money to hire her for the summer to finish it.

The resulting play was good, but the design was lacking (neither my student nor I were graphic designers). I ended up going with the project team leaders to get philanthropic funding to add graphics. (Which introduced bugs I had to fix.) They also had it ported to the PC, which ended up being a mistake.Their hired gun used a platform with an entirely different underlying model and wasn’t able to translate it appropriately. Ouch.

The resulting game, had some specific design features:

It was exploratory, in that the player had to wander around and try to survive.
It was built upon a simple simulation engine, which supported replay.
There were variables, like health and hunger and sleep that would get worse over time, driving action.
The audience was low literacy, so we used graphics to convey variable states, interface elements, and location.
Success was difficult. Jobs were difficult to obtain, and better jobs were even harder. And, of course, you had to discover the chains.
There was coaching: if you were struggling, the game would offer you the opportunity for a hint. If you continued to struggle, eventually you’d get the hint anyway.
There was also a help system, where the basics were laid out.
There were random events, like getting (or losing) money, or having drugs or sex. (We were trying to save lives, and didn’t worry about upsetting the wowsers.)

There was more, but this characterized some of the important elements. In reflecting upon the experience, I realized the alignment between effective education and engaging experiences that means you can, and should, make learning hard fun. I wrote a journal article (with my student) that captured what I will suggest are critical realizations (still!).

They held an event to launch the entire project, including the game (and they gave me a really nice sweater, and Dana something too ;). Tomorrow, I’ll pass on some of the subsequent outcomes.

The Optimistic View

6 June 2018 by Clark Leave a Comment

In yesterday’s post, I quipped about how L&D wasn’t doing well, and I want to clarify my perspective. Because, you see, I’m an optimist! I really only complain to create improvement. And so let me wax philosophical about why we can and should be hopeful about L&D.

Organizations need to learn. And they learn as a function of individuals learning, alone and together. This learning can be ineffective or effective; there are skills involved. And yet, assuming these skills isn’t a safe bet.

And this is a big picture: it’s as much about informal learning as it is formal. Or, so should it be. We need to be ensuring our formal learning is working, but learning is a continuum that extends beyond the course. Evidence shows that we learn through social interaction and through our own work experience. If we only do formal, we’re missing a large part (estimates are around 80%).

And here’s the thing: who in the organization besides L&D should be doing this? Who else understands how we learn? Ideally, of course, we do know this, but let’s make that a working assumption (if you want help here, that’s what I do ;).

So, if we take what we know about learning, individual and social, and apply that, what happens? If we share policies and practices around tools that facilitate learning (curation, creation, collaboration), what is the organizational benefit? We can be facilitating and spreading best principles to optimize and accelerate organizational knowledge.

I want to suggest that facilitating the learning of the organization, particularly in this era of increasing change and competition, is the key to organizational success. Thus, L&D has the opportunity to be not peripheral but central! And that, to me, is not only desirable, but right.

Hence, I’m optimistic. And I’ll keep pushing us to achieve the potential that’s on the table. Ready to join me?

Quip: Learning & Development

5 June 2018 by Clark 4 Comments

I’ve used this quip quite a bit, as it’s essentially the rationale for the Revolution book. And I want to make clear what I’m saying, and then qualify it. It’s about the state of Learning & Development, and sums up one perspective fairly succinctly:

L&D isn’t doing near what it could and should be, and what it is doing it’s doing badly. Other than that, it’s fine.

It’s meant to be a little flip and ‘in your face’, but it’s because I think there’s such potential for L&D! This is my way of characterizing the situation that might spark some reflection, and even action.

L&D is, largely, about courses. And unfortunately, too often they’re about content-dump, and an experience that will rank highly on a smile sheet. Which is historically understandable, but scientifically bereft. Compliance aside (and here’s to a competency shift, away from ‘1 hour / year’ or whatever other time-based basis we might find), our courses should be focused on applying knowledge to meaningful tasks, and meaningful feedback. Sufficient, varied, spaced, and deliberate practice! Of course this isn’t everyone’s L&D, but it certainly appears to be all too present.

The second thing is that L&D could be so much broader! If we’re really worry about organizational performance and continuing improvement (why I suggest L&D should shift to P&D, performance and development), we should do more. Performance support, for instance, should be under the purview of L&D. Otherwise it gets left to chance or those who don’t have the necessary background.

And, then there’s coaching. Recognize that learning takes time, and that we need to continue development beyond the classroom. Thus, coaching’s critical to continued improvement. Again, L&D has a role to play here: developing coaching skills, providing guidance, and tracking.

Then we go beyond formal learning: optimizing the ongoing learning in individuals, teams, and communities. This is organizational learning! There’re processes for individual improvement like PKM, team processes like brainstorming, and community interactions. Leaving these to chance is a mistake, as we can’t assume these skills.

And the outcomes of helping the organization get better beyond the course are big. Not just individual learning, but the organization is learning faster. And that’s a necessity for success, going forward. In short, there’s a lot L&D could be doing that would help the organization that it’s missing now.

Now, complaining as my statement does isn’t necessarily useful, unless it’s constructive, and the point is that we have very comprehensive and specific things we know about doing better. By this quip I don’t mean to criticize; I want to inspire action and improvement. So here’s to revolutionizing L&D. I hope you’ll join us!