Archives for August 2019

Top 10 Learning Tools for 2019

28 August 2019 by Clark Leave a Comment

It’s time again for Jane Hart’s Top Learning Tools Survey, so it’s time for my personal list (and for you to submit yours). Here goes!

WordPress: my first learning tool is this blog. Here’s where I lay out my ideas. The learning comes from just me thinking through things to keep populating the post, and the exercise of actually putting the thoughts down. And of course from comments, whether here or as often happens, on LinkedIn.
OmniGraffle: a lot of thinking comes from reflection, both with the blog for thoughts, and through diagramming my understanding. Diagrams allow us to map conceptual relationships to spatial ones to facilitate comprehension.
OmniOutliner: another way I think is in outlines.
Word: I do most of my writing besides blogging in Word. This includes my Quinnsights column for Learning Solutions and my posts for the Litmos blog. And, of course, books. For the latter, in particular, the outlining features in Word are a necessity for me.
Pagico: This is a project management tool, and I have entries for all the projects and groups I work with. I also through in random ToDos. I’m not as good with it as I’d like, but it helps keep ideas from not getting explored.
Slack: I work with a number of groups, and one in particular really benefits from the social interaction Slack provides between meetings.
Zoom: I use both Blue Jeans and Zoom, but I use Zoom more, as it has chats with my ITA colleagues, as well as video conversations with folks.
Twitter: Of course, Twitter is a way to have debates, as I recently found out, as well as chats (c.f. #lrnchat and #guildchat). There’s also a steady stream of the latest news.
DuckDuckGo: I’ve largely replaced Google for search, but search (and Wikipedia) are powerful learning opportunities.
Social media (read: LinkedIn/Facebook): places where I hang with my colleagues, ask questions, and see what dialogs are going on.

Those are a partial list of my learning tools. What’re yours?

Blinded by the buzzword!

27 August 2019 by Clark Leave a Comment

With any industry, a large quantity of buzzwords exist, and Learning & Development isn‘t any different. Likewise, plusses and minuses accrue. It‘s helpful to know the buzzword as well as the real meaning behind it, but how do you do this?

Buzzwords can become vernacular. With a professional vocabulary, everyone has a shared understanding of what‘s meant. It‘s more efficient when concepts have short words or phrases that define them. “Authoring tools” went from bizbuzz to common parlance. In our field, of course! We can refer to things tersely that unpack into a complex understanding. (And, it can be cool to have a secret language for those in the â€˜know‘. ;)

The flipside is when those buzzwords aren‘t shared, or are vague, or even deliberately misused, confusion ensues. If people are using terms others don‘t know, there‘s an opportunity for uncertainty or even misconceptions. People can toss around buzzwords to sound cool. Or for more nefarious purposes.

To get concrete, terms like xAPI may be obscure. ‘Microlearning‘ is still ill-defined, meaning two different things by its use. And the prefix â€˜neuro‘ has little practical implications, but it sounds like we‘re on top of the latest scientific findings!

How do we deal with this? We need to be aware. A healthy skepticism is a valuable frame of mind around claims. Which requires us to be proactive; we need to be willing to ask people to be clear when they toss terms about. And to keep up with the literature in our field.

The best time to be open is when a term is being used for the first time in your experience. You need to look for definitions. Most importantly, look for independent definitions. And ask yourself “who‘s telling me, and what is their vested interest”

The ultimate goal is to be acquainted with the terminology of your field, and open to new ideas while resistant to unwarranted hype. It requires effort, but the alternative is wasting time or money on things not worthy of resources.

With my wicked smart and totally cool colleagues Jennifer Murphy of QIC and Chad Udell of Float, we‘ll be running a buzzword bingosession at the top-notch DevLearn conference at 3PM on Wed the 23^rdof October. You‘ll cut through the haze, have some fun, and maybe win a prize! Hope to see you there.

Level of polish?

22 August 2019 by Clark 4 Comments

A debate broke out amongst some colleagues the other day about the desirable level of polish in our elearning. One colleague was adamant that we were undermining our position by using low quality production. There was a lot of agreement. I had a slightly different view. Even after finding out he was talking more about external-facing content than internal, I still have some differences. After weighing in, I thought it required a longer response, and of course it has to go here.

So, the main complaint was that so much elearning looks dated and incomplete. And I agree! And others chimed in that this doesn’t have to be, while all agreed that it doesn’t need to approach game quality in effect. Then, in my mind, the question switches to “what is good enough?” And I think we do need an answer to that. And, it turns out, to also answer “and what does it take?”

What is good enough?

So, my first concern is the quality of the design. My mantra on design states that it has to be right first. Then you can implement it. If it isn’t right from the get-go, it doesn’t matter how you implement it. And the conversation took some time to sort this out. But let’s assume that the design’s right. Then, how much production values do you need?

The original complaint was that we’re looking slack by comparison. When you look at what’s being done in other, related, fields, our production values look last decade, if not last century! And I couldn’t agree more. But does that matter? And that’s where we start getting into nuances. My bottom line question is: “what’s the business case?”

So, I suggest that the investment in production values is based upon how important the ‘experience’ is. If it’s internal, and it’s a critical skill, the production values should be only enough to ensure that learners can identify the situation and perform appropriately (or get feedback). It needs a minimum level of professionalism, and that’s it. If you’re selling it to high-end customers and want to charge a premium price, you’ll need much more, of course.

The issue was that we’re losing credibility if we don’t approach a minimal level of competency. There were many arguments about the locus: fear of going out of bounds, managers oppression, low level tools, lack of skills, and more. And these all have validity. We should stipulate a minimal level. Perhaps the serious eLearning Design Manifesto? :) We can do better.

What does it take?

This was the other issue. It was pointed out that design teams in other disciplines work in layers: from concept to realization. Jesse James Garrett has a lovely diagram that represents this for information architecture. And others pointed out that there are multiple skills involved, from dialog writing, through media production and interface design (they’re conceptually separate), and the quality of the programming and more. The more you need polish, the more you need to invest in the appropriate skill sets. This again is a matter of marshaling the appropriate resources against the business case.

I think one of the issues is that we overuse courses when other solutions are more effective and efficient. Thus, we don’t have and properly allocate the resources to do the job right when it does positively absolutely has to be in the head. Thus, we do have a lot of boring, information dump courses. And we could be doing more with engaging practice, and less content presentation. That’s a design issue to begin, and then a presentation one.

Ultimately, I agree that bad elearning undermines our credibility. I do think, however, that we don’t need unnecessary polish. Gilded bad design is still bad design. But then we should align our investment with the professional reception we need. And if we have trouble doing that, we need to rethink our approaches. The right level of investment for the context is the right response; we need the right live of polish. But the assessment the context is complex. We shouldn’t treat is simplistically, but instead systemically. If we get that right, we have a chance to impress folks with our astute sense of doing the right thing with the right resources. Less than that is a path to irrelevancy, and doing more is a path to redundancy. Where do you want to go?

The roots of LXD

21 August 2019 by Clark Leave a Comment

Instructional design, as is well documented, has it roots in meeting the needs for training in WWII. User experience (UX) came from the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) revolution towards User Centered Design. With a vibrant cross-fertilization of ideas, it’s natural that evolutions in one can influence the other (or not). It’s worth thinking about the trajectories and the intersections that are the roots of LXD, Learning eXperience Design.

I came from a background of computer science and education. In the job for doing the computer support for the office doing the tutoring I had also engaged in, I saw the possibilities of the intersection. Eager to continue my education, I avidly explored learning and instruction, technology (particularly AI), and design. And the relationships, as well.

Starting with HCI (aka Usability), the lab I was in for grad school was leading the charge. The book User-Centered System Design was being pulled together as a collection of articles from the visitors who came and gave seminars, and an emergent view was coming. The approaches pulled from a variety of disciplines such as architecture and theater, and focused on elements including participatory design, situated design, and iterative design. All items that now are incorporated in design thinking.

At that time, instructional design was going through some transitions. Charles Reigeluth was pulling together theories in the infamous ‘green book’ Instructional Design Theories and Models. David Merrill was switching from Component Display Theory to ID2. And there was a transition from behavioral to cognitive ID.

This was a dynamic time, though there wasn’t as much cross-talk as would’ve made sense. Frankly, I did a lot of my presentations at EdTech conferences on implications from HCI for ID approaches. HCI was going broad in exploring a variety of fields to tap in popular media (a lot was sparked by the excitement around Pinball Construction Set), and not necessarily finding anything unique in instructional design. And EdTech was playing with trying to map ID approaches to technology environments that were in rapid flux.

These days, LXD has emerged. As an outgrowth of the HCI field, UX emerged with a separate society being created. The principles of UX, as cited above, became of interest to the learning design community. Explorations of efforts from related fields – agile, design thinking, etc, – made the notion of going beyond instructional design appealing.

Thus, thinking about the roots of LXD, it has a place, and is a useful label. It moves thinking away from ‘instruction’ (which I fear makes it all to easy to focus on content presentation). And it brings in the emotional side. Further, I think it also enables thinking about the extended experience, not just ‘the course’. So I’m still a fan of Learning Experience Design (and now think of myself as an LXD strategist, considering platforms and policies to enable desirable outcomes).

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As a side note, Customer Experience is a similarly new phenomena, that apparently arose on it’s own. And it’s been growing, from a start in post-purchase experience, through Net Promoter Scores and Customer Relationship Management. And it’s a good thing, now including everything from the initial contact to post-purchase satisfaction and everything in between. Further, people are recognizing that a good Employee Experience is a valuable contributor to the ability to deliver Customer Experience. I’m all for that.

Sub-symbolic and Situated

13 August 2019 by Clark Leave a Comment

At the time that the connectionist folks were working on neural nets, another similar approach was genetic algorithms. Both were working in a different way than the previous formal approaches to AI. The distinction between the two became known as symbolic vs sub-symbolic. And it’s useful to review why, particularly in the current climate of increasing interest in AI and cognitive science. An interesting outcome is that the sub-symbolic work exposed the contextualized nature of our reasoning. So there’s a link between sub-symbolic and situated cognition.

The prevailing model, starting with the cognitive revolution which arguably began in 1956 (an auspicious year ;) was a formal logical one. Whether in ‘production’ rules of IF THEN, or other formal mechanisms, the notion was to operate on semantic objects like numbers and concepts. This reflected, at the time, the belief that we’re formal logical thinkers.

As cognitive research continued, there was a growing recognition that our behaviors didn’t match particularly well with formal logic (c.f. Kahnemann & Tversky’s work, summed up in Thinking Fast and Slow). Several cognitive scientists separately came up with structures that more aptly described some of the properties we saw: Roger Schank called them scripts (he was focused on episodic thinking, not semantic), Marvin Minksy called them frames, and Dave Rumelhart called them schemas (after Bartlett).

What Rumelhart subsequently saw was that the properties he was trying to capture were very hard to represent in formal logic. He went on, with his colleague Jay McLelland and their collaborators) to develop what they called Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP). These are now known as neural nets (NNs) and are the basis for much of machine learning.

I was in the lab at the time Dave and Jay were working on neural nets, but detoured down a different path. Following work on analogical reasoning (my Ph.D. thesis topic), I became aware of the work Holland, Holyoak, Nisbett, & Thagard were doing with induction. Their framework was genetic algorithms (GAs). Both GAs and NNs use input strings and output strings to work, but internally they represent things differently.

After so much work on symbolic reasoning, here were mechanisms operating beneath the symbolic level. Yet they were attempting to create symbolic behavior. NNs obviously, more closely resemble our cognitive architecture (though GAs are still used in some areas like program generation). So, our conscious thinking is symbolic, but our actual cognition is happening below our conscious thinking. Hence things like illusions, fallacies, myths, and more.

What emerged from this realization is that our cognition isn’t just sub-symbolic, but situated. That is, what is conscious is a combination of what comes in from our senses, and what we know. In fact, with the limited attention we have, much of what we think we’re perceiving, we’re actually generating!

This it accounts for why we’re bad at doing things by rote; we’re liable to confound steps and contexts. This ends up being important because it means we have to work harder for any learning interventions to work effectively across contexts. The relationship between sub-symbolic and situated is, at least to me, and interesting story of the development of cognitive science.

Yet, it still means that our learning works most effectively at the conscious level of symbols, because that can accelerate learning over having to deal with everything through practice and feedback. (And explains why programs talking about neural really aren’t working there.) We still need those, but conscious models can provide a framework to become self-improving over time. So don’t forget to provide the models, and sufficient practice, and feedback.

Lucky on Foundations

9 August 2019 by Clark Leave a Comment

I was thinking about my next directions, and it led to me to think a bit about my foundations. And I realized I’ve been very lucky (and I’m grateful). I’ve had good parents, mentors, colleagues, and friends. But I’ve also had some fortunate timings, and it’s worth reflecting how I’ve been lucky on foundations upon which to build. (A personal reflection, not necessarily worth your time ;)

It started with college, really. I’d always been a typical lad, but with an extra serving of geek (I didn’t fit in with any clique so hung with a few similarly chaotic-good chaps :). I started college interested in marine bio, but there was no formal link between undergrad study and Scripps. The bio program was all cut-throat med, and while I could cut it, it was all rote memorization and deadly boring. So…

I took some comp sci classes, and was tutoring for extra money on the side. Lucky chance: I got a job doing the computer support for the office that coordinated the tutoring. That sparked my awareness of the connections between computers and learning. Of course, back then, at my school, there was no such program. Luck 2: my school had a program where you could design your own major. I found a couple of professors doing a project on using email for classroom discussion (circa ’78; we had the DARPAnet, otherwise there was no email; more luck). They agreed to sponsor my project.

After graduating, I looked all over the country for an org that wanted someone interested in computers and learning. More luck, I finally came across Jim Schuyler, and as he was starting DesignWare, I got a job! And, importantly, it was designing and programming on the earliest personal computers. And I realized that there was real potential for learning in games! But I also realized that we didn’t know enough how to design them. And then I read about ‘cognitive engineering’ (applying what we know about cognition to the design of systems).

I was accepted into the cog program with Don Norman, who’d written the article. And this was another major stroke of luck. While Don’s students were researching how to build systems for how people think, my twist was about how people learn. I got to study behavioral, cognitive, social, even machine learning! Also, Don’s lab partner Dave Rumelhart was conducting his research with Jay McClleland on what became neural nets. You can’t help but get exposed to related research through lab meetings, seminars, and more, even if you’re not active in the particular work. And Ed Hutchins was doing his work on distributed cognition. This was a fundamental shift in perspective from formal to situated cognition.

The lab ran a Unix system, so I was getting steeped in computing systems to complement my personal computer work, along with the cognition focus. I subsequently did a post-doc at LRDC, getting deeper steeped into cognitive learning, and then joined a school of Computer Science, getting further background in computation. I was on the internet before there was a web (and foolishly was rather complacent about it)! And it’s enabled me to keep an eye on new developments like mobile and content and more, and understand their core affordance.

I also got steeped in design, having a chance to look at graphic, industrial, software, architecture, and other approaches (more luck). I combined that with a study of the academic literature, of course. These three foundations have been the basis of my work: applying cognitive and learning sciences to the design of technology to create learning and performance systems.

There’s much more to the story, of course. Serendipity continued in jobs and people to guide me, I’m happy to say. Mentors being shy, you can’t really thank folks enough, so if I’ve been lucky in foundations, it’s my job to pass it on. I hope that this blog helps in some way!

Little Whinging

6 August 2019 by Clark 1 Comment

Every once in a while, I have had enough of some things, and want to point them out. I do so not just to complain, but to talk about good principles that have implications beyond just the particular situation. So, here I go with a little whinging.

Services

Of late, when I call in for assistance, the phone system automatically asks me to verify some information. It can be an account number, or just to confirm some data like my house number. This is all good up until the point when I get connected to a live person, and they then ask me for that same data. Many times, as it’s escalated (“yes, it’s plugged in” and “yes, I’ve already tried rebooting it”), I get passed on to another person. And get asked for the same data again.

When pushed, “it’s our systems”. And that’s not good enough. What’s the lesson? You need your systems synched together. The employees need a performance ecosystem that’s integrated, if you’re going to be able to deliver a good customer experience. Reminded of the fact that Dominos is spending more money fighting to not have to be accessible than the estimate to actually make their system accessible!?!

This plays out in another way. So I’m having internet troubles. It’s intermittent (admittedly, that make it hard to diagnose), and it’s not disconnecting, it’s just slowing way down, and then going back to blazing fast.But it’s creating hiccups for my conference calls and webinars. I’m paying a pretty penny for this.

So, they do some remote stuff to the modem and say call back if it’s not better. And it’s not. So they send a tech. Who says it’s in the network, not the local connections and other techs will work on it, and I don’t have to be present, and they work 24/7 and it should be fixed in a couple of days. And then, I get a call which I return and am told it’ll be fixed by late this morning. And then it’s not. So I call again, and first, the person doesn’t seem to have access to the previous notes (which I’d made a point of), and asks me a bunch of questions. Which I’ve already answered previously in the same call. Then, they arrange to send a tech out! Isn’t that the definition of insanity, trying the same thing and expecting a different outcome?

The problem here is the lack of coordination between the different elements. The latest phone person said that they had the notes from the previous tech, and that this one has different skills, but the previous person had told a different story. It’s that that concerns me; the lack of consistency shatters my already-fragile confidence in them. They should have a good linked record (the ecosystem again), but be able to address obvious mismatches elegantly.

Products

Ok, so this one’s less obvious, but it’s relevant. Here’s my claim: I want products that aren’t just dishwasher-safe, I want them dishwasher-smart! What am I talking about? Look at these two glasses. It may be hard to see, but the one on the left has a three-lobed groove in the bottom. While there’s sufficient surface to stand steadily, it also drains. The one on the right, however, has a concavity in the bottom. So, when it goes in the dishwasher (or the dish drainer for that matter), water pools and it doesn’t dry efficiently. WHY?

Look, you should be designing products so the affordances (yeah, I said the ‘a’ word ;) work for consumers. I like my backup battery (thanks Nick and SealWorks) because it has a built-in cable! You don’t have to carry a separate one. This goes for learning experiences as well; make the desired behaviors obvious. Leave the challenges to the deliberate ones discriminating appropriate decisions from misconceived ones. And authoring tools should make it easy to do good pedagogy and difficult to do info dump and knowledge test! Ahem.

At core it’s about aligning product and service design with how we think, work, and learn. It should be in the products we purchase, and in the products we use. Heck, I can help if you want assistance in figuring this out, and baking it into your workflows. (I used to teach interface design, having had a Ph.D. advisor who is a guru thereof.). Do read Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things if you’re curious about any of this. It’s one of those rare books that will truly change the way you look at the world. For the better.

Design, whether instructional or industrial or interface or anything else that touches people needs to understand those people. Please ensure you do, and then use your powers for good.