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Clark Quinn’s Learnings about Learning

Archives for March 2021

Performance Support and Bad Design

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Here’s a story about where performance support would’ve made a task much easier.

And, as always, the text.

The other day, I had a classic need for performance support. Of course, it didn‘t exist. So here‘s a cognitive story about when and where a job aid would help.

Our Bosch dishwasher stopped near the beginning of the cycle, and displayed an icon of a water tap. The goal was to get the dishwasher running again. What with the layer of undrained water, we figured there was some sort of problem with the drain, clogged or the pump broken. M‘lady had cleaned the drain, but the icon persisted. What now? Of course we could call a service person, but trying to be handy and frugal (and safe), we wanted to find out if it was something I could deal with. So, off to the manual.

Well, in this case, since I didn‘t know where the manual was, I went online. I accessed the site and downloaded the manual. Only to find no guide to what the icons mean. What?!? This violates what we know about our brains, in this case that our memory is limited. The support section of the site did list the error codes, but numerically, not by icon.  So, I had an indication I couldn’t map to a problem, let alone a  solution.  

This is a real flaw! If you‘re gonna use icons, provide a guide!  Don’t assume they’re interpretable. (This had happened once before with this same appliance, with an impenetrable icon and no clue.) As a result, I had to call the service line. That wait took awhile (with more people staying home, they‘re using their dishwashers more, and the appliances are therefore breaking down more). Once, the call dropped. The second time I had to stop because I had an upcoming call. The third time, however, I got through.

And a perfectly nice person listened, asked some questions, and then instructed me through a process. After hitting cancel (which automatically tries to drain everything and reset to zero) by simultaneously pressing two buttons linked by a line on the control panel, I heard noises in the sink like it was draining. After a minute, I was told to go ahead and open it up (yep, drained), turn it off and on, and then try running the cleaning cycle again. And, voila, it worked! (Yay!)

So, what‘s wrong with this picture? First of all, there should be a clear explanation of what the icon means, as indicated above. Second, it should be clearly tied to a process to address the problem, including intermediate steps.This is so common, I am quite boggled that the great engineers that made our (very good) dishwasher aren‘t complemented with a great technical communications team who write up a useful manual to support. It. Is. Just. Silly!

Note: this isn‘t a learning experience. It‘s just fine that I don‘t recall what the last time‘s icon was or what it meant, and maybe what this icon meant and what I should do. It should be infrequent enough that it‘d be unreasonable for me to have to recall. Instead, I should be able to look it up. Put information in the world!  In the long term, this should save them buckets of money because most people could self help. Clearly, they‘ve gone to numeric codes, but they could‘ve just added in the associated icons, or given a mapping from icon to numeric code. Something to help folks who have the pics.  

This is just bad design, and it‘s so obvious how to ameliorate it. People will self-help many times, but only if they can!   Just as you shouldn‘t be creating a training course when a job aid will do, you can save a help call when a job aid can address most of the problems. Use performance support when it makes sense, and doing so comes from understanding how we actually think, work, and learn. When you do, you can design solutions that meet real needs. And that‘s what we want to do, no?

Book hiccups

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As much as writing books is something I do (and I’m immodestly proud of the outcomes), they don’t always come out the way I expect. And that turns out to be true for almost every one!  So here, for the record and hopefully as both mea culpas and lessons learned, are my book hiccups. And you really don’t have to read this, unless you want some things to check for.

After my first book,  Engaging Learning, came out, someone asked me “how do I know it’s really your book?” He had a valid point, because while there was a bio, there was no picture of me. Somehow, I just expected it (and if memory serves, they’d asked for one). Yet it didn’t appear on the dust jacket nor on the author page. In fact, the only Wiley book that  did have my picture ended up being the next one.

Shortly after my next book came out,  Designing mLearning,  I got an email asking for clarification. The correspondent pointed to a particular diagram, and asked what I meant. It turns out, in editing (they’d outsourced it, I understand), someone had reversed the meaning of a caption for a diagram! Worse, I hadn’t caught it. At this time I can no longer find what it was, but it was an unhappy experience.

For my third book,  The Mobile Academy, I asked my friend and colleague John Ittelson to write the preface. And somehow, it wasn’t in the initial printing!  That was a sad oversight, but fortunately they remedied it very quickly.

I had been upset by how expensive the first two books were. Consequently, I was pleased to find out that my fourth,  Revolutionize  Learning & Development, that I really wanted to see do well, was priced much more reasonably. Of course, then I found out why; it was made with paper that wasn’t of the best quality. At least it’s affordable, and I continue to hear from people who have found it useful.

I’m happy to say that the next one,  Millennials, Goldfish & Other Training Misconceptions  has been hiccup free. After switching to ATD Press (they’d been a co-publisher of the previous book), they did a great job with the design, taking my notion of humorous sketches for each topic and executing against it graphically. It’s been well-recognized.

Unfortunately, as I just found out after getting my mitts on the most recent one,  Learning Science for Instructional Designers,  two of the four blurbs I solicited from esteemed colleagues don’t show up in the book!  They do show up on the ATD site, at least (and of course they’re on my own page for the book). I didn’t get a copy of the back cover beforehand, so I couldn’t have checked. My apologies to them. I checked, and it turns out having to do with a space issue because of book formatting. 🤷  Other than that, I’m  as  happy with this book as the last (that is, really happy)!

I can say that I’ve always tried to write in a way that focuses on the aspects that relate to our mental architecture. The goal is that as the technology changes, the implications are still appropriate. Our brains aren’t changing as fast at the tech! I guess I’m just not ready to accept planned obsolescence, so I’m keeping them available.

So there you have it, the book hiccups that can come with publishing. If you’ve made it this far, at least I hope you have some more things to check to make sure your books come out as good as possible.

 

A bad question

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On Twitter today was a question from an organization that, frankly, puzzled me. Further, I think it’s important to understand  why this was a bad question. So here let me unpack several illustrative problems.

First, the question asks “What kind of learning do you prefer?” My initial response is: why would you ask that? What learners prefer has little to do with what outcomes you need to achieve.  We should design for the learning outcomes.

Then, there’s the list of elements:

  • Video-based learning
  • Article-based learning
  • How to guides
  • Interactive quizzes

There are several problems with this list. First, why this subset? This isn’t a full suite of alternatives. What about simulations, scenarios, or games? AR or VR? Podcasts? Why this selection?

Then, the options lack full definitions. What do they mean by ‘video-based learning’?  Is it just a video, with no assessment? Is it really ‘learning’ then? Of course, if the ‘-based’ means assessment as well, how is that separate from ‘interactive quizzes’? Similarly for articles. What is included?

Yet guides and quizzes aren’t ‘-based’. Are we assuming they’re full learning solutions? That’s questionable. A how-to guide, aka performance support, might yield an outcome, but it doesn’t guarantee learning. There are lots of factors that would influence that. And interactive quizzes, without models and examples, would be a slow way to develop expertise.

Another problem is in the separation of the elements. So, for instance, a ‘how to’ guide could be a video or an article! There’s the Youtube video I used to fix my dryer, or the step by step instructions I used to figure out how to run cables on a monitor. Likewise, interactive quizzes could include video or point to an article. These aren’t mutually exclusive categories.

The point is that this is a bad question. It’s already been taken down (I wasn’t the only one to question it!). Still, there’re lessons to be learned. (Maybe the most important is to ensure your social media marketing person has enough knowledge of learning not to do such silly things, but I can’t assume that’s the locus of the problem. It’s just a hypothesis I’ve seen play out elsewhere. ;) While there are times it makes sense to ask provocative questions, there’s also a reason to have conceptual clarity.  At least, that’s my take, I welcome yours!

 

 

How I write

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I’d queued up this topic for a post, and then a conversation with a friend and colleague moved it to the front. We were talking about our process, and he pointed me to an article that nicely catalyzed my thinking. So here’s a brief post about how I write my books (written, of course).

The article my friend pointed me to was titled: “The Simple Way To Outline A Nonfiction Book”, and it’s nicely resonant, and a bit deeper, than my own approach. If you’re thinking about writing a book, I think this is very good advice. And the author even provides a template to get you started. And you should be thinking about writing. It does a couple of things: it forces you to think through your topic, and if it comes to fruition, it gives you some collateral. Be aware: the advice I’ve found to be true is that you make more money giving the book away. It’s a better business card!

So what the article suggests, and what aligns with what I do, is outline. That is, I outline the whole book. He suggests first doing the table of contents, generating your chapters first, then elaborating each. I do a bit more, creating a multi-level outline (often as much as up to five levels, though the innermost level often is just notes to myself what I’ll put in that section). However, this isn’t a one pass thing, it’s iterative. I’ll revisit it a time or two beforehand, and then as I write sometimes I restructure.

Which is why I need industrial strength outlining in my writing package. I want to be able to manipulate the whole document, moving sections. Which is why I use Microsoft Word, I just haven’t found that Pages can do it. Similarly, Google Docs is too awkward, and I never got my mind around Scrivener.

From there, he has a template for chapters as well. It reflects what I’ve seen in many non-fiction books, starting the chapter with a story that sets up the topic. I haven’t been able to get that formulaic, but it might be better!  I tend to write to the outline, but I’m not always telling a story to start, but I do try to set the stage with some interesting element.

Different books have emerged differently. My first,  Engaging Learning, on designing serious games, just flowed. Probably because I’d been thinking about the topic for over a decade… My second one,  Designing mLearning, was much more incremental. I’d write some, then think of something else to add up above, and then maybe a restructure of a bit, and continue, and add a bit more above, and… It was quite the effort to get to the end!  The others have varied.

My most recent effort (I’m working on a ‘Make it Meaningful’ text; how it manifests is still an open question) is an interesting case, since I’ve restructured it somewhat once already, and I think it needs a more major overhaul.  It’s partly that I’m still exploring (and people are lobbing interesting things my way). Also, it’s partly that in trying to incorporate some of my earlier stuff, I was inconsistent. It’s just that even with structure like an outline, you write in spurts, and they don’t always proceed smoothly.

Even in my more immediately forthcoming book,  Learning Science for Instructional Designers, I’d find  that I’d written about the same concept in two different places. While a text is linear, the ideas are interconnected, and can appear more than once in any path through. However, you have to choose one, and saying the same thing again is redundant.

By the way, some of that awareness comes after writing. I’ll admit that it’s an incredible ego crush to get back feedback from the editors: copy and proof. I feel stupid with all the (virtual) red ink I get! Yet, I also see how my writing changes from session to session, and having someone pull it together and point out some reliable flaws helps me improve. I completely value my editors, and am so grateful to them.

Your mileage may vary. If you don’t have a process and structure, however, you’ll struggle more than if you do. Recognize you’ll struggle, at first, and that you should allocate appropriate time. Also, each book is unique and will require its own flow, so also allocate time to discover that on subsequent efforts. Also recognize that even if you block off regular time slots to work, and set goals for those slots (and I don’t do either, by the way, I grab time when I can), you’ll still need to allocate time for revisions and even restructuring.

However, the real value is sharing your learnings. I’ve argued before that you should speak at conferences. If your ideas persist to create a coherent whole, you should consider putting them into book form. Further, if you’ve ambitions to stand out, it’s a useful way. So you should write. In your own way, of course. This is just how I write, but writing, I believe, is a good thing.

 

 

Animation thoughts

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Sparked by a conversation, I generate some animation thoughts.

And, as always, a transcript.

In a conversation the other day, my colleague mentioned how she was making a practice of creating animations. I found this interesting, because while I think animations are important, I don‘t do them all that much (or so I thought). Particularly intriguing was the notion of what principles might guide animations, including when to use them. I was prompted to reflect, and so here are some animation thoughts.

First, let‘s be clear what I mean. I‘ve argued that we don‘t use graphic novel/comic formats enough, and that likewise applies to cartoons. Which are also known as animations. Yet, that‘s not really what I‘m talking about. I think we could use them more, but that‘s another reflection.

Instead, here I‘m talking about animated diagrams. And I think there are times when these are not just engaging, but cognitively important. Diagrams map conceptual relationships to spatial ones, and can add additional coding with color and shape. Animations add the dimension of time, so these relationships can change. In my categorization, these are dynamic diagrams, useful when the conceptual relationships change in important ways depending on other factors.

Interestingly, in the conversation, it came up what one form of her animations were diagram builds.  I use diagrams a lot, not only to communicate, but as a tool for my own understanding! And, I‘d done some builds, but after Will Thalheimer‘s Presentation Science course I realized I needed to do that more systematically (and now do so).  Building diagrams is helpful. Cognitively, a diagram can be overwhelming if there are too many elements. By starting at one point, and gradually adding in other elements, you can prevent cognitive overload. And in a presentation, in particular, you want to highlight important points.  

However, I also think that there are things worth indicating how they work dynamically. Like how a content system would work, e.g. context and rules combining to pull content out by description. Or how coordinates change based upon trigonometric values. I haven‘t done much of this, for the simple reason that I don‘t have a good animation tool. And, yes, I‘m aware that you do motion in PowerPoint and/or Keynote, but I haven‘t gotten into it. Time for a skill upgrade!

There are problems with animations, and guidelines. John Sweller‘s cognitive load plays out with Dick Mayer‘s work on multimedia research (as captured in his book with Ruth Clark: eLearning and the Science of Instruction), as indicated above. Thus, you shouldn‘t try to have people read text while watching visual dynamics (use audio). Also, you should help people focus attention by removing extraneous details and/or highlighting the appropriate focus.  

The general principles of media apply as well. Accessibility suggests some alternate representations. Timing suggests having a pause ability for any animation longer than a certain time, and of course the ability to replay. Similarly, the animation design should use appropriate white space, highlighting, and other aspects that make it visually clear and appealing.  

Overall, I‘d suggest that there are times when animations are the best option for conveying dynamic conceptual information. To use them, however, you have to take into account our cognitive limitations. So, these are some of my animation thoughts. I welcome yours.  

ID Support Thyself

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Want to dig a bit deeper into improving design processes. Here, I look at tools,  asking IDs to ‘support thyself’.

As usual, the transcript:

One of the things I do is help organizations improve their design processes. Last week, I talked about when to team up in the process of learning design. Another component of good design, besides knowing when and how to draw in more minds, is baking learning science into your processes. That‘s where tools help. I expect that most orgs do have process support, but…baking in learning science seems not to be there. So here I‘m exhorting IDs to ‘Support Thyself’.  

As I discuss in my forthcoming book, there are nuances to each of the elements of learning design (as I also talked about for Learnnovators). That includes meaningful practice, useful models, motivating intros, and more. The question is how to help ensure that as you develop them, you make sure to address all the elements.

One approach, of course, is to use checklists. Atul Gawande has made the case for checklists in his The Checklist Manifesto.  In this great book, he talks about his own inspiring efforts in the context of other high-risk/high-value endeavors such as flight and construction.   There are clear benefits.

The point is that checklists externalize the important elements, supporting us in not forgetting them. It‘s easy when you do yet another task, to think you‘ve completed a component because you‘ve done it so many times before. Yet this can lead to errors. So having an external framework is useful. That‘s part of the rationale behind the Serious eLearning Manifesto!

I had originally been thinking about templates, and that‘s another way. And here, I‘m not talking about tarted-up quiz show templates. Instead, I mean a tool that leaves stubs for the important things that should be included. In examples, for instance, you could leave a placeholder for referencing the model, and for the underlying thinking. Really, these are checklists in another format.  All in all, these are ways that you can  Support Thyself!

What you don‘t want to do is make it too constraining. You want to create a minimum floor of quality, without enforcing a ceiling. At least other than the ones your own schedule and budget will import. But you want to be creative while also maintaining effectiveness.

And you can do this in your authoring tool. Just as you may have a template you reuse to maintain look and feel, you can have placeholders for the elements. You can also provide guidance for the elements, in a variety of ways.

There are lots of forms of performance support. And, just as we should be using them to assist our performers (even doing backwards design to design the tools first then any learning), we should be using them to overcome our own cognitive limitations. Our cognitive architecture is amazing, but it‘s prone to all sorts of limitations (there‘s no perfect answer). We can suffer from functional fixedness, set effects, confirmation bias, and more.  

I‘ll admit that I created an ID checklist. The only problem was it had 178 elements, which might be unwieldy (though it did go through the whole process). But you should make sure that whatever tools you do have cover the necessary elements you need. I did create a more reasonable one to accompany my ‘Make it Meaningful‘ initiative (coming soon to a theater or drive-in near you).  

Our brains have limitations that influence our ability to design. Fortunately, we can use technology as support to minimize the impact of those limitations and maximize the contributions of our outcomes. And we should. Thus, my encouragement for IDs to Support Thyself!