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Clark Quinn’s Learnings about Learning

Archives for October 2026

A whinge (you can avoid as you wish)

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I recently received an email, that I responded to. One of the weird things was that it said it came from one person, but the email body said it was doing it on behalf of that person. ? So, I asked. I’m not sorry I did, though I was quite sorry to see the response. So let me share a bit of a whinge (you can avoid as you wish).

So, with the setup above, here was the (anonymized) response:

You’re right about the confusing sender. I’m an AI assistant helping Xxx with Xxxxxxx correspondence, using his mailbox with his authorization. These replies are from the assistant, not Tim personally. Sorry that wasn’t clear.

Several things are, to me, very wrong with this. First, the original message didn’t state that it was an AI. The original message simply said:

I’m helping Xxx, founder of Xxxxxxx.

I feel like I should be informed about the use of technology instead of a person from the start. Yes, it’s not a legal requirement, but I’m thinking perhaps it should be. Because a person, even me, could be misled otherwise, and misleading is really fraud.

Then, there’s the presentation as being intelligent. The characterization of “I”, implying a person, doesn’t sit right. Also, stating that they’re “helping” instead of working on behalf of is important, it would seem to me. This is, after all, a probabilistic machine-generated message, without any consciousness nor contextual awareness. Implying sentience when such isn’t the case again feels misleading.

Of course, anyone giving an AI authorization to generate mail is asking for trouble. It’s not clear if it’s a local AI or using one of the big systems (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, etc) using stolen IP. (Yeah, I know, my general rant, but I still find it odd that our society seems to countenance stealing people’s IP and then charging them to access it. Theft as a business model? What’s next?) The former would be more scrutable, of course. Regardless, when agents have hacked external databases and eliminated internal ones, that seems like a dubious step. Note that these systems have gone around explicit prompts to behave, so that’s not a solution.

Then, there’s the implication that this is being done without Xxx’s input. Or, rather, I’m not clear what Xxx’s input is!

Xxx would decide after seeing the quote.

Has Xxx been involved to this point? If so, how? Or am I negotiating with a stochastic parrot? If so, I feel kinda demeaned. Clearly, Xxx doesn’t seem to believe it’s important for me to know. Ahem.

Overall, this is just the type of scenario I fear happening. Xxx is presumably saving time, but also generating ill will, at least amongst those of us who don’t automatically expect that this is just fait accompli. So, maybe this is just a whinge you can avoid as you wish, but it, to me, is a stark example of just the sort of situation we’re devolving to. Is Xxx actually developing any skills here? Making decisions, or cognitive offloading? Further, do I want to assist an organization that could be helping to decrease intelligence? (And, can I afford to be so principled in this environment?) Maybe I’m way off. What do you think?

(To be clear, I get lots of unsolicited offers – loans, GoodReads Listopia, magazine ‘profiles’, etc – which I don’t like but I understand. Many are probably AI generated too; the Listopia ones in particular seem to be so. This, however, rankled in a different way. FWIW.)

You. Need. To. Know. Practice!

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Everyone’s fretting about the role of IDs (instructional designers) in an age of AI (artificial intelligence). And, there’s so much wrong with this! Quite simply, IDs are still going to be necessary. They always have been, except too much of society has a legacy belief that undermines that awareness. And, to be fair, too few IDs actually know what they should. So, I want to make it perfectly clear: You Need To Know Practice!

Let’s start with the need for practice. Despite being obvious, it’s seemingly unknown! Or, rather, it’s got a mistaken interpretation. For one, folks think that if we present information, that learning will occur. Er, no. That’s definitely wrong; we need to practice retrieving the knowledge. Information dump means, quite literally, wasted money. It’s highly unlikely that presenting information will stick in our brains! If we need information (and we devolve to this all too often), put it in the world. If it absolutely has to be in the head (And yes, there are times this matters. Medical vocabulary is the example I always use; you don’t want to remove an elbow because you didn’t know the term for knee), you can use drill and kill, but that’s highly unlikely to be the case. Good analysis here is the first step. As the old canard has it: tellin’ ain’t training.

Then, it’s not knowledge retrieval we need to practice, or even test. Pooja Agarwal’s research (warning, PDF) shows that what we need to test is the ability to use the information. Too often, we have a legacy belief that we should knowledge test, and that’s sufficient: if they have the knowledge they can do the task. Again, no! It turns out that asking learners to use the knowledge already requires them to access it, so we don’t need that test. Yes, we need generative/elaborative activities to cement that understanding, but that’s prior to retrieval practice.

What’s critical to learning is practice using the information in the way that it will be used after the learning experience! What that means is understanding the actual performance, and designing (essentially) simulated practice. They can be mini-scenarios, branching scenarios, or full simulations. This is where IDs do what can’t be done in other ways. There aren’t technologies that can create meaningful practice; it takes IDs to design them. Technology may be able to play a role, but an ID needs to determine the necessary tasks. (Note: SMEs can’t do this, no matter what technology they use. For instance because they don’t have access [again, PDF] to about 70% of what they actually do.)

Another thing IDs do that I don’t have any reason to believe technology can solve is to choose the suite of contexts. That is, across examples and practice, the minimum set of situations that will foster transfer to all appropriate situations, and no inappropriate ones! Technology doesn’t understand context in any meaningful way. Again, the ID is the one who can (and should) select the minimum appropriate set of contexts.

These two core roles are, to me, what an ID alone can do. There’s probably more, like determining the best way to present information to the learner. What media should we use in this particular instance (is virtual reality [VR] necessary here?), etc. One of the tasks that I think IDs particularly need to perform is the afore-mentioned analysis. How can you determine what people actually need to know if you don’t know what performers are actually doing when they do it right? This sort of analysis can’t be put to technology, either.

Note that feedback is a necessary component of practice. It’s the reflection to the action, but it needs to be nuanced. It needs to be informative (read: useful), minimal, and non-personal. Getting this right is another aspect. Spacing out the practice, too, ends up being important (hence my engagement with Elevator 9). While technology may be able to help here, most likely on the spacing, it could err on the side of not getting feedback right because context again. We learn, after all, through action and reflection, and practice is action, and feedback is reflection. Even things that aren’t biologically primary, in the Geary sense, should be learnable by being driven to resources by practice and feedback.

Of course, all of the above does presume that the ID actually has the necessary skills. Which comes from applying the foundational knowledge of how people learn, e.g. learning science. (Which reminds me that we [the Learning Development Accelerator] are having a Learning Science Conference for just this reason!) We do need to have the professional background to adequately execute the necessary tasks. I’ve pointed before to the recommendation that the next economy will be a transformation one. That is, where we pay for experiences that change us in ways we want or need to be changed. And, that’s what IDs do, when we’re on our game. We are the future!

Tech isn’t, or shouldn’t be the worry. We can (read: should) be the necessary component. Of course, not only we, but society needs to know this. So we can and should promote this awareness. And, of course, counter any vendor who wants to pretend otherwise ;). ID skills are necessary. You need to know practice! You also need to know when to practice, and when to find other solutions, like job aids. But if you do, you’re increasingly invaluable. That’s my stance; am I missing something?

Smauthoring tools

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Is it smothering, or authoring? Are we authoring actual learning, or creating smothering amounts of content? Maybe the answer is ‘yes’…I’m suspicious, however. So, I’ve had opinions on authoring tools, though they’ve changed over the years. Still, there are some things that need to be core. And, of course, they’re violated. So here’re some thoughts on smauthoring tools.

So, first, to achieve real learning – acquiring new skills – you need real practice.  Knowledge presentation is unlikely to yield any meaningful changes, because unless folks apply the knowledge, it’s just knowledge. And, in fact, you should be evaluating to see whether you’re having an impact. You might make content available, or present beforehand, but the important aspect is the practice. Repeatedly, over time. (Yes, there are exceptions, with experts, and serendipitous outcomes, but it’s not a fruitful bet.)

What this implies, then, is that authoring tools should focus on practice. That is, they should make it easy to make meaningful activities. If they just support knowledge test, they’re not going to support the important learning we need. Sure, you can turn multiple-choice into mini-scenarios (I’ve run a whole workshop on that in the past!), but… You’re really working around the limitations of the tool. It took years for them even to have more than one response for all the wrong answers, for crying out loud! In short, authoring tools haven’t, by and large, provided good support for designing learning that sticks. (There have been tools to support building branching scenarios at scale,

However, folks who don’t know learning (or learning science, hence our conference, *cough*), can often believe that presentation = acquisition. That’s a legacy, I suggest, of old beliefs about how our brains work. And, authoring tools have been promoted then, and again now, to not require instructional designers (IDs)! Yes, you can just have experts create learning! Ahem. Sure, it’ll sell, and the executives and managers and learners will feel good about having seen the content. But, you have essentially zero change of actually having an impact.

So, you really can’t have domain experts design learning. And, you shouldn’t. Experts should be experts in their domain, and not be experts on learning. That’s a waste of resources. You should have IDs who know learning, and they should work with the experts to create experiences that develop abilities. The problem is compounded, of course, by having folks who are good at the job being moved to trainers and then instructional designers without any real experience with learning. What Cammy Bean aptly called the ‘accidental’ instructional designer. Give them tools, and they too can create elearning! Er, no.

AI compounds the problem, of course. It can take the content and do the manipulation into information and knowledge test quite well. Yet it’s still not learning. And, really, AI doesn’t know context, and so can’t really make meaningful practice. Again, what we need if we want to develop skills, not just knowledge, is contextualized practice. I don’t think AI can do that.

In the (very) old days, it took teams to develop digitally-delivered learning experiences: they had folks who knew how to program, and folks who knew interfaces, and folks who knew the domain, and folks who knew interfaces. I understand the desire to reduce head count to keep costs lower, and we now do have technology that can support meaningful learning. (I should know, I’ve tracked many and even advise one!) It’s too bad, however that the vendors want quick sales and promote the knowledge, and not the skill. We have to measure, to know, of course. (Completion, and ‘liking’ the course aren’t good measures, by the way.) Once we do measure, we can start erring on the side of making learning that moves necessary needles. We need real practice development tools, not smauthoring tools.