Quinnovating

On Homework

15 March 2011 by Clark 6 Comments

In the ‘getting it off my chest’ department:

I gave a talk to a national society last week on the future of learning. An off-hand comment on ‘homework’ got more interest than I expected. My point was that there are limits to reactivation. However, given the battles I know so many are having with schools on homework, and we too, some thoughts.

The underlying mechanism, roughly, for learning is associations between related neurons (and, at a bigger scale into patterns). However, our brains saturate in their ability to associate new information. Some activation a day is about all a brain can take. Re-activating is key, over time. That is, the next day, and the next. And, of course, the feedback should come quickly after the effort (not the next day). And, let’s be real: some kids need more practice than others. Why aren’t we adapting it? And are we really rewarding achievement? In elementary school, my first-born noticed that by being smart, he got more work than the other kids with the ‘stretch’ assignments, and wondered why being smart was punished!

So, in theory, a light bit of homework on a topic that was first visited in prior days might make sense. So you see it on Monday in class, say, and then visit it again in homework. Note that reactivating it in class the next day in a slightly more complex problem is better. And, as, John Taylor Gatto has hypothesized, everything we need to learn in K6 really ought to take only 100 hours to learn, if the kids are motivated. With the feedback coming the next day, it will also be harder for the learner to be able to make the connection. This post I found while verifying the 100 hour claim is fascinating on the amount of time really necessary.

However, that’s not what we see. I’ve seen my kids complaining about trying to solve more of the same problems they saw in school that day. That’s not going to help. And it’s too much. If every teacher wants to get an hour out of them, they’d be overloaded with homework. This is middleschool, but the same problem manifests in K6, and I’m only dreading what comes next.

And then we get the ‘coloring’ assignments. I’m sure the argument is something along the lines of ‘by seeing the information represented as they color, they’ll remember it’. Sorry, no. If they’re not applying the information, or extrapolating from it, or personalizing it, processing it, it’s not going to lead to anything but prettier classrooms for open house. I’m sorry, but don’t spoil my child’s youth to pretty up your room. And it’s very clear that, at least in our school, largely the mothers are doing it.

And then there is the weekend homework. I’m sorry, but I do believe kids are entitled to a life, or at least most of one. Why have work hanging over them on the weekend? Now, if you give them long term projects and it replaces some homework, and they decide to put it off ’til the weekend, well, I suppose that’s ok, because I think interesting overarching projects are valuable (and bring in important meta-skills). So then there’s the homework assigned on Friday that’s due on Tuesday, so supposedly you can get it done on Monday so it’s not really homework, but who do you think you’re fooling?

So, my first-born got hammered with homework the first year of middle school. Worse, it was idiosyncratic; so it was luck of the draw whether your kid got a teacher who assigned lots of homework. My school admitted that while the math teachers were pretty much in synch, the science department had great variability, and didn’t explicitly admit that they can’t do anything about it (*cough* tenure *cough*). This had been going on, but now my better half had me behind her as she rallied the other mom’s into a persistent force against what was happening. There’s now a homework policy, which still gets violated (oh, this is a honors class at highschool level, so we have to assign weekend homework). Nope, sorry, don’t buy it.

My second has not been hammered by the first year of homework (luck of the draw, the science teacher who doesn’t believe in homework), and hasn’t had her love of schooling squelched. The first, however, has had to have serious support by us to not turn off completely. I really believe that the middle school (a good one) has a belief that the only way to deal with all these coddled elementary school students is to hammer them the first year. Frankly, I’m not convinced that most kids are ready for middle school in 6th grade. But I’m getting away from my point and getting personal…

Some reactivation, within limits of the overall load can’t keep kids tied to desks hours after school’s out, can be understandable, but I’m inclined to believe that it’s not really that necessary. If we tap into motivation, we can accelerate learning and get more utility out of school. Doing the same problems at night, overloading from too many classes, and weekend homework don’t really provide enough advantage to justify such assignments.

I’m not sure whether they’re teaching the principles of homework to teaching students, and whether there’s any education of existing teachers from whatever path, but we’ve got to get it right. If Finland can get by minimal homework, I reckon we can too.

Game Implications

14 March 2011 by Clark Leave a Comment

Eileen Clegg asked me some questions as part of a report she’s doing for the Future of Talent Institute.

1. How do you think gaming will change the landscape for people in charge of recruiting, developing and retaining top talent?

Gaming is an optimized performance environment, with all that entails. First, a game can both help individuals understand what a particular company is about (e.g. Sun’s games to introduce their business units), and what the job is like (e.g. America’s Army). It can also serve as a filter or aptitude test, where the better the individual performs, the better a candidate they’re likely to be. There are a couple of armed/military services around the world that have challenging games to test aptitude (a Scandinavian navy, and the British SAS, if memory serves).

Then, once an employee is onboard, games are the best practice environment next to real world mentored practice, and the latter doesn’t scale well (real practice can be expensive, both to develop and as a consequence of failure; individual mentors are similarly expensive). You can build contextually immersive practice with the depth to achieve mastery. The effort to convey what the job is like and to really develop people (instead of just knowledge dump) is a good incentive to employees to stick with the company, I believe.

Overall, I think that organizations that can take advantage of gaming to provide meaningful practice and assessment are leveraging the most powerful formal learning tool available and will have the competitive advantage.

2. What do you think is “least understood” about gaming right now?

Where do I start? Two things top my list.

First, is the belief that gaming is just ‘tarted-up quiz shows’, when it’s really truly challenging and effective learning practice.

Second, that it has to cost millions of dollars, when instead games can be done on reasonable budgets to meet many organizational needs.

The challenge is in the design, not the development costs, and if you get the design right the development may be quite affordable and the outcomes very effective.

3. What is the best quote from your new book to help us understand the gameification of the corporate world?

“The step from convenience to context-specific, however, provides a new opportunity. A mobile-specific type of game, augmented reality games (or ARGS), has the activity layered on top of real life, taking advantage of when and where you are to drive interaction.”…this form of learning has the potential to be more than effective, but to be truly transformational, and you should be primed to look for opportunities to take the learning experience to the next ‘level’.”

BTW, I did write augmented reality, and many would argue that I mean ‘alternate reality games’, and I do think those have wild potential as well, but here I am talking about context-specific games, and that would be augmented reality.

Business Social Media Benefits

11 March 2011 by Clark 1 Comment

For the Australasian Talent Conference that will run in Sydney May 24-26 (where I’m speaking), they’ve been drumming up interest with a press release. As a consequence, I’ve been doing some interviews, some live, some via email. For the latter, I was asked to address the question: “what businesses can learn from allowing employees to access social networking sites, and how allowing social networking can benefit businesses?” My answer:

People are no longer just what they know, but also who they know. It’s the network. If you block social media at work, they’ll take the ‘social media cigarette break’ and step outside with their phones (you can’t stop the signal), because they need their network to answer questions, share ideas, and more. When you can get connected to the person you need, get answers to your burning questions, connect to colleagues who can mentor, morally support, and more, you find that doing without is no longer acceptable. Personal story: wanted to know about a piece of software and tweeted it, received an answer from the person who wrote it in 3 hours offering to answer any of my questions!

People might be concerned with what folks share, and there are two answers. First, there are corporate equivalents: for every Facebook and Twitter there’s a behind-the-firewall and/or industrial strength and secure solution. Second, investigations into people misusing social media and making inappropriate comments show rare violations. If you’ve got a company with the right culture where the mission is clear and people are empowered, folks just don’t violate sensible guidelines.

There are important reasons to be using social media in connecting with customers, and at least as much by empowering employees to get their work done. To succeed, you need to do more than just plan, prepare, and execute. There isn’t time. You need your employees to continually innovate, problem-solve, and more. This happens collaboratively and through communication – conversations are the engine of business – and consequently success is going to be predicated on empowering employees to work together to continually improve.

If you’re in the Antipodes, or nearby, it looks like a good event. If you are interested in attending, using my discount code ‘CQ11’, will get you a 10% discount. Hope to see you there!

Thinking Social

7 March 2011 by Clark 1 Comment

In talking about the 4C’s of Mobile, the last one I usually mention is ‘communicate’. Communicate isn’t last because it’s least, but instead because it leads us furthest afield, into the areas of social learning, which has many ramifications in many ways: organizationally, cognitively, culturally, and more. However, it is of importance for mobile in terms of thinking about how and when to take advantage of it. It is also something that the Internet Time Alliance is wrestling with.

We strongly believe in performance consulting, that is getting to the root cause of the organizational problem, and determining whether the problem is skill set, information, motivation, or whatever. This is a necessary step before you decide your intervention. However, the current models of performance consulting seem to be missing a couple of things. For one, they are not particularly good at engagement, at least in the formal learning setting, and trying to understand the audience’s interest. More importantly here, they also seem to lack consideration of when a social media solution might make sense.

As a preliminary step, I went back to some material I have from my workshop on mobile learning design. One of the activities is thinking about when you might want to consider a social solution, to connect to someone to communicate, rather than have a prepared solution. My initial thoughts were that you might want to connect when:

the content is highly volatile
the situation is likely unique
the cost of access is low
the need for personal touch or mentoring is high

These make sense to me, but I’ve no reason to believe the list is comprehensive. However, it is a starting point for thinking about when you might want to provide access to a social resource, whether a directory of appropriate people, or consider providing communication tools.

I might extend the list with:

when the situation is likely new
when there is an expert
when the situation is likely to be complex.

Here’s a tougher one: when would you think the situation would likely need a collaborator, instead of an expert? What’s the trigger?

As I said, I’m just starting to wrestle with this. What ideas do you have?

Quip: tuning

1 March 2011 by Clark 2 Comments

You can’t declare it’s a game, your learners will tell you if it is or not.

I found a game for my iPad that I really liked. A casual gamer, so that while it has a story, I can play it without having to get too crazy about learning timing issues or complicated commands.

I played it through, and several different times again with different characters, and eagerly awaited the sequel. Which finally occurred and I was again progressing through the game. Er, until the end, and that’s where this story begins.

When I got to the last boss, suddenly I couldn’t finish. I couldn’t beat the boss! Instead of happily progressing, suddenly I was grinding to get my character to level up, and trying again, while looking for more special equipment. It was suddenly frustrating, not fun.

Now, I’d pretty well just bashed my way through: no finesse in movement. But that had worked. So if I was supposed to pick up more nuanced movements and commands, there had been no incentive. Well, I finally beat the boss after numerous attempts, and then the game was over, but I hadn’t really found out what I’d done that worked.

Again, I started with a different character, and again it was fun. Up until the end, and again I was faced with the unbeatable boss. Again I ground, and again I finally succeeded, but it was still an anti-climax after so much fun prior to that point.

The point here is not to complain about this particular game, but to point out that getting the experience right matters. When I run my game design lectures and/or workshops, I point out that as Will Wright once told me, tuning is 9/10ths of the work. And it’s got to go all the way through, with the right audience. It may be that they didn’t test the end with a casual gamer like me, but it was a jarring ending to what had been.

Now, in most of the formal learning situations we design for, we have sticks as well as carrots, so we aren’t expecting our learners to pay for the privilege of completing our learning experience, but it’s important to understand what learner experience we think would be reasonable and shoot for achieving that. It’s subjective, so asking them is just fine, but you want to set metrics for the user experience (tested for after you ensure usability isn’t a barrier and you are achieving your learning outcomes) and then tune until you get them. Or, of course, until you find out you won’t on your current budget and adjust your expectations, but doing so consciously.

As I say, you don’t turn a scenario into a game, you tune it into a game. And even when you are not shooting for a game, this applies to learning experience design as well. Emotions and subjective experience matters, so do consider testing and tuning until you achieve the experience you need.

Clarity needed around Web 3.0

25 February 2011 by Clark 6 Comments

I like ASTD; they offer a valuable service to the industry in education, including reports, webinars, very good conferences (despite occasional hiccups, *cough* learning styles *cough*) that I happily speak at and even have served on a program committee for. They may not be progressive enough for me, but I’m not their target market. When they come out with books like The New Social Learning, they are to be especially lauded. And when they make a conceptual mistake, I feel it’s fair, nay a responsibility, to call them on it. Not to bag them, but to try to achieve a shared understanding and move the industry forward. And I think they’ve made a mistake that is problematic to ignore.

A recent report of theirs, Better, Smarter, Faster: How Web 3.0 will Transform Learning in High-Performing Organizations, makes a mistake in it’s extension of a definition of Web 3.0, and I think it’s important to be clear. Now, I haven’t read the whole report, but they make a point of including their definition in the free Executive Summary (which I *think* you can get too, even if you’re not a member, but I can’t be sure). Their definition:

Web 3.0 represents a range of Internet-based services and technologies that include components such as natural language search, forms of artificial intelligence and machine learning, software agents that make recommendations to users, and the application of context to content.

This I almost completely agree with. The easy examples are Netflix and Amazon recommendations: they don’t know you personally, but they have your purchases or rentals, and they can compare that to a whole bunch of other anonymous folks and create recommendations that can get spookily good. It’s done by massive analytics, there’s no homunculus hiding behind the screen cobbling these recommendations together, it’s all done by rules and statistics.

I’ve presented before my interpretation of Web 3.0, and it is very much about using smart internet services to do, essentially system-generated content (as opposed to 1.0 producer-generated content and 2.0 user-generated content). The application of context to content could be a bit ambiguous, however, and I’d mean that to be dynamic application of context to content, rather than pre-designed solutions (which get back to web 1.0).

As such, their first component of their three parts includes the semantic web. Which, if they’d stopped at, would be fine. However, they bring in two other components. The second:

the Mobile Web, which will allow users to experience the web seamlessly as they move from one device to another, and most interaction will take place on mobile devices.

I don’t see how this follows from the definition. The mobile web is really not fundamentally a shift. Mobile may be a fundamental societal shift, but just being able to access the internet from anywhere isn’t really a paradigmatic shift from webs 1.0 and 2.0. Yes, you can acccess produced content, and user-generated content from wherever/whenever, but it’s not going to change the content you see in any meaningful way.

They go on to the third component:

The third element is the idea of an immersive Internet, in which virtual worlds, augmented reality, and 3-D environments are the norm.

Again, I don’t see how this follows from their definition. Virtual worlds start out as producer-generated content, web 1.0. Sims and games are designed and built a priori. Yes, it’s way cool, technically sophisticated, etc, but it’s not a meaningful change. And, yes, worlds like Second Life let you extend it, turning it into web 2.0, but it’s still not fundamentally new. We took simulations and games out of advanced technology for the conferences several years ago when I served. This isn’t fundamentally new.

Yes, you can do new stuff on top of mobile web and immersive environments that would qualify, like taking your location and, say, goals and programmatically generating specific content for you, or creating a custom world and outcomes based upon your actions in the world from a model not just of the world, but of you, and others, and… whatever. But without that, it’s just web 1.0 or 2.0.

And it’d be easy to slough this off and say it doesn’t matter, but ASTD is a voice with a long reach, and we really do need to hold them to a high standard because of their influence. And we need people to be clear about what’s clever and what’s transformative. This is not to say my definition is the only one, others have interpretations that differ, but I think the convergent view is while it may be more than semantic web, it’s not evolutionary steps. I’m willing to be wrong, so if you disagree, let me know. But I think we have to get this right.

Jane Hart’s Social Learning Handbook

24 February 2011 by Clark 1 Comment

Having previously reviewed Marcia Conner and Tony Bingham’s The New Social Learning, and Jane Bozarth’s Social Media for Trainers, I have now received my copy of Jane Hart’s Social Learning Handbook. First, I’ll review Jane’s book on it’s own, and then put it in the context of the other two. Caveat: I’m mentioned in all three, for sins in my past, so take the suitable precautions.

Jane’s book is very much about making the case for social learning in the workplace, as the first section details. This is largely as an adjunct to formal learning, rather than focusing on social media for formal learning. Peppered with charts, diagrams, bullet lists, and case studies, this book is really helpful in making sense of the different ways to look at learning.

The first half of the book is aimed at helping folks get their minds around social media, with the arguments, examples, and implementation hints. While her overarching model does include formal structured learning (FSL), it also covers her other components that complement FSL: accidental and serendipitous learning (ASL), personally directed learning (PSL), group-directed learning (GDL), and intraorganizational learning (IOL). The point, as she shares Harold Jarche’s viewpoint on, is that we need to support not just dependent learning, but independent and interdependent learning. And she’s focused on helping you succeed, with lots of practical advice about problems you might face and steps that might help.

Jane has a unique and valuable talent for looking at things and sorting them out in sensible ways, and that is put to great use here. Nearly the last half of the book is 30 ways to use social media to work and learn smarter, where she goes through tools, hints and tips on getting started, and more. Here, her elearning tool of the day site has yielded rich benefits for the reader, because she’s up to date on what’s out there, and has lists of sites, tools, people with helpful comments.

This is the book for the learning and development group that wants to figure out how to really support the full spectrum of performers, not just the novices, and/or who want to quit subjecting everyone to a course when other tools may make sense.

So, how does this book fit with Jane Bozarth’s Social Media for Trainers, and Conner & Bingham’s The New Social Learning? Jane B’s book is largely for trainers adding social media to supplement formal learning, where as Jane H’s book is for those looking to augment formal learning, so they’re complementary. Marcia and Tony’s book is really more the higher level picture and as such is more useful to the manager and executive. Roughly, I’d sell the benefits to the organization with Marcia & Tony’s book, I’d give Jane B’s book to the trainers and instructional designers who are charged with improving on formal learning, and I’d give Jane H’s book to the L&D group overall who are looking to deliver more value to the organization.

They’re all short, paperback, quick and easy reading, and frankly, I reckon you oughta pick all three of them up so you don’t miss a thing. You’d be hard pressed to get a better introduction and roadmap than from this trio of books. Let’s tap into this huge opportunity to make things go better and faster.

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