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Clark Quinn’s Learnings about Learning

Quip: limits

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The limits are no longer the technology; the limits are between our ears (ok, and our pocketbooks).

My old surfing buddy Carl Kuck used to say that the only limits are between our ears, and I’ve purloined his phrase for my nefarious purposes.   This comes from the observation that Arthur C. Clarke made that “any truly advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic“.   I want to suggest that we now have magic: we can summon up demons (ok, agents) to do our bidding, and peer across distances with crystal balls (or web cams). We really can bring anything, anywhere, anytime. If we can imagine it, we can make it happen if we can marshal the vision and the resources. The question is, what do we want to do with it?

Really, what we do in most schooling is contrary to what leads to real learning. I believe that technology has given us a chance to go back to real learning and ask “what should we be doing?”.   We look at apprenticeship, and meaningful activity, and scaffolding, and realize that we need to find ways to achieve this.   (Then we look at most schooling and recoil in horror.)

So, let’s stop letting the ways in which our cognitive architecture limits us (set effects, functional fixedness, premature evaluation) and think broadly about what we could be doing, and then figure out how to make it so. I’ll suggest that some components are slow learning, distributed cognition, social interaction, and meta-learning (aka 21st Century skills).   What do you think might be in the picture?

Quip: innovation

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Optimal execution is only the cost of entry; continual innovation is the necessary competitive differentiator.

When I talk strategy, I channel my colleagues in the Internet Time Alliance about the changes being seen in the workplace.   The rate of change is increasing, and the patterns we imagined we saw (and explained away when violated) are more clearly representing the chaos seen in a fractal world.   As a consequence, organizational nimbleness is a necessity.

In a time when competitors can copy your innovation in a matter of months (or less), you can’t just plan, prepare, and execute optimally any longer.   You now have to continually innovate in products and services, problem-solve faster, avoid repeating mistakes, and in general learn (big ‘L’ learning) faster than your competitors.

The learning doesn’t come from more hierarchy, bigger incentives, or more systems.   Counter-intuitively, perhaps, it comes from being more open, taking time for reflection, having better conversations,   finding ways to give people meaningful goals and giving them the space and support to accomplish them.   It’s more than a process shift, it’s a culture shift, but it can be done, and it works.

Yes, there’s formal learning, and performance support because you can’t neglect the optimal execution, but there’s also community-building, because you need the continual innovation too.   Neglect either, and you’ll fail.   It’s not about more resources (yeah, as if), but about more sensible allocation of them.

My suggestion: use technology and people in ways that maximize their contributions. People can be really good problem-solvers, particularly coupled with complementary technology, but they’re really bad at rote tasks.   However, technology, properly designed and developed, is really good at rote tasks.   Need I say more?   Hint hint, nudge nudge, wink wink.

Building Stronger Organizations

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A recent Ross Dawson blog post included a mention of building flexibility: “the more flexible the organization, the more able it is to succeed”.   Which reminded me of some work I assisted Eileen Clegg with on extremophiles that we wrote up for Marcia Conner & James Clawson’s book, Creating a Learning Culture.

Along the lines of the biomimicry field, Eileen was inspired by her scientist husband’s work on organisms that live in extreme conditions of heat, salt, cold, and more. We riffed on five mechanisms and their corporate equivalents:

  • ionic bonds: stronger bonds built upon attractions of opposites
  • context-sensing: reading the environment for cues to change strategies
  • heat-shock proteins: released under extreme conditions to repair structure
  • inoculation: bring in what challenges you
  • symbiosis: finding strategic partnerships

The reflection was that the mechanisms we were suggesting then, to make companies more resilient, were actually strategies making companies more flexible and adaptive.   It’s been a number of years, so it’s interesting to me to see what we were recommending back then and it’s even more relevant now:

  • leverage human complexity: encourage diversity and use it to drive richer solutions
  • develop ‘wise’ information technology: use technology more strategically to complement our capabilities
  • encourage always-on cross-mentoring: have mentoring networks to provide support across tough times and develop people in multiple dimensions
  • tapping social and value networks: reach out across organizational boundaries to partners and customers and eliminate blockages
  • strategic community-building: facilitating information flows

These are just the sort of activities I continue to push in conjunction with my ITA colleagues, to build flexibility in organizations to, as Ross says, achieve “competitive differentiation”.   Wherever your inspiration may arise, the solutions appear again and again: find ways to motivate and empower people because you care about them and what you are doing, and they will provide you with valuable outcomes.   What ways are you seeing, trying, and finding useful?

Quip: conversations

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Conversations are the engine of business.

Seriously.   How many problems are solved by saying “go talk to <so-and-so>”, or ideas sparked by conversations around the water cooler? How many times has a chance conversation ended up leading to a new product, service, acquisition, or more?   The conversations can be of many types: with co-workers, managers, subordinates, customers, stakeholders. We may execute individually, but the innovations, the changes, the needed learning happens by dialog. The important work is done in conversations.

Consequently, we need to ensure that we have the tools to support conversations, and a culture that promotes them.   It’s got to be valued to be helpful, and part of the culture.   We have had tools for interaction before, from talking, through phone and email, but now we have the opportunity to look at, and support, a richer suite of interaction.

You need mechanisms to ask questions, find people, share thoughts.   Microblogging (e.g. twitter) allows you to follow people who spark thoughts, and ask questions of your followers. Blogging lets you put out more formed thoughts and look for feedback. Profiles let you search for people who have knowledge you   need.   Forums provide opportunities for open and ongoing dialogs.   IM chats provide an open channel to have a continuing presence.   And so on.

And don’t assume conversations are optimal, ensure it.   One of the coming roles for learning designers is facilitating the informal learning as well as the formal, I suggest.   This includes both individual skills and organizational culture.   Make the principles of good conversation explicit, model it, encourage it, and develop it.

Don’t starve the engine, ensure that it’s tuned and getting adequate fuel.   Facilitate business performance and make the environment conducive to good conversations to unleash your organization’s potential.

Quip: design

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If you get the design right, there are lots of ways to implement it; if you don’t get the design right, it doesn’t matter how you implement it.

Too often, people under design and overproduce, resulting in great looking products that are worthless.   This is certainly the case in elearning, but you see it in other fields, too.

Similarly, I’ve found that if you get the design right, you don’t need lots of production.   In an example cited in my Engaging Learning book, we designed a game for kids that need to learn how to live on their own. The first version looked like it was done by lame 3rd graders, but the play was right; as a consequence, we got some funding to tart up the graphics.   On the other hand, if the play hadn’t been right, it wouldn’t have gotten used.

One of the reasons to tout this is so many people are concerned about what tool to use.   I don’t really systematically study tools, because once you’ve got the design, you can probably implement it in a variety of tool solutions. And the tools will change, but the need for quality design won’t.

The focus has to be on the learning experience design first, and then you can worry about how you might build the delivery environment.   So, please, get design, and get the design right.   Then we can talk about how to develop it.

Quip: tradeoffs

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There are no right answers, only tradeoffs.

This is something I frequently say in my design workshops (games, mobile, whatever). When you are doing a design, there are many factors to be considered, and many alternatives.   The question is not “what is the right answer”, the question is “what is the right answer for now, in this context”.   The reason being that there are many possible answers, and you will have to consider several alternatives.

When we do an analysis, we have to decide whether it’s a skill, knowledge, attitude, or something else.   Then we can decide whether to address it with training, job aids, interface redesign, or something else.   And usually it could be one or the other but we eventually converge on a solution.

In the interface design space, there arose an approach called a ‘design rationale‘ just to keep new folks on the team from revisiting prior decisions.   There were even tools created to document these.   There are a lot of factors that affect a solution, including audience, current environment (tech, sociocultural, resources, etc), and goals.   There will be tensions between them, and the solution will end up being a compromise that is the best guess at a solution space.

Or, as I depicted it a while ago, the potential solution space is large, and various factors end up constraining that space down to a solution (if we end up with the empty set, we have to relax one or more of the constraints).   It helps to have constraints.   Some of the solutions are better than others, but seldom is any one so dominantly optimal.   Just think of the problem of what car to buy?   Economy, style, reliability, current sales incentives, there are lots of factors, and   you probably ended up choosing among several possibilities.

On a side note, this is an important way the real world differs from ‘schooling’.   I like what David Jonassen says about how the problems we give our kids in class don’t bear any relation to the problems they face in the world (and his focus on changing the problems seen in schools).

And, as m’lady likes to say, there should be no ‘coulda shoulda woulda’s.   You made the best decision at the time (right?), and then if it later turns out to have been wrong you had no way to know or you would’ve factored it into your decision at the time.   Unless you missed something you could and should have seen then, you still made the right decision.

This is why consultants typically answer with ‘it depends’ when asked for specifics beforehand (much to potential customers dismay).   When the expert realizes the myriad factors that could affect the choices and outcomes, it’s naive to give a pat answer to the client who needs help.   There are likely parameters that affect the decision and may help to constrain it to a range,   and the experience may allow a qualified guess, but don’t expect a binding agreement until a scoping exercise has been performed.

It is important to be explicit about this, rather than assume you can make a perfect decision.   Recognizing the process allows you to be open in your evaluations and honest in your assessment of the solution.   Make the best tradeoffs you can, recognize that you can be wrong, and move ahead.

Social Media Strategy thoughts

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What is a social media strategy for outreach?   Really, it‘s about demonstrating your thinking, your values, and background. It‘s about interacting with appropriate people in ways that reflect who you are.

Here is some thoughts about how that maps out in two areas: Facebook, and Twitter.   I‘m mentioning these as two of the most viable and visible tools for social media engagement.

Twitter

Having a twitter account is a necessary start, maybe several. One might be just a daily thing people can follow, but it has to provide value.   So, for example, you might stream out an interesting bit of the day. That, alone, however, is not enough.

A second important role is to engage people.   More important than the first idea is to ‘be‘ an entity.   If an organization is on social media, and increasingly they should be,   it needs to be interactive. This is accomplished in several ways:

  • point to what the organization is doing
  • point to interesting things outside of the organization
  • re-tweet relevant stuff that others post (which requires following interesting people)
  • respond to people replying to that account.

These require resources, essentially a person or persons who handle these duties.   Done well, these activities demonstrate that there is an interesting mind and a sincere heart behind the account.

Facebook

The same is true of a FaceBook page.   Not only should people be friending it, they should be coming back to be engaged   the organization, but now also with their colleagues also interested in the organization.

There are different ways to be on Facebook: as a static page, or as a ‘presence‘ with dialogs, groups, etc.  A static page might get a few ‘likes‘, but you really want to build a site as a place to come for folks interested in the organization and it’s work.   There need to be discussions supported (and interacted with).   There need to be updates.   There needs to be a way for people to have a dialog with you.   You need information: photos, events.   Use apps to create polls. In short, it’s about interaction around the organization and it’s work.

Again, the message is that you‘re active, engaged, you really care about what you do.   And, again, it takes resources.

Twitter/Facebook Integration

These two elements do not live independently.   Your Twitter strategy should be aligned with your Facebook strategy, so your tweets point to new information on Facebook, your Facebook account reflects your tweets, etc.   Your tweets should drive traffic to the Facebook site, but not exclusively.

There‘s more that can be incorporated: blogs (I use twitter and my blog more than my facebook page, but I‘m an individual not an organization).   However, your elements shouldn‘t be too fragmented.   E.g. only have separate Twitter handles and Facebook pages if your separate initiatives have to maintain unique identities. However, that‘s a branding issue, and not a place I‘m qualified to talk about.   Once you‘ve got the identity, then you need to align your Facebook and Twitter strategies.

So, you should be doing this, and you need to be doing it well.   If you don’t do it right, you may as well not do it at all.

Reflections on the final day of TechKnowledge 11

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Because of prior commitments, I only got to attend the last day of the TechKnowledge conference, to participate in two panels, one on mobile and one on instructional design, and then listen to the closing session.   Some thoughts stuck with me:

The Mobile Panel

It’s clear to me that many folks are still thinking of mobile as content delivery in a course mode.   There’s nothing wrong with content delivery, e.g. for performance support, and for course augmentation, but the panel (Kris Rockwell, Ed Prentice) was wisely arguing for a broader vision for mobile learning.

Kris mentioned the possibilities of just using voice, and I chimed in with the potential for using SMS.   Again, you really want to think a little differently to take advantage of mobile.   I also mentioned the other 3 C’s: Compute, Capture (images, videos, audio), and Communicate.

The possibilities provided by knowing where you are, that these devices have GPS in many cases, was also mentioned. The real point is you need to move beyond thinking of content for courses to really take advantage of the opportunities mobile presents.

Instructional Design Panel

With participants as widely experienced as Steve Villachica, Ellen Wagner, Karl Kapp, and Allison Rossett, you’d expect fun and irreverence in addition to sage advice, and that’s just what you got.   Topics ranged from what should be taught in classes to the reality of practice in the field.   There was some disagreement (I was a self-labeled contrarian a couple of times), but in general we were nodding at what others were saying.

One of the major points was that just understanding instructional design wasn’t enough.   Ellen told the story of her journey out of academia and the wake-up call she received when having to work in an organization.   Steve talked about how they wanted learners to understand business and project management, and Karl talked about the internships they use to ground their classes.

The counter came from the audience where instructional design departments of one were concerned about having time to take on a ‘consulting’ role in addition to meeting their required duties, and how to accommodate the need to add things like mobile to their repertoire.   The need to move up to thinking at a higher level is easy to proselytize, but hard to accomplish in practice.   However, I do argue for the bigger picture, asking you to avoid Learning Malpractice.

Closing Session

The closing session was a brave move by ASTD, and more credit to them for giving it a go; they had a BBC host conduct the session in a TV-style presentation, with rapid fire interviews mixed in with video footage, a quick SkypeCast with a UK-based expert, and tweeted questions.   In the end it came across as a bit too much (the videos had gratuitous graphics and the soundtrack was too like an advertisement), but it was lively and I have to commend experimentation.   It certainly was better than some alternatives I’ve seen (e.g. another conference that closed with a content-free motivational speaker).

One of the most contentious points was a face-off between the view that we’ve been using things like social learning for ever, and only the tools have changed to a contrary point that our learning fundamentally has changed.   The latter point got cheers, but I think what’s changed is we’ve moved away from industrial age efficiency and back to matching our our brains really learn, but with new tools.   So I disagree with both (there’s that contrarian thing again :).

I like the TechKnowledge conference, as I think they work hard to get mostly the right folks (tho’ I confess to being surprised to see a ‘learning styles’ workshop put on pre-conference), and many of our top colleagues have taken a shot at serving on the program committee.   I think it’s in Las Vegas next year, and a good conference to attend regardless.

Social Media Metrics

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I continue to get asked about social learning metrics.   Until we get around to a whitepaper or something on metrics, here’re some thoughts:

Frankly, the problem with Kirkpatrick (sort of like with LMS’ and ADDIE, *drink*) is not in the concept, but in the execution.   As he would say, stopping at level 1 or 2 is worthless.   You need to start with Level 4, and work back.   This is true whether you’re talking about formal learning, informal learning, or whatever. Then, I’m not feeling like you have to be anal about levels 1-3, it’s level 4 that matters, but there’s plausibility that making the link makes your case stronger.   And I also like what I heard added at a client meeting: level 0, are they even taking the course/accessing the system?   But I digress…

So, let’s say you are interested in seeing what social media can do for your organization: what are you not seeing but need to?   If you’re putting in a social media system into a call center, maybe you want reduced time to problem solution, fewer customer return calls on the same problem, etc.   If you’re into an operations group, maybe you want more service or product ideas.   What is it you’re trying to achieve?   What would indicate the innovation that you’re looking to spark?

Parameters for keep, tweak, or killThen, you need to find ways to measure those outcomes. You have three basic decisions to make in terms of a strategic initiative:

  • it’s working, yay, let’s keep it.
  • hmm, it’s kinda working, but we need to tweak it
  • oh oh, this is bleeding money, let’s kill it

You should set parameters before you launch the initiative that you think indicate the thresholds you are talking about.   The keep and kill thresholds likely have to do with the costs versus the benefits.   You may change those parameters on inspection of the results at any time, but at least you are doing it consciously.   And gradually your patience will or should fade.   Eventually you end up with either a leave or kill decision.

Frankly, even activity is a metric.   A vendor of a social media system uses that as a metric for billing (though I don’t think that two touches a month constitutes a meaningful interaction by a user), and if people are talking productively and getting value, you’ve got at least an argument that intangible benefits are being generated.   You could couple that with subjective evaluation of value, but overall I would like to argue for more meaningful outcomes.

And don’t think that you have to have only one. Depending on the size of the initiative and the different silos that are being integrated, you might have more.   You might check not only key business metrics, but look for impacts on retention and morale as well, if the benefits of improving work environments are to believed (and I do).   And, of course, there’s more than the installation and measuring: the tweaking for instance could involve messaging, culture, interface design, or more.

Metrics for informal learning aren’t rocket science, but instead mapping of best principles into specific contexts.   Your organization needs to find ways to facilitate social learning, as the innovation outcomes are the key differentiator going forward, as so many say.   You should be experimenting, but with impacts you’d like to have, not just on faith.

Learning Technologies UK wrap-up

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I had the pleasure of speaking at the Learning Technologies ’11 conference, talking on the topic of games.   I’ve already covered Roger Schank‘s keynote, but I want to pick up on a couple of other things. Overall, however, the conference was a success: good thinking (more below), good people, and well organized.

The conference was held on the 3rd floor of the conference hall, while floors 1 and ground hosted the exposition: the ground floor hosted the learning and skills (think: training) exhibits while the 1st floor held learning technology (read: elearning) vendors.   I have to admit I was surprised (not unpleasantly) that things like the reception weren’t held in the exhibit halls.   The conference was also split between learning technologies (Day 1) and learning and skills (day 2), so I have to admit being somewhat surprised that there weren’t receptions on the respective floors, to support the vendors, tho’ having a chance to chat easily with colleagues in a more concise environment was also nice.

I’m not the only one who commented on the difference between the floors: Steve Wheeler wrote a whole post about it, noting that the future was above, and the past showing below.   At a post-conference review session, everyone commented on how the level of discussion was more advanced than expected (and gave me some ideas of what I’d love to cover if I got the chance again).   I’d   heard that Donald Taylor runs a nice conference, and was pleased to see that it more than lived up to the billing.   There was also a very interesting crowd of people I was glad to meet or see again.

In addition to Roger’s great talk on what makes learning work, there were other stellar sessions. The afore-mentioned Steve did a advanced presentation on the future of technologies that kept me engaged despite a severe bout of jetlag, talking about things you’ve also heard here: semantics, social, and more.   He has a web x.0 model that I want to hear more about, because I wasn’t sure I bought the premise, but I like his thinking very much. There was also a nice session on mobile, with some principles presented and then an interesting case study using iPads under somewhat severe(military) constraints on security.

It was hard to see everything I wanted to, with four tracks. To see Steve, I had to pass up Cathy Moore, who’s work I’ve admired, though it was a pleasure to meet her for sure.   I got to see Jane Bozarth, but at the expense of missing my colleague Charles Jennings.   I got to support our associate Paul Simbeck-Hampson, but at the cost of missing David Mallon talk on learning culture, and so on.

A great selection of talks to hear is better than not. There was also a very interesting crowd of people I was glad to meet or see again.   A great experience, overall, and I can happily recommend the conference.