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Clark Quinn’s Learnings about Learning

Designing a conference

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When I agreed to join as co-director of the Learning & Development Accelerator, I’d already attended their first two conferences. Those had been designed to reflect the circumstances at the time, e.g. the pandemic. In addition, there was a desire on the part of Matt Richter & Will Thalheimer (the original directors) to reflect certain values. Matt and I are running the event again, but times have changed. That means we have to rethink what’s being done. So here’s my thinking about designing a conference.

First, the values Matt and Will started with included being as global as possible, and being virtual. The former was reflected in having presentations given twice, once early in the US day, and then again later. That supported everything from Europe, Africa, and the Mideast to Asia and Australia. The virtual was, at least partly, a reaction to the lack of desire to travel and meet face to face, but also to provide options for those who might struggle.

We’re definitely still focusing on being virtual. Folks who would find it challenging to arrange travel for whatever reason can attend this event. There’s also the environmental considerations. Yes, technology requires resources, but not as much as collective travel. While there’s also a desire to meet different time needs, we’ve found less demand for multiple times. However, we will be recording sessions that are synchronous, so they can be viewed at convenient times. We also are spreading it over six weeks, so that there’s time to consume as much as you want. Further, faculty can choose when they’re offering ;).

The original design was focused on evidence-based L&D (which remains a key guiding principle for the LDA). Matt & Will solicited their presenters based upon their representation, but the agenda was largely what those folks wanted to present. Which, in many ways, reflects what other conferences do. In this new era, we wondered what would make a compelling proposition when you can travel to F2F events. We decided that we wanted to step away from ‘what we get’, and focus on ‘what the audience needs’.

This event, then, has a curriculum, across two tracks, designed to address specific needs. There’s also a different pedagogy than most conferences.We also have specific faculty, rather than presenters based upon submissions. Of course, there are tradeoffs. At least we can share our thinking.

The faculty are folks we know and trust to present evidence-based content. You won’t hear promotion for snake oil, like learning styles. We have a pretty impressive lineup, frankly, of people we think are world-class. This includes folks like Ruth Clark, Mirjam Neelen & Paul Kirschner, Karl Kapp, Julie Dirksen, Kat Koppett, Stella Lee, Nigel Paine, Will Thalheimer, and Thiagi. On top of, of course, Matt and myself. Reality means that a few folks we would’ve liked to have couldn’t commit, but this is a a broad and reputable group.

The tracks are basics and advanced. We want to be able to serve multiple audiences. The intent is that the basic track has the core knowledge an L&D person should know. As best we can, as we negotiate with the faculty, of course. Then, the advanced topics are things that are emergent and need addressing. Of course, there’s no commitment that you have to stay in one or another. As with other conferences, you can pick and choose what to view.

We’re also not just having presentations; we’ve asked the faculty to provide development. That is, we’re intending several rounds of content, activity, and feedback, spread out over several days or weeks. We don’t want people to hear good ideas, and maybe take them back. We want folks to take action! We’re also designing in the opportunity for mentoring.

Of course, there’ll be some social events, and other ways to not only hear content and apply it, but to mingle with faculty and other attendees. We want to foster some community. Also, we’re intending to somewhat front load stuff so that we can adapt. If we hear that we need to do something we haven’t planned, we’re looking to have leeway to address it. The nice thing about being small is the ability to be flexible!

None of this is saying you don’t get much of the same from conferences (except, perhaps, the design). I’ve been on conference program committees, and know conference organizers as well. They typically get more proposals than they can accept, so they can choose a suite that reflect things for various ranges of experience and cover important topics. They may not, however, know all the submitters, and take chances on a few. I laud that, actually, because we can’t know if a new approach or person is worthwhile without experimentation. Still, there is the chance for gaps, and for bad presentations/presenters. They’re also, except for the pre-conference workshops (e.g. my Make It Meaningful one at the upcoming DevLearn), one-off events.

We’re taking a chance on our format, too. We haven’t done it before. It may not work, though we have good reasons to believe it will. So, we hope to see you at the Learning & Development Conference, Oct 10 – Nov 18, if the above thinking about designing a conference sense. We think it does, we hope you do, too.

Projects That Didn’t Fly

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I’ve had the pleasure of leading the design of a number of projects that have had some impact. These include a mobile app a company could point to. Also a game that helped real kids. Even a context-sensitive performance support system that was worth a patent. Then, of course, are the projects that didn’t, for whatever reason, see the light of day.  So here are some reflections on a few projects that didn’t fly.

Back in the mid-90s, I was part of a government-sponsored initiative in online learning, and we were looking for a meaningful project. We made a connection to two folks with a small company that taught about communicating to the press. They could’ve come out with a book, but they wanted to do something more interesting. We collaborated on an online course on speaking to the media. I partnered with an experienced digital producer, and backstopped with a university-based media team. We had a comic skit writer, and cartoonists, to augment our resources. The result was technically sophisticated, educationally sound, and engaging both visually and in prose. It never flew, however, as we didn’t partner it with a viable business model. Which was reflective of the times.

Then, at the end of the 90’s, I was asked to lead a team developing an adaptive learning system. The charge was to help learners understand themselves as learners. I had a stellar team: software engineer, AI expert, psychometrician, learning science guru, visual designer, and an interface designer. The model was to do an initial profile, then present you with learning elements (concepts, examples, practice, etc) and update your model based on your performance. There was even a machine learning component to improve the models as we went along. We actually got a first draft up and running (10 elements in the student model), before ego and greed undermined and killed it. The lessons learned, of course, have continued to inform me, including, for instance, my calls for content systems.

Then, around the mid-2000s, I was given the task to devise a content model for a publisher.  They wanted to develop once and populate a variety of business products. Drawing on previous experience, I developed a robust model, which started from individual elements and supplemented and aggregated them in a systematic way. This also ended sadly. In this case, the software side never reached fruition.

There are lots of reasons good intentions can go awry.  In my case, it wasn’t going to be on a lack in the learning design ;). What I’ve learned, however, is that learning design isn’t the only element that matters. There’s vision, and execution, and partners, and more. All are ways in which things can go wrong. Yet, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. It just means that we should, to the extent of our abilities, also try to ensure the success of the other comments. It’s worth exploring projects that didn’t fly so as to see how future ones might.

Small thoughts about Smalltalk

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A couple of weeks ago, The Computer History Museum hosted a panel session on Smalltalk, which I watched via video. Alan Kay (who’s vision for the Dynabook drove Smalltalk) came in via recorded video. Dan Ingall (the technical guru) joined by live video link. Adele Goldberg (who documented and tested it), showed up live. John Markoff, well known Silicon Valley documenter, hosted. All to talk about Smalltalk. It prompted some small thoughts about Smalltalk.

I was a regular Byte magazine reader, back in the day. I had created my own major in Computer-Based Education, and was designing and programming educational computer games. I’d done academic research as part of the degree requirements, so I was aware of the work at Xerox PARC. (In fact, I flunked a job interview there because I didn’t know what ‘protocol analysis’ meant, though it turns out that’s what I’d been doing!) So, when the Byte issue in Aug 1981 on Smalltalk came out (I checked the date), I was enchanted.

Smalltalk is an object-oriented language that is dynamic, in that you can edit and immediately run it again; it’s not compiled. It was also reflective, in that make itself visible and operate on itself, like Lisp. In Smalltalk, you model your world in objects and they communicate by messages. It has windows, icons, and interactions comes from the mouse as much or more than by the keyboard. You can edit the objects while running and they change. While it wasn’t available to me, I was a fan of the concept.  (Machines running Smalltalk were what Steve Jobs saw on his PARC visit that led to the Lisa and then the Macintosh.)

It’s ironic that between then and when I ended up teaching in a school of computer science, I somehow lost that focus.  I’d gone to grad school to get a grounding in cognitive science in just such a place. After a post-doc looking at learner models, I ended up teaching interface design (and researching educational technology). Along the way I got involved in other issues, though I did get involved in HyperCard, which in many ways was Smalltalk Lite(tm ;).

In the talk, besides the enlightenment of the thinking behind it, there was also the practical aspects. While relatively lean, the language did take up memory and as a dynamic machine wasn’t blindingly fast. There apparently were also decisions about pricing and markets that were classic Xerox. Thus, while it was and is a fabulous modeling environment (still in use in a variety of markets), it didn’t take over the world.  When Steve Jobs built the NeXT computer, he took on the object-oriented model of Smalltalk, but used C as the core language for a variety of pragmatic reasons.

In the session, they talked about the vision of Seymour Papert and Logo, and how they wanted more. Alan Kay walked around with a cardboard model of what a Dynabook would look like, and people begged to buy one. Doug Englebart’s work also was an inspiration. It was a glorious flashback to the days when we dreamt bigger than our tech would support. These days, it seems, we’ve reversed that. I’ve heard that computing isn’t living up to the potential we have for digital technology to be an optimal augment for cognition, and I agree. We can do better, and should. So these are some small thoughts about Smalltalk. And get off my lawn!

Test and tune

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Conducting ScienceIt’s easy to believe that if we build solutions according to the principles, what we build will work. Certainly, that’s the case in many instances. But not, I suggest, when we’re talking about solutions for people? Why do we need to test and tune? Because we’re complex.

Materials, such as wood and steel have predictable properties. When you build a deck, you can follow the building codes for what you need to do for fixing posts to the ground, etc. However, people aren’t quite that predictable.

There’s a case to be made that the brain is the most complex thing in the known universe. In fact, we don’t fully know how it works! Thinking, then, that we can achieve a reliable change in the brain with simple mechanisms is kind of naive. We have to understand how the brain works, first, and then for complex changes, we need some detailed analysis and careful specification. However, we’re not done.

Once we’ve built it, we need to test and tune! Any solution isn’t guaranteed to be optimal or even effective, at least initially. Since people are complex, we can’t just design for the average (c.f. Todd Rose’s The End of Average). We can’t follow waterfall models, despite how appealing it is. Assuming we can is a path to boring and ineffective solutions. “If we build it, it is good” isn’t a useful assumption.

You see this in the best approaches. Michael Allen’s Successive Approximation (SAM), Megan Torrance’s Lot Like Agile Management Approach (LLAMA), David Merrill’s Pebble in the Pond, or Guy Wallace’s PACT approach (I’m not even going to try to deal with that acronym) all have iteration as a fundamental component.

You need some metrics, of course. You test against them, and then tune to get closer. The answer to “when do we stop iterating” is not “when we run out of time and money”. If you’re running out of time and money faster than you’re getting to your metrics, you need to explicitly consider some alternatives, like relaxing your goals, or investing more, or (horrors) abandoning where you’ve at. But it’s better to do it consciously!

To do this, we need to build ‘test and tune’ into our practices. We need to allocate time and money to it. Does this mean things will take longer and cost more? Possibly. The tradeoff is that we should be doing less courses overall, once we’re asking questions, and our solutions will be more effective. Going beyond knowledge dump courses that achieve no organizational benefit? I think that’s a fair exchange. I hope you do, too.

Help with breaking up

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In a current engagement, we’re faced with the challenge of being given large goals. They can be learning, or performance support, or even just awareness. One of the things we’re wrestling with is how and when to break things up into smaller chunks. To be clear, this is about whether to put it into a separate entity, rather than how to segment within an entity. This isn’t an area of my expertise, I admit. As a consequence, I’ve done some scouring and pondering, and here’re some thoughts and my request for help with breaking up.

My initial reaction is that this is about curriculum. That is, the level above pedagogy: not how to teach, but what to teach. A term which made sense is ‘curriculum mapping‘. Which works for K12, but the advice I found wasn’t helpful in this instance. It seemed to be about iterating, which is good, but I was looking for some research-based principles. We don’t have external standards.

Asking around, my colleagues suggested it’s more like information architecture. I know a bit about information architecture, but not a lot. In general, I take it as organizing around the way users think about the content. Which is good for information, but not necessarily for learning.

Of course, your learning objectives should provide a guide. There should be a path from the learner’s initial state, through enabling objectives, to the final objective. That should define the scope of an experience. If it gets too big, then make one or more of the enabling objectives their own piece. In this case, we’re taking something already created and trying to make sense of it.

Really, I’m fine with that latter, but I just wonder if there are any evidence based principles to guide this thinking. Something besides seemingly sensible breakups. It all seems based upon perception (and iterative testing). However, I wonder if there are metrics, or a principled basis. Hence, my request. I’m asking for help with breaking up. What am I missing? Any pointers?

What’s New at Quinnovation

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Time for an update, as things have been happening, Some over the past year, some more recently. So here’s what’s new at Quinnovation.

So, as I’ve already noted, I was asked to join the Learning Development Accelerator last fall as Editor in Chief of the new LDA Press. That means, practically, serving as both acquisition and development editor. So far, I’m better in the latter than the former. We did publish our first, book, er, mine ;). I’ve also joined as co-0rganizer.

We’re doing some fun things with that. The first is the You Oughta Know series of Wed webinars, introducing people, well, that you oughta know. We’ve had an amazing run of guests. I’ll also be starting up a series of Very Opinionated Tech Takes. Yeah, it’s me going off on various techs, but I will be unpacking my thinking behind the takes. And I have had a number of decades of experience at it… Finally, there’s the forthcoming Learning & Development Conference, where we’re looking to do what we think should be done. That is, a focus on important specifics; we’ve two tracks, one more for beginners and one more advanced. Attendees can choose. We’ve got a good tight faculty, and are expecting a great development experience.

In addition to my LDA duties, I’m still continuing on with Quinovation, of course. That has meant some steady client work since the beginning of the year; including two projects on learning and performance strategy. One is likely to be continuing at least a little while longer. From that one is a topic I’ll be discussing as part of at DevLearn. I’ll also be running a ‘Make It Meaningful workshop there; a full day digging into the principles and tricks of making experiences emotionally engaging. (I’ll also be part of a panel of the Guild Masters.)

I’ve also taken on some other roles via Quinnovation. For one, I’ve been working with an initiative attempting to take K12 STEM into the 21st Century. Yes, there are plenty of efforts in this area, I just happen to be involved in this one that has an approach I’m getting to shape aligned with my perspectives. I’m also now on the advisory board of a startup with a platform for augmenting formal learning programs. Finally, I’ve signed on to assist an established elearning firm improve their approach as part of a growth initiative. All are focusing on applying learning science to make bigger and better impacts. Those are the types of things I can comfortably get behind.

So that’s what’s new at Quinnovation. Reckon I’ll be busier than the proverbial beaver, but that’s preferable to the alternative. Stay tuned!

Consumed by consumption?

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I don’t listen to podcasts. Not that I have anything against them; I would if I had a driving commute where my eyes must be occupied while my mind isn’t fully. However, I don’t have such a situation, and otherwise I’d rather read (as with videos, I can generally read faster than they can talk, and I can also skim). However, pondering the increasing growth of podcasts and other media, I begin to wonder if we’re being consumed by consumption. 

To be clear, I like consuming information. I regularly am searching for information about new ideas I’ve come across, or going deeper in particular areas that have gained in importance in what I’m doing. I track Twitter and LinkedIn, and… However, I also take time for reflection. Which is important. If you look at Harold Jarche’s PKM model, you see that the middle section of ‘sense’ is where you process the information, synthesizing it. It’s an important part of learning, elaborating, experimenting, and internalizing.

Nothing wrong with consuming, but I’m suggesting it must be balanced with the synthesis, the integration, the reflection. If we only consume, I fear that we’re really not learning. We need to ponder what it means to us. Yet, in this increasingly fast-paced world, I worry that people feel they need to continually be consuming. I’m arguing that it shouldn’t be the only thing. It needs to be balanced. 

It’s not that I don’t think people reflect, I just want to make sure that they’re conscious of it, and don’t fall prey to a need to be distracted continually. We need to be present, with ourselves and our information, and process it. We need to avoid being consumed by consumption. Happy to believe that I’m wrong, but better to err on the side of over-communicating, eh?

Top 10 Learning Tools for 2022

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I continue to be a fan of Jane Hart‘s work, and her annual survey of Top 10 Learning Tools is only one of the reasons (another being her co-conspirator, along with Harold Jarche & Charles Jennings in the Internet Time Alliance). As a consequence, it’s time for my annual list, this time the Top 10 Learning Tools for 2022.

To be fair, my list could be reproduced from last year’s. However, a couple of tools have become more prevalent, and one’s slipped back, so…  I’ll rearrange my list for this year, given that I’m not writing a book right now, with an expectation that it may swing back.

Text

Writing is a primary way for me to think through things, and that’s not changing. I could say email, but that’s not where I put my most cogent thoughts.

1. WordPress. My blogging tool, is a major part of my learning process. In meeting my commitment of at least a post a week, I’m motivating myself to continue to explore new topics.

2. Google Docs. In collaborating with folks on a suite of things we’re working on, we’re learning together. We’re using a few other tools as well, one in particular, but it doesn’t allow simultaneous editing. Sorry, allowing people to work at the same time is the future.

Visuals

Tapping into our spatial processing capabilities ends up being important for me, both to personally understand things as well as communicate.

3. OmniGraffle. While I seem to have not used it as often, it’s still a major way I experiment with syntheses of ideas. Dear, and with much more capability than I need, but I haven’t found a reasonable alternative. Diagramming, mapping conceptual relationships to spatial, is a powerful way for me to make sense of things.

4. OmniOutliner. I don’t use all the features, and it’s dear, but again, haven’t found another outliner with the one key addition I need, columns. Spreadsheets don’t support outlining, as far as I’ve seen. And this is visual in that the representation of the structure is critical for me.

5. Keynote. Creating presentations is another way to think about how to share. The need to link elements together into a bigger picture is an important element of learning, to me.

Social

Interacting with others is a big part of learning, for me (despite my introversion).

6. Twitter. Following folks on twitter, even occasionally interacting with them, is a way to keep track of what’s happening, and what’s interesting.

7. LinkedIn. The posts I see on LinkedIn are often of interest, and occasionally people point me to things that are worthy of my attention (in one way or another!).

8. Discord. This one is new to me, and it’s still early on in my experience, but I’m finding it an interesting way to interact with colleagues.

9. Zoom. Like everyone else, I’m on a fair amount of Zoom calls (still my preferred environment for videoconferencing), fortunately not enough to experience fatigue yet ;).

Search

Search is a great part of my learning, looking up anything I hear about and don’t know.

10. Duck Duck Go. Duck has become my preferred search engine, because it’s claim to not track is comforting to me. I don’t use their browser, but I find their hits to be pretty spot-on.

So there, that’s my Top 10 Learning Tools for 2022. I encourage you to find a way to add yours to Jane’s list. It’s always interesting to see what emerges from the aggregate responses.

L&D Language is Limiting?

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In our most recent LDA You Oughta Know event, our guest touched on the language we use. It struck a chord for me, thinking about how we refer to things. It led me to wonder whether, in fact, we’re hampering ourselves. So here are some thoughts around the question of whether L&D language is limiting us?

So, Serena Gonsalves-Fersch heads talent for SoftwareONE, a global company. For her dissertation, she interviewed a number of folks about what L&D is doing. While her comments were extremely worthwhile, it was more a toss-off comment about using terms like “talent management” that got me to leave a note to riff on this topic.

So let’s start with those overarching terms. Human Capital, Human Resources, and Talent strike me as ways to dissociate from thinking of people, and instead think of using assets. You might invest in them, but are you investing in your people, or in the capability of your organization? The latter may sound sensible, but it leaves open the question “at what expense”. Do you care if they burn out from the way you use them?  Shouldn’t we talk about our people, employees, or those we’re responsible to and for? Perhaps I’m overly sensitive to the issues, but too often I see the approach being impersonal and if not inhumane.

Similarly, what about the phrase Corporate University? I am fond of the case study Mark Britz presented in Revolutionize L&D, where he said that for his organization, he recognized that what was needed was a community to share, given that they were disconnected but experts. What folks really mean by a corp uni is a training academy, but a uni isn’t a good model. Instead of deep theory with little practical application, it’s almost the reverse. Learning should be continual and ubiquitous, not sent off to separate environs. Even when you do specific formal interventions, they should be seen as integral, not isolated in an ivory tower.

Similarly, I’ve sounded off on the problems of Training & Development, or Learning & Development. Training and learning are means to an end. What we want are people performing optimally, and continually developing. It might even be Performance & Innovation (if you take the revolution seriously ;).

It’s clear language does determine the ways we think about things (is it a mishap or a catastrophe?). When we use language that characterizes activity in certain ways, we implicitly put constraints on it. This is true for every formulation, of course, but perhaps it behooves us to think consciously about the language we use. Do we know if L&D language is limiting us? Let’s make sure that we’re not prematurely handicapping ourselves by our framing.

On blogging

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A recent chain of events led to a realization, and then a recognition, and some cogitation. What am I talking about? Well, it comes down to some reflections on blogging. So here’re some thoughts.

It started when my ISP wanted to do his quinquennial (yeah, I had to look it up) OS upgrade on the servers. Ultimately, it led me to review my site, which included my blogroll. Quelle horreur, it was almost completely out of date! Some people I’ve lost touch with, most who aren’t blogging any more or even in our field! In updating it, however, I found that there are many fewer people who seemed to be blogging. Which is interesting, though there are stalwarts in my upgraded blogroll.

There are lots of places people are putting up their prose thoughts. You can sign up for newsletters (I get a few), and many posts appear on LinkedIn. There are also article sites like Learning Solutions magazine and eLearnMag, amongst others. I have avoided having a newsletter;  I don’t like the idea of collecting folks’ email addresses and using it as a communication tool. (Completely contrary to the advice I receive about marketing.) I also don’t want to post just on LinkedIn, though it’s an increasing way people interact. Instead, I will keep posting here, trying to maintain at least one post a week.

There are myriad reasons I want to continue to blog. First, it’s for me. With a commitment of one post a week, it causes me to search for things to think, and then write, about. Not that there’s a dearth (to the contrary!), but there are ups and downs, and it’s good to have a driver. Blogging has caused me to do more than skim, and actually synthesize things (it’s led me to have thoughts on just about everything!). It’s also a place to lob my other way of thinking, diagramming. The practice of writing, of course, is probably good for my books, with a caveat.

The blog allows me to be more personal, doing things like using too many italics, and use more idiosyncratic references and grammar. Of course, it’s not always perfectly reread, so sometimes I have to go edit it after it’s posted! Which isn’t good for books. It also keeps me terse (a problem I’ve had since high school, my AP English teacher was sure I wouldn’t pass the test for that reason, but it actually was a benefit). Maybe too… Which may be good for books; at least mine are mostly pretty short and to the point ;). It’s also allowed me to share interim ideas and get feedback.

So, I find blogging to be valuable. I’ll happily follow the folks that I can that way. (I use Feedblitz as an email aggregator as I prefer email rather than a dedicated reader.) Or happy to come across their posts wherever, and even some newsletters. I appreciate folks who share their thinking in many ways, though I don’t really listen to podcasts nor watch vids, as I can read faster, and I don’t have a commute. Besides, having watched people I care about get taken down the rabbit hole watching vids (my take: doesn’t give you time to pause and ponder), I think I’ll prefer prose.

So those are some thoughts on blogging. I welcome seeing your comments here, on LinkedIn, or any other way you care to share.