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Clark Quinn’s Learnings about Learning

‘Good’ Theft

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On Gamasutra (the game developers site), there’s an article that uses the new release of Dungeons and Dragons to inspire thoughts about improving games. What I want to note is the following quote, which nicely captures what I try to tell attendees at my game design workshop:

Being inspired by concepts is not just a good idea. When your skill reaches a high enough level, it becomes a state of mind. Start by analyzing games in similar genres for good ideas. Dissect those ideas and learn from them. Then jump to similar games in different genres. Pen and paper role playing games and board games are a great next step.

A true epic-level master of concept-yoinking like Shigeru Miyamoto can take gameplay features from abstract activities like gardening. Pay attention to everything you see, from movies to conversations with friends to patterns in the ceiling tiles. Where do designers get the inspiration for new games? It’s all thievery.

I remember when Lewis & Reimann, in their online HCI text, said something to the effect of: ‘plagiarize, as far as your lawyers will let you’. The point being not to reinvent the wheel when there’re good examples out there already. You may be the da Vinci of game design, but it’s not the way to bet. Use tried and tested solutions from the world around you; you’ll have plenty of challenge integrating them into a coherent whole without having to reinvent genres.

What I tell my learners is that they have a new, onerous responsibility: they have to start taking in lots more quantity and variety of popular culture – read more novels, watch more movies, play more games, etc (ok, so I’m joking about the ‘onerous’ part :). The reason being, they need richer grounds to mine for ideas to improve their games. They need to consciously evaluate what’s working for them, or others (even if it doesn’t work for them).

When I looked at design a number of years ago, one of the models that came out was a process of modifying (mutating) existing designs or combining elements from more than one previous design. Design is good, streamlined design is better in most instances where pragmatism holds sway, like limited resources, scope, and or schedule (“fast, cheap, or good: pick any two”). So, be an integrator, a synthesist, a problem-solver. Hey, if Shigeru is doing it, you’ll be in good company!

Work Literacy

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Tony Karrer, one of our top bloggers/thinkers on elearning, pointed me to WorkLiteracy a few weeks ago, and I’m really excited about the idea, though have yet to have time to really dig in (was in Boston two weeks ago, NJ and LA last week, and several big projects right now; my apologies for the lack of posting). It’s about identifying and developing the skills of the knowledge worker, tapping into the social network.

Naturally I’m quite excited by all this, as it taps into two of my key memes: meta-learning (or learning to learn), and 21st Century Skills. It’s all about helping people learn to be more effective (meta-learning), and focusing on the skill-set for the future (21st Century Skills).

I’m thrilled to see this emerging here, as well as the movements I’m seeing in other places as the recognition grows that the skills of the past aren’t going to carry us into the coming years. We’re seeing it come from corporate groups thinking about the skill sets they need, futurists looking at trends, and now people at the coal face coping with their own roles and thinking about the longer term implications and broader concerns for society (a wise perspective, to be sure).

So, I fully intend to participate, but there’re already a good group of folks, and it’s too important not to get you started. Check it out!

Innovating by Conversation

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Innovation is an increasingly important element in organizational survival, I‘ll suggest. If we accept the increasing rate of change and growing speed of execution, innovation in products and services will be critical to maintain competitive advantage. Whether it‘s completing in ‘red ocean’ markets, or exploring ‘blue ocean‘ opportunities, the ability to continually generate new ideas will be a necessary component of organizational strategy.

So, what do we know about innovation? Naturally, I‘m curious (Quinnovation Logo:).

First, Tony Karrer, blogging at ASTD‘s ICE conference, cites Malcolm Gladwell outlining the principle (which I‘d heard before, but can‘t recall where) that there are two types of innovators: the one-shot wonder, and the steady innovator. The former has something big that they accomplish largely on their own (and tend to get known for), and then there‘s the more common, less heralded steady innovator who works with teams to bring ideas to fruition (I‘m immodestly hoping I‘ve demonstrated the latter). Also, as Sawyer tells us (as I blogged before), innovation is not generally individual, but builds upon others. Certainly, it‘s the way to bet. Now, how do we implement it?

Surowiecki‘s Wisdom of the Crowds, Tapscott‘s Wikinomics, and Libert & Spector‘s We Are Smarter Than Me, are telling us to tap into the wisdom of crowds, and with lots of examples of how creating conversations with folks can spark new insights. The old saying is that the room‘s smarter than the smartest person in the room, though with a caveat: if we manage the process right (e.g. it can‘t be that the loudest person gets to win).

As a start, it‘s time to get your own people working together in effective ways. You need to build eCommunity, getting your people talking to one another, helping one another, and making explicit what‘s currently tacit. This isn‘t as easy as it sounds. In talking with an organization that facilitated organizational innovation for others, most of their work was not teaching innovation per se, but making an innovation culture.

Starting internally is a first step, but also consider opening it up to customers, partners, and more.
The time to start experimenting is now. If your culture‘s not supportive, start finding ways to shift. It‘s only one component of an overall eLearning strategy, but one that may be the most important for the organization to get in place.

Virtual Worldly

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The Learning Circuits Blog Big Question of the Month for June is about Second Life. They elaborate the question:

In what situations, do you believe it makes sense to develop a learning experience that will be delivered within Second Life?

If you were to develop a training island in Second Life, what kind of environment and artifacts would you consider essential for teaching?

Just as there are considerable differences in blended learning and virtualclassroom training, what are some of the major differences (surprises) in training within virtual worlds?

I‘ve made my thoughts on virtual world affordances clear before: virtual worlds (of which Second Life is one) are 3D environments where one can interact with others through an avatar (it‘s not a profile, but an alternative representation of yourself that you can craft), and the key two components are the spatial representation, and the ability to invest a personalization in the avatar.

If you‘re not doing spatial, there are other vehicles for doing collaboration textually or visually. The social aspect with the 3D representation of one‘s self may have unique learning aspects as well, though the overhead (the time to learn, craft an avatar, the download, bandwidth requirements, etc) is significant for that capability. I think the jury is still out on the benefit of the purely social aspects of Second Life, and consequently I‘m still on the fence about the learning environment if your goals aren’t inherently spatial as well.

There are other aspects to Second Life, including the economy, but that‘s not necessarily yet germane to organizational learning goals. There is considerable potential for an individual learning opportunity in Second Life, but that‘s yet to be seen on a broad scale.

So, to me it comes back to spatial situation, but this is not a niche application. I‘ve argued that systems-thinking is part of the new skill set we need to have, and spatial modeling and using spatial representations gives us an extra representation dimension to comprehend and communicate.

A very special version of this is co-collaboration. Second Life lets you work together on creating things, and having disparate experts able to negotiate developing a 3D model to capture their understanding. What‘s more, you can make dynamic representations, with scripts, which really takes you into systems-thinking. The overhead is high, as modeling is difficult in Second Life, and scripting more so, but this is a truly awesome opportunity.

To answer the questions, I wouldn‘t use Second Life for all teaching, but specifically where we want people to understand inherently spatial relationships (e.g. the internals of devices, places, or spaces) or relationships we‘ve mapped into spatial ones. And when I want to let folks jointly create new understandings in a very rich way.

eLearning Strategy Presentation

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I gave my eLearning Strategy presentation to the eLearning Division of ASTD’s LA Chapter. Despite some technical hiccups (GoToWebinar doesn’t seem to have a chat feature, nor does it allow Mac users to be presenters, ahem), the presentation went off reasonably well. And now, it’s available online. It takes quite a while to load (guess it’s *huge*), but you can hear the whole hour+. I’d welcome your feedback!

Manga on the rise…

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I’ve long been a proponent of comics for learning, recognizing some great cognitive and emotional properties they possess, so I was thrilled when, in a sales presentation the potential client suggested using manga as a communication vehicle. It’s usually a hard sell, and here he was asking for it!

More is happening these days, thankfully. Tom King mentions a presentation on story and comics I’m sorry I missed, and talks about how Dan Pink’s new book on career guidance in the new generation is also in manga form.

I’d be thrilled if we can break down the corporate barriers to comics, graphic novels, etc (the potential client was in the K-12 education space). We need to overcome perceptions of lack of substance, but I suppose we also need to find out reliable and cost-effective ways to get them produced. Anyone?

Anxiety, ergonomics, and performance

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I’m a little under the weather today. Not sick, but I’ve had a procedure done (minor, really), and have been a naughty boy on my keyboard. They’ve combined to jump on me this week, and there are some interesting side effects.

First, a number of years ago I was teaching in a department of Computer Science (I taught interface design). Here were faculty members who used computers for their research, their teaching, everything. And, of course, started suffering the side effects of too much keyboard use. In teaching HCI/interface design I talked about ergonomics, and still was as guilty as the rest. Fortunately, the administration recognized the problem, and hired some guidance and was willing to invest in products to remedy the problems including chairs, keyboards, etc.

I rightly noted that just telling folks about how to do it ‘right’ and giving equipment wasn’t sufficient, and that they’d need support in making the change to new ways. Which didn’t happen, so I don’t know how well the lesson stuck for others, but I did put in place support for myself, specifically a piece of software that threw me off every 30 minutes for 5 minutes. It worked after I got rid of the unix terminal on my desk so I couldn’t switch to the other machine in those 5 minutes…

I’ve got a good chair now, and have adjusted the ergonomics to match recommended guidelines.

OSHA seating guidelinesWhat I didn’t do was use the mouse properly. I had a wrist rest that I used while mousing, not just in-between. I’ve got pain in my right wrist now. I thought I might’ve broken it snowboarding or skateboarding, but it was x-rayed and that wasn’t the issue. Referred to a physical therapist, it appears to just be overuse again (maybe a WoW side effect?). And a big deliverable.

I’ve moved the mouse to the left side for the time being (as I did before) to get some rest, and am working to get better habits going (tho’ I just noticed I was typing with my wrists on the wristrest for the keyboard!). I usually am jumping up for something, so I typically don’t spend too much time at the keyboard in one go, but there are times when I’ve got to be more careful.   I’ll get better and switch back (it’s tough at first, and while you get used to it, I’ll be happy to switch back).

Before I draw on the learnings from this, I’ll confess to one other issue. I just had a minor procedure done, that involved some cutting. It was a followup to a previous one. The first one wasn’t a problem, but for some reason this one had induced more anxiety than I expected. I was trying to type a message while waiting for the anesthetic to kick in (local), and my fingers were shaky! I’m fine, but the effects of anxiety were brought home to me in a big way.

So, what are the take-homes here? First, be careful out there! Watch out for your own computing, and keep yourself practicing safe keyboarding (as well as safe surfing). As the therapist said, she’s surprised by how many folks say they’re too busy, but don’t realize that they’re more effective overall if they take the necessary breaks.

Second, how important it is in behavior change to get support. If you don’t provide support, it’s too easy to backslide into bad habits. And by the time symptoms manifest, you’re already damaged.

Finally, don’t forget to make a safe learning environment. There’s an (upside-down) u-shaped curve for performance, where as anxiety/pressure increases, there’s improved performance to a point, but then it falls back down fairly quickly. That high point in relation to pressure shifts a lot depending on the learner. Be careful to ensure that any anxiety is reduced sufficiently to allow learning to be effective (and now so low as to similarly interfere with learning).

Here’s to safe and effective keyboarding and learning.

Better Learning Design

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A few recent blog posts have listed elements of better learning, and I’m pleased to see that the elements they talk about are ones I’ve previously touted in my white paper “The Seven Step Program” (PDF) for better elearning design. These are the same principles that I talk about in my conference presentations on designing for the way people really learn.

Karl Kapp talks about using stories in training after hearing Stephen Denning talk about stories in business. (I’ve read Stephen, but not heard him.) Karl reiterates some of my points about portraying the consequences of not having the knowledge as a way to motivate the learner, and talks about reconnecting the learner back into the world at the end, but there is some great value from taking the perspective of story rather than learning.

Clive Shepherd points to 10 facts about learning that include a number of my points as well and some other great ones. He talks about it being meaningful to the learner, about prior knowledge, about relevant practice, and stories as well. A recommended read!

Just for the sake of completeness, Donald Clark has a list of ten learning facts with very little overlap, but important stuff to know.   I think his link of semantic to text and episodic to visual is misguided, but otherwise there’re some good points, for example “learn by doing”.

Check it out!

Work at learning; learning at work

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I agreed to be part of the third edition (this coming Monday) of Dave Ferguson’s Work/Learning Blog Carnival, and I start from a contrarian perspective, because I think “learning can, and should, be hard fun“. That is, properly done, learning is a positive experience, where you’ve balanced the challenge, set up the initial meaningfulness, have the learner playing an interesting role, providing the appropriate support and feedback, etc. I suppose the point is that the ‘hard’ part of the fun is work, but it isn’t toil or tedium. So, the distinction between the two is suspect. However, my principles about engaged learning are typically when we design the experience for another, but the topic here is, to me, self-learning.

And I do believe passionately in self-learning; if I’m not learning, I may as well be dead. Play is learning, and I intend to keep playing.. :) So I blog, and talk to colleagues, and continually challenge myself with new tasks (like accepting this opportunity). But I do it mindfully, deliberately pacing the challenge, searching for personal meaningfulness, and finding the fun in it all. I take responsibility for making it hard fun. I think the most successful people are those who can find not a balance, but an integration between work and learning.

Let me take it to the next step, now, talking about organizational learning. In addition to the obvious implications of how we design learning experiences, I think the less obvious implication, but perhaps the more important one, is helping people to become not only toiling self-learners, but joyful self-learners.

To me, the increasing rate of change means that fixed competencies – the notion that an organization can anticipate, design, and deliver the needed learning – is going to go away. The true competitive advantage will not be in just hiring the needed skills, but in developing folks who can continue to self-learn. Too many are still tied into the “we can hire the talent”, but the folks who’ve done well in school have succeeded in a system that doesn’t match the way the world outside of school works. And there’ll be increasing competition for the folks who demonstrably can succeed in a dynamic environment. Trusting that you can acquire sufficient talent seems like a riskier bet than instilling that capability in the organization.

Imagine really unleashing your organization. Yes, it’s Senge’s Learning Organization, and more. We know what this entails, but I’m still searching for organizations who really want to execute against it.

(Serious) Games in 5 paragraphs

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Just as I did for mobile, here’re 5 paragraphs on games:

Serious Games (or, to be Politically Correctâ„¢, Immersive Learning Simulations) have hit the corporate learning mainstream, so you should be asking yourself: “why are people excited” Quite simply, because games (I‘m not PCâ„¢) are probably the most pragmatically effective learning practice you can get. Sure, mentored real performance is the ideal, but there are two potential hiccups: scaling individual mentors has proven to be unrealistically expensive, and mistakes in live practice often are expensive, dangerous, or both. Why do you think we have flight simulators?

For principled reasons, the best learning practice is contextualized, motivating, and challenging. Interestingly, so are the most engaging experiences. It turns out that the elements that cause effective educational practice line up perfectly with those that create engaging experiences. Thus, we can safely say that learning should be ‘hard fun‘.

Then the issue becomes if we can do this reliably, repeatably, and on a cost-effective basis. It turns out that the answer to this question is also in the affirmative. While you can‘t just shove gamers and educators in a room and expect the result to work (all the bad examples that led to ‘edutainment‘ becoming a bad word are evidence), if they understand the alignment above, systematically follow a creative process (no, systematic creativity is not an oxymoron; why do we have brainstorming processes?), and are willing to take time to ‘tune‘ the result, we can do this reliably.

The question is really: when to use games. The answer for engine-driven (read: programmed, variable) games is when we have a need for deep practice: when there are complex relationships to explore, or making the change will be really hard. Branching scenarios are useful when we want to experience some contextualized practice but we don‘t need a lot of it. And the principles suggest that at minimum, we should write better multiple-choice questions that put learners into contexts where they must make decisions where they‘re applying the knowledge, not just reciting it.

And, yes, we can spend millions of dollars (I can help :), but for many needs we may not need to. While there isn‘t any one tool that lets us do this, there are a number of cost-effective ways to develop and deliver on the resulting design. As I like to say “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”.

Further resources include:

  • My book on designing games
  • The eLearning Guild’s Research Report on ILS
  • The Serious Games site
  • Clark Aldrich’s blog on learning games
  • My other game blog posts