Right after my opening keynote at the International Conference on ICT in Teaching and Learning in Hong Kong, David Jonassen presented via a canned video and a live video chat Q&A afterward. David’s presentation on his long term work on problem-solving dove-tailed nicely with mine, as I talked about how to design learning experiences around meaningful decisions, and he talked about different categories of those meaningful decisions. (On a personal note, I was thrilled to hear he was going to use my book in a class of his!)

He started with the claim that we need meaningful education, and that problem-solving was a core skill going forward, a theme I too support. He argued that we also needed to recognize that the types of problems we teach learners to solve in school bear little resemblance to the types of problems our learners face outside of schoo, and that we needed to change the types of problems we introduce learners to. An astute observation!

He made off-hand comments that I suspect not all the audience picked up: the importance of addressing new concepts and problems qualitatively before addressing them quantitatively (contrary to much done in schools), quoting (I *think* it was Gardner) that theories have no meaning until they’re applied, and that our learners were coming to us too spoon-fed with overly simplistic problems and consequently that it was hard to develop richer abilities to flexibly apply schemas (nor, I might add, with mindsets about persistence and willingness to fail).

He also talked about how while he supported problem-based learning,
I’ve taken to given challenging problems as group assignments in my classes when I teach, having them wrestle with some ambuigity as part of developing a decontextualized approach to applying the concepts to the outside world. The problems are simplified to unrealistically focus on particular aspects, but are otherwise framed as Requests For Proposals or grant opportunities that they might really face. They sometimes complain, but I do think at the end of the experience they’re better equipped to solve the problems we want graduates to be able to solve. It’s nice to be able to blame David!

Who’d have thought it’d be fun to spend two mornings studying the constitution? I’m in San Diego at one of the We The People: The Citizen & The Constitution teacher institutes (from the Center for Civic Education), looking for ways technology might support this activity, to either make it more efficient, more effective, or broaden the reach.
Susan Leeson, a former Oregon Supreme Court Justice and expert in political theory and public law has been riveting in bringing to life the context in which the US Constitution struggled to be born. Far from a miracle, it almost didn’t happen. Documenting the personal and political intrigues, she also communicates the philosophical tensions that led to the document that has governed this nation for more than 200 years.

It’s quite clear that you couldn’t replace her, and any experience would have to find different ways to develop the understanding. Personal passion, personal presence, and effective pedagogy trump anything else you can do. Note that it’s interactive, not a monologue, but her ability to bring it alive, make it a story, and connect it to the context and causes, is a powerful lesson for moving from our tendency to teach this as a set of facts (3 branches of government, checks and balances, etc). Much as I can imagine a compelling game that let you role play this would be a strong second, hearing her would be my first choice.

So I guess my real task is to figure out what to do if and when we can’t have her! Which is, of course, is probably as it should be.

You’ve heard me talk about the importance of innovation, creativity, and problem-solving, and recently I had a chance to explore it further.

On Sunday on my way to the airport, I had breakfast with Dr. Chris Stevens and David Burroughs of Creative Mastery at Lori’s Diner in San Francisco (a classic American diner) to talk about innovation. At the UK eLearning Mission last month, I had chatted with Charles Jennings of Reuters about trying to generate innovation, and he suggested I contact Chris.

As background, my PhD thesis focused on improving general (analogical) reasoning skills, while the whole lab was focused on user interface design. As a consequence, I started teaching interaction design at the University of New South Wales in 1991, and got interested in the design process itself, naturally wanting to transfer that to learning system design as well.

Looking at design naturally led me also to look at innovation and creativity, other general purpose skills. Given the increasing pressures on organizations for problem-solving and innovation, I’m increasingly thinking that has to be an explicit focus for curriculum. And can be. Naturally, my interest is also in how technology might facilitate this.

Creative Mastery provide interventions around organizational creativity. It’s clear that they were passionate about the need, knowledgeable about the solutions, and professional about the implementation.

Their business has been the ‘creative’ industries, but we agreed that this is going to have to go global across any industry that will need innovation to thrive or even just survive. There are component skills, but their position is that there’s more about the mental space needed. This is in consonance with Don Norman’s points about the effects of emotional design, a positive affects supports lateral and associative thinking. It also takes ongoing support to develop it as a culture, not just a one-off workshop.

There’s lots of cognitive science research that problem-solving support is domain-specific, but increasingly our knowledge workers are getting into new domains, and the value of more general approaches makes sense, and there are some more domain-general approaches (e.g. engineering’s Triz approach). I think making support available, whether formal courses, or informal resources, is an obvious first step, but I’m also thinking about ways in which we can ‘bake’ this into our IT infrastructure. An opportunity for innovation and creative problem-solving; I’d love to hear from you if this interests you.

In the previous post about reflection, I was reminded about a trick we used when we couldn’t auto-evaluate learner responses. The topic was Media Skills, and after some earlier simpler tasks like identifying a well-formed statement, ordering elements, and choosing an appropriate response, we needed to get the learners to respond on their own.

We continued this careful scaffolding (ala Cognitive Apprenticeship), where first they wrote into a text box, but then we needed more immediacy. We rigged up an automated phone system that you dialed in and navigated to questions that you would answer. First, you knew the questions that were coming (the website gave them to you before giving you the number to call), and then you wouldn’t. Not quite as rigorous as facing an interviewer, but plenty challenging regardless. There was a cover story about choosing the different news agency, print, radio, or TV, and a particular reporter, so that you had a reason to navigate the system to where you needed to go.

While I still think this was extraordinarily clever (it was a team effort, not just me :), the important thing was how to evaluate it. We couldn’t evaluate their written prose (at the time, and even now Latent Semantic Analysis would be overkill), let alone their verbal responses. What could we do? We gave them model answers, and asked them to compare their responses to our model ones.

I would (I frankly can’t recall, now, whether we did this) add in a set of heuristics about how to evaluate your responses: what to look for, to note whether you did or not. If you knew common mistakes, and you would, you could prompt for those, too.

The reason this is so important, beyond being pragmatic, is that asking learners to self-evaluate leads them another step along the way towards internalizing the concept and self-monitoring, becoming self-improving learners. So go for grander tasks, ask learners to self-evaluate (with support, which you might gradually remove), and really accelerate your learners towards self-sufficiency. Now, to go practice what I preach…

Someone pinged me, asking about learning culture, and in particular a Learning Culture Index. I don’t know of a Learning Culture Index, but this triggered a couple of interesting thoughts:

First, I was talking to my students at the face-to-face weekend get together about the benefits of diversity, and mentioned Hofstede’s dimensions of national character (Power Distance, Individualism, Masculinity, Uncertainty Avoidance, & Long-Term Orientation). This was part of an effort to get the students to work well in groups.

At a multi-cultural learning workshop I attended when I taught in Australia, they argued that you shouldn’t create different learning cultures but instead use the best culture and assist learners into it from whatever their initial learning culture is. So what is the best learning culture?

It seemed to me that an ideal would be low power-distance, a cooperative learning situation; low individualism, working collaboratively (though that must be tempered with ownership of one’s own responsibility for learning); low masculinity, not feminity but gender neutral; low uncertainty avoidance, being willing to wrestle with ambiguity and uncertainty since by definition the material is not known; and a long-term orientation.

I think you could characterize an organization’s learning culture, though I’m less certain it would differ from the organization’s culture as a whole.

I was also reminded of Samantha Chapnick’s thorough elearning Readiness Assessment. There was an instrument, but it seems to have withered away.

Somewhere between Hofstede & Chapnick I suspect there’s a valuable approach. Then you have to ask, what would you do with a learning culture index? Understanding it would be a first step and then determining useful directions, and assessing readiness to progress would be next, and then finally executing, leading to more nimbleness, greater innovation, and all the other benefits that can accrue.

I’m busy preparing to teach a course in the CSUMB’s Master of Instructional Science & Technology program. It’s online, mostly; a face-to-face weekend bookends the 12 weeks, to meet accreditation requirements (!?!?). And I’m finding that my Just In Time management style isn’t working in a situation where you need to have a site up before it all begins, a syllabus listing all the assignments, coordinated with your fellow instructors.

So, if I’ve been a wee bit quiet of late, this is part of the reason. Head down, beavering away…

On the other hand, it’s a great learning experience, as I have to try to practice what I preach about making it meaningful (without having the resources to do game development), and in particular to make it more social when I’m at heart a solo learner (Marcia Conner’s excellent Learn More Now book was a revelation in many ways but in particular her “learning-together style” assessment instrument helped me realize that learning with a few people at most is my learning style, and more makes me very uncomfortable).

This course is on learning theories, and I’ve read most, but will get deeper on Ausubel and Bandura through the text (Driscoll’s wordy but perfect coverage in Psychology Of Learning For Instruction). It’s more fun than when I designed a similar course for American Intercontinental University a few years ago, since I haven’t to follow their interesting but constrained template (and didn’t teach it).

Still, I think it’s important to give back to the community, and develop the next generation, and keep yourself challenged. And I guess it’s my learning style to take on new tasks.

Ok, back to work…

Jay Cross, jumping off from Michael Allen’s new book, has posted about design processes. It’s timely, as I’ve had my head down on designing a conference, on a design project with a client, and designing my subject to start next weekend.

Jay, not surpisingly, argues against the standard design process, by and large, arguing for learning ecosystems (a term I first heard from Shirley Alexander at UTS, one of those I venerate) instead:

Michael’s prescriptions are for creating programs. That’s his business.

On the other hand, I am focused on learning environments.

I agree with Jay in general (he’s mentor and friend), and I think the real detail is asking the question: “when do we need courses or programs”, “when do we need rich suites of resources”, etc.

I generally like Michael Allen’s approach, including what Jay cites as a new design approach of ‘successive approximation’, and his focus on how to design for elearning, not just repeating traditional instructional design. And when you need courses, their design does need a process, albeit one that is not a ‘waterfall’ model of separate and distinct stages but instead an iterative cycle.

I think learning environments need to be designed too, actually. I can think of a particular case where a large client had portals for their workers, but it turned out there were multiple ones, and different work groups had different cultures (or maybe ‘mythologies’ is a better word) about which to use and how.

The point is that we need to step away from designing ‘instruction’, and start looking at how to support ‘doing’, deciding when we need a full course, but also when we just need a job aid, or even an attitude change (which that previously mentioned design project really is about, for instance). I’ll be talking about that in next month’s eLearning Guild Online Forum on Advanced ID.