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Clark Quinn’s Learnings about Learning

Future Strategy

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Jay Cross has started talking about a rethink on what ‘management’ is about. He’s spot on that focusing on execution is not sufficient, and it’s got to be about “giving everyone a voice, experiment often, power comes from below, communities are self-defining, decisions are peer-based, and just about everything is decentralized”. I think it’s fair to say that ‘administering’ business (hence the MBA) isn’t the way forward.

He then goes on to talk about the implications for training departments. His take is that “ISD lacks the framework to invent non-learning solutions. Meta-learning and flexible infrastructure are becoming more important than individual topics.” I’m a fan of meta-learning, and what he then talks about is really filling what Jay calls the ‘learnscape’, with opportunities to learn, to collaborate, and more. It’s not the LMS (see Will Thalheimer’s recent piece), it’s a whole suite of resources, channels, and more.

On ITFORUM, George Siemens just concluded a discussion about his connectivist model of learning, and how the networks are in our head and external, and that learning will be building and exploiting those networks external to augment what we know to solve new problems. Our notion of ID will be much broader than course design if it’s to succeed; we have to be about supporting people through their own learning. I was thinking the ‘training’ department of today will need to be the ‘learning partner’ of tomorrow, helping others develop resources, mentoring discussions, finding new tools.

That’s what I’m trying to help organizations do: see the bigger picture, take responsibility for the full performance ecosystem, and move to a more enlightened approach to learning and, consequently, business. It’s not only doable, it’s really the only option, don’t you think?

Theory foundations for ISD?

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Cammy Bean is having an interesting dialog with John Curry on whether you need to know the underlying theories of ISD to do effective design. He’s revising his thinking on whether theory is useful, having initially come from that viewpoint. He says:

“Theoretical instructional design needs to mirror practical instructional design more. And when it does, and as our field shifts to more designers-by-assignment, then we‘ll be on to something important.”

Cammy’s view is:

“I’ve heard of some of these theories and theoreticians. I’ve even read about some of them. I actually have some books on my shelf that cover these topics. Admittedly, I may not have read all of the books. Do you think it matters?”

Well, here’s my response. I don’t think you need to know all the different theories, but you do need to know the deeper implications for design. If you don’t understand from Spiro’s Cognitive Flexibility Theory when and why multiple concept representations are useful, you might miss helping your learners to comprehend and apply the principle. If you haven’t seen the intersection of Schoenfeld’s work as captured in Cognitive Apprenticeship with Sweller’s Cognitive Load theory, your examples might miss essential components in linking the concept to the context.

I don’t think you need them all, as there’s considerable overlap, but you do need an exposure to at least a ‘reader’s digest’ approach (not to mischaracterize the work, but I like Michael Allen’s Guide to eLearning as such, at least specific to elearning; or my own PDF, though overly simplified).   Of course, you have to find a good approach that does integrate the nuances, and I’m not confident any one is really sufficient, and you do really need to know in some depth how the mind learns to make smart inferences in the ‘gaps’.   You don’t have to read Vygotsky in the original Russian, but what you can not do, and I see all too often, is follow a cookie-cutter approach which says “I have to have an introduction, concept, example, …”, and then write one of each without understanding what are the key principles behind each of those elements.

The benefit of the Master’s is the chance to get to know the theories (depending on the program and instructor). The pedagogy for the course should include applying the theories to pragmatic design, not just reciting back the contents (I used to use RFP’s asking for designs or redesigns using the theories). It’s not the only way, but being familiar enough with the underlying principles to be able to adapt the design to match the circumstances is important. What I believe doesn’t work are ad hoc approaches based upon ‘experience’ and feedback. Learners don’t necessarily know what’s best for them versus what really works, so you need more than level 1 feedback.

Note that Cammy is a ‘reflective practitioner’ to use Schön’s term, as she reads and reflects on what she does. That’s why she’s effectively done her own ‘masters’ in learning/ISD. So, I’m not comfortable with trusting experience over time to yield competent results, I think it takes someone being an ongoing learner. That’s easier in a well-designed program, though the caveat is that all programs are not necessarily well-designed.

And I realize that there are pragmatic constraints, but I trust someone who understands the roles of the elements to make a better judgment about how to achieve the goal on limited resources rather than someone who’s not understanding the deeper principles. If your learning matters, that is. But if it doesn’t, why bother?

Learning tools

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It’s been getting a wee bit crazy, and will be for at least the next two weeks (apologies in advance if my posts get sparse). Today I began the morning talking to our local elementary school teachers at their staff development day as a consequence of offering to assist in their technology efforts and a welcome reception by the principal. A really committed principal and great staff working in the context of a woeful funding situation and inadequate tech support…

My role was to provide some big picture guidance which then would spark their working sessions around technology. We started with the latest incarnation of the Shift Happens 2 video to set the stage. I then presented a bit of my strange and twisted background before going through some thoughts on curriculum, pedagogy, and technology (nothing new to regular readers of this blog).

Interestingly, I talked afterwards to one of their many bright lights (the designated technology coach), and when I said (as before) that they shouldn’t be teaching the apps, but talking about goals (represent your hypothesis) and giving the kids reference cards, she had an interesting response. She said she’d tried that, and some kids were left helpless. 4th graders!

This, I admit, boggled my mind. I know I’m an idealist and optimist (much of the time :), but this is a pretty good school. I don’t know if their parents aren’t using tech (which is the situation in some of our families), or that they’re not seeing tech sufficiently in earlier grades (which also happens to some extent). I suggested that the approach allows the teacher to work with those who are having trouble with the steps, and that even other students who did get it could help, but it felt a bit weak.

In retrospect, I think it argues even more strongly that the approach I suggest should be used, but much earlier! Perhaps the teaching can and should be how to use references to learn to things with technology tools, not just how to save a file, but instead, when your goal is to do x (e.g. save a file), how to look up x in the reference card and follow the steps.

Which mimics my overall response which is that in this age of increasing knowledge and knowledge change, we need to be modeling, and equipping our learners to, use resources to solve problems, not to learn specifics that will soon be out of date.

I confess I’m not steeped enough in this particular literature, so I’ll have to do some searching, but as I told them, I don’t have answers but I’m happy to work with them to figure the answers out. Which pretty much overextends out my philanthropy bandwidth, but some things are just too important! Fingers crossed.

Suggestions for optimizing the conference experience?

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Being on the program committee for TechKnowledge (in San Antonio at the end of the month; hope to see you there as it should be great!), I’ve ‘volunteered’ to lead the part of the conference orientation on tips for getting the most out of the conference (among other things).

I’ve already tapped into Tony Karrer’s tips about asking good questions, and Jim Javenkoski gave me some good advice about handling the physical side (e.g. stay hydrated). I’m also thinking about the mental side e.g. attitude (positive, social). However, rather than just put up the ideas I know about and find, I’d love to tap into the wisdom of the net. So, what would you recommend as good tips and strategies for conference attendees?

Representing openness

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I was asked about my thoughts on creative commons concepts:

“free resources that are available to users but that also come with the pretense that by sharing the material openly, users will be able to perhaps improve upon the original”

This is an interesting question, and it got me thinking about shared editing. Increasingly, it’s about representations. I use diagrams, but am trying to be more visual and include photos in my presentations, and of course I’ve been textual (life as an academic). Others are looking to video. Someone recently had a presentation at the Institute For The Future (which I missed, unfortunately) on how it’s media literacy that’s important, not just traditional textual literacy, and I have to fully agree.

So, increasingly it’s going to be about using web-based tools for creation and sharing. Rip/mix/burn! Wikis are important, but so are things like Google’s tools: open spreadsheets & documents, and diagrams (e.g. Gliffy. where BTW no one’s taken me up on collaborating, well that’s a learning too). Newer representations are possible, including 3D in Second Life, audiocasts, videocasts, photos, it’s all fair game via Flick’r, YouTube, etc.

However, I don’t believe in the teaching of particular applications. For instance, if you learned PowerPoint, the new version’s rearrangement could throw you for a loop unless you’ve used lots of apps and know your, so you can figure it out. But what if you’d learned it by rote (as at least one teacher at our elementary is doing)?

So, instead, I want to teach the principles of goal-oriented collaboration, the notion of finding important questions, gathering data, creating hypotheses, conducting experiments, writing up results, and sharing. With interim question, post thoughts, share, reflect, review, at every stage. Then, have them use different tools at different times with the same goals, so they abstract the principles and can carry them forward regardless of the latest tool du jour.

What are your thoughts?

Spores of Imagination

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A wise colleague of mine pointed me to this video of Will Wright talking about his new game Spore to the TED conference (I was invited once, years ago when I was in Australia, but it was a lot of money at the time, on an academic salary with the exchange rate then…). It’s a fascinating talk, covering the game design but also the philosophy behind it.

Will Wright, in case you don’t know, is the genius behind Sim City and The Sims, two famous games. He’s revered among game designers because his games are complete leaps to a new game space, and successful. He has a talent for taking something he finds interesting, building a model (a simulation is just a model, a scenario is when you put it in an initial state and ask the player to take it to a goal state, and a game is when you tune that experience until it’s engaging), and then making the experience of manipulating the model into a game. In particular, one of the hallmarks of his work is his ability to tune it in unique and non-obvious ways (e.g. monsters coming in to smash your cities) to create a compelling and yet thought-provoking experience.

Here he talks about the game design, but couples it to important issues. How games are toys that can help us learn. It’s the final statement that resonates, about using this new game as a tool to foster long-term thinking. Really, that’s what I’m on about, using games as tools to develop new ways to think. And here’s a master. Enjoy, and reflect.

When/where ID?

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The Learning Circuit’s Blog Big Question of the Month is Instructional Design: If, when, and how much. It may seem like an odd question, but here’s an elaboration: “For a given project, how do you determine if, when and how much an instructional designer and instructional design is needed?” And this is an important question.

Partly, it depends on your definition of ID. An enlightened version is a performance system view, which includes job aids, rapid elearning, eCommunity, etc. A more typical version is a templated approach to courses. If you’re talking about this latter, it should be used when you’re designing courses, and otherwise stay out of the way (and be replaced by an enlightened instructional design that incorporates deeper cognitive understanding and emotional awareness, e.g. my two white papers on Enhanced ID and eMotional eLearning; warning, PDFs).

However, if you’re talking about the more overarching version, then I say it comes in early, makes a determination what the goal and desired resource is, and then decides whether to do a course, create a resource, let a SME loose on it (with or without a template), or leave it to the community (and sometimes take back from the community to design something anew).

I think there’s a role for strategically outlining the solution and then making a decision about how best to do it, and there’s a role for some design smarts in architecting portals, guiding SMEs, supporting communities to critical mass, etc. There’s also a time to let go, but it should be an informed decision, not an abrogation of responsibility.

K-12 education and technology

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On Monday, my day started with a meeting with our local school principal. No, my kids weren’t in trouble, nor was I, but instead I’d been offering to assist in improving the use of technology in the classroom, and the new principal finally got the message. So, I’m helping out.

The funding situation is dire; everything but No Child Left Untested, and legal requirements for special education is pretty much optional and dependent on parent support. However, there are grants available, and there’s an opportunity in our local community, so I’ve been giving advice.

It’s hampered, of course, by the state standards. They’re at the level of ‘use MS Word to do X’. Which is just wrong. There’s nothing wrong with using Word, but the standard should be focusing on the goal: ‘communicate Y using a word processing program capable of X’ or somesuch. And it shouldn’t be an independent goal, but a layer on top of curriculum goals ‘Outline and then finalize an article about the local Indians using a word processing program such as MS Word’. Hey, I’m thinking it might be Google Docs or Pages!

It gets back to your curriculum goals, and I’ve already argued those should be about using tools to accomplish goals like communicate, collaborate, evaluate, etc. So, together we’re considering using the grant (which has to buy technology) to run workshops that help the teachers rewrite lesson plans to use technology as a tool (and we’ll buy some projectors so the output can be viewed).

Of course, the workshops will have to require the teachers to create files and presentations, since some of them aren’t tech-savvy. And others of the teachers believe teaching to use the tools, e.g training on PowerPoint, is the answer. However, research tells us that if we teach the tools as ends in themselves, they won’t be used as tools to accomplish goals. I suggested that we even not teach the tools, but just give the goals and have reference cards around. Sometimes I think we don’t give kids enough credit!

Of course this is all further hampered by a limited tech environment. Students can manipulate other’s files, and even misplace their own, instead of saving into a safe place. A major district level effort was to get the teachers to all put their name, phone number, and email address on their school web page.   I said that that information should be auto-populated from a data base. Of course, silly me, the district system isn’t that sophisticated.

Our kids are getting tech savvy, despite the school system, but it’s got great variation, naturally correlated with the tech savvy and financial resources of the parents, which suggests an ongoing digital divide. There’s a long road ahead of us to address the curriculum goal we really need to implement, and use the technology to support these goals. So, I’ll start on one little part, and see what can be done.

Virtual World Learning

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Yesterday I had the privilege of an in-world meeting with my colleague Claudia L’Amoreaux, who’s now a major part of Linden Lab‘s education efforts with Second Life. Second Life, if you’ve been in a cave the past few years, is the first major successful virtual world. It’s a massively multi-player online environment, but it’s not a role-playing game, as there are no quests or NPC (non-player characters). In 2nd Life, you can build things, earn ‘money’ (Linden dollars; which have a cash exchange value for US$), and of course socialize. Many companies have set up places or islands in 2nd Life, and are holding learning events or creating learning places.

It was very gracious of her to give me time in her busy schedule, and I’m grateful because she refined and extended my understanding. I’ve talked before about virtual world learning affordances, so I let me focus on the new understandings.

First, I have to say that she didn’t change my fundamental take on the affordances. It is very much about spatial opportunity, both in place and in 3D representations. These are not trivial at all, but instead may have unique appeal for special needs rather than being general purpose. When those are the need, however, the virtual world is very compelling.

A second issue is one that I undervalued, and that’s the ability to represent yourself how you’d like to be seen, in more ways than one. The overhead is somewhat high, but I think I didn’t really ‘get’ how important this can be, as Tony O’Driscoll has let us know. There was another facet of this, however, which I truly missed, and that’s the ability to create a place to meet (if you own land, or you can presumably choose a meeting place that represents the ‘atmosphere’ you want to convey).

What Claudia helped me see is that the ability to create a look and environment serves as a powerful channel to communicate much information. She teleported me to a location she’s created to hold meetings with people and it’s a beautiful, comfortable place, very relaxing. She showed me Pathfinder Linden‘s in-world place which is very different, full of cool toys.

She emphasized the informal learning potential in such spaces, which can be building things to share if you’re appropriately skilled, or taking people to places with appropriate things. In formal learning, it’s more about, as said above, spatial and immersive experience. She mentioned learners making a ‘film’ of a book about a child soldier, and it did occur to me that if you have internet access, you could create a set and have actors and record it with much less overhead than a live movie. So there are some barrier-reductions involved in this world too.

So, all in all, I have to say I’ve underestimated virtual worlds. By the same token, I still think they’ve been over-hyped. Claudia’s lasting message, however, is intriguing. She said that when the world wide web was established, no one truly imagined how it would grow. Claudia sees virtual worlds as a similarly new platform with as yet unexplored potential, where we’re still repeating old activities with the new technology. Which we know is historic precedent, and gives us reason to pause in judgment.. As she said, no one she knows who’s really gotten into it has subsequently ‘got out’.

At the DevLearn conference, Paul Saffo pointed out that our technology expectations are linear, but the capabilities grow in a non-linear manner. Consequently, we’re liable to find that such innovations underperform our expectations initially, and outperform as they reach critical mass. And I know that my old boss/mentor/colleague Joe Miller and the folks within Second Life are continually driving new innovations, so we can probably expect things to get simpler, more powerful, or both. So there’re unexplored opportunities. I’ll stick with my (modified) position now, but eagerly await new understandings.

2008 Predictions

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eLearn, the online elearning magazine, has released it’s list of various folks predictions for 2008 (including yours truly). It’s a pretty stellar cast (self excluded) and there’re some really interesting thoughts, ranging from the visionary to the quite specific, and cynical to optimistic. Tony Karrer’s left a link to the Learning Circuit’s blog where the Big Question for January was also predictions, and also included is a link to Stephen Downes’ evaluations of last years predictions. Which is a daunting thought to face in writing one’s own, but what the heck, you have to take some chances!

Of course, I played it safe, with some easy guesses :). What do you think will be happening this year?