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Clark Quinn’s Learnings about Learning

How to solve problems, and learn to…

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I’m unduly proud of having now served on two eLearning Guild research reports – ILS (read: games) and mobile. I’ll argue that it’s due to my approach rather than genius (I know too many people that are way smarter than me), and of course from having great mentors. It’s believe it’s because I try to have a conceptual understanding of many models as tools to think and solve problems, both frameworks and approach. My PhD advisor’s focus (at the time) was on applied cognition, and that’s what I try to bring to bear. It necessarily includes an understanding of how our brains work, how to be systematic in examining problems and trialing solutions, organizations, and quite a bit of background in technology.

I’d started drafting this post and then read Jay Cross’ comments on lots of models, loosely joined, rather than one overarching approach. Exactly!

I want to suggest that these are great curriculum goals as well. Understanding the societal context, including economics and business, understanding technology systems, and how people think and interact, are critical components of an ability to meet the coming needs. Also having systematic processes of information gathering, design/problem-solving, and execution, driven again by a conceptual understanding of where and how they work (so you can adapt them to the situation) is a component.

Of course, your pedagogy has to have you working on complex problems and pulling models in to solve them, so you have practice and can meta-reflect as well. We’ve the knowledge, and the technology, now if only we had the political will. I’m afraid it won’t be done tinkering around the edges of No Child Left Behind, but throwing out the whole thing except the notion that we might want to assess learning, and starting again. I suspect the end result will be annotated portfolios, with profiles of performance, not ‘scores’. But I’ll leave that to the people who solve this particular problem.

Interfacing smart phones…

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You’ve heard me rant about the iPhone’s lack of cut/copy/paste. Well, someone’s come up with a brilliant video that shows how it could be done in the parameters of their existing interface, and does it as a spoof of their current tutorial. Brilliant. Which doesn’t cover some other gaps I’ve railed about. Others have noted gaps, too.

Which brings me to this eloquent lambasting of Palm’s lack of innovation around the Treo (the major iPhone competitor, IMHO). It does a great job of pointing out how the Treo (my current smartphone) hasn’t really been updated in any significant way in several years (which is an eon in tech circles). Lack of multi-tasking, weak browser, no wi-fi are just a few of very reasonable complaints.

It has been a bee in my bonnet that I can’t select text on the Treo with the jog-dial (four direction arrows and center button) and the keyboard (and of course it could, if you used the shift key like you do on a laptop). In fact, I’d go so far as to say that the Treo should be *completely* operable from the buttons, and never need the touchscreen (except as a backup option for speed in certain circumstances).

Which would be an interesting contrast: the total keyboard control of a Treo versus a total touchscreen experience of the iPhone. One for ‘the rest of us’, one for the powerusers, for instance. There’s lots of space in this market, I reckon…

Mobile report released…

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The eLearning Guild’s just released their Mobile Learning report (disclaimer: I’m one of the authors). They’re really cranking out an impressive suite of elearning research reports, and in addition to the articles by the chosen authors (a who’s who, present company excepted), which include case studies and resources, there’s the ability to access data collected from and regularly updated by the eLearning Guild’s membership (typically covering over a 1000 respondents with representation across industries, sectors, and nations).

You can download the abstract from the link at the bottom. The report and access is not free, but if you’re in the mobile learning business, or looking to take advantage of the powerful learning opportunity mobile learning provides, I do want to encourage you to see if it’s for you. And I get nothing based upon how well it sells, so I have no vested interest in encouraging this other than that I know Steve Wexler, their director of research, puts great effort into making sure that the reports are as good a piece of work as can be done. Check it out!

Improvisation…

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Because my wife and kids are at day camp all week, I’ve been pitching in on cooking, and it’s reminded me of one of my favorite ‘challenges’. I prefer dealing with whatever’s left over in the fridge (make a meal out of what’s sitting around) to actually going out and shopping. Even when I have to go shopping, I prefer to pick up some things I want to figure out how to make go together rather than knowing how they’ll go together. Not always, but, in general, I don’t like measurements, and I like taking more than one recipe and picking the best parts out of each (which, BTW, did not work for Hot and Sour Soup, and is why I do not bake).

Cooking is my creative outlet, aside from my passion/work/vocation/avocation, which is learning technology. Using principles of flavor combination (as a graduate student, someone turned me on to Elisabeth Rozin’s Flavor Principle cookbook), I feel pretty comfortable taking ingredients and turning them into various cuisines such as Mexican, Cajun, Thai, etc (ok, I have a predilection for spicy food).

There’s a learning principle here, however. It’s about having models, frameworks, that you can use to guide your solution seeking. I do it in cooking, and I do it in solving interesting learning technology problems (and I enjoy both). Having a suite of useful models makes it easier to deal with uncertain situations. Which is why, I think, that I love challenges where someone says “we have this really tough problem that we can’t solve”. I’ve had a recent spate of fun challenges where I’ve come in and been able to provide useful feedback by integrating models to provide tailored solutions. Following existing processes wouldn’t work, but by taking principled approaches and adapting them to pragmatic contexts, unique and successful solutions could be found.

This drives at least one of my beliefs about curriculum goals for the new era: systems-thinking. You need to be able to reason in terms of models. And experience with more models, and deliberately trying to map them across domains, can build the sort of flexible thinking that drives innovation. When I looked at design a number of years ago, what I found were models that talked about exploring outside the normal design solution space, and ones that talked about melding two different approaches together. You do that by having a quiver of approaches to hand, and being systematically creative. And that’s not an oxymoron.

So, do, please, think in terms of models, promote model-based thinking, and have fun with thinking outside of the box.

A quick modeling capability test

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In the type of learning games I talk about, to go beyond branching scenarios you need to build a model. That is, a branching scenario captures the underlying relationships and consequences implicitly in the branches, but to build the underlying simulation for an engine/rule-driven game, you’re going to have to capture the relationships and causality explicitly. It’s not difficult, but it’s a unique skill set that not everybody has. And you need it to be successful in creating a design that can be documented and produced.

So, people often ask what the ‘reality check’ is for the type of person who’s likely to be able to do this. My short answer used to be anyone who programs, though that’s a much more limited set than we’d like. It’s got to be someone who can map some statements about relationships into some unambiguous representation such as rules, formulas, or look-up tables. And it typically should not be the same person who’s being creative (hard to be both the creative diverging, and the modeler converging). I thought of a better answer, however.

I think a good indicator is whether you have ever captured your thinking in a formalism. A couple of frequent ways people do this is to create a working mail filter rule, create a new macro, or build a complex spreadsheet. It’s got the same notion of capturing a relationship that programming does.

So, I guess I’d claim that if you’ve been successful at that sort of task, you’re probably capable of doing the modeling. If not, e.g. you avoid the sort of tasks I’m talking about, you should find someone else to handle that on your design team, and take the creative role.

Design trumps production!

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The other day, the following comment appeared in the Serious Games discussion list:

This gets to an issue that I believe is important, what does it cost an average team to build a good game. I have seen RFPs that had ambitious, laudable goals, such as aids education. … But the budget was in the low six figures. If the game was built for that kind of money there is no way it could achieve the goals.

And it really made me mad! It’s driving me nuts that folks are saying that meaningful games have to cost in the high six or low seven figures, because you don’t need that much; you can get meaningful learning outcomes in games in the mid-high five and low six figures. How do I know? Because I’ve done it, and know I can do it reliably and repeatedly.

On principle, the point is that if you get the design right, you don’t need to spend lots on production. If you know what you’re doing (and you should), you focus in on the key decisions, work them into a setting, sweat the details, model the design, and produce it. Now, I admit that these aren’t Wii-quality games, rather they’re likely going to be Flash on the web, but that works. You don’t need 3D scrolling graphics and rendered worlds (in fact, they can get in the way).

So, before you write off creating real engaging games, make sure you’re not buying the pricetags some folks would have you believe. If you do have that type of budget, I can help there too ;), but seriously, unless you need an America’s Army or some other mass-market quality game, don’t think you’ve got to break the bank!

Visualizing the role of visuals

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As you’ve no doubt figured out, I’m big on visuals. Someone pointed me to this site, and I like how he talks about the role models can play. He’s made a business out of creating diagrams to capture understandings and share them. Similar work is done by Dave Gray’s XPLANE, and (more with imagery than with diagrams) Eileen Clegg’s Visual Insight.

The goal is to understand someone’s models, and make them explicit in a way that captures understanding and shares it to support conversation, modification, and closure. I make diagrams myself (as I’ve mentioned before) as a way to understand things, and use them to solve problems. The visual pattern-matching channel is very powerful.

I’ve argued that we don’t use conceptual models enough in elearning, and that we should be using them to communicate the concept, show their use in examples, and highlight their predictions in practice feedback. Their practical use in communication and problem-solving also shouldn’t be overlooked!

Content, context, and experience

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In my (next to) last post, I talked about print versus screen reading, and at the end made a comment about publishers. I want to extend that comment here, and to do so I need to go to Pine & Gilmore’s Experience Economy.

I’ve talked about it before, but the premise briefly is that we’ve moved from selling services to selling total customer experiences (the pre-sales, the sale, the product or service, the support). Hence the success of Apple, which creates amazing experiences, generating great customer loyalty and satisfaction. So how does this bear on publishers?

The hoary old cliche’ is that publishers need to realize that they’re not about books, they’re about content (the analogy being to the railroad companies who suffered when they didn’t realize they were in the transportation business). On the other hand, the current discussion in industry is that now context is king. The point is that content can be customized to the immediate need. What the experience economy tells us is that the differentiator will be the overall experience. So, is experience or context king?

I want to suggest that the answer is ‘yes’. Contextualized content creates a positive experience. However, I want to argue two facets to this. Publishers do need to move to where content is semantically tagged for when there are smart systems that can contextualize it. However, I want to suggest that they also need quality information design to create a good experience even when it’s unable to be customized.

That’s come into play with educational publishers. Pine & Gilmore have argued that the subsequent economy will be the ‘transformation economy’, with experiences that transform us. I want to suggest that quality learning design will be the differentiator, and it definitely means going beyond traditional instructional design and incorporating cognitive science research and emotional engagement. I immodestly suggest that Engaging Learning is part of the solution, but the point is much bigger. It’s about reorganizing content to focus on meaningful outcomes, and then aligning the experience to achieve those. While incorporating the semantic hooks as well.

So, I’m arguing that the content business needs to look to both quality in design, and elegance in implementation, to support either or both scenarios: customized and quality experiences.

mLearning = mPSS?

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There have been some great discussions swirling around the eLearning Guild’s mobile learning 360 research report team (along with the relative merits and flaws of the iPhone ;). The question came up as to whether the fact that mobile devices focus on communication means that they can’t really deliver learning. My response to this was:

Don’t think about formal learning when you think about mLearning. As David (Metcalf) points out in his mLearning book, think of a mobile device as a learning *adjunct*. It’s a broader view of learning, where we take our learning process and augment it with mobile components. And take a performance focus: what will make people perform better!

It’s NOT about delivering an entire motivating learning experience through a 2″ screen (it *can* be, but that’s not the point). Which typically only is needed when you have a full skill-set change needed. Practitioners and experts can get away with just the facts, ma’am.

SO, we might ‘communicate’ concepts, examples, even practice (though interactivity is still the big barrier in mobile, re: the standards issue Judy (Brown) rightly raised) as *part* of a learning experience.

Or ‘communicate’ job aids/information as performance support.

It’s useful, it can lead to learning, but we need a broader definition of learning when we talk about mobile learning.

And, as the discussion re: Treo/iPhone illustrates, as we asymptotically approach the full capability of a desktop, the cognitive capability asymptotically approaches a full learning experience.

What do you think?