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Clark Quinn’s Learnings about Learning

Stealth learning (or not)

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One of the recurrent ‘dreams’ is of stealth learning, where one could play a game and learn something without even being aware of it. It resurfaced again on the Serious Games mailing list, and somehow my thoughts finally coalesced. Here’s what I had to say:

I’ve often wondered whether stealth educational games are possible, and I had an epiphany yesterday when thinking about this (and was reminded of by Noah’s post today). In short, I don’t think there can be stealth education, at least in a reliable way. Let me explain why by analogy to analogy(!):

In classic analogical reasoning (the topic of my PhD thesis), Gick & Holyoak (1980) gave learners one experience with a problem, and then they were asked to solve an analogously related problem. The base rate of solution was low (e.g. 30%), unless externally prompted (then 75%). (Base rate without prior problem 10%). With two problems the likelihood goes higher, but not as effectively as if there’s guidance to explicitly abstract (Gick & Holyoak 1983).

My inference here is that presenting relevant problems without explicit discussion of transfer is not as likely to lead to the learning outcome as if you explicitly make the relation between the learning experience and the ‘real world’. In other words, your ‘stealth learning’ *might* work, but not as likely nor effectively as if you ensure some abstraction and explicit transfer to other similar problems.

Could you do that in a game in a way that it’s thematically consistent? Perhaps, but then you’re treading a mighty thin line between being explicit and being stealth.

So, guess I’ve convinced myself that it’s not plausible. Possible, yes. With enough opportunities to practice, and some embedded diagrams, you might well develop the capability. But without it being explicit, you might miss some opportunities to apply it. I fear it just wouldn’t be as robust as making it explicit. Once you’re done with the game, you might not mind having it pointed out what a valuable skill you have obtained (maybe like leadership in World of Warcraft).

Reason as rule

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Harold Jarche has a post in which he points out that good education and civics are necessary but not sufficient, citing Al Gore. The necessary additional component is dialog around ideas. I have to agree, we can’t advance if we aren’t collaboratively creating our future in an open and informed way.

It reminded me of this quote from Al Gore (excerpted from his comments at Sierra‘s Climate Forum) that I’ve been meaning to blog, which mimics my feelings about current US politics (and, to some extent Australian, my other home):

With regard to our political system, it now devalues knowledge and facts. It didn’t used to. What was special about the America we were born into was that it still embodied the highest values of the Enlightenment We grew up in a world where truth mattered, and when new ideas came … the merit of those ideas was judged against the rule of reason. … The political system doesn’t act that way anymore. As in the feudal era, wealth and power regularly trump knowledge, facts, and reason.

We don’t value reason any more. We deride scholars as eggheads or wonks, and laud those who have acquired money or celebrity through questionable means or for no notable contribution at all. This does not bode well for governments based upon the collective will of the people.

I’m an optimist, and I think that technologies like the internet give us hope, but we can’t be distracted by rote testing when our nations needs critical thinking and reasoning. You can’t care about the world and not be passionate about education.

Civic Education (or lack thereof)

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I’m on the board for the Center for Civic Education, a role I got for my expertise in learning technology, but a group I’ve become proud to be affiliated with. Their programs have incredible benefits for the students as well as society, as has been demonstrated internationally, and I think an understanding of civics is a necessary part of a wise curriculum. Imagine my dismay to read that the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Civics Report Card shows that “the vast majority of our young people are either not taught civics and government at all, or they are taught too little, too late, and inadequately” to quote Chuck Quigley, Executive Director of the Center.

The site for the report of course cites the improvements, but looking at the scores, they’re at about 50%, at best, across the board. Lower in certain demographics, as you’d expect. The standards actually come from the Center, and I’ve seen the diligence with which they develop them, (they’re publically available, too) so I have some idea just what’s at stake. (And, of course, the Center has solutions for addressing the problem, so I’m well aware of their vested interest in drawing attention to the gap, but the problem remains.)

I’ve seen how civics education can increase participation in society, reduce violence, and increase mutual self-respect. I also care that people understand government so they can vote from an informed perspective (which seems to be something severely lacking). So the lack of civics education is a concern.

I’m not a fan of No Child Left Untested, er, Behind, for a host of reasons (and fortunately, far more knowledge people than me have made the point, including Jim Pellegrino in a commissioned paper on behalf of the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce). Moreover, our funding situation strangling school budgets and tying so much to rote skills is eliminating civics, science, and more.

I care about our society, and that’s why I’m in education as I think it’s the best way to ensure a positive future, so it continues to dismay me that we can’t seem to solve the problems in schools. When you have a chance to make a choice, do think about education and the future. Please?

Learning Mobile

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Ok, so I’m on the eLearning Guild‘s research team for mobile learning (a truly awesome group of people to be able to work with), and one of the team members asked: how do you get transfer from mobile learning? My reply was:

transfer … comes from a couple of sources: applying the same concept as skill in different contexts, and reflection even after a single context explicitly discussing abstraction and reapplication in other contexts.

So, a couple of ways (and agreeing with [the] notion of a blend, so these are in conjunction with other activities): you can stream out different examples in different contexts for viewing/reading/listening (vcast, PDF/page, podcast), you can make available little mini-scenarios in different contexts, you can bring in reflection after real-life practice, you could provide abstraction and reapplication questions after most any of the above…

This was just off the top of my head, but there’s a point here. You’ve heard me riff on models before, and to answer the question I stepped back and looked at the fundamental concept behind transfer (ok, a very abbreviated version), and then put that together with some of the models behind mobile, and was able to generate an answer on the fly.   That’s the power of models: they’re explanatory, they’re predictive, and they’re generative.

And, of course, thinking about mobile design is a habit I’m trying to inculcate in organizations and designers. There are great opportunities to deliver not only immediate (and, potentially, contextualized) performance support, but also to extend learning. Will Thalheimer has touted ‘learning follow-on’ systems, and it’s also consonant with my ‘slow learning‘ interest in developing people over time.

So, think models, think mobile, think opportunity!

(And stay tuned for the report. I was part of the Immersive Learning Simulations report, and it was not only fun but I think the outcome is really good, and I expect the same here.)

Slow(ly) Learning and Wisdom update

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While I haven’t been talking much about wisdom and slow-learning of late, they’ve not dropped off my radar. Jay Cross was kind enough to loan me his copy of In Praise of Slowness, a book that tours not only slow food, but also slow health, slow cities, slow work, even slow sex! It’s an inspiring read, with a strong argument for the benefits of slowing down for individuals, families, organizations, and society. These thoughts are slowly percolating into my life (sorry, couldn’t resist).

Similarly, there was a new comment on my old Learning Wisdom post, and I see that the thoughts continue to circulate among those who are looking a little further out. It looks like I’ll be speaking at the Danish Research Network‘s yearly conference in November (let me know if you’re interested in meeting with me while I’m there), and I’m going to use the themes of wisdom and magic to weave a story about the future possibilities for learning and technology.

So, while I’m not actively promoting them (my immediate focus is elearning strategy and mobile learning), I’m still advocating and investigating slow learning and wisdom as personal and organizational goals. We learn deepest when we learn slowly, we learn best when we take time to reflect, and we become the best we can be when we look towards being wise over time, not just smart in the moment.

The Dalai Lama

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I saw the Dalai Lama in person when he was the year’s Wallace Wurth Memorial Lecture speaker at the University of New South Wales when I was there. A truly inspirational leader, he exudes wisdom and preaches practical peace. Others have noted that he’s “interested in technology, and he occasionally makes remarks about the Internet and how its communication aspects hold great hope”. However, he doesn’t have time for a blog.

Now, one’s been created for him. This blog links to writeups from some select people, and points to others. If you’re a fan, it’s the place to go.

PowerPoint, evil or just a tool?

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This month’s Learning Circuit’s Big Question is: “PowerPoint – What is Appropriate, When and Why?“. Tony Karrer’s collected some nice articles about the underlying cognitive issues, and it jives with what I’ve seen. The big complaints are too much text on the screen, too many bullet points, and overloaded graphics. That’s not a surprise. This also clearly indicates to me it’s about bad use of PowerPoint, not the tool itself.

I took a two-day ‘presentation course’, after several years of university teaching and several corporate presentations, and recall the instructions that it’s about you, not the slides, and you shouldn’t have slides except when you’re showing a diagram. That’s similarly indicated by others. However, I think you need to look at the broader context of what sort of talk it is, who the audience is, and what the setting is. I mostly talk to practitioners at different levels. In my mind, a keynote is very different from a conference session from a board presentation from a customer presentation from a… PowerPoint will have different roles.

From this point on, I’m going to talk about useful information communication: stuff that helps you make decisions. This is not a keynote, nor even a customer presentation, but more like a conference or board presentation or a training session.
Speaking of which, conference organizers ask for your slides beforehand, and ask for handouts. As an attendee, I like having handouts to make notes on. And sometimes I even try to take a copy of slides for a presentation I can’t attend, when there’s another presentation at the same time I also want to attend and I haven’t yet mastered being in two places at once (though sometimes my clients insist that I must).

As a reality check, I went back and looked at my own PowerPoint presentations (conference presentations), and I’m not squeaky clean. I do have lots of graphics (I peg the ‘visual’ and ‘conceptual’ meters; see my Models page), but I also have bullet points. But that’s deliberate.

There’re several reasons. As indicated above, I like to have a place to take notes, and want to provide the same for my audience. Yes, they could have a pad of paper, but I like providing the slides with generous white space for them to take notes. I generally don’t put a lot of prose on those slides, but only telegraphic bits that keep me from forgetting an important point and that I elaborate on, not reciting against. Instead, a reminder both for me and the audience when they come back to the slides (I know that at least *some* do).

Also, I know that one way to keep people from being able to fully interpret what you’ve presented unless they attend is to not have all the prose on the slide. So the ‘key phrases’ approach is also a way to induce people to actually stick around and find out what they unpack to (without that extra presentation, it’s pretty hard to know what’s coming there, and again that’s deliberate). It also induces extra cognitive processing, to map what I say to the phrase, which is good for the right audience.

I also understand the realities of most presentation situations: that people’s attention can be distracted by someone coming in the room, by an email or text message, by a colleague’s wry comment, whatever. Having the structure of the handout and the slides helps them reconnect. Also, I do add extra references and tools to the end of the handout when appropriate to support taking action on the presentation. And, as part of the emotional as well as cognitive component, I like context-setting through images that elaborate prose, and quotes that pithily indicate some of the background thinking.

So, my answer to the question is that what’s appropriate are diagrams, quotes, images, and limited bullet point lists, in that order, for cognitive and emotional value. My presentations may not be perfect, but I strive to provide long-lasting value (not immediate appeal), just as in everything else I do.

Tagging video and platform neutrality

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I’m not much of a video person (though I do watch TV, professional obligation ;).
I seldom have the time when I’m online, and would rather have a ‘readers digest condensed ™’ version to read when I’m on the go. However, I do recognize that capturing a presentation can be appropriate for the right audience. Say, for example, when the audience is above the novice level, and when contextualization is important (this is a model that shows my beliefs about when/how to use media).Media Properties

Before the eLearning Guild conference, I was pinged by Veotag, a video tagging company. They were kind enough to buy me a beer when I stopped by and asked some questions (the things I’ll do for beer…). Basically, it’s a web service where you can upload and manually tag videos so that they can be hosted and you can index in to any particular place. I know Avaltus Learning does this as well, though I believe they do it for you, and charge accordingly.

I tried viewing a sample video, in this case of Guy Kawasaki interviewing Steve Wozniak, and it worked just fine, being able to jump around wasn’t a problem, and I could see that this could be a learning solution.

However, when I went to their site, I was dismayed to see that it requires Windows to do the tagging (not for viewing, I could see Woz just fine on my Mac with Firefox). In this day and age I find it hard to justify having a solution that depends on a particular platform. Yes, the corporate world is still largely tied to Microsoft, so this likely isn’t a deal breaker for most folks. But for me, while I think there’s definitely a role for capturing video and making it navigable, I don’t think this is a solution I’m rapt over.

Action game mixins

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Ernest Adams, one of my favorite writers about game design, has written a piece about mixing in action game elements into other formats. Along the way, he talks about accessibility, challenge, and design principles. Now, I’ve argued in different places for not throwing in gratuitous twitch elements, based upon some instinctive reactions, but he makes a cogent case why it’s wrong in a broader context.

In short, his argument is that throwing in twitch reactions rewards the twitch gamer, and precludes other players. And, when the game genre doesn’t naturally support it, it might preclude the audience you want. For learning games, this is more the case, when you want to keep the focus on important decisions. You can still have random events, keep score, etc, but don’t require motor skill coordination unless that’s essential to the ultimate performance.

Glad to have someone else say it, with the nuanced discrimination it needs. Recommended.

Imagineering

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Last week we went down to LA to visit my Mother for her birthday, and to take the kids to Disneyland for a day (after the other trips we’ve taken for family reasons, including my Dad‘s rememberance). It was a great trip for all reasons, but the Disney experience had a lesson for me.

We had almost no lines the whole day even for top rides like the Matterhorn, Pirates of the Caribbean, Indiana Jones, etc. We caught Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride early, but late in the day went back to Fantasyland to hit Pinocchio, Snow White, & Peter Pan (none of which I’d been on in more years than I care to admit). We went on the first two, since the line for Peter Pan was substantially longer.   Finally we bit the bullet and got in line for Pan, and then I understood why people were waiting for it. Peter Pan was a substantially better ride, for important reasons.

Now, each of these rides has a ‘license’ (in the game industry, companies with ‘properties’ such as Lord of the Rings will license them to companies to make accompanying games, and no one else can make a competing game) they have to align with. The trick, then, is to make the ride a compelling experience in and of itself, as well as use the story associated with the license. With games, sometimes the experience *is* the story, that is you play James Bond in GoldenEye, and other times it’s another story with the same character (e.g. Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis).

In a ride, the experience should be good on it’s own, whether or not you know the story. So, for example, our kids never got into the Pinocchio movie and consequently don’t know the story. Nor had they seen the Disney version of Peter Pan. Yet the Peter Pan ride was just very cool: you float out over the city in a sailing ship and into the stars, before coming down and flying around Neverland. While in Pinocchio, you basically just see the events in the story (with the one caveat of being eaten by the whale, which is scary). And Snow White didn’t even have a real ending, suddenly you’re just out!

Disney’s Imagineering has done amazing things, and those rides are old, but there’s a lesson here about getting the experience right, so that not only is the story referenced, but the rider actually has an interesting experience. That holds for learning game (er, Immersive Learning Simulation) design, too, where you don’t just want cognitive practice of important decisions, but you’d like the learner to be emotionally engaged. As I tell my workshop attendees, it’s not about designing content, it’s about creating an experience! So, think wholistically and create an environment that hooks you from the beginning, creates interesting emotional trajectories, and provides a feeling of closure at the end.