Jimmy Atkinson passed on this list of 77 Ways to Learn Faster, Deeper, & Better. Maybe he knows I’m keen on meta-learning, or learning to learn, and there are some nuggets in here. No one’s suggesting, I’m sure, that you should go for all of them, but you might want to graze the list and incorporate one or two into your existing approaches.

Being a better learner is one of the key differentiators, going forward (it’s part of my curriculum, which I discussed previously). I admit I haven’t scrutinized the list in fullness, though I might add “engage yourself”, that is, finding your own ways to make the content meaningful if the instructor hasn’t, such as creating examples where it would be important to you.

Still, having more guides to becoming a better learner is a ‘good thing’ (see also Marcia Connor’s Learn More Now). Learn on!

Sorry, it’s been a whirl of activity, this past week and more. Most of it, interestingly, circling around something I was working on several years ago, content models. The notion is being more granular in content specification, separating out, both in content development and in representation through tagging,the different components of learning:

This gives us flexibility in packaging them up in different ways to serve different needs.

I once defined the right size of a learning object as the smallest unit you’d give to one learner versus another (implying if you were serving as a wise and knowledgeable tutor). However, we’re not there yet with the ability to sufficiently tag domain/topic role down to the level of a table or a graphic across all domains, which is what you’d need to build a really intelligent but mass-market tutoring system, but we certainly can make approximations.

Yes, I do have complaints from authors who feel it’s constraining, but when we pay closer attention to the elements (and good principles along with, see the Seven Steps to Improved Instructional Design white paper, warning: PDF; soon to come out in a ‘readers digest condensed’ version via Lisa Neal’s eLearningMag) we get more flexibility and better learning outcomes. And it’s not that hard to shift, it’s some initial extra overhead, not a whole new writing process.

As you move from publishing monolithic works to delivering Wayne Hodgin’s “right stuff” (the right information, to the right person, at the right time, in the right place…etc), and increasingly want authors who don’t have instructional design expertise but important knowledge to develop learning, you’ll need this structure. I’m finally seeing some real market movements in these directions, and I look forward to more innovations.

I haven’t received Jay’s Informal Learning book yet (he’s promised it’s coming) but I’ve been thinking about informal learning a lot lately, not least because it’s emerged as an issue in some recent elearning strategy engagements.

One of the issues is the transition from novice to expert. I think Tony O’Driscoll’s model captures it elegantly, how the role of formal drops off and informal comes to play a bigger role as you transition from novice to expert. At the expert level, collaboration that is the knowledge negotiation process can be handled by email, blogs, and wiki. The problem is having the learner becoming part of the community from the beginning. I’d like to insist that it be baked into the LMS infrastructure, but I think instead that our elearning needs to be designed with communication and knowledge representation into it even for the most formal courses.

Which, of course, is hard to think of when you’re taking the typical siloed view of content and designing independent asynchronous courses. Which is why I’m arguing for a performance focus for organizations.

For example, the learning follow-on systems touted by Will Thalheimer, the example Jay Cross posted about where a new app emailed him several times over several days with further tips, and my own ‘layered learning’ model for slow learning.

Along the same lines, in a couple of recent engagements I’ve been suggesting that customer help needs to have a single entry point, with self-help resources and then an obvious and steady progression forward through getting assistance if the answer doesn’t already exist (ala my Learning At Large paper, PDF).

The points being that we need a broader focus, and our instructional design has to be augmented with information design and information architecture. It’s about supporting performance, not just about courses.

Just briefly, I finally created a page of some of the models I use in design. I’ve talked about the power of models before, but now I’ve finally taken the time to make them web-sized and put a few of them up. These are ones I’ve created, and

• they’re not all I use (I have more, and I bring in others as necessary)
• they get modified in use
• they’re not all I have

but it’s a representative set. At last!

Joining, once again, the Learning Circuit blog’s big question of the month, which this month is “Are ISD / ADDIE / HPT relevant in a world of rapid elearning, faster time-to-performance, and informal learning?”. A fun thing that they’ve started. My initial short answer was, of course, “yes”, but continued “but not the same ISD/ADDIE/HPT”.

However, as I started writing this I realized that keeping the labels ISD/ADDIE/HPT is probably not good in the long run, so that probably means my answer is “no”…

We need a design process. Without knowing what we’re trying to achieve, metrics that let us know how we’re doing, and ownership of the outcomes, among other things, you don’t have any idea what you’re doing. However, it’s not always going to fall into either a course or a job aid. There’re more solutions under the sun than are dreamt of in the philosophies that led to those old approaches.

You need a recognition, as Tony O’Driscoll has elegantly articulated, of the way support needs change as a learner moves from novice to expert. When do you provide community instead of content?

You need a recognition, as Jay Cross is suggesting, that many times self-directed learners may be better served with information resources than with courses.

You need a recognition, as Marc Rosenberg tells us, that knowledge management and other areas are part of our responsibility of meeting performance needs, not just skill needs.

And you need a recognition, as I’ve argued, that you can’t assume self-directed learners, so your learning design might include objectives of creating self-directed learners while addressing the obvious gap. And a recognition that, a barrier that may appear to be a knowledge/skill gap may really be an attitude gap, or some other hurdle.

In addition, our capabilities have changed, and we have new opportunities that we didn’t have before, such as layering little bits of knowledge around and on top of or the events in our life to use those as practice opportunities and not having to simulate them in an artificial course (an approach I’m calling layered learning, part of my ‘slow learning’ movement). This is a mobile affordance, but we also have some webservices affordances (e.g. Web 2.0) to do much more customized learning delivery, and more.
So we need a systematic process, but we need a broader perspective. We should keep our feet firmly planted in the ground of what’s known about how people learn, and recognize what makes an effective process. Sometimes the approach will look like the output of ISD, but other times it may be considerably different.

Whether we continue with the moniker’s of ISD/ADDIE/HPT, or use a term like ‘cognitive design’ or ‘learning design’ (what I call what I do) to overthrow the baggage and limitations of those approaches, is a different issue. I’ve been suggesting for a while that our labels are a barrier to our success, keeping us mired in limited approaches. As a bit of marketing (and when we’re selling our organizational value to the C-suite we need to market our benefits), training and instructional design don’t cut the mustard. Not that I’ve solved this; learning design is slightly better, cognitive design starts taking us far afield (and brings up some other bad images), performance system design might be misconstrued, etc. Yet somehow we have to broaden our perspective.

I have to admit I wasn’t as familiar with comes closest, and ISPI’s definition (courtesy of Harold Jarche) sounds like what I’m talking about, but then why isn’t it better known? And the label isn’t compelling, to address those issues we’ve talked about above.
So, process yes, old approaches no. When we have a course to develop, we might use ISD, but there’re lots of times we’ll want to consider other approaches.

Jay Cross’ InternetTime Blog pointed me to Mark Oehlert’s eClippings post about 6 word learning plans. I’m reminded of the 3 word design mantra I used way back when I was at Access Australia Cooperative Multimedia Centre: “Do, Review, Refine”. The first obvious extension is to iterate: “Do, Review, Refine, Repeat”.

I suppose you have to have a goal, and of course you shouldn’t just Do first, so “Goal, Plan, Do, Review, Refine, Repeat”. Not quite happy with it, as I think the four word version has better rhythm, but if I *must* have 6…

Last week I presented at the DocTrain conference on customizing information. This is a conference for technical communicators interested in documentation and training. On exhibit were a wide variety of content management systems and content development, QA, and other tools. My presentation followed JoAnn Hackos’ keynote about the importance of structure in content, and included a mention of DITA, the Darwin Information Typing Architecture which provides a way to describe the structure of content in meaningful ways that synergize with ontologies and topic maps as ways to describe what the content’s about.

JoAnn was gracious in person, and eloquent about the power of models for content. This was a great setup for my talk about how to exploit models of content, task, user, and context to create customized information delivery (Wayne Hodgins’ the Right Stuff: the right information to the right person in the right place at the right time in the right way on the right device…).

However, the message didn’t really seem to take hold (except for one gent who didn’t have a business card).

Now, I suppose this shouldn’t surprise me. I was on about games for a couple of years before I started getting traction, and the same pattern was seen with mobile several years before it took off (which is just now beginning to make headway). So maybe the idea is still ahead of it’s time?

Or maybe I didn’t seed the ground well enough at the beginning. I’m also willing to believe it may be partly my presentation, which can be a bit conceptual at times (I’m working on it, OK?). And it may not have been quite the right audience, perhaps more the communicators and the administrators instead of the managers.

So, I’m willing to let this one instance go, but not the whole idea. We can’t just trust to Jay Cross’ Informal Learning, much as that’s necessary (and Jay gets this, working with me as he has on meta-learning). We can’t just create an ecosystem of learning resources, though we need to do this too, but we also need to educate our folks about how to use the system, and we also need to optimize information flows for and to them. And we do this through models, with logic to glue them together.

Not sure where to carry this message forward, but it’s part of the push to stop the silo separation: documentation separate from training separate from support. It’s about performance, at the end of the day, and as long as we don’t have that overall perspective that integrates the elements, we’ll keep having redundant content development, proliferating portals, and confused and ineffective performers.

Tony Karrer & Dave Lee over at the excellent Learning Circuits Blog (where I got my start in blogging) have started a “Big Question of the Month” series which sounds like a lot of fun.

The first question is whether all learning professionals should be blogging. I think the answer is clearly no. However, all learning professionals should be systematically reflecting, and blogging is a great way to do it.

On the other hand, it’s not the only way, nor does the reflection need to be public. You could keep a journal, or make a wiki, or record podcasts. The thing is to go through the effort to be explicitly reflective.

We know that explicitly capturing our thoughts adds some rigor that we can miss when we just think. And that reviewing our thinking regularly is a valuable act in terms of learning and improving. I just don’t think everyone has to be public and in the written form. I often create graphics to capture my understanding (I’ve got to figure out how to easily add images to my blog!).

I look forward to further questions, and the dialog that goes along with it.