Last night I addressed the local chapter of ASTD on the topic of instructional design for how people really learn. It’s very much like the article I did for eLearnMag on improved ID, and the interesting thing is how valuable people felt it was.

Despite the warm and fuzzies for me, it’s actually kind of scary that it was that valuable. I’ve heard that people are executing ID by rote without really understanding it, and I know I’ve seen way too many examples of eLearning that didn’t really seem to get what the point of the learning elements are. Still, it’s a revelation.

I recall seeing some of the award winners from the various self-appointed bodies to anoint those who pony up the cash to compete, and thinking that behind the polish, there wasn’t solid learning design there. I’m going to get a chance to speak again about this (among other things) at the eLearning Guild’s always excellent conference, the Annual Gathering, but I realize that there’s a good reason why eLearning’s getting bad press. We deserve it!

It’s not rocket science, but there is science behind it, and we’ve got to stop following the cookie cutter that says we have to have: an introduction, concept, examples, practice, etc, without understanding why they’re there!

So, please, make sure you know why you’re doing it, and how it fits in a learning experience. To paraphrase Dorothy Parker, you can drag learners to learning, but you can’t make them think.

And moreover, when you think about our real goals for learning: retention over time until an appropriate opportunity, and transfer to all appropriate situations, we need to use what’s known about achieving these: cleverly, flexibly, efficiently. After all, respecting our learners has to be one of our goals, and being respectful of their time by making our learning maximally effective is one of the things we should feel duty-bound to do.

Ok, so the Learning Circuits Blog has their January Big Question out. I wonder where they get these? Are they solicited from questions real users have? That’d be cool. The reason I ask is this one seems like a no-brainer…

The question is: What are the trade offs between quality learning programs and rapid e-learning and how do you decide?

Actually, the short answer to the latter is which one will cost you less ;). If we think that by informing our learners of the reasoning and the change they’ll be able to make the change, we don’t need a full course. If we think that we’ll need to inform our learners of the change and then given them considerable practice to address reliable misconceptions in execution and hone their abilities before they won’t make mistakes that cost dollars and lives, we’ll need quality learning.

Which, of course, informs you of the tradeoffs. Quality learning costs more, but delivers reliable change. Rapid learning costs less, and works if you have compliant or expert learners who only need an information update to change their behaviors.

The point is that we need to be looking at a broader space of solutions than just elearning courses. If we move to a performance focus, we’ll see that there are times where just an update of how things have changed is sufficient, or we only need to change the references or job aids, and sometimes we have a need for a major change to skill set.

From my message to Training Magazine this morning:

Imagine my surprise when I received an automated phone call at 9:45 PM (Pacific Time!) from Training Magazine with some NASCAR person trumpeting something which I now realize was this new promotion. Imagine my anger as I smashed down the phone after being disturbed that late by a machine from an organization I thought was reputable.

I don’t know what sort of caffeine-fueled sleep-deprived marketing drone thought auto-phone calls about this at *any* time, let alone late at night, would be a good idea, but I would very much like to suggest the contrary.

Please put me on your ‘do not call’ list for all such ham-fisted marketing campaigns. I’m always happy to talk to the pleasant folks at VNU who coordinate my presentations at events like Training 2007, but having a machine interrupt my evening is an experience I’d like to never have happen again.

Need I say more?

No, it’s not the metaphor you’re thinking. I’m actually talking about going ice-skating with my family yesterday (we’re in California, it was an indoor rink). But I had way too much fun re-learning and extending my learning by a very overt practice of learning.

The last time I ice-skated must’ve been when I was no more than 12. I don’t want to tell you how long ago that was, but it’s decades. So I got out pretty wobbly. But I started thinking and experimenting very heavily.

I regularly scanned my proprioceptive (information from your body about it’s joints and angles) feedback (“do I my weight over the balls of my feet?”), watched how I was doing (“are my motions smooth?”), thinking through principles (“how should the angle of the blade affect where the skate moves?”), checking out other people (“are they using the edge of the blade or the teeth to push off?”), etc.

It may sound like hard work, but it was really “hard fun”, as my skating, over the course of an hour and a half, got better than I think it’d ever been. It was fun spending time with my family, helping them, and it was just a ball skating better and better. I wasn’t quite ready to skate backwards, but probably close, and I *know* that’s better than I had been.

Sure, it was accelerated by my previous experience (eons ago), but being conscious about learning let me accelerate my performance better than I had been able to as a kid when I couldn’t self coach, and didn’t have one. I’m pleased to say that my coaching helped my lad accelerate faster too, and I don’t know how to coach ice-skating!

The important point being, if we learn to learn (meta-learning), we can help ourselves perform better. I’ve been on the stump before about it, and I continue to think it’s the key to organizational competitiveness going forward. I think that baking meta-learning into the infrastructure: culture and IT, is doable, and will be the key to innovation.

I think the way to do it is to explicitly address learning as a domain topic, provide support around our regular tasks, and steadily develop it over time. Ironically, speed will depend on slow-learning!

I’m sure most of you actively learn, but explicitly look at how you learn, and consider other ways you might also improve. Also consider raising that awareness more broadly, and how we might do it. I guess we need to learn how to promote learning to learn!?!? Your ideas most welcome!

Over the past month or so I’ve had the privilege or so to be working with some of the luminaries of simulation and gaming (Clark Aldrich, Mark Oehlert, Jeff Johannigman) under the auspices of Steve Wexler (director of research for eLG) as they put together the first of a new series of research reports. It’s been fun and a great learning experience!

One of the things Steve has instituted is a live research gathering tool that allows the members to fill in their profiles and update them and it automatically generates industry research data. There are incentives to do so, and the result is a wealth of valuable information.

If you’re a member of the eLearning Guild, please do scurry off and fill out the survey now. They’re getting near critical mass of data, and your contributions will help.

If you’re not a member of the eLearning Guild and you care about elearning, you should be; they offer great conferences, services, and overall value for money. (Disclaimer: I regularly speak at their conferences, but it’s always a pleasure, and the audiences always seem pleased with the event.

As I understand it, there will be a fee for the report, but if you’re considering the use of simulations and games for learning (and you should be), it’s looking to be chock full of value.

When I was teaching interaction design, a number of years ago, I also explored design in general (as I am inclined to do when I get interested in something). I looked at engineering design, architectural design, graphic design, industrial design, etc. As always, I was looking for heuristics that would provide a short cut to good design. Also, as always, I came up with my own model, that included several elements. For some reason, one of them sprung to mind, and I thought it was worth revisiting. Probably mostly for my own benefit, but perhaps you’ll find some resonance too.

So many times when we sit down to design, we’re locked into previous solutions (in cognitive science, we call that ‘set effects’), and limited uses of tools (aka ‘functional fixedness’). As a way to break out of our preconceptions, I started suggesting to my students that they should, once having surveyed the requirements, do a ‘no limits’ design exercise before they look at previous solutions. The principle is to think what you’d do if you had magic (well, no mind-reading, I don’t want you having any idea what goes through my so-called mind) to solve the design problem.

And, as Arthur Clarke so famously said, “any truly advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. Really, the limits are our imaginations, not technology any more. (Ok, perhaps our resources are limits still as well.)

The point being, before we lock into the constraints we face, we blue-sky about what we’d do if we could. It’s a way to think laterally, and expand the potential space of our solutions. Many times, I find that thinking this way brings in some technology capabilities we hadn’t considered beforehand, and we actually can come very close to the ideal design instead of sticking to what’s been done before.

I’m working on a fun design project right now, where we’re conceptualizing content models (http://blog.learnlets.com/wp/?p=86), and I’m looking to both shake my partners and the clients out of their traditional industry thinking. I’ve asked my partners to use a technique like this in thinking through the navigation issues, and I’m eager to see the results.

I guess it’s one of the tools in the quiver of innovation, or, I should say, Quinnovation ;). Now you can add it to yours.

For reasons I don’t know, a recent thing running around the learning bloggers is the “5 things you probably don’t know about me” post. And, willing as most to talk about themselves…

1. My first elearning activity was around 1978-1979. I saw the connection between computers and learning when I got a job managing the data from the tutoring office on campus for extra money while attending college. Since there wasn’t a program on my campus, I could design my own major but had to find a supervisor. I found Jim Levin & Hugh Mehan starting a project using email (long before the internet, using ARPANET) to conduct classroom discussion, and they were kind enough to let me join them. It’s been my life ever since.

2. I (board) surf. Don’t get to it much these days, living an hour from the beach and the water’s bloody cold up here in NoCal, but I still go when I can. I was on the team in college and even coached it one year when our previous coach left, though I can’t say I did a great job (girls were a terrible distraction).

3. I like the wilderness. I did Outward Bound in high school, backpacked (aka bushwalked for my Aussie friends) in the desert in college, and the past few years have been hitting Yosemite with my friend/mentor/colleague Jim Schuyler. I’ve taken the family camping and hope to get the kids (boy 9, girl 7) backpacking too.

4. Despite the fact that I’m a ham, willing to speak (or act), I’m actually a bit of an introvert, at least until I get to know you. I also don’t handle large crowds well, being more a small group kind of person. I’m trying to get better, but if you see me at a social event standing quietly or looking awkward, I’m not being aloof but instead feeling shy. So come up and say hi!

5. I’m musically ‘challenged’. I never did learn to play an instrument, despite limited piano and flute lessons, and garage jamming (playing bass) a bit in college and grad school. I’ve a ‘tin ear’, with real trouble staying in key vocally and unable to tune an instrument even with a reference note. I love lyrics and singing, but don’t want to subject anyone else to my off-key warbling (as previous girlfriends and now wife are all too willing to point out). Fingers crossed that the kids have their music ability from the other side of the family.

I was talking last week with Tony Karrer, a sharp guy who runs TechEmpower, which does some very interesting things with technology beyond elearning such as linking competencies with interventions and tracked back to performance. Naturally, he’s also the author of the eLearningTech blog. Among the things we discussed was the problem in talking about what we do.

eLearning, a great phrase at the time, has some problems. It can easily be perceived to be focusing on the formal learning part, ignoring informal learning. And it doesn’t convey at the C-level that we consider the broader possibilities of how we can link technology to facilitate organizational innovation and knowledge worker effectiveness (and efficiency). Marc Rosenberg‘s captured part of it in the notion of Beyond eLearning, but that’s a perspective, not a categorical phrase.

However, I’ve yet to come across a better term. Performance Support, while a great concept, can get confused with other forms of organizational performance. Human Capital Improvement just doesn’t resonate, sounding more like Fredrick Taylor-style time and motion studies than knowledge worker empowerment. Even what I just said “Knowledge Worker Empowerment” sounds more like a social movement than a targeted design approach.

When I talk about moving up the eLearning Value Chain, the top end is far beyond eLearning (e.g. the Performance Ecosystem). Yet I don’t have a better phrase! Neither Tony nor I think our solutions are just an HR issue, but instead involve crossing silos to provide overarching solutions that are directly linked to operations and revenue.

It’s a marketing thing, but an important one I think. We’re already having trouble selling beyond the HR group, and I think the phrase eLearning still gets bucketed into that ‘cost center’ mentality. We need to be about effectiveness, not efficiencies. A phrase that’s forward looking, not loaded with baggage (as performance support, knowledge management, elearning, and most others are).

Any ideas? Can anyone think of anything besides holding a nationwide competition? Is it a topic for Learning Circuit’s big question? Help!

I’m pleased to say that my article on 7 Steps to Better eLearning is now out in eLearning Mag. Have a look and let me know what you think!

Once again, it’s the Learning Circuit’s BIG Question, which is really 3 questions:

1. What will you remember most about 2006?
2. What are the biggest challenges for you/us as head into 2007?
3. What are your predictions for 2007?

So, what will I remember most about 2006? Probably that it was the Year of the Game. Gaming became mainstream (we moved it out of the ’emerging’ track at TechKnowledge, for example). Whether called Serious Games, Simulations, Scenarios, or whatever, it’s definitely crossed the chasm. That’s not to say it’s ubiquitous, or even well done yet, but it’s definitely playing a role in many more organizations, and it’s on more people’s radar.

It’s also been a year of more strategic use of eLearning. The progression on my models page is one way I’ve been thinking about it (feedback welcome), but increasingly I’m seeing folks interested in road maps to address organizational performance by leveraging their IT investment in more intelligent ways, not just purchasing an LMS and acquiring content to meet training needs.

The biggest challenges will be executing successfully to take eLearning to the “next level”, whether it’s tactics like improving the instructional design or adding eCommunity to strategies about changing the customer role. It’s too easy to take half-baked approaches: have one workshop run, or engage one improvement initiative without applying the organizational change implementation thoughts that accompany these initiatives.

It’s also important to focus on the goals, not the tools. Getting the design right is the hard part, not figuring out what technology implementation can render the design.

My predictions for 2007 are first that mobile learning will cross the chasm like Games have. It’s on the cusp, and I’m hearing lots of different buzz going around. The capabilities are pretty mature now, and the integration is now possible, so that we have a whole new set of affordances or capabilities that provide some real performance opportunities.

I also think that the hype will go off podcasts and blog and wikis as phenomena, and they’ll take their rightful place as power tools in our suite of resources. This is not to diminish them in the least, they’re valuable tools at the higher level for collaboration and communication, but we’ll start looking at the larger picture, about why we need collaboration and communication and start developing systemic approaches, not experimenting with them as one-offs.

We’ll see greater awareness of the necessity of what I call performance ecosystems and Jay Cross has termed ‘Learnscapes’ (a nice term, I may have to adopt it). We’ll start seeing a recognition that individuals need a unified and richly populated playground with all sorts of resources and ways to extend our understanding and our capabilities.

And I fervently hope we’ll begin to recognize that we can’t assume that if we build it, they will learn, but we have to develop a learning culture, that we need to develop our learners’ ability to learn, that we have to recognize, take responsibility for, and foster meta-learning (learning to learn).

While this is not my last message of the year I hope, this is a great opportunity to thank everyone for a very interesting year, and send my best wishes that the coming year be the best yet for all of us.