It’s been too long since I’ve posted, but among other things I’d been preparing for the UK eLearning Mission that happened yesterday. A team of selected eLearning experts are over here on a government sponsored visit to suss out what’s new and exciting. I had the honor of co-chairing the session with Dr. Jim Terkeurst from the University of Abertay, so I used my time to lob a couple of frameworks (will blog them soon) into the air to set the stage.

The reps from the UK, and an assorted lot of US folks, (about 20 folks all up) each presented a bit on their organization and a ‘controversial statement’, in groups of six, interspersed with panel discussions about 4 specific topics (new learning, new technologies, economics, and effective elearning) chaired by inspiring folks like Michael Carter, Gordon Bull, Nile Hatch, and Joe Miller. Top reps of unknown companies like the BBC, Cisco, Microsoft, Reuters, and IBM mixed it up with smaller organizations doing cool stuff such as DDL, 3MRT, BrightWave, and Red7. This was definitely heady company!

I expect to post more reflections, but here are the threads that recurred and emerged (colored by my own filters):

• Move to more motivation and engagement, seen as a strong shift to games (yes!)
• A shift from learning as event to learning as process
• Also shown as a shift to a broader view of elearning (performance support/workflow)
• A shift to ‘context-aware’ learning (knowing who/where/what to uniquely support)
• The importance of reflection, and learning to learn
• The collaborative/connective nature of learning

I have to say it was a delightful chance for me to step away from the ‘head down’ mode I’ve been in since I returned from overseas and hear some challenging discussion. It was also reassuring to hear folks talking about the same directions I’ve been feeling are ways we need to go.

There will be a summary report, but i’m not sure how far it will be available. However, a couple of pointers worthy of note include Stephen Heppel’s NotSchool program that’s trying to re-engage disaffected youth (I met Stephen in Perth, very clever guy), and several of the things that are happening in SecondLife.

All hosted by SRI and with a reception sponsored by Oracle afterwards, it left a feeling that elearning is definitely an area with enormous potential and excitement, and of course some very challenging issues. Many thanks as well to the UK government for arranging this whole visit.

On short notice, I drove down to Mountain View to meet with someone attending the Internet Identify Workshop. Kellee is coordinating the 1Society project for Marcia Conner. It’s an interesting concept, where you have a profile on the net and there’s an architecture where you can register with different activities that will take into account your profile and provide customized information and opportunities. Much like Microsoft’s Passport, but open source, trustworthy, and socially conscious.

I remember a number of years ago telling a couple of my net-savvy colleagues at the University of New South Wales that we’d eventually need persistent identities, and they scoffed. (For once) I was right!

Using XRI and XDI, two protocols that support building public interchanges (read more at XDI.org), they’re working under the outstanding umbrella of Planetwork. They’re just getting started, but providing an easy way for people to tap into personalized services and work together to accomplish meaningful goals is something I think is not only very cool, but very desirable. To stay up to date with this project, I recommend signing up for their newsletter.

It’s been too long since I’ve blogged, and I guess I just have to realize that travel and intensive work (and the consequent ‘catching up’) takes more time and energy than I’ve been willing to admit. However, in addition to the great eLearning Guild conference (plan on their upcoming DevLearn/ID conference in fall here in the SF Bay Area), I had an amazing trip to Taiwan.

There for a two-day workshop on learning game design (stretching it into two days let me talk slowly and work in some more material), a one-day on mobile learning design, and a day of consulting for a couple of companies, I didn’t get much chance to look around, but I did a chance to appreciate some of the wonderful elements of the country.

First, the people were delightful. Full of energy, far less formal than I had supposed, they were thoughtful considerate hosts, and very interested in how technology could better support learning. They eat often, and provide plenty of food, much more of it is fruit and vegetables than we typically have. There’s great fruit, owing to the rain (continual during my trip); the afternoon snack the three days of the workshops was always a big container full of fresh fruit. Their dishes are not what you’ll typically see at a Chinese restaurant, though you can order them. I was served kung pao chicken and hot and sour soup one night, in addition to more unusual things: shrimp in a lettuce leaf, tofu noodles with greens, and a broth-filled dim sum are just some of the things I had. Many were very good, a few were too strange for me. I have to say that I’m right off fish for breakfast…

The folks were very gracious, escorting me around, providing the great food experiences, and talking with enthusiasm about possibilities and showing their work for feedback, as well as answering gracefully my many questions about the culture and the country. They’re also quite entrepeneurial, and we we had several discussions about business ideas around games and mobile. All in all, a great time and I hope to return there again.

Well, I do, because I’m now getting an order of magnitude or two more spam than real comments. So, with great regrets, I’m going to have to require registration to post comments. I hadn’t reckoned with how fast these scum (don’t you just want to have a chance to ask them “what makes you think you have the right to interrupt my life like this”, before you start causing them extreme pain?) can swamp a site. Who buys from these people? Sigh…

* Actual line from a citizen interviewed in a commercial for Spam. I at least liked that they were willing to recognize the average person’s reaction.

Plane travel is an interesting opportunity to chat with folks solving real problems. Last fall, while awaiting my flight I had the pleasure of chatting with a gent who was working out of Asia and was concerned that his folks didn‘t have a cultural bent towards continuous innovation. He figured that they didn‘t want to put themselves out of a job, when in fact they were growing so fast that he was more concerned with getting enough folks.

Still, that systematic self-reflection and continual search for improvement isn‘t necessarily natural. On a recent gig a client was spending serious effort to get more systematic about process, to the level of every individual reviewing their own work product, and recognized the pragmatic difficulties despite obvious benefits.
I‘m on a plane to Taiwan (via Japan) as I write this, and my seatmate was talking about how their company (renown for quality), worked towards creativity in their work processes. Again, a quick question revealed opportunities for improvement.

As Dan Pink (author of A Whole New Mind) talked about in his keynote for the eLearning Guild conference, creativity is going to be a core skill going forward. Dan‘s message was that the global pressures were going to mean that the competitive edge will shift from execution to elegance, and that we‘d need to tap into and integrate our right brain as well as our left. As a consequence, by the way, that‘s part of the components of my thoughts on a new curriculum, for the same reasons.

One of the things I‘ve looked at is design and creativity, and quite a bit is known about it. There are ways we can foster innovation explicitly. Yet we don‘t typically talk about it nor make it part of our curriculum (what part of No Child Left Untested addresses creativity?). We can and should make it part of our culture, our values, and our education system, both organizationally and societally (as well as personally). While you can make a separate course, it‘s better off layered atop our ongoing process, but it needs to not just be presented, but made part of our process.

Mobile was getting hot at the latest eLearning Guild conference (delightful as always). A number of the usual suspects were there; in addition to my session David Metcalf (University of Central Florida) and Judy Brown (University of Wisconsin) had sessions on mobile. Most interesting to me was the final panel where David Holcombe of the eLearning Guild had aggregated preliminary results of their mobile learning survey (the most recent of their ongoing research program), and had David, Judy, Ellen Wagner (Adobe) and myself reflect on the results.

It was interesting to hear how we reacted to the results for each question in the survey. The commonalities were that people have to stop thinking about mobile as eLearning Lite ™, and take a broader perspective.

The take homes included:

• your ‘charges‘, the folks you look out for, already have mobile devices, and while they may be heterogeneous there are already broad solutions possible
• not to focus on courses but think broader about what you could do for performance with dribbling information at the right time and/or place
• to not miss the ‘low-hanging fruit‘ of ensuring that the web information you already have up will work on mobile devices
• not to treat this as a pilot project, but consider the ROI of what you‘re doing (not specific to mlearning, but worth reiterating)

What wasn‘t stated really explicitly, but which was an underlying theme, is that you have to start looking at your infrastructure in a broader way; not just your LMS, but your CMS, your portals, the network, etc. Which is part and parcel of realizing you‘re not just about training, you must be about improving performance. Which is part and parcel of moving training from a cost-center in HR to a contributing component of organizational success.

Sorry for the slowdown, but I’ve been travelling, workshopping, presenting, etc at one of the as-always excellent eLearning Guild conferences. It’s given me great opporunitities for learnings, which will dribble out in spare moments in my upcoming schedule (I’m back for one day then on a plane to Taiwan).

One of the comments I found myself saying to folks here at the conference is “more and more, I’m coming to believe that much of our learning goals aren’t about knowledge or skills, but about attitude change”. People actually have a lot of knowledge they can draw upon in the world, but they have to believe it’s important to act in that way. Their lack of performance in a particular way is not an inability, but an unwillingness.

Because I’ve been interested in looking at all the ways in which people understand the world I’ve looked at things as far afield as machine learning and ritual, and also what’s known about attitude change. AECT’s research handbook entry is my best guide, and it’s become clear that attitude change is not easy (as if we didn’t know that…:).

So how do we do it? I’m inclined to think that a suite of effective steps goes like this:

• First, we have to make people aware of their own beliefs. Many times we aren’t even aware of our own attitudes towards things. So we need to create an activity that ‘unpacks’ these attitudes.

• Then we have to present alternative attitudes. These need to be plausible alternatives, and I suspect we need more than just one other (but I’m willing to be wrong about this).

• We have to support learners comparing the tradeoffs embodied in the different attitudes. They need to be free to explore what the different attitudes or beliefs will provide, both upside and down.

• We have to support learners in choosing an attitude. They need to commit to the suite of attitudes that characterize what they want to believe.

• And then, assuming that they’ve chosen a new approach, we need to support their realignment of behavior. Recognize that even a change in belief may not realize a sustained change in behavior if there’s no support around that process (it’s hard to break habits).
  

So, for illicit use of software copying, this might look like:

Making them acknowledge their own behavior, in this case using illegal software. Then we might talk about different attitudes that could be tolerated: nonchalance, the ‘rationalizing’ approach, an honest approach, and their tradeoffs: potential risk of prosecution, ripping off or supporting endeavor, etc. Then allow the learner to choose, and support them through a change (assuming they choose to move to an honest approach), for instance by giving them some situations where they might be tempted to backslide and give them chances to practice ways to deal with it in ethical but non-confrontational methods.

It may not have to be this exhaustive, but the underpinning structure probably includes this.

I’d welcome feedback on the claim that it’s more prevalent or the approach.

In Engaged and Engaging Science: A Component of a Good Liberal Education, Judith A. Ramaley & Rosemary R. Haggett (Association of American Colleges and Universities Winter 2005 peerReview) claim:

Increasingly, capacities such as cognitive flexibility, creativity, knowledge transfers, and adaptability are becoming the new basic skills of an educated generation.

They’re arguing that science is part of this, and that it needs to be taught in meaningful and engaging ways. I can’t agree more that our curriculum needs to stop focusing on rote knowledge, and start addressing on learning to learn. And, of course, I can’t agree more that making it engaging is the way to get learners meaningfully involved.

Later on, they talk about “the convergence of the disciplines…; the growth of multidisciplinary interest in the science of learning and the
availability of deeper understandings of how people learn; the capacity to model dynamic systems.” Again, absolutely!

I note that Jay Cross says, in his aInformal learning blog, “Senge was right on the mark when he trumpeted the need for systems thinking in The Fifth Discipline.” He heard me mention systems thinking back at the eMerging eLearning Conference in Abu Dhabi in November that he got me invited to. I can’t say I contributed (he cites Verna Allee, who I agree has got a lot going on in her value network stuff), but I’m glad to hear more voices talking about the necessity of systematic model-based reasoning as a core skill to cope with the increasing need for the capability to deal with novel problems, and continuous innovation.

David Rejeski, from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, claims in this commentary that we need a Corporation for Public Gaming, akin to the current Corporation for Public Broadcasting. He makes his case by analogy with television, where early on there was the ‘vast wasteland’.

I think it’s a great idea, as there’s a huge opportunity to create a library of interesting games that address the curriculum we ought to have, with meta-learning, systems-thinking etc, and no business model to wrap around it. I’m open to other suggestions, but this would be one way to go about it. One of those “wish I’d thought of it” ideas.

Speaking of which, one of my proposals is, as our next ‘put a man on the moon’-style major initiative/goal, to put an entire (enlightened, not No Child Left Untested) K12 curricula up online, but I digress.

CPG, I’m for it!