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Reconciling Cognitions and Contexts

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In my past two posts, I first looked at cognitions (situated, distributed, social) by contexts (think, work, and learn), and then the reverse. And, having filled out the matrixes anew, they weren’t quite the same. And that, I think, is the benefit of the exercise, a chance to think anew. So what emerged? Here’s the result of reconciling cognitions and contexts.

Situated/Distributed/Social by Think/Work/LearnSo, taking each cell back in the original pass of cognitions by contexts, what results? I took the Think row to, indeed, be Harold Jarche’s Seek > Sense > Share model (ok, my interpretation). We have in Situated, the feeds you’ve set up to see, and then the particular searches you need in the current context. Then, of course, you experiment and represent as ways to externalize thinking for Distributed. Finally, you share Socially.

For Work, not practices but principles (and the associated practices therefrom) as well as facilitation to support Situated Work. Performance support is, indeed, the Distributed support for Work. And Socially, you need to collaborate on specific tasks and cooperate in general.

Finally, for Learning, for a Situated world you need (spread) contextualized practice to support appropriate abstraction of the principles. You want models and examples to support performance in the practice, as Distributed resources. And, finally, for Social Learning, you need to communicate (e.g. discussions) and collaborate (group projects).

What’s changed is that I added search and feeds, and moved experiment, in the Think row. I went to principles from practices to support performance in ambiguity, left performance support untouched, and stayed with collaborations and cooperation instead of just shared representations (they’re part of collaborate). And, finally, I made practice about contexts, went from blended learning to support materials for learning, and interpreted social assignments as communicating and collaborating.

The question is, what does this mean? Does it give us any traction? I’m thinking it does, as it shifts the focus in what we’re doing to support folks. So I think it was interesting and valuable (to my thinking, at least ;) to consider reconciling cognitions and contexts.

Contexts By Cognitions

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So, in my last post, I talked about exploring the links between cognitions on the one hand (situated, distributed, social), and contexts (aligning with how we think, work, & learn).  I did it one way, but then I thought to do it another, to instead consider Contexts by Cognitions, to see if I came to the same elements. And they weren’t quite identical!  So I thought I should share that thinking, and then come to a reconciliation. Thinking out loud, as it were.

Considering thinking, working, and learning by situated, distributed, and social.So in this one, I swapped the headings, emptied the matrix, and took a second stab at filling them out, with a relatively clear mind. (I generated the first diagram several days ago and had been iterating on it, but not today. Today I was writing it up and was early in the process, so I came to it relatively free of contamination. And of course, not completely, but this is ‘business significance’, not ‘statistical significance’ ;). The resulting diagram appears similar, but also some differences.

When we consider Thinking by Situated, we’re talking about coping with emergent situations. I thought being guided by best principles would be the way to cope, abstracted models. I thought representation was key for distributing one’s thinking, and sharing of course for social.

Working Situatedly suggested having in-house practices and facilitation. Of course, Distributed support for Work is performance support. And working socially suggests shared representations.

Finally, learning situated suggests the need for much practice (across contexts, I now think). Distributed support for learning are models and examples. And social learning suggests communicating (e.g. discussions) and collaboration (group projects).

Interestingly, these results differ from my previous post. So, I think I’ll have to reconcile them. The fact that I did get different results, and it sparked some additional thinking, is good. The outcome of considering contexts by cognitions improved the outcomes, I think. And that’s worth thinking about!

Graham Roberts #Realities360 Keynote Mindmap

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Graham Roberts kicked off the 2nd day of the Realities 360 conference talking about the Future of Immersive Storytelling. He told about their experiences and lessons building an ongoing suite of experiences. From the first efforts through to the most recent it was insightful. The examples were vibrant inspirations.

Cognitions By Contexts

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I have, in the past, talked about the three cognitions: situated, distributed, and social. Similarly, I talk about aligning with the contexts: how we think, work, and learn. I then wondered about how they interacted. Naturally, I diagrammed it (surprise, right?). I created the 3 x 3 matrix, and then tried to fill the boxes.  So here’s some preliminary thoughts (ok, they’ve already been processed a few times) on considering cognitions by contexts.

The intersections do point to some implications.  Cutting through the contexts by cognitions, we can make some prescriptions. When we think of Situated by Think, I suggested experimentation as a mechanism to help resolve unclear outcomes. Situated by Work suggested the ambiguity inherent in new situations, and suggested supporting addressing that. Finally, Situated for Learning suggests the need for meaningful practice.

Similarly, when we look at Distributed by Thinking, I considered the need to represent understanding concretely. For Work, it’s about using external tools to support effective performance, e.g. performance support. For Learning, it’s about blending learning across a variety of elements: technologies, interaction methodologies, etc, to support successful outcomes.

Social is a bit of a conflict, because I often mean that as a reflection of ‘work’. Here, however, I’m considering Work as ‘getting stuff done’. (Note to self: reconcile this!). So Social and Think is the notion of sharing the results (hmm, pondering in next paragraph). Social and Work is collaboration & cooperation, working together specifically on projects and also more broadly a willingness to contribute when/where/ever. Finally, Social for learning is social assignments.

Which makes me think that the whole ‘Think’ line could be Harold Jarche’s Seek > Sense > Share model, and then we’re talking about the Situated Thinking would be continually seeking new information to help settle ambiguity. Which is a nice idea I might put in, but then I have to consider where I put experiment. That may have to go in with ‘represent’ in Distributed and Think.

I also, as an experiment, decided to swap the labels (horizontal for vertical), and see if I came up with the same inputs. And, no, I didn’t. That’s my next post, the swapped version. It won’t be ’til the beginning of July, because next week I’m speaking at the Realities 360 conference, and will be posting mindmaps of the keynotes, if all things go per usual. And there’ll be a reconciliation after that, as the above paragraph suggests. Stay tuned! But here you see me ‘think out loud’ as I try to consider Cognitions By Contexts. I welcome any thoughts of yours!

Working virtually

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Of late, I’ve been involved in two separate initiatives that are distributed, one nationally, one internationally. And, as with some other endeavors, I’ve been using some tools to make this work. And, finally, it really really is. I’m finding it extraordinarily productive to be working virtually.

In both endeavors, there’s trust. One’s with folks I know, which makes it easy. The other’s with folks who have an international reputation for scholarly work, and that generates an initial acceptance. Working together quickly generates that.

Working

The work itself, as with most things, comes down to communication, collaboration, and cooperation. We’ve got initiatives to plan, draft, review, and execute. And we need to make decisions.

We’re using one social media tool to coordinate. In both cases, we’re using Slack as the primary tool for asynchronous communications. We’re setting up meetings (sometimes with the help of Doodle), asking questions, updating on occurrences, and sharing thoughts.

We’re using different tools for synchronous sessions. In one, we’re using Zoom, Blue Jeans in the other. I like Zoom a bit better because when you open the chat or the list of participants, it expands the window. In Blue Jeans, it covers a bit of the screen. Both, however, handle video streams without a problem.

And, for both, we’re using Google tools to create shared representations. Documents, and occasionally spreadsheets, mostly. I’m experimenting with their draw tools; while they’re not as smooth as OmniGraffle, they’re quite robust. It’s even fun to be working together watching several of us editing a doc at the same time!

There are always the hiccups; sometimes one or another can’t attend a meeting, or we lose track of files, but nothing that doesn’t plague co-located work. One problem that’s unique is those folks who aren’t regular users of one or the other tools. But we’ve enough peer pressure to remedy that. And, of course, these are folks who are in tech…

Reflecting

One key element, I think, is the ‘working out loud’. It’s pretty easy to share, and people do. Thinking is largely out in the open. There’re subcommittees, for instance, that may work on specific issues, and some executive discussions, but little you can’t see.

And we’re unconsciously working in, and consciously working on, a desirable learning culture. We’re sharing safely, considering ideas fairly, taking time to reflect, and actively seeking diversity. We experiment, and we do serendipitously review our practices (particularly when we onboard new folks).

Most importantly, this is beginning to not only feel natural, but productive.  This is the new world of work. Using tools to handle collaboration, coordination, and cooperation (the 3 c’s?).  We’re working, and evolving too!

And, a key learning for me, is that this doesn’t preclude being co-located. Though I wonder if that would actually hurt, since hallway conversations can progress things but there’re no trails. Unless, I suppose, if you commit to immediately capture whatever emerges. That’s a cultural thing.

This working virtually is a direction I think will be productive for organizations going forward. It’s social, it’s augmented, and it’s culturally sound. It’s not to say that I won’t welcome the chance to be co-located with these folks at some point. There might even be hugs between folks who’ve never met before (that happens when you interact in a safe space online). But the important thing is that it works, well. And what else needs to be said, after all?

 

Cognition external

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reading outsideI was thinking a bit about distributed cognition, and recognized that there as a potentially important way to tease that apart. And I’ll talk it out first here, and maybe a diagram will emerge. Or not. The point is to think about how external tools can augment our thinking. Or, really, a way that at least partly, we have cognition external.

The evidence says that our thinking isn’t completely in our head. And I’ve suggested that that makes a good case for performance support. But I realize it goes further in ways I’ve thought about it elsewhere. So I want to pull those together.

The alternative to performance support, a sort of cognitive scaffolding, is to think about representation. Here we’re not necessarily supporting any particular performance, but instead supporting developing thinking. I shared Jane Hart’s diagram yesterday, and I know that it’s a revision of a prior one. And that’s important!

The diagram is capturing her framework, and such externalizations are a way to share; they’re a social as well as artifactual sharing. It’s part of a ‘show your work‘ approach to continuing to think. Of course, it doesn’t have to be social, it can be personal.

So both of these forms of distributed cognition are externalizing our thinking in ways that our minds have trouble comprehending. We can play around with relationships by spatially representing them. We can augment our cognitive gaps both formally through performance support, and informally by supporting externalizing our thinking. Spreadsheets are another tool to externalize our thinking. So, too, for that matter, is text.

So we can augment our performance, and scaffold our thinking. Both can be social or solitary, but they both qualify as forms of distributed cognition (beyond social). And, importantly, both then should be consciously considered in thinking about revolutionizing L&D. We should be designing for cognition external. The tools should be there, and the facilitation, to use either when appropriate. So, think distributed, as well as situated, and social. It’s how our brains work, we ought to use that as a guide. You think?

A very insightful framework

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Jane Hart has just come up with something new and, to me, intriguing. Ok, so she’s a colleague from the Internet Time Alliance, and I’ve been a fan of her work for a while, but I think this is particularly good.  If you’ve read here before, you’ll know I love a good model (Harold Jarche’s Seek>Sense>Share comes to mind). So when I parsed her “from training to modern workplace learning”, it resonated in many ways.  So here’s her framework with some comments.

First, some context. If you’ve known my work at all, you know that I’ve been pushing a L&D revolution. And that’s about rethinking training to be about transformative experience design, performance support to be included, and informal learning to be also addressed. That’s intellectricity! And it’s sometimes hard to tie them together coherently.

Jane’s always had a talent for drilling down into the practicalities in sensible ways. Her books, continually updated, have great specifics about things to do. This is a framework that ties it together nicely.

The thing I like is the way she’s characterized different activities. The categories of Discovery (informal learning), Discourse (social learning), and Doing (experiential learning) provides a nice handle around which to talk about elements, roles, and tasks. And, importantly, prescriptions. And I really like the ‘meta’ layer, where she suggests skills for each vertical.

I’m not without quibbles, however small. For instance, with her use of microlearning, because of my concerns about the label rather than her specific intention. She told me personally that she means “short daily learning”, and I think that’s great. I just think of that as spaced learning ;). And I might label ‘discovery’ to be ‘develop’, because it’s about the individual’s continual learning. And I’m not sure there’s what I call ‘slow’ innovation there, creating a culture and practices about experimentation and exposure to the ‘adjacent possible’. But it’s hard for one diagram to capture everything, and this does a great job.

I admit that I haven’t parsed all the nuances yet. But as an advocate of diagrams and frameworks, I think this is truly insightful and useful. (And she’s updated it so I’ve grabbed this copy which appears to have lost microlearning.)  I’m sure she, as well as I, welcome your thoughts!

The ARG experience

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In preparing a couple of presentation for the Realities 360 conference coming up late this month, I got thinking about ARGs again. ARGs (alternate reality games) were going to be the thing, but some colleagues suggest that the costs were problematic.  I still think that ARGs could be powerful learning experiences. And, of course, I understand that the overhead would make them useful only in particular situations. For instance, those where the needs were pressing and the real world experience is important. And I reckon those are few.  In some sense, disaster drills are an example!  Still, I thought it was worth looking at the ARG experience. And, of course, I made a diagram. It’s nothing particularly astute, but on the principle of ‘show your work’…

In particular, I was thinking about artificial virtuality (AV). In the continuum from reality to virtual reality (VR), AV sits between augmented reality (AR) and VR. That is, the goal is virtual (e.g. a made up one, not one that’s manifest in the real world, at least directly. And yet it permeates the real world. And that, to me, really defines an ARG!  Of course, it doesn’t have to be tuned to the experience of a game, it can just be a scenario, but you know I’m not going to stop there! :)

So what’s going on here?  I’m suggesting that there’s a story that is the experience designed for the player. I talk about LARGs, which is an ARG for learning. The ARG experience here is implemented by an engine which embodies the game (just as games are done). Instead, however, of the experiences being mediated by a computer interface, instead activities are inserted into the players experience.

So, there’s an underlying model driving the action (just as in traditional computer games). There are variables maintaining state, and rules operating on them. So your choice depends on what’s happened before (actions have consequences), and you can be moving up or down depending on how you play. The rules determine what happens next. A colleague built a whole engine for this!

The information and decisions the player takes are mediated by real world interfaces, but distributed, not concentrated in one interface. Videos on a phone, or a screen being passed along the way (e.g. an animated billboard or a TV screen in an office) bring information. Social media is carrying messages.

And the player is similarly sending messages as responses. Even real world objects are instrumented, so a door might lock or unlock as the result of player actions. The player may be choosing between competing taxis. And it can be played out over days. In the example we did, the in-game characters would take overnight to respond to your messages.

Now this could all be done by a puppetmaster (or several), but the goal here would be to set it up so it can run without a suite of people involved. The goal is to design a game like we do traditionally, but manifest across the player’s life. I do recommend seeing the movie The Game as a dramatic example.

The real question is what sort of things match these types of goals. The example we built was for sales training; handling virtual customers. As mentioned above, disaster preparedness could make sense. Or other real world awareness tasks (spies?).  Again, there may not be many situations, but for doing that mix of delivering a simulated experience in your life instead of a virtual life could be interesting. Certainly intriguing.

At any rate, I just needed to capture the ARG experience for myself. And to share at the conference. If you’re there, do say hello!

 

Labels for what we do

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Several labelsOf late there’s been a resurrection of a long term problem. While it’s true for our field as a whole, it’s also true for the specific job of those who design formal learning. I opined about the problem of labels for what we do half a year ago, but it has raised its head again. And this time, some things have been said that I don’t fully agree with. So, it’s time again to weigh in again.

So, first, Will Thalheimer wrote a post in which he claims to have the ultimate answer (in his usual understated way ;). He goes through the usual candidates of labels for what we do – instructional designer, learning designer, learner experience designer – and finds flaws.

And I agree with him on learning designer and instructional designer. We can’t actually design learning, we can only create environments where learning can happen. It’s a probabilistic game. So learning designer is out.

Instructional designer, then, would make sense, but…it’s got too much baggage. If we had a vision of instruction that included the emotional elements – the affective and conative components – I could buy it. And purists will say they do (at least, ones influenced by Keller). But I will suggest that the typical vision is of a behavioristic approach. That is, with a rigorous focus on content and assessment, and less pragmatic approaches to spacing and flexibility.

He doesn’t like learning engineer for the same reason as learning designer: you can’t ‘engineer’ learning. I don’t quite agree. One problem is that right now there are two interpretations of learning engineer. My original take on that phrase was that it’s about applying learning science to real problems. Just as a civic engineer applies physics…and I liked that. Though, yes, you can lead learners to learning, but you can’t make them think.

However, Herb Simon’s original take (now instantiated in the IEEE’s initiative on learning engineering) focused more on the integration of learning science with digital engineering. And I agree that’s important, but I’m not sure one person needs to be able to do it all. Is the person who engineers the underlying content engine the same one as the person who designs the experiences that are manifest out of that system? I think the larger picture increasingly relies on teams. So I’m taking that out of contention for now.

Will’s answer: learning architect. Now, in my less-than-definitive post last year, I equated learning experience designer and learning architect, roughly. However, Will disparages the latter and heaps accolades on the former. My concern is that architects design a solution, but then it gets not only built by others, but gets interior designed by others, and… It’s too ‘hands off’!  And as I pointed out, I’ve called myself that recently, but in that role I may have been more an architect ;).

His argument against learning experience designer doesn’t sit well with me. Ignoring the aspersions cast against those who he attributes the label to, his underlying argument is that just designing experiences isn’t enough. He admits we can’t ensure learning, but suggests that this is a weak response. And here’s where I disagree. I think the inclusion of experience does exactly what I want to focus on: the emotional trajectory and the motivational commitment. Not to the exclusion of the learning sciences, of course. AND, I’d suggest, also recognizing that the experience is not an event, but an extended set of activities. Specifically, it will be across technologies as needed.

The problem, as Jane Bozarth raised in a column, is more than just this, however. What research into the role shows is that there are just too many jobs being lumped under the label (whatever it is). Do you develop too? Do you administer the LMS? The list goes on.

I think we need to perhaps have multiple job titles. We can be an instructional designer, or a learning experience designer, or an instructional technologist. Or even a learning engineer (once that’s clear ;). But we need to keep focused, and as Jane advised, not get too silly (wizard?). It’s hard enough as it is to describe what we do without worrying about labels for it. I think I’ll stick with learning experience designer for now. (Not least because I’m running a workshop on learning experience design at DevLearn this fall. ;) That’s my take, what’s yours?