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Clark Quinn’s Learnings about Learning

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Passion and Learning

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My better half recently got a sample of special butter. A gift from a co-worker (an interesting story), and led me to reflect on the link between passion and learning.

M’lady’s co-worker is a fan of good butter. I was able to view a picture of her refrigerator, and the assortment of butters rivals what you might see in a fine grocery!  We did a tasting between the ordinary butter we ordinarily purchase and this special butter. The difference was noticeable. I was reminded of the fine butter they serve when in Europe. Or at really fine restaurant.

This may seem odd, but think about it a bit. What do you care enough about to really understand? At various times I’ve been known to wax poetic about beer, cooking, waves, and more. And, of course, cognition, learning, engagement, and design. I managed to get educated about (American) football and cricket (yes, cricket) from inspired roommates. The list goes on.

And what’s fun is learning from these folks just why they find it so interesting. Which is related to the task of finding the intrinsic interest for designing learning. Talk to the experts! They’ve spent hours becoming experts, what motivated them? If you can find that, you’ve got a handle on it.

And I’m sure you’ve learned something from someone who was passionate about it. That’s usually a good indication that they’re also knowledgable, but there are caveats on that.  People can get passionate about myths, too. There are reasons to be cautious. In general, however, you’re liable to be lucky.

Passionate people not only make fields comprehensible, they tend to drive fields forward. If you’re here, I’m expecting you’re passionate about performance & development. Maybe even up for a revolution! Let’s connect passion and learning to make it better.

 

Cultural Comment Shift

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I’ve been blogging now for over a decade, and one thing has changed. The phenomena is that we’re seeing a cultural comment shift; comments are now coming from shared platforms, not directly on the site. And while I try not to care, I’m finding it interesting to reflect on the implications of that, in a small way.

When I started, people would comment right on the blog. It still happens, but not in the way it used to. It wasn’t unknown for a post to generate many responses right in the post. And I liked that focused dialog.

These days, however, I get more comments on the LinkedIn announcement of the post rather than the post itself. And I don’t think that’s bad, it’s just interesting. The question is why.

I think that more and more, people want one place to go. With the proliferation of places to go: from Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn to a variety of group tools and Instragram and Pinterest and…the list goes on. People instead are more likely to go where others are.

And that makes it increasingly easy to just view and comment in a place where I already am. And since that’s possible, it works. I wish I could automatically post directly to LinkedIn, but apparently that’s not of interest (APIs are a clear indicator of intent).

I think the lesson is, as I was opining about elsewhere, is to go where people are. Don’t try to set up your own community if you can get people to participate where they already are. Of course, that also implies having good places to go. We’re seeing certain platforms emerge as the ‘go to’ place, and that’s OK, as long as they work. The cultural comment shift is merely an indicator of a bigger cultural shift, and as long as we can ride it, we’re good.

On building trust

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My post last week was on trust, and it triggered a question on LinkedIn: “Do you have any tips, processes, models, suggestions, etc. for building trust within a team?”  And while I wrote a short response there, I thought it would be worth it to expand on it.  So here’re some thoughts on building trust.

First, there was a further question: “You mentioned that it started with credentials. For example, did you all take turns going around and introducing yourselves?” No, it wasn’t introducing ourselves. Potential new candidates are scrutinized in a call, so existing members are aware of new members’ capabilities. In my case, I looked them up, or more usually their activities emerged in conversation. It develops authentically.

The most important thing was that there were activities underway, and people were contributing in an open, constructive, non-personal way.  There’s a focus on reinventing the organization, and an important activity underway was using the Business Model Canvas as a framework to explore opportunities. The activity was led by one of the team whose experience became abundantly clear, for example.

There also was acknowledgement of others’ contributions. Conversations would reference and build upon what others said. It was an implicit ‘yes and’, but also an occasional ‘but what about’.  That is, we were free to present alternative viewpoints. Sometimes they resolve and other times it’s ok to leave them hanging in the moment. The only agenda is the common good.

One critical element is that the leaders are very unassuming and solicitous of input, as well as sharing lessons learned. There is a lot of sharing of experience, connections, and more. There’re also personal notes about travel, concerns, and more. It’s very ‘human’.

It quickly was obvious that the group was a safe place where people had a shared goal but were also diverse. We’re diverse in geography, race, gender, and role, which forms a strong basis for good outcomes.  The culture’s established, and we naturally align. As Mark Britz says, we follow the systems, but they’re right from the start.

It goes back to the learning organization dimensions, particularly the environment: open mind, valuing diversity, time for reflection, and psychological safety. When it’s lived, it works. And that’s what’s happening. When you’re focused on building trust, get the culture right, and the rest follows.

 

Building Trust

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Some months ago, I talked about I was working virtually in a couple of instances. Using distributed tools, we’re able to coordinate and collaborate.  One team got together physically last week to get work done. And the outcome was intriguing about how we’d ended up building trust virtually that manifested in the real world.

This was an executive retreat for the officers of the board of a not-for-profit. Distributed nationally and even internationally, with a global focus, in the history it’s been rare but regular to meet. However, the group had gone through some hiccups, and was regenerating. I’m relatively new to the group, but interested and learning a lot (always a plus!).

I’d only ever met one of these people before, but we had video-chatted and I’d gotten to know them some. Also, collaborating with relevant comments and revisions similarly has built trust. Trust was initially established by credentials and commitment, but it’s been deepened through working together.

What pleasantly surprised me was how close we’d become. When we met to start work, it began with hugs, between people who’d never met before! I’ve seen it before with #lrnchat, but it’s still rare and treasured.

We also were able to work together quite effectively. We had already established a safe place to interact, and it carried over. Over the course of 2.5 days, we established what the opportunities were, what ones we’d address, and how we’d do it. There’s still work, but we accomplished what we needed to create a new direction.

My takeaway is that what matters is not the tools but the atmosphere. If you work together well, you can do so in either real or virtual worlds. It’s about building trust first, and having that relationship prosper through whatever communication media are available. I think of these folks as friends now, not just colleagues. And that’s all to the good!

Templates for good

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In terms of the various ways in which we can support the gaps in our cognition, one of the terms is ‘templates’. And it’s worth discussing what a template is, and considering them at a variety of levels. I want to suggest we should have templates for good.

What is a template? Merriam-Webster defines it as “a gauge, pattern, or mold used as a guide to the form of a piece being made”. In terms of software and business, templates are forms with some of the elements already completed. Instead of starting from scratch, pieces are already done, and there are slots for various information.

Why use templates?  With them, it’s easier to do design. They make it easy to accomplish particular goals. They can make it easy to build particular types of outputs, and make them more systematic and consistent. For better or worse.

How does that change for learning? Here, a template tends to be a framework for particular interactions. For example, there are the tarted-up quiz show formats. With more depth, we can provide guides for learning, suggesting quality elements. We might have a place in our examples for the underlying thinking. Or we could  structure practice as decision making.

But we can have templates at higher levels, too. For instance, we can ask that the objective include elements of measurable evaluation, and carry that forward through the final practice design. We can go beyond that, and have structures to guide doing good curricula design.

If I have to choose, of course, I’ll go for substance over style. I’d rather your templates suggest good design than flashy but insubstantial experience. It’s time to be doing evidence-based learning instead of gaudy but rote experiences. If we’re going to have templates, let’s have templates for good.

Helen Papagiannis #DevLearn Keynote Mindmap

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Helen Papagiannis kicked off the second day of the DevLearn conference. She explored the possibilities of AR with exceptional examples. She went through a variety of concepts, helping us comprehend new opportunities. Exposing the invisible and annotating the world were familiar, but collaborative editing of spatial representations resurrected one of the most interesting (and untapped) potentials of virtual worlds.

Sophia the Robot #DevLearn Keynote Mindmap

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DevLearn opened with a keynote from Sophia the Robot. With an initially scripted presentation, and some scripted questions from host David Kelly, Sophia addresses the differences between AI and robots, with a bit of wit. The tech used to make the illusion was explored, but the technology was put to the test with some unscripted questions, and the responses were pretty good. An interesting start!

Play to Learn

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Tic Tac Toe gameThinking more about Friston’s Free Energy Principle and the implications for learning design prompted me to think about play. What drives us to learn, and then how do we learn?  And play is the first answer, but does it extend? Can we play to learn beyond the natural?

The premise behind the Free Energy principle is that organisms (at every level) learn to minimize the distance between our predictions and what actually occurs. And that’s useful, because we use our predictions to make decisions. And it’s useful if our decisions get better and better over time. To do that, we build models of the world.

Now, it’d be possible for us to just sit in a warm dark room, so our predictions are right, but we have drives and needs. Food, shelter, sex, are drives that can at least occasionally require effort. The postulate is that we’ll be driven to learn when the consequences of not learning are higher than the effort of learning.

At this level, animals play to learn things like how to hunt and interact. Parents can help as well. At a higher level than survival, however, can play still work? Can we learn things like finance, mathematics, and other human-made conceptions this way? It’d be nice to make a safe place to ‘play’, to experiment.

Raph Koster, in his A Theory Of Fun, tells us that computer games are fun just because they require learning. You need to explore, and learn new tricks to beat the next level.  And computer games can be about surviving in made-up worlds.

The point I’m getting to is that the best learning should be play; low stakes exploration, tapping into the elements of engagement to make the experience compelling. You want a story about what your goal is, and a setting that makes that goal reasonable, and more.

To put it another way, learning should be play. Not trivial, but ‘hard fun’.  If we’re not making it safe, and providing guided discovery to internalize the relationships they need, to build the models that will make better decisions, we’re not making learning as naturally aligned as it can be. So please, let your people play to learn. Design learning experiences, not just ‘instruction’.