Cathy Davidson gave us an informative, engaging, and inspirational talk talking about how we’re mismatching industrial approaches in an information era. She gave us data about how we work and why much of what we do isn’t aligned, along with the simple and effective approach of think-pair-share. Very worthwhile.
We’ve already received the first request for an article on the Serious eLearning Manifesto, and it sparked a realization. We (my co-conspirators are Will Thalheimer, Julie Dirksen, and Michael Allen) launched the manifesto last week, and we really hope you’ll have a serious look at them. More, we hope you’ll find a way to follow them, and join your colleagues in signing on.
What has to happen now is people need to look at them, debate the difficulties in following them, and start thinking about how to move forward. We don’t want people just to sign on, we want them to put the principles into practice. You may not be able to get to all from the beginning, but we’re hoping to drive systematic change towards good elearning.
The Manifesto, if you haven’t seen it, touts eight values of serious elearning over what we see too often, focusing on the biggest gaps. The values are backed up by 22 principles pulled from the research. And we’ve been already been called out for it perhaps being too ‘instructor’ driven, not social or constructivist enough. To be fair, we’ve also already had some strong support, and not just from our esteemed trustees, but signatories as well.
And I don’t want to address the issues (yet), what we want to have happen is to get the debate started. So I didn’t accept the opportunity to write (yet another) article, instead I said that we’d rather respond to an article talking about the challenges. We want to engage this as dialog, not a diatribe. Been there, done that, you can see it on the site ;).
So, please, have a look, think about what it would mean, consider the barriers, and let’s see if, together, we can start figuring out how to lift the floor (not close off the ceiling).
The main complaint I think I have about the things L&D does isn’t so much that it’s still mired in the industrial age of plan, prepare, and execute, but that it’s just not aligned with how we think, learn, and perform, certainly not for information age organizations. There are very interesting rethinks in all these areas, and our practices are not aligned.
So, for example, the evidence is that our thinking is not the formal logical thinking that underpins our assumptions of support. Recent work paints a very different picture of how we think. We abstract meaning but don’t handle concrete details well, have trouble doing complex thinking and focusing attention, and our thinking is very much influenced by context and the tools we use.
This suggests that we should be looking much more at contextual performance support and providing models, saving formal learning for cases when we really need a significant shift in our understanding and how that plays out in practice.
Similarly, we learn better when we’re emotionally engaged, when we’re equipped with explanatory and predictive models, and when we practice in rich contexts. We learn better when our misunderstandings are understood, when our practice adjusts for how we are performing, and feedback is individual and richly tied to conceptual models. We also learn better together, and when our learning to learn skills are also well honed.
Consequently, our learning similarly needs support in attention, rich models, emotional engagement, and deeply contextualized practice with specific feedback. Our learning isn’t a result of a knowledge dump and a test, and yet that’s most of what see.
And not only do we learn better together, we work better together. The creative side of our work is enhanced significantly when we are paired with diverse others in a culture of support, and we can make experiments. And it helps if we understand how our work contributes, and we’re empowered to pursue our goals.
This isn’t a hierarchical management model, it’s about leadership, and culture, and infrastructure. We need bottom-up contributions and support, not top-down imposition of policies and rigid definitions.
Overall, the way organizations need to work requires aligning all the elements to work with us the way our minds operate. If we want to optimize outcomes, we need to align both performance and innovation. Shall we?
Wow, you try to do one little thing, and everyone gets all upset! Well, that’s how it feels, and it’s a real lesson. So I’ll explain, and then try to clarify.
As I posted, one of the two things I’m pushing is something that’s trying to improve elearning, and we’re having our launch on Thurs, March 13th at noon PT (3ET). To get attention, the four of us (Michael Allen, Julie Dirksen, and Will Thalheimer are my con-conspirators) have been teasing the event, trying to build awareness. And this has turned out to be a problem we didn’t anticipate.
Our goal was to use our names by capitalizing on the situation what while the four of us who, while friends and colleagues, were independent of one another professionally, we had banded together on this initiative. We believed, naively, that people would infer our intentions to be benign. And many did.
Including the trustees we’re so grateful to. We briefed a handful of respected individuals around the industry (not everyone we could and should, but a representative sample across many sectors that we could work with quickly), and got them to lend their names in support.
So we started our marketing, including the site, a press release, and our social media efforts. And learned that what was obvious to us wasn’t obvious to others. There were clear concerns that the focus was on us, not on the message, and that our motives were dubious.
We received both private and publicly expressed concerns about our intentions. Maybe we were trying to promote a book, or a consultancy, or collecting email addresses. And this was an unpleasant surprise. When I have a chance to work with people like Michael, Julie, and Will that I respect for their intellect, concern, and integrity, it is painful to have our motives questioned.
Yet it was an clear miscalculation on our parts that our intentions would be obvious to all. As soon as we got wind of the concerns, we discussed how to respond, and as a consequence, we reined in the messages about us on the site. We removed our pictures from the pre-launch page, and toned down the ‘authors’ page. Hopefully that’s enough.
Because, the message is the important thing. Frankly, we’d prefer that the change happens and we get no recognition. It’s not about us; we’ve got other fish to fry. We’ve no joint book, no consultancy, and the only reason we’d do anything with any email addresses would be to tell them updates with nothing for sale. We believe that the message would be sullied with any such attempts, and we do not want to risk the chance of undermining the message, and the hoped-for change.
So, a valuable lesson learned about marketing. Trying to inspire curiosity using a launch event, and trusting to our names beforehand was, in retrospect, too self-aggrandizing. We probably needed to focus on at least the core of the message, rather than just the mystery of what we were up to. We still hope you’ll attend, and more importantly agree to try harder on the change we’re agitating for. As to the change? Well, the short answer is better elearning. For the specifics, you’ll just have to wait :). BTW, in addition to the launch, at least a subset of us will be discussing the desired change at Learning Solutions session 105 on Wednesday March 19 at 1PM, followed by a Morning Buzz on Thursday. Hope to see you at one of these!
A few weeks ago, I mentioned that this was a year of making trouble, and talked about my forthcoming book, but now it’s time to let you in on the second thing I’m doing. This time, I’m not doing it alone, but in concert with three of my most respected and trusted colleagues, Michael Allen, Julie Dirksen, and Will Thalheimer. So what are the four of us up to?
Well, I won’t give it all away, since we’re doing an official launch next week, but in short, we’re attempting to do something about what we perceive as the sorry state of elearning. We just couldn’t stand by, so we’re standing up and saying something. It’s been a real pleasure to work with them, and we’re hoping what we’re up to might make an impact.
You’ll also find out that a number of folks have signed up to support us as trustees. Not everyone we could and should’ve gotten, but a representative sample across sectors of some of the most respected folks in the industry that we could reach out to in short order.
You can find out what we’ve done on Thurs, March 13th at noon PT (3ET). We’re holding a Google Hangout where we’ll talk about what we’re up to, and then take questions. You can sign up to attend at the associated site.
It’s an honor to be able to work with Will, Julie, & Michael on this, and if you care about good elearning (and if you’re here, I figure that’s a safe bet :), I hope you’ll attend, and join us.
Dorian Peters has written the first book I’ve seen on UI for learning, linking two of my favorite things. Understand that I did my Ph.D. in a research group that was hot into HCI at the time, and my first faculty position was to teach User Experience. At the time, in many ways UI was ahead of ID in terms of user-centered practices, and I made many presentations on porting UI concepts to Ed Tech audiences.
Consequently, it was a pleasant surprise to hear about this book, and more so now that I’ve had a chance to peruse it. This book is very valuable not just for interface designers doing learning solutions, but also for IDs and developers who end up having to design. The second chapter on how we learn is a great whirlwind tour of learning, well grounded in research and setting up the background for those who’s background isn’t learning. Similarly, she provides an overview of elearning in Chapter 3, and UI basic terms in Chapter 4. From there, it’s all about UI for learning.
She starts very early on in the book by showing how learning interfaces have to be different from user interfaces. If your goal is to learn, not do a task, it makes sense that the interface should and could be different. She then delivers on this and goes on to cover a suite of principles: learning is visual, learning is social, learning is emotional, and learning is mobile, in subsequent chapters (with one on multimedia and gaming interspersed). She even discusses the design of learning spaces. In each, she separates out principles and strategies.
This is a fun book, widely illustrated with examples and illustrations, quotes, and graphical highlighting to practice what she preaches. It is clear from the breadth and depth of citations that she’s done her homework, and this is a well-organized, easy to read, and useful book.
Interface Design for Learning is a book that everyone who ends up developing learning experiences, creating the interface learners interact with, needs to have to hand, on their desk ready to refer to and get the principles down on each project until they’re firmly internalized. Highly recommended.
In addition to my keynote and session at last week’s Immersive Learning University event, I was on a panel with Eric Bernstein, Andy Peterson, & Will Thalheimer. As we riffed about Immersive Learning, I chimed in with my usual claim about the value of exaggeration, and Will challenged me, which led to an interesting discussion and (in my mind) this resolution.
So, I talk about exaggeration as a great tool in learning design. That is, we too often are reigned in to the mundane, and I think whether it’s taking it a little bit more extreme or jumping off into a fantasy setting (which are similar, really), we bring the learning experience closer to the emotion of the performance environment (when it matters).
Will challenged me about the need for transfer, and that the closer the learning experience is to the performance environment, the better the transfer. Which has been demonstrated empirically. Eric (if memory serves) also raised the issue of alignment to the learning goals, and that you can’t overproduce if you lose sight of the original cognitive skills (we also talked about when such experiences matter, and I believe it’s when you need to develop cognitive skills).
And they’re both right, although I subsequently pointed out that when the transfer goal is farther, e.g. the specific context can vary substantially, exaggeration of the situation may facilitate transfer. Ideally, you would have practice across contexts spanning the application space, but that might not be feasible if we’re high up on the line going from training to education.
And of course, keeping the key decisions at the forefront is critical. The story setting can be altered around those decisions, but the key triggers for making those decisions and the consequences must map to reality, and the exaggeration has to be constrained to elements that aren’t core to the learning. Which should be minimized.
Which gets back to my point about the emotional side. We want to create a plausible setting, but one that’s also motivating. That happens by embedding the decisions in a setting that’s somewhat ‘larger than life’, where we’re emotionally engaged in ways consonant with the ones we will be when we’re performing.
Knowing what rules to break, and when, here comes down to knowing what is key to the learning and what is key to the engagement, and where they differ. Make sense?
BJ Fogg gave a lively and focused presentation. Seen him before, but great to renew, and there were further extensions. Very worthwhile!
This year is the 30th anniversary of the Macintosh, and my newspaper asked for memories. I’ll point them to this post ;).
As context, I was programming for the educational computer game company, DesignWare. DesignWare had started out doing computer games to accompany K12 textbooks, but I (not alone) had been arguing about heading into the home market, and happened to run into Bill Bowman and David Seuss at a computer conference, who’d started Spinnaker to sell education software to the home market, and were looking for companies that could develop product. I told them to contact my CEO, and as a reward I got to do the first joint title, FaceMaker. When DesignWare created it’s own titles, I got to do Creature Creator and Spellicopter before I headed off to graduate school for my Ph.D. in what ended up being, effectively, applied cognitive science.
While I was at DesignWare, I had been an groupie of Artificial Intelligence and a nerd around all things cool in computers, so I was a fan of the work going on at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (aka Parc), and followed along in Byte magazine. (I confess that, at the time, I was a bit young to have been aware of the mother of all demos by Doug Engelbart and the inspiration of the Parc work.) So I lusted after bitmap screens and mice, and the Lisa (the Mac predecessor).
My Ph.D. advisor, Donald Norman, had written about cognitive engineering and the research lab I joined was very keen on interface design (leading to Don’s first mass-market and must-read book, The Psychology of Everyday Things, subsequently titled The Design of Everyday Things, and a compendium of writings call User-Centered System Design). He was, naturally, advising Apple. So while I dabbled in meta-learning, I was right there at the heart of thinking around interface design.
Naturally, if you cared about interface design, had designed engaging graphic interfaces, and had watched how badly the IBM PC botched the introduction of the work computer, you really wanted the Macintosh. Command lines were for those who didn’t know better. When the Macintosh first came out, however, I couldn’t justify the cost. I had access to Unix machines and the power of the ARPANET. (The reason I was originally ho-hum about the internet was that I’d been playing with Gopher and WAIS and USENET for years!)
I finally justified the purchase of a Mac II to write my PhD thesis on. I used Microsoft Word, and with the styles option was able to meet the rigorous requirements of the library for theses without having to pay someone to type it for me (a major victory in the small battles of academia!). I’ve been on a Macintosh ever since, and have survived the glories of iMacs and Duos (and the less-than stellar Performa). And I’ve written books, created presentations, and brainstormed through diagrams in ways I just haven’t been able to on other platforms. My family is now also on Macs. When the alternative can be couched as the triumph of marketing over matter, there really has been little other choice. Happy 30th!
I’ve been on the content rant before, talking about the need to structure content into models, and the benefits of tagging. Now, there’s something you can do about it.
You have to understand that folks who do content as if their business depended on it, e.g. web marketers, have a level of sophistication that elearning (and all elearning: performance support, social, etc) would do well to adopt. The power of leveraging content by description, not by link, is the basis for adaptive, custom, personalized experiences. But it takes a lot of knowledge and work, and a strategy.
You’ve seen it in Netflix and Amazon recommendations, and sites that support powerful searches. We can and should be doing this for learning and performance, whether pull or push. But where do you learn?
One of the people I follow is Scott Abel, the Content Wrangler. And he’s put together the Intelligent Content Conference that will give you the opportunities you need to get on top of this. This isn’t necessarily for the independent instructional designer, but if you do elearning as a business, whether a publisher or custom content house, or if you’re looking for the next level of technical sophistication, this is something you really should have on your radar.
Full disclosure: I will be on a press pass to attend, but they didn’t reach out to me. I reached out to them because I wanted a way to attend. Because I know this is important enough to find a way to hear more. I don’t have a set company I work for, so if I want to know this stuff to be able to help people take advantage of it, I have to earn my keep (in this case, by writing an article afterward). I only feel it fair, however, that if I think it’s important enough to finagle a way to attend, I should at least let you know about it.
(And, fair warning, if you do lob something at me, expect to join the many who have received a firm refusal, on principle. I’m not in the PR business. As I state in my boilerplate response: “I deliberately ignore what comes unsolicited, and instead am triggered by what comes through my network: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Skype, etc.”. Save us both time and don’t bother.)