BJ Fogg gave a lively and focused presentation. Seen him before, but great to renew, and there were further extensions. Very worthwhile!
Mac memories
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!
Intelligent Content
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.)
Augmenting Human Intellect: Vale Doug Engelbart
Somehow, I forgot to farewell one of the finest minds to cross our paths. (I was sure I had, but searching this morning found no evidence. Mea culpa.) Last night, I had the privilege of attending a Festschrift for Doug Engelbart, who passed last July, with speakers reciting the trajectory and impact of his career. And I was inspired anew by the depth of his vision.
Doug is widely known as the inventor of the mouse, but that was just an implementation detail in his broader view. His mission manifested further in the ‘mother of all demos‘, where he showed collaborative work, video conferencing, and more, working with a mouse, keyboard, and graphic display. In 1968. And yet this too was just the tangible output of a much larger project.
At a critical juncture early in his career, he took a step back and thought about what he could really contribute. He realized that the problems the world was facing were growing exponentially, and that our only hope was to learn at a similarly exponential rate, and decided that helping humans accomplish this goal was a suitable life’s work. His solution was so all-encompassing that most people only get their minds around a small bit of it.
One component was a knowledge work environment where you could connect with colleagues and collaborate together, with full access to articulated knowledge sources. And yes, this foresaw the internet, but his vision was much richer. Doug didn’t see one editor for email, another for documents, etc, he wanted one work environment. He was also willing for it to be complex, and thought using inadequate tools as riding tricycles when we should be riding road bicycles to get places. His notion was much closer to EMACS than the tools we currently use. The mouse, networks, and more were all just developments to enable his vision.
His vision didn’t stop there: he proposed co-evolution of people and technology, and wanted people developing systems to be using the tools they were building to do their work, so the technology was being built by people using the tools, bootstrapping the environment. He early on saw the necessity of bringing in diverse viewpoints and empowering people with a vision to achieve to get the best outcomes. And continual learning was a key component. To that end, he viewed not just an ongoing reflection on work processes looking for opportunities to improve, but a reflection on the reflection process; sharing between groups doing the work reflection, to collaboratively improve. He saw not just the internet, but the way we’re now seeing how best to work together.
And, let’s be clear, this isn’t all, because I have no confidence I have even a fraction of it. I certainly thought his work environment had too high a threshold to get going, and wondered why he didn’t have a more accessible onramp. It became clear last night that he wasn’t interested in reducing the power of the tools, and was happy for people to have to be trained to use the system, and that once they saw the power, they’d buy in.
To me, one of the most interesting things was that while everyone celebrated his genius, and no argument, it occurred to me to also celebrate that time he took to step aside and figure out what was worth doing and putting his mind to it. If we all took time to step back and think about what we could be doing to really make a dent, might we come up with some contributions?
I was fortunate to meet him in person during his last years, and he was not only brilliant and thoughtful, but gentle and kind as well. A real role model. Rest in peace, Doug.
Design for Doing
It occurs to me that we are too busy designing for learning, and that’s not what it’s about. It’s not about learning, as I often say. What is it about? It’s about doing. It’s about performance. So what does that mean?
My backwards design process suggested looking at the desired performance, and then working backwards. This comes from a good analysis of the performance gap and determining the root cause of the difference between the existing performance and the desired one. The solution then is determining what can be in the world, and what has to be in the head.
Another way to be thinking about it is looking at how people really perform in the world. We need to be looking at when and how people need support, and figure out how we can bring support. People would rather not have to discover the answer if possible, and rather find it. Ideally, we are supporting finding the answer, but there are times when we haven’t anticipated the need, or it’s too unique to be worth investing.
The point here is that these ways of thinking about the problem come from thinking about meeting organizational needs, not about delivering learning services. They come from focusing on the doing, not the learning. And that’s a perspective organizations need.
We do, however, need to be thinking about a broader picture. It’s not just doing the work, but it’s also about doing innovation, and continual capability development. So it’s not just putting in place elements that support optimal execution, but it’s also about putting in place the elements that support cooperation and collaboration.
The overall focus has to be supporting the needs of the organization. We need to be thinking about supporting the do, not just the learn. Are you designing for doing?
Leveraging Technology
Technology is supposed to support our goals, and, when well-written, it does. So for instance, when I write, I use particular features to make my writing process better aligned with my thinking. I’m working on a book (as you’ve seen hints of and some resultant interim thoughts), and I’m finding that now that it’s time to deliver, I’ve got a conflict. Let me explain.
My writing is not just a process of sitting down and having the prose flow. At some point it is, but even with my first book that had gestated for years, I had a structure. Subsequent exercises in screed generation have really relied on my creating an overarching structure, that lets me tell a story that incorporates the things I need to cover. And I use outlines as my structuring tool.
Even this isn’t linear: structure and then write. As I write, I have ideas that I will either put later in the structure, or go back and add into the prose. One of the things that regularly happens is that, as I write, I find things flowing in a different way than I originally expected, and I rearrange the outline to achieve a structure that captures the new flow.
To do this, I use the outline feature hugely. I don’t just restructure, but move chunks to different places using these capabilities. While I have not been a fan of Microsoft in general, I learned Word to write my PhD thesis, and have used it consistently ever since. For instance, while I love Keynote, I haven’t been able to adopt Pages because it hasn’t had industrial-strength outlining. This also means I inherently use styles. I like styles. A lot. For instance, it makes me crazy when people format by hand on something that might need to be reformatted.
The reason I mention this is because I’m now faced with an externally-induced dilemma. Having a deadline, and finally having crafted my prose, I now look at their submission requirements. And they’re antiquated. Here’s the requirement from my publisher:
Our production process requires minimal file formatting; do not use formatting such as fields and links, styles, page headers or footers, boxed text, and so on.
No auto-indexing, no auto-table of contents, nothing. And yes, I faced this before, but it’s still hugely frustrating. The dilemma I’m in: I’ve had to use styes to write a well-structured book. Now I’m faced with the onerous task of removing all the file formatting created by the outline styles that I needed to use to give my best effort. And I have to do it by hand, as there’s no way to systematically go through and manually format all the headings.
This is nuts! I mean, it is almost 2014, and they still need me to use hand-formatting. Um, people, this is why we have technology: to support us in working smarter, not to go to a last-century (or worse) manual process. These instructions are essentially unchanged since 2005, when I wrote my first tome! (Ok, they no longer require a floppy disk version, and I talked them out of the 3 paper copies. Ahem.) I managed to create camera-ready material for my thesis (with library restrictions where they’ll take out the ruler to make sure the measurements meet the criteria) in Word back in 1989; I bet I could create camera-ready page-proofs to meet their requirements today. As you can infer, I’m frustrated (and dreading the chore). The irony of using last century production processes to tout moving L&D into the 21st Century is not lost on me.
Please, if your processes are still like this, let’s have a conversation. I will be having a fight with my publisher (which I will lose; they can’t change that fast), but I hope you can do better.
Really Useful eLearning Instruction Manual
Rob Hubbard organized a suite of us to write chapters for a use-focused guide to elearning. And, now it’s out and available! Here’s the official blurb:
Technology has revolutionised every aspect of our lives and how we learn is no exception. The trouble is; the range of elearning technologies and the options available can seem bewildering. Even those who are highly experienced in one aspect of elearning will lack knowledge in some other areas. Wouldn‘t it be great if you could access the hard-won knowledge, practical guidance and helpful tips of world-leading experts in these fields? Edited by Rob Hubbard and featuring chapters written by global elearning experts: Clive Shepherd, Laura Overton, Jane Bozarth, Lars Hyland, Rob Hubbard, Julie Wedgwood, Jane Hart, Colin Steed, Clark Quinn, Ben Betts and Charles Jennings – this book is a practical guide to all the key topics in elearning, including: getting the business on board, building it yourself, learning management, blended, social, informal, mobile and game-based learning, facilitating online learning, making the most of memory and more.
And here’s the Table of Contents, so you can see who wrote what:
- So What is eLearning? – Clive Shepherd
- Getting the Business on Board – Laura Overton
- Build In-House, Buy Off -the-Shelf or Outsource? – Jane Bozarth
- Production Processes – Making it Happen! – Lars Hyland
- Making the Most of Memory – Rob Hubbard
- Blended Learning – Julie Wedgwood
- Informal and Social Learning – Jane Hart
- Facilitating Live Online Learning – Colin Steed
- Mobile Learning – Clark Quinn
- Game-Based Learning – Ben Betts
- Learning Management – Charles Jennings
If you‘d like to purchase the book, VBF11 is the promotion code to get 15% discount when you buy the book at www.wiley.com, or you can get it through Amazon as a book or on Kindle. I look forward to getting my copy in the mail!
Carrying forward
During my presentation in Minneapolis on future-looking applications of technology to learning, the usual and completely understandable question came up about how to change an organization to buy-in to this new way of acting in the world: to start focusing on performance outcomes and not courses. I’m sensitive, because I have claimed that the change is needed. So I riffed off a couple of answers that I’ll offer for discussion:
For one, the question was how to start. I suggested making small changes in what was being done now: push back a bit on the immediate request for a course, and start really diving into the real performance problem. Then, of course, designing a solution for the real problem. I also suggested starting to chunk content into finer granularity, and focusing on the ‘least‘ that can be done. I didn’t add, but should’ve, that bootstrapping some community would be good, and I’d also suggest that you have to be ‘in it to win it’ (as the lottery would have it). You have to keep experimenting yourself.
I added that you should simultaneously start some strategic planning. That is, be looking at the larger picture of what can be done and where an organization should be, and then figure out what steps to take towards that in what order. When I run my elearning strategy workshops or for clients, some folks might need to start working on performance support, others might best benefit from initial efforts in social, and some might better start on improving learning design. And that’s all good, it’s what is right for them and where they’re at. But you won’t get there if you don’t start planning.
One of the attendees started asking further, and was already doing some prototyping, which triggered another response from me. Start prototyping different approaches. Web (including mobile web) is a really good way to follow on from choosing the early adopter to work with, finding an area where a small intervention can have a big impact, and get some initial measurable improvements to leverage. Iterate quickly.
As a final suggestion, I added that there likely is a need to ‘manage up’, that is educate your bosses and up about the need for the change. It’s really Org Change 101: you need to create a vision, get buy-in, spread the message (the benefits of change, as as Peter de Jager suggests, make it a choice), support and reward the change, get some early success, and leverage that going forward.
This seems like some sensible top-level approaches, but I welcome additions, revisions, improvements.
Thinking Context in the Design Process
I was talking to the ADL Mobile folks about mobile design processes, and as usual I was going on about how mobile is not the sweet spot for courses (augmenting yes, full delivery no). When tablets are acting more like a laptop, sure, but otherwise. I had suggested that the real mobile opportunities are using sensors to do contextual things, and and I also opined that we really don’t have an instructional design model that adequately addresses taking context into account. I started riffing on what that might involve, and then continued it on a recent trip to speak in Minneapolis.
Naturally, I started diagramming. I am thinking specifically of augmenting formal learning here, not performance support. In this diagram, when it’s not a course you head off to consider contextual performance support, if indeed the context of performance is away from a computer.
When, however, it is a course, and you start embedding the key decisions into a setting, the first thing you might want to do is use their existing context (or contexts, it occurs to me now). Then we can wrap learning around where (or when) they are, turning that life event into a learning experience. Assuming, of course, we can detect and deliver things based upon context, but that’s increasingly doable.
Now if you can’t use their context, because it’s arguably not something that is located in their existing lives, we want to create a context (this is, really, the essence of serious game design). It might be fantastic (some conspiracy theory, say) or very real (e.g. the Red 7 sales demo, warning: large PDF), but it’s a setting in which the decisions are meaningfully embedded (that is, real application of the model and of interest to the learner). It might be desktop but if possible, could we distribute the experience into the learners’ world, e.g. transmedia? Here we’re beginning to talk Alternate Reality Game. (And we use exaggeration to ramp up the motivation.)
As an aside, I wondered when/how collaboration would fit in here, and I don’t yet have an answer: before setting, after, or in parallel? Regardless, that’s definitely another consideration, which may be driven by a variety of factors such as whether there are benefits to role-play or collaboration in this particular instance.
This is still very preliminary (thinking and learning out loud), but it has some initial resonance to me. For you too, or where am I going off track?
Performance & Development
In thinking about how L&D needs to shift to accommodate this new day and age, I started thinking from the perspective of why the term Learning & Development (let alone Training & Development) bothered me, and it’s because I believe we need to shift from thinking about learning to think about performance. My first take was that training and development wasn’t enough. Even learning & development isn’t enough; we need to focus on developing individual and team skills and contributions, but where does performance support fit?
As another way to think about it, I started with the combination of Optimal Execution and Continual Innovation, and worked backwards. I was trying to find the elements that contribute to each. What are the components we can use technology to improve individual and group contribution to optimal execution? What can we do to similarly improve continual innovation?
For execution, we have training, performance support, performance coaching, assistance from others by cooperating, and self-designed or acquired support as part of personal knowledge management (PKM). For innovation, we want self-development by personal knowledge management, collaboration amongst individual, mentoring to develop individuals and ideas, and education to introduce new skills ideas. Elements of those components fall variously under formal, performance focus, or eCommunity.
Underpinning this is a culture where cooperation and collaboration can flourish. Note that there are opportunities for support of those component skills, like developing coaching and mentoring skills, that cut across the areas, but this seemed to be a manageable way to look at it.
Going further, when I look at what contributes to execution, it ends up being about performance. When the focus is supporting innovation, we can call it development. What we can, and should, be focusing on is both supporting performance in the moment and developing individual and team capability over time. The skills are performance consulting, and facilitation of development and innovation. Thus, the field, to me, is really about performance and development.
This is a first cut, and I’m willing to consider improvements. There are layers below this that are being glossed over to focus on the top level, but I really do think that we need a broader focus, and this seems to capture the way my thinking is going. So, what am I missing?