Roger Schank gave a passionate, inciteful and insightful talk about how learning really works and how he’s building businesses on those principles. He raced along and jumped around, making mapping challenging, but his message was apt.
Michael Moore #eli3 Keynote Mindmap
Professor Moore gave a carefully detailed argument about why educational institutions (particularly higher ed) had to change, given the changes in society. He then argued some of the changes needed, and suggested some new institutional structure models that might provide guidance.
Steve Wozniak #eli3 Keynote Mindmap
The legendary Steve “The Woz” Wozniak was the opening keynote at the 3rd International Conference of e-Learning and Distance Learning. In a wide-ranging, engaging, and personal speech, Steve made a powerful plea for the value of the thoughtful learner and intrinsic motivation, project-based learning, social, and self-paced learning.
Real mLearning
Too many times, at conference expos and advertisements, it appears that folks are trying to say that courses on a tablet (or phone) are mlearning. On the contrary, I’ll suggest that courses on a phone or a tablet are elearning. Then, what is mlearning?
My argument is pretty simple: just because courses are on a different device, if they’re a traditional course – page turning with knowledge test, a virtual classroom, or even a simulation – if it’s only made touch-enabled, it’s still just elearning. Even if you strip it down to work on a phone, minimizing text, how is it really, qualitatively different?
Now, if you start breaking it up into chunks, and distributing it over time, we’re in a bit of a grey area, but really, isn’t that just what we should be doing in elearning, too? Learning needs to be distributed, but this is still just a greater degree of convenience than doing the same on a laptop. It’s a quantitative shift, not tapping into the inherent nature of mobile.
So, when is it really mlearning? I want to suggest that mlearning – and here I’m talking about courses, not mobile performance support, mobile social, etc, which also could and should be considered mlearning or at least mperformance – is when you’re using the local context to support learning. That could be restated as when you are turning a performance situation into a learning situation, wrapping the performance context with resources and support to take a performance experience and turn it into a learning experience.
Most of our formal learning involves what IBM termed ‘work-apart’ learning, something that happens away from your regular job. And most training and online learning are just that, separated from work. We artificially create contexts that mimic the workplace in most of our learning. And there are occasionally good reasons to do that, like handling multiple people and when failure can be costly or expensive.
Now, however, when we can bring digital technology wherever we are, we can use our real work to be the base of the learning experience. We don’t need an external context, we’re in one! We can provide concepts, examples, and feedback around real contextualized practice. Or, we can add a layer to performance support that educates, not just supports, as Gloria Gery had proposed (but is still to be seen).
And, if the work context is using the desktop, then mobile isn’t necessarily a sensible solution. However, on those increasing circumstances when we’re on a site visit, meeting, at an event, and generally away from our desks, mlearning as I’m construing it here makes sense.
I don’t want to discount the value of elearning on mobile devices, particularly on tablets (where I have argued that the intimacy may have uniquely beneficial impacts), but I do think we shouldn’t consider context-free courses on a small device as anything other than just elearning. So, the question I’m wrestling with is whether mlearning includes mobile performance support, informal, etc, or do we want a separate term for that? But I kinda do want to keep mlearning from not meaning ‘courses on a phone (or tablet)’. What say you?
Living with Complexity
Don Norman (disclaimer, my PhD advisor and mentor) has had a string of important books, starting with his stellar Design of Everyday Things (tops my ‘recommended books’ list for designers). His latest, Living with Complexity, is not as landmark a book as that, but it has some very astute thinking to present.
The book, as the title implies, is largely about how complexity isn’t bad, it’s necessary, and the real issue is about designing to manage it. We want powerful systems to accomplish meaningful goals, and he makes the case that this naturally requires complexity, either at the front end or at the back end. Complexity at the front end offers powerful choice at the tradeoff of comprehensibility, which we often want. Complexity at the back end can seem like magic, but offers more opportunity for things to go wrong catastrophically.
Good design is naturally the solution. He suggests that good design makes complexity usable, and bad design makes complexity frustrating. And he makes a strong point that it’s now about services.
He goes beyond product design in detailing how you really aren’t designing just a product, but an experience, and that it takes a system to create an experience. Using Apple’s iPod, he points out how simplifying the purchasing (backend: lining up publishers to allow downloading individual titles for a simple fee) and downloading music (instead of converting files and storing in special folders) made a device that could carry a lot of music in a small package.
He goes deeper into service design, using the examples of waiting in lines (I now know why immigration in SFO can be so frustrating!). He finally gets to coverage of recommendations for improvements, including signifying (making affordances perceivable), checklists, and job aids (over courses). His focus is on tapping into how our minds work, and aligning tools with them. He covers both sides, including what designers should do differently, and what ‘consumers’ can do. He also covers some of the mismatches between design and consumers, going beyond the design to the overall system.
Overall, while seemingly not as well structured as previous books, this book offers some advanced thinking into design that will benefit those looking to take a bigger picture. Feeling more like a collection rather than a coherent narrative, each of the elements is related and there are important insights in each section. Recommended for the advanced designer.
Engagement, people!
I’m working on a project with a partner, and have this really sharp ID working with me. My role is to be guiding the design, not doing it, and it’s working well. The thing I see, however, is emblematic of what I’m seeing much more broadly: the dissociation between the designer and the learning experience.
Ok, so not many ID theorists are talking about the emotional engagement. Keller and his ARCS model is really the only one. And some folks are touting it for elearning. Michael Allen and his mantra of “no more boring elearning” has been at the forefront for a long time. Julie Dirksen covers it in her recent book, and it’s also implicit in Cathy Moore’s Action Mapping & Roger Schank’s Goal-Based Scenarios. Yet somehow the message isn’t getting through.
The output, however, is at arm’s distance from the learner. It’s got comprehensive coverage. It’s got stories, and animations (I’m having some effect :), but they’re so abstract. So overwritten. So impersonal. It’s not the ID’s fault. Where, in most programs in ID, in most settings, do you see a focus on learner experience? Not clicky-clicky bling bling, as Cammy Bean so aptly coined it, but really engaging learning. It’s harder to find than you think.
There are several important components:
Making it meaningful: focus on changes that will impact the workplace and help convey to the learner that this is real and really needed. If it’s not tied to impacting a business metric, it’s probably not the right topic.
Making it personal: this includes several things. One is writing like you’re talking to the person. Another is having them connect it to their own practices, either retroactively or proactively. Give them an assignment about what to do in the workplace that they bring back.
Making it visceral: this means introducing and using examples that go beneath the merely informative, and tap into basic instincts. Learners should be connected in a very emotional way, using fear or empathy or other hook that appeals directly to their personal needs in ways that cause them to resonate in their core.
Minimalizing: going through and slashing your verbiage. Most elearning is grossly overwritten, and can be trimmed at least 40%, and usually can be trimmed down 60% or more. You want to use rich media (I’m pushing graphic novel formats in the project) and animations, but much less prose and production than you think you need.
Putting it into practice: this means having the learner perform the way they’ll need to perform outside the learning experience. Get them making the decisions in practice that you want in the workplace. It’s not about knowing, it’s about doing. Until they can’t get it wrong.
Making it flow: think about not just the individual bits, but also the segue between them. What’s the emotional trajectory the learner goes through? How are they intrigued, and how do we lead them from apathy and anxiety to motivation and confidence?
These are the top level categories, but they map out into more practices. And you should be working on these in your teams. And I can state from experience that just workshops by themselves aren’t sufficient, and what really helps are an exposure to the principles and the practice, then feedback on a series of attempts until satisfied that the principles have been internalized in the practice. Please, go beyond content, and get into real experience design. Systematically, reliably, and repeatedly. For your learners, and for the industry. We need to lift our game.
Bob Pike #ASTDMENA Keynote Mindmap
Bob Pike launched the third and final day of ASTD’s Middle East and North Africa event with a keynote that took some well-established principles of good learning design and put his own unique and engaging spin on them. Along the way he discussed learning styles (in a different phrase) and generations. And he certainly practices what he preaches.
Refining Designing
A couple of months ago, I posted on thinking about designing, calling for designing ‘backwards and forwards’. And it’s continued to percolate, rightly or wrongly.
As I originally structured it, you worked backwards (1) from the ultimate performance you need to put information in the head, and in the world, and then designed forward (2) the combined learning experience, and the performance resource. While the HPT movement thinks about this as well (they definitely talk about whether it should be a learning or performance support solution; I don’t know but assume they will do a mix if needed). Which I don’t disagree with, but I realized I needed to address one issue.
It occurred to me that when you design your resource(s), that has to happen first. If there are resources, they should be included in the learning experience. That is, you want to provide practice with the resources as part of the learning experience to develop the performer’s ability to use the resources in the performance situation.
Thus, I’ve ended up redesigning it such that performance resource(s) influence the learning experience design (3), and are available in the learning experience as well as in the performance environment. It’s more complex, but more accurately captures the types of thinking we need to have as designers. We need to create what’s in the world and then prepare what’s in the head to accommodate the new performance environment.
Which, of course, may actually need to be iterative. As Atul Gawande points out in his book, his checklists were rigorously trailed and refined. That sort of evaluation and revision should be part of our ongoing processes too. We shouldn’t assume we’ll get it perfect the first time. And the existing environment prior to our intervention will also factor into our resource and experience design.
That said, does this conceptualization help? I’m trying to find ways to represent design that helps reduce our overemphasis on all training being about trying to put everything ‘in the head’, and this, combined with my earlier thoughts on learning experience design, is part of my ongoing effort. If, however, it’s either too confusing, or already common knowledge, I need to work more. Feedback?
Vale David Jonassen
David Jonassen passed away on Sunday. He had not only a big impact on the field of computers for learning, but also on learning itself. And he was a truly nice person.
I had early on been a fan of his work, his writing on computers as cognitive tools was insightful. He resisted the notion of teaching computing, and instead saw computers as mind tools, enablers of thinking. He was widely and rightly regarded as an influential innovator for this work.
I also regularly lauded his work on problem-solving. The one notion that really resonated was that the problems we give to kids in schools (and too often to adults in training) bear little resemblance to the problems they’ll face outside. He did deep work on problem-solving that more should pay attention to. He demonstrated that you could get almost as good a performance on standard tests using meaningful problems, and you got much better results on problem-solving skills (21st century skills) as well. I continue to apply his principles in my learning design strategies.
I had the opportunity to meet him face to face at a conference on learning in organizations. While I was rapt in his presentation, somehow it didn’t work for the audience as a whole, a shame. Still, I had the opportunity to finally talk to him, and it was a real pleasure. He was humble, thoughtful, and really willing to engage. I subsequently shared a stage with him when he presented virtually to a conference I was at live, and was thrilled to have him mention he was using my game design book in one of his classes.
He contributed greatly to my understanding, and to the field as a whole. He will be missed.
Designing Backward and Forward
At the recent DevLearn, several of us gathered together in a Junto to talk about issues we felt were becoming important for our field. After a mobile learning panel I realized that, just as mlearning makes it too easy to think about ‘courses on a phone’, I worry that ‘learning experience design’ (a term I’ve championed) may keep us focused on courses rather than exploring the full range of options including performance support and eCommunity.
So I began thinking about performance experience design as a way to keep us focused on designing solutions to performance needs in the organization. It’s not just about what’s in our heads, but as we realize that our brains are good at certain things and not others, we need to think about a distributed cognition solution, looking at how resources can be ‘in the world’ as well as in others’ heads.
The next morning in the shower (a great place for thinking :), it occurred to me that what is needed is a design process before we start designing the solution. To complement Kahnemann’s Thinking Fast and Slow (an inspiration for my thoughts on designing for how we really think and learn), I thought of designing backward and forward. Let me try to make that concrete.
What I’m talking about is starting with a vision of what performance would look like in an ideal world, working backward to what can be in the world, and what needs to be in the head. We want to minimize the latter. I want to respect our humanity in a way, allowing us to (choose to) do the things we do well, and letting technology take on the things we don’t want to do.
In my mind, the focus should be on what decisions learners should be making at this point, not what rote things we’re expecting them to do. If it’s rote, we’re liable to be bad at it. Give us checklists, or automate it!
From there, we can design forward to create those resources, or make them accessible (e.g. if they’re people). And we can design the ‘in the head’ experience as well, and now’s the time for learning experience design, with a focus on developing our ability to make those decisions, and where to find the resources when we need them. The goal is to end up designing a full performance solution where we think about the humans in context, not as merely a thinking box.
It naturally includes design that still reflects my view about activity-centered learning (which I’m increasingly convinced is grounded in cognitive research). Engaging emotion, distributed across platforms and time, using a richer suite of tools than just content delivery and tests. And it will require using something like Michael Allen’s Successive Approximation Model perhaps, recognizing the need to iterate.
I wanted to term this performance experience design, and then as several members workshopped this with me, I thought we should just call it performance design (at least externally, to stakeholders not in our field, we can call it performance experience design for ourselves). And we can talk about learning experience design within this, as well as information design, and social networks, and…
It’s really not much more than what HPT would involve, e.g. the prior consideration of what the problem is, but it’s very focused on reducing what’s in the head, including emotion in the learning when it’s developed, using social resources as well as performance support, etc. I think this has the opportunity to help us focus more broadly in our solution space, make us more relevant to the organization, and scaffold us past many of our typical limitations in approach. What do you think?