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Clark Quinn’s Learnings about Learning

A game? Who says?

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I just reviewed a paper submitted to a journal (one way to stay in touch with the latest developments), and all along they were doing research on the cognitive and motivational relationships in the game. They claimed it was a game, and proceeded on that assumption.  And then the truth came out.

When designing and evaluating learning experiences, you really want to go beyond whether it’s effective or easy to use, and decide whether it’s engaging.  Yes, you absolutely need to test usability first (if there’s a problem with the learning outcomes, is it the pedagogy or the interaction?), and then learning effectiveness. But ultimately, if you want it optimally tuned for success, pitched at the optimal learning level using meaningful activities, it should feel like a game.  The business case is that the effectiveness will be optimized, and the tuning process to get there is less than you think (if you’re doing it right).  And the only real way to test it is subjectively: do the players think it’s a game.

If you create a learning experience and call it game, but your learners don’t think it is, you undermine their motivation and your credibility.  It can be relative (e.g. better than regular learning) as you might not have the resources to compete with commercial games, but it ought to be better than having to sit through a page turner, or you’ve failed.

There are systematic ways to design games that achieve both meaningful engagement and effective education practice. Heck, I wrote a whole  book  on the topic.  It’s not magic, and while it requires tuning, it’s doable. And, as  I’ve stated before:  you can’t say it’s a game, only your players can tell you that.

So here were these folks doing research on a ‘game’. The punchline: “students, who started playing the game with high enthusiasm, started complaining after a short while, ‘this is not a game’, and stopped gameplay”.  Fail.

Seriously, if you’re going to make a game, make it demonstrably fun. Or it’s not a game, whether you say so or not.

Emergent & Semantic Learning

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The last of the thoughts still percolating in my brain from #mlearncon finally emerged when I sat down to create a diagram to capture my thinking (one way I try to understand things is to write about them, but I also frequently diagram them to help me map the emerging conceptual relationships into spatial relationships).

Semantic and Emergent rules for contentWhat I was thinking about was how to distinguish between emergent opportunities for driving learning experiences, and semantic ones.  When we built the Intellectricity© system, we had a batch of rules that guided how we were sequencing the content, based upon research on learning (rather than hardwiring paths, which is what we mostly do now).  We didn’t prescribe, we recommended, so learners could choose something else, e.g. the next best, or browse to what they wanted.  As a consequence, we also could have a machine learning component that would troll the outcomes, and improve the system over time.

And that’s the principle here, where mainstream systems are now capable of doing similar things.  What you see here are semantic rules (made up ones), explicitly making recommendations, ideally grounded in what’s empirically demonstrated in research.  In places where research doesn’t stipulate, you could also make principled recommendations based upon the best theory.  These would recommend objects to be pulled from a pool or cloud of available content.

However, as you track outcomes, e.g. success on practice, and start looking at the results by doing data analytics, you can start trolling for emergent patterns (again, made up).  Here we might find confirmation (or the converse!) of the empirical rules, as well as potentially  new patterns that we may be able to label semantically, and even perhaps some that would be new.  Which helps explain the growing interest in analytics.  And, if you’re doing this across massive populations of learners, as is possible across institutions, or with really big organizations, you’re talking the ‘big data’ phenomena that will provide the necessary quantities to start generating lots of these outcomes.

Another possibility is to specifically set up situations where you randomly trial a couple alternatives that are known research questions, and use this data opportunity to conduct your experiments. This way we can advance our learning more quickly using our own hypotheses, while we look for emergent information as well.

Until the new patterns emerge, I recommend adapting on the basis of what we know, but simultaneously you should be trolling for opportunities to answer questions that emerge as you design, and look for emergent patterns as well.  We have the capability (ok, so we had it over a decade ago, but now the capability is on tap in mainstream solutions, not just bespoke systems), so now we need the will.  This is the benefit of thinking about content as systems – models and architectures – not just as unitary files.  Are you ready?

 

An integrating design?

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In a panel at #mlearncon, we were asked how instructional designers could accommodate mobile.  Now, I believe that we really haven’t got our minds around a learning experience distributed across time, which our minds really require.  I also think we still mistakenly think about performance support as separate from formal learning, but we don’t have a good way to integrate them.

I’ve advocated that we consider learning experience design, but increasingly I think we need performance experience design, where we look at the overall performance, and figure out what needs to be in the head, what needs to be in the world, and design them concurrently.  That is, we look at what the person knows how to do, and what should be in their head, and what can be designed as support.  ADDIE designs courses.  HPT determines whether to do a job aid (the gap is knowledge), or training (the gap is a skill).  I’m not convinced that either really looks at the total integration (and willing to be wrong).

What was triggered in my brain, however, was that social constructivism might be a framework within which we could accomplish this.  By thinking of what activities the learners would be engaged in, and how we’d support that performance with resources and other learners and performers as collaborators when appropriate, we might have a framework.  My take on social constructivism has it looking at what can and should be co-owned by the learner, and how to get the learner there, and it naturally involves resources, other people, and skill development.

So, you’d look at what needs to be done, and think through the performance, and ask what resources (digital and human) would be there with the performer, the gap between your current learner and the performer you’d need, and how to develop an experience to achieve that end state.  The notion is what mental design process designers may need going forward, and what framework provides the overarching framework to support that design process.

It’s very related to my activity framework, which nicely resonates as it very much focuses on what you can do, and resourcing that, but that framework is focused on reframing education to make it skills focused and developing self learning. This would require some additions that I’ll have to ponder further.  But, as always, it’s about getting ideas out there to collect feedback. So, what say you?

Sims as CTA

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I had several great conversations over the course of last week’s #mLearnCon that triggered some interesting thoughts.  Here’s the first:

I was talking with someone charged with important training: nuclear.  We were talking about both the value of sims to support deep practice, and the difficulty in getting the necessary knowledge out of the subject matter expert (SME).  These converged for me in what seemed an interesting way.

First, the best method to get the knowledge out of the heads of SMEs is Cognitive Task Analysis (CTA).  CTA is highly effective, but also very complex.  It requires considerable effort to do the official version.

A different thread was also wrapped up in this.  Not surprisingly, I believe simulation games are the best form of deep practice to help cement skills.  I believe so strongly I wrote a  book  about it ;).

And the cross-pollination: I believe that we’ll be passing on responsibility for defining curricular paths to competency in areas to the associated communities of practice.  Further, I believe we will have collaboratively developed sims as part of that path, where we use wikis to edit the rules of the simulation to keep it up to date.

The integration in this context was to think of having the SMEs collaborate on the design of the sim as a way to make the necessary tacit knowledge explicit. It would make their understanding very concrete, and help ensure that the resulting sim is correct. Of course, they might rebel in terms of exaggerating and basing the practice in fantastic contexts, but it certainly would help focus on meaningful skills instead of rote knowledge.

The barrier is that experts don’t really have access to what they know, so having a concrete activity to ground their experience in practical ways strikes me as a very concrete way to elicit the necessary understandings.  CTA is about detailed processes to get at their tacit knowledge, but perhaps sim design is a more efficient mechanism. It could have tradeoffs, but it seems to disintermediate the process.

OK, so it’s just a wild idea at this time, but I always argue that thinking out loud is valuable, and I try to practice what I preach. What think you?

5 Phrases to Make Mobile Work

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Today I was part of a session at the eLearning Guild’s mLearnCon mlearning conference on Making Mobile Work.  For my session I put my tongue slightly in cheek and suggested that there were 5 phrases you need to master to Make mLearning Work.  Here they are, for your contemplation.

The first one is focused on addressing either or both of yourself or any other folks who aren’t yet behind the movement to mobile:

How does your mobile device make you smarter?

The point being that there are lots of ways we’re all already using mobile to help us perform.  We look up product info while shopping, use calculators to split up the bill, we call folks for information in problem-solving like what to bring home from the grocery store, and we take photos of things we need to remember like hotel room numbers or parking spots.  If you aren’t pushing this envelope, you should be.  And if folks aren’t recognizing the connection between how they help themselves and what the organization could be doing for employees or customers, you should be helping them.

The second one focuses on looking beyond the initial inference from the phrase “mlearning”:

Anything but a course!

Here we’re trying to help our stakeholders (and designers) think beyond the course and think about performance support, informal learning, collaboration, and more.  While it might be about augmenting  a course, it’s more likely to be access to information and people, as well as computational support.  Mobile learning is really mobile performance support and mobile social.

The third key phrase emphasizes taking a strategic approach:

Where’s the business need?

Here we’re emphasizing the ‘where’ and  the ‘business’.  What’s important is thinking about meeting real business needs, with metrics and everything.  What do the folks who are performing away from their desks need?  What small thing could you be doing that would make that activity have a much more positive impact on the bottom line?

The fourth phrase is specifically focused on design:

What’s the least I can do for you?

It’s not about doing everything you can, but instead focusing on the minimal impact to get folks back into the workflow.  Mobile is about the 20% of the features that will meet 80% of the need.  It’s about the least assistance principle.  It’s about elegance and relevance.

From there, we finish by focusing on our providers:

Do you have a mobile solution?

Look, mobile is more than just a tactic, it’s a platform, and you need to recognize it as such. Frankly, if a vendor of an enterprise solution (except, perhaps, for computationally intensive work like 3D rendering and so on) doesn’t  have a mobile solution, I reckon it’s a deal-breaker.  This is where mobile is really the catalyst for change: it’s bringing a full suite of technology support whenever and wherever needed, so we need to start thinking about what a full suite of support is. What is a full performance ecosystem?

So there you have it, the gist of the presentation.  If you master the concepts behind these phrases and employ them judiciously, I do believe you’ll have a better chance of making mlearning work.

BJ Fogg #mLearnCon Keynote Mindmap

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BJ Fogg, known from his work on persuasive technology, talked about making persistent behavior change via tiny habits. Very interesting research with important implications both personally and commercially.

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Taking the step

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A while ago, I wrote an article in eLearnMag, stating that better design doesn’t take longer.  In it, I suggested that while there would be an initial hiccup, eventually better design doesn’t take longer: the analysis process is different, but no less involved, the design process is deeper but results in less overall writing, and of course the development is largely the same.    And I’m interested in exposing what I mean by the hiccup.

What surprised me is that I haven’t seen more movement.  Of course, if you’re a one-person shop, the best  you could probably do is attend a ‘Deeper ID’ workshop.  But if you’re producing content on a reasonable scale, you should realize that there are several reasons you should be taking this on.

Most importantly, it’s for effectiveness.  The learning I see coming out of not only training shops and custom content houses, but also internal units, is just not going to make a difference.  If you’re providing knowledge and a knowledge test, I don’t care how well produced it is, it’s not going to make a difference.  This is core to a unit’s mission, it seems to me.

It’s also a case of “not if, but when” when someone is going to come in with an effective competing approach.  If you can’t do better, you’re going to be irrelevant. If you’re producing for others, your market will be eaten. If you’re producing internally, your job will be outsourced.

Overall, it’s about not just surviving, but thriving.

Yes, the nuances are subtle, and it’s still possible to sell well-produced but not well-designed material, but that can’t last.  People are beginning to wake up to the business importance of effective investments in learning, and the emergence of alternate models (Khan Academy, MOOCs, the list goes on) is showing new ways that will have people debating approaches.  It may take a while, but why not get the jump on it?

And it’s not about just running a workshop. I do those, and like to do them, but I never pretend that they’re going to make as big a difference as could be achieved. They can’t, because of the forgetting curve.  What would make a big difference isn’t much more, however.  It’s about reactivating that knowledge and reapplying.

What I envision (and excuse me if I make this personal, but hey, it’s what I do and have done successfully) is getting to know the design processes beforehand, and customizing the workshop to your workflow: your business, your processes of working with SMEs, your design process, your tools, and representative samples of existing work. Then we run a workshop where we use your examples. Working through the process, exploring the deeper concepts, putting them into practice, and reflecting to cement the learning.  Probably a day.  People have found this valuable in an of itself.

However, I want to take it just a step further. I’ve found that being sent samples of subsequent work and commenting on it in several joint sessions is what makes the real difference.  This reactivates the knowledge, identifies the ongoing mistakes, and gives a chance to remediate them.  This is what makes it stick, and leads to meaningful change.  You have to manage this in a non-threatening way, but that’s doable.

There are more intrusive, higher-overhead ways, but I’m trying to strike a balance between high value and minimal intensiveness to make a pragmatic but successful change.  I’d bet that 90% of the learning being developed could be improved by this approach (which means that 90% of the learning being developed really isn’t a worthwhile investment!).  It seems so obvious, but I’m not seeing the interest in change.  So, what am I missing?

Getting Pragmatic About Informal

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In my post on reconciling informal and informal, I suggested that there are practical things L&D groups can  do about informal learning.  I’ve detected a fair bit of concern amongst L&D folks that this threatens their jobs, and I think that’s misplaced.  Consequently, I want to get a wee bit more specific than what I said then:

  • they can make courses about  how  to use social media better (not everyone knows how to communicate and collaborate  well)
  • share best practices
  • work social media into formal learning to make it easier to facilitate the segue into the workplace
  • provide performance support for social media
  • be facilitating the use of social media
  • unearth good practices in the organization and share them
  • foster discussion

 

I also noted “And, yes, L&D interventions there will be formal in the sense that they‘re applying rigor, but they‘re facilitating emergent  behaviors that they don‘t  own“. And that’s an important point. It’s wrapping support around activities that aren’t content generated by the L&D group. Two things:

  1. the expertise for  much doesn’t reside in the L&D group and it’s time to stop thinking that it all can pass through  the L&D  group (there’s too much, too fast, and the L&D group has to find ways to get more efficient)
  2. there is expertise in the L&D group (or should be) that’s more about process than product and can and should be put into practice.

So, the L&D group has to start facilitating the sharing of information between folks. How can they represent and share their understandings in ways the L&D group can facilitate, not own?  How about ensuring the availability of tools like blogs, micro-blogs, wikis, discussion forums, media file creating/sharing, and profiles, and  helping communities learn to use them?  Here’s a way that L&D groups can partner with IT and add real value via a synergy that benefits the company.

That latter bit, helping them learn to use them is also important.  Not everyone is naturally a good coach or mentor, yet these are valuable roles.  It’s not just producing a course about it, but facilitating a community around  these roles.  There are a lot of myths about what makes brainstorming work, but just putting people in a room isn’t  it.  If you don’t know, find out and disseminate it!  How about even just knowing how to work and play well with others, how to ask for help in ways that will actually get useful responses, supporting needs for blogging, etc.

There are a whole host of valuable activities that L&D groups can engage in besides developing content, and increasingly the resources are likely to be more valuable addressing the facilitation than the design and development.  It’s going to be just too much (by the time it’s codified, it’s irrelevant).  Yes, there’ll still be a role for fixed content (e.g. compliance), but hopefully more and more curricula and content will be crowd-sourced, which increases the likelihood of it’s relevance, timeliness, and accuracy.

Start supporting activity, not controlling it, and you will likely find it liberating, not threatening.

 

Help? Two questions on mobile for you

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In the process of writing a chapter on mobile for an elearning book, the editor took my suggestion for structure and then improved upon it. I’d suggested that we have two additional sections: one on hints and tips, and the others on common mistakes.  His suggestion was to crowd-source the answers.  And I think it’s a good idea, so let me ask for you help, and ask you to respond via comments or to me personally:

  1. What are the hints and tips you’ve found valuable for mlearning?
  2. What are the mlearning mistakes you’ve seen or experienced that you’d recommend others avoid?

I welcome seeing what you come up with!

Design Readings

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Another book on design crossed my radar when  I was at a retreat and in the stack of one of the other guests was Julie Dirksen’s book Design for How People Learn  and  Susan Weinschenk’s  100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People.  This book provides a nice complement to Julie’s, focusing on straight facts about how we process the world.

Dr. Weinschenk’s book systematically goes through categories of important design considerations:

  • How People See
  • How People Read
  • How People Remember
  • How People Think
  • How People Focus Their Attention
  • What Motivates People
  • People Are Social Animals
  • How People Feel
  • People Make Mistakes
  • How People Decide

Under each category are important points, described, buttressed by research, and boiled down into useful guidelines. This includes much of the research I talk about when I discuss deeper Instructional Design, and more.  While it’s written for UI designers mostly, it’s extremely relevant to learning design as well.  And it’s easy reading and reference, illustrated and to-the-point.

There are some really definitive books that people who design for people need to have read or have to hand. This fits into the latter category as does Dirksen’s book, while  Don Norman’s books, e.g.  Design of Everyday Things  fit into the former.  Must knows and must haves.