It’s a continuing phenomenon (and a cliche’) that we use new technologies as we used their predecessors, so the first television was people standing in front of microphones, performing. Does this have to be true? Can we, on principle, advance beyond? I’d like to suggest that the answer, at least sometimes, is yes.

I’ve previously talked about ‘affordances‘, for mobile and virtual worlds (at least implicitly, for the latter). Elliot Masie just raised the issue (strange he doesn’t provide a useful URL) for virtual worlds (only a year behind the times ;), saying we should not get carried away with hype, and I agree. The point being that technologies have certain inherent capabilities they support, though we may discover new hidden affordances. I’d like to suggest two things:

First, that we can on principle determine what learning affordances a technology has, and assess it’s utility. Sure, there might be a bit of the ‘Hawthorne effect‘ (and we should consider deliberately exploiting that), but we also should be direct.

Second, we should be looking at the capabilities we don’t have, and imagine how we might achieve them.

As I’ve mentioned before, our limits are no longer technological. So let us dream what we want, and make it so!

I’ve written in the past about Pine & Gilmore’s Experience Economy, enough so that I apparently got on their radar. As a consequence, I was contacted by Bob Dean, who’s VP of Learning & Talent Development at Heidrick & Struggles. He shares my passion for learning, with an impressive track record in industry, and was so taken with the implications of the Experience Economy for learning that he became certified in the models and principles thereof.

It’s an intriguing proposition. Certainly, I’m a fan of the role of experience in learning, because as I’ve argued, Engaging Learning is about how to design engaging and effective learning experiences. Or, rather, meaningful practice, but I’ve also argued for wrapping learning events with preparation and follow-up to make the learning experience optimally effective (which is why I’m so excited about mobile learning), and the need for using organizational change to successfully implement elearning. Among other things.

Bob pointed me to The Six Disciplines of Breakthrough Learning, and provided a synopsis. I could see why it caught his attention when the second discipline is to design the complete experience! The other disciplines are valuable too, in particular focusing on achieving real business outcomes, as well as the afore-mentioned follow-through. If I had one complaint, it might be that it appears to focus on training and not include performance support, though I haven’t read it completely. Of course, major organizational skill shifts will require more than just job aids or updates.

I’m fascinated that Bob sees experience principles as relevant for learning, and would have to agree. I think that when we hear that the total customer experience is the new business differentiator, it does make sense for our learning, too. Certainly if we want it to stick. I’m of course interested in how technology can facilitate the total experience, have lots of cognitively-based principles that we’re largely missing, and that I’d love to implement. Your thoughts?

Because my wife and kids are at day camp all week, I’ve been pitching in on cooking, and it’s reminded me of one of my favorite ‘challenges’. I prefer dealing with whatever’s left over in the fridge (make a meal out of what’s sitting around) to actually going out and shopping. Even when I have to go shopping, I prefer to pick up some things I want to figure out how to make go together rather than knowing how they’ll go together. Not always, but, in general, I don’t like measurements, and I like taking more than one recipe and picking the best parts out of each (which, BTW, did not work for Hot and Sour Soup, and is why I do not bake).

Cooking is my creative outlet, aside from my passion/work/vocation/avocation, which is learning technology. Using principles of flavor combination (as a graduate student, someone turned me on to Elisabeth Rozin’s Flavor Principle cookbook), I feel pretty comfortable taking ingredients and turning them into various cuisines such as Mexican, Cajun, Thai, etc (ok, I have a predilection for spicy food).

There’s a learning principle here, however. It’s about having models, frameworks, that you can use to guide your solution seeking. I do it in cooking, and I do it in solving interesting learning technology problems (and I enjoy both). Having a suite of useful models makes it easier to deal with uncertain situations. Which is why, I think, that I love challenges where someone says “we have this really tough problem that we can’t solve”. I’ve had a recent spate of fun challenges where I’ve come in and been able to provide useful feedback by integrating models to provide tailored solutions. Following existing processes wouldn’t work, but by taking principled approaches and adapting them to pragmatic contexts, unique and successful solutions could be found.

This drives at least one of my beliefs about curriculum goals for the new era: systems-thinking. You need to be able to reason in terms of models. And experience with more models, and deliberately trying to map them across domains, can build the sort of flexible thinking that drives innovation. When I looked at design a number of years ago, what I found were models that talked about exploring outside the normal design solution space, and ones that talked about melding two different approaches together. You do that by having a quiver of approaches to hand, and being systematically creative. And that’s not an oxymoron.

So, do, please, think in terms of models, promote model-based thinking, and have fun with thinking outside of the box.

As you’ve no doubt figured out, I’m big on visuals. Someone pointed me to this site, and I like how he talks about the role models can play. He’s made a business out of creating diagrams to capture understandings and share them. Similar work is done by Dave Gray’s XPLANE, and (more with imagery than with diagrams) Eileen Clegg’s Visual Insight.

The goal is to understand someone’s models, and make them explicit in a way that captures understanding and shares it to support conversation, modification, and closure. I make diagrams myself (as I’ve mentioned before) as a way to understand things, and use them to solve problems. The visual pattern-matching channel is very powerful.

I’ve argued that we don’t use conceptual models enough in elearning, and that we should be using them to communicate the concept, show their use in examples, and highlight their predictions in practice feedback. Their practical use in communication and problem-solving also shouldn’t be overlooked!

It’s really easy to posit a conspiracy. All you need is a problem, and a clear beneficiary to the problem not being solved. Let me demonstrate:

I stay in a lot of hotels (one of the dubious benefits of what I do). And, you’ll be pleased to hear, I take showers. You don’t want to bring liquids so the hotels are kind enough to provide shampoo and conditioner. The final piece of the setup is that we all get older (if we’re lucky), and that means decreasing manual dexterity and visual acuity.

Which brings up the problem of hair care products in small bottles, with smooth caps. You get into the shower, and you can’t open the bottles with wet hands. If you’ve read Don Norman’s Design of Everyday Things (and if you design for people, you should; it’s an easy read, and you won’t look at the world in the same way), you know that you could redesign the bottle caps to facilitate opening with wet hands (ridges, non-symmetrical shapes, etc). But they don’t. So, you use your teeth (unless you happened to loosen the cap before you get in the shower, very unlikely unless you do this alot).

Who benefits? Dentists! You ruin your teeth opening the bottle, and have to see the dentist. So clearly they’re sponsoring this ongoing assault.

And it continues. Who is responsible for bad computer interfaces? 3M, the maker of post-its. The only cure for a bad interface is to put up a post-it note with the way around the problem. I’m sure they’re sponsoring companies to continue to come up with bad interfaces.

The one I can’t figure out is back to the hair-care bottles. They make the print small, and the contents indistinguishable, so you can’t figure out which one you need to use. It’d be easy, making the shampoo clear and the conditioner opaque, using large print. So, all I need to do is figure out who benefits…

So it goes. (RIP Kurt Vonnegut)

This month’s Learning Circuit’s Big Question is: “PowerPoint – What is Appropriate, When and Why?“. Tony Karrer’s collected some nice articles about the underlying cognitive issues, and it jives with what I’ve seen. The big complaints are too much text on the screen, too many bullet points, and overloaded graphics. That’s not a surprise. This also clearly indicates to me it’s about bad use of PowerPoint, not the tool itself.

I took a two-day ‘presentation course’, after several years of university teaching and several corporate presentations, and recall the instructions that it’s about you, not the slides, and you shouldn’t have slides except when you’re showing a diagram. That’s similarly indicated by others. However, I think you need to look at the broader context of what sort of talk it is, who the audience is, and what the setting is. I mostly talk to practitioners at different levels. In my mind, a keynote is very different from a conference session from a board presentation from a customer presentation from a… PowerPoint will have different roles.

From this point on, I’m going to talk about useful information communication: stuff that helps you make decisions. This is not a keynote, nor even a customer presentation, but more like a conference or board presentation or a training session.
Speaking of which, conference organizers ask for your slides beforehand, and ask for handouts. As an attendee, I like having handouts to make notes on. And sometimes I even try to take a copy of slides for a presentation I can’t attend, when there’s another presentation at the same time I also want to attend and I haven’t yet mastered being in two places at once (though sometimes my clients insist that I must).

As a reality check, I went back and looked at my own PowerPoint presentations (conference presentations), and I’m not squeaky clean. I do have lots of graphics (I peg the ‘visual’ and ‘conceptual’ meters; see my Models page), but I also have bullet points. But that’s deliberate.

There’re several reasons. As indicated above, I like to have a place to take notes, and want to provide the same for my audience. Yes, they could have a pad of paper, but I like providing the slides with generous white space for them to take notes. I generally don’t put a lot of prose on those slides, but only telegraphic bits that keep me from forgetting an important point and that I elaborate on, not reciting against. Instead, a reminder both for me and the audience when they come back to the slides (I know that at least *some* do).

Also, I know that one way to keep people from being able to fully interpret what you’ve presented unless they attend is to not have all the prose on the slide. So the ‘key phrases’ approach is also a way to induce people to actually stick around and find out what they unpack to (without that extra presentation, it’s pretty hard to know what’s coming there, and again that’s deliberate). It also induces extra cognitive processing, to map what I say to the phrase, which is good for the right audience.

I also understand the realities of most presentation situations: that people’s attention can be distracted by someone coming in the room, by an email or text message, by a colleague’s wry comment, whatever. Having the structure of the handout and the slides helps them reconnect. Also, I do add extra references and tools to the end of the handout when appropriate to support taking action on the presentation. And, as part of the emotional as well as cognitive component, I like context-setting through images that elaborate prose, and quotes that pithily indicate some of the background thinking.

So, my answer to the question is that what’s appropriate are diagrams, quotes, images, and limited bullet point lists, in that order, for cognitive and emotional value. My presentations may not be perfect, but I strive to provide long-lasting value (not immediate appeal), just as in everything else I do.