A few recent blog posts have listed elements of better learning, and I’m pleased to see that the elements they talk about are ones I’ve previously touted in my white paper “The Seven Step Program” (PDF) for better elearning design. These are the same principles that I talk about in my conference presentations on designing for the way people really learn.

Karl Kapp talks about using stories in training after hearing Stephen Denning talk about stories in business. (I’ve read Stephen, but not heard him.) Karl reiterates some of my points about portraying the consequences of not having the knowledge as a way to motivate the learner, and talks about reconnecting the learner back into the world at the end, but there is some great value from taking the perspective of story rather than learning.

Clive Shepherd points to 10 facts about learning that include a number of my points as well and some other great ones. He talks about it being meaningful to the learner, about prior knowledge, about relevant practice, and stories as well. A recommended read!

Just for the sake of completeness, Donald Clark has a list of ten learning facts with very little overlap, but important stuff to know.  I think his link of semantic to text and episodic to visual is misguided, but otherwise there’re some good points, for example “learn by doing”.

Check it out!

This month’s Learning Circuit’s Blog Big Question of the Month is: Do we design learning different for digital natives? My short answer is no, but let me elaborate, as I’ve gone off on this in various places but not here (as far as I can see), and I think there’s something importantly wrong going on here

Let’s start with the hypothesis: that these digital ‘natives’ are fundamentally different than us – they’re immersed in a digital world, are better multi-taskers, and need more immersive and engaging learning environments.

My take is a twist on this. The old ways of learning are wrong for everyone; the instructivist model of tell & test doesn’t work for the new generation any more than it did for the old one! It was designed for industrial efficiency in delivery, and wasn’t worried about effectiveness as it was really a filter to higher-learning for those who *could* learn in this way.

So we do need to do new learning design, immersive and engaging, but for everyone, as it brings in the elements we’ve lost. We used to have apprenticeships, and we’ve gone away from this. We need to get back to contextualized task performance with learning layered on, for everyone! No wasted time, no dull and plodding content push, but instead meaningful action and appropriate information nuggets.

Look, the differences in this new generation are more attitudinal than mental skill set. Ask any mother about multi-tasking! It’s not about catering to them, it’s about the best learning for everyone.

Stefan Sagmeister’s a renowned designer, and gave us a talk about what he’s learned and how it’s influenced his design. Or rather, more how what he’s learned has driven a number of design projects. He started with the type of stuff his studio does: music business design (a music building flexible logo approach), socially responsible design (helping TrueMajority.org demonstrate Pentagon spending in context, with creative approaches including the pig car train and the topsy-turvy bus), and corporate design (an embossed organic hierarchy, e.g. flowers, as a vehicle for different lighting treatments to illustrate a lighting company corporate report).

The second part of his talk started with talking about how creative organizations use reflection to maintain innovation. This was an interesting contrast to a discussion in the first day of the Learning Management Colloquium where Lance was arguing with a audience member about whether reflection was necessary (!?!). Obviously, I’m all for it; in times of increasing change, execution of established patterns won’t help, and you’ll need to innovate, and reflection is a component of that.

From his reflections, he had a list of statements or mantras that he then had used as the basis for a number of commissioned works with a wide variety of representations, from words created out of a variety of materials to huge manifestations of the prose. There was quite a variety, some of them seeming to overlap a bit in the content of the phrases, and sometimes in the approach taken. Some were very clever plays, however, on the concepts. A billboard that faded illustrated letting go of issues, and a visual web that you got ‘tangled in’ as you passed by reflected the problems of lying.

Not specifically about learning, the issues of creativity and reflection were valuable and inspirational. My last mind map, at least for this conference:

I’m working on a very interesting project right now, allowing me to partner with a variety of expertises (game design, visual design, content area expert, technical implementation, etc). We’ve come together to develop an integrating scenario for some learning. Interestingly, we started off with a bit of the ‘blind men and the elephant‘, each bringing in our own notions of what we were focusing on first (e.g. me wanting to start with the learning objectives and the expert saying he couldn’t provide objectives ’til he knew what the scenario would be like).

We worked on this finally through some ‘show and tell’, and that helped a lot. However, there is a principle that I wanted us as a team to adopt, and that was creating and sharing, early and often, interim representations of our thinking. What I mean here are ways of capturing thoughts, whether diagrams (me, use diagrams to capture models? :), mockups, tables, what have you.

I’d emphasized this early, but when someone shared one, I publicly lauded it and suggested that we continue to work towards creating those, getting real buy in since this one had helped. We’ve created a wiki site that we’ll store documents, and hopefully creatively create some of the necessary representations. Naturally, I’ve already been drawing diagrams on the boards (and creating them again in OmniGraffle for sharing). Others have created powerpoint diagrams, flash mockups, or captured in documents.

In a variety of forms of design they talk about ‘design rationale‘, capturing the decisions along the way so you don’t have to revisit them, just review them. These interim representations, aggregated, help capture some of that, but also help every stay on the same page. When someone has a way they’re thinking about something, representing and sharing helps everyone understand and accept or constructively critique, to help remove the blinders.

This is one of the heuristics I’ve found useful in design, and recommend it to you. Sharing design tips is another idea I laud, so got any of your own?

There’s an interesting article on Apple’s design process at BusinessWeek (no, I don’t read it; I learned about it somewhere else :). Now, I’ve taken a long look at design over the years from a lot of perspectives, partly because I taught interface design for a while, but mostly because I want to know how to execute good design in general (and how to support it). I’ve similarly looked at what makes effective learning, what makes engaging experiences, etc. And design’s fun!

Along the way, I looked at graphic design, instructional design, architectural design, industrial design, etc, and design in domains like writing, comics, etc. Design’s interesting, in that you’re trying to explore a potentially vast space of possible solutions, and you don’t want to miss any areas of the overall space in case you miss out on a great solution. We tend to prematurely converge, bringing in subconscious constraints from our cognitive limitations like functional fixedness, set effects, etc. So, what we look for are ways to help keep us be highly divergent before we get convergent.

Across disciplines, you see repeated effort to do this. Brainstorming is of course common. An approach I knew a small interface design house used was to have to parallel teams working separately on a design before choosing one to develop further, and in Apple’s approach we see a much bigger version thereof.  Egoless design (sharing and being open to constructive feedback), no-limits design (what would you do if you had magic), kitchen-sink design (look at what others have done; as far as your lawyers will let you, plagiarize), etc, are a few of the rubrics I came up with to help facilitate thinking out of the box. They are all tricks to help widely populate the design space. Systematic creativity is not, in fact, an oxymoron, but the result of the fact that certain processes increase the likelihood of the best solution (yes, it’s probabilistic).

Apple’s approaches of the multiple solutions, and the parallel meetings really do help partner systematicity with creativity in demonstrably effective ways. There are interesting lessons here. Design is a key component of the ability to continue to innovate, which is a critical survival skill, even more so going forward. Design on!

In an asynchronous ‘interview’, I was prompted to provide examples of elearning I liked. It was an odd list, with games, animations, etc, but one which I wanted to mention is Clive Shepherd’s 60 Minute Master’s (used to be 30 minutes, but it got longer ;). (Disclaimer, I, among others, contributed to the original wiki used to generate it.) I found an aberration requiring an enrollment key which he’s kindly removed, so now all you have to do is register (I haven’t received any unsolicited email yet ;).

This is a great service, as it’s designed not for the instructional designer (though many could benefit), but instead to be a quick course for SMEs to learn enough to be viable rapid elearning partners. It’s been done as a public service, yet it’s got an appropriate amount of polish, and some pretty good illustrations.

I’m, of course, thrilled to see them talk about hooking in the emotions at the beginning, providing guidance for augmenting and streamlining information presentation, about making meaningful practice, and about wrapping up. I recommend those who are developing online learning to have a look!

Cammy Bean is having an interesting dialog with John Curry on whether you need to know the underlying theories of ISD to do effective design. He’s revising his thinking on whether theory is useful, having initially come from that viewpoint. He says:

“Theoretical instructional design needs to mirror practical instructional design more. And when it does, and as our field shifts to more designers-by-assignment, then we’ll be on to something important.”

Cammy’s view is:

“I’ve heard of some of these theories and theoreticians. I’ve even read about some of them. I actually have some books on my shelf that cover these topics. Admittedly, I may not have read all of the books. Do you think it matters?”

Well, here’s my response. I don’t think you need to know all the different theories, but you do need to know the deeper implications for design. If you don’t understand from Spiro’s Cognitive Flexibility Theory when and why multiple concept representations are useful, you might miss helping your learners to comprehend and apply the principle. If you haven’t seen the intersection of Schoenfeld’s work as captured in Cognitive Apprenticeship with Sweller’s Cognitive Load theory, your examples might miss essential components in linking the concept to the context.

I don’t think you need them all, as there’s considerable overlap, but you do need an exposure to at least a ‘reader’s digest’ approach (not to mischaracterize the work, but I like Michael Allen’s Guide to eLearning as such, at least specific to elearning; or my own PDF, though overly simplified).  Of course, you have to find a good approach that does integrate the nuances, and I’m not confident any one is really sufficient, and you do really need to know in some depth how the mind learns to make smart inferences in the ‘gaps’.  You don’t have to read Vygotsky in the original Russian, but what you can not do, and I see all too often, is follow a cookie-cutter approach which says “I have to have an introduction, concept, example, …”, and then write one of each without understanding what are the key principles behind each of those elements.

The benefit of the Master’s is the chance to get to know the theories (depending on the program and instructor). The pedagogy for the course should include applying the theories to pragmatic design, not just reciting back the contents (I used to use RFP’s asking for designs or redesigns using the theories). It’s not the only way, but being familiar enough with the underlying principles to be able to adapt the design to match the circumstances is important. What I believe doesn’t work are ad hoc approaches based upon ‘experience’ and feedback. Learners don’t necessarily know what’s best for them versus what really works, so you need more than level 1 feedback.

Note that Cammy is a ‘reflective practitioner’ to use Schön’s term, as she reads and reflects on what she does. That’s why she’s effectively done her own ‘masters’ in learning/ISD. So, I’m not comfortable with trusting experience over time to yield competent results, I think it takes someone being an ongoing learner. That’s easier in a well-designed program, though the caveat is that all programs are not necessarily well-designed.

And I realize that there are pragmatic constraints, but I trust someone who understands the roles of the elements to make a better judgment about how to achieve the goal on limited resources rather than someone who’s not understanding the deeper principles. If your learning matters, that is. But if it doesn’t, why bother?