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Clark Quinn’s Learnings about Learning

Evil Design

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In the mobile ideation session I ran today for some folks, the question came up about good and bad examples of design, and subsequent events reminded me of the topic of not just bad, but evil design. What I mean is design that is crafted to return maximal outcome to the designer, not just at the expense of the user, but even to the discomfort of the user or contrary to their intentions.  Let me cite a few examples.

First, while this has been improved somewhat, the kiosks that <my usual airline> uses to check in had a big yellow ‘continue’ button that you used to indicate you were ready to move on to the next screen. And the first couple of times in an instance it was innocuous, so you got used to using the button comfortably and automatically.  But then, you’d get the opportunity to spend some extra money – nicer seats, extra miles – and the default action, signaled by the big yellow button,was to spend the money.  This could be several hundred dollars! I fortunately didn’t get trapped (I try to get to the airport early), but I wonder how many rushing travelers inadvertently *did* manage to overspend.  I think such a design takes advantage of our cognitive architecture, falling into a pattern, in unconscionable ways.

Then, today, I was driving back to O’Hare airport from the aforementioned engagement. Following my GPS instructions and the signs, I followed the route to the airport.  Now, on the way out there was a required toll, and I drove through and paid the guy (since naturally I didn’t have a pass). The signs on the way back announcing tolls didn’t look noticeably different, and so I didn’t pay too much attention. Imagine my surprise, then, to find a toll payment arrangement requiring either a pass (which of course I didn’t have) or payment by coins.  Which I also didn’t have.  And  the amount was more than the outbound fee, so even if I tried to use change, I likely wouldn’t have enough (who keeps lots of change around these days?).

The cameras no doubt caught me sitting there looking around, then calling for help, then furiously driving on after giving the camera a frustrated glare. Of course there’s a fine if you don’t pay, but there’s no way to pay except through a long URL that’d be hard to get exactly right.  You have seven days, which in one sense is nice, but might cause you to put it off and forget.  Worse, when you do go online, you’d have to known to record the license plate state and number to be able to pay!  And, of course, it’s highly likely in the rush of travel that you’d forget to do this.  This seems designed for the sheer purpose to get more fees.  For example, paying online is more expensive than paying the original fee.  Why can they have a person outbound, and not inbound?  It’s capitalizing on expectations and putting you in circumstances that are likely to maximize your inability to pay in the initial instance.  What’s with that?

It gets worse, by the way. If you didn’t remember (and our brains aren’t good at rote memory) that the site is singular (Xtollway.com) and instead type  Xtollways.com  (a reasonable and even likely mistake), you end up at a site that looks like it can help, but instead seems to have sponsored ads and looks for clicks. If you weren’t paying attention, you could end up giving your credit card to the wrong site, and still not have paid the fine!  I’m surprised such a site can exist and not be shut down!

Our cognitive architecture has some flaws, and these can be exploited by the unscrupulous (c.f. commercial gambling).  It helps to be cognizant of it. It ranges from the designing interface, to ad campaigns, and the whole way companies conduct  business (see the Cluetrain Manifesto).

This is, BTW, at least part of the reason I don’t like gamification, as many game mechanics like adding points tap into human reactions in a way to get them to do things they might not otherwise do.  This *can* be good if it gets them to do things like lose excess weight or quit smoking, but I’d rather tap into intrinsic motivation instead.

While I’m a fan of good design, and there’s a continuum to bad design, I still prefer that to evil design.  How about you?

Layered Learning

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Last week, I posted about a model where a system could provide a sage who looks at the events of your life and provides support.  I want to elaborate that model by looking at it in a different way.

The notion here is that you have events in your life, across the bottom. And you have some learning goals, e.g. to learn about project management, and about running meetings.  You might get some initial content about those two goals, but then let’s focus on developing that learning over time.

The events in your life give you a chance to use them as learning experiences, not just performance opportunities.  If there are not enough in your life, you might have interstitial activities (those in dashed lines), but you can be developed across learning goals abcd, and uvwxyz, both through delivered experiences, and with learning wrapped around real experiences.

Expanding an event into some actionsLet me make that latter clearer.  Say you’ve got some event like project work, and an associated learning goal (e.g. concept ‘d’ in a curricula).  A system could see the calendar entry for the project work and, through tagging or other semantic means, recognize the relationship with learning goal ‘d’.  Then, some relevant activation and concept material might precede the event, an aid could appear during, and either a self-evaluation metric or a connection to a live person could happen afterward.  Delivered, for instance, through mobile devices.

The goal is to use the events in your life as learning opportunities as much as possible (or preferable).  We can also mix in some simulated practice (e.g an alternate reality game) if it’s not occurring at a sufficient rate in real life, but the goal is to match the learning development plan to the rate at which we effectively learn.  And, to be clear, we do not  learn effectively by a one-off knowledge dump and a quiz, as much of what we do actually works out to be.

As I’ve mentioned before, we have the magic, the sufficiently advanced technology Arthur C. Clarke talked about, to hand.  We should start using it to develop us towards our goals in appropriate ways.  The opportunity is there; who’s ready to seize it?

Sage at the Side

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A number of years ago, I wrote an article  (PDF) talking about how we might go beyond our current ‘apart’ learning experiences.  The notion is what I call ‘layered learning’, where we don’t send you away from your life to go attend a learning event, but instead layer it around the events in  your life. This is very much part of what I’ve been calling slow learning, and a recent conversation has catalyzed and crystalized that thought.

A 'personal mentor' model

Think about the sort of ideal learning experience you might have.  As you traverse the ‘rocky road’ of life, imagine having a personal coach who would observe the situation, understand the context of the task and the desired goal, and could provide some aid (from some sack of resources) that could assist you in immediate performance.  Your performance would improve.

Let’s go further. This sage, moreover, could draw from some curricula (learning trajectories) and prepare you beforehand and guide reflection afterward so that real performance event now becomes a learning opportunity as well, helping you understand why  this particular approach makes sense, how to adapt it, and more.  In this way, the sage moves from performance coach to learning mentor.

One step further would be to have learning trajectories not only about the domain (e.g. engineering) but also about quality, management, learning, and more.  So learners could be developed as learners, and as persons, not just as performers.

Now this would be ideal, but individual mentors don’t scale very well.  But here’s the twist: we can build this.  We can have curricula, learning objects, and build a sage via rules that can do this.  Imagine going through your workday with a device (e.g. an app phone or a small tablet) that knows what you’re doing (from your calendar), which triggers content to be served up before, during, and after tasks, that develops you over time.  We can build the tutor,  develop and access the curricula and content, deliver it, track it.

I hope this is clear.  There are other ways to think about this, and I’ll see if I can’t capture them in some way; stay tuned.  The limitations are no longer the technology, the limits are between our ears.  Reckon?

Book Review Pointer

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In case you didn’t see it, eLearn Mag has posted my book review of Mark Warschauer’s insightful book, Learning in the Cloud.  To quote myself:

This is … a well-presented, concise, and documented presentation of just what is needed to make a working classroom, and how technology helps.

As one more teaser, let me provide the closing paragraph:

The ultimate message, however, is that this book is important, even crucial reading. This is a book that every player with a stake in the game needs to read: teachers, administrators, parents, and politicians. And not to put too delicate a point on it, this is what I think should be our next “man in the moon” project; implementing these ideas comprehensively, as a nation. He’s given us the vision, now it is up to us to execute.

I most strongly urge you, if you care about schooling, to read the book, and then promote the message.

Three core foundations for online learning

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The wise Ellen Wagner has a neat post about what should be the ‘ten commandments’ of online learning.  I agree with them, and recommend them to  you.  I have thought about it in a slightly different, but similar frame.

I came up with this as I was trying to suggest what the core value propositions (yeah, I said it, deal with it) of an online offering should be.  And I tried to frame it the way I thought Steve Jobs might:

  • An absolutely killer learning experience
  • We don’t just develop your understanding, we develop you
  • We’re your partner for your success

What I mean by a killer learning experience is one that is engaging and  effective, ie all the principles of Engaging Learning. It’s a pedagogy that’s challenging, meaningful, relevant, tightly coupled, and more. It’s also social, having you learn with others, not just on your own.

Developing the person means not only developing their knowledge of the topic, their degree, but also their success factors. That includes things like helping them develop a portfolio of work, developing skills in working with others, communicating, etc.  In essence, layered on top of the domain knowledge are 21st century skills, which are likely to be the only lasting value you can provide learners (c.f. Father Guido Sarducci’s 5 Minute University).

And finally, it’s about not just providing the content and having the learner sink or swim, but instead actively looking at the learner’s performance, finding ways to scaffold the learning and being attentive to signals of potential trouble.  It’s data-driven adaptivity to the individual learner, coupled optimally with human intervention.  And competency-based, so the learner has clear indications of what they need to do.

We can do this, on a cost-effective basis, and I reckon it’s going to be the only sustainable differentiator to be a successful provider.  The only question then becomes: who’s going to bring it all together?  The market is waiting.

Quinnovation ‘to go’

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The travel schedule is booting up again, and I’ll be hither and yon speaking about this and that for a good part of the coming two months. More specifically:

  • From 2-3 Oct I’ll be running a two day elearning strategy  workshop at Learning 3.0 in Chicago.  If you want to get above the individual tactics and see how the pieces fit together, and work on a plan for you and your org, I hope to see you there.  Then on Tuesday the 4th, I’ll be talking about creating Engaging Learning.
  • Then, on 12 Oct in Laguna Niguel at the CLO Fall Symposium, I’ll be joining with my ITA colleagues Jay Cross and Jane Hart to talk about controversial issues for CLOs.  This will be fun and worthwhile, as we will be aiming at some sacred cows.
  • It’s off to Las Vegas at the beginning of November for DevLearn, where I’ll be running a mobile learning strategy session on the the 1st.  If you want to get beyond just designing a one-off, and look at the broader picture of how to make mobile a part of your solution, it’s the place to be.
  • That’s followed by Learning 2011 in Orlando Nov 6-9, where I’ll be hosting an author session for Designing mLearning.
  • I’m still not done, as I head later that week to DC to speak to the local ASTD chapter with a talk on mobile learning and a social learning workshop.  That latter will talk about both formal and  informal learning, as well as looking at the different tools.
  • And, to cap it off, I’ll be presenting at the Canadian Society for Training & Development’s annual conference in Toronto on Friday the 18th of November, looking forward and more broadly at the role of learning in the organization.

That may seem  like a lot (and it is), but traveling on only one continent will seem easy after this past May-August ;).  I hope to see you at one or more of these learning events!

Cognitive Task Analysis

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While I argue strongly for stepping away more frequently from formally structured learning, not least because we overuse it, there are times when it is crucial.  As naysayers of informal learning like to point out, you wouldn’t want your pilot or heart surgeon to have picked up the task by reading a book. When performance is critical, you really want to understand what the important elements are, whether to train them or  provide support.

A technique for doing that is Cognitive Task Analysis (CTA).  This is not a shortcut, it’s deep in terms of the knowledge elicitation techniques, the analytical task, and the representation of results.  Based in decades of cognitive research, integrating work on mental models, expertise, and more, it provides a mechanism to try to unearth the tacit understanding experts hold. Because experts compile away their knowledge to the point that they no longer have access to it, it is hard to get at this knowledge, and it takes a rigorous process.

While useful for system design, CTA is also valuable for designing performance support, and training.  The deep elicitation process can derive what the task really is, and what should be in the learner’s head and what support can and should be available.  When I talk about the performance ecosystem, particularly for complex tasks, you want just this sort of support to determine what should be distributed across formal learning and performance support.

One of the problems with CTA is that there have been a number of different approaches, and they tend to be buried in academic papers or proprietary processes. The good news is that there’s now a book about CTA, Working Minds, by Beth Crandall, Gary Klein, & Robert Hoffman, academics and practitioners.  It boils down the divergence into a fairly reasonable set of steps, with techniques that can be used at each stage.  The bad news is, of course, that it still is a daunting read, with considerable depth.

If you’ve got performances that absolutely have to be right, you’ll want to do the analysis ala CTA, and use it to decide what really needs to be in training, checklists, etc.  This goes deeper than HPT even, tho’ I think it’s as weak when it comes to the benefits of social learning, but I reckon it’s for expert *performance*, not innovation. That’s another layer.  Still, a valuable tool in the quiver of supporting performance.

Please at least understand what CTA is, and know when you need it. You may not need to be an expert in it, but you should at least be aware.

Meaningful processing

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Sometimes I worry about the myths that are out there about learning.  Ok, to be honest I worry about them a lot. Learning styles, generational differences, digital natives, the list goes on. But one that has personally been surfacing a lot is the type of activity that leads to meaningful learning.  So it’s time for me to lay it out, for the record.

I’ve talked previously about social processing, so I’m going to focus specifically on individual processing.  And, realize, my goals are not the ability to recite rote knowledge, but I’ll even address that. Note, by the way, that there are really two types of knowledge (c.f. Van Merriënboer), the things you need and the complex problems you apply them to.  So, first we’ll start with the knowledge you need, and then the problems you apply them to.

To help folks get knowledge down, memorizing the core facts they’ll draw upon in solving complex problems, the main component necessary is reactivating the knowledge.  You need to match the term with the definition, the model with it’s relationships, etc.  Sheer repetition doesn’t help, even here it’s making choices and getting feedback.

So, for instance, coloring a poster with the associated words doesn’t do the necessary processing, you need to activate the necessary concepts with connections to relevant things.  You need to semantically process the terms again and again.  Elaborating them, putting them in context, applying them to simple problems is necessary.  Flash cards work because they require the association task.  Just exposure doesn’t work, even with testing, it’s discrimination from competing alternatives.

Then we get to the application. And frankly, if you’re not having folks learn things to use  them, why are you bothering? That’s why I like Cathy Moore’s Action Mapping, she works backwards from the task and then only focuses on the knowledge necessary to do  the task.  A good heuristic approach that couples elegantly to a principled foundation.  And, as converging theories suggest, you need to be applying knowledge to support the ability to transfer that skill out of the learning experience.

So, you need to be looking at the knowledge to be learned in a more discriminating fashion than just exposure, and you then need to be applying that knowledge to a suite of tasks to support making it useful. There’s more, such as the necessary spread of tasks to support appropriate decontextualization to support transfer, and sufficient and spacing of practice to support retention, but here I just want to emphasize that rote exposure to knowledge doesn’t mean it will be learned, and that learning facts without applying them doesn’t lead to any meaningful outcome.  So can we start focusing on learning activities that generate meaningful processing?  Please?

 

Ownership versus ubiquity

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The notion that soon everything will be in the cloud, and we’ll just use an interface surface near us is not new.  The notion is that the technology will recognize you and present your environment, ready for you to accomplish your goals.  This is a nice idea, and I can see it working, but it’s not trivial.

Contrast this to the element that Judy Brown talks about as important component of mobile learning.  For her, mobile devices have to be something you’re familiar with and have with you all the time.  And that, to me, is the sticking point.

With an interface surface you come upon, would you necessarily recognize the different ways the interface would manifest?  You don’t want a big touchscreen (despite Minority Report  imaginings) for very complex work, because the research shows your arms fatigue too quickly. So you might have a keyboard on some devices.  And the variety could be high.  And, yes, it’s your interface, but with all the different possible form-factors, could you make it comprehensible?  And you’re still at the mercy of availability of surfaces (kinda like waiting in line for computers to check email at conferences has been).

Now, I can see having a mobile device and  then using an accessible interface that recognizes you by the device proximity, so you’re not stuck. And I can imagine that it would be possible to make a scalable interface (just not necessarily easy).  I do wonder, however, about some surfaces being so designed for aesthetics that the usability is compromised (c.f. The Design of Everyday Things).

And, particularly for my notion of slow learning  (which I need to augment with ubiquity and personalization – quick, I need a new phrase! :), the ability for a device to be with you may be required to do the teachable moment  thing.  That is, having a context-sensitive device right that at the appropriate place and time may be needed to really develop us in the ways we deserve.

So I don’t take that vision of ubiquitous computing surfaces at face value, I think that there are some reasons why mobile devices may still make sense.  Which isn’t to say there’s not a way, but I’m still holding out for something with  me.