Today, one of my heroes, Alan Kay, gave a keynote to the Innovations in eLearning conference. The mindmap can’t convey the broad range, but to get it out there…
Performer-focused Integration
On a recent night, I was part of a panel on the future of technical communication with the local chapter of the Society for Technical Communication, and there were several facets of the conversation that I found really interesting. Our host had pulled together an XML architecture consultant who’s deep into content models (e.g. DITA) and tools, Yas Etassam, and another individual who started a very successful technical writing firm, Meryl Natchez. And, of course, me.
My inclusion shouldn’t be that much of a surprise. The convener had heard me speak on the performance ecosystem (via Enterprise 2.0, with a nod to my ITA colleagues), and I’d included mention of content models, learning experience design, etc. My background in interface design (e.g. studying under Don Norman, as a consequence teaching interface design at UNSW), and work with publishers and adaptive systems using content models, means I’ve been touching a lot of their work and gave a different perspective.
It was a lively session, with us disagreeing and then finding the resolution, both to our edification as well as the audiences. We covered new devices, tools, and movements in corporate approaches to supporting performance, as well as shifts in skill sets.
The first topic that I think is of interest was the perspective they took on their role. They talk about ‘content’ and include learning content as well. I queried that, asking whether they saw their area of responsibility covering formal learning as well, and was surprised to hear them answer in the affirmative. After all, it’s all content. I countered with the expected: “it’s about the experience” stance, to which Meryl replied to the effect of “if I’m working, I just want the information, not an experience”. We reconciled that formal learning, when learners need support for motivation and context, needed the sort of experience I was talking about, but even her situation required the information coming in a way that wasn’t disruptive: we needed to think about the performer experience.
The other facet to this was the organizational structure in this regard. Given the view that it’s all content, I asked whether they thought they covered formal learning, and they agreed that they didn’t deliver training, but often technical writers create training materials: manuals, even online courses. Yet they also agreed, when pushed, that most organizations weren’t so structured, and documentation was separate from training. And we all agreed that, going forward, this was a problem. I pushed the point that knowledge was changing faster than their processes could cope, and they agreed. We also agreed that breaking down those silos and integrating performance support, documentation, learning, eCommunity, and more was increasingly necessary.
This raised the question of what to do about user generated content: I was curious what they saw as their role in this regard. They took on a content management stance, for one, suggesting that it’s content and needed to be stored and made searchable. Yas talked about the powerful systems that folks are using to develop and manage content. We also discussed the analogy to learning in that the move is from content production to content production facilitation.
One of the most interesting revelations for me actually came before the panel in the networking and dinner section, where I learned about Topic-Based Authoring. I’ve been a fan of content models for over a decade now, from back when I was talking about granularity of learning objects. The concept I was promoting was to write tightly around definitions for introduction components, concept presentations, examples, practice items, etc. It takes more discipline, but the upside is much more powerful opportunities to start doing the type of smart delivery that we’re now capable of and even seeing. Topic-based is currently applied for technical needs (e.g. performance support) which is enough reason, but there can and should be educational applications as wellThe technical publications area is a bit ahead on this front. Topic-based authoring is a discipline around this approach that provides the rigor needed to make it work.
Meryl pointed out how the skill set shift needn’t be unitary: there were a lot of areas that are related in their world: executive communications, content management, information architecture, even instructional design is a potential path. The basics of writing were still necessary, but like in our field, facilitation skills for user-generated content may still play a role. The rate of change means that the technical writers, just like instructional designers, won’t be able to produce all the needed information, and that a way for individuals to develop materials would be needed. As mentioned above, Yas just cared that they did the necessary tagging! Which gets into interest system areas about how can we make that process as automatic as possible and minimize the onerous part of the work.
The integration we need is for all those who are performer-focused to not be working in ignorance of (let alone opposition to) each other. Formal learning should be developed in awareness of the job aids that will be used, and vice-versa. The flow from marketing to engineering has to stop forking as the same content gets re-purposed for documentation, customer training, sales training, and customer service, but instead have a coherent path that populates each systematically.
Training Book Reviews
The eminent Jane Bozarth has started a new site called Training Book Reviews. Despite the unfortunate name, I think it’s a great idea: a site for book reviews for those of us passionate about solving workplace performance needs. While submitting new reviews would be great, she notes:
share a few hundred words
1) on a favorite, must-own title, or maybe even
2) of criticism about a venerated work that has perhaps developed an undeserved glow
In the interest of sparking your participation (for instance, someone should write a glowing review of Engaging Learning :), here’s a contribution:
More than 20 years ago now, Donald Norman released what subsequently became the first of a series of books on design. My copy is titled The Psychology of Everyday Things, (he liked the acronym POET) but based upon feedback, it was renamed The Design of Everyday Things as it really was a fundamental treatise on design. And it has become a classic. (Disclaimer, he was my PhD advisor while he was writing this book.)
Have you ever burned yourself trying to get the shower water flow and temperature right? Had trouble figuring out which knob to turn to turn on a particular burner on the stove? Push on a door that pulls or vice-versa? Don explains why. The book looks at how our minds interact with the world, how we use the clues that our current environment provides us coupled with our prior experience to figure out how to do things. And how designers violate those expectations in ways that reliably lead to frustration. While Don’s work on design had started with human-computer interaction and user-centered design, this book is much more general. Quite simply, you will find that you look at everyday things: shower controls, door handles, and more in a whole new way.
The understanding of how we understand the world is not just for furniture designers, or interface designers, but is a critical component of how learning designers need to think. While his subsequent books, including Things That Make Us Smart and Emotional Design, add deeper cognition and engagement (respectively) and more, the core understanding from this first book provides a foundation that you can (and should) apply directly.
Short, pointed, and clear, this book will have you nodding your head in agreement when you recognize the frustrations you didn’t even know you were experiencing. It will, quite simply, change the way you look at the world, and improve your ability to design learning experiences. A must read.
Interactivity & Mobile Development
A while ago, I characterized the stages of web development as:
- Web 1.0: producer-generated content, where you had to be able to manage a server and work in obscure codes
- Web 2.0: user-generated content, where web tools allowed anyone to generate web content
- Web 3.0: system-generated content, where engines or agents will custom-assemble content for you based upon what’s known about you, what context you’re in, what content’s available, etc
It occurred to me that an analogous approach may be useful in thinking about interactivity. To understand the problem, realize that there has been a long history of attempts to characterize different levels of interactivity, e.g. Rod Sims’ paper for ITFORUM, for a variety of reasons. More recently, interactivity has been proposed as a item to tag within learning object systems to differentiate objects. Unfortunately, the taxonomy has been ‘low’, ‘medium’ and ‘high’ without any parameters to distinguish between them. Very few people, without some guidance, are going to want to characterize their content as ‘low’ interactivity.
Thinking from the perspective of mobile content, it occurred to me that I see 3 basic levels of interaction. One is essentially passive: you watch a video, listen to an audio, or read a document (text potentially augmented by graphics). This is roughly equivalent to producer-generated content. The next level would be navigable content. Most specifically, it’s hyper-documents (e.g. like the web), where users can navigate to what they want. This comes into play for me on mobile, as both static content and navigable content are easily done cross-platform. I note that user-generated content through most web interfaces is technically beyond this level.
The next level is system-generated interaction, where what you’ve done has an effect on what happens next. The web is largely state-independent, though that’s changing (e.g. Amazon’s mass-customization). This is where you have some computation going on in the background, whether it’s form processing or full game interaction. And, this is where mobile falls apart. Rich computation and associated graphics are hard to do. Flash has been the lingua franca of online interactivity, supporting delivery cross-platform. However, Flash hasn’t run well on mobile devices, it is claimed, for performance reasons. Yet there is no other cross-platform environment, really. You have to compile for each platform independently.
This analysis provides 3 meaningful levels of interactivity for defining content, and indicates what is currently feasible and what still provides barriers for mobile as well. The mobile levels will change, perhaps if HTML 5 can support more powerful computation, interaction, and graphics, or if the performance problems (or perception thereof) go away. Fingers crossed!
Better design doesn’t take longer!
I wrote a screed on this topic over at eLearn Mag, which I highly recommend. In short:
Better design takes no more time* and yields better outcomes
(*after an initial transition period).
I look forward to your thoughts!
Making Learning Broadly Available
A post by Ellen Wagner got me thinking about what I’m really looking for in an interactivity solution. She was bringing some clarity to the Adobe Flash – HTML 5 debate, pointing out that HTML 5 is not yet a standard, and emphasizing some moves by Adobe to make Flash more open. Whether I agree or not, I realized my desire is not to choose one or the other, but instead it’s to find a solution!
The opportunity I’ve talked about before is a channel for publishers to move to a new era. The title of my blog is learnlets, based upon a claim I made almost two decades ago: in the future there will be lots of small interactive learning experiences (learnlets) that will teach you anything you want to know, including how to make small interactive learning experiences. That’s still a dream I have, but we’re now capable of realizing it, and there are some nuances that come from thinking about it in the current context.
Publishers produce books, but with the technology augments that they produce (ancillary or companion sites), they have most of the components needed to put meaningful problems (read: scenarios) in the mix and resource around those to create real learning experiences. With a market channel for those learning experiences (something like an app store), where it could go out to anyone’s device (tablets would be ideal), individuals could develop their own learning path, and for formal education we’d remove the burden of books (it pains me to watch my kids lug their own weight in books off to school!) and lift the learning.
What’s necessary, besides the devices and the market (and we’re getting those) is a meaningful interactivity standard. Flash has had performance issues, and HTML 5 may not be quite ready for prime time (and I have not yet been convinced of it’s ability to handle simulation-driven interactions). I don’t really care which one ends up ‘winning’, I just want a standard that allows me to deliver static (e.g. text, graphics), dynamic (video/audio/animations), and interactive content in a package that I can download and interact with! It doesn’t have to report back, we’d likely have other ways to assess outcomes (though reporting wouldn’t be a bad thing).
I think that if we can lift our learning design to match the quality of our devices, and have the market to deliver those learning experiences where and when desired, we’ll have the opportunity to lift ourselves to another level.
User-generated curriculum & competencies?
I like jogging (ok, more like plodding), as it’s a time I can queue up some questions to think about and then take them on the road to get some insights. In addition to some great thoughts on my presentation for the Innovations in eLearning Symposium, and my workshop at the mLearn Conference, I thought about LMS and social media.
I was reflecting on what I liked about Q2Learning’s model for system support, where a variety of things can be aggregated to achieve a competency: a course, a meeting, a project, etc. It occurred to me to think that if someone can decide what goes together to create a course, why shouldn’t the community itself decide?
It goes further: I got to design my own undergraduate major. I took a bunch of things I’d done, and some things I thought augmented those activities to create a coherent body of study on what was then termed Computer-Based Education (UCSD didn’t have a program in it back then), and submitted it as a proposal. The Provost vetted it, and I was on my way. Isn’t that a model that could be replicated? Can’t we have folks propose their course of study?
I started thinking about having networks start moving to becoming communities by defining component skills and proposed paths for achieving those skills, and also supporting proposals for other paths. Really, it’s about the community deciding how to help individuals move to the center, but with some explicit steps rather than implicit.
The learning organization role would be then one of facilitating this process of developing roles, competencies and curricula. It would certainly be a way of addressing the decreasing half-life of knowledge, by having it continually updated by the community in which those roles and skills made sense.
In this way, a community would co-create it’s learning paths in a dynamic interchange between the goals and tasks. And an LMS would then be a networking tool with the ability to manage the discussions, resources, and paths to competency as well as a learner’s record. It would be more organic and coupled in a robust feedback loop, not externalized, abstracted, filtered, and returned in ways that may diminish the value.
The learning organization would be dispersed as members of the constituent communities, helping develop the components of the competency path in concert with the members, adding in their value and nurturing development.
The thinking hasn’t yet gone far beyond this yet, but I have to say that it seems to approach an appropriate blend between the value of bringing in a real understanding of knowledge (the role of a learning organization) with the dynamic co-development of understanding that characterizes a community. Does this make sense to you?
The Mobile Design Workshop!
Mobile is coming at us hard and fast. Announcements of changes in the marketplace (HP acquiring Palm in just the past week), and new devices (Google passing on the Nexus One to tout the next gen system), are coming fast and furious. The devices are out there (mobile is outselling the desktop) and the workforce is increasingly mobile (72%, according to IDC!). The question is, how do you get on top of taking advantage of mobile devices for organizational (and personal) learning?
I confess, I’m a design guy. I like to look at problems and create solutions. And I like to think that 30-odd years of practice and reflection on learning design (investigating myriad design practices, looking at design models, etc) provides some reason to think I’ve developed a wee bit of expertise on the topic.
I’m also a geek and I love tech toys. I’ve also been extremely enamored of the potential for mobile learning since Marcia Conner asked me to write a little screed on the topic 10 years ago now. It got me thinking in ways that haven’t stopped, so that I’ve been thinking and doing mobile for the past decade, and am awaiting feedback on the draft of a book on the topic for Pfeiffer.
Mobile is the killer app for deep reasons, and not surprisingly, my focus is on mobile design. As I say “if you get the design right, there are lots of ways to implement it; if you don’t get the design right it doesn’t matter how you implement it!” Design is the key. There are two things I’ve found out about mobile design:
- you really need to think differently. It’s not about courses, it’s about augmenting (accessorizing) our capabilities, both learning and performance
- there are some really useful models that give you a handle on thinking different.
You’ve heard me talk here before about some, e.g. the 4 C’s.
Naturally, it’s best if you work with these models a bit to really internalize them and see how they guide new opportunities to meet learning and performance needs for your folks. That’s why I’m pleased that I have the chance to offer a mobile design workshop at the eLearning Guild’s mobile learning conference, mLearnCon.
This is going to be an interactive and fun way to incorporate mobile learning into your repertoire of solution tools. Not to worry, we’ll contextualize design as well, talking about the devices, the market trends, the tools, and the organizational issues, but the focus is going to be, as it should, on design. It’s also in one of my favorite towns: San Diego, and of course there’s the rest of the conference to put the icing on the cake. I hope I’ll see you there, and get a chance to work with you on this exciting new area.
Situated Learning Styles
I’ve been thrust back into learning styles, and saw an interesting relationship that bears repeating. Now you should know I’ve been highly critical of learning styles for at least a decade; not because I think there’s anything wrong with the concept, but because the instruments are flawed, and the implications for learning design are questionable.
This is not just my opinion; two separate research reports buttress these positions. A report from the UK surveyed 13 major and representative learning style instruments and found all with some psychometric questions. In the US, Hal Pashler led a team that concluded that there was no evidence that adapting instruction to learning styles made a difference.
Yet it seems obvious that learners differ, and different learning pedagogies would affect different learners differently. Regardless, using the best media for the message and an enlightened learning pedagogy seems best.
Even the simple question of whether to match learners to their style, or challenge them against their style has been unanswered. One of the issues that has been that much of the learning styles have been focused on cognitive aspects, yet cognitive science also recognizes two other areas: affective and conative, that is, who you are as a learner and your intentions to learn.
These two aspects, in particular the latter, could have an effect on learners. Affective, typically considered to be your personality, is best characterized by the Big 5 work to consolidate all the different personality characteristics into a unified set. It is easy to see that elements like openness and conscientiousness would have a positive effect on learning outcomes, and neuroticism could have a negative one.
Similarly, your intention to learn would have an impact. I typically think of this as your motivation to learn (whether from an intrinsic interest, a desire for achievement, or any other reason) moderated by any anxiety about learning (again, regardless whether from performance concerns, embarrassment, or other issue). It is this latter, in particular, that manifests in several instruments of interest. Naturally, I’m also sympathetic to learning skills, e.g learning to learn and domain-independent skills.
In the UK study, two relatively highly regarded instruments were those coming from Entwistle’s program of research, and another by Vermunt. Both result in four characterizations of learners: roughly undirected learners, surface or reproducing learners, strategic or application learners, and meaning/deep learners. Nicely, the work by Entwistle and Vermunt is funded research and not proprietary, and their work, instruments, and prescriptions are open.
I admit that any time I see a four element model, I’m inclined to want to put it into a quadrant model. And the emergent model from these three (each of which does include issues of motivation as well as learner skills) very much reminds me of the Situational Leadership model.
The situational leadership model talks about characterizing individual employees and adapting your leadership (really, coaching) to their stage. They have two dimensions: whether the learner needs task support and whether they need motivational support. In short, you tell unmotivated and unskilled employees what to do, but try to motivate them to get them to the stage where they’re willing but unskilled and skill them. When they’re still skilled but uncertain you support their confidence, and finally you just get out of their way!
This seems to me to be directly analogous to the learning models. If you chose two dimensions as needing learning skills support, and needing motivational support, you could come up with a nice two way model that provides useful prescriptions for learning. In particular, it seems to me to address the issue of when do you match a learners’ style, and when do you challenge; you match until the learner is confident, and then you challenge to both broaden their capabilities and to keep them engaged with challenge.
So, to keep with the result that the UK study found where most purveyors of instruments sell them and have no reason to work together, I suppose what I ought to do is create an learning assessment instrument and associated prescriptions of my own, label the categories, brand it, and flog it. How about:
Buy: for those not into it, get them doing it
Try: for those willing, get them to develop their learning skills and support the value thereof
My: have them apply those learning skills to their goals and take ownership of the skills
Fly: set them free and resource them
I reckon I’ll have to call it the Quinnstrument!
Ok, I’m not serious about flogging it, but I do think that we can start looking at learning skills, and the conative/intention to learn as important components of learning. Would you buy that?
Reflections on ISPI 2010
Early in the year, I gave a presentation online to the Massachusetts chapter of ISPI (the international society for performance improvement), and they rewarded me with a membership. A nice gesture, I figured, but little more (only a continent away). To my benefit, I was very wrong. The ISPI organization gave each chapter a free registration to their international conference, which happens to be in San Francisco this year (just a Bart trip away), and I won! (While the fact that my proximity may have been a factor, I’m not going to do aught but be very grateful and feel that the Mass chapter can call on me anytime.). Given that I just won a copy of GPS software for my iPhone (after seemingly never winning anything), I reckon I should buy a lottery ticket!
Now, it probably helps to explain that I’ve been eager to attend an ISPI conference for quite a while. I’m quite attracted to the HPT (Human Performance Technology) framework, and I’m ever curious. I even considered submitting to the conference to get a chance to attend, but their submission processes seemed so onerous that I gave up. So, I was thrilled to get a chance to finally visit.
Having completed the experience, I have a few reflections. I think there’s a lot to like about what they do, I have some very serious concerns, and I wish we could somehow reconcile the too-many organizations covering the same spaces.
I mentioned I’m a fan of the HPT approach. There are a couple of things to like, including that they start by analyzing the performance gaps and causes, and are willing to consider approaches other than courses. They also emphasize a systems approach, which I can really get behind. There were some worrying signs, however.
For instance, I attended a talk on Communities of Practice, but was dismayed to hear discussion of monitoring, managing, and controlling instead of nurturing and facilitation. While there may need to be management buy-in, it comes from emergent value, not exec-dictated outcomes the group should achieve!
Another presentation talked about the Control System Model of Management. Maybe my mistake to come to OD presentations at ISPI, but it’s this area I’m interested via my involvement in the Internet Time Alliance. There did end up being transparency and contribution, but it was almost brought in by stealth, as opposed to being the explicit declarations of culture.
On the other hand, there were some positive signs. They had enlightened keynotes, e.g. one talking about Appreciative Inquiry and positive psychology that I found inspiring, and I attended another on improv focusing on accepting the ‘offer’ in a conversation. And, of course, Thiagi and others talked about story and games.
One surprise was that the technology awareness seems low for a group with technology in their prized approach. Some noticed the lack of tweets from the conference, and there wasn’t much of a overall technology presence (I saw no other iPads, for instance). I challenged one of the editors of their handbook, Volume 1 (which I previously complained didn’t have enough on informal learning and engagement) about the lack of coverage of mobile learning, and he opined that mobile was just a “delivery channel”. To be fair, he’s a very smart and engaging character, and when I mentioned context-sensitivity, he was quite open to the idea.
I attended Guy Wallace‘s presentation on Enterprise Process Performance Improvement, and liked the structure, but reckon that it might be harder to follow in more knowledge-oriented industries. It was a pleasure to finally meet Guy, and we had a delightful conversation on these issues and more, with some concurrence on the thoughts above. As a multiple honoree at the conference, there is clearly hope for the organization to broaden their focus.
Overall, I had mixed feelings. While I like their rigor and research base, and they are incorporating some of the newer positive approaches, it appears to me that they’re still very much mired in the old hierarchical style of management. Given the small sample, I reckon you should determine for yourself. I can clearly say I was grateful for the experience, and had some great conversations, heard some good presentations, and learned. What more can you ask for?