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Clark Quinn’s Learnings about Learning

Web 2.0 Learning Skills

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The Learning Circuit’s blog big question of the month asks:

In a Learning 2.0 world, where learning and performance solutions take on a wider variety of forms and where churn happens at a much more rapid pace, what new skills and knowledge are required for learning professionals?

I have to say that there’s a lot in this.   Taking a performance ecosystem approach, we also need to recognize that the responsibility of the learning role is more than just courses, it’s performance support, social/informal learning, content models, mobile, and more.   How does this play out?

For one, it’s a shift in perspective.   The responsibility needs to be for all organizational learning, not just formal learning.   Who better?   This means understanding information design, usability, and information architecture as well as instructional design.   Also including for mobile, not just classroom and desktop.   Thus, we have expanded content development skills.

There is more, however. As my colleagues and I have been talking, it’s also clear that the role of the learning designer will likely move from exclusively a content developer to likely more time spent as a learning facilitator.   If we start having user-generated content, while we might occasionally be formalizing that, we’ll also need to be facilitating the learning process itself. We’ll have to be understanding how to nurture groups into cohesion, communication, and collaboration: how to catalyze discussions, how to maintain commitment, how to neutralize negativity, and and how to reach out to those who might feel alienated.

As a consequence, we’ll also have to understand organizational culture, the drivers and barriers to individuals feeling safe and valued to contribute. We’ll have to understand incentives, how to moderate behavior, how to align   vision.   It may not be completely within our power to address, but we have to know, recognize, and nurture useful cultural components, and when and how to point out problems to those who can change factors.

We won’t, for at least the short- and medium-term, be able to assume individual learning skills, also.   We’ll have to know what individual and group learning skills are, make those explicit, assess and nurture them, and value them. It will mean letting go, too, as Jane Bozarth points out.

Finally, we’ll have to be smarter about organizational goals, because all of this can’t immediately be done completely for everything, so we’ll have to prioritize.   We’ll have to earn the right to take on these responsibilities by showing that we know how they contribute to the organizational success.

If you don’t get this, we should talk. Developing these skills is critical, and the time to get moving is now.   Is your organization ready?

Artifacts of reflection

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The other day  John Ittelson stopped by for a visit.  I think of him as the guru of video usage in elearning, not least because of the recording studio he built in his house!  He mentioned his use of Flip camcorders, and finally a piece clicked into place that had been floating around in my thoughts.

Media PropertiesI’ve had a slight blindspot for photos and video because I peg the ‘conceptual’ meter. I recognize the value, though I don’t play with the files enough (tho’ I took a digital audio/video editing course more than a decade ago, and recently edited home videos for my wife’s birthday).  Photos and videos are really good for contextualizing, and that’s particularly valuable for examples (and practice).

The revelation was about the value of having learners capture information in situ, and sharing this for a variety of reflective opportunities.  The information captured can be performances, products, whatever.  It could also be interviews, or thoughts.

A colleague’s wife used to take an iPod with a microphone to conduct interviews.  Gina Schreck discussed giving groups of employees Flips to make videos of what their business unit does for the org, to share.  John mentioned capturing samples of teaching to share.  Having captures of actual practice is a valuable tool around which to scaffold discussion, and a powerful tool for reflection.  You can capture someone’s stories of best practices, or your own performance to review.

Note that making both other’s and personal captures available opens up the opportunity to learn more with and from others than your own reflective observations will provide, if you can be that open.  As a learning facilitator, you should provide ways for individuals and groups to capture and share thoughts, actions, events, and more.

One of the powerful things in digital performance environments (read: games, er, immersive learning simulations, and virtual worlds as was part of the discussion the other day) is the ability to capture records of action for review, too.  So look at ways to digitally track activity in learning environments (another reason to make the alternative to the right choice to be a reliable misconception!).

Reflection is powerful, and digital tools give us ways to truly leverage that power.  Reflect on that!

Rethinking Virtual Worlds

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I guess I have a visceral aversion to hype, because my initial reaction to ‘buzz’ is focusing in on the core affordances and disparaging mistaken uses of a new technology.  However, I do eventually open to taking advantage of the affordances in new ways. Case in point: learning styles.  I pointed out the flaws in the thinking several times, and then rethought them (without removing my previous views, I looked for the positive opportunities).  Now, preparing for a presentation, I’m rethinking some of my stances on learning in virtual worlds.

I’ve previously opined that there are two key affordances in virtual worlds: the spatial and the social, and that the technical overheads mean that unless there’s a long term relationship, the associated costs really argue that you should be hitting both.  I’m not changing that, but I was wondering what we might do if we did try to leverage those key affordances deliberately to support learning.

Taking a slightly cheeky approach, and quite willing to discredit presenting powerpoint presentations ‘in world’, I’ve tried to think through some subordinary, ordinary, and potentially extraordinary approaches to learning in a virtual world.  That is, opening learners up both cognitively and emotionally, presenting concepts, having examples available, creating meaningful practice, and scaffolding reflection.  What might we do?

Starting with pedagogy, I think a standard instructional design (read: presentations) is clearly subordinary.  An ordinary pedagogy might be a problem-based approach, but a really extraordinary approach might be to create a full immersive storyline in which the problem is embedded, turning it into a game world: a World of LearnCraft.  The idea is to mimic more closely the urgency typically felt when applying the knowledge in the real world (where it counts) by creating a similarly meaningful storyline to develop the associated motivation.  Then embedding resources in the story would scaffold the learning.  Of course, what I’m really talking about is game design ;).

Working with concepts, just presenting them is subordinary. Ordinary would be having them explorable, mapping them out in space, maybe with a scavenger hunt asking learners to find answers to questions embodied in the model.  A truly extraordinary approach would be to have the learners co-create the concept representation, using the collaborative creation capability available at least in Second Life.

Just having a poster for an example seems subordinary.  Having an example ‘gallery’, where you can examine the problem, the approach, and the results would be an ordinarily good approach. Ideally, the example could have the conceptual model layered on top of the decisions, mapping them to represent how th concept played out in context.  Beyond that, however, having the example be truly exploratory, where you could make certain decisions and see how they play out, and being able to backtrack (particularly with annotation about the mistakes the original team made) would be really extraordinary.

Practice is where we can and should be looking to games.  While having a quiz would be truly subordinary (if not maniacally mistaken), having a problem to solve ‘in world’ would be an ordinary approach. Again, having the problem be situated in a storyline, as the overall pedagogy, would be truly meaningful.  It’s easiest if the task is inherently spatial and social, but we certainly can benefit from the immersion, and building in social learning components can lead to powerful outcomes.

I’m somewhat concerned about trying to make reflection ‘in world’, because it’s inherently an ‘immediate’ environment.  It’s synchronous, and it’s been documented where normally reflective kids can go all ‘twitch’ in a digital environment.  It may be that reflection is ‘best’ when kept out of the world.  But for the sake of argument, let’s consider external reflection to be subordinary, and consider what might be ordinary and extraordinary.  Surely, having an ‘in-world’ but ‘post-experience’ discussion would be the ordinary approach.  Again, co-creating a representation of the underlying model guiding performance would be a really powerful reflective opportunity.

You still want to make some very basic learning decisions about virtual worlds.  If you don’t have an inherent expectation that there’s a long-term relationship with the world, the technical and learning overheads to facility in using the world would clearly suggest that you should seriously ensure that the payoff is worth it (like if the learning outcome is inherently spatial and social) and otherwise consider alternatives.  After that, you want to ensure that you’ve got meaningful practice.  That’s your assessment component, and you do want them applying the knowledge.  I suppose you could have the world be for concepts and examples, and have practice in some other format, but I admit I’m not sure why.  Around the practice, figure out how to embed concept and example resources. Finally, seriously reflect on how you support reflection for your learners.

Serious learning can and does happen in virtual worlds, but to make it happen systematically is a matter of design, not just the platform.  Fair enough?

Mistakes and easy steps to ‘the next level’

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One of my clients told me I helped him take his elearning to the ‘next level’.  I like that, naturally (it’s certainly my aim), but I started thinking what that means, practically.  More importantly, at many levels there are easy steps to the ‘next level’.  So where do people go wrong and what are the associated opportunities?

One of the mistakes I see is ‘cookie cutter’ instructional design. I’ve rarely found an elearning course that wasn’t flawed, and there has typically been a reliable pattern in execution that can be remedied fairly systematically with a straightforward approach.  I wrote the whole ‘broken ID‘ blog series around it, but that was at the very specific design level.  At the organizational level, what’s a firm to do?  It’s about updating the design team understanding (workshop) and reviewing the design process (templates).  It may also take a stronger attitude with stakeholders about meaningful outcomes (strategy update).

Another mistake I see is a limited technology repertoire.  Many organizations are ignoring the opportunities afforded by the proliferation of mobile devices.  Folks have them, but organizations aren’t capitalizing, and for the wrong reasons.  Sure, the different platforms have different standards, but this is more a barrier at the top end, not the entry level (and those problems are going away as certain areas are getting easier).  There are some low-hanging fruit at the ‘making existing material available’ and at the ‘easy development of custom application’ levels.  Taking the time to develop a mobile strategy is a small investment with a potentially large payoff.

A further mistake is not recognizing the need for organizations to go beyond formal training and deliberately start supporting informal learning.  With training budgets shrinking, it just amazes me how many units are still taking the ‘we do courses’ approach and missing out on the bigger picture.  With my TogetherLearn colleagues, we’ve been on about this, and again, the development of a social media infrastructure is relatively low-cost, and while it takes some time again the payoff for the organization can be huge.  Figuring out an approach that suits your current situation and infrastructure is another big opportunity.

Beyond these steps, there are organizations still developing content without consideration of the underlying content model and the opportunities.  Not developing content in a delivery-independent framework is a missed opportunity both for now and the future.  The development redundancies in most organizations is a real potential opportunity for savings in efficiency, and the possibility in relatively advanced organizations to start using business rules to do personalization and mass-customization is hard to fathom.

The list goes on.  I’m not saying you need to do all of them today, but taking the right next step for your organization, and realizing that wherever you are, there are low-cost, high-return possibilities available, should be something you are thinking about.  Whether you take one on, tactically, or step back and make a plan whereby you figure out what your next steps are going to be, in order, you should be thinking ahead.  Status quo is definitely threatened, I think, and therefore I encourage you to be considering how you’re going to be in a continual improvement loop.  Time’s a wasting!

Virtual Worlds & SCORM

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I was invited (thanks, Eilif!) to attend SRI’s workshop for ADL on SCORM and Virtual Worlds (VW) today.   I furiously tweeted it (check out the #adlvw hashtag), but now it’s time for reflections.   Represented were a number of people from various VW vendors (at least Qwaq, Second Life, Thinking Worlds), as well as SRI and ADL folks, and Avron Barr representing LETSI.

In case you don’t know, SCORM was developed to be a way to support interoperable content for learning.   However, the demands have grown. Beyond interaction, there’s a desire to have assessment reportable back to an LMS, and as our digital content resources grow larger, to address data quantities that go beyond download.   Angelo Panar from ADL   helped us understand that there are myriad ways that SCORM doesn’t scale well to handle things other than stand-alone objects. Peter Smith from ADL emphasized the importance of game-based learning, and the potential of VWs for meaningful learning.

Ron Edmonds from SRI nicely summarized the intersection: SCORM is standardized and interoperable, VWs are in competition and have vastly different models. The question is, what is the relationship between the two? Eilif Trondsen nicely characterized the situation that learning spans a gap from formal to informal.   SCORM’s highly focused (as of now) on asynchronous independent learner experience, but VWs are about social interaction, and are platforms, where learning experiences can be built.

The questions they were trying to answer were how to design learning experiences and measure/assess them, and then to decide what role SCORM plays.   It occurred to me that there are no unique issues to VWs except the social, so one particular solution is that the problems for SCORM and social media need resolving, and then can be ported to VWs without requiring a unique VW solution.

Another issue is the level of granularity.   If you design a collaborative exercise, and the interaction and collaborative response to reflection questions are what is key for the learning, then it’s a very different situation than when the goal is tightly constrained responses to very specific situations, e.g. the difference between training and education.   Back to the continuum Eilif was talking about, it seems to me that we can match the level of definition of the measure to the desired outcome (duh!).   However, SCORM has trouble with free-f0rm responses, so we get into some issues there.

The obvious ‘easy’ answer is to have SCORM just be a mechanism to introduce existing content objects ‘in world’.   That’s what a number of platforms have done, whether having SCORM objects appear as objects, or an embedded browser presents them.   A more complex alternative is to have an instructor or the learner respond via a custom interface with a response that’s relayed to an LMS using SCORM protocols. But can we go further?

I’ve argued in the past that social interactions should be a design feature only if the learning objective includes social components.   However, I also pointed out today that the VW may only be part of the solution, and when we look at the broader picture of the learning experience, we may well wrap reflection outside the world.   So then our learning model needs to include more than just content presentation, and we start veering off to Educational Modeling Language and the IMS Learning Design specification, which really isn’t yet a part of SCORM (but arguably should be).

Really, our learning categorization has to include activities as broad as mentoring, coached real performance, and social interaction, as well as content exposure, and interactive activities. It needs to span VWs, social media, and more.   It’s about developing learners richly, not just presenting a prix fixe menu.

I’m mindful of the conversation I had with Adam Nelson from Linden Labs (one of many fruitful conversations at the breaks that helped frame the thoughts above), and I asked whether his role for enterprise learning applications included my broad view of learning, that it’s not just about formal learning, or, worse, just ‘training’, but includes mentoring, discussions, all the way to expert collaboration.   That’s not necessarily what we need to track, but we do need to see the results, to look for opportunities (adding value as facilitators, not just content producers).

It’s clear that ‘in world’, we can have the equivalents of most social media, e.g. collaborative persistent spaces with representations and annotations are a richer form of wiki.   A shared element was the ‘overhead’ in virtual worlds, so the question is whether the affordances of virtual worlds are worth the investment.   I still believe that’s an issue of whether the domain/task is inherently 3D and/or that this is a long-term relationship so the investment is amortized.   There are lots of factors.   Still, it’s an intriguing idea to think that we will be able to interact, communicate, and collaborate in technology-augmented ways that aren’t possible in the real world. Of course, we’ll be able to do those in the real world too, largely, via ARGs (as I previously commented on the connections).

There’s a broad gap between what our tools enable, and what standards are ready to support.   The ultimate question was what the role of ADL would be.   I reckon it’s early days for VWs, so the role in this regard is, to me, track what’s happening and look for patterns that can be extracted and codified for ways to add value.

It’s the wild west or a goldrush right now, and the outcome is still to be decided.   However, the learning potential is, quite frankly, awesome, so it’s an exciting time.   Here’s to adventure!

Context & learning environments

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I was talking with Gina Shreck, who I’d known through Twitter, at a Sun-sponsored happy hour about new learning environments. She’s been quite active in Virtual Worlds (VW), and I was describing an Augmented Reality Game (ARG), and it came to me that there are some really meaningful similarities.

We know from research like John Bransford’s Anchored Instruction and Brown, Collins, & Duguid’s Situated Cognition that learning works better in context (even if you spread across contexts to generalize).   What I realized is that both approaches are really using technology to bring context for learning into vivid relief.   I’ve been active in games for learning because it provided meaningful practice, and of course VW’s can be used to host games in (realizing that VW‘s aren’t inherently games, but instead are just environments), and so are ARG’s.

Even when designed for learning, the point is to try to enrich the context.   Web-based games are the easiest, but there are times when more full contextualization is necessary, and the different environments offer different affordances or capabilities.

Despite the overhead, VWs are immersive in that your avatar is totally ‘in world’, and you can design that world to be anyplace/anytime you want it to be.   You can design the contingencies the way you want.   While most valuable for 3D, it may also be important for when total difference is necessary.   Specific examples include building real world structures that must be explored or investigated, for learning purposes.

On the other hand, ARGs are set in the real world, but specific constraints can be introduced.   You can have specific events, materials, and people (real or virtual) appear in the world you want.   Again, you want to develop associated decision making for those explored contexts.

The reason to use an ARG is to develop the ability to develop the capability in situ, that is, as close to the real world context as possible, whereas VWs can add extra dimensions, or work for contexts that are too expensive or dangerous to do live.   That’s also true for non-VW games as well, of course.

The point is to minimize distance and maximize transfer from learning context to real world application.   The overhead to take advantage of these sorts of capabilities is dropping quite rapidly. The goal is to discover the degree and type of contextualization needed (as well as pocketbook, of course), and decide what environment offers the necessary depth and value to achieve the outcomes you need.   However, you need to understand the full repertoire of tools available, and their affordances, to optimally choose an approach.   So, game on!

Designing on demand

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Yesterday I had the pleasure of working with a team on a grant to use games as a context to conduct high stakes cognitive assessments.   The cognitive tasks for assessment are remarkably abstract, e.g do this particular discrimination task (ie look at a string of four characters and signal if one is a vowel), sometimes while monitoring another situation or as an attention-distractor from another task, but the tasks that they are matched to range from very expensive to life-saving..   The goal is to establish a baseline, and then look for decrements at particular instances before a crucial task, indicating lack of readiness.

The interesting thing is the challenge of placing these tasks in a meaningful context.   It’s creative, and consequently fun.   It’s also collaborative, and when you get divergent contributors in a safe environment, you can really get productive synergy going.   We got together the night before for a meal and some social lubricants, and the next day spent hours in a conference room discussing, whiteboarding and generally designing.

One of the problems is that there have been diverse project specifications from the granting organization, and lack of access to the intended audience. We had some feedback that there should be minimal ‘story’, and very clearly that if the audience doesn’t perceive value, they can ignore the activity completely.   Also, there were some important constraints on how much we could change the core task without invalidating the deep research base.   Fortunately, a background in cog psych as well as having the minds behind the tests with us allowed a reasonable guess.   Still, a bit of a challenge.

We focused in early on the value, and I brought up that if the cognitive activity produces improvements in ability, that it’s training as well as assessment, and the audience cares very much about being able to do the job.   That hadn’t been determined to date, but may be available.   We also talked about marketing the value, and if the assessment can in this case (as it has in the past) serve as a very accurate predictor of performance (e.g. detecting a decrement in performance without prior knowledge), that may provide the necessary motivation.

When it comes to design, I’ve made a claim before that you can’t give me an objective I can’t design a game for (I reserve the right to raise the objective ‘high’ enough, but have yet to be proved wrong; it’s an outcome of the engaging learning framework), and this isn’t an exception. In fact, we came up with numerous possible settings, originally for what we were told of the mission, and then for a more near-term mission.   We also came up with relative degrees of abstraction from real (e.g. closely aligned to real task) to essentially arbitrary (like Tetris has little correlation to real time).   The fact of the matter is, you can embed meaningful tasks in appropriate contexts, and tune into a game no matter what the objective is.   It just takes systematic creativity (not an oxymoron), as in the heuristics I’ve talked about previously in two spots.

Since we don’t yet have access to the audience (though we know who they are), I suggested that we need to mock up several different plausible looks and trial them when they do get access (they’re working on that).   They had talked to some stakeholders, but that’s not reliable, for reasons I related to them.   In the process of designing the Quest game, we talked to the counselors who worked with these ‘at risk’ youth, who suggested this issue was smart shopping and cooking.   Fortunately, we then got to talk to some of the youth themselves, who responded “yeah, that’s important, but what’s really important is…” and proceeded to give us a set of relationships that then became key to the game.   Lesson: don’t just listen to the managers, or just the trainers, or just…all those are important, but they may not be right.

It was easy to consider a number of degrees of story ‘depth’, and visual styles to go with each.   At least, they’re in my head, but I went out and grabbed screenshots of various things that could serve as models.   You want the game mechanics to reflect the cognitive task, but you can wrap a number of different looks round that. We’ll pull together our notes, get some storyboards generated, but we managed to sketch out five separate games for what evidence suggests are likely to be the most important skills.

And that’s the real lesson, that it can be done, reliably and repeatedly.   And that’s important, because if you can’t, then it’s all well and good to talk about the value of games as learning environments, but it’s a waste of time if you don’t have an associated design process.   Fortunately, I can still comfortably say: “learning can, and should, be hard fun“.

Developing Learners

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Charles Jennings makes a brilliant observation about how Learning & Development folks are taking the wrong path in his post: When the Game’s Up. He points out that L&D practitioners are focused on Instructor Led Training, and:

ILT may be helpful for some change management and big-picture ‘concept‘ development, but it is demonstrably the least effective and certainly the least efficient approach for most learning that‘s required.

In short, we’re just not doing what we need to be doing.   I was revisting my previous thoughts on slow learning and distributed learning, and I realize we’re missing a major perspective.   We seem to have two extremes on the continuum: the ‘event’ or informal learning.   There’s more.

I had a tour of Q2Learning‘s environment today, courtesy of John Darling, and while I’m not conducting a thorough point by point evaluation, one element struck me as relevant.   Their platform’s ‘DNA’ came from social learnng, but their formal model (client driven) is based upon proficiency, and if not mandating, certainly enables what they call a ‘proficiency’ approach.

mixedassessmentlearningmapWhat I like about it is it takes a longer term view of skills. The sample he showed (and of course I realize it’s presented in the best light) was a learning map for a course, but with lots of components spread out over time (sample map shown).   There’s a priori assessment, content, activities with managers, etc.; a mix of activity, practice, reflection, just the sort of model we should be designing.   We know spaced practice matters, with reactivation, reflection, etc. It’s also valuable to go   back to the workplace, and then check-in later to see how things are going.   It’s a fuller picture of what learning’s about.

John mentioned some need formal features, such as the ability to assign journals as an activity, and similarly assign posting to a discussion board and then commenting on other posts (and tracking this!).   Given that these were two of three activities I used in my own online course (and mentioned here), I asked about the third activity: assigning group work (e.g. collaborating through a wiki) and handling the submission.   It wasn’t there, but could be added as another of their templates of ‘activities’.

The important thing, to me, is the point that a system to support formal learning should be able to link together and track a sequence of activities that develop a person over time, not just through an ‘event’ perspective.   Integrating the same social tools from the informal side also provides hope that there can be an elegant segue from the formal to the informal.

We agreed that one of the problems on the informal side is assuming that people are skilled at self-learning (or even group learning, I’ll add), and that we shouldn’t take it for granted.

All told, I think it’s an important different perspective on learning to think about developing people along a continuum, not a ‘spray and pray’ approach to learning.   Now, to only get the L&D function to start looking beyond their zone of comfort, and into the area of relevance.   Otherwise, we’d be better off, as Charles suggests, taking the training money and letting them spend it at the pub, at least reducing their stress and developing some morale!

Conceptualizing the Performance Ecosystem

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elearningvaluenet.jpgSo I’ve been playing with rethinking my Performance Ecosystem conceptualization and visualization.   The original had very discrete components, and an almost linear path, and that doesn’t quite convey the reality of how things are tied together. I believe it’s useful to help people see the components, but it doesn’t capture the goal of an integrated system.

I’ve been wrestling with my diagramming application (OmniGraffle) to rethink it.   My   notion is that systems, e.g. content/knowledge management/learning management systems underpin the learnscape, and that on top exist formal learning, performance support like job aids organized into portals, and social media.   Mobile is a layer that floats on top, making contextually accessible the capabilities assembled below.   It’s not perfect, but it’s an evolving concept (perpetual beta, right/).

Strategic LayersSo here’s my current conception.   It took me a long time to create the circle with different components!   First I had to discover that there were tools to create freeform shapes, and then work to get them to articulate, but I like the kind of ‘rough’ feel of it (appropriate for it’s stage).

It also captures the conceptual relationships as spatial relationships (my principle for diagram creation).   At least for me.   So here’s the question: does it make sense for you?   Does it help you perceive what I’m talking about, or is it too a) coarse, b) confusing, or c) some other problem?   I welcome your feedback!

Model learning

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On Monday, a hearty Twitter exchange emerged when Jane Bozarth quoted Roger Schank “Why do we assume that theories of things must be taught to practitioners of those things?”   I stood up for theory, Cammy Bean and Dave Ferguson chimed in and next thing you know, we’re having a lively discussion in 140 characters.   With all the names to include, Dave pointed out we had even less space!

One side was stoutly defending that what SMEs thought was important wasn’t necessarily what practitioners needed.   The other side (that would be me) wanted to argue that it’s been demonstrated that having an underlying model is important in being able to deal with complex problems.

So, of course, the issue really was what we mean by theory.   It’s easy (and correct) to bash conceptual knowledge frameworks that don’t have applicability to the problem at hand; Dave revived the great quote: “In theory, there’s no difference between theory and practice. But in practice, there is.” He also cited Van Merrienboer & Kirschner as saying that teaching theory to successful practitioners can be detrimental. (BTW, see Dave’s great series of posts ‘translating‘ their work.) On the other hand, having models has clearly been shown to be valuable in adapting to complexity and ambiguity.   What’s a designer to do?

So, let me be clear.   If there’s a rote procedure to be followed, there’s no need for a theory.   In fact, there’s no need for training, since you ought to automate it!   Our brains are good at pattern matching, bad at rote repetition, and it seems to me to be sad if not criminal to have people do rote stuff that could be done better by machine; save the interesting and challenging tasks for us!

It’s when tasks are complex, ill-structured, and/or ambiguous with lots of decisions, that we need theories.   Or, rather, models.   Which, I think, is part of the confusion (and I may be to blame! :).

I’m   talking about an understanding of the underlying model that guides performance.   Any approach to a problem has (or should) a rationale behind it about why that’s the reason you do it this way, not that way.   It’s based upon some theory, but it should be resolved into a model that has just enough richness to help you decide when to do X and when to do Y. As I said many years ago:

I see mental models as dynamic.   That is, they’re causal explanations of system behaviour.   They are used to explain observed outcomes and to predict the effects of perturbations.

It’s the explanation and prediction capabilities that are important.   The problem is, if the situation’s complex enough (and most are, whether it’s controlling a production line, or dealing with a customer, or…), you can’t train on all the situations that a learner might face.   So then you need to provide guidance.   Yes, we’ll use example and practice context to support transfer, but we should refer back to a model that guides our performance. And that’s useful and necessary.

Cammy noted that it’s extra work to develop that model, and I acknowledge that.   I’ve said that good instructional design requires more work and knowledge on the part of the designer than we typically expect, which is why I don’t think you can do good ID without knowing some learning theory. (BTW, my Broken ID series addresses a lot of the above.)

So, let me be clear: in any reasonably complex domain (and you shouldn’t be training for simple issues: just give a job aid or automate or…), you should present the learner with a model that you reinforce in examples and practice.   It should not be an abstract academic theory, but a practical guide to why things are done this way and what governs the adaptation to circumstances.   As that model is acquired through examples and practice, you provide the basis for self-improving performance.

That’s my model for designing effective learning.   What’s yours?

On a side note, what I recall as to the various tweets, and what Twitter shows from each person, doesn’t have a perfect correlation.   While I acknowledge my memory failing more frequently (just age, not dementia or Alzheimer’s, I *think*), I’m pretty sure that Twitter dropped some of those messages from the record (the same time they acknowledged having trouble with dropping avatar images).   Tweeter beware!