When I read the description of Pirolli’s Information Foraging book, I immediately sent the description to Jay Cross, guru of informal learning, because the principles of information foraging are key descriptors of informal learning on the web. Then I went and googled the concept.

You see, when you take the broader picture of elearning (see Tony Karrer’s current discussion), beyond courses to populating the ‘learnscape’ or performance ecosystem with eCommunity and portals as well, you want to make sure that your learners can get to the information they need. This means good information architecture as well as powerful search.

I was thrilled to see Jakob Nielsen’s information foraging page, where he covers simply not only the theory, but the implications for site design. It’s information we should use in designing our portals and resources for our learners. Will they quickly be able to find what they need because we’ve designed the clues to lead them to it? Or will they find incomprehensible barriers?

I’m biased, as by circumstance my background has been steeped in information architecture and interface design, but it’s a component we need to be aware of to truly support performance in our organizations. It’s needed in the systems so we’re not training around bad interface design, but also to meet needs whether it’s customers, our own employees, or our students. Check it out!

As the latest in the activities I do with my son through YGuides, yesterday we went kayaking around Sausalito. It was a nice trip: the day was sunny and warm enough, and we saw seals, cormorants, two Great Blue Herons, a pelican, terns, jellyfish as we paddled around.

There were some lessons, however, in the training. Our guide nicely prepared us for a comf0rtable trip, providing splash skirts so we could stay dry inside the kayaks, in addition to the required life-jackets.   And he gave us some useful paddling advice about using our bodies to turn, not just our arms (I’m happy with the latter, trying to keep my board-paddling muscles in tune), which way to turn the paddle, etc. However, they missed the boat (arr arr) on a few other things.

For one, the boats steer with a rudder at the back (in addition to the paddles) that is operated by the stern paddler. These pedals work in a funny way that seemed counter-intuitive, pushing left to turn left. Also, it’s easy to overcompensate one misdirection with too much the other way (common in driving and flying).   I could do it slowly, but if pushed my instinct was to push with my right leg to turn left (I can’t even place the origin: bicycle? surf/snowboard?). Shortly after taking off, he led us through a pier, and I managed to bounce the kayak against a barnacle-covered piling despite my best efforts, due to my tendency to initially make matter worse before I remembered to push the pedal the other way. Now, I can be slow on the uptake sometimes, but not usually on something like this. The lesson here was to give us more time to get comfortable before challenging us. It’s their boat, so they can risk it, but it wasn’t fun to make the mistake when it counted.

The other two problems came from paddling. While the paddles were pretty smooth, moving them in your hands for close to three hours can wear away your skin (particularly if your usual ‘hard work’ is pushing keys). They mentioned gloves on the site, but only for half-day trips. It was fun shoveling dirt today (helping out on the landscaping project my wife’s currently involved in) with pre-existing blisters on my hands. Not. I wish they would’ve recommended gloves for all, and the lesson is to consider your learners abilities.

The final problem isn’t a training problem, but of course ends up being. To be fair, they did say to keep your arms up while paddling. BUT, it’s hard when your digging deep to get out of the way of a dredge, or pulling against the tide and the wind (and, of course, arms can get tired and/or sloppy). I don’t mind pulling and digging in, but there was a consequence: the side of the kayak right where I was paddling had two screwheads sticking out from each smooth side. In 3 hours, I managed to drag my fingers across those screws several times, with a bloody consequence. It shouldn’t be a training issue, and I note that the other pair had the Seascape 2 (we were in the original Seascape, or Seascrape as I told the guide I’d renamed it) and it no longer had those screws. They were training me to avoid problems from a bad design! The right solution should be to have a good design first, and then design to get optimal performance, not train to cover a bad design! But, of course, that’s not always the case. Which is why usability folks, and I’ve been one and remain committed to the cause, suggest that you need to get the support folks and the trainers into the initial design process. They know what users will face, and can help keep problems from getting into the design.

Don’t get me wrong, it was a good time with the lad, and I’m glad we went (my hands will heal :). Still, it could’ve been better, and as the saying goes, “it’s OK to lose, but don’t lose the lesson”. So, get the design right first, then prepare learners for success, and give them sufficient time to adapt to the newness. Please!

A post by Clive Shepherd reminded me of his 30 minute Master’s project to, as it states on the site “develop a curriculum to train subject-matter experts in the design of rapid e-learning materials”. So I went over to check it out, and the script is pretty complete and very good.

I of course am thrilled to see the emotional engagement upfront in the design phase (not least because I suggested it ;), but overall the design does a very good job of having misconceptions to the suggested approaches, and addressing them, using a storyline to keep the ‘flow’ moving, etc. Very practical, focused, and informed.

It sounds like he’s planning on producing it, which is great, but even reading the script and imagining the actual experience is worthwhile to understand the content, and viewing it in script phase is valuable to think about interim representations in developing elearning. So, two learning experiences for the price of none!

He’ll be presenting it at DevLearn, the eLearning Guild conference in San Jose in November. I’ll be there, as the Guild’s events are always good, and I’m presenting twice and participating in two of the pre-conference management symposiums (any practical solutions for cloning one’s self?).

I’m actually working on a similar project, but it’s still hush-hush for now. Hopefully before the end of the year we’ll be able to talk about or even show it.   In the meantime, you can read my 7 steps to better ID paper (warning, PDF).

BJ Schone contacted me and I sent him some feedback on a document he was preparing. He’s now finished with his Engaging Interactions For eLearning, and making it freely available at the site. It’s in the form of an eBook (PDF), and he’s also promised to blog each interaction at the site, to support discussion around them.

It’s compendium of 25 activities for learning that map to various learning goals. There are the familiar things like drag-and-drop, and more complex activities as well. The activities aren’t academically categorized, but it is focused on the learning outcome, not just different interaction modality. The interactions cover a range from simple exercises such as re-ordering steps, to more complex activities like virtual labs.

It’s a useful resource, and if you’re looking for some inspiration it’s worth a look. Thanks, BJ!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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