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Clark Quinn’s Learnings about Learning

Content, context, and experience

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In my (next to) last post, I talked about print versus screen reading, and at the end made a comment about publishers. I want to extend that comment here, and to do so I need to go to Pine & Gilmore’s Experience Economy.

I’ve talked about it before, but the premise briefly is that we’ve moved from selling services to selling total customer experiences (the pre-sales, the sale, the product or service, the support). Hence the success of Apple, which creates amazing experiences, generating great customer loyalty and satisfaction. So how does this bear on publishers?

The hoary old cliche’ is that publishers need to realize that they’re not about books, they’re about content (the analogy being to the railroad companies who suffered when they didn’t realize they were in the transportation business). On the other hand, the current discussion in industry is that now context is king. The point is that content can be customized to the immediate need. What the experience economy tells us is that the differentiator will be the overall experience. So, is experience or context king?

I want to suggest that the answer is ‘yes’. Contextualized content creates a positive experience. However, I want to argue two facets to this. Publishers do need to move to where content is semantically tagged for when there are smart systems that can contextualize it. However, I want to suggest that they also need quality information design to create a good experience even when it’s unable to be customized.

That’s come into play with educational publishers. Pine & Gilmore have argued that the subsequent economy will be the ‘transformation economy’, with experiences that transform us. I want to suggest that quality learning design will be the differentiator, and it definitely means going beyond traditional instructional design and incorporating cognitive science research and emotional engagement. I immodestly suggest that Engaging Learning is part of the solution, but the point is much bigger. It’s about reorganizing content to focus on meaningful outcomes, and then aligning the experience to achieve those. While incorporating the semantic hooks as well.

So, I’m arguing that the content business needs to look to both quality in design, and elegance in implementation, to support either or both scenarios: customized and quality experiences.

Conspiracy Theory 101

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It’s really easy to posit a conspiracy. All you need is a problem, and a clear beneficiary to the problem not being solved. Let me demonstrate:

I stay in a lot of hotels (one of the dubious benefits of what I do). And, you’ll be pleased to hear, I take showers. You don’t want to bring liquids so the hotels are kind enough to provide shampoo and conditioner. The final piece of the setup is that we all get older (if we’re lucky), and that means decreasing manual dexterity and visual acuity.

Which brings up the problem of hair care products in small bottles, with smooth caps. You get into the shower, and you can’t open the bottles with wet hands. If you’ve read Don Norman’s Design of Everyday Things (and if you design for people, you should; it’s an easy read, and you won’t look at the world in the same way), you know that you could redesign the bottle caps to facilitate opening with wet hands (ridges, non-symmetrical shapes, etc). But they don’t. So, you use your teeth (unless you happened to loosen the cap before you get in the shower, very unlikely unless you do this alot).

Who benefits? Dentists! You ruin your teeth opening the bottle, and have to see the dentist. So clearly they’re sponsoring this ongoing assault.

And it continues. Who is responsible for bad computer interfaces? 3M, the maker of post-its. The only cure for a bad interface is to put up a post-it note with the way around the problem. I’m sure they’re sponsoring companies to continue to come up with bad interfaces.

The one I can’t figure out is back to the hair-care bottles. They make the print small, and the contents indistinguishable, so you can’t figure out which one you need to use. It’d be easy, making the shampoo clear and the conditioner opaque, using large print. So, all I need to do is figure out who benefits…

So it goes. (RIP Kurt Vonnegut)

Learning Mobile

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Ok, so I’m on the eLearning Guild‘s research team for mobile learning (a truly awesome group of people to be able to work with), and one of the team members asked: how do you get transfer from mobile learning? My reply was:

transfer … comes from a couple of sources: applying the same concept as skill in different contexts, and reflection even after a single context explicitly discussing abstraction and reapplication in other contexts.

So, a couple of ways (and agreeing with [the] notion of a blend, so these are in conjunction with other activities): you can stream out different examples in different contexts for viewing/reading/listening (vcast, PDF/page, podcast), you can make available little mini-scenarios in different contexts, you can bring in reflection after real-life practice, you could provide abstraction and reapplication questions after most any of the above…

This was just off the top of my head, but there’s a point here. You’ve heard me riff on models before, and to answer the question I stepped back and looked at the fundamental concept behind transfer (ok, a very abbreviated version), and then put that together with some of the models behind mobile, and was able to generate an answer on the fly.   That’s the power of models: they’re explanatory, they’re predictive, and they’re generative.

And, of course, thinking about mobile design is a habit I’m trying to inculcate in organizations and designers. There are great opportunities to deliver not only immediate (and, potentially, contextualized) performance support, but also to extend learning. Will Thalheimer has touted ‘learning follow-on’ systems, and it’s also consonant with my ‘slow learning‘ interest in developing people over time.

So, think models, think mobile, think opportunity!

(And stay tuned for the report. I was part of the Immersive Learning Simulations report, and it was not only fun but I think the outcome is really good, and I expect the same here.)

PowerPoint, evil or just a tool?

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This month’s Learning Circuit’s Big Question is: “PowerPoint – What is Appropriate, When and Why?“. Tony Karrer’s collected some nice articles about the underlying cognitive issues, and it jives with what I’ve seen. The big complaints are too much text on the screen, too many bullet points, and overloaded graphics. That’s not a surprise. This also clearly indicates to me it’s about bad use of PowerPoint, not the tool itself.

I took a two-day ‘presentation course’, after several years of university teaching and several corporate presentations, and recall the instructions that it’s about you, not the slides, and you shouldn’t have slides except when you’re showing a diagram. That’s similarly indicated by others. However, I think you need to look at the broader context of what sort of talk it is, who the audience is, and what the setting is. I mostly talk to practitioners at different levels. In my mind, a keynote is very different from a conference session from a board presentation from a customer presentation from a… PowerPoint will have different roles.

From this point on, I’m going to talk about useful information communication: stuff that helps you make decisions. This is not a keynote, nor even a customer presentation, but more like a conference or board presentation or a training session.
Speaking of which, conference organizers ask for your slides beforehand, and ask for handouts. As an attendee, I like having handouts to make notes on. And sometimes I even try to take a copy of slides for a presentation I can’t attend, when there’s another presentation at the same time I also want to attend and I haven’t yet mastered being in two places at once (though sometimes my clients insist that I must).

As a reality check, I went back and looked at my own PowerPoint presentations (conference presentations), and I’m not squeaky clean. I do have lots of graphics (I peg the ‘visual’ and ‘conceptual’ meters; see my Models page), but I also have bullet points. But that’s deliberate.

There’re several reasons. As indicated above, I like to have a place to take notes, and want to provide the same for my audience. Yes, they could have a pad of paper, but I like providing the slides with generous white space for them to take notes. I generally don’t put a lot of prose on those slides, but only telegraphic bits that keep me from forgetting an important point and that I elaborate on, not reciting against. Instead, a reminder both for me and the audience when they come back to the slides (I know that at least *some* do).

Also, I know that one way to keep people from being able to fully interpret what you’ve presented unless they attend is to not have all the prose on the slide. So the ‘key phrases’ approach is also a way to induce people to actually stick around and find out what they unpack to (without that extra presentation, it’s pretty hard to know what’s coming there, and again that’s deliberate). It also induces extra cognitive processing, to map what I say to the phrase, which is good for the right audience.

I also understand the realities of most presentation situations: that people’s attention can be distracted by someone coming in the room, by an email or text message, by a colleague’s wry comment, whatever. Having the structure of the handout and the slides helps them reconnect. Also, I do add extra references and tools to the end of the handout when appropriate to support taking action on the presentation. And, as part of the emotional as well as cognitive component, I like context-setting through images that elaborate prose, and quotes that pithily indicate some of the background thinking.

So, my answer to the question is that what’s appropriate are diagrams, quotes, images, and limited bullet point lists, in that order, for cognitive and emotional value. My presentations may not be perfect, but I strive to provide long-lasting value (not immediate appeal), just as in everything else I do.

See you in the funny papers

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I decided to elaborate a bit more on my comment that I think comics/cartoons are underused in learning, as I truly believe this. I’ve used them in elearning to serve as a motivating example, humorously exaggerating the negative consequences of not learning the material. I’ve also used them as story examples, where the character models the behavior of transforming an ill-formed statement into a well-formed statement. Why?

There are some powerful reasons to consider using cartoons and comic strips (graphic novels, manga, what have you). First, we understand the world in terms of stories, in many instances, and comic strips are a great way to communicate stories. They’re concise, and can minimize the amount of literacy required. And they’re visually appealing.

Then they elegantly simplify the context. You can include the necessary components, and allow the learner’s brain to fill in the rest. That’s true too for the transition between panels (see Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics for more). This may also facilitate the learner taking ‘ownership’ of the story, as they have to do some of the processing.

They also have one facility I really like. As Alan Shoenfeld’s work says, as I know it through Collins & Brown’s Cognitive Apprenticeship, experts need to make the underlying thought processes visible, not just the resulting steps (say, in working a problem). Thought bubbles are a great way to do this! You can do this with the ‘voiceover’ in audio and video (typically echoing slightly when it’s thoughts), but it’s easier to produce.

Comic ComicPragmatically, they can be relatively low-cost to produce, and they’re certainly low bandwidth (well, if you do it right ;). Brent Schenkler’s been talking about using ComicLife (a Mac app that lets you put speech and thought bubbles on photos) which would work as well, and then he points to tools that let you make comics! Here’s an elementary one I created with ComicLife. Not definitive, but illustrative (and doable with my limited skills).

Finally, they travel well. While humor might not (though certain types of humor should), the story will, as most if not all cultures have a form of comic strip and they’re easily comprehended. Practically, the internationalization and localization should be easy as well, as long as you leave enough room in the thought bubbles for languages like German translation (and keep all lettering in a separate layer).

I know, you have enough trouble talking about games in corporate settings, and comics may not be any easier, but think of the excitement of your audience, particularly young ones, talk about the lower cost to hit the global market and for lower-literacy employees. I even think they could be used to tell the corporate story (as has been done with novelizations).

Upcoming talk: Deeper eLearning

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At several conferences over the past couple of years, I’ve heard people talking about a need for a deeper understanding of instructional design. I’d sort of thought people understood ID, but I’ve seen too much ‘cookie cutter’ eLearning (and even F2F stuff) and have realized that there are a lot of people following templates without a real understanding of what the elements are and best principles around the elements.

I wrote a white paper (warning, PDF) about it, an abbreviated version of which appeared as an eLearnMag webzine article. However, it appeared there was demand for more.

So I created a talk and presented it at the local chapter, where it was well-received (“very good”, “great”, “learned a lot“, etc). In fact one of the audience members convinced me to offer it a a guest lecture in his class. Hey, there has to be some reason I’ve studied learning from every perspective imaginable!

Consequently, it’s one of the talks I’ll be giving at the eLearning Guild’s Annual Gathering next week in Boston (besides the learning simulation design workshop). If you’re designing elearning, or learning at all, I hope I’ll see you there!