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Clark Quinn’s Learnings about Learning

Why Engaging Learning?

24 October 2018 by Clark Leave a Comment

Book coverSomeone asked me what I would say about my first book, Engaging Learning. And, coincidentally, my client just gave some copies to their client as part of our engagement, so I guess there’s still value in it!  And while I recognize it’s now about 13 years old, I really do believe it has relevance. Since they asked…

I saw the connections between computers and learning as an undergraduate, and designed my own major. My first job out of college was designing and programming educational computer games. Long story short: I went back for a Ph.D. in what was effectively ‘applied cognitive science’, but games continued to play a role in my career. And I reflected on it, and ultimately what started as a research agenda manifested as a model for explaining why games work and how to do it. And then when I started consulting, Pfeiffer asked me to write the book.

To be clear, I believe engagement matters.  We learn better when our hearts and our minds are engaged. (That’s the intent of the double meaning of the title, after all.)  Learning sticks when we’re motivated and in a ‘safe’ learning situation.  Learning can, and should, be ‘hard fun’.  However,  if we can’t do it reliably and repeatedly, it’s just a dream. I believe that if we systematically apply the principles in the book, we can do it (systematic creativity is  not an oxymoron ;).

One of the concerns was that things were changing fast even then (Flash was still very much in play, for example ;).  How to write something that wouldn’t be outdated even before it came out?  So I tied it to cognitive principles, as our brains aren’t changing that fast.  Thus, I think the principles in it still hold.  I’ve continued to check and haven’t found anything that undermines the original alignment that underpins designing engaging experiences.

And the book was designed for use. While the first three chapters set the stage, the middle three dig into details. There you’ll find the core framework, examples, and a design process. The design process was focused mostly on adding to what you already do, so as not to be redundant. The final three chapters wrap up pragmatics and future directions.

While ostensibly (and realistically) about designing games, it was really about engagement. For instance, the principles included were applied backwards to branching scenarios, and what I called linear and mini-scenarios. The latter just being better written multiple choice questions!

The book couldn’t cover everything, and I’ve expanded on my thinking since then, but I believe the core is still there: the alignment and the design process in particular. There have been newer books since then by others (I haven’t stayed tied to just games, my mind wanders more broadly ;) and by me, but as with my other books I think the focus on the cognitive principles gives lasting guidance that still seems to be relevant. At a recent event, someone told me that while I viewed mobile as a known, for others it wasn’t. I reckon that may be true for games and engagement as well. If we’re making progress, I’m pleased. So, please, start engaging learning by making engaging learning!

PS, I wrote a Litmos blog post about why engagement matters, as a prelude to a session I’ll be giving at their Litmos Live  online event (Nov 7-8) where I talk about how to do it.

 

Engagement

11 October 2018 by Clark 1 Comment

In a meeting today, I was asked “how do you define engagement”, and I found it an intriguing question. I don’t know that I have a definition so much as steps to enhance it. Still, it made me think.

What engagement is not, let’s be clear, is tarting content up. It’s not just flashy visuals, stereotypes, and cute prose.  Those things add aesthetics (or, done poorly, undermine same), but that’s not where to go.

Flow stateInstead, I’m looking for an experience that has certain characteristics. One way of looking at it is through the ‘flow’ phenomenon, with cognitive immersion at a level that finds the sweet spot between frustration and boring.  Similarly, for learning, it’s the Zone of Proximal Development, between what you can do with one hand tied behind your back, and what you can’t do no matter how much support you get.  And it’s both.

You there by exploiting the alignment between the elements of practice and engaging experiences. So just as the above diagram can represent either Czikszentmihalyi or Vygotsky, there’s the alignment I highlighted in Engaging Learning  between the elements in greater elaboration. It’s goal, context, challenge, meaningfulness, and more all aligned to create that subjective feeling. And in case you say “you’re extending engagement to learning”, I will note that Koster, in his book A Theory of Fun, explicitly tied what makes games work  is that it’s about learning. So, yeah, that’s the type of engagement I’m interested in, regardless.

One of the simple ways I like to characterize it (and it’s not original with me), is ‘hard fun’.  I think, if nothing else, that’s a great heuristic. It may be like the famous quote about pornography: “you know it when you see it”. Or maybe you can coin a concise definition. And you can attempt to quantify it through objective criteria like galvanic skin response or adrenalin levels. However, I’m perfectly happy to use subjective criteria. If people say they found it challenging but fun, I’m happy. If they say it’s the best way they can see to learn it, my job is done.

I don’t really yet have a good way to define engagement in a concise specification. Do you have a definition of engagement you like?  I’d welcome hearing it!

 

 

ONE level of exaggeration

26 September 2018 by Clark 5 Comments

I’ve argued before that we should be thinking about exaggeration in our learning design. And I’ve noticed that it’s a dramatic trick in popular media. But you can easily think of ways it can go wrong. So what would be appropriate exaggeration?

When I look at movies and other story-telling media (comics), the exaggeration  usually is one level.  You know, it’s like real life but some aspect is taken beyond what’s typical. So, more extreme events happen: the whacky neighbor is  maniacal, or the money problems are  potentially fatal, or the unlikely events on a trip are just more extreme.  And this works; real life is mundane, but you go too far and it treads past the line of believability. So there’s a fine line there.

Now, when we’re actually performing, whether with customers or developing a solution, it matters. It’s our  job after all, and people are counting on us.  There’s plenty of stress, because there are probably not enough time, and too much work, and…

However, in the learning situation, you’re just mimicking the real world. It’s hard to mimic the stress that comes from real life. So, I’m arguing, we should be bringing in the extra pressure through the story. Exaggerate!  You’re not just helping a customer, you’re helping the foreign ambassador’s daughter, and international relations are at stake!  Or the person you’re sweet on (or the father of said person) is watching!  This is the chance to have fun and be creative!

Now, you can’t exaggerate everything. You could add extraneous cognitive load in terms of processing if you make it too complex in the details. And you definitely don’t want to change the inherent decisions in the task and decrease the relevance of the learning. To me, it’s about increasing the meaning of the decisions, without affecting their nature. Which may require a bit of interpretation, but I think it’s manageable.

At core, I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say exaggeration is one of your tools to enhance engagement  and effectiveness. The closer we bring the learning situation to the performance situation, the higher the transfer. And if we increase the meaningfulness of the learning context to match the performance context, even if the details are more dissimilar, I think it’s an effective tradeoff. What do  you think?

User-experienced stories

15 August 2018 by Clark Leave a Comment

Yesterday I wrote about examples as stories. And I received a comment that prompted some reflection. The comment suggested that scenarios were stories too. And I agree!  They’re not examples, but they  are stories. With a twist.

So, as I’ve said many times, simulations are just a manipulable model of the world. And a motivated, self-capable learner  can learn from them. But motivated and self-capable isn’t always a safe bet. So, instead, we put the simulation in an initial state, and ask the learner to take it to a goal state, and we choose those such that they can’t get there until they learn the relationships we want them to understand. That’s what I call a scenario.  And we can tune those into a game. (Yes, we turn them into games by tuning; making the setting compelling, adjusting the challenge, etc.)

Now, a scenario needs a number of things. It needs a context, a setting. It needs a goal, a situation to be achieved. And, I’ll suggest, it should also have a reason for that goal to make sense. If you see the alignment that says why games  should be hard fun, you’ll see that making it meaningful is one of the elements. And that,  I say, is a story. Or, at least, the beginning of one.

In short, a story has a setting, a goal, and a path to get there. We remove boring details, highlight the tension, etc.  We flesh out a setting that the learner cares about, provide a sense of urgency, and enable the goal achievement.  But it’s not all done.

The reason this isn’t a complete story is we don’t know the path the protagonist uses to accomplish the goal, or ultimately doesn’t.  We’ve provided tools for that to happen, but we, as designers, don’t control the protagonist. The learner, really,  is the the protagonist!

What I’m talking about is that the story, certainly for the learner, is co-created between the world we’ve developed, and their use of the options or choices we provide. Together, a story is written for them by us  and them.  And, their decisions and the feedback are the story  and the learning!  It’s, voilà, a learning  experience.

Learning is powerful. Creating experiences that facilitate learning are creative hard fun for the designer, and valuable hard fun for the learner. Learning is about stories, some told, some c0-created, but all valuable.

Game Results

13 June 2018 by Clark Leave a Comment

The game we designed (as I talked about yesterday), Quest for Independence, was actually a fair bit of a hit. While we couldn’t talk to kids still, anecdotally we heard that the kids were playing it.  And, as the design intended, it led them to talk to the Care counselors. That was good enough, but there was more.

First, the Aussie science program  Quantum  had a bit on it. They even interviewed me (with a big production about bringing stuff to our house), but never used the footage.  They also couldn’t talk to the kids ‘in care’, but it turns out Quest was being used by kids  not in care!  High schools were using it to explore life after school as well. That was a nice outcome.

Another occurrence brought new action. Sometime after the game launched, I became aware of the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) standard for the web. What this did was allowed web pages to do backend processing based upon user actions, and then programmatically change the front end.  In short, web pages could react based upon what had happened before.

For  Quest, this meant that we could port it to the web!  That is, you started the game, the player’s actions were sent to the web, the program could calculate the outcome and render an appropriate new page, with the graphics assembled to represent the game variables, the current location, and more.  This was exciting.

Splash screenAnd, again, I had a student wanting to do a project. So the project was to take the game graphics, and the programming, and make the game web-playable. And lo, it was done; the game could be played over the web.  Most wonderfully, it  still can be!  (Yay, standards!)

Naturally, I wrote it up (with the student; a principle I always stuck to: even if I usually ended up writing it all, they got credit for their work and ideas).  And, as far as I know, it was the very first web-delivered serious game. At the least, without Flash.

The underlying principles in the game also became part of a couple of chapters, and ultimately the alignment between effective education and engaging experiences formed the core of my book on serious game design,  Engaging Learning.  

One final reflection is that working on this, on a project that really helped real kids, was still one of the most rewarding projects I’ve ever worked on.  It’s nice to help clients deliver outcomes, but saving lives that were at risk?  That’s just too good.  Anyone up for some more ‘hard fun’?

Designing a game

12 June 2018 by Clark Leave a Comment

When I was a young academic in Australia, a colleague asked me if I would talk to some folks about a game. He knew that I had designed games before returning to grad school, and had subsequently done one on my thesis research. This group, the Australian Children’s Welfare Agency, had an ‘After Care’ project to assist kids  who needed to live independently. They’d spent their budget on a video, comic book, and a poster, but now realized that the kids would play games at the Care centers. I had a talented student who wanted to do a meaningful honours project, and so I agreed.

Following best principles, we talked not only to the project leaders, and the counselors, but more. We weren’t allowed to talk to youth ‘in care’ (for obvious reasons), but they did get us access to some recent graduates. They gave us great insights, and later they playtested the prototype for fine-tuning.

One of the lessons from this was important. The counselors told us that what these kids needed were to learn to shop and cook. While I  could have made a game for that, when we talked to the kids we learned that there was more.  (My claim: you can’t give me a learning objective I can’t make a game for, though I reserve the right to raise the objective in a taxonomic sense.)   They said what was important were the chains. That is, you could get money while you looked for a job, but… They wouldn’t give you money, however, they’d deposit in a bank account. BUT, to get that, you needed ID.  To get that, however, you needed references. And so on. So that was the critical focus.

I taught my interface design students HyperCard, to have a simple language to prototype in. This meant that we had an environment that we knew games could be built in.  My student did most of the programming, under my direction.  When that wasn’t quite sufficient to finish the development, I used some grant money to hire her for the summer to finish it.

early screenThe resulting play was good, but the design was lacking (neither my student nor I were graphic designers). I ended up going with the project team leaders to get philanthropic funding to add graphics. (Which introduced bugs I had to fix.)  They also had it ported to the PC, which ended up being a mistake.Their hired gun used a platform with an entirely different underlying model and wasn’t able to translate it appropriately. Ouch.

Later street

The resulting game, had some specific design features:

  • It was exploratory, in that the player had to wander around and try to survive.
  • It was built upon a simple simulation engine, which supported replay.
  • There were variables, like health and hunger and sleep that would get worse over time, driving action.
  • The audience was low literacy, so we used graphics to convey variable states, interface elements, and location.
  • Success was difficult. Jobs were difficult to obtain, and better jobs were even harder. And, of course, you had to discover the chains.
  • There was coaching: if you were struggling, the game would offer you the opportunity for a hint. If you continued to struggle, eventually you’d get the hint anyway.
  • There was also a help system, where the basics were laid out.
  • There were random events, like getting (or losing) money, or having drugs or sex. (We were trying to save lives, and didn’t worry about upsetting the wowsers.)

There was more, but this characterized some of the important elements.  In reflecting upon the experience, I realized the alignment between effective education and engaging experiences that means you can, and should, make learning  hard fun.  I wrote a journal article (with my student) that captured what I will  suggest are critical realizations (still!).

They held an event to launch the entire project, including the game (and they gave me a really nice sweater, and Dana something too ;).  Tomorrow, I’ll pass on some of the subsequent outcomes.

#AECT17 Conference Contributions

16 November 2017 by Clark 1 Comment

So, at the recent AECT 2017 conference, I participated in three ways that are worth noting.  I had the honor of participating in two sessions based upon writings I’d contributed, and one based upon my own cogitations. I thought I’d share the thinking.

For my own presentation, I shared my efforts to move ‘rapid elearning’ forward. I put Van Merrienboer’s 4 Component ID and Guy Wallace’s Lean ISD as a goal, but recognized the need for intermediate steps like Michael Allen’s SAM, David Merrill’s ‘Pebble in a Pond‘, and Cathy Moore’s Action Mapping. I suggested that these might be too far, and want steps that might be slight improvements on their existing processes. These included three thing: heuristics, tools, and collaboration. Here I was indicating specifics for each that could move from well-produced to well-designed.

In short, I suggest that while collaboration is good, many corporate situations want to minimize staff. Consequently, I suggest identifying those critical points where collaboration will be useful. Then, I suggest short cuts in processes to the full approach. So, for instance, when working with SMEs focus on decisions to keep the discussion away from unnecessary knowledge. Finally, I suggest the use of tools to support the gaps our brain architectures create.   Unfortunately, the audience was small (27 parallel sessions and at the end of the conference) so there wasn’t a lot of feedback. Still, I did have some good discussion with attendees.

Then, for one of the two participation session, the book I contributed to solicited a wide variety of position papers from respected ed tech individuals, and then solicited responses to same.  I had responded to a paper suggesting three trends in learning: a lifelong learning record system, a highly personalized learning environment, and expanded learner control of time, place and pace of instruction. To those 3 points I added two more: the integration of meta-learning skills and the breakdown of the barrier between formal learning and lifelong learning. I believe both are going to be important, the former because of the decreasing half-life of knowledge, the latter because of the ubiquity of technology.

Because the original author wasn‘t present, I was paired for discussion with another author who shares my passion for engaging learning, and that was the topic of our discussion table.  The format was fun; we were distributed in pairs around tables, and attendees chose where to sit. We had an eager group who were interested in games, and my colleague and I took turns answering and commenting on each other’s comments. It was a nice combination.  We talked about the processes for design, selling the concept, and more.

For the other participation session, the book was a series of monographs on important topics.  The discussion chose a subset of four topics: MOOCs, Social Media, Open Resources, and mLearning. I had written the mLearning chapter.  The chapter format included ‘take home’ lessons, and the editor wanted our presentations to focus on these. I posited the basic mindshifts necessary to take advantage of mlearning. These included five basic principles:

  1. mlearning is not just mobile elearning; mlearning is a wide variety of things.
  2. the focus should be on augmenting us, whether our formal learning, or via performance support, social, etc.
  3. the Least Assistance Principle, in focusing on the core stuff given the limited interface.
  4. leverage context, take advantage of the sensors and situation to minimize content and maximize opportunity.
  5. recognize that mobile is a platform, not a tactic or an app; once you ‘go mobile’, folks will want more.

The sessions were fun, and the feedback was valuable.

3 E’s of Learning: why Engagement

16 August 2017 by Clark 1 Comment

Letter EWhen you’re creating learning experiences, you want to worry about the outcomes, but there’s more to it than that.  I think there are 3 major components for learning as a practical matter, and I lump these under the E’s: Effectiveness, Efficiency, & Engagement. The latter may be more of a stretch, but I’ll make the case .

When you typically talk about learning, you talk about two goals: retention over time, and transfer to all appropriate (and no inappropriate) situations.  That’s learning effectiveness: it’s about ensuring that you achieve the outcomes you need.  To test retention and transfer, you have to measure more than performance at the end of the learning experience. (That is, unless your experience definition naturally includes this feedback as well.) Let alone just asking learners if they  thought it was valuable.  You have to see if the learning has persisted later, and is being used as needed.

However, you don’t have unlimited resources to do this, you need to balance your investment in creating the experience with the impact on the individual and/or organization.  That’s  efficiency. The investment is rewarded with a multiplier on the cost.  This is just good business.

Let’s be clear: investing without evaluating the impact is an act of faith that isn’t scrutable.  Similarly, achieving the outcome at an inappropriate expense isn’t sustainable.  Ultimately, you need to achieve reasonable changes to behavior under a viable expenditure.

A few of us have noticed problems sufficient to advocate quality in what we do.  While things may be trending upward (fingers crossed), I think there’s still ways to go when we’re still hearing about ‘rapid’ elearning instead of ‘outcomes’.  And I’ve argued that the necessary changes produce a cost differential that is marginal, and yet yields outcomes more than marginal.   There’s an obvious case for effectiveness  and efficiency.

But why engagement? Is that necessary? People tout it as desirable. To be fair, most of the time they’re talking about design aesthetics, media embellishment, and even ‘gamification‘ instead of intrinsic engagement.  And I will maintain that there’s a lot more possible. There’s an open question, however: is it worth it?

My answer is yes. Tapping into intrinsic interest has several upsides that are worth the effort.  The good news is that you likely don’t need to achieve a situation where people are willing to pay money to attend your learning. Instead, you have the resources on hand to make this happen.

So, if you make your learning – and here in particular I mean your introductions, examples, and practice – engaging, you’re addressing motivation, anxiety, and potentially optimizing the learning experience.

  • If your introduction helps learners connect to their own desires to be an agent of good, you’re increasing the likelihood that they’ll persist  and  that the learning will ‘stick’.
  • If your examples are stories that illustrate situations the learner recognizes as important, and unpack the thinking that led to success, you’re increasing their comprehension and their knowledge.
  • Most importantly, if your practice tasks are situated in contexts that are meaningful to learners both because they’re real  and important, you’ll be developing their skills in ways closest to how they’ll perform.  And if the challenge in the progression of tasks is right, you’ll also accelerate them at the optimal speed (and increase engagement).

Engagement is a fine-tuning, and learner’s opinions on the experience aren’t the most important thing.  Instead, the improvement in learning outcomes is the rationale.  It takes some understanding and practice to get systematically good at doing this. Further, you can make learning engaging, it is an acquired capability.

So, is your learning engaging intrinsic interest, and making the learning persist? It’s an approach that affects effectiveness in a big way and efficiency in a small way. And that’s the way you want to go, right? Engage!

Simulations versus games

9 August 2017 by Clark Leave a Comment

At the recent Realities 360 conference, I saw some confusion about the difference between a simulation and a game. And while I made some important distinctions in my book on the topic, I realize that it’s possible that it’s time to revisit them. So here I’m talking about some conceptual discriminations that I think are important.

Simulations

As I’ve mentioned, simulations are models of the world. They capture certain relationships we believe to be true about the world. (For that matter, they can represent worlds that aren’t real, certainly the case in games.). They don’t (can’t) capture all the world, but a segment we feel it is important to model. We tend to validate these models by testing them to see if they behave like our real world.  You can also think about simulations as being in a ‘state’ (set of values in variables), and move to others by rules.  Frequently, we include some variability in these models, just as is reflected in the real world. Similarly, these simulations can model considerable complexity.

Such simulations are built out of sets of variables that represent the state of the world, and rules that represent the relationships present. There are several ways things change. Some variables can be changed by rules that act on the basis of time (while countdown timer = on, countdown = countdown -1). Variables can also interact (if countdown=0: if 1 g adamantium and 1 g dilithium, Temperature = Temperature +1000, adamantium = adamantium – 1g, dilithium = dilithium – 1g).  Other changes are based upon learner actions (if learner flips the switch, countdown timer = on).

Note that you may already have a simulation. In business, there may already exist a model of particular processes, particularly if they’re proprietary systems.

From a learning point of view, simulations allow motivated and self-effective learners to explore the relationships they need to understand. However, we can’t always assume motivated and self-effective learners. So we need some additional work to turn a simulation into a learning experience.

Scenarios

One effective way to leverage simulations is to choose an initial state (or ‘space of states’, a start point with some variation), and a state (or set) that constitutes ‘win’. We also typically have states that also represent ‘fail’.  We choose those states so that the learner can’t get to ‘win’ without understanding the necessary relationships.   The learner can try and fail until they discover the necessary relationships.  These start and goal states serve as scaffolding for the learning process.    I call these simulations with start and stop states ‘scenarios’.

This is somewhat complicated by the existence of ‘branching scenarios’. There are initial and goal states and learner actions, but they are  not represented by variable and rules. The relationships in branching scenarios are implicit in the links instead of explicit in the variables and rules. And they’re easier to build!  Still, they don’t have the variability that typically is possible in a simulation. There’s an inflection point (qualitative, not quantitative) where the complexity of controlling the branches renders it more sensible to model the world as a simulation rather than track all the branches.

Games

The problem here is that too often people will build a simulation and call it a game. I once reviewed a journal submission about a ‘game’ where the authors admitted that players thought it was boring. Sorry, then it’s not a game!  The difference between a simulation and a game is a subjective experience of engagement on the part of the player.

So how do you get from a simulation to a game?  It’s about tuning.  It’s about adjusting the frequency of events, and their consequences, such that the challenge moves to fall into the zone between boring and frustrating. Now, for learning, you can’t change the fundamental relationships you’re modeling, but you can adjust items like how quickly events occur, and the importance of being correct. And it takes testing and refinement. Will Wright, a game designers’ game designer, once proposed that tuning is 9/10’s of the work!  Now that’s for a commercial game, but it gives you and idea.

You can also use gamification, scores to add competition, but, please,  only after you first expend the effort to make the game intrinsically interesting. Tap into why they  should care about the experience, and bake that it.

Is it worth it to actually expend effort to make the experience engaging?  I believe that the answer is yes. Perhaps not to the level of a game people will pay $60 to play, but some effort to manifest the innate meaningfulness is worth it. Games minimize the time to obtain competency because they optimize the challenge.  You will have sticks as well as carrots, so you don’t need to put in $M budgets, but do tune until your learners have an engaging and effective experience.

So, does this help? What questions do you still have?

FocusOn Learning reflections

27 June 2017 by Clark Leave a Comment

If you follow this blog (and you should :), it was pretty obvious that I was at the FocusOn Learning conference in San Diego last week (previous 2 posts were mindmaps of the keynotes). And it was fun as always.  Here are my reflections on what happened a bit more, as an exercise in meta-learning.

There were three themes to the conference: mobile, games, and video.  I’m pretty active in the first two (two books on the former, one on the latter), and the last is related to things I care and talk about.  The focus led to some interesting outcomes: some folks were very interested in just one of the topics, while others were looking a bit more broadly.  Whether that’s good or not depends on your perspective, I guess.

Mobile was present, happily, and continues to evolve.  People are still talking about courses on a phone, but more folks were talking about extending the learning.  Some of it was pretty dumb – just content or flash cards as learning augmentation – but there were interesting applications. Importantly, there was a growing awareness about performance support as a sensible approach.  It’s nice to see the field mature.

For games, there were positive and negative signs.  The good news is that games are being more fully understood in terms of their role in learning, e.g. deep practice.  The bad news is that there’s still a lot of interest in gamification without a concomitant awareness of the important distinctions. Tarting up drill-and-kill with PBL (points, badges, and leaderboards; the new acronym apparently)  isn’t worth significant interest!  We know how to drill things that must be, but our focus  should be on intrinsic interest.

As a side note, the demise of Flash has left us without a good game development environment. Flash is both a development environment and a delivery platform. As a development environment  Flash had a low learning threshold, and yet could be used to build complex games.  As a delivery platform, however, it’s woefully insecure (so much so that it’s been proscribed in most browsers). The fact that Adobe couldn’t be bothered to generate acceptable HTML5 out of the development environment, and let it languish, leaves the market open for another accessible tool. And Unity or Unreal provide good support (as I understand it), but still require coding.  So we’re not at an easily accessible place. Oh, for HyperCard!

Most of the video interest was either in technical issues (how to get quality and/or on the cheap), but a lot of interest was also in interactive video. I think branching video is a real powerful learning environment for contextualized decision making.  As a consequence the advent of tools that make it easier is to be lauded. An interesting session with the wise Joe Ganci (@elearningjoe) and a GoAnimate guy talked about when to use video versus animation, which largely seemed to reflect my view (confirmation bias ;) that it’s about whether you want more context (video) or concept (animation). Of course, it was also about the cost of production and the need for fidelity (video more than animation in both cases).

There was a lot of interest in VR, which crossed over between video and games.  Which is interesting because it’s not inherently tied to games or video!  In short,  it’s a delivery technology.  You can do branching scenarios, full game engine delivery, or just video in VR. The visuals can be generated as video or from digital models. There was some awareness, e.g. fun was made of the idea of presenting powerpoint in VR (just like 2nd Life ;).

I did an ecosystem presentation that contextualized all three (video, games, mobile) in the bigger picture, and also drew upon their cognitive and then L&D roles. I also deconstructed the game Fluxx (a really fun game with an interesting ‘twist’). Overall, it was a good conference (and nice to be in San Diego, one of my ‘homes’).

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