Beau Lotto gave a very interesting keynote that built from perceptual phenomena to a lovely message on learning.
Learning in 2024 #LRN2024
The eLearning Guild is celebrating it’s 10th year, and is using the opportunity to reflect on what learning will look like 10 years from now. While I couldn’t participate in the twitter chat they held, I optimistically weighed in: “learning in 2024 will look like individualized personal mentoring via augmented reality, AI, and the network”. However, I thought I would elaborate in line with a series of followup posts leveraging the #lrn2024 hashtag. The twitter chat had a series of questions, so I’ll address them here (with a caveat that our learning really hasn’t changed, our wetware hasn’t evolved in the past decade and won’t again in the next; our support of learning is what I’m referring to here):
1. How has learning changed in the last 10 years (from the perspective of the learner)?
I reckon the learner has seen a significant move to more elearning instead of an almost complete dependence on face-to-face events. And I reckon most learners have begun to use technology in their own ways to get answers, whether via the Google, or social networks like FaceBook and LinkedIn. And I expect they’re seeing more media such as videos and animations, and may even be creating their own. I also expect that the elearning they’re seeing is not particularly good, nor improving, if not actually decreasing in quality. I expect they’re seeing more info dump/knowledge test, more and more ‘click to learn more‘, more tarted-up drill-and-kill. For which we should apologize!
2. What is the most significant change technology has made to organizational learning in the past decade?
I reckon there are two significant changes that have happened. One is rather subtle as yet, but will be profound, and that is the ability to track more activity, mine more data, and gain more insights. The ExperienceAPI coupled with analytics is a huge opportunity. The other is the rise of social networks. The ability to stay more tightly coupled with colleagues, sharing information and collaborating, has really become mainstream in our lives, and is going to have a big impact on our organizations. Working ‘out loud’, showing our work, and working together is a critical inflection point in bringing learning back into the workflow in a natural way and away from the ‘event’ model.
3. What are the most significant challenges facing organizational learning today?
The most significant change is the status quo: the belief that an information oriented event model has any relationship to meaningful outcomes. This plays out in so many ways: order-taking for courses, equating information with skills, being concerned with speed and quantity instead of quality of outcomes, not measuring the impact, the list goes on. We’ve become self-deluded that an LMS and a rapid elearning tool means you’re doing something worthwhile, when it’s profoundly wrong. L&D needs a revolution.
4. What technologies will have the greatest impact on learning in the next decade? Why?
The short answer is mobile. Mobile is the catalyst for change. So many other technologies go through the hype cycle: initial over-excitement, crash, and then a gradual resurgence (c.f. virtual worlds), but mobile has been resistant for the simple reason that there’s so much value proposition. The cognitive augmentation that digital technology provides, available whenever and wherever you are clearly has benefits, and it’s not courses! It will naturally incorporate augmented reality with the variety of new devices we’re seeing, and be contextualized as well. We’re seeing a richer picture of how technology can support us in being effective, and L&D can facilitate these other activities as a way to move to a more strategic and valuable role in the organization. As above, also new tracking and analysis tools, and social networks. I’ll add that simulations/serious games are an opportunity that is yet to really be capitalized on. (There are reasons I wrote those books :)
5. What new skills will professionals need to develop to support learning in the future?
As I wrote (PDF), the new skills that are necessary fall into two major categories: performance consulting and interaction facilitation. We need to not design courses until we’ve ascertained that no other approach will work, so we need to get down to the real problems. We should hope that the answer comes from the network when it can, and we should want to design performance support solutions if it can’t, and reserve courses for only when it absolutely has to be in the head. To get good outcomes from the network, it takes facilitation, and I think facilitation is a good model for promoting innovation, supporting coaching and mentoring, and helping individuals develop self-learning skills. So the ability to get those root causes of problems, choose between solutions, and measure the impact are key for the first part, and understanding what skills are needed by the individuals (whether performers or mentors/coaches/leaders) and how to develop them are the key new additions.
6. What will learning look like in the year 2024?
Ideally, it would look like an ‘always on’ mentoring solution, so the experience is that of someone always with you to watch your performance and provide just the right guidance to help you perform in the moment and develop you over time. Learning will be layered on to your activities, and only occasionally will require some special events but mostly will be wrapped around your life in a supportive way. Some of this will be system-delivered, and some will come from the network, but it should feel like you’re being cared for in the most efficacious way.
In closing, I note that, unfortunately,my Revolution book and the Manifesto were both driven by a sense of frustration around the lack of meaningful change in L&D. Hopefully, they’re riding or catalyzing the needed change, but in a cynical mood I might believe that things won’t change near as much as I’d hope. I also remember a talk (cleverly titled: Predict Anything but the Future :) that said that the future does tend to come as an informed basis would predict with an unexpected twist, so it’ll be interesting to discover what that twist will be.
On the Road Fall 2014
Fall always seems to be a busy time, and I reckon it’s worthwhile to let you know where I’ll be in case you might be there too! Coming up are a couple of different events that you might be interested in:
September 28-30 I’ll be at the Future of Talent retreat at the Marconi Center up the coast from San Francisco. It’s a lovely spot with a limited number of participants who will go deep on what’s coming in the Talent world. I’ll be talking up the Revolution, of course.
October 28-31 I’ll be at the eLearning Guild’s DevLearn in Las Vegas (always a great event; if you’re into elearning you should be there). I’ll be running a Revolution workshop (I believe there are still a few spots), part of a mobile panel, and talking about how we are going about addressing the challenges of learning design at the Wadhwani Foundation.
November 12-13 I’ll be part of the mLearnNow event in New Orleans (well, that’s what I call it, they call it LearnNow mobile blah blah blah ;). Again, there are some slots still available. I’m honored to be co-presenting with Sarah Gilbert and Nick Floro (with Justin Brusino pulling strings in the background), and we’re working hard to make sure it should be a really great deep dive into mlearning. (And, New Orleans!)
There may be one more opportunity, so if anyone in Sydney wants to talk, consider Nov 21.
Hope to cross paths with you at one or more of these places!
Vale Joe Miller
This is a name you’re not likely to know, but I can’t let his passing go without comment. Joe was an intensely private person who had a sizable impact on the field of technology in learning, and I was privileged to know him.
I met Joe when my colleague Jim “Sky” Schuyler, who had hired for my first job out of college, subsequently dragged me back from overseas to work for him at a new company: Knowledge Universe Interactive Studios (KUIS). I’d stayed in touch with Sky over the years, and I was looking to come back at the same time he had been hired to lead KUIS’s work to be an ISP for the KU companies, but also to create a common platform. I was brought on board to lead the latter initiative.
To make a long story short, initially I reported to Sky, but ultimately he moved on and I began to report to the CEO, Joe, directly. Sky had said that he liked working for people smarter than himself, and if indeed Joe was such this was quite the proposition, as Sky was not only a Northwestern PhD but a wise colleague in many ways. He’d been a mentor and friend as well as a colleague, and if Sky (reticent as he is) thought highly of Joe, this was high praise indeed.
I got to know Joe slowly. He was quite reserved not only personally but professionally, but he did share his thinking. It quickly became clear that not only did he have the engineering chops of a true techy, he also had the strategic insight of an visionary executive. What I learned more slowly was that he was not just a natural leader, but a man with impeccable integrity and values.
I found out that he’d been involved with Plato via his first job at Battelle, and was suitably inspired to start a company supporting Plato. He moved to the Bay Area to join Atari, and subsequently was involved with Koala Technologies, which created early PC (e.g. Apple) peripherals. His trajectory subsequently covered gaming as well as core technology, eventually ending up at Sega before he convinced the KU folks to let him head up KUIS. He seemed to know everyone.
More importantly, he had the vision to understand system and infrastructure, and barriers to same. He was excited about Plato as a new capability for learning. He supported systems at Koala for new interface devices. He worked to get Sega to recognize the new landscape. In so many ways he worked behind the scenes to enable new experiences, but he was never at the forefront of the public explanation, preferring to make things happen at the back end (despite the fact that he was an engaging speaker: tall, resonant voice, and compelling charisma).
In my short time to get to know him, he shared his vision on a learning system that respected who learners were, and let me shape a team that could (and did) deliver on that vision. He fought to give us the space and the resources, and asked the tough questions to make sure we were focused. We got a working version up and running before the 2001 crash.
He continued to have an impact, leading some of the major initiatives of Linden Labs as they went open source and met some challenging technical issues while negotiating cultural change to take down barriers. He ended up at SportVision, where he was beginning to help them understand they were not about information, but insight. Unfortunately, I didn’t have much view into what was happening there, as it was proprietary and Joe was, as I said, private.
Joe served as a mentor for me. I found him to have deep values, and under his austere exterior he exemplified values of humanity and compassion. I was truly grateful when I could continue to meet him regularly and learn from him as he expressed true interest as well as sharing his insights.
He was taken from us too early, and too quickly. He fought a tough battle at the end, but at least was surrounded by the love of his life and their children as they passed. Rest in Peace.
Update: there’s a memorial site for Joe, http://www.josephbmilleriii.com where you can leave thoughts, view pictures, and more. RIP.
Aspiration trumps trepidation
Last week’s #lrnchat (a twitter chat on learning that runs Thurs evenings for an hour 5:30 PT/8:30 ET) was on the topic of fear-mongering in Organizational Learning. The point is that often fear-mongering happens (by definition always wrongly), but what are the reasons, impacts, and ways to avoid. And among my responses are one that I like as a quip.
I was, in particular, flashing back on the book Story Wars, that talked about how advertising has changed. This was in the context of fear-mongering as an approach to motivating behavior. In that book, they cited how advertisements in older days were designed to target your concerns. In essence, they made you worry about shortcomings as a motivation to buy remedies, whether to address your personal hygiene or appearance of success.
What’s changed is that they’ve now moved on to finding out that what is more motivating is tapping into your goals. What are you trying to achieve? Who are you and what reflects your passions? Then they provide products that can align with your self-image. Of course, their ability to target your market segment is much more advanced, so they know more about who you are and have more specific means of reaching you.
In learning, however, this is also true. It’s far better to tap into your aspirations to motivate your learning than drumming on your fears. The latter will work some, if you’ve got legitimate concerns (e.g. losing your job), but far better is to help you understand how this will help you.
So, when it comes to motivation, I’ll argue that targeting aspiration trumps targeting trepidations. Help people understand why this is valuable or important, not fear of the consequences of failure to comply. It’s part of a better culture, and a better workplace. And that’s something you aspire to, right? ;)
Degrees of Difference
I’ll shortly be on the road going both near and far. And it occurred to me that the distance isn’t the issue so much (aside from the time zone) as is the adaptations you face. I’ll suggest it’s the change that you must adapt to as much as the time.
Sure, first of all, there’re the time differences. On short jaunts, the direction matters too. I (selfishly) don’t have a lot of sympathy for East Coast US folks who have to come here to the West Coast. I find it easier to stay up later and get up later (well, I don’t really get up later, I’m a bad sleeper, brother got all the good sleeper genes) than to try to go to bed earlier (as if) or get up earlier. (I’ve gotten my doctor to assist with the ‘going to bed earlier!). Of course, at the end Easterners will have to go back, but that brings up a second issue.
I think it’s much easier to adapt when you’re in a familiar context. It’s easier for me to get back to schedule at home than to adjust to a different time zone in an unfamiliar environment. There’re the regular rhythms of life at home that give you many more cues than just the clock about what’s happening. Kid’s schedules, meals, etc. Which makes one of my strategies for travel to give myself food cues.
And that difference magnifies. I find it more exhausting overall to deal with new contexts, and that diminishes your available resources for other coping. So it’s harder to cope somewhere else than at home, and in a more similar culture than a more unfamiliar one. I would find it easier, for example, to go to Germany (where my Mother was born) or the UK than somewhere a similar distance away (maybe Spain or France) but more foreign to my experience. And Europe is easier than the MidEast, which in general is more different. Saudi Arabia, for instance, though a fascinating place, was quite challenging to figure out how to cope. And despite being quite far, Australia is easy for me because I lived there for a number of years (and the culture isn’t that different regardless).
Business makes it a bit easier, too. As a somewhat common culture, you can moderate the differences in expectation. Dress and hours won’t vary too much, but there are subtle differences in discussions and negotiations. Hofstede’s dimensions help illustrate how countries can differ. Though even organizations can have different cultures that may need to be navigated.
And this all affects some more than others. Some people are naturally relaxed and confident, and if it’s coupled with being good sleepers, they’ll be fine. Others of us fret more about having things go trouble free (and I find as I get older that this is becoming more frequently the case :). And, of course, the importance of the outcome can influence the degree of confidence and comfort or not. So I invest effort in trying to get things right (and recently relearned the lesson from being too relaxed about it).
So food cues, striking the balance between bringing the right stuff and traveling light, getting outside, and caffeine have been my tricks. Also reading up on new places to have some advance notice. Books and movies too, for the travel time itself (again, not a good sleeper). Does this make sense to you? How do you cope?
Layering on success
In a previous post, I talked about the layers around learning design. One of the layers that’s increasingly interesting to me is the notion of the success skills, or meta-skills that are involved. For example, the SCANS competencies are a decent suite of skills that recognize the general skills for success that cross different disciplines.
However, you really can’t focus on such skills in isolation. Like most meta-skills, they need to be applied in a domain. As a consequence, they really need to be worked on while developing some other skills. That is, when you’re developing a curriculum, you have opportunities to require using those skills, but they need to be explicitly included and better yet, assessed.
In the field of educational software, there have been many ‘games’ that claimed “develops problem-solving skills”. This wasn’t accurate, as most of them required problem-solving skills, but there was no development. Development would require assessing performance and providing feedback. And that’s what we want to do to develop these skills.
So my suggestion is to layer on these requirements across the curriculum, and assess them separately. The skills, like organizing, problem-solving, communicating, researching, etc, are naturally part of an activity-based curriculum, but need to be deliberately inserted at reasonable rates and tracked. It’s not hard, you choose this assignment (task/activity/practice) to include a presentation, that one to require research, another to require a design task, etc. And you assess them across assignments.
So, you look at their repeated performance on each skill at each time they’re inserted. You can provide support and gradually remove it (as you do for other skill-development practice).
The point is to not only develop the learner’s ability to acquire the curricular skills, but also to acquire the meta-skills. For instance, if you are helping people acquire job skills, you are also developing their ability to hold the job, and self-improve over time.
Think of it this way. People acquire a job by their ability to do X, but they will need to know how to work in a job context regardless of whether it’s X, Y, or Z. Also, X will change to X+ and X++ over time, and the skills to keep up to date and move up require the meta-skills.
I think of this as one of the pillars of a successful education practice; develop the learners not only in the domain, but as learners. Developing them as people, not only as practitioners of a competency. I think this is a practical approach, what do you think?
Recharging
For many of the past 10 years, I’ve gone walkabout with some friends into the mountains to, well, many things. It’s fun, it’s thoughtful, it’s invigorating, and it is also hard work. I’ll paint a picture to contextualize the picture.
With two friends (one I’ve known for 30+ years), we drove up into the hills, spent the night in a tent cabin, and the next morning parked and started hiking. We followed the trail up to May Lake, which is already a gorgeous high Sierra lake just above timberline. From there, my two friends had got adventurous.
So, we went around the lake and took off cross country up the ridge. This was up rock, as we were above timberline, and off trail so it was where we figured we could go.
At the top of the ridge, we had the view you see in the picture, and we headed down to the left to get to the lake. We camped in some stunted trees off to the right of the lake out of the picture. We of course had to carry our tents, stoves, water filters, sleeping bags, clothing, everything with us.
And I learned a valuable lesson. I packed in a flurry of trying to get other things done, and missed just a couple of things I should’ve brought, checked, etc. I ended up ok, but forgetting the sleep pad led to some discomfort. I could’ve been in worse shape, though my friends would’ve helped out if I didn’t have enough fuel. If I’d used the checklist my colleague created, I’d have been better off!
We day hiked the next day. You can see small plumes of smoke in the background, as there was a ‘management fire’ going on at the time. We got a blast for about 20 minutes or so, but it cleared up so I didn’t have to panic. Right before nightfall, we saw some hovering against the wall of the ridge to the left (1000′ above us, and we were at 9000’+), and I feared that it might settle down overnight.
Indeed, we woke up the last morning in smoke, and hiked back out only to find out that May Lake, Tenaya Lake, and as far as we could tell all of Tuolomne Meadows was covered. The gorgeous views were tarnished, but we feared that the fires were not those that were being managed, and indeed so we subsequently discovered. My thoughts to those who are suffering. Fortunately, we got out safe and sound.
The conversation we shared veered from philosophical discussions, personal details, and of course ridiculous humorous dialogs. There were also periods of no discussion, merely contemplating and enjoying nature. There’s something restorative about being in the wild, with vistas, wildlife, and the sounds of wind and water. You don’t have to get out there with the level of exertion and immersion we choose, but I believe there’s something primal and necessary in getting away from the daily hustle and bustle regularly.
So, how do you recharge?
Top 10 Tools for Learning
Jane Hart compiles, every year, a list of the top 10 tools for learning. And, of course, it’s that time again, so here we go. I like what Harold Jarche did about tagging his list with the steps of his Seek-Sense-Share model for Personal Knowledge Mastery, so I’m adding that as well. In no particular order:
1. Word: I write most of my articles and books in Word. The outline feature is critical for me (and the main reason I haven’t switched to Pages, it’s just not industrial strength) in structuring my thoughts, and writing is one of the ways I think out loud. Sense & Share.
2. WordPress: the other way I write out loud is on my blog (like this), and my blog is powered by WordPress. Share.
3. OmniGraffle: diagramming is the other way I think out loud, and I’m regularly getting my mind around things by diagramming. Sense.
4. Google: the core tool in my searching for answers for things. Seek.
5. Twitter: a major source of input, pointing to things of interest. Seek.
6. Facebook: also a source of insight. Seek.
7. Skype: continues to be the way I stay in touch with my ITA colleagues (Seek, Sense, & Share)
8. Mail: email is still a major tool for getting pointers, staying in touch, asking questions, etc. (Seek, Share)
9. Keynote: creating presentations is another way I organize my thoughts to share. Sense & Share.
10. OmniOutliner: another way of organizing my thoughts. A different tool for the same purpose. Sense.
What tools do you use?
Quinnovating for Jobs
It’s now official, so I figure it’s time to update you all. I’ve taken on a role of Chief Learning Architect (a slightly better title than the one originally considered) for the Wadhwani Foundation. It’s an initial 6 month contract, so Quinnovation isn’t going to cease to exist, just have (much) more limited availability. I’m still passionate about the Serious eLearning Manifesto, and the Revolution message, and I’ll still be thinking out loud here and on Twitter.
The Foundation’s mission is to create jobs and prepare people to take them. They’ve started with Entrepreneurship programs to create new businesses, and are supplementing with job training to prepare people to staff them. A third leg will be innovation grants. It’s a noble mission, the vision of the founder.
My role is to refine the learning design to increase success. Partnerships and content development are already underway, so it’ll be a challenge to influence processes, but it’s a chance to have a real impact on something that matters. I start today, and fingers crossed. We’ll see if I can practice what I preach, eh?