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Making Slow Learning Concrete #change11

7 December 2011 by Clark 5 Comments

It occurs to me that I’ve probably not conveyed in any concrete terms what I think the ‘slow learning’ experience might be like. And I admit that I’m talking a technology environment in the concrete instance (because I like toys). So here are some instances:

Say you’ve a meeting with a potential client. You’ve been working on how to more clearly articulate the solutions you offer and listening to the customer to establish whether there’s a match or not. You’ve entered the meeting into your calendar, and indicated the topic by the calendar, tags, the client, or some other way. So, shortly before the meeting, your system might send you some reminder that both reiterated the ‘message’ you’d worked out, and reminded you about pulling out the client’s issues. Then, there might be a tool provided during the meeting (whether one you’d created, one you’d customized, or a stock one) to help capture the important elements. Afterwards, the system might provide you with a self-evaluation tool, or even connect you to a person for a chat.

Or, say, you’re walking around a new town. Your system might regularly suggest some topics of interest, depending on your interest showing architecture, history, or socioeconomic indicators. You could ignore them, or follow them up. Ideally, it’d also start connecting some dots: showing a picture from a previous trip and suggesting “Remember we saw an example of <this> architect use here? Well, right here we have the evolution of that form; see how the arches have…” So it’s making connections for you. You can ignore, pursue further, or whatever. It might make a tour for you on the fly, if you wanted. If you were interested in food, it might say: “we’ve been exploring Indian food, you apparently have no plans for dinner and there’s an Indian restaurant near here that would be a way to explore Southern Indian cuisine”.

Another situation might be watching an event, and having extra information laid on top. So instead of just watching a game, you could see additional information that is being used by the coaches to make strategic decisions: strengths and weaknesses of the opposing team in this context, intangible considerations like clock management, or the effects of wind.

And even in formal schooling, if you’re engaged in either an individual or group problem, it might well be available to provide a hint, as well as of course tools to hand.

The notion is that you might have more formal and informal goals, and the system would layer on information, augmenting your reality with extra information aligned to your interests and goals, making the world richer. It could and would help performance in the moment, but also layer on some concepts on top.

I see this as perhaps a mobile app, that has some way of notifying you (e.g. it’s own signature ‘sound’), a way to sense context, and more. It might ask for your agreement to have a link into the task apps you use, so it has more context information, but also knows when and where you are.

This isn’t the only path to slow learning. Ideally, it’d just be a rich offering of community-generated resources and people to connect with in the moment, but to get people ready to take advantage of that it might need some initial scaffolding. Is this making sense?

Initial reflections on Slow Learning #change11

6 December 2011 by Clark 2 Comments

I have to say that I found the comments on my initial post very interesting and challenging. A couple of themes have emerged that partly I want to elaborate on, and partly want to reflect upon. I believe in, and do try, ‘learning out loud’, so I’ll both try to elaborate and draw myself up short.

One of the themes that emerged is the rejection of the GPS idea, and extolling a preference for getting lost (I did explicitly mention that GPS’s do not help you learn the terrain, but I’ll add that they could). I want to unpack that a bit. One of the issues is, for me, where you want to learn, and where you don’t. As a definitely curious individual (in both senses, I suppose :), there’s far too much of interest for me to be able to focus on it all. As a consequence, I want to decide on what I invest effort in, and what I don’t. So, for instance, I’ve learned about keyboard shortcuts to use Word’s outline capabilities, and I can understand where others would not (tho’ I admit to wishing everyone would learn styles, as a valuable model going forward!). So, I think we’d use a mental GPS when it’s something we don’t want to learn, and we’d want a different relationship when we do. If we’re self-aware learners.

There’s also the issue of how the Sage on the Side would operate? What curricula are being used? Who’s providing the content? I will admit that while I talk a constructivist game, I do tend to err too quickly to think about designed resources. In my own defense, I will suggest that self-learning skills aren’t broadly distributed enough yet, and particularly for novices, there are times when they don’t know what they need and why it’s important. I am very much a fan of guided discovery learning (not the unguided discovery learning that was used as a straw-man opponent to instructivist in the Kirschner, Sweller, Clark article), but I do believe guidance is necessary until learners demonstrate self-learning capability. And I definitely think we can and should be developing that capability, but I’m not sanguine that we’re very good at it yet.

However, I’ve earlier talked about user generated curricula, and I think that’s really the way to go. In the long term, the communities will take ownership of the paths to competency. I’m hoping, through something like Project Tin Can (horrible name, but…), we can support defining broad paths to capability that are maintained by the community, and even self-proposed paths that are vetted by the community (says a guy who designed his own undergraduate major).

I admit that I’m trying to focus on a system that can be supporting a person in their goals with minimal human intervention. I want it to be one of the options on the table for the ‘sage’ to draw upon (e.g. the resources can be people, too), but I’m trying to make this scalable. Idealistically, I would like communities to become more other-supporting, but I think such a system would have desirable properties in terms of developing people over time.

As I think about it, I also anticipate some serendipity in the sage approach. There’s some randomness in our cognitive architecture, and I’d like to see some similar probabilistic behavior in the system recommendations. When we built the Intellectricityâ„¢ system, we had options ‘competing’ for the opportunity to be presented. We also had machine learning in the background to improve the weighting. This is where deep analytics and semantics could generate some real interesting outcomes.

And I definitely would hope that we would explicitly be working in a layer on top of the learning goals to address meta-learning or learning to learn, so we could move from providing guidance to merely suggesting resources. So, for example, despite my time trying to improve my learning, there’s still room for improvement and I welcome any assistance I can get. I’m mindful of Watts Humphrey’s work in software quality, where documenting your decisions and having them reviewed identified persistent mistakes, and allowed for continual improvement (resulting in large decreases in errors, much more accurate schedules, and other tangible benefits). The approach is certainly applicable to other areas of design and work, and I think it’d be fascinating to have systemic support (because the overhead is high enough that I haven’t been able to instill it in myself ;).

Given that we’re all novices in some areas while experts in others, I think the notion of at least a bootstrap from some support makes sense to assist transition into a community of practice. I don’t think this is fundamental opposition to rhizomes,connectivism, or anything else, but I welcome your thoughts. I do think that the notion of a tree of trajectories may be too rigid, so I’ll have to ponder that, but I’d like to devolve that decision to the community of practice.

Going beyond just the notion of the system, I believe that we need to start thinking more broadly about our curricula, pedagogy, and more. That’s not new, but I do believe a shift from learning events to continual development is not only needed, but doable. Given that each of us is a member of multiple communities, it may look more like a network, but that’s OK.

Slow Learning – #change11

3 December 2011 by Clark 18 Comments

This is a longer post launching my week in the #change11 MOOC (Massively Open Online Course).

Our formal learning approaches too often don‘t follow how our brains really work. We have magic now; we can summon up powerful programs to do our bidding, gaze through webcams across distances, and bring anyone and anything to pretty much anywhere. Our limitations are no longer the technology, but our imaginations. The question is, what are we, and should be, doing with this technology?

I like to look at this a couple of ways. For one, I like to ask myself “what would my ideal learning situation be”

Stop and ask yourself that. Go ahead, I‘ll wait. And feel free to share!

For me, that would be having a personal mentor traveling with me, looking at my tasks, providing both support in the moment, and developing me slowly over time. I talked about how we might systematize that in a post titled Sage at the Side. I also talked about this model as Layered Learning. That is, layering on learning across our life.

It‘s part of what my colleague Harold Jarche talks about when saying “work is learning and learning is workâ€, the notion that as organizations start empowering workers to adapt to the increasing complexity, there will be no difference between work and learning, and we‘ll have to move away from the â€˜event‘ model of learning and start integrating learning more closely into our activities. We‘ll need to have a closer coupling between our activities and the resources, creating what Jay Cross calls a workscape and I‘ve termed the performance ecosystem. That is, having the tools to hand, including job aids, people, and skill development, but in a more systemic way.

Think about that: how would you construct an optimal performance environment for yourself? What would it look like? Again, feel free to share.

Would it look like an LMS over here, training away over there, job aids scattered across portals, and social networks hierarchically structured or completely banned? Would you have spray-and-pray (aka show up and throw up) training? Online courses that are clicky-clicky bling-bling? Resources accessible by the way the organization is siloed? Even the simple and well-documented matter of spaced learning is largely violated in most of the learning interventions we propagate. In short, all of this is in conflict with how the human brain works!

Look at how how we learn naturally, before schooling (what I call the 7 C‘s of natural learning). We see that we learn by being engaged in meaningful activity, and working with others. It‘s not about knowledge dump and test, but instead about coupling engaged activity with reflection. I like Collins, Brown, & Holum‘s Cognitive Apprenticeship as a model for thinking more richly about learning. Other learning models are not static (c.f. Merrill‘s trajectory through CDT to ID2 to Ripples), and I believe they‘ll converge where Cognitive Apprenticeship is (albeit perhaps my slightly adulterated version thereof). It talks about modeling, scaffolding and release, naturally incorporating social and meaningful activity into the learning process.

Taking a broader look, too many of our systems have a limited suite of solutions to choose from, and ignore a number of features that we need. The ADDIE process assumes a course, and still doesn‘t have any real support for the emotional engagement aspect. A step above is the HPT approach, which does look at the learning need and checks to see whether the solution might be a course, a job aid, realigning incentives, or some other things. However, it still doesn‘t consider, really, engagement, nor does an adequate job of considering when connecting to a person is a more valuable solution than designing content.

And while Gloria Gery‘s seminal work on Electronic Performance Support Systems suggested that these systems could not only provide support in the moment but also develop the learners‘ understanding, I still don‘t see this in any systems in practice. Even GPSs don‘t help you understand the area, they just get you where you‘re trying to go. So we are still missing something.

I‘m really arguing for the need to come up with a broader perspective on learning. I‘ve been calling it learning experience design, but really it‘s more. It‘s a combination of performance support and learning (and it‘s badly in need of some branding help). The notion is a sort-of personal GPS for your knowledge work. It‘s knows where you want to go (since you told it), and it knows where you are geographically and semantically (via GPS and your calendar), and as it recognizes the context it can provide not only support in the moment, but layers on learning along the way. And I think that we don‘t know really how to look at things this way yet; we don‘t have design models (to think about the experience conceptually), we don‘t have design processes (to go from goal to solution), and we don‘t have tools (to deliver this integrated experience). Yet the limits are not technological; we have the ability to build the systems if we can conceptualize the needed framework.

I think this framework will need to start with considering the experience design, what is the flow of information and activity that will help develop the learner (e.g. “If you get the design right, there are lots of ways to implement itâ€). Then we can get into the mechanics of how to distribute the experience across devices, information, people, etc. But this is embryonic yet, I welcome your thoughts!

Really, I‘m looking to start matching our technology more closely to our brains. Taking a page from the slow movement (e.g. slow X, where X = food, sex, travel, …), I‘m talking about slow learning, where we start distributing our learning in ways that match the ways in which our brains work: meaningfulness, activation and reactivation, not separate but wrapped around our lives, etc.

There‘s lots more: addressing the epistemology of learners, mobile technologies, meta-learning & 21st C skills, and deep analytics and semantic systems, to name a few, but I think we need to start with the right conceptions. Some of my notions of design may be too didactic, after all, and we‘ll need to couple information augmentation with meaning-making to make real progress, but I think this notion of stepping back and reflecting on what we might want to achieve and where we‘re currently inadequate is an initial step.

And now the initiative is over to you. I look forward to your thoughts.

Readings

Collins, A., Brown, J.S., and Holum, A. (1991). . Cognitive Apprenticeship: Making Thinking Visible. American Educator, Winter.

Quinn, C. (2004). Learning at Large. Educational Technology, 44, 4, 45-49.

Quinn, C. (2009). Populating the LearnScape: e-Learning as Strategy. In M. Allen (Ed.) Michael Allen‘s eLearning Annual 2009. Pfeiffer, San Francisco.

Quinn, C. (2010). Rethinking eLearning. Learning Solutions Magazine. April.

Quinn, C. (2010). Designing for an uncertain world. Learnlets. April.

Thalheimer, W. (2006). Spacing Learning Over Time. Work Learning Research.

Stephen Berlin Johnson Keynote Mindmap

17 November 2011 by Clark 2 Comments

Here at the very friendly Canadian Society for Training & Development annual conference, Stephen Berlin Johnson gave a great keynote telling the story of innovation. In it, he busted the myth of individual inspiration and instead pointed to the contributions of the slow hunch, diverse inputs, and continual communication & collaboration.

Layered Learning

8 November 2011 by Clark 1 Comment

Last week, I posted about a model where a system could provide a sage who looks at the events of your life and provides support. I want to elaborate that model by looking at it in a different way.

The notion here is that you have events in your life, across the bottom. And you have some learning goals, e.g. to learn about project management, and about running meetings. You might get some initial content about those two goals, but then let’s focus on developing that learning over time.

The events in your life give you a chance to use them as learning experiences, not just performance opportunities. If there are not enough in your life, you might have interstitial activities (those in dashed lines), but you can be developed across learning goals abcd, and uvwxyz, both through delivered experiences, and with learning wrapped around real experiences.

Let me make that latter clearer. Say you’ve got some event like project work, and an associated learning goal (e.g. concept ‘d’ in a curricula). A system could see the calendar entry for the project work and, through tagging or other semantic means, recognize the relationship with learning goal ‘d’. Then, some relevant activation and concept material might precede the event, an aid could appear during, and either a self-evaluation metric or a connection to a live person could happen afterward. Delivered, for instance, through mobile devices.

The goal is to use the events in your life as learning opportunities as much as possible (or preferable). We can also mix in some simulated practice (e.g an alternate reality game) if it’s not occurring at a sufficient rate in real life, but the goal is to match the learning development plan to the rate at which we effectively learn. And, to be clear, we do not learn effectively by a one-off knowledge dump and a quiz, as much of what we do actually works out to be.

As I’ve mentioned before, we have the magic, the sufficiently advanced technology Arthur C. Clarke talked about, to hand. We should start using it to develop us towards our goals in appropriate ways. The opportunity is there; who’s ready to seize it?

Sage at the Side

1 November 2011 by Clark 13 Comments

A number of years ago, I wrote an article (PDF) talking about how we might go beyond our current ‘apart’ learning experiences. The notion is what I call ‘layered learning’, where we don’t send you away from your life to go attend a learning event, but instead layer it around the events in your life. This is very much part of what I’ve been calling slow learning, and a recent conversation has catalyzed and crystalized that thought.

A 'personal mentor' model

Think about the sort of ideal learning experience you might have. As you traverse the ‘rocky road’ of life, imagine having a personal coach who would observe the situation, understand the context of the task and the desired goal, and could provide some aid (from some sack of resources) that could assist you in immediate performance. Your performance would improve.

Let’s go further. This sage, moreover, could draw from some curricula (learning trajectories) and prepare you beforehand and guide reflection afterward so that real performance event now becomes a learning opportunity as well, helping you understand why this particular approach makes sense, how to adapt it, and more. In this way, the sage moves from performance coach to learning mentor.

One step further would be to have learning trajectories not only about the domain (e.g. engineering) but also about quality, management, learning, and more. So learners could be developed as learners, and as persons, not just as performers.

Now this would be ideal, but individual mentors don’t scale very well. But here’s the twist: we can build this. We can have curricula, learning objects, and build a sage via rules that can do this. Imagine going through your workday with a device (e.g. an app phone or a small tablet) that knows what you’re doing (from your calendar), which triggers content to be served up before, during, and after tasks, that develops you over time. We can build the tutor, develop and access the curricula and content, deliver it, track it.

I hope this is clear. There are other ways to think about this, and I’ll see if I can’t capture them in some way; stay tuned. The limitations are no longer the technology, the limits are between our ears. Reckon?

Vale Jobs

11 October 2011 by Clark 2 Comments

My first job out of college was designing and programming educational computer games. I had to do the TRS-80 Model I before I got to work on an Apple ][, but I finally bought a ][e, and sold it to my company shortly thereafter as I headed off to graduate school. I was a grad student in an HCI lab (with Donald Norman, who went on to become an Apple Fellow), and so I was very aware of the Macintosh (I’d coveted a Lisa before that), and bought a Mac II to write my PhD thesis on. Since then I’ve only used Macs as my main machine (tho’ there has been the odd PC around the house). And that’s quite a few; in my office right now is an iMac DV, a Powerbook Wallstreet and also a G4, as well as an old and a new MacBook Pro, iPhone, and an iPad.

And let’s not dismiss the software. Despite some quirks, the OS has a solid foundation, and the interface experience on top of it is pretty good. I learned HyperCard (even though I’d moved on from programming), love Keynote, think Pages is *almost* there (the outlining is not quite yet industrial strength), etc. So you can imagine it was with some unexpected sadness that I learned about the passing of Steve Jobs.

Enough has been said about the fact that it wasn’t just the surface design, but his insistence on a comprehensive user experience. It has also already been covered that it was much more than that, it was the insight into the market, e.g. not just the iPod, but iTunes. Not just the iPhone, but the whole reengineering of the relationship between hardware provider and telcos. Industry-changing stuff, and absolutely true. But I want to talk about one other thing that has somewhat passed under the radar.

How many of you would have liked to work for Apple? You didn’t hear much about it, like you might with Google, but it seemed like a pretty cool place to hang out. And there are two aspects to this. One is that you didn’t hear much. In the notoriously gossipy Silicon Valley, Apple was remarkably resistant to leaks. I think this is reflective of the other component. While you can install some pretty rigorous constraints, I think you do better if you instill some loyalty. And I think that while Jobs was at times dictatorial, as has come out, I think he did it through selling a vision inside the company as well as outside.

It has been said that the best form of government is a benevolent dictatorship (the only problem is ensuring the benevolent part), and I think Steve Jobs made a company doing things worth getting behind, and I suspect that it was pretty easy to go along with some of the constraints because you knew why they were there. But it has to also be a place where you can make mistakes, as Steve made them himself, starting with the Apple ///. I think that Apple has wanted the best, but rewarded folks for being that, too.

This is all inference, as I never worked there, and haven’t discussed it with the few people I’ve known who worked there. But some pretty fabulous stuff has come from there, and it can’t all be one person. So I just wanted to acknowledge that he not only built products, and a company, but a culture that allowed the company to succeed, wildly. I’m somewhat skeptical of the ability to use a university model to develop executives who can perpetuate the Apple success, but the fact that they’re trying is worthy of consideration. I think they can continue to succeed, but I hope that they have some other approaches too.

And, that, to me, is a lesson to take away from this. Steve Jobs was inspiring, but he recognized it was more than just luck, it was a habit of mind that can be developed. Not only do you have to pursue your dream, but there are skills and habits of mind that go along with it. And if you recognize that, identify those skills, model them, develop them, and reward them, you can build a successful company.

RIP.

Motivation & Gamification

6 October 2011 by Clark Leave a Comment

The initial Learning 3.0 conference (well-done, Phillip, Julie, & Leah) was held in conjunction with The Motivation Show, a large conference (dwarfing our little group) and Expo on incentive and recognition programs. And it’s thought-provoking.

First, you have to know that while I understand sales commissions and rewards, because they *work*, I don’t like them. It seems to me to be rewarding a behavior of convincing people to buy things they might not otherwise do. And, yes, I know that there’s a move to solution selling (through one of my partners I’ve done a fair bit of work on sales), but still, solution selling hasn’t always worked (partly because it often isn’t implemented well: e.g. the incentives are still aligned with product selling).

So you can imagine my reaction as I walked the motivation expo hall on the last day. Aisle after aisle of vacation destinations, gourmet foods, luxury items, and more. It would’ve been a great shopping experience if you were well-heeled and this wasn’t focused on corporate buyers.

And I became curious. We’d heard that there are incentives for many things: health, safety, and more. I’d heard of rewarding innovation. I wondered if, as I cynically believed, this was largely for sales rewards instead of those other things. And while I couldn’t get the answer as clearly as I wanted, it wasn’t as bad as I’d thought.

What I found was that sales was something less than a quarter, consumer promotions roughly a quarter, business gifts roughly another quarter, and employee recognition rounded out the last quarter. So, 70-75% or so was on the transaction side and the rest was for employees. Moreover, talking to one of the recogntion system vendors, it became clear that this trend was new; that sales *had dominated, but they were moving to recognizing that this could apply more broadly (tho one of the venue folks noted that the show had shrunk from years before).

And I think it makes sense. Look, there are product and service designers working to come out with new and better products that better serve the market, and increase sales. And, as one of the attendees I shared lunch with noted, if the learning group offers improved sales training and product training, and it creates a delta in sales, why don’t they get a share?

Now, this whole incentive ‘motivation’ thing is “gamification”. They’re creating simple reward things that increase behaviors, but they’re extrinsic, not intrinsic (cf the distinction between gamification and what I call engagification). And, as Dan Pink’s “Drive” says (as did the keynote by the former CEO of Texas RoadHouse), intrinsic awards work better.

I think I’ll stand by my belief that sales incentives can end up creating a situation where people are rewarded for getting people to do things that they’re not inclined to do. And while some may argue that it is in the best interest (e.g. getting people to be safe, or exercise, or eat better, which I’d argue folks largely would like to do), in general I reckon most folks wouldn’t like to buy things that they might not otherwise purchase. And for those who think I’m being too harsh on sales, let me ask what they think would happen if those incentives went away and sales folks were on salary only. Would you have happier consumers?

Look, I’m still happy to do the best I can to make sales training and product skills the best it can be (and I’ll suggest that the design principles I espouse will do that as well as it can be done), because it is largely independent of the rewards structure. I just want that, as a society, we might want to look at the tradeoffs. When teachers impact society in more important ways (granted, in my opinion), I think we might want to be looking at increasing their performance more than sales folks. Reckon?

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