meta-learning Archives - Page 49 of 58

Thought trails

19 January 2011 by Clark Leave a Comment

I’ve riffed before about virtual mentorship, and it resonated again today. We were getting a tour of one of the social platforms, organized as many are around tasks, questions, and dialog. While implicitly it could support tracking a group’s progress, separate thoughts as recorded through blogs and tweets aren’t a natural feature. Yes, there’s integration with wikis and blogging tools, but it’s not quite the same. And seeing these meme tracks or thought trails can be a valuable way to understand how someone thinks in context, which can develop others’ thinking.

Don’t get me wrong, task oriented discussions are the real new opportunity for business, but I’m looking at a separate level that’s also valuable. The 70/20/10 model that Charles Jennings so effectively promotes (on the job, mentor/coaching, formal, respectively), suggests that mentorship is a valuable component of overall development. What if we could make it lower overhead for higher impact?

The notion is that learners ‘follow’ potential leaders. They can do for external thought leaders by reading their blog and following their tweets. But there are more immediate people also worth being mentored by. What if employees could follow their bosses and executives within the organization? Transparency is valuable, and if these leaders can be convinced to share their thoughts, more folks can take advantage of them without needing specific meetings (and, of course, making those meetings more valuable). Naturally, other representations could also be valuable: if they record thoughts while driving, podcasts could be ok too, or recorded video messages (tho’ perhaps harder to edit). Even recording meetings where leaders speak could be a low-overhead mechanism.

The tough part, really, is getting the leaders to share their thoughts. Making it a recommendation, and making it easy is important. Sharing the value of reflecting is also important (people who take time to reflect outperform those who don’t, despite corporate mythology to the contrary). You also have to make it ‘safe’, so that mistakes can be shared and learned from.

The goal is to make thinking visible; leading out loud. It might seem onerous, but the outcomes of better communication and developing potential new leaders are big. What do you think are the potential benefits of more people knowing what is important? What if more people could start thinking strategically? These are on the table, and potentially on tap. Are you missing this opportunity?

Learning Experiments

15 January 2011 by Clark Leave a Comment

I have a habit of taking on challenges, things that I decide to do that invoke a bit of anxiety, but I will be happy if I accomplish. Many times those are work-related assignments that stretch me, helping me learning things I’m interested in, or require developing skills that I am interested in.

Then, sometimes, I choose to stretch in other ways. This past year I took on two such that provide a bit of an opportunity for reflection.

Obstacles

The first one was something I heard about on Twitter. I shared it, and at least one colleague and one friend was interested. The colleague is not local, so he did it near him, and my friend and I did it with some of his friends. The event was Warrior Dash, which is a 3.5 mile course with 12 obstacles along the way. At the end, you get a funny hat with horns, and a free beer. It’s silly, but also a physical challenge, and it sounded fun. While I know I’m not particularly athletic in any one thing, I like to think (delude myself) that I’m fairly balanced across activities.

The obstacles ended up including climbing over cars, climbing under several things including a tunnel and a wire maze, climbing up a rope wall, jumping over hurdles, sliding down a watered down hillside, and running up a hill, across tires, up and down a haybale. The final two obstacles were jumping over fire, and then navigating a mud filled puddle. They really hype the last one, encouraging you to do a dive into it. Silly. Fun.

My goals were simple. At my age, and level of fitness, I was going to be happy just running the whole thing. I was not aiming to win, even my age group. I was nervous a bit (my usual plod around my mostly vertical neighborhood is 2.2. miles, which I alternate with a couple of torture devices that reside in my office, or in the summer in the pool a bit), but fairly confident I could do it. I didn’t do any specific training, either, relying on my overall level of fitness with perhaps a bit of extra effort on my usual routine.

Starting slow, not fighting to be the first in the wave of runners at my elected time but starting quite a ways back and pacing myself, was a wise move. About 1/3 of the way through I felt ok and picked up my pace slightly. At about 2/3 of the way through I felt the toll a bit, but pushed on. I passed some of the early starters (many folks seemed to have no problem walking at times, and there were a very wide variety of levels of fitness), but by no means did I make any great statement. I did ‘take on’ the obstacles, as they are the fun part for me. This worked mostly, but I confess that I cracked each of my knees as I hurdled the hurdles, and while I was successful getting over them, I could feel it. The mud part was surprising, as it seemed like you would just swim through it, but it really pulled back. It was a good workout and I was feeling the overall event for several days afterward, but not too badly.

Not sure I have to do it again, but no regrets.

Conflict

The second event was fantasy football. There was a #lrnchat team the year before, which sounded fun but I hadn’t heard about it. I’d never done it, but as I played football in high school (long story, but briefly, with 900 in my graduating class we had not only a varsity a JV, but also a B team, which I could qualify for :), I follow pro football as a guilty pleasure. So it sounded like something to try.

Again, I didn’t expect to do well; I know my limitations; I have a college friend who’s a real sports fiend, and he has the type of knowledge to do real well. So my only goal was to do ok for my first year.

There were some hiccups getting started. The process starts with a ‘draft’ where teams (I named mine the Quinnstitute Inmates) take turns picking players. I didn’t like the default order, but the process to change the default looked ridiculously complex. A bad interface, with an insufficient lack of information, and I didn’t know who to ask. So I went with the default draft rankings. Consequently, while lucky in some respects, I also had some players that I shortly had to dump.

That was the second hiccup; the process of claiming players and releasing yours was opaque. It appeared that if you picked them, you had to give up a player (you don’t get them immediately, there’s a time when everyone can pick anyone available they want, but then who gets who is determined by a preference model). It was only after selecting the player to give up that you found out that you wouldn’t give them up unless you got the player you requested. Again a bad interface and resources.

This time, however, I was bold enough to ask in our league’s forums, and found great help. Apparently there’s also ‘smack boards’ where you can talk trash to the other teams, but it was quiescent this year (it certainly didn’t appeal to me). The dialog with the other players (teams) in the league was minimal, but good natured and helpful.

Overall, I achieved the modest success I was hoping for. I also found out that there’s a phenomenal amount of luck involved, even if you have good players. I suppose if you were even more into it, you would be better able to detect when a normally successful and called upon player would have a bad week, but I certainly wasn’t at that level. It was fun, and no regrets. Whether I’ll do it again (if I even have the opportunity) is an open question, but the decision is more about time and opportunity than any negative experience.

Lessons

I did learn some lessons here. I found that if I set appropriate goals, I didn’t have too many problems living with the outcomes. I also let myself have the space to experiment and have fun, and it was. Learning is fun, even on seemingly trivial things.

I also found out that the ‘interface’ helps. The obstacle event was very well handled, with lots of guidance; there was little confusion about where to go and what to do. The web-interface to the fantasy game, however, needed a lot more ‘user-experience’ design. Perhaps there were more comprehensive information resources available, but I didn’t easily find them. And, fortunately, I can take Donald Norman to heart and say that if I can’t use it, it’s badly designed (it’s not me :).

I found I can be competitive. On the course, I did see a couple of people who were moving at roughly my pace, and I did try to beat them at the end (I had just enough left, and wanted to ‘leave it all on the field’). In the fantasy football, I did try to change my roster around to do the best I could when my seemingly decent team had some serious flaws (I’m not sure if I ended up with more than 1 player I started with), and I actively traded and juggled the lineup.

Learning is important, challenging yourself is important, and learning should be fun. Reflecting on it is important as well. It was worthwhile, and I will continue to find ways in my work and in my play that stretch me. I hope you do so too.

My path to ITA

22 December 2010 by Clark Leave a Comment

As my colleagues Harold and Jane have done, I thought I’d capture my learning journey that led me to the Internet Time Alliance. I started out seeing the connection between computers and learning as an undergraduate, and designed my own degree. My first job out of college was designing and programming educational computer games, which led me back to graduate school and a Ph.D. in applied cognitive science to find out how to design learning solutions better.

That has been a recurrent theme across academic endeavors, some government-sponsored initiatives, and an internet startup: designing solutions that are innovative and yet pragmatic. It was really brought home to me when we were recently discussing a new initiative, and while my colleagues were looking at the business opportunities, my mind was racing off figuring out how to design it.

This continued in my consulting, where I moved from designing the individual solutions to designing the processes and structures to reliably deliver quality learning experience design, what I’ve called learning experience design strategy. However, as I’ve worked with organizations looking to move to the ‘next level’, as happened with and through some of my clients, I regularly found a recurrent pattern, that integrated formal learning with performance support and eCommunity (and some other steps).

So I was focusing on trying to help organizations look at the bigger picture. And what I recognized is that most organizations were neglecting eCommunity the most, yet as I learned more about this from my colleague Jay Cross, the social and informal learning were the big and missed opportunity. When Jay started talked about grouping together to address this part of the space, it made perfect sense to me. The opportunities to have large impacts with challenging but not costly investments is a natural. So here I am. Based upon my previous work on games and now mobile, there are some design strategy opportunities that fall to Quinnovation, but I’m eager to help organizations through ITA as well. Hope to talk to you in the new year about whatever is relevant for you from here.

Pidgin Learning

12 December 2010 by Clark 2 Comments

The other day, my colleague Jane Hart wrote an interesting post comparing getting comfortable with learning in the real world to the experience of learning a new language. In my recent experience visiting my aunt in MÃ¼nchen and then family friends in a small village outside Bayreuth, I had a chance to experience the intermediate stages of transitioning from one language, really one culture, to another.

As I sit on a train watching the landscape change from snowy villages to rainy towns, one of my learnings was that the â€˜camaraderie‘ of the people trying to communicate means a lot. While my German is pretty bad, and my aunt‘s and the friends English is better but unpracticed, we could communicate. This was because there were good intentions all around. We were not looking for ways to misinterpret, or to avoid on the grounds that we could not comprehend. We instead were looking for ways to understand.

It‘s clear that we were speaking a â€˜pidgin‘ language, a simplified hybrid of the two, and actually both the German and the English were butchered as a result. We would mix words from both languages when our vocabulary failed us, and find creative ways to express our thoughts. And express our thoughts we did. Between getting directions to the post office to mail the package of goodies my aunt had expected me to bring back in my streamlined luggage, running her errands, and getting my glasses fixed, all went well.

Similarly with less-familiar folks; the wonderfully warm people who hosted me in the small village were family friends, but hadn‘t seen me for 20 years, even though they know my mother. Regardless, it was easy to help her buy a computer, and for them to take me through a dark and snow-covered village in a small valley to the once a year weekend Christmas Market, where I met their friends and we drank glÃ¼hwein, sang some Xmas songs, translated questionable jokes into English, and had a truly magical time.

The implications are clear: when people are committed to the process, they can be incredibly productive despite challenges. Conversely, when they‘re not, even insignificant obstacles can become complete barriers.

Don’t take learning skills for granted!

30 August 2010 by Clark Leave a Comment

In all the excitement about empowering learners by providing rich information and social environments, it’s too easy to think that “if you build it, they will learn”. Yet the evidence is to the contrary. While there are numerous components, including a culture that tolerates diversity and doesn’t punish honest mistakes, one that is easy to neglect the actual learning skills of employees. My ITA colleague Charles Jennings made a nice first pass at a list of useful skills.

Individual learning skills include the ability to know where to look for what, and how to write good search queries and evaluate search results. While you would think that at least the so-called ‘digital natives’ (a myth) would have these skills down, a UK study found to the contrary that they were “anything but expert searchers”. On the contrary, there was a gap between performance and self-estimates of skill (a general trend when 80% of people think they’re above average :), and little time spent evaluating the quality of the information.

Social learning skills similarly should not be assumed. As I mentioned in my previous screed on social learning design, my experience showed that learners don’t necessarily know how to work together. The full suite of how to: be trustworthy, be appropriate, ask for help, give help, discuss intelligently, collaborate usefully and more are all not necessarily in the competency set of your audience.

Back when Jay Cross and I were pushing Meta-Learning, we argued, and still believe, that one of the best investments you could make would be to focus on the learning skills of your team, ensuring they’re optimally capable of learning new things. That’s certainly true for information/knowledge/concept workers. Coupled with a similarly light and strategic investment in social learning infrastructure, it seems like the biggest bang you can get for your buck.

I suggest identifying the necessary skills, making them explicit in the organization, and even assessing and developing those skills. In a time of increasing complexity, helping learners address complexity seems like an obviously valuable investment!

My Top 10 Learning Tools

3 August 2010 by Clark Leave a Comment

My ITA colleague Jane Hart regularly collects the top 100 learning tools via contributions from lots of folks. It’s a fascinating list, worth looking at. I couldn’t use her submission sheet (some sort of system bug), so I thought I’d make an annotated post.

There are several categories of tools here. Harold Jarche talks about our personal knowledge management task, and in that, there are the tools I use to capture and share my own thinking (like this), and tools I use to go out and find or follow information.

In the capture and share category, major tools include:

WordPress – I blog as a way to reflect and get feedback on my developing thoughts
OmniGraffle – I diagram as another way to capture my thinking, trying to map conceptual relationships onto spatial ones

Then, of course, there are the more standard thought capture and share tools:

Word – while I like Pages, it’s outlining just does not meet my needs, as I outline as part of my writing process
Keynote – while I often have to transfer to PowerPoint, here the Apple product is superior

On the information finding/sharing path, some tools I use include:

Google – like everyone else, I’m all over searching
Twitter – this has been quite the revelation, seeing pointers and getting support, and of course #lrnchat
Feedblitz – this is how I aggregate blogs I track and have them come via email (where I’ll see them)
Skype – chats and calls and videochats with folks

Then I use several tools to keep track of information:

Evernote – is a place to keep information across my devices (though I use Notes too, when I want it backed up and private)
Google Docs – where I collaborate with colleagues on thoughts

The list changes; it’s different than what I put in the last two years, I’m sure, and may be more representative of today versus tomorrow or yesterday. And it doesn’t really include my mobile tools, where Google’s Maps app becomes quite the help, and Photos to share diagrams, and…. Also, email’s still big, and is not represented Still, it’s a reasonably representative list.

So, what am I missing?

Situated Learning Styles

2 May 2010 by Clark 1 Comment

I’ve been thrust back into learning styles, and saw an interesting relationship that bears repeating. Now you should know I’ve been highly critical of learning styles for at least a decade; not because I think there’s anything wrong with the concept, but because the instruments are flawed, and the implications for learning design are questionable.

This is not just my opinion; two separate research reports buttress these positions. A report from the UK surveyed 13 major and representative learning style instruments and found all with some psychometric questions. In the US, Hal Pashler led a team that concluded that there was no evidence that adapting instruction to learning styles made a difference.

Yet it seems obvious that learners differ, and different learning pedagogies would affect different learners differently. Regardless, using the best media for the message and an enlightened learning pedagogy seems best.

Even the simple question of whether to match learners to their style, or challenge them against their style has been unanswered. One of the issues that has been that much of the learning styles have been focused on cognitive aspects, yet cognitive science also recognizes two other areas: affective and conative, that is, who you are as a learner and your intentions to learn.

These two aspects, in particular the latter, could have an effect on learners. Affective, typically considered to be your personality, is best characterized by the Big 5 work to consolidate all the different personality characteristics into a unified set. It is easy to see that elements like openness and conscientiousness would have a positive effect on learning outcomes, and neuroticism could have a negative one.

Similarly, your intention to learn would have an impact. I typically think of this as your motivation to learn (whether from an intrinsic interest, a desire for achievement, or any other reason) moderated by any anxiety about learning (again, regardless whether from performance concerns, embarrassment, or other issue). It is this latter, in particular, that manifests in several instruments of interest. Naturally, I’m also sympathetic to learning skills, e.g learning to learn and domain-independent skills.

In the UK study, two relatively highly regarded instruments were those coming from Entwistle’s program of research, and another by Vermunt. Both result in four characterizations of learners: roughly undirected learners, surface or reproducing learners, strategic or application learners, and meaning/deep learners. Nicely, the work by Entwistle and Vermunt is funded research and not proprietary, and their work, instruments, and prescriptions are open.

I admit that any time I see a four element model, I’m inclined to want to put it into a quadrant model. And the emergent model from these three (each of which does include issues of motivation as well as learner skills) very much reminds me of the Situational Leadership model.

The situational leadership model talks about characterizing individual employees and adapting your leadership (really, coaching) to their stage. They have two dimensions: whether the learner needs task support and whether they need motivational support. In short, you tell unmotivated and unskilled employees what to do, but try to motivate them to get them to the stage where they’re willing but unskilled and skill them. When they’re still skilled but uncertain you support their confidence, and finally you just get out of their way!

This seems to me to be directly analogous to the learning models. If you chose two dimensions as needing learning skills support, and needing motivational support, you could come up with a nice two way model that provides useful prescriptions for learning. In particular, it seems to me to address the issue of when do you match a learners’ style, and when do you challenge; you match until the learner is confident, and then you challenge to both broaden their capabilities and to keep them engaged with challenge.

So, to keep with the result that the UK study found where most purveyors of instruments sell them and have no reason to work together, I suppose what I ought to do is create an learning assessment instrument and associated prescriptions of my own, label the categories, brand it, and flog it. How about:

Buy: for those not into it, get them doing it
Try: for those willing, get them to develop their learning skills and support the value thereof
My: have them apply those learning skills to their goals and take ownership of the skills
Fly: set them free and resource them

I reckon I’ll have to call it the Quinnstrument!

Ok, I’m not serious about flogging it, but I do think that we can start looking at learning skills, and the conative/intention to learn as important components of learning. Would you buy that?

Designing for an uncertain world

17 April 2010 by Clark 9 Comments

My problem with the formal models of instructional design (e.g. ADDIE for process), is that most are based upon a flawed premise. The premise is that the world is predictable and understandable, so that we can capture the ‘right’ behavior and train it. Which, I think, is a naive assumption, at least in this day and age. So why do I think so, and what do I think we can (and should) do about it? (Note: I let my argument lead where it must, and find I go quite beyond my intended suggestion of a broader learning design. Fair warning!)

The world is inherently chaotic. At a finite granularity, it is reasonably predictable, but overall it’s chaotic. Dave Snowden’s Cynefin model, recommending various approaches depending on the relative complexity of the situation, provides a top-level strategy for action, but doesn’t provide predictions about how to support learning, and I think we need more. However, most of our design models are predicated on knowing what we need people to do, and developing learning to deliver that capability. Which is wrong; if we can define it at that fine a granularity, we bloody well ought to automate it. Why have people do rote things?

It’s a bad idea to have people do rote things, because they don’t, can’t do them well. It’s in the nature of our cognitive architecture to have some randomness. And it’s beneath us to be trained to do something repetitive, to do something that doesn’t respect and take advantage of the great capacity of our brains. Instead, we should be doing pattern-matching and decision-making. Now, there are levels of this, and we should match the performer to the task, but as I heard Barry Schwartz eloquently say recently, even the most mundane seeming jobs require some real decision making, and in many cases that’s not within the purview of training.

And, top-down rigid structures with one person doing the thinking for many will no longer work. Businesses increasingly complexify things but that eventually fails, as Clay Shirky has noted, and adaptive approaches are likely to be more fruitful, as Harold Jarche has pointed out. People are going to be far better equipped to deal with unpredictable change if they have internalized a set of organizational values and a powerful set of models to apply than by any possible amount of rote training.

Now think about learning design. Starting with the objectives, the notion of Mager, where you define the context and performance, is getting more difficult. Increasingly you have more complicated nuances that you can’t anticipate. Our products and services are more complex, and yet we need a more seamless execution. For example trying to debug problems between hardware device and network service provider, and if you’re trying to provide a total customer experience, the old “it’s the other guy’s fault” just isn’t going to cut it. Yes, we could make our objectives higher and higher, e.g. “recognize and solve the customer’s problem in a contextually appropriate way”, but I think we’re getting out of the realms of training.

We are seeing richer design models. Van Merrienboer’s 4 Component ID, for instance, breaks learning up into the knowledge we need, and the complex problems we need to apply that knowledge to. David Metcalf talks about learning theory mashups as ways to incorporate new technologies, which is, at least, a good interim step and possibly the necessary approach. Still, I’m looking for something deeper. I want to find a curriculum that focuses on dealing with ambiguity, helping us bring models and an iterative and collaborative approach. A pedagogy that looks at slow development over time and rich and engaging experience. And a design process that recognizes how we use tools and work with others in the world as a part of a larger vision of cognition, problem-solving, and design.

We have to look at the entire performance ecosystem as the context, including the technology affordances, learning culture, organizational goals, and the immediate context. We have to look at the learner, not stopping at their knowledge and experience, but also including their passions, who they can connect to, their current context (including technology, location, current activity), and goals. And then we need to find a way to suggest, as Wayne Hodgins would have it, the right stuff, e.g. the right content or capability, at the right time, in the right way, …

An appropriate approach has to integrate theories as disparate as distributed cognition, the appropriateness of spaced practice, minimalism, and more. We probably need to start iteratively, with the long term development of learning, and similarly opportunistic performance support, and then see how we intermingle those together.

Overall, however, this is how we go beyond intervention to augmentation. Clive Thompson, in a recent Wired column, draws from a recent “man+computer” chess competition to conclude “serious cognitive advantages accrue to those who are best at thinking alongside machines”. We can accessorize our brains, but I’m wanting to look at the other side, how can we systematically support people to be effectively supported by machines? That’s a different twist on technology support for performance, and one that requires thinking about what the technology can do, but also how we develop people to be able to take advantage. A mutual accommodation will happen, but just as with learning to learn, we shouldn’t assume ‘ability to perform with technology augmentation’. We need to design the technology/human system to work together, and develop both so that the overall system is equipped to work in an uncertain world.

I realize I’ve gone quite beyond just instructional design. At this point, I don’t even have a label for what I’m talking about, but I do think that the argument that has emerged (admittedly, flowing out from somewhere that wasn’t consciously accessible until it appeared on the page!) is food for thought. I welcome your reactions, as I contemplate mine.

The GPS and EPSS

20 March 2010 by Clark Leave a Comment

It’s not unknown for me to enter my name into a drawing for something, if I don’t mind what they’re doing with it. It’s almost unknown, however, for me to actually win, but that’s actually the case a month or so ago when I put a comment on a blog prior to the MacWorld show, and won a copy of Navigon turn-by-turn navigation software for my iPhone. I’d thought a dedicated one might be better, though I’d have to carry two devices, but if I moved from an iPhone to Droid or Pre I’d suffer. But for free…

When I used to travel more (and that’s starting again), I’ve usually managed to get by with Google Maps: put in my desired location (so glad they finally put copy/paste in, such a no-brainer rather than have to write it elsewhere and type it on, or remember, usually imperfectly). In general, maps are a great cognitive augment, a tool we’ve developed to be very useful. And I’m pretty good with directions (thankfully), so when a trip went awry it wasn’t too bad. (Though upper New Jersey…well, it can get scary.) Still, I’d been thinking seriously about getting a GPS, and then I won one!

And I’m happy to report that Navigon is pretty darn cool. At first the audio was too faint, but then I found out that upping the iPod volume (?) worked. (And then it didn’t the last time, at all, with no explanation I can find. Wish it used the darn volume buttons. We’ll see next time. ) However, it does a fabulous job of displaying where you are, what’s coming up, and recalculating if you’ve made a mistake. It’s a battery hog, keeping the device on all the time, but that’s why we have charging holders (which I’d already acquired for long trips and music). It also takes up memory, keeping the maps onboard the device (handy if you’re in an area with bad network coverage), but that’s not a problem for me.

However, my point here is not to extol the virtues of a GPS, but instead to use them as a model for some optimum performance support, as an EPSS (Electronic Performance Support System). There’s a problem with maps in a real-time performance situation. This goes back to my contention that the major role of mlearning is accessorizing our brain. Memorizing a map of a strange place is not something our brains do well. We can point to the right address, and in familiar places choose between good roads, but the cognitive overhead is too high for a path of many turns in unfamiliar territories. To augment the challenge, the task is ‘real time’, in that you’re driving and have to make decisions within a limited window of recognition. Also, your attention has to be largely outside the vehicle, directed towards the environment. And to cap it all of, the conditions can be dark, and visibility obscured by inclement weather. All told, navigation can be challenging.

While the optimal solution is a map-equipped partner sitting ‘shot-gun’, a GPS has been designed to be the next best thing (and in some ways superior). It has the maps, knows the goal, and often more about certain peculiarities of the environment than a map-equipped but similarly novice partner. A GPS also typically does not get it’s attention distracted when it should be navigating. It can provide voice assistance while you’re driving, so you don’t need to look at the device when your attention needs to be on the road, but at safe moments it can display useful guidance about lanes to be in (and avoid) visually, without requiring much screen real estate.

And that’s a powerful model to generalize from: what is the task, what are our strengths and limitations, and what is the right distribution of task between device and individual? What information can a device glean from the immediate and networked environment, from the user, and then provide the user, either onboard or networked? How can it adapt to a changing state, and continue to guide performance?

Many years ago, Don Norman talked about how you could sit in pretty much any car and know how to drive it, since the interface had time to evolve to a standard. The GPS has similarly evolved in capabilities to a useful standard. However, the more we know about how our brains work, the more we can predetermine what sort of support is likely to be useful. Which isn’t to say that we still won’t need to trial and refine, and use good principles of design across the board, interface, information architecture, minimalism, and more. We can, and should, be thinking about meeting organizational performance, not just learning needs. Memorizing maps isn’t necessarily going to be as useful as having a map, and knowing how to read it. What is the right breakdown between human and tool in your world, for the individuals you want to perform to their best? What’s their EPSS?

And on a personal note, it’s nice to have the mobile learning manuscript draft put to bed, and be able to get back into blogging and more. A touch of the flu has delayed my ability to think again, but now I’m ready to go. And off I go to the Learning Solutions conference in Orlando, to talk mobile, deeper learning, and more. The conference will both interfere with blogging and provide fodder as well. If you’re there, please do say hello.

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