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Clark Quinn’s Learnings about Learning

Anxiety, ergonomics, and performance

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I’m a little under the weather today. Not sick, but I’ve had a procedure done (minor, really), and have been a naughty boy on my keyboard. They’ve combined to jump on me this week, and there are some interesting side effects.

First, a number of years ago I was teaching in a department of Computer Science (I taught interface design). Here were faculty members who used computers for their research, their teaching, everything. And, of course, started suffering the side effects of too much keyboard use. In teaching HCI/interface design I talked about ergonomics, and still was as guilty as the rest. Fortunately, the administration recognized the problem, and hired some guidance and was willing to invest in products to remedy the problems including chairs, keyboards, etc.

I rightly noted that just telling folks about how to do it ‘right’ and giving equipment wasn’t sufficient, and that they’d need support in making the change to new ways. Which didn’t happen, so I don’t know how well the lesson stuck for others, but I did put in place support for myself, specifically a piece of software that threw me off every 30 minutes for 5 minutes. It worked after I got rid of the unix terminal on my desk so I couldn’t switch to the other machine in those 5 minutes…

I’ve got a good chair now, and have adjusted the ergonomics to match recommended guidelines.

OSHA seating guidelinesWhat I didn’t do was use the mouse properly. I had a wrist rest that I used while mousing, not just in-between. I’ve got pain in my right wrist now. I thought I might’ve broken it snowboarding or skateboarding, but it was x-rayed and that wasn’t the issue. Referred to a physical therapist, it appears to just be overuse again (maybe a WoW side effect?). And a big deliverable.

I’ve moved the mouse to the left side for the time being (as I did before) to get some rest, and am working to get better habits going (tho’ I just noticed I was typing with my wrists on the wristrest for the keyboard!). I usually am jumping up for something, so I typically don’t spend too much time at the keyboard in one go, but there are times when I’ve got to be more careful.   I’ll get better and switch back (it’s tough at first, and while you get used to it, I’ll be happy to switch back).

Before I draw on the learnings from this, I’ll confess to one other issue. I just had a minor procedure done, that involved some cutting. It was a followup to a previous one. The first one wasn’t a problem, but for some reason this one had induced more anxiety than I expected. I was trying to type a message while waiting for the anesthetic to kick in (local), and my fingers were shaky! I’m fine, but the effects of anxiety were brought home to me in a big way.

So, what are the take-homes here? First, be careful out there! Watch out for your own computing, and keep yourself practicing safe keyboarding (as well as safe surfing). As the therapist said, she’s surprised by how many folks say they’re too busy, but don’t realize that they’re more effective overall if they take the necessary breaks.

Second, how important it is in behavior change to get support. If you don’t provide support, it’s too easy to backslide into bad habits. And by the time symptoms manifest, you’re already damaged.

Finally, don’t forget to make a safe learning environment. There’s an (upside-down) u-shaped curve for performance, where as anxiety/pressure increases, there’s improved performance to a point, but then it falls back down fairly quickly. That high point in relation to pressure shifts a lot depending on the learner. Be careful to ensure that any anxiety is reduced sufficiently to allow learning to be effective (and now so low as to similarly interfere with learning).

Here’s to safe and effective keyboarding and learning.

Work at learning; learning at work

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I agreed to be part of the third edition (this coming Monday) of Dave Ferguson’s Work/Learning Blog Carnival, and I start from a contrarian perspective, because I think “learning can, and should, be hard fun“. That is, properly done, learning is a positive experience, where you’ve balanced the challenge, set up the initial meaningfulness, have the learner playing an interesting role, providing the appropriate support and feedback, etc. I suppose the point is that the ‘hard’ part of the fun is work, but it isn’t toil or tedium. So, the distinction between the two is suspect. However, my principles about engaged learning are typically when we design the experience for another, but the topic here is, to me, self-learning.

And I do believe passionately in self-learning; if I’m not learning, I may as well be dead. Play is learning, and I intend to keep playing.. :) So I blog, and talk to colleagues, and continually challenge myself with new tasks (like accepting this opportunity). But I do it mindfully, deliberately pacing the challenge, searching for personal meaningfulness, and finding the fun in it all. I take responsibility for making it hard fun. I think the most successful people are those who can find not a balance, but an integration between work and learning.

Let me take it to the next step, now, talking about organizational learning. In addition to the obvious implications of how we design learning experiences, I think the less obvious implication, but perhaps the more important one, is helping people to become not only toiling self-learners, but joyful self-learners.

To me, the increasing rate of change means that fixed competencies – the notion that an organization can anticipate, design, and deliver the needed learning – is going to go away. The true competitive advantage will not be in just hiring the needed skills, but in developing folks who can continue to self-learn. Too many are still tied into the “we can hire the talent”, but the folks who’ve done well in school have succeeded in a system that doesn’t match the way the world outside of school works. And there’ll be increasing competition for the folks who demonstrably can succeed in a dynamic environment. Trusting that you can acquire sufficient talent seems like a riskier bet than instilling that capability in the organization.

Imagine really unleashing your organization. Yes, it’s Senge’s Learning Organization, and more. We know what this entails, but I’m still searching for organizations who really want to execute against it.

Evaluating Serious Games (er, ILS)

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I’ve been working with a group creating the rubrics for evaluating submissions in a 2nd Life serious game competition. It’s an interesting issue, as there’re broad variances in what folks are thinking. As a reaction to a draft consensus of opinion, I rewrote the criteria to be evaluated as:

Learning
Comprehensiveness of alternatives to right answer
Match of game decisions to learning objectives
Appropriateness of feedback

Usability
Appropriate interface match to action
Interface navigation

Game
Naturalness of feedback mechanism
Continuity of experience
Seamlessness in embedding decisions into game world
Appropriateness of world to audience
Relevant to irrelevant action ratio
Appropriate challenge balancing
Level of replay (linear, branching, engine-driven)

I know this can be done better.     Your thoughts?

It’s an effort to combine my aligned elements from both education and engagement (the theoretical basis for my book on learning game design): clear goals, balanced challenge, thematic context, meaningfulness of action to story, meaningfulness of story to player, active choice, direct manipulation, integrated feedback, and novelty (see below), with the more standard elements necessary to make a successful online experience.

Alignment of Engagement and Game Elements

I find it useful to revisit principles from another angle, as it gives me a fresh chance to put a reality-check on my thinking. I think my older model holds up (and has continued to over the years), and the extras are not unique to learning games. Some elements cross boundaries, such as feedback having to components: one being the relation to the learning, and the other to the action.

The principles state that, done properly, the best practice (next to mentored real performance) ought to be games. Or, as I like to say: “Learning can, and should, be hard fun!”

eLearning Guild Keynote: John Patrick

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Today’s keynote was John Patrick, talking about the future of the internet and implications for learning. There was a lot of the former, and unfortunately not enough of the latter. He made some great points, specifically that we’re only tapping 5% of the potential, citing a number of examples of where people were dropping the ball (what a great deal, getting paid to whinge about bad internet experiences :), and also about what was possible with coming developments. Here’s the mindmap:

Patrick Keynote MindMap

In followup questions (part of the learning management colloquium), he talked a bit more about learning to learn (a pet fave of mine): that, generationally-independently, some get it and some don’t. I asked the obvious question: given that the internet has so much knowledge, but (as he claimed in his talk) that folks don’t necessarily have good internet skills, would the obvious implication be that the role of formal learning be about how to learn to learn with internet resources? His answer was discursive, unfortunately, but an interesting opportunity would be a software ‘net-surfing’ coach that watched your net strategy and provided guidance.

The opportunities of ubiquitous internet access are exciting, certainly, but I think it will take some smart ‘voting with eyeballs’ to really make a change. I’m an idealist, but I also recognize that individuals are satisficing, not optimizing, and people are still buying shoddy product (why are people still buying Coors?). How will we get the necessary cluetrain going? Odd thought: ridicule.

Getting better

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The Learning Circuits Blog Big Question of the month is: “What would you like to do better as a Learning Professional?” Certainly a question bound to spark some introspection. Certainly, I know my weaknesses, though not all are things I’d want to change.

Some might argue I’m *too* conceptual, and I certainly do err on talking concepts rather than concrete examples. I believe being conceptual is good, in that it gives me tools for problem-solving, and I’ve demonstrated that on behalf of clients and others (I like coming up with innovative approaches to tough problems). However, I do need to recognize that I should use more examples in my presentations (and have made that a conscious act in the last few presentations I’ve created, though my legacy ones may lack a bit).

Similarly, I tend to use diagrams to communicate, and I think that’s good, but I sometimes err on not including enough context (via photos). And for someone who’s quite visually oriented, I don’t do enough with video. However, that’s at least partly due to lack of facility with the tools rather than a fundamental blindspot. I wish I was more capable of creating animations to communicate visually as well.

And I wish I could cartoon! It’s such a powerful, and underused, communication and learning medium. It’s got great value in examples in particular, and comics in particular could be valuable in helping motivate in the beginning (humorously exaggerating the consequences of not having the skills being presented is one way I recommend).

So I guess my answer is that I would like to augment my conceptual approach with visual context more effectively, for better communication. And I’m working on it!

QUINOV8

Always blogging, always learning

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After the panel at TechKnowledge, one of my fellow panelists lauded the way I handled a particular question. Naturally pleased, I also had to admit that I had handled the question before. Where? Here in my blog! And that’s the point.

There are many reasons to blog, but I started this primarily to practice what I preach: use technology to be smarter (or wiser). You should see that (as a relation used to say), “me, I’m thinking all the time”. I really do try to make the posts my ongoing reflections about learning. It keeps me always on the lookout for my own learning, which I believe is a valuable thing. It keeps me open to new ideas, and processing those ideas to see what’s a new opportunity.

That sort of mindset, consciously scanning the horizon, is not only a ‘learning to learn’ thing, it’s a necessity for the almost cliched exponential increase in information, and decreasing half-life of knowledge. I was talking today with the strategic team for our school about what’s needed for our new generations, and it definitely includes an attitude of continual learning. Blogging is a ‘forcing function’ that, if you’re committed to continually refreshing the content, serves the purpose. There are others, but it’s certainly a low overhead, high return option.

As an extension of yesterday’s post, this is one way I keep myself continually looking for new ideas. And I find that I’ve already considered a lot about things other people end up thinking about, and having some thoughtful responses (which I’ll suggest is valuable). What are your thoughts about that?

Learning to eLearn

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Lisa Neal’s put a nice list of hints and tips to be a better elearning professional. Her tips focus on how to get deeper into formal learning, which Scott Leslie expands in a comment. However, there are some good additions from Jay Cross and Saul Carliner about how to broaden the fields you draw upon.

The point being, you’ve got to be a consistent and persistent self-learner, which is a meta-learning topic. Things are dynamic and changing, and you’ve got to keep pushing the envelope. It takes little time (Lisa’s talking about 10 minutes per day), and yet it may be the best investment you can make personally. I’ll also argue that helping learners to learn (what Tony Karrer calls “building learning skills”) is probably the best investment an organization can make!

What are the ways you keep yourself continually learning?

Learning tools

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It’s been getting a wee bit crazy, and will be for at least the next two weeks (apologies in advance if my posts get sparse). Today I began the morning talking to our local elementary school teachers at their staff development day as a consequence of offering to assist in their technology efforts and a welcome reception by the principal. A really committed principal and great staff working in the context of a woeful funding situation and inadequate tech support…

My role was to provide some big picture guidance which then would spark their working sessions around technology. We started with the latest incarnation of the Shift Happens 2 video to set the stage. I then presented a bit of my strange and twisted background before going through some thoughts on curriculum, pedagogy, and technology (nothing new to regular readers of this blog).

Interestingly, I talked afterwards to one of their many bright lights (the designated technology coach), and when I said (as before) that they shouldn’t be teaching the apps, but talking about goals (represent your hypothesis) and giving the kids reference cards, she had an interesting response. She said she’d tried that, and some kids were left helpless. 4th graders!

This, I admit, boggled my mind. I know I’m an idealist and optimist (much of the time :), but this is a pretty good school. I don’t know if their parents aren’t using tech (which is the situation in some of our families), or that they’re not seeing tech sufficiently in earlier grades (which also happens to some extent). I suggested that the approach allows the teacher to work with those who are having trouble with the steps, and that even other students who did get it could help, but it felt a bit weak.

In retrospect, I think it argues even more strongly that the approach I suggest should be used, but much earlier! Perhaps the teaching can and should be how to use references to learn to things with technology tools, not just how to save a file, but instead, when your goal is to do x (e.g. save a file), how to look up x in the reference card and follow the steps.

Which mimics my overall response which is that in this age of increasing knowledge and knowledge change, we need to be modeling, and equipping our learners to, use resources to solve problems, not to learn specifics that will soon be out of date.

I confess I’m not steeped enough in this particular literature, so I’ll have to do some searching, but as I told them, I don’t have answers but I’m happy to work with them to figure the answers out. Which pretty much overextends out my philanthropy bandwidth, but some things are just too important! Fingers crossed.

Representing openness

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I was asked about my thoughts on creative commons concepts:

“free resources that are available to users but that also come with the pretense that by sharing the material openly, users will be able to perhaps improve upon the original”

This is an interesting question, and it got me thinking about shared editing. Increasingly, it’s about representations. I use diagrams, but am trying to be more visual and include photos in my presentations, and of course I’ve been textual (life as an academic). Others are looking to video. Someone recently had a presentation at the Institute For The Future (which I missed, unfortunately) on how it’s media literacy that’s important, not just traditional textual literacy, and I have to fully agree.

So, increasingly it’s going to be about using web-based tools for creation and sharing. Rip/mix/burn! Wikis are important, but so are things like Google’s tools: open spreadsheets & documents, and diagrams (e.g. Gliffy. where BTW no one’s taken me up on collaborating, well that’s a learning too). Newer representations are possible, including 3D in Second Life, audiocasts, videocasts, photos, it’s all fair game via Flick’r, YouTube, etc.

However, I don’t believe in the teaching of particular applications. For instance, if you learned PowerPoint, the new version’s rearrangement could throw you for a loop unless you’ve used lots of apps and know your, so you can figure it out. But what if you’d learned it by rote (as at least one teacher at our elementary is doing)?

So, instead, I want to teach the principles of goal-oriented collaboration, the notion of finding important questions, gathering data, creating hypotheses, conducting experiments, writing up results, and sharing. With interim question, post thoughts, share, reflect, review, at every stage. Then, have them use different tools at different times with the same goals, so they abstract the principles and can carry them forward regardless of the latest tool du jour.

What are your thoughts?

Spores of Imagination

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A wise colleague of mine pointed me to this video of Will Wright talking about his new game Spore to the TED conference (I was invited once, years ago when I was in Australia, but it was a lot of money at the time, on an academic salary with the exchange rate then…). It’s a fascinating talk, covering the game design but also the philosophy behind it.

Will Wright, in case you don’t know, is the genius behind Sim City and The Sims, two famous games. He’s revered among game designers because his games are complete leaps to a new game space, and successful. He has a talent for taking something he finds interesting, building a model (a simulation is just a model, a scenario is when you put it in an initial state and ask the player to take it to a goal state, and a game is when you tune that experience until it’s engaging), and then making the experience of manipulating the model into a game. In particular, one of the hallmarks of his work is his ability to tune it in unique and non-obvious ways (e.g. monsters coming in to smash your cities) to create a compelling and yet thought-provoking experience.

Here he talks about the game design, but couples it to important issues. How games are toys that can help us learn. It’s the final statement that resonates, about using this new game as a tool to foster long-term thinking. Really, that’s what I’m on about, using games as tools to develop new ways to think. And here’s a master. Enjoy, and reflect.