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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.

Telecom Travel Travails

16 November 2011 by Clark 1 Comment

Ok,so I’m ‘abroad’ in Canada, and they have different carriers, so I can’t blithely use data like I normally do. Well, I’m told that the conference center has no wifi, and it’s away from the hotel, so I figured I didn’t want to be out of touch, so I’d look into data packages.

Now the story gets interesting: the guy who gave the ‘reduced’ call rate said that the package was 125 MB for $50, but that since I would be only there a few days, that the cost would be prorated but I could use all the data. That’s too much money overall, but prorated… I wanted time to think about it, so I called back to order. This lady said it would be prorated,b it only for my time into the month, so half price for half the data. 65MB, that should be enough.

And, sure enough, I set my device to only use email (I think), and it’s 1.5 MB when I land (hours later) and 2.2 some hours after that. At that rate, I’ll be good. Then after going out to dinner with colleagues, it’s 77 MB used!?! And I have wifi in the hotel, so I was using that on the iPad!

I call AT&T and this time the guy says it’s the full rate for the full data (which I wouldn’t have paid, too high), so I’m OK on the data, except I’m not; at that rate, I’ll go over the limit. He has not the same record of data usage, but says “bookkeeping” could take a while. E.g. he has no reason why my usage suddenly spiked, which means I can’t take the chance.

So here I am, with three different stories about how much I’m paying and getting (two of which got me to buy more than I intended by, effectively, deception), no ability to determine the source of data usage (certainly at least largely due to Apple’s impenetrable data usages, and I’m not too dense), and consequently out of money, data, and contact.

Just to add icing to the cake, despite paying for wifi, I am still getting pop-up ads! Grumble, mumble…

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?

Intimacy & Immediacy

20 October 2011 by Clark 6 Comments

I’ve been wrestling with the difference between the smartphone (or PDA, aka the ‘pod’) versus a tablet (aka the ‘pad’), and it occurred to me that one way to think about it might be to distinguish between ‘intimacy’ and ‘immediacy’.

By immediacy, I’m talking about how you use the devices. As Palm documented a long time ago, you use laptops only a few times per day, but for long periods of time. Whereas you use mobile devices many times a day for quick access. Tablets are actually more used like laptops in this respect. You don’t tend to whip your tablet out, answer a quick question, and put it away. The size tends to make it awkward to whip in and out, and instead is more amenable to using for a period of time. Of course, smaller tablets may bridge the gap.

By intimacy, I mean the relationship to the device. As Judy Brown defines a mobile device, it’s small enough to fit in your pocket, has a battery to last all day, and you really know it. I’m particularly picking up on the latter, and moreover, that you can customize it. David Pogue has opined that it’s not really the smartphone that matters, but rather the ‘app phone’, and I think it’s important that you can optimize the device by loading it with capabilities that accessorize your brain. Though you can add ringtones, and even some apps (via, for instance, Brew), it’s much harder to augment your capabilities without a rich market of differentiated programs.

There’s more. For one, the smaller screen means you have the device closer. Laptops are inherently at arms length (or at least forearm’s length), to effectively use a keyboard. The smaller screen of a mobile device invites it closer, as does the small keyboard, using thumbs instead of the whole hand. A touchscreen interface also invites a different relationship.

This gives me a framework for distinguishing between the devices. A laptop, even if customized by your applications, isn’t intimate, and by size isn’t used with immediacy. Tablets are intimate, but not immediate. Smartphones are intimate and immediate. Finally, there’s the category of immediate but not intimate. This might be the use of a touchscreen kiosk you find at a public spot or in a museum, or perhaps also using someone else’s device for a quick access.

This seems to give me a handle on thinking about the differences between tablets and smartphones & PDAs (I think the iPod touch is a great device, say for kids in schools). Does it work for you?

The Mobile Academy

29 September 2011 by Clark Leave a Comment

If you’ve been paying attention to mobile learning, hopefully you’ve heard about my recent book, Designing mLearning. I’m proud of it, as I feel I did a pretty good job of addressing the important issue: helping you get your mind thinking different which is an important component of taking advantage of mobile. I also covered examples (thoughtfully provided by a number of my colleagues in the space), design processes, strategy and more.

However, as the subtitle suggests (Tapping into the Mobile Revolution for Organizational Performance), it’s focused on helping businesses and other organizations take advantage of mobile technologies to largely meet internal learning and performance needs. Unfortunately, the term mlearning tends to get people to immediately think of ‘courses on a phone’, which is not the value proposition mobile largely provides. So the book is relatively sparse on the side of formal learning.

So I was asked to write a book on mobile learning for higher education, which means focusing on using mobile to support the student experience (otherwise, it’s back to the first book). And I’m pleased to announce that this book is now out: The Mobile Academy: mLearning for Higher Education. And it’s a very different book, with a very different cut through mlearning.

This book is more completely about how do you use mobile devices to augment formal learning. While there is a chapter on meeting student administrative needs, the rest is focused on looking at the different elements of instruction and how mlearning can be used to broaden and deepen the experience. Consequently, three of the main chapters are on content roles in learning, developing interactivity for practice, and adding in the social component. While it’s specifically focused on higher education for practical reasons, there are no fundamental reasons why a large portion of it is relevant at least in secondary schools as well (with no discussion of developmental levels nor child-appropriate form-factors, it’s less applicable to K-6).

So now there are two different books, for two different audiences. If you’re focused on formal learning, that is in delivering courses as a business, this new one is for you. If, instead, your role is supporting performance in the organization (including but not limited to augmenting courses), the original one is for you. (And, please, do not assume you want the new one if you’re part of the learning or training unit in an organization, unless there’s another unit responsible for performance support and social learning.)

I hope that one or the other of these will help you ‘get going’ with mlearning.

Smart Habits

28 September 2011 by Clark Leave a Comment

I admit that I’m not patient. While this has it’s faults, I use it to drive certain behaviors that are positive. For instance, I’m almost an obsessive optimizer in travel. I try to minimize my luggage (I typically travel out of just an expanded briefcase for trips of around 3 days), and similarly the amount of times sitting in lines. And I use apps to try to find the best places to eat in airports and around wherever I’m staying.

App use is one of the tools we have to accessorize our brains. We can use the standard PIM software (e.g. memos, tasks, contacts, calendar) and any other built-in features, but for me the real opportunity is the distinction between smartphone and the app phone as David Pogue calls it. The ability to customize the device with software that meets my particular interests and needs lets me configure with free or paid apps to get the capabilities I need. So, yes, I can use the built-in camera to record hotel room numbers or parking spots, but more importantly I can get a train app to let me plan a trip, or a diagramming tool to let me capture some thoughts, or…

Another habit we can get into is thinking. I just recently blogged about reflection as a powerful tool, and we can make blogging a habit, for instance. I also deliberately will queue up a problem I’m working on before I start exercising or taking a shower, and see if I can’t come up with some new ideas.

The point is that deliberately thinking about possible ways to think smarter and work smarter is a good habit to get into, and one that you can cultivate to discover other habits. How about deciding, at the next conference you go to, to not only pay attention to the messages but also the presentations, to see what you can learn? Pay attention to how a meeting is being run next time, or what the coaching process you are receiving (or not) is? And watch or even ask how other people handle things. How do they book travel, or find out about the program, or… I ask my mobile workshop audiences how they use their devices to make themselves smarter, and I always seem to find out about a new app or two.

The point is that there are some well-known self-improvement tips like reading books, but there are more that are just sitting there awaiting your attention. Why not look for opportunities to work smarter, not harder? It’s the smart thing to do.

Reflecting socially

23 September 2011 by Clark 5 Comments

About ten years ago, now, Jay Cross and I met and with some other colleagues, started what we called the Meta-Learning Lab. We’ve maintained our interest in meta-learning across our involvement now with the Internet Time Alliance, and a component we identified as one of the most valuable activities you can do is reflection.

We don’t mean just navel-gazing, of course, but instead we mean systematically stepping back and reviewing ongoing activity with a view towards looking for improvement. It’s baked into things like Watts Humphrey’s Personal Software Process, and without that level of rigor, it still has benefits. Even more so if it’s shared.

So, blogging is one way of sharing your thoughts and getting feedback (as I do here). The social processing that happens when sharing is not just for formal learning, but for personal, self-directed learning as well. Creating a representation of your understanding is valuable in and of itself, to make your thinking concrete, but sharing and getting feedback is even more powerful.

This isn’t just for individuals, of course, but also for teams. If teams share their collective thinking (blogs again, or perhaps wikis), they can get feedback not just from each other but also from non-team individuals. This improves the thinking.

And we can start using richer media than just text. We can capture our understanding with images, audio or video, e.g. conducting interviews (you think differently creating a response to a deep question synchronously than asynchronously). You can go out and create a video of something that communicates what you think. You can even film a performance by the individual or team and bring it back for discussion. What a couple of high-tech firms have done, having outstanding performers talk about or perform on video, and adding their own reflections (‘directors notes’ versions), is really powerful for learners too.

Mobile gives us the capability to be more flexible in our communication capture and sharing, which decouples our thinking from the desktop. We also may be able to review interactions in a social media system, messages and such, to reflect on our communication patterns and improve. And facilitating all this is, to me, one of the opportunities for the learning professional as we start a) expanding our responsibility for all performance, not just ‘training’, and b) start investing our efforts in proportion to the workplace impact (c.f. 70:20:10).

So, I encourage you to start reflecting personally, of course, but consider also reflecting socially, with your colleagues, teammates, and more. Learning out loud is a key to moving forward faster and more effectively.

Contextualized Learning

22 September 2011 by Clark Leave a Comment

Recently, a colleague videotaped me responding to some questions about how mobile could change learning. I find I riff a bit in such situations, and one of the ideas I had then is something I wanted to explore a little more. It had to do with context.

What we do, in so many of our formal learning designs, is create artificial contexts. In face-to-face learning, we’ll do role-plays, and in online learning we’ll create simulations or games. Now, this makes sense; you want to do practice away from real performance if the consequences are costly. Yet other times, e.g. after the learning experience, they end up performing (and, too often, before they’ve received sufficient practice because of time and money constraints as well as just bad habits). A further opportunity is that out there in the real world, there may be some contexts that the learner comes across that may be relevant, and we could extend the learning experience.

Context-aware systems give us a chance to do something more here. If you’re performing a task that’s related to some formal learning, your system could be equipped to notice, and bring in some appropriate content. This was the promise of electronic performance support systems, and we can now start doing it not just in custom-designed environments, but we can connect context clues to associated content with semantic rules. So, if you’re in a coaching meeting, the system could prepare you beforehand, provide support during, and some reflective evaluation afterward. Say, a checklist.

Similarly, we can notice the context of the learner and even if it’s not a performance situation, if there’s a meaningful connection (I didn’t want to use semantic again :), the system could provide some mention of the linkage, which reactivates and contextualizes the learning, making it more likely to be retained and transferred.

Mobile, of course, decouples this capability from the desktop, and increases the likelihood that the connection opportunities are capitalized on, and even the performance support model can be brought to bear. The two necessary components are the context-awareness (done via GPS, calendar) and semantic linkages (done with tagging). This is no longer rocket science, just a product of decent task analysis and content engineering.

I reckon it’s time that we can, and should, lift our game a little to start looking at more sophisticated support technologies. If improving performance matters…and it should.

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