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Clark Quinn’s Learnings about Learning

Off the grid

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High SierrasIt’s time to get away from electronic diversions, and spend some time in nature, once again. Off to the high Sierras, up near timberline, lakes, rocks, trees, and wild critters.   There’s no phone connection, so no internet, email, etc.   And with nought but a twitch and a shudder, I shall endure :).

On a side note about mobile, I’ve got two invitations to talk mobile at the beginning of next year.   A sign that we’re finally hitting our stride?

Back at the end of the week. Hope you too are finding time to recharge your batteries.

Mobile in 5 Paragraphs

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A colleague asked me for 5 paragraphs on mobile:

Let‘s get that straight right from the beginning: mobile learning is not about courses on a phone. mLearning is where we really bring home the message: “It‘s not about learning…it‘s about doing”, because while there are learning implications for mobile devices, it‘s really about performance support. Yes, one of the applications of mobile devices is learning augmentation, extending the learning experience over time through distributed presentations, examples, and practice, but the real opportunities are providing context-sensitive support for the mobile workforce. Increasingly, the workforce is mobile, whether directly for work or indirectly, e.g. commuting, and they have the devices (“Have you already purchased a mobile learning device” “Let me rephrase the question: do you have a cell phone” “Hello…”). Not taking advantage of it is just leaving money on the table.

The variety of mobile devices is vast, spanning media players, handheld gaming platforms, PDAs, cell phones (though that name is no longer apt; cellular technology is long gone), and, increasingly, smartphones. There are convergences, however, where many mobile devices are now phones, media players, PIM (Personal Information Management, read: contacts, calendars, memos, and ToDos), GPS, and more. If you‘re having trouble with any of these TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) BTW, you can do a search on them to get them defined.

The issues are in how to develop content and resources for these devices, and the answers stack up like a pyramid. The bottom is the proverbial “low hanging fruit”, the content you already have that can be made available “as is” or converting the files to mobile formats. So, your PDFs, your audio recordings of presentations, any videos, and of course your web pages/HTML. The next level is taking all the content you will continue to produce, and proactively capture it (if you‘re not) and ensure that it‘s an automatic feature of your process to produce mobile ready versions. The top is to develop specific mobile resources, and that‘s where we‘re reaching the tipping point: instead of custom tools, we‘re seeing the major tool providers now providing mobile output options. The mobile web is another increasing option, as more and more mobile devices include browsers. As I say, “480 x 320 is the new 1024 x 768”. Mobile is hitting the mainstream.
And, it is hitting it in many ways. There have been instances of successful courses on mobile devices, but that‘s not the sweet spot. One of the more useful options is in augmenting online or face-to-face courses.

We know learning retention fades fast unless reactivated, and mobile gives us a great way to do that. We can send out different ways of thinking about it, more examples, and even new forms of practice. In fact, we should start rethinking the course, moving to blending including mobile as part of the extended experience! The second major big win is in making accessible support for the mobile workforce. We can provide manuals, trouble-shooting, even remote part ordering, to the field engineer. We can bring customer refreshers and updates, cross-selling recommendations, and purchasing capabilities to our mobile field force. And more.

Organizationally, the workforce is more distributed, more mobile, and needing to be more opportunistic and contextually optimal. Mobile is an enabler of increased individual and organizational performance. You need to treat it like any other initiative, managing the change process, but it also leverages other changes that might be happening. Knowledge or content management, mobile device deployment, webinars, many are the initiatives that, with a marginal extra effort, make mobile an additional delivery channel and opportunity. Take advantage of this new direction!
Further resources include:

New White Paper: Mobile Devices

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I’d started writing up mobile learning for either a book or a chapter. However, the part on mobile design got written into the eLearning Guild’s 360 Research Report on Mobile Learning (which I highly recommend, with great chapters by David Metcalf, Judy Brown, and more). With that out there, I was at a loss as to what to do with the rest.

Well, I first finished writing the part on the technologies, the devices and the networks, and figured I’d make it available while I decide whether I want to write more about tools than I already have. You can find this 10 page 3.1 MB PDF here. I welcome feedback on whether you like it, find it useful, what’s missing, etc.

Learning Management Colloquium: Bob Dean

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In addition to the Q&A with Patrick (and Steve Wexler on the Guild research), the other thing I wasn’t involved in was Lance’s thought-provoking interview with Bob Dean (who I’ve blogged about before). He came in as a representative of the CLO role, and threw out more TLA‘s than you can shake a stick at.

In talking about what he was looking for in his role, he said “universities are one of the least innovative solutions” in reference to many corporate approaches. What he wanted was a Talent Development System (TDS), which is much more than an LMS. I didn’t get a chance (but I’ve pinged him) whether the performance ecosystem was close to what he had in mind. It would include competency modeling, online performance review, yellow pages, profiles, and career development history. Talent’s the new way to view the learning role, it appeared, and he suggested their needs to be a Chief Talent Officer (CTO, which is why I’d suggest it might be Chief Performance Officer, CPO, not to step on the toes of IT).

I did get to ask him, in light of the increasing change, whether competency models would be out of date too fast, and whether he was thinking it would be closer to 21st century skills (learning to learn, etc, the type of curriculum I think we need). He basically agreed, indicating there might be core skills and new skills. Interestingly, talking about their (recruiting firm) 19 C-suite competencies, he thought that they weren’t needing to change, but the 5 or so priorities that they ask their clients for are!

As before, he was still enthused with learning experiences, and as before I fully agree. He talked about Continuous Development Experiences (or CDEs), and it’s not a bad notion: viewing learning as an ongoing process instead of a punctate series of events. Now that’s a role for mobile learning to augment.

He was not focused on ROI, but on Return on Visibility (ROV), where how the efforts were perceived were what carried weight. He reckoned that by the time the numbers were available they were on to other things, and getting programs done was what was important. In contrast, I remember Ellen Wagner once saying that “if you aren’t measuring it, why bother”. Still, it appeared to be the context that they aren’t looking to him for measurable results.

I note that, given Marc’s talk yesterday and Bob’s today, it’s clear the new strategic concept is ‘alignment’. The notion is that learning (or talent) initiatives need to be geared towards organizational goals. I think it’s obvious, but clearly to be buzzword-compliant I’ll have to get better at tossing the word around ;).

Overall, Lance did a good job handling the interviews , the colloquium seemed valuable to the audience, and fun for me. Well done!

Out of my head…

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… and into the world. No, I’m not talking about the fact that I’ve the kids for the week, I’ve actually got that pretty well handled (or so I think, which probably means I’m missing something ;). Instead I’m talking about how we need to better recognize that our thinking and performing is not all in our head. I was reminded of this by a PhD student who pinged me about his thesis on mobile learning. The student wasn’t interested in context-sensitive as a core affordance and largely untapped opportunity, for whatever reason, and brought up grounded cognition. This reminded me of distributed cognition, and the concept behind both is really relevant for informal learning, mobile learning, and instructional design in general.

I wasn’t familiar with ‘grounded cognition’, though from the definitions I’ve found it’s similar to distributed cognition but without as much of the social component (though that’s not what I focus on in distributed cognition either). It’s apparently a reaction to the symbol-grounding problem from AI that Stevan Harnad carried the banner for, that the ‘symbols in the head’ needed a real-world referent.   It may seem a bit obtuse, but the point is that when we try to build smart systems, we find out that they really can’t act in the world as they’re not connected to it. But that’s not what’s important here.

The interesting thing pragmatically is that our thinking isn’t all in our heads, but distributed across external representations (e.g. the letters associated with the keys on a phones). This is similar to connectivism, in that it’s not what you know, but what you can access, that is the determinant of success. As I’ve said before, it’s certainly a fair reflection of the fact that our brains aren’t good at arbitrary fact remembering, but instead are pattern matchers (e.g. my old claim that if I make a promise to do something for you and it doesn’t get into my PIM, we never had the conversation).

The take-home for learning is that we don’t need to carry all the information in our head, but instead we should have it available. Our courses should be designed for reference as well as learning, and we should carefully examine our performance needs to see how we should distribute information between the world and our head. Heck, too much of the elearning I’ve seen is overloaded with rote memorization, and we’ve got to do better. And, obviously, this is a great application for mobile.

The student was interested in relevant theories of cognition, and it really does illustrate a need to go beyond both behavioral and traditional cognitive and look at how people really perform. John Carroll’s minimalism was effective just for the reason that he focused on the least amount of information people needed to be successful, and took advantage of what they knew. We need to extend that to take advantage of what’s in the world already, or can be.

Mobilized reactions

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In this (anonymous) post on the Learning Technologies conference blog, there’s a reaction to my previous post on mobile tipping point. Two pertinent quotes: “To my mind mobile learning will always be one of two things – either a niche delivery mechanism to tackle particular issues, as with BT, or (and less commonly within organisational L&D) a general delivery mechanism for ‘just-in-case‘ learning.” and “I also find it difficult to imagine mobile learning being used as the primary mechanism for a general, on-going programme of organisational learning and development.”

The response I posted:

Yes, it’s not about putting a full course on a mobile devices, it’s performance support or learning augment.
But it is about the technology to the point that once mainstream content development/authoring tools start having mobile-capable output as an easy option, it will cross the chasm, and that appears to be happening. The devices are out there, but it’s not yet easy enough to get content onto them.

It’s really about ‘just in time’ learning, not ‘just in case’, ala the Zen of Palm showing mobile use is in short amounts frequently, versus desktop. There are more ‘just in case’ delivery options including, specifically, podcasts, and ebooks, but that’s really about convenience rather than ideal opportunity. Yes, it’s another specialist tool.

However, there’s a wide swath of space under the “niche delivery mechanism to tackle particular issues” with many nuances, and really a wealth of opportunity. “mLearning” may be the wrong monicker, maybe ‘mPerformance’, but the organizational impact potential is truly worth exploring. Adventure, anyone?

Mobile eCommunity?

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I‘m working with a client on their mobile strategy. Most of this is reasonably straightforward, but one of their problems is a need for a cross-hierarchy ability to share best practices. It’s a globally distributed workforce, however not all of the individuals have personal internet access (though many apparently have access through a colleague or internet café). Some will have MP3 players, or PDAs, and pretty much all of them have cellphones, though perhaps without digital services.

eCommunity is important, but to truly reach out globally, we may need mobile access. I recently opined that soon mobile web browsers will be quite capable, and that we‘ll see soon see Web 2.0 apps being accessible on the go. I‘m not sure that I want to count on that in the short term, and wonder if there are any other mobile accessible community tools available. I‘m hoping someone knows a pre-existing solution. Ideas?

What’s the (m)point?

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Laura asks in a comment on my last mobile post: “When do you think the tipping point to mobile will occur?” It’s something I’ve been trying to understand, and I think I’ve got a handle on it. My response was long enough that I thought I’d make it a post:

Right now the mLearning space feels like the gaming space did a couple of years ago. I’ve been on the stump for games for 6 years or so at least, and it always felt like they were just ready to break. However, there was a point where games suddenly became mainstream. For instance, a couple of years ago Captivate added the ability to make branching scenarios.

I’ve similarly been on the stump for mobile for 5 or so years, and it feels like the gaming space did a couple of years ago. There are mobile tools, and we’re seeing initial work, but now vendors at the expo were saying they had mobile prototypes underway for more mainstream tools. Probably next year we will have more generic tools, or rather mobile output from existing tools.

How that will play out is an interesting challenge. There isn’t an easy ‘works on all mobile devices’ solution. Phone browsers are pretty limited, but they do a fairly consistent java. Other platforms (Palm, iPhone) do better web, but more idiosyncratic java. FlashLite is coming, but is still on a limited set of phones. And so on. Getting a solution that works on a broad variety of devices, some reasonable percentage, even if it’s two separate forms of output, is probably not far away but still problematic.

I think that we will see sufficient (not great, just sufficient) convergence on a reasonable set of platforms that we can make progress in a year or so, and that will be the tipping point. In two years we’ll have some mainstream examples and typical organizations will be making some mobile moves. Fingers crossed!

480 x 320 is the new 1024 x 768

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How do we achieve a balanced solution for mobile content and applications? The iPhone has really raised the bar for mobile web browsing, and most mobile devices will soon have high quality browsing even if the screen remains small. Similarly, the growth area in handhelds are so-called ‘converged‘ devices: smartphones or wireless-enabled PDAs. Consequently, I propose it will be a plausible approach to start thinking of web apps as a delivery vehicle for mLearning.

Web standards for screen size started at 640 x 480, and have ranged through 800 x 600, to 1024 x 768. The iPhone has established a significant enough market presence to drive a variety of sites to create a version that accommodates the iPhone‘s resolution of 480 x 320. Phones can go down to as low as 160 x 160, so that might be your lowest common denominator, but I believe a safe bet could be 320 x 240 which is fairly common on a variety of devices. The new 800 x 600?

The point being, that thinking about small web apps may be the cost-effective and logical approach to provide mobile access, content. 160 x 160 is the new 640 x 480, etc. Already there are blogging tools for phones/mobile devices, and wikis are just web pages, etc. Web 1.0 is likely to be a viable solution, and the convergence of Web 2.0 and mobile is a promising place to play. Anyone game?

Making Peace

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My colleague/friend/mentor Jim Schuyler has a new post talking about an interactive mobile art project, Making Peace. Jim’s been developing a system architecture that integrates web, mobile, fax, etc to support creating ubiquitous games.

The technology is rich with opportunity, and his creativity has led to some really varied and interesting applications. In my mobile workshop and presentations I use several examples I’ve participated in with him or he’s done on his own including: a sales game demo, his mobile art hunts, and also a game for the Institute For The Future.

Since he’s CTO of the Dalai Lama Foundation, he does related work, hence this art installation. If you want to get an outside-the-box mobile experience, I recommend you join in, particularly if you’re in the Bay Area and can see the associated installation at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.