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Clark Quinn’s Learnings about Learning

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I did get to ask him, in light of the increasing change, whether competency models would be out of date too fast, and whether he was thinking it would be closer to 21st century skills (learning to learn, etc, the type of curriculum I think we need).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.

Context is king

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In two recent readings, I‘ve seen people miss one of the essences of mobile. In the New Media Consortium Horizon report (which has some pretty good points about collective intelligence, collaboration webs, and social operating systems), they talked about mobile broadband and how people are connecting. Which isn‘t wrong, but incomplete. In the other, the author mentioned using mobile while waiting for the bus, and further cited a work that insisted people doing mobile learning ‘on the go‘ won‘t do deep reflection.

In both instances, the authors are first making the assumption that mobile devices are about reaching out to people and content while out and about. That‘s fine; in training, huge amounts of effort is spent to reproduce a performance context so we can wrap learning around it. In mobile learning, if someone‘s performing, they can wrap information and guidance around that performance to turn it into a learning experience.

And that can be a reflective experience. Here I am on a plane, writing my blog, which is a reflective experience. The author missed that on the bus is also a mobile learning opportunity. If you can prompt, or capture, a reflective thought anytime, you can get deep reflection.

But the point I want to make is that one of the other opportunities is ‘context-sensitive‘ learning. That can be where you are, using your current location to connect you to some available resource that connects with a learning goal (Jim Schuyler at Red7 has a nice example of a puzzle hunt that leads you around the Yerba Buena Gardens outdoor sculpture collection). It can also, and this is something I‘m quite keen on and yet haven‘t seen people really take up, do something for when you are, not just where you are. For example, knowing that you‘re in a meeting with a vendor might trigger a system to deliver some negotiating tips, or refresh some negotiation content you‘ve recently viewed.

When I naively wrote about mobile learning in 2000, I admit I missed the context-sensitive opportunities (I wrote “Soon there will be essentially no distinction between mLearning and elearning”), but it is more than seven years later!   I hope you‘ll be looking at the broader mobile opportunities, rather than limiting yourself to courses on phones.

My Top Ten (Mobile) Learning Tools

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Jane Hart runs a great list of Top Learning Tools compiled from top learning professionals, and is updating the list for 2008. She includes performance support as part of her requirements. I had a list last year, but fortunately this year she’s given more structure and I like my new list better. Rather than repeat it, you can find both here.

However, I struggled to figure out how to put my mobile tools in (I cheated and lumped them under PalmOS), so I decided to do that here. Note that I’m still on my old Treo (I won’t go on yet again about how the iPhone isn’t yet ready for primetime :), and hope to switch this year to a new/faster one, or an iPhone, or an Android phone, or… Palm OS, while creaky (a new OS is in the works, but won’t appear ’til ’09), has heaps of apps that let you do most anything. So here’re the ones I find that I use a lot to make me more productive or to learn:

  1. The basic PIM functions: ToDo, Contacts, Calendar, Memos (since it’s my list, I can cheat and cram several under one item :). Makes me way more productive (if I make a promise and it doesn’t get in here, we never had the conversation)
  2. VersaMail: the included email application. It’s not great, but it’s good enough to preclude me spending my money on another one. I’ve got to be in touch. I probably use my phone more for email than to talk! (I’m not a great phone person)
  3. Opera Mini: the built-in browser, Blazer, pales compared to Opera, though Opera’s not as well integrated. Being able to search the web while in conversations or meetings is really useful!
  4. SplashPhoto: I put not only pictures of my family, but also my diagrams, and a portfolio of applications I’ve developed. I can talk about applications, but also talk to the diagrams in problem-solving
  5. SplashID: I need all those passwords, card numbers, logins, etc, with me when I’m on the road (rather than carry the cards or attempt to memorize them), but after almost losing my phone I realized that they’ve got to be secure
  6. Missing Sync: the better synching solution that keeps my desktop and mobile in line, and keeps me together
  7. Google Maps: I use this all the time for directions and to find nearby locations I want to visit
  8. Adobe Reader: I can bring documents along to read or for reference
  9. Documents to Go: I can bring Powerpoints along to practice my talks
  10. Clicker: this application turns my phone into a bluetooth presentation controller, so I can stroll around the room and not have to be tethered to my laptop

I’m not mentioning more personal things like the Bart schedule application that I use to know when to go catch a train. I’ve also just downloaded a Flight Status application that will let me check on flights, so it’s too early to say, but it seems like a potential win. So, what do you use to make yourself a better learner or more productive?