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Clark Quinn’s Learnings about Learning

Products

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I don’t usually talk about products, particularly ones I’ve received as opposed to have chosen.  However, there are a couple of mentions worth making:

GOOD

I won a copy of Navigon. I’d always wanted a GPS, but didn’t want to buy one, figuring they’d get outdated. I was glad to get it, as Google Maps wasn’t allowed to do turn-by-turn on the iPhone.  I’ve used it a number of times, and have been very satisfied. The nice thing as opposed to the apps is that it works where there isn’t cellphone connectivity. The interface generally maps well to my goals, and I can usually figure out how to do the unusual things. Note that I don’t usually try to put in extra stops or anything.  It won’t seem to use my bluetooth headphone, unlike Google Maps, which now does turn-by-turn, so these days I may alternate.  Note: the processing required for Navigon does mean using a car-charger, or seriously depleting your batter, but I can’t see how that could be worked around, it is a processing intensive task.  It’s been a keeper, and gratefully used a number of times over the past few years.  Nice to have it as an app that travels with my phone so no extra hardware needed, and they can upgrade the software and it migrates to new phones.

I also earned a pair of Sony Walkman headphones. These are digital, so you can load up your playlist, and then wear them.  They’re very minimalist: two ear pieces and a cable that joins them that goes behind your head.  As you might expect, they’re oriented towards Windows, with no information for a Mac user provided, but their website shows how to load music on them.  I don’t listen to music via headphones much, but for working out these seemed like a great solution, better than figuring out where to carry an iPhone and having the cord dangling. It’s got decent storage; my workout playlist fits with plenty of room. One problem for a Mac is that there’s no obvious information about how to have different playlists, though your supposed to be able to shuffle between lists. Regardless, I am only using for working out at this point so my ‘rowdy’ music is just fine.  Another nice point is that the USB cable that connects to the computer is also how you charge them. They fit easily in my luggage and are now a travel partner.

BAD

I didn’t win, but paid an expo price (or so I thought) for a HyperShield stylus for my iPad. I liked the two-tone silver/gold look and the pen form-factor  I got it over a year a year ago, and in the past couple of months started using it occasionally to try taking handwritten notes (contemplating an app that allows both handwriting and tapping, because I like to take diagrams).  The stylus is far better than my finger for such purposes, and though my writing makes a doctor’s prescription look legible, I liked changing inks, drawing pictures, etc.  I am in awe and jealous of my colleague’s abilities to do the same and make excellent drawings and elegant writing, but it was good enough. Until, after not many hours of use, suddenly it started grabbing at the screen, not dragging smoothly but chattering across.  I looked carefully at the nub, and saw that it was peeling. What was apparently peeling off is the smooth surface.  Of course, there was only a 90 day warranty, and I didn’t really expect to get it replaced, but I am dismayed that it could fail after such a short period of time.  Caveat emptor.

And a rude noise in the general direction of any app with a free teaser and a premium version that decides to increase the annoyance factor to get you to pay.  Make a clear value proposition to upgrade that is on virtue of better capability.  Don’t have an initial choice and then decide to pester people more.  Ahem, Sol Free.

Types of thinking

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Harold Jarche reviews Marina Gorbis’ new book  The Nature of the Future,  finding value in it. I was intrigued by one comment which I thought was relevant to organizations.  It has to do with the nature of thinking.

In it, this quote struck a nerve: “Gorbis identifies unique human skills”.  The list of them intrigued me:

  • Sensemaking
  • Social and emotional intelligence
  • Novel and adaptive thinking
  • Moral and ethical reasoning

While all are intriguing and important, the first and third really struck me.  When I talk about digital technology (which I do a  lot :), I mention how it perfectly augments our cognitive architecture. Our brains are pattern-matchers and meaning extractors.  They’re really good at seeing insights.  And they’re really bad at rote memory, and complex calculations.

Digital technology is exactly the reverse: it’s great at remembering rote information and in doing complex calculations. It’s extremely hard to get computers to do good pattern-matching or meaning making.

For the purposes of achieving meaningful outcomes, coupling our capabilities with digital technology makes a lot of sense.  That’s why mobile makes so much sense: it decouples that complementary capability from the desktop, and untethers our outboard brain.

From an organizational point of view, you want to be empowering your people with digital augmentation. From a societal point of view, you want to have people doing meaningful tasks where they tap into human capability, and not doing rote tasks. They’re going to be bad at it!  And, you can infer, it’s also the case that you’re going to want education to focus on how to do problem-solving and using digital technology as an augment, not on doing rote things and memory tasks.  Ahem.

Email a ’rounding error’?

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“Education over the Internet is going to be so big it is going to make email usage look like a rounding error.” – John Chambers, CEO of Cisco

This bold pronouncement of John Chambers a number of years ago hasn’t really played out as promised.  I would argue that elearning has begun to grow, what with the rise of online education and the recent interest in MOOCs.  And if we take a performance ecosystem view of elearning, including performance support and social, we can begin to think much more broadly about the relationship.  I don’t think John thought of self-learning via Google or YouTube, or learning together via LinkedIn and Twitter, but if we give him the benefit of the doubt, we can begin to think that elearning may be of a substantial bulk in proportion to email, though not yet rounding error size.

However, I want to consider another elearning view that could propose such a relationship.  If we take a performance ecosystem view of mobile, we may well have that sort of ratio.  Think about it, mobile can claim large numbers around:

  • people with mobile phones who have no email or real internet, but voice and text messages give them reach
  • using and/or sharing photos or videos for help
  • accessing the internet through their phones to learn and perform
  • using apps to help them do things, calculating things, supporting their performance
  • connecting to social networks on a variety of platforms: FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn, …
  • people using context-sensitive apps to solve problems where they are and tell them what’s around
  • the growth in all the above

If we consider all those (and using mobile devices  for email :)  we actually come up with a pretty big number!  We use mobile personally to learn and perform better in increasing ways, and we’ll start doing it more and more for work as well.  In this way, mobile learning  performance is becoming the massive shift that will make email seem like a rounding error. And that is big.

 

iPads do make sense for schools

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Donald Clark (the UK one) generally writes great posts: insightful and irreverent, and consequently fun. I like that he is willing to counter the prevailing wisdom with good research. I hope to someday meet him. However, his recent post against iPads in the classroom seemed to me to miss a couple of points.  Not that I fully disagree with him, but that I think that some elaboration might shed some light.  Note: I’m starting by focusing on K-6, not middle school or higher ed. He does acknowledge the potential value for young kids, so we’re not quibbling too much, but I still want to make a few points.

He first claims that they don’t support writing.  Yes, that’s true, the touchscreen isn’t the same as a keyboard.  However, my colleague Scott Marvel has filmed lots of kids with iPads and he tells me they don’t have much trouble using the touchscreen (they’re not highly capable with regular keyboards at young ages), they use speech to text as well, and also take freehand notes too.  So writing isn’t horribly impeded on iPads for younger kids.  Further,  writing shouldn’t necessarily be done in the classroom anyway. Learning to type, and heavy writing should be done offline, and shared for feedback in class.  It’s a waste of valuable teacher time, when they could be facilitating meaningful engagement.

I also note that he says they don’t work for creative work, and that they should be creating, not consuming. I generally agree on the creation aspect (while noting that flipping the classroom and getting reading and tutorials done at home isn’t bad and the latter isn’t passive consumption), but note that he’s missed one of the big content creation aspects that smaller devices support: taking pictures and filming videos.  It may be that iPod Touches are even better for K-6, but running around and filming with a tablet (particularly an iPad mini, which may be optimal for K-6) is better than a laptop.  And I’ll bet that the video and photo editing tools on tablets are just the simple tools that kids really need; they just need basic capabilities.

I note that I didn’t buy my iPad for content consumption: when it was announced I wrote it off for just that reason. However, between the time it was announced and became available, I saw how I would use it to be more productive: creating not consuming.  And I bought one the first day it came out for that reason.

Let me also elaborate on the size point.  Elliot Soloway many years ago made the point that laptops were the wrong form-factor for young kids, and he started using Palm Pilots.  I think it’s still the case that a laptop isn’t right for kids, and that touch screens make much more sense than keyboards and touch pads or mice.  There are plenty of people noticing how 2 year olds are able to use iPads!

Donald also talks about coding, and it  is a shame that there isn’t a HyperCard equivalent for the iPad (though Infinite Canvas may be such, tho’ it’d need educational pricing).  However, something like Scratch for the iPad would be a real opportunity (precluded by Apple, unfortunately, I wonder if there’s an Android version).  And coding K-6 other than scratch doesn’t make a lot of sense.

He says that iPads are problems for teachers, and I’m somewhat sympathetic. However, too often I’ve seen instances where teachers weren’t properly prepared.  For instance, something like GoClass (caveat: partner), while still a bit instructivist, could scaffold teachers initially until they began to see the opportunities.  And there needs to be mobile management software to deal with the issues. However, I’m hard pressed to believe iPads are any  more fragile than laptops.

Now, for higher grades, I take the point.  My lad and lass both have MacBook Pros, though they each also have an iPod touch (lad’s is my old iPhone without a sim card) that they use.  Note that they do not take the laptops to school in most cases.  I think that a nice augment for mobile work, getting out of the classroom (please!) is much better facilitated with a tablet or pocketable (smartphone/PDA) than a laptop.  And even for collaborative group work, sharing a tablet is better than hovering around a laptop.  If necessary, they could be using a bluetooth keyboard when needed.  So while I know this is hard to justify on a cost basis, I’d probably argue for an iPad or pocketable for class, and a desktop or laptop for home.

Less related, he makes the side claim that employees don’t use iPads. I’m amazed at the number that turn up at workplace learning conferences, and in meetings.  They seem pretty ubiquitous, so I don’t buy this claim.  Yes, they may be older, and some folks are using netbooks or MacBook Airs, but I see plenty of folks with iPads equipped with keyboard cases. I keep a bluetooth keyboard for when I’m cranking (e.g. writing on an airplane), but frankly just for quick notes the touchscreen keyboard works good enough for meetings, and that ‘all day’ battery really makes a difference.

And I’ll add on one other benefit for mobile devices: the ability to do contextual work. These devices can be context aware, and do things because of where you are.  This is yet to be really capitalized on, but provides a real opportunity.

I think tablets are only going to get more capable, and already make more sense in the classroom than laptops.  Teachers should be seeing how to use them, even at higher levels, and save the high-powered writing and editing out of the classroom.  Laptops make sense for learners, but not in the classroom. In the classroom, smaller and more versatile devices make more sense.

Real mLearning

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Too many times, at conference expos and advertisements, it appears that folks are trying to say that courses on a tablet (or phone) are mlearning. On the contrary, I’ll suggest that courses on a phone or a tablet are elearning. Then, what is mlearning?

My argument is pretty simple: just because courses are on a different device, if they’re a traditional course – page turning with knowledge test, a virtual classroom, or even a simulation – if it’s only made touch-enabled, it’s still just elearning. Even if you strip it down to work on a phone, minimizing text, how is it really, qualitatively different?

Now, if you start breaking it up into chunks, and distributing it over time, we’re in a bit of a grey area, but really, isn’t that just what we should be doing in elearning, too?  Learning needs to be distributed, but this is still just a greater degree of convenience than doing the same on a laptop.  It’s a quantitative shift, not tapping into the inherent nature of mobile.

So, when is it really mlearning? I want to suggest that mlearning – and here I’m talking about courses, not mobile performance support, mobile social, etc, which also could and should be considered mlearning or at least mperformance – is when you’re using the local context to support learning. That could be restated as when you are turning a performance situation into a learning situation, wrapping the performance context with resources and support to take a performance experience and turn it into a learning experience.

Most of our formal learning involves what IBM termed ‘work-apart’ learning, something that happens away from your regular job.  And most training and online learning are just that, separated from work. We artificially create contexts that mimic the workplace in most of our learning.  And there are occasionally good reasons to do that, like handling multiple people and when failure can be costly or expensive.

Now, however, when we can bring digital technology wherever we are, we can use our real work to be the base of the learning experience. We don’t need an external context, we’re in one!  We can provide concepts, examples, and feedback around real contextualized practice. Or, we can add a layer to performance support that educates, not just supports, as Gloria Gery had proposed (but is still to be seen).

And, if the work context is using the desktop, then mobile isn’t necessarily a sensible solution. However, on those increasing circumstances when we’re on a site visit, meeting, at an event, and generally away from our desks, mlearning as I’m construing it here makes sense.

I don’t want to discount the value of elearning on mobile devices, particularly on tablets (where I have argued that the intimacy may have uniquely beneficial impacts), but I do think we shouldn’t consider context-free courses on a small device as anything other than just elearning. So, the question I’m wrestling with is whether mlearning includes mobile performance support, informal, etc, or do we want a separate term for that? But I kinda do want to keep mlearning from not meaning ‘courses on a phone (or tablet)’. What say you?

The Future of Mobile?

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In the webinar I did the day before yesterday, one of the questions I was asked was what I thought the future of mobile would be.  My first response was that mobile wasn’t going away, and that we’d see more converged devices.  I also opined that five years ago I couldn’t have predicted where we are now, and consequently it might be hard to think that far forward.  There was also a question of whether I thought the laptop was dead, and I kind of did.

Since then, however, I had a few moments in the middle of the night when I should’ve been sleeping, and I pondered this a bit more.  Let me answer in greater depth, thinking through hardware, software, and context.

One of the questions was wearables.  I frankly don’t know whether we’ll want them just on our sleeve (though it might be a nice fashion accessory), or still pulled from a pocket.  I think we’ll have the opportunity to have either. What will really be important, however, is having that visual display whether tangible in the world, or projected via a headsup display.  We’ll also have audio, both to listen to, and to communicate with. We’ll still likely couple that with gesture, whether on a screen or detected via gestures.  The important thing is that we’ll be interacting with our normal tools for acting on the world.  I think we may still need keyboards from time to time, as text is still a relatively rich communication channel with low bandwidth requirements.  Whether we can have virtual keyboards is still an open question, I think.

I do think the devices will continue to have richer sensors: in addition to accelerometers, compasses, GPS, microphones and cameras they’ll also have barometers, thermometers, and more.  They’ll be able to tap into these to do ever more clever context-sensing and reacting.  And I think they’ll be in a variety of form factors, some choosing pocketable, some choosing to tradeoff mobility for screen real estate.  Some will choose to have one multipurpose, perhaps, others likely will have several. They’ll synch seamlessly, so that it doesn’t matter what device we have when we’re looking for answers. And there will still be a role for the very large screen, with lots of real estate, when we’re tapping into our powerful pattern matching capabilities.

I think that it’s strongly possible that more of the computational capability will be served from the cloud, instead of locally, though I think the local capabilities will continue to increase as well.  I fully hope that they will be able to do intelligent and context-sensitive things.  My ideal is sort of a continual mentor, developing me over time and scaffolding behavior. This is probably wildly optimistic, though I’ve been asking for it for near to a decade, and we’re beginning to see elements thereof.

The interfaces may well simplify.  With rich communication possibilities, distributed across gesture and voice, the necessary screen representations may be minimized.  Still, as was recently pointed out to me, the current space is relatively mature and only a revolutionary technology shift would have a change. Can we anticipate that?  Likely, but not likely to hit the market within that 3-5 year timeframe.  And I’m willing to be wrong on that.

Regardless of technology, I can safely predict that most people will have some portable digital companion with them that they use to make themselves smarter in the moment, much as we do now. But I’m hoping that we’ll also be able to be using it to make us smarter over time, maybe even wiser.  That, to me, is the real vision of the future.

I’ve got your content right here

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I was engaging in a mobile strategy session with a small not-for-profit the other day, and naturally it became an overall technology strategy session, as you really can’t do mobile strategy without considering social media strategy, learning technology strategy, even enterprise technology strategy. Mobile is a platform for all of the above, and you

One of the questions they struggled with was their social media strategy, as they were (as many people are) struggling with their existing workload.  And there are lots of elements that can, and should, play a role.  But their problem was really much simpler.

They had a Facebook page, and a twitter account, and a blog they had a placeholder for, and they couldn’t figure out how they were going to populate these.  They were naturally concerned about what to blog, what to put on the Facebook page, what they would tweet about, and how they’d get the content for it, and keep it up.

The interesting thing was as we discussed it, talking about what a wide variety of material would make sense: reviews of relevant articles, updates about courses, etc, they started realizing that the content they needed was regularly being produced already. One enthusiastic staff member was always sending emails about things they should pay attention to. They also had notices about courses they were offering.  And there was a regular stream of events that occurred.

It became clear that there was a lot of content available from their various channels, what they needed was curation.  I was reminded of the fabulous job David Kelly does in curating conferences, and it’s largely the same set of skills (here’s Jane Hart interviewing Dave on the topic).  Curation in many ways seems just an external manifestation of Harold Jarche’s Personal Knowledge Management (an extension of the share part of seek-sense-share).

It seemed plausible  that they could give a few hours a week to a young person eager to add ‘social media’ to their resume who would do a minor bit of editing and get this to their blog. They wondered whether Facebook should have the same, and in this case the answer appeared to be ‘yes’ (blog allows RSS, some folks don’t go onto Facebook), and then the tweet stream could be for shorter pointers, announcements from the posts, whatever.

The result was that they had a simpler path to a coherent approach than they had realized.  There’s more: it’s an org change and there’d have to be the usual messaging, incentives, etc.  It’s only a start, but it gets them going while they develop the longer term strategy integrating mobile, web, social media, etc.  Do you have a social media strategy in place, and is there emergent content from within your organization?

Extending the tablet proposition

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A few months ago, I opined about what the opportunities for mlearning with a tablet are.  And while I think I got it largely right, I missed one.

What I said before is that tablets make sense when you need a fair bit of data at once, and/or when your mobility constraints aren’t too severe.  There’s something nice about the big screen even if you don’t need the data, if you’ve the time and flexibility.  I take my iPad up to the living room, not my phone.  But you don’t take your tablet with you  everywhere,  like you do your phone.

So I was having a nice conversation with the CEO of an elearning firm, and he was talking about their customers and their mobile tablet solution. He was talking about sales as a large part of their business, and I was reminded that there was another situation where tablets make sense:  sharing!

Sharing a tablet to look at something is much easier, and friendlier.  It’s even fun.  So if you need to show something to someone, or work with them together on something, tablets are a nicer solution. You can sit together looking at the screen, going through things, pointing to things, even acting on them.  I keep a number of images on the qPhone and qPad for sharing, but except for family photos, I prefer the tablet.  If I’m sharing diagrams, or one of the portfolio items I’ve stored, it’s better on the larger screen.

If social is part of the designed solution, tablets have a viable reason to be considered as a potential solution.   So, tablets make sense when you need the screen real estate, and/or when you have more freedom of movement and less constraints on size,  and/or  when you’re sharing your screen.  Make sense?

Interviewed about mobile

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Denise VanderLinde, a  student from Florida Gulf Coast University, interviewed me on mobile.  Here’s the (largely unedited) transcript she provided for me:

  1. What is your definition of mobile learning? Using a mobile device to make us more effective, either in the moment or developing us over time. A mobile device is a small portable device that is with us all the time and we are doing something with it because of where we are.
  2. Would you consider a laptop a Mobile Device? A laptop is not normally considered a mobile device and this topic has been discussed and argued at length, in fact, amongst industry leaders who concur that they are essentially ‘mobile desk tops‘. ‘Pocket-able devices‘ such as tablets and phones are considered mobile devices generally. Phones are usually used to access some information quickly and then it is put away and iPad or other tablet can be used for content creation and can be used for more long-term usage.
  3. Can you tell me about your success story of using mobile technology for learning (or training, or performance improvement)? My company doesn‘t create solutions so much as helping people come up with the strategies to do it. When I was designing solutions, though, a cell phone technology provider approached us to supplement a face to face training course on negotiation to be delivered via the phone. I designed a solution that incorporated (amongst other things) a quiz with 19 elements that were deemed important subject matter that trainees should know cold, 10 little mini scenarios trainees might be subject to, performance support for 16 stages of negotiation and the questions trainees should be asking themselves at each stage.
  4. What important development trends do you see coming down the pike in mobile learning? Context sensitive; we have the capability now but we‘re not taking advantage of it yet. The opportunity to know where people are (GPS chip) and what they are doing via their mobile calendars. That way we can tailor what we pull or push to/from individuals based on their locations and what sorts of meetings they attend and on what subjects etc. to meet individual‘s needs better.
  5. What important problems do you think still need to be resolved in mobile learning?
    1. Cross Platform issue/ lack of standards – html 5 not standard yet but if it were would be great but there will be, of course, resistance by software companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft etc.
    2. I would love to see productivity tools available to enable users to design/write their own apps that meet their needs better.
    3. Thinking that M-learning is just ‘courses on a phone‘ is a change that we‘ve got to make. It‘s much more than that. It‘s about the 4 C‘s: Content, Communicate, Capture and Compute.
  6. Does your firm work predominantly with corporations or do you also work with teachers, schools and/or school boards in improving educational technology use in the classroom setting?   I haven‘t done much mobile K-12 but have done some higher education mobile work but most work in mobile has been corporate. People have their mobile device with them all the time so it‘s a great way to distribute knowledge to the world, not just one head.
  7. Do you find corporate and/or school staff still seem reluctant to use technology or do you see that trend shifting in more recent years? I haven‘t experienced much resistance unless people are asked to use their personal device that they pay for themselves. That is not going over so well but, overall, if you have the right culture, there hasn‘t been much resistance.
  8. Is there anything else at all that you would like to share at this time regarding mobile technology? The one that starts going hand in hand with mobile is to begin to think in a deeper way about Content Systems, about Content Modeling and Content Architectures. It‘s going to support mobile initially and that personalization going forward. I wrote an article on this topic and another is coming out soon in Learning Solutions Magazine.