strategy Archives - Page 58 of 83

iPads do make sense for schools

26 February 2013 by Clark 3 Comments

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.

Norman’s Design of Future Things

18 February 2013 by Clark Leave a Comment

Donald Norman’s book, The Design of Everyday Things is a must-read for anyone who creates artifacts or interfaces for humans. This one goes forward in the same vein, but talking about how new tech in the roughly 20 years since that book came out, and the implications. There are some interesting thoughts, though few hints for learning.

In the book, Don talks about how new technologies are increasingly smart, e.g. cars are almost self-driving (and since the book was published back in 2007, they’re now already on the cusp). As a consequence, we have to start thinking deeply about when and where to automate, having technologies make decisions, versus when we’re in the loop. And, in the latter case, when and how we’re kept alert (pilots lose attention trying to monitor an auto-pilot, even falling asleep).

The issue, he proposes, is that tenuous relationship between an aware partner and the human. He uses the relationship between a horse and rider as an example, talking about loose-rein control and close-rein control. Again, there are times the rider can be asleep (I recall a gent in an Irish pub bemoaning the passing of the days when “the horse knew the way home”).

He covers a range of data points from existing circumstances as well as experiments in new approaches. This ranges from noise to crowd behavior. For noise, he looks at how the way mechanical things made noises were clues to their state and operation, and that we’re losing those clues as we increasingly make things quiet. Engineers are even building in noise as a feature when it’s disappeared via technical sophistication. For crowd behavior, one example is how the removal of street signs in a couple of cities have reduced accidents.

At the end, he comes up with a set of design principles:

Provide rich, complex, and natural signals
Be predictable
Provide a good conceptual model
Make the output understandable
Provide continual awareness, without annoyance
Exploit natural mapping to make interaction understandable and effective

For learning, he talks about how robots that teach are one place in which such animated and embodied avatars make sense, whereas in may situations they’re more challenging. He talks about how they don’t need much mobility, can speak, and can be endearing. Not to replace teachers, but to supplement them. Certainly we have the software capability, but we have to wonder what sort of system makes sense to invest in the actual embodiment versus speaking from a mobile device or computer.

As an exercise, I looked at his design principles to see what might transfer over to the design of learning experiences. The main issue is that in learning, we want the learner facing problems, focusing on the task of creating a solution with overt cognitive awareness, as opposed to an elegant, almost unconscious, accomplishment of a goal. This suggests that rule 2, ‘be predictable’, might be good in non-critical areas of focus, but not in the main area. The rest seem appropriate for learning experiences as well.

This is a thoughtful book, weaving a number of elements together to capture a notion, not hammer home critical outcomes. As such, it is not for the casual designer, but for those looking to take their design to the ‘next level’, or consider the directions that will be coming, and how we might prepare people for them. Just as Don proposed that the interface design folks should be part of the product design team in The Invisible Computer, so too should the product support specialists, sales training team, and customer training designers be part of the design team going forward, as the considerations of what people will have to learn to use new systems are increasingly a concern in the design of systems, not just products.

Performance support-ing learning

11 February 2013 by Clark 8 Comments

In a post last week, I mentioned how Gloria Gery’s original vision of performance support not only was supposed to help you in the moment, it was also – at least in principle – of developing you over time. And yet I have yet to see it. So what am I talking about?

Let’s use an example. I think of the typical GPS as one of the purest models of performance support: it knows where you’re trying to go (since you tell it), and it helps you every step of the way. It can even adapt if you make a mistake. It will get you there.

However, the GPS will tell you nothing about the rationale it’s using to choose your route, which can seem different than one you might have chosen on your own. Even if it offers you alternatives, or you specify preferences like ‘no toll roads’, the underlying reasoning isn’t clear. Yet this might be an opportunity for navigational learning (e.g. “this route has more lights, so we prefer the slightly longer one with fewer opportunities for stopping”).

Nor does it help you learn anything along the way: geography, political boundaries, even geology, although it could do any of these with only a thin veneer of extra work: “as we cross the river, we are also crossing the boundary between X county and Y; in 1643 the pressure between the two cities of X1 and Y1 jockeying for power led to this settlement that shared the water resource.”

It could go further, using this as an example of a greater phenomena: “geographic features often serve as political boundaries, including mountains and rivers as well as oceans”. This latter would, in a sensible approach, only be used a few times (as the message,nonce known, could become annoying. And, ideally, you could choose what you wanted to learn about.

This isn’t limited to GPS, this could be used in any instance of guided performance. Sometimes you might not care (e.g. I suspect most users of Turbo Tax don’t want to know about the nuances of the tax, they just want it done!), but if you want people to understand the reasoning as a boost to more expert performance, e.g. so they can then start using that model to infer how to deal with things that fall outside of the range of performance support, this is a missed opportunity.

The point is to have even our programs to be ‘thinking out loud‘, both to help us learn, and to serve as a check on validity. Sure, it should be able to be shut off or customized, but the processing going on provides an opportunity for learning to happen in new and meaningful ways. The more we can couple the concept to the context, the more we can create learning that will really stick. And that is, or should be, the real goal.

Roger Schank #eli3 Keynote Mindmap

7 February 2013 by Clark 5 Comments

Roger Schank gave a passionate, inciteful and insightful talk about how learning really works and how he’s building businesses on those principles. He raced along and jumped around, making mapping challenging, but his message was apt.

Brandon Hall #eli3 Keynote Mindmap

6 February 2013 by Clark Leave a Comment

Brandon Hall used the proposition that changes in the US are subsequently reflected in the rest of the world to examine coming changes in Higher Ed. He proposed that big change is coming and that the way to cope is to move to more vocational alignment and a project-based pedagogy.

Michael Moore #eli3 Keynote Mindmap

5 February 2013 by Clark Leave a Comment

Professor Moore gave a carefully detailed argument about why educational institutions (particularly higher ed) had to change, given the changes in society. He then argued some of the changes needed, and suggested some new institutional structure models that might provide guidance.

Living with Complexity

30 January 2013 by Clark Leave a Comment

Don Norman (disclaimer, my PhD advisor and mentor) has had a string of important books, starting with his stellar Design of Everyday Things (tops my ‘recommended books’ list for designers). His latest, Living with Complexity, is not as landmark a book as that, but it has some very astute thinking to present.

The book, as the title implies, is largely about how complexity isn’t bad, it’s necessary, and the real issue is about designing to manage it. We want powerful systems to accomplish meaningful goals, and he makes the case that this naturally requires complexity, either at the front end or at the back end. Complexity at the front end offers powerful choice at the tradeoff of comprehensibility, which we often want. Complexity at the back end can seem like magic, but offers more opportunity for things to go wrong catastrophically.

Good design is naturally the solution. He suggests that good design makes complexity usable, and bad design makes complexity frustrating. And he makes a strong point that it’s now about services.

He goes beyond product design in detailing how you really aren’t designing just a product, but an experience, and that it takes a system to create an experience. Using Apple’s iPod, he points out how simplifying the purchasing (backend: lining up publishers to allow downloading individual titles for a simple fee) and downloading music (instead of converting files and storing in special folders) made a device that could carry a lot of music in a small package.

He goes deeper into service design, using the examples of waiting in lines (I now know why immigration in SFO can be so frustrating!). He finally gets to coverage of recommendations for improvements, including signifying (making affordances perceivable), checklists, and job aids (over courses). His focus is on tapping into how our minds work, and aligning tools with them. He covers both sides, including what designers should do differently, and what ‘consumers’ can do. He also covers some of the mismatches between design and consumers, going beyond the design to the overall system.

Overall, while seemingly not as well structured as previous books, this book offers some advanced thinking into design that will benefit those looking to take a bigger picture. Feeling more like a collection rather than a coherent narrative, each of the elements is related and there are important insights in each section. Recommended for the advanced designer.

Old -> New

23 January 2013 by Clark 2 Comments

My ITA Colleague Jay Cross had a hangout over the weekend and the conversation rolled around to the role of L&D in the new era (related to yesterday’s post). I’ve previously addressed how we can now be using tech for more of the full suite of performance, but it occurred to me that there are some ways we could and should be thinking differently about the ways in which performance can be supported. And while these old:new lists are fun and sometimes overdone, and these may have been covered elsewhere by others, it seemed reasonable to go through a few that occurred to me.

Courses -> Search

The first is that too often we think of courses, but what’s happening these days is that people are increasingly self-helping. Rather than take a course ‘just in case’, they’re getting the help they need ‘just in time’. It seems to me that we should be focusing on making sure that learners have good search skills, and searchable and well-organized portals, to ensure searching success. Whether you view it as performance support or a ‘teachable’ moment, the fact is that learners are self-serving, going for pull solutions more. The goal is to support performers how they want to, and are learning, rather than trying to force them into our models.

Instruction -> Coaching

As social media is more available, people are more available, and people are often reaching out to others for support rather than courses. Whether it’s a quick query through a microblog or a full blown video chat, people are increasingly reaching out to folks for help. This is similar to the courses/search above, but sometimes they go for content and sometimes for people. Are you making it easy to reach out to people?

Development -> Mentoring

Rather than developing people through programs, increasingly people are looking for mentoring. Programmed development is like taking the bus, when mentoring is like having a chauffeur. It may seem extravagant, but folks like to help, and increasingly having a program of ‘each one teach one’, where those who’ve benefitted from mentoring pass it on, is workable. With digital support, this becomes both a more momentary, and longer term activity. It’s increasingly viable, so it should be on your radar.

Read -> Watch

It used to be that to the only way to find things out was to read the manual, or a step-by-step job aid. That’s no longer true, and increasingly it’s easy to create videos that show how to do things. So, for example, it’s now easy to create software ‘walkthrus’, and it’s not just the L&D department that are creating them. Learners are getting them through services like Lynda.com, and creating their own with screen casting software. Not to say reading won’t continue to play a role for concepts, but for procedures, the context and dynamism makes videos powerful. Are you supporting video/screen cast creation, hosting, and searching?

Test -> Simulation

The pragmatic barriers to creating simulations are falling down, and we now know that knowledge test isn’t an adequate assessment of ability to apply. We no longer have to have separate summative assessments, as digital environments can store performance as part of a portfolio of ability. Most importantly, we can make the practice environment much closer to the performance environment. When we’ve determined a real skill needs to be developed, we can and should be looking at rich assessments of ability.

“’til they get it right” -> “’til they can’t get it wrong”

Coupled with the above is the notion that we can move from minimal practice that isn’t sufficient to develop capability and confidence, and start providing sufficient practice to ensure ability. We need to be spacing it out over time, and ensuring real competence, not just until folks have had a taste of it, but inadequate to develop real capability. If it matters, we need to match practice to task and learner, and we can.

Desktop -> Mobile

People are now going ‘mobile first’, as are companies like Google. The reality is that the mobile devices are more familiar, and more available. People are getting in the habit of getting their support through a mobile device. And enterprise platforms are increasingly making that solution available. Are you enabling your workers to meet their needs with mobile?

These are just a few ways we can, and should, be shifting our thinking. I’m sure you’ve got more, and I look forward to hearing them.

#itashare

Starting from scratch

22 January 2013 by Clark 3 Comments

From a conversation with my ITA colleagues, talking about the (self-imposed) death of L&D that Charles wrote about, Jane wondered what we might do if we were starting from scratch. I decided to take this on, thinking about an org that was already in operation, with it’s goals, processes, and practices, and what I might do if I were to come in and get it going (with the support of the executive team to do what I thought was right).

My initial step would be to establish a social media system, supporting conversations and collaboration on work teams and communities of practice. I’d make sure that folks could establish dialogs, work together on documents, and share files, quick pointers, and more fully developed thoughts. They’d also be able to both create and share media, video, audio, and screencasts. I’d want to have some folks supporting the development of the use of this capability, in a performance consulting or performance strategist role.

Associated with this would be a big emphasis on transparency in communication, with the overall mission of the org percolating all the way through, and emphasizing the part each role plays in the overall picture. Another emphasis would be on developing individual capability for self-learning.

My second step would be to set up a mechanism to support portals organized around work tasks (not by org silo), where media, files, and conversations around topics could happen. The goal is to have tools ‘to hand’ as well as people. Thus, any created job aids would be appropriately located. Again, with a performance strategy focus. This is related to the first point.

Finally, I’d consider formal learning to supplement the informal learning, in places where it demonstrably would add value, with a view to minimizing the use of this except where a sound business case could be made that the time spent was aligned to key business indicator, and that developing this skill was the necessary approach. And, perhaps, on ways to effectively take advantage of the systems indicated above. However, a longer term approach than the ‘event’ model would be used. I’d want to track activity, not just content and assessment. Compliance and onboarding, typically roles for formal learning, would have a different look than currently.

I’d supplement this with mobile access, and ultimately start looking for ways to add contextual support. I’d be looking for business impact across the board. I’d probably structure this as a performance unit, and ensure that the staff are trained to look at the full suite of opportunities to improve performance including social, and consider the emotional side – motivation, anxiety, and confidence – as well as the cognitive.

This is all hypothetical, of course, but I think it’s illustrative of a different way of approaching this. I think that the way things are going: changing faster, dealing with more ambiguity ,and requiring more ingenuity and innovation, require a different approach than the assess, prepare, rollout model. The focus increasingly is on supporting people meeting their needs, instead of attempting to meet their needs. Organizations have to be more nimble, and this approach starts there and works back, instead of the other way around.

#itashare

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