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Clark Quinn’s Learnings about Learning

Book Review Pointer

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In case you didn’t see it, eLearn Mag has posted my book review of Mark Warschauer’s insightful book, Learning in the Cloud.  To quote myself:

This is … a well-presented, concise, and documented presentation of just what is needed to make a working classroom, and how technology helps.

As one more teaser, let me provide the closing paragraph:

The ultimate message, however, is that this book is important, even crucial reading. This is a book that every player with a stake in the game needs to read: teachers, administrators, parents, and politicians. And not to put too delicate a point on it, this is what I think should be our next “man in the moon” project; implementing these ideas comprehensively, as a nation. He’s given us the vision, now it is up to us to execute.

I most strongly urge you, if you care about schooling, to read the book, and then promote the message.

CLO Thinking (& Measurement)

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I attended the CLO Symposium with my ITA colleagues Jay Cross and Jane Hart.  It was an interesting event, with a theme of “Game-Changing Learning: Development for the New Normal“, held at a classy venue on the beach, and was well-organized.  (You can see Jay’s writeup here.)  And the keynotes that I saw were in synch: Stephen Covey talked about the need for trust and Jon Katzenbach on how to build culture were both excellent, as was Dan Pontefract’s story on making collaboration intrinsic to Telus.  At a lower level, however, the conference felt mired in the past.

Jay, Jane, and I ran a unpanel where we took questions from the audience and took turns answering it.  Some folks even had trouble with the format, apparently!  We got questions about how the role of the learning unit changes, about myths and new tools, and about measurement.  Our riff inspired some subsequent inquiries if we could assist.  Well, but of course!

A lot  of the other sessions also seemed to deal with measurement.  A special lunch was held specifically around creating a standard set of measurements: effectiveness, efficiency, and business impact. While the latter is business specific, the other two could be handled. Efficiency tends to mean things like amount per hour of training, etc.  Effectiveness was less clear, but I’m afraid we’d see pre-post test messages instead of number of people completing the competency test (happy to be wrong).  My problem here is that this stuff shouldn’t be a topic in 2011, it should be already well-practiced  and in the repertoire. We should be thinking about how to start tracking meaningful activity in social networks, the value of performance support and more, not old stuff about courses.  And, how to tie it back to important deltas in organizational performance.

As for addressing the social and informal metrics, while I addressed this a bit earlier, let me go a bit further.  If you are putting in performance support (e.g. a portal, but *ahem*, well-designed) or social network, you should be asking yourself what it should be achieving.  Is it closing more sales?  Generating higher revenue per sale?  How about less time spent on customer calls?  If you put in an HR portal, you should expect less calls to HR.  If you put in a social network among sales folks, you might expect a higher percentage of closing. Figure out what change this should  affect, and then find a way to measure it. Which should be the indicator that you have a problem in the first case!

Which is not to say there weren’t good topics on tap too: leadership development for agility, bridging the gap between IT and the learning unit, informal learning, etc.  But when other topics are ‘how to talk to executives’, in- or out-sourcing talent, and on-demand training, it’s clear we’re not where we can, and should, be.

“The future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed”, as  William Gibson  has said, but I guess my concern is with some of what is considered game-changing in an era where the new normal is continual innovation and perpetual beta.  Things are moving too fast not to already have mastered the basics of measurement, and be thinking about adapting.  The ability to talk ‘business’ should be a pre-requisite for the job, and the strategic issues need  to be culture and collaboration.  We’re getting there, but then patience has never been one of my strong suits ;).

 

Vale Jobs

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My first job out of college was designing and programming educational computer games. I had to do the TRS-80 Model I before I got to work on an Apple ][, but I finally bought a ][e, and sold it to my company shortly thereafter as I headed off to graduate school.  I was a grad student in an HCI lab (with Donald Norman, who went on to become an Apple Fellow), and so I was very aware of the Macintosh (I’d coveted a Lisa before that), and bought a Mac II to write my PhD thesis on.  Since then I’ve only used Macs as my main machine (tho’ there has been the odd PC around the house).  And that’s quite a few; in my office right now is an iMac DV, a Powerbook Wallstreet and also a G4, as well as an old and a new MacBook Pro, iPhone, and an iPad.

And let’s not dismiss the software.  Despite some quirks, the OS has a solid foundation, and the interface experience on top of it is pretty good.  I learned HyperCard (even though I’d moved on from programming), love Keynote, think Pages is *almost* there (the outlining is not quite yet industrial strength), etc.  So you can imagine it was with some unexpected sadness that I learned about the passing of Steve Jobs.

Enough has been said about the fact that it wasn’t just the surface design, but his insistence on a comprehensive user experience.  It has also already been covered that it was much more than that, it was the insight into the market, e.g. not just the iPod, but iTunes.  Not just the iPhone, but the whole reengineering of the relationship between hardware provider and telcos.  Industry-changing stuff, and absolutely true.  But I want to talk about one other thing that has somewhat passed under the radar.

How many of you would have liked to work  for Apple? You didn’t hear much about it, like you might with Google, but it seemed like a pretty cool place to hang out.  And there are two aspects to this.  One is that you didn’t  hear much.  In the notoriously gossipy Silicon Valley, Apple was remarkably resistant to leaks.  I think this is reflective of the other component. While you can install some pretty rigorous constraints, I think you do better if you instill some loyalty. And I think that while Jobs was at times dictatorial, as has come out, I think he did it through selling a vision inside the company as well as outside.

It has been said that the best form of government is a benevolent dictatorship (the only problem is ensuring the benevolent part), and I think Steve Jobs made a company doing things worth getting behind, and I suspect that it was pretty easy to go along with some of the constraints because you knew why  they were there.  But it has  to also be  a place where you can make mistakes, as Steve made them himself, starting with the Apple ///.  I think that Apple has wanted the best, but rewarded folks for being that, too.

This is all inference, as I never worked there, and haven’t discussed it with the few people I’ve known who worked there.  But some pretty fabulous stuff has come from there, and it can’t all be one person.  So I just wanted to acknowledge that he not only built products, and a company, but a culture that allowed the company to succeed, wildly.  I’m somewhat skeptical of the ability to use a university model to develop executives who can perpetuate the Apple success, but the fact that they’re trying is worthy of consideration.  I think they can continue to succeed, but I hope that they have some other approaches too.

And, that, to me, is a lesson to take away from this.  Steve Jobs was inspiring, but he recognized it was more than just luck, it was a habit of mind that can be developed. Not only do you have to pursue your dream, but there are skills and habits of mind that go along with it.  And if you recognize that, identify those skills, model them, develop them,  and reward them, you can build a successful company.

RIP.

Three core foundations for online learning

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The wise Ellen Wagner has a neat post about what should be the ‘ten commandments’ of online learning.  I agree with them, and recommend them to  you.  I have thought about it in a slightly different, but similar frame.

I came up with this as I was trying to suggest what the core value propositions (yeah, I said it, deal with it) of an online offering should be.  And I tried to frame it the way I thought Steve Jobs might:

  • An absolutely killer learning experience
  • We don’t just develop your understanding, we develop you
  • We’re your partner for your success

What I mean by a killer learning experience is one that is engaging and  effective, ie all the principles of Engaging Learning. It’s a pedagogy that’s challenging, meaningful, relevant, tightly coupled, and more. It’s also social, having you learn with others, not just on your own.

Developing the person means not only developing their knowledge of the topic, their degree, but also their success factors. That includes things like helping them develop a portfolio of work, developing skills in working with others, communicating, etc.  In essence, layered on top of the domain knowledge are 21st century skills, which are likely to be the only lasting value you can provide learners (c.f. Father Guido Sarducci’s 5 Minute University).

And finally, it’s about not just providing the content and having the learner sink or swim, but instead actively looking at the learner’s performance, finding ways to scaffold the learning and being attentive to signals of potential trouble.  It’s data-driven adaptivity to the individual learner, coupled optimally with human intervention.  And competency-based, so the learner has clear indications of what they need to do.

We can do this, on a cost-effective basis, and I reckon it’s going to be the only sustainable differentiator to be a successful provider.  The only question then becomes: who’s going to bring it all together?  The market is waiting.

Quinnovation ‘to go’

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The travel schedule is booting up again, and I’ll be hither and yon speaking about this and that for a good part of the coming two months. More specifically:

  • From 2-3 Oct I’ll be running a two day elearning strategy  workshop at Learning 3.0 in Chicago.  If you want to get above the individual tactics and see how the pieces fit together, and work on a plan for you and your org, I hope to see you there.  Then on Tuesday the 4th, I’ll be talking about creating Engaging Learning.
  • Then, on 12 Oct in Laguna Niguel at the CLO Fall Symposium, I’ll be joining with my ITA colleagues Jay Cross and Jane Hart to talk about controversial issues for CLOs.  This will be fun and worthwhile, as we will be aiming at some sacred cows.
  • It’s off to Las Vegas at the beginning of November for DevLearn, where I’ll be running a mobile learning strategy session on the the 1st.  If you want to get beyond just designing a one-off, and look at the broader picture of how to make mobile a part of your solution, it’s the place to be.
  • That’s followed by Learning 2011 in Orlando Nov 6-9, where I’ll be hosting an author session for Designing mLearning.
  • I’m still not done, as I head later that week to DC to speak to the local ASTD chapter with a talk on mobile learning and a social learning workshop.  That latter will talk about both formal and  informal learning, as well as looking at the different tools.
  • And, to cap it off, I’ll be presenting at the Canadian Society for Training & Development’s annual conference in Toronto on Friday the 18th of November, looking forward and more broadly at the role of learning in the organization.

That may seem  like a lot (and it is), but traveling on only one continent will seem easy after this past May-August ;).  I hope to see you at one or more of these learning events!

Cognitive Task Analysis

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While I argue strongly for stepping away more frequently from formally structured learning, not least because we overuse it, there are times when it is crucial.  As naysayers of informal learning like to point out, you wouldn’t want your pilot or heart surgeon to have picked up the task by reading a book. When performance is critical, you really want to understand what the important elements are, whether to train them or  provide support.

A technique for doing that is Cognitive Task Analysis (CTA).  This is not a shortcut, it’s deep in terms of the knowledge elicitation techniques, the analytical task, and the representation of results.  Based in decades of cognitive research, integrating work on mental models, expertise, and more, it provides a mechanism to try to unearth the tacit understanding experts hold. Because experts compile away their knowledge to the point that they no longer have access to it, it is hard to get at this knowledge, and it takes a rigorous process.

While useful for system design, CTA is also valuable for designing performance support, and training.  The deep elicitation process can derive what the task really is, and what should be in the learner’s head and what support can and should be available.  When I talk about the performance ecosystem, particularly for complex tasks, you want just this sort of support to determine what should be distributed across formal learning and performance support.

One of the problems with CTA is that there have been a number of different approaches, and they tend to be buried in academic papers or proprietary processes. The good news is that there’s now a book about CTA, Working Minds, by Beth Crandall, Gary Klein, & Robert Hoffman, academics and practitioners.  It boils down the divergence into a fairly reasonable set of steps, with techniques that can be used at each stage.  The bad news is, of course, that it still is a daunting read, with considerable depth.

If you’ve got performances that absolutely have to be right, you’ll want to do the analysis ala CTA, and use it to decide what really needs to be in training, checklists, etc.  This goes deeper than HPT even, tho’ I think it’s as weak when it comes to the benefits of social learning, but I reckon it’s for expert *performance*, not innovation. That’s another layer.  Still, a valuable tool in the quiver of supporting performance.

Please at least understand what CTA is, and know when you need it. You may not need to be an expert in it, but you should at least be aware.

Working Smarter

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Work smarter, not harder.

Have you heard that?  I did, in my first job out of college; my boss said it, but it wasn’t clear what it meant.  What does ‘work smarter’ mean?  I already thought I was working smarter.  Well, as I’ve learned (in conjunction with my ITA colleagues), it means a number of things that organizations can, and should, do.

So, what is known about when we work smarter? We work smarter under a number of conditions: when we have a clear goal of what we’re supposed to achieve and we recognize it’s importance; when we’re free to experiment, explore, and even fail; when we have colleagues to collaborate with; and  when we have the resources we need available ‘to hand’.  This provides some guidance about what an organization should be doing to optimize the likelihood of success.

We need to be doing meaningful work that we’re excited about.  We need to be connected to a vision, and understand how our role contributes.  There needs to be transparency above and below as well as ahead, so we can see how the parts are working together.

We also need a culture where that transparency is empowering, not threatening. It has to be safe to perform in public, to share our thoughts, and to both provide and receive help to others.  Where, when mistakes are made, the lessons are learned and shared.

We need to see it as important to contribute, and be enabled to communicate to the right people, and be able to work together to get the job done.  We need time to reflect as well, to take time to think about what we’re doing. We should be doing that publicly too. We need to learn out loud and together.

Finally, we need the tools available. We shouldn’t have to take time to go multiple places to get what we need, and use inconsistent interfaces to use them. We should have an environment where we’re focused on our tasks, and can get who and what we need to stay focused.

How to work smarter isn’t a mystery. The mystery is why  more organizations aren’t systematically breaking down the barriers to working smarter.  Are you ready to get going?

Layering learning

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Electronic Performance Support Systems are a fabulous concept, as pioneered by Gloria Gery back in the early 90’s.  The notion is that as you use a system, and have entries or decisions to make, there are tools available that can provide guidance: proactively, intelligently, and context-appropriate.  Now, as I heard the complaint at the time, this would really be just good interface design, but the fact is that many times you have to retrofit assistance on top of a bad design for sad but understandable reasons.

The original were around desktop tasks, but the concept could easily be decoupled from the workplace via mobile devices.  One of my favorite examples is the GPS system: the device knows where you are, and where you want to go (because you told it), and it gives you step by step guidance, even recalculating if you make a change.  Everything from simple checklists to full adaptive help is possible, and I’ve led the design of such systems.

One of the ideas implicit in Gery’s vision, however, that I really don’t  see, is the possibility of having the system not only assist you in performing, but also help you learn. She talked about the idea in her book on the subject, though without elaborating how that would happen, but her examples didn’t really show it and I haven’t seen it in practice in the years since.  Yet the possibility is there.

I reckon it wouldn’t really take much. There is (or should be) a model guiding the decisions about what makes the right step, but that’s often hidden (in our learning as well).  Making that model visible, and showing how it guides the support and recommendations that are made, could be made available as a ‘veneer’ over the system. It wouldn’t have  to be visible, it could just be available at a click or as a preference for those who might want it.

Part of my vision of how to act in the world is to ‘learn out loud’. Well, I think our tools and products could be more explicit about the thinking that went into them, as well.  Many years ago, in HyperCard, you could just use buttons and field, but you could open them up and get deeper into them, going from fixed links to coded responses.  I have thought that a program or operating system could work similarly, having an initial appearance but capable of being explored and customized.  We do this in the real world, choosing how much about something we want to learn (and I still want everyone  who uses a word processor to learn about styles!) about something. Some things we pay someone else to do, other things we want to do ourselves. We learn about some parts of a program, and don’t know about others (it used to be joked that no one knows everything about Unix, I feel the same way about Microsoft Word).

We don’t do enough performance support as it is, but hopefully as we look into it, we consider the possible benefits of supporting the performance with some of the underlying thinking, and generating more comprehension with the associated benefits that brings. It’s good to reflect on learning, and seeing how thinking shapes performance both improves us and can improve our performance as well.

Levels of analysis

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When I was a grad student, a fellow student did an interesting study.  In analogical reasoning, what helps is abstracting from the specifics to the more general (and folks are bad at generating good analogies, though okay at using them, according to my PhD and other research).  Folks had made efforts at getting abstraction, and failed. What my fellow student did was to control the abstraction, and got useful outputs.  It turns out some abstract too far, and of course in general most don’t go far enough.

From that beginning, I’ve been interested in useful mental models, and good analysis from appropriate levels of abstraction. That’s what I have tried to do in my books: abstract to useful levels, and guide application in pragmatic ways.  And that’s what I look for in other’s work as well.  My PhD advisor has served as an excellent model: Don Norman’s book Design of Everyday Things is still a must-read for anyone designing for humans, and his subsequent books have similarly provided valuable insight.

I like the thinking of a number of folks who do this well.  For instance, I’m regularly learning with my Internet Time Alliance colleagues (Jay, Jane, Harold, and Charles).  Jane Bozarth, Marc Rosenberg, Allison Rossett, Will Thalheimer, Marcia Conner, and Donald’s Clark & Taylor are just a few of the folks who cut through the hype with incisive thinking. There are of course others I’m forgetting to mention (my apologies).  They’re looking for best principles, not best practices.

It’s a similar thinking that helps break down new technologies and finds the key affordances for learning, avoiding other intriguing but ultimately distracting features (Powerpoint presentations in Second Life, anyone?).  You need to look a bit deeper than the surface.

Interestingly, to do so really requires taking time for reflection.  Which is why it always frustrates me to hear those folks who say “I don’t have time for reflection”.  Really?  You don’t have time to do the most valuable level of thinking that will impact your effectiveness and ultimately save you time and money?

And can we please put this process into our school curriculum as well?  I benefited mightily by having a 12th grade AP English teacher (that’s you, Dick Bergeron) who modeled deeper thinking and used reciprocal teaching (without having that label) to help us develop our own abilities.  While I try to do so for my own kids, our society and world needs more folks thinking at useful levels.

So, please, take time and a step back from your day to day problem-solving and abstract across your activities and look for higher level principles, both emergent and external, that can improve what you’re doing.

 

Integration (or not)

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I’ve recently been asked about what industries are leading in the use of (choose one: mobile, games, social).  And, in my experience, while there are some industries (medicine in mobile, for example), it’s more about who’s enlightened enough yet.  Which made me think a little deeper about what I do, and don’t see.

What I do see are pockets of innovation. This company, or this manager, or this individual, will innovate in a particular area.  Chris Hoyt has innovated in social learning for recruitment for PepsiCo, and is now branching out into mobile.  One company will do games, another mobile, another social. And that’s ok as a starting point, but there’s more on the table.  You want to move from tactics to strategy.

Performance EcosystemI want to suggest it’s better if someone higher up sees that tying the elements together into a coherent system is the larger picture.  You don’t just want the individual tactics, but you want to see them as steps towards the larger picture.  At the end of  the day, you want your systems tied together in the back end, providing a unified environment for performance for the individual.  And that takes a view of where you’re going, and the appropriate investment and experimentation.

I recall (but not the link, mea culpa) a recent post or article talking about the lack of R&D investment in the learning space (let me add, the performance space overall).  That is, folks aren’t deliberately setting aside monies to fund some experimentation around learning.  Every learning unit should be spending 3-5% of the budget on R&D.  Is that happening?  If so, it’s not obvious, but I’m happy to be wrong.

I really struggle to find an organization that I think is getting on top of this in a systematic way: that has realized the vision, is aligning tactics to organizational outcomes, and is looking to integrate the technologies in the backend to capitalize on investment in content systems, social media systems, portal technologies, and learning management systems.  This can also be customer-facing as well, so that you’re either meeting customer learning needs around other products or services, or delivering learning experiences as a core business, but still doing so in a coherent, comprehensive, and coordinated approach.

I am working with some folks who are just starting out, but I think the necessity to link optimal execution with continual innovation is going to require much more thorough efforts than I’m yet seeing.  Am I missing someone?  While I love to hear about exemplary individual efforts, I’d really like to hear from those who are pulling it all together as well.