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Clark Quinn’s Learnings about Learning

Measuring the right things

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For sins in my past, I’ve been invited on to our school district’s technology committee.   So, yesterday evening I was there as we were reviewing and rewriting the technology plan (being new to the committee, I wasn’t there when the existing one was drafted).   Broken up into five parts, including curriculum, infrastructure, funding, I was on the professional development section, with a teacher and a library media specialist.   Bear with me, as the principles here are broader than schools.

The good news: they’d broken up goals into two categories, the teacher’s tech skills, and the integration of tech into the curriculum. And they were measuring the tech skills.

The bad news: they were measuring things like percentage of teachers who’d put up a web page (using the district’s licensed software), and the use of the district’s electronic grading system. And their professional development didn’t include support for revising lesson plans.

Houston, we have some disconnects!

So, let’s take a step back.   What matters?   What are we trying to achieve?   It’s that kids learn to use technology as a tool in achieving their goals: research, problem-solving, communication.   That means, their lessons need to naturally include technology use.   You don’t teach the tool, except as ancillary to doing things with it!

What would indicate we were achieving that goal?   An increase in the use of lesson plans that incorporate technology into non-technology topics would be the most direct indicator.   Systematically, across the grade levels.   One of the problems I’ve seen is that some teachers don’t feel comfortable with the technology, and then for a year their students don’t get that repeated exposure.   That’s a real handicap.

However, teacher’s lesson plans aren’t evaluated (!).   They range from systematic to adhoc.   The way teachers are evaluated is that they have to set two action research plans for the year, and they take steps and assess the outcomes (and are observed twice), and that constitutes their development and evaluation.   So, we determined that we could make one of those action research projects focus on incorporating technology (if, as the teacher in our group suggested, we can get the union to agree).

Then we needed to figure out how to get teachers the skills they need.   They were assessed on their computer skills once a year, and courses were available.   However, there was no link between the assessment and courses.   A teacher complained that the test was a waste of time, and then revealed that it’s 15-30 minutes once a year.   The issue wasn’t really the time, it’s that the assessment wasn’t used for the teachers.

And instead of just tech courses, I want them to be working on lesson plans, and, ideally, using the tools to do so.   So instead of courses on software, I suggested that they need to get together regularly (they already meet by grade level, so all fifth grade teachers at a school meet together once a week) and work together on new lesson plans.   Actually, I think they need to dissect some good examples, then take an existing lesson plan and work to infuse it with appropriate technology, and then move towards creating new lesson plans.   To do so, of course, they’ll need to de-emphasize something.

Naturally, I suggested that they use wikis to share the efforts across the schools in the district, but that’s probably a faint hope.   We need to drive them into using the tools, so it would be a great requirement, but the level of technology skills is woefully behind the times.   That may need to be a later step.

One of the realizations is that, on maybe a ten-year window, this problem may disappear: those who can’t or won’t use tech will retire, and the new teachers will have it by nature of the culture.   So it may be a short-term need, but it is critical.   I can’t help feeling sorry for those students who miss a year or more owing to one teacher’s inability to make a transition.

At the end, we presented our results to the group.   We’ll see what happens, but we’ve a new coordinator who seems enthusiastic and yet realistic, so we’ll see what happens.   Fingers crossed! But at least we’ve tried to show how you could go towards important goals within the constraints of the system.   What ends up in the plan remains to be seen, but it’s just a school-level model of the process I advocate at the organizational level.   Identify what the important changes are, and align the elements to achieve it (a bit like ID, really).   If you’re going to bother, do it right, no?

On the road again

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Well, this spring is shaping up differently than I expected. Instead of the doing the familiar talks or workshops in the usual places: Training’s Conference, eLearning Guild’s Annual Gathering, and ASTD’s TechKnowledge and International Conference, I’m doing new things in old and new places.   Not that I don’t like those conferences, in fact I recommend them, it’s just that life takes funny turns (and I like challenging myself). Which isn’t to say I won’t be at those conferences again (I hope and intend to).

So, where will I be showing up?   At VizThink, for one.   A conference I’ve been very interested in, and managed to get a chance to present at.   That’s really just in a few days (Feb 22-25), and I’ll be talking about the cognitive underpinnings behind diagrams (and more).   As well as soaking up some great thoughts from others!

I’ll also be talking at the 5th Annual Innovations in eLearning Conference, hosted by the Defense Acquisition and George Mason Universities in the beginning of June.   My topic is myths about new learners, and I intend to debunk much of the hype just as I like to do around learning styles (which will probably show it’s head in the talk), as well as provide practical guidelines.   Folks like Will Wright and Vint Cerf are keynoting, so this is bound to be special.

Finally, assuming there are enough registrations, I will be at ASTD’s ICE (end of May), not speaking but running a pre-conference workshop on elearning strategy.   This is based upon my chapter in the forthcoming Michael Allen’s eLearning Annual 2009 about both the important principles of elearning tactics like mobile, portals, social learning, and more, and tying those tactics together into a strategy.   The focus is on an integrated ‘performance ecosystem‘, and I reckon it’s the most useful thing I can offer in this economic uncertainty.   I’ve given it as a talk before, but not as a workshop, and this is for managers and executives to take the next step in improving their organizational learning infrastructure.   It’s time to work smarter, folks!

One of the ways I work smarter and keep learning is to push myself into new areas that are beyond my comfort zone but that are within my reach (e.g. Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development).   I recommend it to you too.   It’s a way to keep learning, and expanding.   I welcome new challenges, got any handy?

Jumpstarting

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I’m on the Board of Directors for an educational not-for-profit that has had almost 30 years of successful work with programs in classrooms, nationally and internationally.   However, 5 years ago or so when I joined, they were doing almost nothing with technology.   Since then I’ve been working systematically to get them to the stage where they’re leveraging technology not just for education, but for the organization.

It’s been a slow road. There were several false starts along the way, with two separate groups within the organization having a go, but each withered.   I wrote a vision document, laying out the opportunities, but they just weren’t getting the message; they were already successful.   Several things have helped: the economic uncertainties of funding for the past few years,   an external group that looked to partner for online delivery (which went awry, sadly), and the growing use of technology by their ever-younger employees (and their audience!).

Mainly through persistence, consistently better messaging, and a growing awareness on the part of both Board and organization, I finally managed to get the Board to push for an IT Strategy from the organization, which led to the formation of an IT Committee on the Board.   (For my sins I got to chair it.)   Since then I’ve been working with the organization to start developing a strategy, though I can only advise.

Jumpstarting may seem hardly the right phrase for a several-years long process, but actually it’s a significant shift and real progress.   They’re still having trouble getting a real strategic vision, focusing a bit too much on tactics like a killer website instead of back-end system and information architecture, but it’s within grasp now.   I likely will be going down and giving the organization’s team a more in-depth view, and the Board has asked to get an overview of the new technologies and the opportunities.   I’m even going to run a survey to see if we can move to more use of technology for the Board’s communications (the number of trees…).

Persistence pays off, even in the most hidebound environments.   Serendipity helps, but you get better at getting the message across.   And the number of examples now available makes it even easier.   Jumper cables, anyone?

Economic Impact

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The Learning Circuit’s Blog Big Question of the Month is “What is the impact of the economy on you and your organization? What are you doing as a result?”.   Heavy topic, but appropriate for the times.   I’ll answer two-fold: myself, and what I see for clients.

First, the impact: for some organizations it appears mostly an issue of scale, trying to do more with less, but for others it’s more cataclysmic; layoffs, no ability to secure capital for activity, no new business.   For me, it’s several projects that have gone on hold (extra capability available, call now, operators are standing by).

I’ve gone off already on the economic times and what I see are valuable steps for organizations: investing in capability.   I very much believe in walking the walk, so I’m investing in my own capability .   I’ve checked out some non-fiction books from the library that I’m reading to expand my abilities, I revamped my website (and continuing to improve it), writing a new article,   and I’ve started a new blog series on ID.

The point is to use down-time to be prepared to capitalize on the up-time.   Fingers crossed for all of us that it occurs soon.

Disruption and Adaptation

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I was pointed by Harold Jarche to Dave Snowden talking about the coming age and the characteristics of what it will take. He documents a shift from mechanistic to systematic, and posits that the coming age is chaotic, requiring a new approach.   Dave terms this ‘praxis‘, a continual cycle of experimenting on the basis of theory and reflecting, rather than pre-determined approaches.

Harold wondered whether this counted as meta-learning, and I’d have to say yes.   You not only are looking at the outcomes of your intervention, but you’ve got to be paying attention to your process, and revising the theory and the practice as well as the problem-solving.   It may seem like an awful lot of overhead, but these skills become practiced, and the outcomes are far better in the long run.

Things aren’t slowing down.   I was reflecting earlier today on how quickly the ‘iClones‘ came after the announcement of the iPhone.   Things are moving faster, we’re being showered with more and more information, and asked to do more and more with less.   Most importantly, the fundamental game changes, where a whole industry is upended by a disruptive innovation, are getting so frequent that there is no longer a period in which to adapt to a steady state: change is the steady state.

Everything of any value at work will be adapting to change and solving problems. The processes you’d execute against will be out of date by the time they’re codified.   You’ll instead be applying frameworks, and monitoring the results while you refine the models and your approach.

At a personal level, this means meta-learning: learning on an ongoing basis, developing your learning skills and continually problem solving.   It’ll also mean collaborating, as it’s no longer sufficient to assume you can do it yourself; there’s power in numbers, when managed right.   So you’ll also have to develop and evolve not only personal learning, but learning to learn with others.   (That’s one of things Harold, Jay, Jane and I are working on via TogetherLearn.)

This naturally implies the skills of larger groups of people, and at the organizational level it means continuing to experiment as well, and providing the tools and the space to learn.   It also means being systematic and continuous about review.   (Doug Engelbart, ahead of the curve as always, has even suggested another level, where nodes of meta-learning collaborate to review the meta-learning!)

It’s attitudinal, too, as you’ve got to keep it from being scary, and let yourself remember that learning is fun.   As Raph Koster tells us, learning is fun (at least until we kill that thought with schooling).   So, let’s start having fun!

Less than words

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Yesterday, while I was posting on how words could be transcended by presentation, there was an ongoing twitfest on terms that have become overused and, consequently, meaningless.   It started when Jane Bozarth asked what ‘instructionally sound’ meant, then Cammy Bean chimed in with ‘rich’, Steve Sorden added ‘robust’, and it went downhill from there.

I responded to Jane’s initial query that instructionally sound cynically meant following the ID cookie cutter, but ideally meant following what’s known about how people learn.   I similarly tried to distinguish the hyped version of engaging (gratuitous media use) from a more principled one (challenging, contextualized, meaningful, etc).   (I had to do the latter, given I’ve got the word engaging in my book title.)

Other overused terms mentioned include: adaptive, brain-based. game-like, comprehensive, interactive, compelling, & robust.   Yet, behind most of these are important concepts (ok, game-like is hype, and Daniel Willingham’s put a bucket of cold water on brain-based).   I should’ve added ‘personalized’ when a demo of an elearning authoring suite I sat through yesterday could capture the learner’s name and use it to print a ‘personalized’ certificate at the end.

And that’s the problem: important concepts are co-opted for marketing by using the most trivially qualifying meaning of the term to justify touting it as an instance.   Similarly, clicking to move on is, apparently, interactive.   Ahem.   It’s like the marketers don’t want to give us any credit for having a brain. (Though, sadly, from what I see, there does seem to be some lack of awareness of the deeper principles behind learning.)   I invoke the Cluetrain, and ask elearning vendors to get on board.

So, before you listen to the next pitch from a vendor, get your Official eLearning Buzzword Bingoâ„¢ card, make sure you know what the terms mean, and challenge them to ensure that they a) really understand the concept, and b) really have the capability.   You win when you catch them out; a smarter market is a better market. Ok, let’s play!

Usability and Learnability

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Palm has just announced the Palm PrÄ“ as a new smartphone, and it’s got a fair bit of things right.   Like the iPhone it’s got a touchscreen, but adds a keyboard.   And GPS, WiFi, etc.   However, that’s not what I’m on about, but instead key things, like usability.   And there’s a lesson here that I’ve talked about before but I want to generalize it a bit.

To start at the beginning, when Jeff Hawkins designed the first Palm, he cut a block of wood to the size he wanted as a form factor, and then took it with him wherever he went, asking himself “what would I do with this if I could have it make me more effective”.   He ended up with a core list of features that still defines Personal Information Management (PIM) today. Those were Contacts/Addresses, Calendar/DateBook, ToDos, & Memos/Notes.   He added a few essential elements to be ultimately satisfactory and keep from repeating the problems that had plagued earlier attempts at a PDA: synchronizing with your desktop computer, instant on,   rock-solid stability, and absolute simplicity.   The latter got codified into the Zen of Palm.

So what’s the PrÄ“ offering that are steps ahead?   Several things. For one, it’s integrated all the message you can get, SMS, IM, eMail into one place to respond.   And all email accounts into one inbox.   Multiple applications can run at one, and it’s easy to switch between them.   It syncs into the ‘cloud’, automatically.   It’s not out yet, so it’s hard to confirm all the facts (does it have a good phone?), but we can also assume it has memos and ToDos, as it has already been reported as having as cut/copy/paste.

There are two lessons here.   The first is about how to gather your requirements.   It was inspired to spend the time walking around with the brick.   And it’s not obvious how the design process led to the new interface, but they’ve made huge steps in terms of what people need.   It drives me nuts to have to switch apps on the iPhone and have lost the context when I return. It makes me crazy to have to use so many taps to get between my different mailboxes.

This analysis is critical.   I was talking yesterday in an online session about how to do information gathering, and it’s got to be more than SMEs; you’ve got to talk to managers of the people performing, you’ve got to talk to the ‘consumers’ of the learned behavior (not the learners, but those impacted by the learner’s skills after the training), you want to look at the context; ideally you watch them. In usability, we used to talk about anthropological methods or ethnography (real or ‘fake’), and contextual and partipatory inquiry.   You’ve got to really get to know the problem to get the right answer.

The second part is getting the right usability in place, and it’s not trivial.   Koreen Olbrish goes off on instructional design being dead, and I think the problem is really that people follow a cookie cutter approach instead of being critically aware (hence my Deeper ID presentations).   I think that is true for too much (e.g. I recently had the same <expletive deleted> experience with a stupid phone number field in another online form) of practices.   You might by chance get it right, but why do people skimp on any component of a project?   Get the right skills for all components!

Yes, I live in the real world too, and know we can’t always use all the resources we should, but then test the solution first.   I say that you have to test usability before you can test for any learning effect, because if it’s not working, how do you know if it’s problems with the interface design or the instructional design?

So, at a surface level, we have to make it possible for people to interact with our elearning solutions, easily mapping their goals to the available affordances at the interface. This goes further however.   It’s also the underlying architecture.   Portals go wrong not only because they’re so many of them that users can’t figure out where to go, but also because they often are organized according to one persons thoughts, and there are likely to be more than one way to think about the organization.   Good portals provide several different ways to browse, and an ability to search as well.

When we move beyond the elearning ‘course’, to portals, and eCommunity/social networking, we need to think about how these tie together not only conceptually, but also from a usability perspective.   What we don’t want, and likely can’t afford, is having our workers avoiding our technical support because we didn’t make it comprehensible and usable. It’s an extra burden to take this into account, but I reckon it’s as much a job of learning technology design as is project management, understanding how people learn, the communicative properties of media, and more.   This isn’t a place for amateurs, because learning is just too darned important!

The Quiver & The Gun

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(No, I’m not talking about weapons, or anthropological determination, sorry :).

Organizations have to be nimble; the environment we face is more like sitting in the ocean waiting to ride the ever-changing waves than it is striding down a concrete road.   Increasingly, in these chaotic times, changes are unpredictable.   There are changing tides, swells, weather, and the resulting waves.   You’d rather ride them than be tossed by them, but what do you do?   When it comes to waves, how do surfers cope, and what are the implications?

Beginning surfers typically have a board, a solution for riding waves.   And that’s ok, because there’re a limited number of wave conditions they should go out in.   Sometimes they get a good board for general small wave conditions, but sometimes for a variety of mistaken reasons they get something like a gun.   A gun is a board specifically for big fast waves.   It’s a board if you’re surfing on the North Shore of Oahu in winter. Not for beginners.

More experienced surfers start accumulating a quiver of boards for different conditions. Short boards, long boards, and a gun, etc.   Depending on their budget, storage space, and commitment to surfing, they could have two to as many as 8.   The pros have quivers in the teens, but they get them free and on-demand.   They’ll check the conditions, and then choose the appropriate board.

The analogy is that when you’re moving from just beginning to being able to adapt to a changing environment, you   need to have a suite of tools that provide the flexibility you need.   There isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution, just as there isn’t the perfect board.   There are boards that suit a wide variety of conditions, and if you’re small, cash-strapped, or whatever you may have to make do with one tool with most of the necessary capabilities, but when you’re serious, you need industrial-strength tools.

With my TogetherLearn colleagues, we’ve been evaluating tools for a while, and we’re not happy with any one. Consequently, we’ve a quiver of tools we use for different purposes, and we’re continually scanning for one that feature either better integration, or a more elegant delivery of capabilities.

There’s more, of course.   Experienced surfers sit and watch the waves for a while, choose a board, and then when they’re out they’re scanning the horizon for swells, and moving to get optimal position.   Once they’re riding, they’re watching how the wave changes and making spontaneous decisions.   Sometimes they come in and pick a different board before going back out.

And that’s before you figure out how to choose tools that suit your organization, proactively adapt your culture, and align with your business goals.   Surfers who want to get better get out in the water more, get more experience, and experiment.   Surfers who want to get better quickly get coaching.

I reckon the business environment is going to get more turbulent, and organizations are going to have to be more flexible, more nimble, be able to adapt and move faster.   That requires faster and more effective problem-solving.   We know that innovation isn’t the product of one person, but of collaboration and ongoing work, by people who are motivated and supported.   You need the right culture and the right infrastructure   to support that collaboration.   What’s your strategy?

eLearn Mag predictions

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eLearning Magazine’s 2009 predictions are now up, including those of yours truly.   It’s a fascinating look of optimism, pessimism, and viewpoints from a lot of different perspectives.   It’s also an impressive array of thinkers (myself excluded), many are folks I follow through blogs and/or tweets.   It’s a thought-provoking list and I recommend give it a look.

By my (informal) count, one of the major predictions is the rise of social networking. I think that’s a no brainer, as I’ve been going off on this quite a bit recently.   The reasons mimic what you might think: big benefits, but also because it’s low cost.   It’s also strategic: covering more of learners’ needs.   The economic climate is definitely a factor in many of the comments.

Consequently another common theme is an increase in online learning, as a cost effective method, although there is some differences of opinion on whether the quality will rise or fall.   Certainly we have more powerful tools, but I continue to be amazed at how little of good design seems to be known.

The predictions go off in more directions from there.   Some are focused on the cloud, some on open learning and open software.   There are recommendations as well, such as governments would do well to sponsor more elearning, and that universities need to focus more on what’s important.   There is also a heartening focus beyond corporate and higher ed, focusing into the developing world.

There are only a few comments on mobile, interestingly, and a few on the semantic web.   Which isn’t surprising, really, as they’re still a bit out of the mainstream, and in tough times the fringes tend to get neglected.   (Speaking of mobile, BTW, the Palm Pre’ is truly exciting if only for seeming to get almost everything right.)

Whether or not any of the predictions come to pass, it’s a broad view of what could be, and particularly the optimistic views provide some insight into what’s coming sooner or later.   It’s some great thinking, and we all can use that as a spark from time to time. Check it out!

learning inside ™?

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I was just reading the posts on the MacWorld Keynote by Phil Shiller, and saw some interesting themes in comments: empowering users, and learning as a key selling item.   These are certainly worth expl0ring.

On the TUAW coverage, they made the comment “Y’know, it seems like iMovie and iPhoto are now designed to repair human failings.”   They were referring to how iMovie could remove any handheld jitters in your movies, and how iPhoto could do some autotagging both geographically and based upon face recognition.   That really struck me as a fantastic product advantage: it makes you better.   It doesn’t improve your skillset, but it allows you to create better outcomes: it’s performance support.

Which is a different solution, but one that is often a more apt one than providing a training course.   People sometimes want to learn how to do it themselves, and other times they are just as happy to have a smart system partner with them to reduce their cognitive load and still produce superior results.   Hence the ‘performance focus’ stage in my strategic approach. It’s part of an overall approach, and also of a performance ecosystem.   I hope it’s in your repertoire.

The other interesting announcement came from their music application: GarageBand.   In it, they now have tutorials on guitar and keyboards; introductory videos built in to teach you instrument basics.   In addition to being able to edit music tracks to create songs, you can learn how to play two versatile instruments.   (For a fee, you can go on and get popular stars to teach you about one of their favorite songs.).   As one of the commenters noted on the iPhone Blog livecast: “Garage Band Instructor beats Guitar Hero”.   And my lad has become an avid Guitar Hero player since he got it for Christmas, yet this may grab his attention.

The deeper meaning harkens back to something I’ve talked about before, the Transformation Economy.   Beyond wanting to have ‘experiences’, we can have experiences that transform us (in ways we value).   Now, I can’t say how compelling the experience with these tutorials will be (yet; I am strongly compelled to get the upgrade); despite Apple’s typically superior comprehension of user experience, there’s no reason to believe they get interactive learning experience yet (e.g they didn’t consult me :).

It’s a real opportunity, however, to have the new “intel inside ™” be “learning inside ™“.   Wouldn’t that be cool?   Too many products in my experience decouple learning, and consequently risk consumer dissatisfaction.   But a second step up from learning the product is learning new skills in the environment.

Sure, there were some other thrills for me: an iPhone app that allows you to control your Keynote preso (unfortunately, only by WiFi apparently), and having outlines in Pages (I write in outlines). I reckon I’ll be forking over for upgrades.   But the big ones were those performance support features, and the learning built into a consumer app.   I think the former is an interesting perspective on consumer value, and the latter could be a major market shift.   What do you think?