David Pogue addressed the DevLearn audience on Learning Disruption. In a very funny and insightful presentation, he ranged from the Internet of Things, thru disintermediation and wearables, pointing out disruptive trends. He concluded by talking about the new generation and the need to keep trying new things. 
Looking forward on content
At DevLearn next week, I’ll be talking about content systems in session 109. The point is that instead of monolithic content, we want to start getting more granular for more flexible delivery. And while there I’ll be talking about some of the options on how, here I want to make the case about why, in a simplified way.
As an experiment (gotta keep pushing the envelope in a myriad of ways), I’ve created a video, and I want to see if I can embed it. Fingers crossed. Your feedback welcome, as always.
Biz tech
One of my arguments for the L&D revolution is the role that L&D could be playing. I believe that if L&D were truly enabling optimal execution as well as facilitating continual innovation (read: learning), then they’d be as critical to the organization as IT. And that made me think about how this role would differ.
To be sure, IT is critical. In today’s business, we track our business, do our modeling, run operations, and more with IT. There is plenty of vertical-specific software, from product design to transaction tracking, and of course more general business software such as document generation, financials, etc. So how does L&D be as ubiquitous as other software? Several ways.
First, formal learning software is really enterprise-wide. Whether it’s simulations/scenarios/serious games, spaced learning delivered via mobile, or user-generated content (note: I’m deliberately avoiding the LMS and courses ;), these things should play a role in preparing the audience to optimally execute and being accessed by a large proportion of the audience. And that’s not including our tools to develop same.
Similarly, our performance support solutions – portals housing job aids and context-sensitive support – should be broadly distributed. Yes, IT may own the portals, but in most cases they are not to be trusted to do a user- and usage-centered solution. L&D should be involved in ensuring that the solutions both articulate with and reflect the formal learning, and are organized by user need not business silo.
And of course the social network software – profiles and locators as well as communication and collaboration tools – should be under the purview of L&D. Again, IT may own them or maintain them, but the facilitation of their use, the understanding of the different roles and ensuring they’re being used efficiently, is a role for L&D.
My point here is that there is an enterprise-wide category of software, supporting learning in the big sense (including problem-solving, research, design, innovation), that should be under the oversight of L&D. And this is the way in which L&D becomes more critical to the enterprise. That it’s not just about taking people away from work and doing things to them before sending them back, but facilitating productive engagement and interaction throughout the workflow. At least at the places where they’re stepping outside of the known solutions, and that is increasingly going to be the case.
Where in the world is…
It’s time for another game of Where’s Clark? As usual, I’ll be somewhat peripatetic this fall, but more broadly scoped than usual:
- First I’ll be hitting Shenzhen, China at the end of August to talk advanced mlearning for a private event.
- Then I’ll be hitting the always excellent DevLearn in Las Vegas at the end of September to run a workshop on learning science for design (you should want to attend!) and give a session on content engineering.
- At the end of October I’m down under at the Learning@Work event in Sydney to talk the Revolution.
- At the beginning of November I’ll be at LearnTech Asia in Singapore, with an impressive lineup of fellow speakers to again sing the praises of reforming L&D.
- That might seem like enough, but I’ll also be at Online Educa in Berlin at the beginning of December running an mlearning for academia workshop and seeing my ITA colleagues.
Yes, it’s quite the whirl, but with this itinerary I should be somewhere near you almost anywhere you are in the world. (Or engage me to show up at your locale!) I hope to see you at one event or another before the year is out.
Content engineering
We’ve heard about learning engineering and while the focus is on experience design, the pragmatics include designing content to create the context, resources, and motivation for the activity. And it’s time we step beyond just hardwiring this content together, and start treating it as professionals.
Look at business websites these days. You can customize the content you’re searching for with filters. The content reacts to the device you’re on and displays appropriately. There can even be content that is specific to your particular trace of action through the site and previous visits. Just look at Amazon or Netflix recommendations!
This doesn’t happen by hardwired sites anymore. If you look at the conferences around content, you’ll find that they’re talking industrial strength solutions. They use content management systems, carefully articulated with tight definitions and associated tags, and rules that pull together those content elements by definition into the resulting site. This is content engineering, and it’s a direction we need to go.
What’s involved is tighter templates around content roles, metadata describing the content, and management of the content. You write into the system, describe it, and pull it out by description, not by hard link. This allows flexibility and rules that can pull differentially by different contexts: different people, different role, different need, and different device. We also separate out what it says from how it looks, using tags to support rendering appropriately on different devices rather than hard-coding the appearance as well as the content and the assembly.
This is additional work, but the reasons are several. First, being tighter around content definitions provides a greater opportunity to be scientific about the role the content plays. We’re too lax in our content, so that beyond a good objective, we don’t specify what makes a good example, etc. Second, by using a system to maintain that content, we can get more rigorous in content management. I regularly ask audiences whether they have outdated legacy content hanging around, and pretty much everyone agrees. This isn’t effective content governance, and content should have regular cycles of review and expiry dates.
By this tighter process, we not only provide better content design, delivery, and management, but we set the stage for the future. Personalization and customization, contextualization, are hampered when you have to hand-configure every option you will support. It’s much easier to write a new set of rules and then your content can serve new purposes, new business models, and more.
If you want to know more about this, I hope to see you at my session on content at DevLearn!
The future of libraries?
I had lunch recently with Paul Signorelli, who’s active in helping libraries with digital literacy, and during the conversation he talked about his vision of the future of the library. What I heard was a vision of libraries moving beyond content to be about learning, and this had several facets I found thought-provoking.
Now, as context, I’ve always been a fan of libraries and library science (and librarians). They were some of the first to deal with the issues involved in content organization, leading to information science, and their insight into tagging and finding is still influencing content architecture and engineering. But here we’re talking about the ongoing societal role of libraries.
First, to be about learning, it has to be about experience, not content. This is the crux of a message I’ve tried to present to publishers, when they were still wrestling with the transition from book to content! In this case, it’s an interesting proposition about how libraries would wrap their content to create learning experiences.
Interestingly, Paul also suggested that he was thinking broader, about how libraries could also point to people who could help. This is a really intriguing idea, about libraries becoming a local broker between expertise and needs. Not all the necessary resources are books or even print, and as libraries are now providing video and audio as well as print, and on to computer access to resources beyond the library’s collection, so too can it be about people.
This is a significant shift, but it parallels the oft-told story of marketing myopia, e.g. about how railroads aren’t about trains but instead are about transportation. What is the role of the library in the era of the internet, of self-help.
One role, of course, is to be the repository of research skills, about digital literacy (which is where this conversation had started). However, this notion of being a center of supporting learning, not just a center of content, moves those literacy skills to include learning as well! But it goes further.
This notion turns the role of a library into a solution: whether you need to get something done, learn something, or more, e.g. more than just learning but also performance support and social, becoming the local hub for helping people succeed. He aptly pointed out how this is a natural way to use the fact that libraries tend to exist on public money; to become an even richer part of supporting the community.
It’s also, of course, an interesting way to think about how the locus of supporting people shifts from L&D and library to a joint initiative. Whether there’s still a corporate library is an open question, but it may be a natural partner to start thinking about a broader perspective for L&D in the organization. I’m still pondering the ways in which libraries could facilitate learning (just as trainers should become learning facilitators, so too should librarians?).
2015 top 10 tools for learning
Jane Hart has been widely and wisely known for her top 100 Tools for Learning (you too can register your vote). As a public service announcement, I list my top 10 tools for learning as well:
- Google search: I regularly look up things I hear of and don’t know. It often leads me to Wikipedia (my preferred source, teachers take note), but regularly (e.g. 99.99% of the time) provides me with links that give me the answer i need.
- Twitter: I am pointed to many amazing and interesting things via Twitter.
- Skype: the Internet Time Alliance maintains a Skype channel where we regularly discuss issues, and ask and answer each other’s questions.
- Facebook: there’s another group that I use like the Skype channel, and of course just what comes in from friends postings is a great source of lateral input.
- WordPress: my blogging tool, that provides regular reflection opportunities for me in generating them, and from the feedback others provide via comments.
- Microsoft Word: My writing tool for longer posts, articles, and of course books, and writing is a powerful force for organizing my thoughts, and a great way to share them and get feedback.
- Omnigraffle: the diagramming tool I use, and diagramming is a great way for me to make sense of things.
- Keynote: creating presentations is another way to think through things, and of course a way to share my thoughts and get feedback.
- LinkedIn: I share thoughts there and track a few of the groups (not as thoroughly as I wish, of course).
- Mail: Apple’s email program, and email is another way I can ask questions or get help.
Not making the top 10 but useful tools include Google Maps for directions, Yelp for eating, Good Reader as a way to read and annotate PDFs, and Safari, where I’ve bookmarked a number of sites I read every day like news (ABC and Google News), information on technology, and more.
So that’s my list, what’s yours? I note, after the fact, that many are social media. Which isn’t a surprise, but reinforces just how social learning is!
Share with Jane in one of the methods she provides, and it’s always interesting to see what emerges.
Evolutionary versus revolutionary prototyping
At a recent meeting, one of my colleagues mentioned that increasingly people weren’t throwing away prototypes. Which prompted reflection, since I have been a staunch advocate for revolutionary prototyping (and here I’m not talking about “the” Revolution ;).
When I used to teach user-centered design, the tools for creating interfaces were complex. The mantras were test early, test often, and I advocated Double Double P’s (Postpone Programming, Prefer Paper; an idea I first grabbed from Rob Phillips then at Curtin). The reason was that if you started building too early in the design phase, you’d have too much invested to throw things away if they weren’t working.
These days, with agile programming, we see sprints producing working code, which then gets elaborated in subsequent sprints. And the tools make it fairly easy to work at a high level, so it doesn’t take too much effort to produce something. So maybe we can make things that we can throw out if they’re wrong.
Ok, confession time, I have to say that I don’t quite see how this maps to elearning. We have sprints, but how do you have a workable learning experience and then elaborate it? On the other hand, I know Michael Allen’s doing it with SAM and Megan Torrance just had an article on it, but I’m not clear whether they’re talking storyboard, and then coded prototype, or…
Now that I think about it, I think it’d be good to document the core practice mechanic, and perhaps the core animation, and maybe the spread of examples. I’m big on interim representations, and perhaps we’re talking the same thing. And if not, well, please educate me!
I guess the point is that I’m still keen on being willing to change course if we’ve somehow gotten it wrong. Small representations is good, and increasing fidelity is fine, and so I suppose it’s okay if we don’t throw out prototypes often as long as we do when we need to. Am I making sense, or what am I missing?
Symbiosis
One of the themes I‘ve been strumming in presentations is one where we complement what we do well with tools that do well the things we don‘t. A colleague reminded me that JCR Licklider wrote of this decades ago (and I‘ve similarly followed the premise from the writings of Vannevar Bush, Doug Engelbart, and Don Norman, among others).
We‘re already seeing this. Chess has changed from people playing people, thru people playing computers and computers playing computers, to computer-human pairs playing other computer-human pairs. The best competitors aren‘t the best chess players or the best programs, but the best pairs, that is the player and computer that best know how to work together.
The implications are to stop trying to put everything in the head, and start designing systems that complement us in ways that assure that the combination is the optimized solution to the problem being confronted. Working backwards [], we should decide what portion should be handled by the computer, and what by the person (or team), and then design the resources and then training the humans to use the resources in context to achieve the goals.
Of course, this is only in the case of known problems, the ‘optimal execution‘ phase of organizational learning. We similarly want to have the right complements to support the ‘continual innovation‘ phase as well. What that means is that we have to be providing tools for people to communicate, collaborate, create representations, access and analyze data, and more. We need to support ways for people to draw upon and contribute to their communities of practice from their work teams. We need to facilitate the formation of work teams, and make sure that this process of interaction is provided with just the right amount of friction.
Just like a tire, interaction requires friction. Too little and you go skidding out of control. Too much, and you impede progress. People need to interact constructively to get the best outcomes. Much is known about productive interaction, though little enough seems to make it‘s way into practice.
Our design approaches need to cover the complete ecosystem, everything from courses and resources to tools and playgrounds. And it starts by looking at distributed cognition, recognizing that thinking isn‘t done just in the head, but in the world, across people and tools. Let‘s get out and start playing instead of staying in old trenches.
Tom Wujec #LSCon Keynote Mindmap
Tom Wujec gave a discursive and well illustrated talk about how changes in technology were changing industry, ultimately homing in on creativity. Despite a misstep mentioning Kolb’s invalid learning styles instrument, it was entertaining and intriguing.
