Chuck Martin gave a lively and valuable keynote at #mLearnCon, with stats on mobile growth, and then his key components of what he thinks will be driving mobile. He illustrated his points with funny and somewhat scary videos of how companies are taking advantage of mobile.
Christopher Pirie opened the eLearning Guild’s mLearnCon mobile learning conference with a fair overview of technology for learning. He talked about the usual trends, and pointed to some interesting game apps for learning. Kodu, in particular, is an interesting advancement on things like Scratch and StageCast’s Creator.
I was somewhat surprised by his pointer to Bloom as the turning point to modern learning design, as I’d be inclined to point more to Collins & Brown’s Cognitive Apprenticeship. I also think he should take a look at Donald Clark’s criticisms of Mitra’s Hole in the Wall. Finally, the characterization between the overhead projector as characteristic of 1991 and the Kinect for 2012 is a bit spurious: in 1991 we also had HyperCard, and in 2012 I don’t see the Kinect in many classrooms yet, but his point is apt about the potential for change we have at our fingertips.
Overall, a nice kickoff for the conference.
A few years ago, I created a diagram to capture a bit about the technology to support learning (Big ‘L’ Learning). I was revisiting that diagram for some writing I’m doing, and thought it needed updating. The point is to characterize the relationship between underpinning infrastructure and mechanisms to support availability for formal and informal learning.
Here’s the accompanying description: As a reference framework, we can think of a hierarchy of levels of tools. At the bottom is the hardware, running an operating system and connecting to networks. Above that are applications that deliver core services. We start with the content management systems, from the delivery perspective, which maintains media assets. Above that we have the aggregation of those assets into content, whether full learning consisting of introductions, concepts, examples, practice items, all the way to the summary, or user-generated content via a variety of tools. These are served up via delivery channels and managed, whether through webinars, courses, or simulations through a learning management system (LMS) on the formal learning side, or self-managed through social media and portals on the informal learning side. Ultimately, these activities can or will be tracked through standards such as SCORM for formal learning or the new experience API (xAPI) for informal learning.
I add, as a caveat: Note that this is merely indicative, and there are other approaches possible. For instance, this doesn‘t represent authoring tools for aggregating media assets into content. Similarly, individual implementations may not have differing choices, such as not utilizing an independent content management system underpinning the media asset and content development.
So, my question to you is, does this make sense? Does this diagram capture the technology infrastructure for learning you are familiar with?
Yesterday I wrote about some products, and I thought I should also own up to the mobile apps I use while traveling (at least domestically, international is still a bloody headache). It’s something I do a fair bit, and is a natural opportunity for mobile to make your life easier and more effective.
First, the natural functions of basic apps are helpful. I put my flight details and a reminder into my calendar. 3 hours before the flight, unless it’s a connection, then 40 minutes to alert me to get to the gate (United used to have an option to automatically download it to your calendar, but that changed with the software switch on the integration with the proud bird). I also put in reservations for cars and hotels. I keep track of the confirmation number that way and don’t have to carry around an extra piece of paper. The camera is useful too, when I need to remember my parking space. Easier than entering into the calendar! And I have a password app (I use SplashID since I had it before on my Treo) where I store all my membership numbers for the loyalty programs. May as well get the benefits if you have to travel. And Google Search gets used for lots of things.
A I mentioned yesterday, Navigon is GPS software that I’ve used many a time to get from place a to place B. I try to avoid driving if at all possible (such a waste of time, give me a train any time), but when I need to in or to an unfamiliar destination, GPS is the go. These days Google Maps does a very good job too, but if you’re going somewhere with dodgy cell coverage, having maps local is nice (if battery abusive: keep a charger). Google maps in particular is very useful for walking directions and times, too.
I use the iBart app to check train schedules to and from the airport. There are lots of apps out there to facilitate using particular train systems, and I’d use Metro in other towns if I were using public transit, e.g. Boston or DC. If you live in a particular location, check and see if there’s an app for your system.
On occasions, I use SuperShuttle (I try to be frugal when time allows), and their app lets you book the trip, check on your van, etc. When needed, it’s quite useful. TaxiMagic would be used sometimes if I had trouble getting a cab (I can recall one time in Philly where it would’ve been very handy).
When I do have to drive, CheapGas helps you find the prices of petrol near you and find a provider with the best deal. Other special purpose driving apps are RoadAhead (finding things at turnouts ahead; but it would require someone else in the car with you) and the AAA and Roadside apps, which can help you find accommodation or help you with car trouble. Thankfully haven’t needed them, but nice to have.
At airports, I love GateGuru. I try to get to the airport early (I’d rather be cooling my heels with a book or an app than sweating whether I’ll make it thru security on time), and if I have time to kill or need to grab a meal or a drink, GateGuru finds the opportunities nearby and has ratings. Very helpful.
I’ve the SeatGuru app, but I tend to use the website, as it can be helpful for choosing the best seating position, particularly when you’ve got a choice and the extra considerations aren’t obvious (loud, limited recline, etc).
When I’m looking for a place to eat, Yelp can be very helpful (in fact, finding us the nice Twin Cities Grill in Minneapolis just last week). You can indicate where you are and look for what’s around. Google Maps can do this too, but Yelp’s somehow a little better, optimized as it is for this purpose. On occasion I’ll use or coordinate with UrbanSpoon.
Finally, a shoutout to United. I’ve been sucked in for years (long story, started when they were the last option when I lived in Sydney), but whether you like the service or airline or not, their app is a great example of mobile support. You can review your flights, get your boarding pass, check flight status, get your mobile QR code boarding pass, and even book a flight. Really nice job of matching user need to functionality.
So, what apps have made your life easier when you travel?
I don’t usually talk about products, particularly ones I’ve received as opposed to have chosen. However, there are a couple of mentions worth making:
GOOD
I won a copy of Navigon. I’d always wanted a GPS, but didn’t want to buy one, figuring they’d get outdated. I was glad to get it, as Google Maps wasn’t allowed to do turn-by-turn on the iPhone. I’ve used it a number of times, and have been very satisfied. The nice thing as opposed to the apps is that it works where there isn’t cellphone connectivity. The interface generally maps well to my goals, and I can usually figure out how to do the unusual things. Note that I don’t usually try to put in extra stops or anything. It won’t seem to use my bluetooth headphone, unlike Google Maps, which now does turn-by-turn, so these days I may alternate. Note: the processing required for Navigon does mean using a car-charger, or seriously depleting your batter, but I can’t see how that could be worked around, it is a processing intensive task. It’s been a keeper, and gratefully used a number of times over the past few years. Nice to have it as an app that travels with my phone so no extra hardware needed, and they can upgrade the software and it migrates to new phones.
I also earned a pair of Sony Walkman headphones. These are digital, so you can load up your playlist, and then wear them. They’re very minimalist: two ear pieces and a cable that joins them that goes behind your head. As you might expect, they’re oriented towards Windows, with no information for a Mac user provided, but their website shows how to load music on them. I don’t listen to music via headphones much, but for working out these seemed like a great solution, better than figuring out where to carry an iPhone and having the cord dangling. It’s got decent storage; my workout playlist fits with plenty of room. One problem for a Mac is that there’s no obvious information about how to have different playlists, though your supposed to be able to shuffle between lists. Regardless, I am only using for working out at this point so my ‘rowdy’ music is just fine. Another nice point is that the USB cable that connects to the computer is also how you charge them. They fit easily in my luggage and are now a travel partner.
BAD
I didn’t win, but paid an expo price (or so I thought) for a HyperShield stylus for my iPad. I liked the two-tone silver/gold look and the pen form-factor I got it over a year a year ago, and in the past couple of months started using it occasionally to try taking handwritten notes (contemplating an app that allows both handwriting and tapping, because I like to take diagrams). The stylus is far better than my finger for such purposes, and though my writing makes a doctor’s prescription look legible, I liked changing inks, drawing pictures, etc. I am in awe and jealous of my colleague’s abilities to do the same and make excellent drawings and elegant writing, but it was good enough. Until, after not many hours of use, suddenly it started grabbing at the screen, not dragging smoothly but chattering across. I looked carefully at the nub, and saw that it was peeling. What was apparently peeling off is the smooth surface. Of course, there was only a 90 day warranty, and I didn’t really expect to get it replaced, but I am dismayed that it could fail after such a short period of time. Caveat emptor.
And a rude noise in the general direction of any app with a free teaser and a premium version that decides to increase the annoyance factor to get you to pay. Make a clear value proposition to upgrade that is on virtue of better capability. Don’t have an initial choice and then decide to pester people more. Ahem, Sol Free.
Harold Jarche reviews Marina Gorbis’ new book The Nature of the Future, finding value in it. I was intrigued by one comment which I thought was relevant to organizations. It has to do with the nature of thinking.
In it, this quote struck a nerve: “Gorbis identifies unique human skills”. The list of them intrigued me:
While all are intriguing and important, the first and third really struck me. When I talk about digital technology (which I do a lot :), I mention how it perfectly augments our cognitive architecture. Our brains are pattern-matchers and meaning extractors. They’re really good at seeing insights. And they’re really bad at rote memory, and complex calculations.
Digital technology is exactly the reverse: it’s great at remembering rote information and in doing complex calculations. It’s extremely hard to get computers to do good pattern-matching or meaning making.
For the purposes of achieving meaningful outcomes, coupling our capabilities with digital technology makes a lot of sense. That’s why mobile makes so much sense: it decouples that complementary capability from the desktop, and untethers our outboard brain.
From an organizational point of view, you want to be empowering your people with digital augmentation. From a societal point of view, you want to have people doing meaningful tasks where they tap into human capability, and not doing rote tasks. They’re going to be bad at it! And, you can infer, it’s also the case that you’re going to want education to focus on how to do problem-solving and using digital technology as an augment, not on doing rote things and memory tasks. Ahem.
Twitter’s been an integral part of my social media existence for more than four years n0w, and owing to things like #lrnchat, I need to have good tools. I’ve played around with a number, but TweetDeck swept my enthusiasm for quite a while. And now it’s going, and I’m mad and sad.
To understand, you have to understand several things:
TweetDeck met all of these. Barely, it was across platforms, but not well: TweetDeck on the iPad had degraded to pretty pathetic. It surprised me how it could be so good on the iPhone, and so bad on the iPad. Of course, they haven’t updated the iPad version in forever. I used to regularly harass them about it via tweets.
Twitter bought TweetDeck, which seemed like it could be a good thing, but it seemed to hamstring the teams, having them focus on the web version. And now they’re getting rid of the apps completely. That’s why I’m sad.
What’s worse, the reasons TweetDeck is supposedly going away is that they find that more and more people are using the Twitter app on iOS. Um, hello, the TweetDeck on the iPad is broken! Of course they aren’t using it! And columns on the iPhone just don’t make a lot of difference. That’s why I’m mad, it’s not that it’s not in demand, they’ve killed it!
There had been no other cross-platform solution that meets all the needs above. None. HootSuite came close, but it didn’t update fast, last I checked. TweetBot was supposedly industrial strength, but it was only iOS. And Twitter’s own solution doesn’t support columns. There literally wasn’t an alternate. Even TweetDeck on the web will ‘time out’ and you need to login again. It’s a barrier to go into your password keeper, enter ID app password, navigate to entry, get twitter password, and go back and log in. Particularly when you’re dashing to join a chat.
It appears TweetBot now has a Mac solution, so I’ll be checking that out. Fingers crossed.
The API formerly known as Tin Can provides a consistent way to report individual activity. With the simple syntax of <who> <did> <this> (e.g. <Clark Quinn> <wrote> <a blog post>), systems can generate records across a wide variety of activity, creating a rich base of data to mine for contingencies that lead to success. While machine learning and analytics is one opportunity, there’s another, which is having people look at the data. And one person in particular.
As background, I was fortunate back in 1989 to get a post-doctoral fellowship to study at the Learning Research & Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh. One of the projects that had been developed was a series of intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) that shared an unusual characteristic. Unlike most ITS, which tutor on the domain, these three systems crossed domains (geometric optics, microeconomics, and electrical circuits, if memory serves) but the tutoring was about the systematicity in exploration. That is, the system tracked and intervened on whether you were varying one variable at a time, ensuring your data sampling was across a broad enough range of data points, etc. This reflected work done by the Valerie Shute and Jeffery Bonar some years before on your learning strategies.
I had the further benefit to work under the guidance of Leona Schauble, a very insightful researcher. One of her projects was with Kalyani Raghavan on working to make the learners’ paths in these systems visible and comprehensible to the learner, and they created the Dynamic And Reflective Notation (DARN, heh!) to capture and represent those paths.
Fast forward to today, and one of the big opportunities I see is for performers to reflect on their own paths of action. The granularity at which Tin Can can capture data, and systems might be instrumented to generate data, could be too small to be useful, so some way of aggregating activity to a reasonable level would be necessary, but looking at one’s own paths, and perhaps others, would be a useful way to reflect on process and look for opportunities to improve.
Reflection on action is a powerful learning and improvement process, but recollection isn’t as good as actual recording. The power of working out loud is really seen when those tracks are left for examination. The API has the opportunity to support more than system mining (“oh look, everyone who has this responsibility who touches this resource does way better than those who don’t”). Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but having performers do it too is a great opportunity not to be missed. As the work on protein folding has found, some patterns are better for computer solution, and others for human. We’d be remiss if we didn’t explore the opportunities to be found.
“Education over the Internet is going to be so big it is going to make email usage look like a rounding error.” – John Chambers, CEO of Cisco
This bold pronouncement of John Chambers a number of years ago hasn’t really played out as promised. I would argue that elearning has begun to grow, what with the rise of online education and the recent interest in MOOCs. And if we take a performance ecosystem view of elearning, including performance support and social, we can begin to think much more broadly about the relationship. I don’t think John thought of self-learning via Google or YouTube, or learning together via LinkedIn and Twitter, but if we give him the benefit of the doubt, we can begin to think that elearning may be of a substantial bulk in proportion to email, though not yet rounding error size.
However, I want to consider another elearning view that could propose such a relationship. If we take a performance ecosystem view of mobile, we may well have that sort of ratio. Think about it, mobile can claim large numbers around:
If we consider all those (and using mobile devices for email :) we actually come up with a pretty big number! We use mobile personally to learn and perform better in increasing ways, and we’ll start doing it more and more for work as well. In this way, mobile learning performance is becoming the massive shift that will make email seem like a rounding error. And that is big.
Robert Ballard gave a personal and inspiring tale of exploring the world’s oceans and using technology to broaden reach.
