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Services

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From time to time, it’s worth a reminder that Quinnovation (the firm behind the blog) is available to help you.  Here are the services you can look to from me, in case you want to accelerate your success.

And a wee bit of self-promotion: if expertise comes from years of practice, how about 3+ decades of investigating the breadth and depth of learning & performance, and exploration of technology support?  Why not get assistance from where the thinking originates, not the several-steps away diluted version?

Consulting:

Learning Design: are your design processes yielding the outcomes they should and need to? I have worked with many organizations to generate or tighten learning design processes to reflect learning science (not myths). I recognize that most organizations can’t completely revamp their approaches, so I look to the small changes with the biggest impact. A white paper talks about this.

Performance Ecosystem Strategy: are you leading your organization forward in learning (read: innovation) or are you still taking orders for courses?  Based on the book, I’ve helped a number of organizations understand the full spectrum of possibilities, evaluate their situation, and prioritize short-, medium-, and long-term steps.  Another white paper talks about this.

Games & Mobile: I’ve helped a number of organizations get their minds, strategies, and design processes around mobile and/or games, based upon those books.

Workshops

Want to get your team up to speed on learning science, strategy, games, mobile, or more?  I have workshops on each that are interactive, engaging, and effective. Preferably, they’re coupled with followup to extend the learning (applying the learning science), and that can be done in a variety of ways.

Presentations

A number of organizations around the world have booked me to speak to their audiences. They have been about the subjects of my books, or the future of learning technology in general. And have indicated they were quite satisfied with the result ;). If you want a credible, engaging presenter around intelligence augmentation, I’m a candidate.

Writing

In addition to books, I write white papers, blog posts, and articles for others. I could do the same for you.

Coaching

If you’re a learning leader that would like assistance over time addressing your organization’s needs, it would certainly be worth a conversation. I haven’t done this formally, but it seems like a natural extension.

And, of course, there are combinations of these services as well. You can find out more at the official Quinnovation site. Next week we return you to your regularly scheduled blog at this same channel.

Context is key

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Workflow learning is one of the new buzzphrases. The notion is that you deliver learning to the point of need, instead of taking people away from the workflow. And I’m a fan. But it’s not as easy as it sounds!  Context is a critical issue in making this work, and that’s non-trivial.

When we create learning experiences, typically we do (or should) create an artificial context for learners to practice in. And this makes sense when the performance has high consequences.  However, if people are in the workflow, there is a context already. Could we leverage that context for learning instead of creating one?  When would this make sense?

I’d suggest that there are two times workflow learning makes sense. For one, if the performers aren’t novices, this becomes an opportunity to provide learning at the point of need to elaborate and extend learning. Say, refining knowledge on sales, marketing, or product when touching one of them.  For another, it would make sense if the consequences aren’t high and the ease of repair is easy. So, sending on a workpiece that will get checked anyways.

Of course, we could just do performance support, and not worry about the learning, but we can do that and support learning as well. So, having an additional bit of learning content at the right time, whether alone or in conjunction with performance support, is a ‘good thing’.  The difficulties come when we get down to specifics.

Specifically, how do we match the right content with the task? There are several ways. For one, it can just be pull. Here the individual asks for some additional help and/or learning. This isn’t completely trivial either, because you have to have a search mechanism that makes it easy for the performer to get the right stuff. This means federated search, vocabulary control, and more. Nothing you shouldn’t already be worrying about for pull learning anyways, but for the record.

Second, you could do push. Here it gets more dicey.  One way is to have content tied to specific instances. This can be hand done as some tools have made possible. That is, you instrument content with help where you find, or think, it could be needed. The other way is to be smart about the context.

And this is where it gets complicated. For such workflow learning to work, you really want to leverage the context, so you need to be able to identify the context.  How do you know what they’re doing? Then you need to map that context to content. You could use some signal (c.f. xAPI) that tells you when someone touches something. Then you could write rules that map that touch to the associated content. It might even by description, not hardwired, so the system’s flexible. For instance, it might change the content depending on how many times and how recently this person has done this task.  This is all just good learning engineering, but the details matter.

Making workflow learning work is a move towards a more powerful performance ecosystem and workforce, but it requires some backend effort.  Not surprising, but worth being clear on.

Real (e)Learning Heroes

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Super logoWhile there are people who claim to be leaders in elearning (and some are), there is another whole group who flies under the radar. These are the people who labor quietly in the background on initiatives that will benefit all of us. I’m thinking in particular of those who work to advance our standards. And they’re really heroes for what they’ve done and are doing.

The initial learning technology standards came out from the AICC.  They wanted a way to share important learning around flight, an area with a big safety burden.  Thus, they were able to come together despite competition.

Several other initiatives include IEEE (which is pretty much the US based effort on electric and electronic technology standards to the international stage), and the IMS efforts from academia.  They were both working on content/management interoperability, when the US government put it’s foot down. The Department of Defense’s ADL initiative decided upon a version, to move things forward, and thus was born SCORM.

Standards are good. When standards are well-written, they support a basis upon which innovation can flourish.  Despite early hiccups, and still some issues, the ability for content written to the standards to run on any compliant platform, and vice versa, has enabled advancements. Well, except for those who were leveraging proprietary standards.  As a better example, look how the WWW standard on top of the internet standards has enabled things like, well, this blog!

Ok, so it’s not all roses.  There are representatives who, despite good intentions, also have vested interests in things going in particular directions. Their motivations might be their employers, research, or other agendas.  But the process, the mechanisms that allow for decision making, usually end up working. And if not, there’s always the ADL to wield the ‘800 lb gorilla’ argument.

Other initiatives include xAPI, sponsored by ADL to address gaps in SCORM. This standard enables tracking and analytics beyond the course. It’s no panacea, but it’s a systematic way to accomplish a very useful goal. Ongoing is the ICICLE work on establishing principles for ‘learning engineering’, and IBSTPI for training, performance, and instruction.  Similarly, societies such as ATD and LPI try to create standards for necessary skills (their lists are appendices in the Revolution book).

And it’s hard work!  Trying to collect, synthesize, analyze, and fill in gaps to create a viable approach requires much effort both intellectual and social!  These people labor away for long hours, on top of their other commitments in many cases.  And in many cases their organizations support their involvement, for good as well as selfish reasons such as being first to be able to leverage the outputs.

These people are working to our benefit. It’s worth being aware, recognizing, and appreciating the work they do.  I certainly think of them as heroes, and I hope you will do so as well.

Tools and Design

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I’ve often complained about how the tools we have make it easy to do bad design. They make it easy to put PPTs and PDFs on the screen and add a quiz. And not that that’s not so, but I decided to look at it from the other direction, and I found that instructive. So here’re some thoughts on tools.

Authoring tools, in general, are oriented on a ‘page’ metaphor; they’re designed to provide a sequence of pages. The pages can contain a variety of media: text, audio, video.  And then there are special pages, the ones where you can interact.  And, of course, these interactions are the critical point for learning. It’s when you have to act, to do, that you retrieve and apply knowledge, that learning really happens.

What’s critical is what you do.  If it’s just answering knowledge questions, it’s not so good.  If it’s just ‘click to see more’, it’s pretty bad.  The critical element is being faced with a decision about an action to take, then apply the knowledge to discriminate between the alternatives, and make a decision.  The learner has to commit!  Now, if I’m complaining about the tools making it easy to do bad things, what would be good things?

That was my thinking: what would be ideal for tools to support? I reasoned that the interactions should represent things we do in the real world.  Which, of course, are things like fill in forms, write documents, fill out spreadsheets, film things, make things.  And these are all done through typical interactions like drag, drop, click, and more.

Which made me realize that the tools aren’t the problem!  Well, mostly; click to see more is still problematic.  Deciding between courses of action can be done as just a better multiple choice question, or via any common form of interaction: drag/drop, reorder, image click, etc. Of course, branching scenarios are good too, for so-called soft skills (which are increasingly the important things), but tools are supporting those as well. The challenge isn’t inherent in the tool design.  The challenge is in our thinking!

As someone recently commented to me, the problem isn’t the tools, it’s the mindset.  If you’re thinking about information dump and knowledge test, you can do that. If you’re thinking about putting people into place to made decisions like they’ll need to make, you can do that. And, of course, provide supporting materials to be able to make those decisions.

I reckon the tool vendors are still focused on content and a quiz, but the support is there to do learning designs that will really have an impact.  We may have to be a bit creative, but the capability is on tap. It’s up to (all of) us to create design processes that focus on the important aspects.  As I’ve said before, if you get the design right, there are lots of ways to implement it!

No all-singing all-dancing solution

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I was pinged on LinkedIn by someone who used the entrée of hearing me speak in next week’s Learning Solutions conference to begin discussing LMS capabilities. (Hint: they provide one.)  And I thought I’d elaborate on my response, as the discussion prompted some reflections.  In short, what are the arguments for and against having a single platform to deliver an ecosystem solution?

In Revolutionize Learning & Development, I argue for a Performance & Development ccosystem. The idea is more than courses, it’s performance support, social, informal, etc. It’s about having a performer-centric support environment that has tools and information to hand to both help you perform in the moment and develop you over time. The goal is to support working alone and together to meet both the anticipated, and unanticipated, needs of the organization.

On principle, I tend to view an ‘all singing all dancing’ solution as likely to fail on some part of that. It’s implausible that a system would have all the capabilities needed.  First, there are many functionalities: access to formal learning, supporting access to known or found resources, sharing, collaborating, and more.  It’s unlikely that all those can be done well in one platform. Let alone, doing them in ways that matches any one organization’s ways of working.

I’m not saying the LMS is a bad tool for what it does. (Note: I am not in the LMS benchmark business; there are other people that do that and it’s a full time job.) However, can an LMS be a full solution? Even if there is some capability in all the areas, what’s the likelihood that it’s best-of-breed in all? Ok, in some small orgs where you can’t have an IT group capable of integrating the necessary tools, you might settle for working around the limitations. That’s understandable. But it’s different than choosing to trust one system. It’s just having the people act as the glue instead of the system.

It’s always about tradeoffs, and so integrating best-of-breed capabilities around what’s already in place would make more sense to me.  For instance, how *could* one system integrate enterprise-wide federated search as a stand-alone platform? It’s about integrating a suite of capabilities to create a performer-centric environment. That’s pretty much beyond a solo platform, intrinsically. Am I missing something?

The Dearth of Science in Learning Technology

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Over the years, I’ve looked at a lot of learning technology.  And I see a dispiriting trend. There seems to be little learning science of late.  What I see are marketing driven decisions, even when there are claims to science!  And I think this is a problem.

First, I generally resist the ‘let me show you our product and give us your opinion’. That’s free consulting, and a very rude ask!  (Though I’m contemplating it but all they’ll get for free is the number of comments in each category I’ve noted. ;)  Still I will investigate things of my volition at times.  I end up seeing a lot of technology by checking it out when someone talks about it, or wandering expo halls.  And what I see concerns me.

For one, there are too many tools that have suites of features that are oriented towards ‘information dump and knowledge test’.  Which we know isn’t going to lead to meaningful learning.  Yet when I try to push them to the next level of engagement (cognitive and emotional), they’re uninterested.  The response: “this is what our customers say they want”.  Which, of course, isn’t what they need.

It gets worse when supposedly more advanced tools are proselytized. I recently sampled one system promoting their advanced memory model.  And the free-to-air course on learning science was broken!  It failed on a couple of dimensions beyond drilling rote memory about one thing. That’s not a good example to be showing.  Yet people who don’t know better might be enthused.

For a quick test, check to see if there’s anyone who understands learning on the executive team of a vendor. You’ll see all the business roles filled.  Some might have advisory boards composed of learning folks, but it’s not clear what role they play.

And I get it.  Unfortunately, as an industry, we’re not informed consumers. I see continual conceptually fuzzy promotion of ideas, and even societies offering white papers on the latest buzzwords.  It’s business, and with business folks in charge (and shareholders to assuage), they’ll do what people want.  Yet this isn’t the professionalism we need.

Ok, so this rant doesn’t taint all companies, but it’s too true for many or most. It’s all too easy to look at the typical offerings and point out the fundamental flaws in what they’re doing, if you know how we learn. And you should.

So, I’ll continue on my crusade for us as an industry to lift our game. I hereby offer to assist any learning technology that wants to put it’s money where it’s mouth is to help them understand learning science, build it into their products, and help them promote the benefits. And I likewise offer any organization using learning technology to help them lift their game and be better consumers.  I’ve done both before, and am ready to assist others. Because our learners need us to represent their true interests.

 

A broader view of Augmented Reality

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I was answering some questions about a previous post of mine on AR, and realized I have made some unnecessary limitations in my own thinking. And I may not be the only one!  So I thought I’d share my thoughts on a broader view of augmented reality.

Now, most people tend to think of Augmented Reality as visual augmentation of a scene. This typically done with a camera that registers what you’re seeing, and then adds information to the visual field.  The approach is usually either a projector on glasses (e.g. Google Glass) or by putting it on your screen (Apple’s ARKit).  But what occurred to me is that there’re more ways to augment the world with useful information.

One of the limitations of visual systems is their ‘directionality’; you have to be pointed in a particular direction to notice something.  Movement in the periphery of your vision may draw your attention elsewhere, but otherwise you’re pretty limited.  Yes, we have blindspots.

Audio, on the other hand, is direction-independent. It may be affected by distance, or interference (as is vision too), but is independent of where you’re looking. E.g. we can listen to the radio or podcasts while we drive, and the GPS notifications don’t require that we look at the map (“turn left in 200 feet”).

And this information also can augment our world.  It could be a narration of interesting points as you traverse some space, or it could be performance information. Or even notifications!  I regularly set alarms before events to do things like get me to the call or room on time, to remember to load presentations on flash drives, and more.  This extra information in the world is very helpful.  It’s what Don Norman called a ‘forcing function’, making it hard for your to avoid processing it. (His example was putting something you needed to take to work in front of the door so you couldn’t leave without at least moving it.)

Movement information can also  be useful. Vibration of a phone on silent, or the different taps that an Apple Watch can give to have you turn left or right are both examples.  (For that matter, I always wonder if airlines make it warmer during the flight to help you sleep, particularly at night, and colder before you need to wake up to land.)

There are lots of ways we can instrument the world to provide useful information (train arrival notifications, maps, street signs).  Digital support that is contextually cued is even more powerful.  But don’t limit yourself (as I was somewhat inclined to do) to just visual cues. Think of a rich suite of human perception and leverage accordingly.

 

2018 Trajectories

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Given my reflections on the past year, it’s worth thinking about the implications.  What trajectories can we expect if the trends are extended?  These are not predictions (as has been said, “never predict anything, particularly the future”).  Instead, these are musings, and perhaps wishes for what could (even should) occur.

I mentioned an interest in AR and VR.  I think these are definitely on the upswing. VR may be on a rebound from some early hype (certainly ‘virtual worlds’), but AR is still in the offing.  And the tools are becoming more usable and affordable, which typically presages uptake.

I think the excitement about AI will continue, but I reckon we’re already seeing a bit of a backlash. I think that’s fair enough. And I’m seeing more talk about Intelligence Augmentation, and I think that’s a perspective we continue to need. Informed, of course, by a true understanding of how we think, work, and learn.  We need to design to work with us.  Effectively.

Fortunately, I think there are signs we might see more rationality in L&D overall. Certainly we’re seeing lots of people talking about the need for improvement. I see more interest in evaluation, which is also a good step. In fact, I believe it’s a good first step!

I hope it goes further, of course. The cognitive perspective suggests everything from training & performance support, through facilitating communication and collaboration, to culture.  There are many facets that can be fine-tuned to optimize outcomes.Similarly, I hope to see a continuing improvement in learning engineering. That’s part of the reason for the Manifesto and the Quinnov 8.  How it emerges, however, is less important than that it does.  Our learners, and our organizations, deserve nothing less.

Thus, the integration of cognitive science into the design of performance and innovation solutions will continue to be my theme.  When you’re ready to take steps in this direction, I’m happy to help. Let me know; that’s what I do!

Video Lessons

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So, I’ve been creating a ‘deeper elearning’ course for one of the video course providers. And I’m not mentioning where it is (yet), since it’s still under development.  But to do this, I had to do some serious learning about creating video.  And there were some realizations in this, of course.

One of the decisions to be made was how to include graphics.. My mentor/colleague/friend showed me (by video chat) his elegant setup.  He has green screens, and lights, and has a full studio in a separate room as well. Of course, he’s been doing video for decades.  I’ve hardly done much besides taking a multimedia course at least 20 years ago. And narrating the occasional Keynote deck.

In the meantime I asked around, and colleagues were pretty unanimous on ScreenFlow being the tool to use.  So I got a copy. And, indeed, I was able to film myself.  Moreover, I quickly found out I could include diagrams and text right on the screen! That eliminated the need for a green screen.

My video imageI had a couple of lights, and without them my screen reflected on my glasses.  However, that’s not really fixable, since I didn’t get the anti-glare coating when I had them made.  Doh!  Next time, for sure. I positioned a couple of lights off to each side, and they reduced (though not eliminated) the glare.

We were moving my office back to the front of the house (long story), so we moved a bookcase behind me, with my library.  It looks good, but…you don’t see much of it anyway.  I filmed standing up (on my new stand/sit desk converter), and I block most of the background anyway (except for the Albert Einstein poster that sits on the wall).

Having read up,  I knew to have a written script, which, without a prompter, I just positioned to the top of the screen under the camera.  Of course I changed it a bit, and adlibbed a bit, but mostly stuck to what I’d written. It’s not quite as spontaneous (and goofy) as I am in person, but it ensures consistent quality. And I filled in diagrams a few times, and added some text a few times, to help keep pace.

Frankly, it’s not great, but I had a deadline.  It’s too much of me talking, without animation. But this is done by me, alone, under a tight deadline. And that’s my error, too, since I have video anxiety almost as bad as my phone anxiety, and dragged my heels until things were too late.  Dang emotions getting in the way again! (Even when you know this.)

I also created some quizzes, in mini-scenario fashion pretty much. That is, there’s a fair bit of dialog that you either are asked and/or choose to respond with. Because it’s only a multiple choice option, I was somewhat constrained.  I subsequently was prodded for some assignments, and found I could do what I’d talked about.  I used the assignment tool to create questions that asked learners to go out and do things and then provide them with some guidance to self-evaluate.

One thing I learned is that I don’t have a good mental model of how the software works. I ‘get’ the tracks, but there’s another aspect I don’t understand. So, it turns out though I’d filmed myself at 720p, and exported at 720p, it still had an unnecessary border. Fortunately, in stumbling around I found a ‘crop’ setting that forced it to 1280 x 720 (720p), but I don’t understand why that was necessary!?!?

I still want to add some examples (as documents) before I feel it’s fully ready to go. And I now sympathize much more with those who struggle to do good learning design under real-world constraints.  It’s also certainly been an example of my accepting assignments that are within my reach, but not within my grasp; my learning style ;).   More later, but thought I’d share my struggles and learning. I welcome your feedback.

Usability and Networks

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As I mentioned in an earlier post, I have been using Safari and Google to traverse the networks. And in a comment, I mentioned that the recent launch of the new Firefox browser was prompting me to switch.  And that’s now been put through a test, and I thought it instructive to share my learnings.

The rationale for the switch is that I don’t completely trust Google and Apple with my data. Or anyone, really, for that matter.  On principle. I had used Safari over Chrome because I trust Apple a wee bit more, and Firefox was a bit slow.  And Safari just released a version that stops videos from auto-starting. And similarly, Google’s search has been the best, and with a browser extension and some adjustments, I was getting ads blocked, tracking stopped, and more.  Still, I wasn’t happy.  And I hadn’t figured out how to do an image search with DuckDuckGo (something I do a fair bit) the last time I tried, so that hadn’t been a search option.

All this changed with the release of Firefox’s new Quantum browser. After a trial spin, the speed was good, as was the whole experience.  Now, I want to have an integrated experience across my devices, so I downloaded the Firefox versions for my iDevices as well.  And, as long as I was changing, I tried DuckDuckGo again, and found it did have browser search.  So I made it my search engine as well.

And, after about a week of experience, I’m not sticking with Firefox.  The desktop version is all I want, but the iDevice versions don’t cut it. I use my toolbar bookmarks a lot.  Many times a day.  And on the iDevices, they do synch, but…they’re buried behind four extra clicks. And that’s just not acceptable.  The user experience kills it for me. Those versions also don’t take advantage of the revised code behind the new desktop version, but it wasn’t the speed that killed the deal.  The point I want to make is that you have to look at the total experience, not just one or another in isolation. It’s time for an ecosystem perspective.

On the other hand, I’m still trying DuckDuckGo.  It seems to have a good output on it’s hits.  And the fact that they’re not tracking me is important.  If I can avoid it, I will.  Sure, my ISP still can track me, and so can Apple, but I’ll keep working on those.  Oddly, it seems to return differently on different devices (?!?!).  Still testing.

And, as long as we’re talking the net, I’m going to do something I don’t usually do here; I’m going to take a position on something besides learning. To do so, let me provide some context. I’ve been on the net since before there was a web.  Way before.  Circa 1978, I was able to send and receive email even though there wasn’t any internet. I was at a uni with ARPANET, however, so I had a taste. Roll forward a decade and more, and I was playing with Gopher and WAIS and USENET before Tim Berners-Lee had created http.  That is, there were other protocols that preceded it. (In fact, I was blasé about the web at first, because of that; doh!)  My point is that I’ve been leveraging the benefits of networks for a bloody long time.

And now we depend on it. The internet is the basis for elearning! And, of course, so much more. It has vastly accelerated our ability to interact. And while that’s created problems, it’s also enabled incredible benefits.  Innovation flourishes when there are open standards.  When people can build upon a solid and open foundation, creativity means new opportunity.  Network effects are true for people and for data.

Which is why I’m firmly in the camp for net neutrality.  This is important!  (It must be, because I used bold, which I almost never do ;). The alternative, where providers will be able to throttle or even bar certain types of data will stifle innovation.  It’s like plumbing, telephone, and electricity: they need to be available as long as you can pay your bill (and there need to be options to support those with limited incomes).  Please, please, please let your elected representatives and the FCC know that this is important to you.