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Clark Quinn’s Learnings about Learning

Co-design of workflow

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I’ve talked before about how our design task will need to accommodate both the formal learning and the informal job resources, but as I’ve been thinking about (and working on) this model, it occurs to me that there is another way to think about learning design that we have to consider.

The first notion is that we should not design our formal learning solutions without thinking about what the performance support aspects are as well.   We need to co-design our performance support solutions along with our preparation for performance so that they mutually reflect (and reference) each other. Our goal has to be to look at the total development and execution of the task.

The other way I’ve now been thinking of it, however, is to think about designing the workflow and the learning ‘flow’ together.   Visualize the formal and informal learning flows as components within an overall workflow.   You want the performer focusing on the task, and learning tools ‘to hand’ within the task flow.   Ideally, the person is able to find the answers, or even learn some new things, while still in the work context. (Context is so important in learning that we spend large amounts to recreate context away from our existing work context!)

The point being, not only is formal learning and informal learning co-designed, but they’re both co-designed in the context of understanding the flow of performance, so you’re designing the work/learning context.   Which means we’re incorporating user-interface and user-experience design, as well as resource design (e.g. technical communications) on top of our learning design.   And probably more.

Now, are you ready to buy this?   Because I’d talked myself to this point and then realized: “but wait, there’s more. If you call now, we’ll throw in” an obvious extension. To be covered in the next and last post of this series (tying it back to the context of explorability and incremental advantage I started with in my last post.

My Top 10 Learning Tools

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My ITA colleague Jane Hart regularly collects the top 100 learning tools via contributions from lots of folks.   It’s a fascinating list, worth looking at. I couldn’t use her submission sheet (some sort of system bug), so I thought I’d make an annotated post.

There are several categories of tools here.   Harold Jarche talks about our personal knowledge management task, and in that, there are the tools I use to capture and share my own thinking (like this), and tools I use to go out and find or follow information.

In the capture and share category, major tools include:

  • WordPress – I blog as a way to reflect and get feedback on my developing thoughts
  • OmniGraffle – I diagram as another way to capture my thinking, trying to map conceptual relationships onto spatial ones

Then, of course, there are the more standard thought capture and share tools:

  • Word – while I like Pages, it’s outlining just does not meet my needs, as I outline as part of my writing process
  • Keynote – while I often have to transfer to PowerPoint, here the Apple product is superior

On the information finding/sharing path, some tools I use include:

  • Google – like everyone else, I’m all over searching
  • Twitter – this has been quite the revelation, seeing pointers and getting support, and of course #lrnchat
  • Feedblitz – this is how I aggregate blogs I track and have them come via email (where I’ll see them)
  • Skype – chats and calls and videochats with folks

Then I use several tools to keep track of information:

  • Evernote – is a place to keep information across my devices (though I use Notes too, when I want it backed up and private)
  • Google Docs – where I collaborate with colleagues on thoughts

The list changes; it’s different than what I put in the last two years, I’m sure, and may be more representative of today versus tomorrow or yesterday.   And it doesn’t really include my mobile tools, where Google’s Maps app becomes quite the help, and Photos to share diagrams, and….   Also, email’s still big, and is not represented Still, it’s a reasonably representative list.

So, what am I missing?

Wizardly Collaboration and HyperCard

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I was talking to my colleague Harold Jarche the other day about the changes in work needs and it triggered a thought. Normally, when we talk about performance support and collaboration, we think of creating job aids. Yet I believe that, increasingly, interactive performance support will be more valuable in generating meaningful outcomes. It occurred to me that there was a missed opportunity: editable wizards.

Now, when I talk about wizards, I mean software tools that interact with us to ask some questions and then can use that information to do complex things for us like filling out our taxes or configure our email. This is fine for things that are static, but increasingly, things are dynamic. The question then becomes how we make more flexible, less brittle, tools.

In content, we are using wikis as tools that are open for collaborative updating. Wikipedia of course being the best known example. These are powerful ways for a community to keep a body of knowledge up to date. Can we have an intersection?

The idea that occurred to me was to have collaborative wizards; wizards written in a simple but reasonably powerful language that are open for editing. Rather than Wikzard, I thought I’d call it a Wizki (pronounced “whisky”, of course :).

Admittedly, having a simple but powerful language is non-trivial, but then I was reminded of HyperCard (which several of us reminisced about fondly just a short while ago). HyperCard was a simple environment to build applications in, with the property of ‘incremental advantage‘ that Andi diSessa touted years ago. Imagine having a collaborative HyperCard! It could be done.

Of course, there are other simple programming environments (Scratch comes to mind), but we really need a simple (and cross-platform!) environment to develop applications again, and moreover a collaborative one is the next logical step in user-generated content.

I reckon it is past time to develop passive content, and start sharing interactions. What do you say?

Apple missing the small picture

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I’ve previously discussed the fight between Apple and Adobe about Flash (e.g. here), but I had a realization that I think is important.   What I was talking about before was the potential to create a market place beyond text, graphics, and media, and to start capitalizing on learning interactivity. What was needed was a cross-platform capability.

Which Apple is blocking, for interactivity.

Apple allows cross-platform media players, whether hyperdocs (c.f. Outstart, Hot Lava, and Hybrid Learning) and media (e.g. video and audio formats are playable). What they’re not is cross-platform for interactivity.

Now, I understand that Apple’s rabidly focused on the customer experience (I like the usability), and limiting development to content is a way to essentially guarantee a vibrant experience.   And I don’t care a fig about the claims about ‘openness’, which in both cases are merely a distraction.   Frankly, I haven’t missed Flash on my iPhone or iPad.   I hardly miss it on my browser (I have a Firefox extension that blocks it unless I explicitly open them, and I rarely use it; and I browse a lot)!

What I care about is that, by not supporting cross-platform programs that output code for different operating systems (OS), Apple is hurting a significant portion of the market.

I came to this thought from thinking about how companies should want to go beyond media to the next level. There will be situations where navigable content isn’t enough, and a company will want to provide interactivity, whether it’s a dynamic user order configuration tool, a diagnostic tool, or a learning simulation.   There are times when content or a web-form just won’t cut it.

Big companies can probably afford dedicated programming to make these apps come to life on more than one platform: Windows Mobile, WebOS, Blackberry OS, Android, and iPhone OS (they need a name for their mobile OS now that the iPad’s around: MacOSMobile?), but others won’t.

What are small to medium sized companies supposed to do? They’d like to support their mobile workers with smartphones regardless of OS, but when they’re that 1-few person shop, they aren’t going to have the development resources.   They might have a great idea for an app, and they probably have or can get a Flash programmer, but won’t have the capabilities to develop separately across platform. And no one’s convinced me that HTML 5 is going to bring the capability to even build Quest, let alone a training game with characteristics like Tips on Tap.

Worse, how about not-for-profits, or the education sector?   How are these small organizations, with limited budgets, supposed to expand the markets?   How can anyone develop an ability to transcend the current stranglehold of publishers on learning content?

Yes, the cross-platform developer might not carry the latest and greatest features of the OS forward, but they’re meeting real needs.   There are the ‘for market’ applications, and the pure content plays, but there’s a middle ground that is going to increasingly comprehend the potential, but be shut out of the opportunity because they can’t develop a meaningful solution for their limited market that just needs capability, not polish.

I get that Flash isn’t efficient.   I note that neither Adobe or Apple talk about their software development practices, so I don’t know whether either use some of the more trusted methods of good code development like agile programming, PSP & TSP, or refactoring, but I think that doesn’t matter.   While I think in the long run it would be to their advantage, I think that even a slow and even slightly buggy version of a needed app would be better received and more useful than none.

I don’t have the email address to lob this at Steve directly like some have, but I’d like to see if he can comprehend and address the issue for the people caught in the situation where delivering interactivity could mean anything from more small-to-medium enterprise success, to meeting a real need in the community, to lifting our children to a higher learning plane, but they don’t have much in the way of resources.

Quite simply, a cross-platform interactivity solution really doesn’t undermine the Apple experience (look at the Mac environment), as it’s likely to be a small market. Heck, brand it as a 2nd Class app or something, but don’t leave out those who might have a real need for an easy cross platform capability.

I’m curious: do you think that the ability to go beyond navigable content to interactivity in a cross-platform way could be useful to a serious amount of people in a lot of little different pockets of activity?

When to LMS

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Dave Wilkins, who I admire, has taken up the argument for the LMS in a long post, after a suite of posts (including mine).   I know Dave ‘gets’ the value of social learning, but also wants folks to recognize the current state of the LMS, where major players have augmented the core LMS functions with social tools, tool repositories, and more. Without doing a point-by-point argument, since Dan Pontefract has eloquently done so, and also I agree with many of the points Dave makes. I want, however, to point to a whole perspective shift that characterizes where I come from.

I earlier made two points: one is that the LMS can be valuable if it has all the features.   And if you want an integrated suite.   Or if you need the LMS features as part of a larger federated suite. I made the analogy to the tradeoffs between a Swiss Army knife and a toolbox.   Here, you either have a tool that has all the features you need, or you pull together a suite of separate tools with some digital ‘glue’.   It may be that the glue is custom code from your IT department, or one tool that integrates one or more of the functions and can integrate other tools (e.g. SharePoint, as Harold Jarche points out on a comment to a subsequent Dave post).

The argument for the former is one tool, one payment, one support location, one integrated environment.   I think that may make sense for a lot of companies, particularly small ones. Realize that there are tradeoffs, however.   The main one, to me, is that you’re tied to the tools provided by the vendor. They may be great, or they may not. They may have only adequate, or truly superb capabilities.   And as new things are developed, you either have to integrate into their tool, or wait for them to develop that capability on their priority.

Which, again, may still be an acceptable solution if the price is right and the functionality is there.   However, only if it’s organized around tasks. If it’s organized around courses, all bets are off. Courses aren’t the answer any more!

However, if it’s not organized around courses, (and Dave has suggested that a modern LMS can be a portal-organized function around performance needs), then why the #$%^&* are you calling it an LMS?   Call it something else (Dan calls it a Learning, Content, & Collaboration system or LCC)!

Which raises the question of whether you can actually manage learning.   I think not. You can manage courses, but not learning.   And this is an important distinction, not semantics.   Part of my problem is the label.   It leads people to make the mistake of thinking that their function is about ‘learning’ with a small ‘l’, the formal learning.   Let me elaborate.

Jane Hart developed a model for organizational learning that really captures the richness of leraning. She talks about:

  • FSL – Formal Structured Learning
  • IOL – Intra-Organizational Learning
  • GDL – Group Directed Learning
  • PDL – Personal Directed Learning
  • ASL – Accidental & Serendipitous Learning

The point I want to make here is that FSL is the compliance and certification stuff that LMS’ handle well. And if that’s all you see as the role of the learning unit, you’ll see that an LMS meets your needs.   If you, instead, see the full picture, you’ll likely want to look at a richer suite of capabilities.   You’ll want to support performance support, and you’ll absolutely want to support communication, collaboration, and more.

The misnomer that you can manage learning becomes far more clear when you look at the broader picture!

So, my initial response to Dave is that you might want the core LMS capabilities as part of a federated solution, and you might even be willing to use what’s termed LMS software if it really is LCC or a performance ecosystem solution, and are happy with the tradeoffs.   However, you might also want to look at creating a more flexible environment with ‘glue’ (still with single sign-on, security, integration, etc, if your IT group or integration tool is less than half-braindead).

But I worry that unless people are clued in, selling them (particularly with LMS label) lulls them into a false confidence. I don’t accuse Dave of that, by the way, as he has demonstrably been carrying the ‘social’ banner, but it’s a concern for the industry.   And I haven’t even talked about how, if you’re still talking about ‘managing’ learning, you might not have addressed the issues of trust, value, and culture in the community you purport to support.

Performer-focused Integration

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On a recent night, I was part of a panel on the future of technical communication with the local chapter of the Society for Technical Communication, and there were several facets of the conversation that I found really interesting.   Our host had pulled together an XML architecture consultant who’s deep into content models (e.g. DITA) and tools, Yas Etassam, and another individual who started a very successful technical writing firm, Meryl Natchez.   And, of course, me.

My inclusion shouldn’t be that much of a surprise. The convener had heard me speak on the performance ecosystem (via Enterprise 2.0, with a nod to my ITA colleagues), and I’d included mention of content models, learning experience design, etc.   My background in interface design (e.g. studying under Don Norman, as a consequence teaching interface design at UNSW), and work with publishers and adaptive systems using content models, means I’ve been touching a lot of their work and gave a different perspective.

It was a lively session, with us disagreeing and then finding the resolution, both to our edification as well as the audiences. We covered new devices, tools, and movements in corporate approaches to supporting performance, as well as shifts in skill sets.

The first topic that I think is of interest was the perspective they took on their role.   They talk about ‘content’ and include learning content as well.   I queried that, asking whether they saw their area of responsibility covering formal learning as well, and was surprised to hear them answer in the affirmative. After all, it’s all content.   I countered with the expected: “it’s about the experience” stance, to which Meryl replied to the effect of “if I’m working, I just want the information, not an experience”.   We reconciled that formal learning, when learners need support for motivation and context, needed the sort of experience I was talking about, but even her situation required the information coming in a way that wasn’t disruptive: we needed to think about the performer experience.

The other facet to this was the organizational structure in this regard. Given the view that it’s all content, I asked whether they thought they covered formal learning, and they agreed that they didn’t deliver training, but often technical writers create training materials: manuals, even online courses.   Yet they also agreed, when pushed, that most organizations weren’t so structured, and documentation was separate from training.   And we all agreed that, going forward, this was a problem. I pushed the point that knowledge was changing faster than their processes could cope, and they agreed.   We also agreed that breaking down those silos and integrating performance support, documentation, learning, eCommunity, and   more was increasingly necessary.

This raised the question of what to do about user generated content: I was curious what they saw as their role in this regard.   They took on a content management stance, for one, suggesting that it’s content and needed to be stored and made searchable.   Yas talked about the powerful systems that folks are using to develop and manage content.   We also discussed the analogy to learning in that the move is from content production to content production facilitation.

One of the most interesting revelations for me actually came before the panel in the networking and dinner section, where I learned about Topic-Based Authoring. I’ve been a fan of content models for over a decade now, from back when I was talking about granularity of learning objects.   The concept I was promoting was to write tightly around definitions for introduction components, concept presentations, examples, practice items, etc. It takes more discipline, but the upside is much more powerful opportunities to start doing the type of smart delivery that we’re now capable of and even seeing.   Topic-based is currently applied for technical needs (e.g. performance support) which is enough reason, but there can and should be educational applications as wellThe technical publications area is a bit ahead on this front.   Topic-based authoring is a discipline around this approach that provides the rigor needed to make it work.

Meryl pointed out how the skill set shift needn’t be unitary: there were a lot of areas that are related in their world: executive communications, content management, information architecture, even instructional design is a potential path.   The basics of writing were still necessary, but like in our field, facilitation skills for user-generated content may still play a role. The rate of change means that the technical writers, just like instructional designers, won’t be able to produce all the needed information, and that a way for individuals to develop materials would be needed. As mentioned above, Yas just cared that they did the necessary tagging!   Which gets into interest system areas about how can we make that process as automatic as possible and minimize the onerous part of the work.

The integration we need is for all those who are performer-focused to not be working in ignorance of (let alone opposition to) each other.   Formal learning should be developed in awareness of the job aids that will be used, and vice-versa.   The flow from marketing to engineering has to stop forking as the same content gets re-purposed for documentation, customer training, sales training, and customer service, but instead have a coherent path that populates each systematically.

Interactivity & Mobile Development

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A while ago, I characterized the stages of web development as:

  • Web 1.0: producer-generated content, where you had to be able to manage a server and work in obscure codes
  • Web 2.0: user-generated content, where web tools allowed anyone to generate web content
  • Web 3.0: system-generated content, where engines or agents will custom-assemble content for you based upon what’s known about you, what context you’re in, what content’s available, etc

It occurred to me that an analogous approach may be useful in thinking about interactivity.   To understand the problem, realize that there has been a long history of attempts to characterize different levels of interactivity, e.g. Rod Sims’ paper for ITFORUM, for a variety of reasons. More recently, interactivity has been proposed as a item to tag within learning object systems to differentiate objects.   Unfortunately, the taxonomy has been ‘low’, ‘medium’ and ‘high’ without any parameters to distinguish between them. Very few people, without some guidance, are going to want to characterize their content as ‘low’ interactivity.

Thinking from the perspective of mobile content, it occurred to me that I see 3 basic levels of interaction. One is essentially passive: you watch a video, listen to an audio, or read a document (text potentially augmented by graphics). This is roughly equivalent to producer-generated content.   The next level would be navigable content.   Most specifically, it’s hyper-documents (e.g. like the web), where users can navigate to what they want. This comes into play for me on mobile, as both static content and navigable content are easily done cross-platform.   I note that user-generated content through most web interfaces is technically beyond this level.

The next level is system-generated interaction, where what you’ve done has an effect on what happens next.   The web is largely state-independent, though that’s changing (e.g. Amazon’s mass-customization). This is where you have some computation going on in the background, whether it’s form processing or full game interaction.   And, this is where mobile falls apart.   Rich computation and associated graphics are hard to do.   Flash has been the lingua franca of online interactivity, supporting delivery cross-platform.   However, Flash hasn’t run well on mobile devices, it is claimed, for performance reasons.   Yet there is no other cross-platform environment, really.   You have to compile for each platform independently.

This analysis provides 3 meaningful levels of interactivity for defining content, and indicates what is currently feasible and what still provides barriers for mobile as well.   The mobile levels will change, perhaps if HTML 5 can support more powerful computation, interaction, and graphics, or if the performance problems (or perception thereof) go away.   Fingers crossed!

Why bash the LMS?

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In response to a query about why someone would question the concept of the LMS, I penned the (slightly altered, for clarity) response that follows:

What seems to me to be the need is to have a unified performer-facing environment.   It should provide access to courses when those are relevant, resources/job aids, and eCommunity tools too.   That’s what a full technology support environment should contain.   And it should be performer- and performance-centric, so I come in and find my tools ‘to hand’.   And I ‘get’ the need for compliance, and the role of courses.

So, what’re my concerns?

On principle, I want the best tool for each task.   The analogy is to the tradeoffs between a Swiss Army knife and a tool kit.   There will be orgs for which an all-singing all-dancing system make sense, as they can manage it, they can budget for it.   In general, however, I’d want the best tool for each job and a way to knit them together.   So I’d be inclined to couple an LMS with other tools, not assume I can get one that’s best in all it’s capabilities.   I’m sure you’ve seen the companies that put in some version of a capability to be able to tick it off on a feature list, but it’s a brain-dead implementation.

Also, I do worry about the DNA of the all-singing, all-dancing.   I was asked whether a social system and an LMS, each with the same features, would be equivalent. Yes, but.   It depends on the learner experience, and that could be different.   The feature list could be identical, and all the features accessible, but I’d rather have it organized around the learner’s communities and tasks rather than courses.   But even that’s not the big worry.

My big worry, both at the individual and org level: is that focusing on an LMS, and talking about an LMS, focuses on formal learning.   And history, tradition, and a bunch of other things already have made that too much the emphasis.   Yes, I’m on a crusade, not to replace formal learning, but to put it in balance with the rest.   And given all the weight tilting towards formal, I think the pressure has to be to push much harder on non-formal before we’ll get a balance.

As an aside, my take on Snake Oil is that it’s actually about the social space, not LMSs.   Everyone who can program a DB is suddenly a social media vendor.   And lots of folks who’ve used twitter and blogged a few times are suddenly social media experts. That’s the snake oil; and it’s SoMe, not LMS (it happened there, too, but that’s past).

I don’t want my colleagues who work for LMS companies to take the bashing personally; I’ve great respect for their integrity and intellect, but I want them to understand that it’s a mission.   I’m not anti-LMS, or anti-LMS vendor; I’m anti-‘courses are the one true learning’, and I’m afraid that leading with the LMS is a slippery slope to that place.

LMSs are a tool, social networks are a tool.   I’m perfectly willing to believe that “the remaining LMS vendors are adding Web 2.0 / Social / Collaborative functionality into their offerings in a robust way”, but then don’t call it an LMS!   LMSs are about ‘managing’ learning, and that’s not what we want to do (nor, really, can do), nor do we want organizations thinking like that.   We want to facilitate learning.   Call them learning infrastructure platforms (you wanna give me some LIP?), or something else.

But if someone keeps leading with ‘learning management‘, I’m going to keep suggesting a different path.

Making Learning Broadly Available

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A post by Ellen Wagner got me thinking about what I’m really looking for in an interactivity solution.   She was bringing some clarity to the Adobe Flash – HTML 5 debate, pointing out that HTML 5 is not yet a standard, and emphasizing some moves by Adobe to make Flash more open.   Whether I agree or not, I realized my desire is not to choose one or the other, but instead it’s to find a solution!

The opportunity I’ve talked about before is a channel for publishers to move to a new era.   The title of my blog is learnlets, based upon a claim I made almost two decades ago: in the future there will be lots of small interactive learning experiences (learnlets) that will teach you anything you want to know, including how to make small interactive learning experiences.   That’s still a dream I have, but we’re now capable of realizing it, and there are some nuances that come from thinking about it in the current context.

Publishers produce books, but with the technology augments that they produce (ancillary or companion sites), they have most of the components needed to put meaningful problems (read: scenarios) in the mix and resource around those to create real learning experiences.   With a market channel for those learning experiences (something like an app store), where it could go out to anyone’s device (tablets would be ideal), individuals could develop their own learning path, and for formal education we’d remove the burden of books (it pains me to watch my kids lug their own weight in books off to school!) and lift the learning.

What’s necessary, besides the devices and the market (and we’re getting those) is a meaningful interactivity standard.   Flash has had performance issues, and HTML 5 may not be quite ready for prime time (and I have not yet been convinced of it’s ability to handle simulation-driven interactions).   I don’t really care which one ends up ‘winning’, I just want a standard that allows me to deliver static (e.g. text, graphics), dynamic (video/audio/animations), and interactive content in a package that I can download and interact with!   It doesn’t have to report back, we’d likely have other ways to assess outcomes (though reporting wouldn’t be a bad thing).

I think that if we can lift our learning design to match the quality of our devices, and have the market to deliver those learning experiences where and when desired, we’ll have the opportunity to lift ourselves to another level.