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Clark Quinn’s Learnings about Learning

Continual Learning

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A recent request for feedback on new learning technology research areas highlighted areas they thought were important, and a subset naturally struck me:

  • the connection between formal and informal learning: an interest of mine since I first noticed the gap in organizations
  • emotional and motivational aspects of technology-enhanced learning which was the topic of first book
  • informal learning: which is a major component of my work as a member of the Internet Time Alliance
  • personalization of learning: which was the focus of a project I led a decade ago and still an area of interest
  • ubiquitous and mobile technology and learning: given that I’ve just written a book about it :)

As academics are wont to do, this isn’t a surprising list (there were interesting others as well) because despite the overlap there’s reason to study each on their own.   But what inspired me was the intersection.

I started thinking about a vision (PDF) I had about 8 years ago now, where your portable mobile device would know where you are and what you are doing, and coupling that with your learning goals, would layer on support for developing your learning goals opportunistically based upon your context.   Think about how you’d learn if you had no limits at all: your ideal could be to have a personal mentor always with you looking for opportunities to develop you.

The learning benefits are severalfold, it’s customized for you, and it’s focused on your interests.   It also ideally would bridge the gap between formality and informality, as it could be more formal for a new area but then become more informal gradually.   Another way to think of it is as ‘slow learning‘, (like ‘slow food’, not like ‘slow learner’) based upon a long-term relationship with (and a long-term interest in) the learner.

The technology capabilities make this possible. What is still required would be the curricula, the content, the rules, and the business model. If nothing else, I think organizations should be thinking about this internally, mobile or not.   It is another way to start thinking about workscapes/performance ecosystems and a broader perspective on learning. Anyone game?

2011 Predictions

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For the annual eLearn Mag predictions, this year I wrote:

I think we’ll see some important, but subtle, trends. Deeper uses of technology are going to surface: more data-driven interactions, complemented by both more structured content and more semantics. These trends are precursors to some very interesting nascent capabilities, essentially web 3.0: system-generated content.   I also think we’ll see the further demise of “courses über alles” and the ‘all-singing all-dancing‘ solution, and movement towards performance support and learning facilitation driven via federated capabilities.

I think it’s worth elaborating on what I mean (I was limited to 75 words).

I’ve talked before about web 3.0, and what it takes is fine granularity and deep tagging of content, and some rules about what to present when.   Those rules can be hand-crafted based upon good guesses or existing research, but new opportunities arise from having those rules capitalize on rich data of interactions.   Both based upon some client work, and what I heard at the WCET conference, folks are finally waking up to the potential of collecting internet-scale data (e.g. Amazon and Netflix) and mining that as a basis for optimizing interactions.   Taking the steps now have some immediate payoffs in terms of optimizing content development streams and looking anew at what are important interactions, but the big returns come in creating optimized learning and performance interactions.

The second part is a bit of evangelism hoping that more organizations will follow the path foreseen by my Internet Time Alliance colleagues, and move beyond just training to covering informal learning.   I’ve talked before about looking at the bigger picture of learning, because I’m convinced that the coming differentiator will not be optimal execution but continuing innovation.   That takes, in my mind, both an optimized infrastructure and ubiquitous access (c.f. mobile).   It’s more, of course, because it also implies a culture supportive of learning, yet I think this is both an advantage for business competitiveness and a move that meets real human needs, which makes it an ideal as well as real goal.

The eLearning Mag predictions should be out soon, and I strongly encourage you to see what the bevy of prognosticators are proposing for the coming year.   I welcome hearing your thoughts, too!

Engineering both the front- and back-end

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I had the pleasure of meeting Bob Glushko a couple of weeks ago, and finally had a chance to dig into a couple of papers if his (as well as scan his book Document Engineering). He’s definitely one that you would call ‘wicked’ smart, having built several companies and now having sold one, he’s only hanging around doing cutting edge information science because he wants to.

The core of what he’s on about is structuring data, as documents, to facilitate transactions that for the basis of services. He focuses on the term ‘document’ rather than data to help emphasize the variety of forms in which they manifest, the human component, and most of all the nature of combining data to facilitate business interactions. At the heart is something I’ve been excited about, what I call content models, but he takes much further to support a more generic and comprehensive capability.

He makes a useful distinction between ‘front-end’ and ‘back-end’ services to help highlight the need to take the total service-delivery system into account. The front end provides the customer-facing experience, while the back end ensures efficiency and scalability. It can be difficult to reconcile these two, and yet both are necessary.

This is important in learning experience design as well. Having served on either side, both, and as the mediator between, I know the tension that can result from the caring designer crossing swords with the focused developer.

I have talked before about the potential of web 3.0, system-generated content, and that’s what this approach really enables. Yes, there are necessary efficiencies and effectiveness enough to justify this approach in your learning experience system design, but the potential for smart adaptive experiences is the new opportunity.

If you’re building more than just content, but also delivery systems and business engines, you owe it to yourself to get into Document Engineering. If you’re going further (and you should), you really need to get into the whole services and information science area.

There are exciting advancements in technologies, going beyond just XML to learning focused structures on top, and solid concept engineering behind these that are the key to the next generation of learning systems (and, of course, more).

Beyond Reason

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Night before last, I had my ITA colleagues over for dinner.   We’ve been conversing for close on two years, but other than Jay, I’d met each only once: Jane, I’d met last year when she was here, and Harold and Charles I’d each met several years ago briefly.   I don’t think Harold and Charles had met before.

So how was it that if felt like old friends getting together? Quite simply, the varied conversations we’d had had created something more than just intellectual convergence.

Now, you have to understand, we have pretty typically met once a week, via voice or video conferencing during that time. We also have a Skype chat we keep open and there are conversations that continue most every day.   We’ve also had one on one conversations by phone when needed or wanted.   We share our travels, interests, issues, concerns, and more.

This is a friendship, built virtually but still connected by all the elements that make friendships: trust, authenticity, shared concerns, and mutual goals. And, yet, we still wrestle with, and advance, our understandings of the work we’re trying to do as well.   We coordinate events, and gigs, working together as well as helping one another.

I mention this to reinforce the point that real communities can be built with virtual tools. With the right emotional connections, environment, and commitment, our cognitive commitments are effectively met , and perhaps even augmented, relative to meeting face to face.   Sure, we’ll have a couple of days of face to face work to take care of some stuff that we’ve been working on, but we’ve built the relationships and done useful work as well, and it will continue.

To me, that is the power that’s on tap, the offer we must seize to the benefits of our organizations, and society.   We welcome you to join us.

The LMS Debate rides again

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Well, Saba called me out in an semi-anonymous (there’s a picture, but I don’t know who of, and there’s no name – in social media?) blog post on the LMS debate (a bit late to join the fray, no?).   I was surprised by the way they referred to me, but there you go(ng).   I made a comment which is awaiting moderation, but I’ll give it to you here in the interim:

I don’t know who to thank for this post, but glad to see it.   I would like to point you to a subsequent post:   When to LMS about why I don’t have a problem with the functionality, I have a problem with the philosophical stance.

Formal learning is necessary, and tracking it can be required, but it’s a small picture. When you look at the larger picture, as you talk about: user-generated content, etc, the notion that you can *manage* this activity becomes somewhat ludicrous.   And you don’t want to manage it so much as support it.   It’s the move from being an ‘instructor’ to a mentor, a facilitator.

I look at your list of capabilities, and I see support, and facilitation. Hear hear!   Great stuff.   It’s not management.   If you’re doing it task-centric, and community-centric, you’re doing it right, but then it’s not course-centric, and really you’re no longer coming from the perspective of where LMS emerged from.

Yes, Dave Wilkins of Learn.com and Tom Stone of Element K have already argued that the label is still needed in the marketplace, but I’m really trying to shift the way people think about what their role is, and to me using the label LMS is a major barrier to shifting out of the comfort zone.   And to me, that’s not just a game of semantics, it’s a fundamental perspective shift that’s necessary and desirable.

Yes, kudos to your customers who are getting much broader leverage from it than I‘m worried about. But despite your claim that my concerns are ‘old news‘, the results my colleagues saw at a recent elearning event in the UK, Allison Rossett‘s recent survey results, and my own client experience suggest that way too many organizations are still seeing things in the old way.

So, what do you think?

Collaborative co-design

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In my previous post, I mentioned that we needed to start thinking about designing not just formal learning content, or formal learning experiences, but learning experiences in the context of the informal learning resources (job aids, social tools), and moreover, learning in the context of a workflow.   I’d sold myself on this, when I realized just where my ITA colleagues would draw me up short: it’s still the thinking that we can design solutions a priori!

Things are moving so fast, and increasingly the work will be solving new problems, designing new solutions/products/services, etc, that we won’t be able to anticipate the actual work needs.   What we will need to do, instead, is ensure that a full suite of tools are available, and provide individuals with the ability to work together to create worthwhile working/learning environments.

In short, tying back to my post on collaboratively designing job aids, I think we need to be collaboratively designing workflows. What I mean is that the learning function role will move to facilitating individuals tailoring content and tools to achieve their learning goals.   (And not, I should add, to ‘accreditation‘!)

And that’s where I tie back to Explorability and Incremental Advantage: we need easy to use tools that let us build not just pages, but environments.   The ‘pods’ that you can drag around and reconfigure interfaces are a part, but there’s a semantic level behind it as well. No one wants to get tied to a) learning a complex system that’s separate from their goals, or b) depending on some department to do it when and where convenient for the department.

Obviously, providing a good default is the starting point, but if people can invest as much as they want to get the power they want to configure the system to work the way they want, with minimal assistance, we’re making progress.

So that, to me, facilitating the development of personal (and group) learning environments is a valuable role for the learning function, and a necessary tool will be an easily configurable environment.

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?