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Clark Quinn’s Learnings about Learning

Game Development Tools

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The last topics in our 2 day game design workshop for the Guild (great group of attendees, great experience) were evaluation, production, and organizational issues.   On the production issue, the perennial topic of tools came up.   In thinking about it, I realized that we needed a map, so I started coming up with one (a diagram, of course :) ).   I ran it past Jeff (Johannigman, my co-conspirator on the workshop) in our taxi to the airport, to his general approval.

gametoolspace

The two dimensions are complexity of the scenario (only covering branching and model-driven), and the power (e.g. complexity) of the tool.   It’s a pretty linear map, and realize that small distances aren’t significant (so the clusters are roughly equivalent).

The impossible dream is that tool that everyone wants that makes it easy to develop model-driven interactions.   Sorry, I’m convinced it can’t exist, because to be flexible enough to cover all the different models that we’d want to represent, it’s got to be so general as to be essentially just a programming language.   QED (Quinn Ephemeral Decision).

This is a first stab, so feedback welcome.   If desired, I can create it in Gliffy and we can collaboratively develop it (though my first effort with that was underwhelming in participation…).   Thoughts?

DevLearn ’08

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Up in the mountains, there’s lots to reflect on, little time to capture it. However, I do want to note that DevLearn is again on the horizon (November), which will include keynote, preconference sessions, concurrent sessions, and more.

I’m really looking forward to Tim O’Reilly’s keynote, as his description of Web 2.0 is fairly definitive.   I reckon I’ll again be part of the pre-conference sessions on Serious Games, er, Immersive Learning Simulations, and Mobile Learning as well.   I have a concurrent session on deeper instructional design which is stuff I really believe is fundamental yet seemingly not widespread, and fortunately has been well received in a few prior instances.

The real excitement for me is having a chance to catch up with some of the brightest folks in the business, like Tony Karrer, Will Thalheimer, Ruth Clark, Judy Brown, David Metcalf, Mark Oehlert, Brent Schenkler, Frank Nguyen, Lance Dublin, Karen Hyder, Michelle Lentz, and more, as well as the new folks I’ll meet.

The Guild’s conferences have always been a highlight of the year for me, so I hope I’ll see you there!

Future of Publishing?

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Based on a strange twist of circumstance, Jay Cross and I will be leading a discussion on the future of publishing in an online era here in the Bay Area next Monday (July 28).   He and I prepared some days ago, and came up with several issues, including who owns IP, new business models, moving from content to experience, increasing rates of change, and more.

The fact of the matter is that the day of the (non-fiction) book is at an inflection point.   That’s not to say we won’t still want to read books from time to time, at least those of us ‘of an age’ ;).   But what, where, when, and how will be our primary sources of information, moving forward?   My book cover

Certainly there are some interesting experiments going on.   On ITFORUM, Bev Ferrell and others have been citing a number of initiatives of self-publishing and open textbooks.   Certainly fodder for thought (particularly when I’m working with publishers on several projects, and have had a book published!).

We aren’t providing answers, but we’ll be with a very knowledgeable cohort and hope to work through to some interesting ideas.   If you’re in the area, and are interested, let me know and I’ll lob coordinates at you.

Ain’t it Tweet?

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OK, so my colleague/mentor/friend Sky finally got me on Twitter.   If you don’t know twitter, it’s a microblog, where you post the equivalent of a SMS (text message), maximum 160 characters.   People I respect are into it, but I’d wondered the advantages.   Sky told me he was using TwitterFox which lets you put it in your Firefox browser.   So I installed it, and managed to get it running (tho’ I may still be mucking a few things up).   And finding out that people will ‘follow’ you in the hopes you’ll visit and see their ads, e.g. weightloss; there’s spam everywhere; something I’m doing wrong?

So far, I’ve been on it a few days (@Quinnovator), and find it easy to update what I’m doing, harder to use it as a reflective tool.   I’m also only following a couple of folks I know, as I haven’t found an easy way to find folks I know who might be tweeting.   So far, some interesting things are coming through and I’ve answered a couple of questions.

One of the few folks I am following, however, pointed me to this site, recommendations of how to use Twitter as a college student.   I like where someone looks to a technology and finds the learning affordances (what I try to do myself).   I’ve not the experience with Twitter, let alone the additional apps people are building (e.g. retweetme, a twitter reminder system), as yet, so it’s nice to see someone else doing it.

I’m not going to be SMSing my tweets (I’ve a limit on SMS messages, and like that I never come near the limit), but I will be giving it a spin through the browser interface.   Any recommendations?

Lead the Charge?

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This month’s Learning Circuit’s Big Question of the Month is whether learning organizations should be leading the way in the use of Web 2.0 technologies. Or, to be more exact:

  • Should workplace learning professionals be leading the charge around these new work literacies?
  • Shouldn’t they be starting with themselves and helping to develop it throughout the organizations?
  • And then shouldn’t the learning organization become a driver for the organization?
  • And like in the world of libraries don’t we need to market ourselves in this capacity?

The short answer is yes, we (I’m assuming most of you are learning professionals) should be leading the way. It may seem like an odd locus for technology awareness, but it’s really about technology affordances for organizational effectiveness, not just new technology. That’s why it shouldn’t be IT, or operations, or engineering, because they’re focused on a task, not the meta-level look at how the task is being accomplished, can be improved, etc. And that’s the unique perspective that makes the learning organization the right instigator.

Learning folks have the perspective of looking at the performance needs of the organization, and are charged with helping people meet those needs, but that also gives the learning organization the opportunity to improve them. When it’s the product or servce, it’s the user experience group (that, ideally, gets in early in the design process), but internally, it’s the learning group.

Which means the learning organization can’t be just a training group, but that’s part of the strategic picture I’ve talked about elsewhere. The point being that to truly help an organization you have to move to a performance focus, moving people from novice, through practitioner, to expert, and giving them a coherent support environment. To do this, you need to know what’s available. And, consequently, the learning organization has to experiment with new technologies for it’s own internal workings to determine how and when to deploy them to organizational benefit.

To put it another way, if not the learning organization, then who? Of course, there’s the political perspective as well, demonstrating currency, but I’m more concerned about adding real value. Learning professionals need to know it, bring it to bear when it’s valuable (and skewer it when it’s not), and in general be seen not only knowing what’s what but also what’s hype.

Marketing is smart in general, but it’s not hype, it’s helping transition the perspective from a training group being an expendable cost-center to a learning capability that’s central to organizational effectiveness and performance. Which is where a learning organization should be, right?

Consumer’s revenge

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Thanks to Harold Jarche, I tuned into this site, named for the first person to create a mall. Harold points out how it’s led to some negative reaction, but my reaction was hilarity. The site is for an Aussie telly show: “Each week two of the advertising industry’s finest agencies are pitted against each other and challenged with selling the unsellable.” The sample ads I saw were funny and effective, but what really struck me was a particular section of the site.

They’ve created a really clever web app. They provide some stock ad footage as clips for a beer, a bank, and a beauty creme, and the ability to create your own ads, with text, voiceover, or whatever. Of course, you can download the stuff and edit it with your own tools, as well. There’s a gallery, too, where what’s been created can be seen, and that’s where I was LOL.

What’s been created (at least, what I viewed) is wickedly funny, albeit occasionally crude and not Politically Correct ™ by any means. While I can see that advertising agencies might be upset, as Harold notes, there is an advertising lingo glossary and a list of ad roles which does a nice job of explaining the business and creative functions of agencies. You may know I’m interested in helping individuals buy smarter, and understanding advertising is a key.

What’s interesting is the underlying design.   By giving people differing views of the same situation, they allow people to choose how to put it together, and in doing so, they’ve given them the tools to understand.   Not that it’s guaranteed folks will learn about advertising by playing with it (tho’ clearly some have, demonstrating they’ve internalized the concepts by using the concepts to have fun), which is why we learned that we need guided discovery environments unless you can guarantee motivated and effective self-learners, but scaffolded tools are a great start to a learning experience.

So, if you’re looking for some entertaining and educational fun, have a look at the Gruen site.

Virtual Worldly

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The Learning Circuits Blog Big Question of the Month for June is about Second Life. They elaborate the question:

In what situations, do you believe it makes sense to develop a learning experience that will be delivered within Second Life?

If you were to develop a training island in Second Life, what kind of environment and artifacts would you consider essential for teaching?

Just as there are considerable differences in blended learning and virtualclassroom training, what are some of the major differences (surprises) in training within virtual worlds?

I‘ve made my thoughts on virtual world affordances clear before: virtual worlds (of which Second Life is one) are 3D environments where one can interact with others through an avatar (it‘s not a profile, but an alternative representation of yourself that you can craft), and the key two components are the spatial representation, and the ability to invest a personalization in the avatar.

If you‘re not doing spatial, there are other vehicles for doing collaboration textually or visually. The social aspect with the 3D representation of one‘s self may have unique learning aspects as well, though the overhead (the time to learn, craft an avatar, the download, bandwidth requirements, etc) is significant for that capability. I think the jury is still out on the benefit of the purely social aspects of Second Life, and consequently I‘m still on the fence about the learning environment if your goals aren’t inherently spatial as well.

There are other aspects to Second Life, including the economy, but that‘s not necessarily yet germane to organizational learning goals. There is considerable potential for an individual learning opportunity in Second Life, but that‘s yet to be seen on a broad scale.

So, to me it comes back to spatial situation, but this is not a niche application. I‘ve argued that systems-thinking is part of the new skill set we need to have, and spatial modeling and using spatial representations gives us an extra representation dimension to comprehend and communicate.

A very special version of this is co-collaboration. Second Life lets you work together on creating things, and having disparate experts able to negotiate developing a 3D model to capture their understanding. What‘s more, you can make dynamic representations, with scripts, which really takes you into systems-thinking. The overhead is high, as modeling is difficult in Second Life, and scripting more so, but this is a truly awesome opportunity.

To answer the questions, I wouldn‘t use Second Life for all teaching, but specifically where we want people to understand inherently spatial relationships (e.g. the internals of devices, places, or spaces) or relationships we‘ve mapped into spatial ones. And when I want to let folks jointly create new understandings in a very rich way.

Social Nutworking

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It’s not the well-meaning people who are nuts, it’s the proliferation of ways in which to network; it’s completely nuts! In recent weeks I’ve received invitations to join Pulse, FriendFeed, Naymz, Twitter, and now Diigo (and I’m probably forgetting a few). This is in addition to FaceBook, LinkedIn, and a few Ning sites, where I’m already on. And these are people I do want to link to, it’s just that I’m getting leery of joining too many sites. Which may not be a concern, but I just don’t know. So far, I’ve been shining them on or asking what’s up. I suspect that a number of them have just been read off of email lists…

I’m trialing differing philosophies: on LinkedIn, I try very much to only link to people I know (or, in a few cases, that I should). And I haven’t really tried taking advantage of LinkedIn, like asking questions. On FaceBook I’ve been more open and experimental, but with no real payoff. And I’ve joined a few relevant Ning sites.

The social web is supposed to be the killer app, and maybe I’m too much the introvert. I want to network, but I really want to invest where the payoff is (and minimize exposure to too much junk), and it seems like only a few people are on each, whereas most of the people I know seem to be on LinkedIn. I talk about eCommunity, because I believe in it, and use it in a variety of ways, but I’m still coming to grips with it in the bigger picture.

So this is a question about your advice and recommendations. Join all, and see what happens (thankfully, I use secure software to store all these #$*%! passwords)? Ignore the oddball sites until they get momentum? Run and hide? ?

Course technology and assignments

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In the recent ITFORUM discussion, I had an opportunity to revisit the assignment strategy I had developed last time I taught an online course, and I thought it worth repeating here:

I had a philosophy that the major components to successful retention and transfer were for learners to connect the learning to their own life, to elaborate the material conceptually, and to apply the knowledge practically. Consequently, I had them: keep journals (e.g. blogs) with three posts per week about their own reflections on how the course materials were relevant in their lives; post answers to my posed conceptual questions on the discussion board and comment in a elaborative way on someone else’s post (the prior post to theirs, except the first person who commented on the last post); and the group assignments applying the knowledge to a posed ‘real’ problem (no hesitation about ‘exaggerating’ the importance of the situation when possible ;).

It seemed to work, as their final report (a separate task) generally correlated with the quality of the work above and overall their understanding seemed to coalesce to the desired level.

There are problems with group assignments, when some students don’t contribute sufficiently, but these days tools like wikis track who’s done what (for example, in the CentralDesktop workspace I’m working with a few colleagues on a next-gen organizational learning approach), so it should be possible to evaluate it.

Central Desktop Contribution Tracking

It’s nice that the tool diversity supports different cognitive tasks, and then the only question is whether/how to integrate them together.

Serious About Games, and podcasting

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Lisa Neal and I have co-written an article about whether there are topics that serious games weren’t appropriate for. If you know me, you can probably guess where we come down on the topic ;).

Her blog has a bunch of interesting 10 things lists. For instance, her most recent post presents 10 reasons why text is better than podcasting. I responded:

I recall a story about an organization where the engineering groups produced white papers that the others wanted to read but didn‘t have time. The training group had someone read the white papers to make audio files, so the engineers could listen to them on their commutes. The engineers demanded more! (How often do training groups get demands for more of their services?!?!)

So, while I personally am not particularly auditory, and you make good points, there are times when they‘re the best tool for the job, as the other commenters suggest.

And, of course, there’s ‘voice’ . So, two topics of conversation. What do you say?