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Clark Quinn’s Learnings about Learning

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?

Learning tools

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It’s been getting a wee bit crazy, and will be for at least the next two weeks (apologies in advance if my posts get sparse). Today I began the morning talking to our local elementary school teachers at their staff development day as a consequence of offering to assist in their technology efforts and a welcome reception by the principal. A really committed principal and great staff working in the context of a woeful funding situation and inadequate tech support…

My role was to provide some big picture guidance which then would spark their working sessions around technology. We started with the latest incarnation of the Shift Happens 2 video to set the stage. I then presented a bit of my strange and twisted background before going through some thoughts on curriculum, pedagogy, and technology (nothing new to regular readers of this blog).

Interestingly, I talked afterwards to one of their many bright lights (the designated technology coach), and when I said (as before) that they shouldn’t be teaching the apps, but talking about goals (represent your hypothesis) and giving the kids reference cards, she had an interesting response. She said she’d tried that, and some kids were left helpless. 4th graders!

This, I admit, boggled my mind. I know I’m an idealist and optimist (much of the time :), but this is a pretty good school. I don’t know if their parents aren’t using tech (which is the situation in some of our families), or that they’re not seeing tech sufficiently in earlier grades (which also happens to some extent). I suggested that the approach allows the teacher to work with those who are having trouble with the steps, and that even other students who did get it could help, but it felt a bit weak.

In retrospect, I think it argues even more strongly that the approach I suggest should be used, but much earlier! Perhaps the teaching can and should be how to use references to learn to things with technology tools, not just how to save a file, but instead, when your goal is to do x (e.g. save a file), how to look up x in the reference card and follow the steps.

Which mimics my overall response which is that in this age of increasing knowledge and knowledge change, we need to be modeling, and equipping our learners to, use resources to solve problems, not to learn specifics that will soon be out of date.

I confess I’m not steeped enough in this particular literature, so I’ll have to do some searching, but as I told them, I don’t have answers but I’m happy to work with them to figure the answers out. Which pretty much overextends out my philanthropy bandwidth, but some things are just too important! Fingers crossed.

K-12 education and technology

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On Monday, my day started with a meeting with our local school principal. No, my kids weren’t in trouble, nor was I, but instead I’d been offering to assist in improving the use of technology in the classroom, and the new principal finally got the message. So, I’m helping out.

The funding situation is dire; everything but No Child Left Untested, and legal requirements for special education is pretty much optional and dependent on parent support. However, there are grants available, and there’s an opportunity in our local community, so I’ve been giving advice.

It’s hampered, of course, by the state standards. They’re at the level of ‘use MS Word to do X’. Which is just wrong. There’s nothing wrong with using Word, but the standard should be focusing on the goal: ‘communicate Y using a word processing program capable of X’ or somesuch. And it shouldn’t be an independent goal, but a layer on top of curriculum goals ‘Outline and then finalize an article about the local Indians using a word processing program such as MS Word’. Hey, I’m thinking it might be Google Docs or Pages!

It gets back to your curriculum goals, and I’ve already argued those should be about using tools to accomplish goals like communicate, collaborate, evaluate, etc. So, together we’re considering using the grant (which has to buy technology) to run workshops that help the teachers rewrite lesson plans to use technology as a tool (and we’ll buy some projectors so the output can be viewed).

Of course, the workshops will have to require the teachers to create files and presentations, since some of them aren’t tech-savvy. And others of the teachers believe teaching to use the tools, e.g training on PowerPoint, is the answer. However, research tells us that if we teach the tools as ends in themselves, they won’t be used as tools to accomplish goals. I suggested that we even not teach the tools, but just give the goals and have reference cards around. Sometimes I think we don’t give kids enough credit!

Of course this is all further hampered by a limited tech environment. Students can manipulate other’s files, and even misplace their own, instead of saving into a safe place. A major district level effort was to get the teachers to all put their name, phone number, and email address on their school web page.   I said that that information should be auto-populated from a data base. Of course, silly me, the district system isn’t that sophisticated.

Our kids are getting tech savvy, despite the school system, but it’s got great variation, naturally correlated with the tech savvy and financial resources of the parents, which suggests an ongoing digital divide. There’s a long road ahead of us to address the curriculum goal we really need to implement, and use the technology to support these goals. So, I’ll start on one little part, and see what can be done.

Virtual World Learning

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Yesterday I had the privilege of an in-world meeting with my colleague Claudia L’Amoreaux, who’s now a major part of Linden Lab‘s education efforts with Second Life. Second Life, if you’ve been in a cave the past few years, is the first major successful virtual world. It’s a massively multi-player online environment, but it’s not a role-playing game, as there are no quests or NPC (non-player characters). In 2nd Life, you can build things, earn ‘money’ (Linden dollars; which have a cash exchange value for US$), and of course socialize. Many companies have set up places or islands in 2nd Life, and are holding learning events or creating learning places.

It was very gracious of her to give me time in her busy schedule, and I’m grateful because she refined and extended my understanding. I’ve talked before about virtual world learning affordances, so I let me focus on the new understandings.

First, I have to say that she didn’t change my fundamental take on the affordances. It is very much about spatial opportunity, both in place and in 3D representations. These are not trivial at all, but instead may have unique appeal for special needs rather than being general purpose. When those are the need, however, the virtual world is very compelling.

A second issue is one that I undervalued, and that’s the ability to represent yourself how you’d like to be seen, in more ways than one. The overhead is somewhat high, but I think I didn’t really ‘get’ how important this can be, as Tony O’Driscoll has let us know. There was another facet of this, however, which I truly missed, and that’s the ability to create a place to meet (if you own land, or you can presumably choose a meeting place that represents the ‘atmosphere’ you want to convey).

What Claudia helped me see is that the ability to create a look and environment serves as a powerful channel to communicate much information. She teleported me to a location she’s created to hold meetings with people and it’s a beautiful, comfortable place, very relaxing. She showed me Pathfinder Linden‘s in-world place which is very different, full of cool toys.

She emphasized the informal learning potential in such spaces, which can be building things to share if you’re appropriately skilled, or taking people to places with appropriate things. In formal learning, it’s more about, as said above, spatial and immersive experience. She mentioned learners making a ‘film’ of a book about a child soldier, and it did occur to me that if you have internet access, you could create a set and have actors and record it with much less overhead than a live movie. So there are some barrier-reductions involved in this world too.

So, all in all, I have to say I’ve underestimated virtual worlds. By the same token, I still think they’ve been over-hyped. Claudia’s lasting message, however, is intriguing. She said that when the world wide web was established, no one truly imagined how it would grow. Claudia sees virtual worlds as a similarly new platform with as yet unexplored potential, where we’re still repeating old activities with the new technology. Which we know is historic precedent, and gives us reason to pause in judgment.. As she said, no one she knows who’s really gotten into it has subsequently ‘got out’.

At the DevLearn conference, Paul Saffo pointed out that our technology expectations are linear, but the capabilities grow in a non-linear manner. Consequently, we’re liable to find that such innovations underperform our expectations initially, and outperform as they reach critical mass. And I know that my old boss/mentor/colleague Joe Miller and the folks within Second Life are continually driving new innovations, so we can probably expect things to get simpler, more powerful, or both. So there’re unexplored opportunities. I’ll stick with my (modified) position now, but eagerly await new understandings.

MacWorld Expo report…

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For those of you who didn’t make the trek yourself (and why would you, unless you’re a fanatic Mac user or live in the Bay Area), here’re some brief thoughts on the MacWorld Expo this year. You can mostly ignore if you don’t care about Macs, but I have to say that more people are considering or making the switch!

First, the MacBook Air is unbelievable. It’s just SO thin! It’s hard to believe it’s a full computer. The way it uses wireless to remove the need for backup and accessing CD/DVD is very well thought out. You’ll have to have another Mac (or a PC) to do media stuff, perhaps, but that’s more peripheral. And I’ve gotta love the tag line: Thinnovation (sounds so familiar :).

Microsoft’s Office 2008 for the Mac is available, and is finally reasonably priced (Home/Student Edition; I don’t need Exchange capabilities). I just bought iWork, but Pages doesn’t have outlining, plus I’ll want to read the new Office XML formats, so I snapped it up. Apparently it’ll support 3 licenses, so it covers the whole house, too. I may not trust the OS, but the apps can be a requirement. (NB: iWork covers 5 licenses, so it’s around the house too).

I also bought Parallels, the virtualization software that lets Intel-powered Macs run Windows (supposedly runs XP better than VMWare’s Fusion, the main competitor, and I’m SO not going to Vista). It supposedly lets me use the license for XP from my old copy of Virtual PC (an emulator, that was unusably slow). I don’t intend to run Office, but I sometimes need Internet Explorer with Active X for various client stuff (as I was doing last week, with some over-the-top security plan). We’ll see how it goes!

The floor was covered with neat covers for iPhones, iPods, and even your laptops, accessories like input devices (keyboards), stands and furniture, etc. Also, of course, software. There’re usually expo-only deals, so I ended up saving more than the cost of the Bart ticket and lunch by coming down (but not by much, since I didn’t buy much, the only other thing was a keyboard cover for my laptop).

Apple made other announcements besides the MacBook Air, including a hard drive-equipped wireless router to automatically handle backups for the whole network, some iPhone/iPod Touch software updates, and iTunes movie rentals. Much as I like the Air, I think that the latter is the really interesting move, business-wise. The 24 hour limit on watching time after starting will be an initial deal-breaker (we often take 2 nights to finish a movie), but other than that there’s a real potential switch here in terms of the relationship between consumer, distributor, and producer.

I’m trying to recall what else I saw that’s of interest for elearning and more. There’re some Mac training companies, but that’s not really what I mean. I guess the one thing, besides cool software like Graphic Converter and OmniGraffle, was the fact that The Brain is now Mac compatible. The Brain is a tool that lets you link concepts together in ways that reflect their conceptual relationships. Jerry Michalski has publicly been creating his brain for years now, as a great demonstration (and a personal tool). It can currently be used to collaborate via a server version that uses the web (though potentially P2P soon, apparently), and it’s the type of knowledge sharing and collaboration tools I think we need to advance organizational innovation.

All in all, a fun way to spend the day (I also got to spend some time walking the floor with mentor/colleague/friend Jim Sky). I’ll have to let you know if more reflections emerge, but as I say when I talk about mobile learning, we really have magic these days (c.f. Arthur C. Clarke’s “any truly advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”). Our limitations are between our ears, now, no longer the technology.