In a couple of recent posts, I’ve been telling tales of helping organizations, and I wanted to tell at least one more. In this case, I’m extending the type of work I’ve done to have a real impact, still with a low overhead.  The key is to include some followup activities.

Serious eLearning

In one  instance, a person who’d attended my game design workshop wanted to put it into practice.  With a colleague, they were wanting  to improve  their online learning to better support their stakeholders, and wanted to deepen the experience.  The goal was to provide their learners opportunities to practice success skills.

We knew they were were going to be developing scenarios, so the key was the develop the skills of these two. Consequently, we  arranged a series of meetings where they’d deliver their latest work, and I’d not only critique it, but use it as opportunities to deepen their understanding. This occurred  over a period of a couple of months, on calls for an hour or so.  Each call would occur a short time after they delivered their latest version.

It took several iterations, but their outputs improved substantially.  When we  were comfortable with their progress, the engagement was over.

Learning Strategy

In another instance, a company was moving to a ‘customer experience’ focus, and wanted to workshop what this meant for the training function.  They had already planned on using a particular process that involves a team of stakeholders on a week-long meeting, and in particular that process called for one outsider (yours truly).  Beforehand, I got up to speed on their business and current status.

During that week, I found my role to continue to advocate for taking a bigger picture of meeting customer learning and performance needs.  They found it easy to slip back into thinking of courses, but continued to ‘get’ that they should look at augmenting their work with performance support. Given that their product was complex, it became clear that ‘how to’ videos were a real opportunity..    They were particularly excited about the concept of ‘spacing’ practice, and loved the spacing diagram originated by my colleague Will Thalheimer.

What’s more important is that we also built in several ongoing reviews. So, their process had a few subsequent deliverables, and we worked out that they would come through me for feedback.  In general, new ideas can backslide if not reinforced, and this process helped them cement in several new features, including a new emphasis on the videos.

The point being, extending engagements with a few simple followups provides a much higher likelihood of improvement than just a one-off.  It doesn’t take much, and the outcome is better.  It  is a spaced practice, really, and we know that works better.  I reckon the marginal extra investment yields a much bigger benefit.  Does that make sense to  you?

In preparing to work  with a client on developing their learning science understanding, I realized that I was using two representations about meaningful learner interaction that could be seen to be conflicting.  On the one hand I talk about using decisions as a basis for design, and on the other I refer to activity-based learning. And I have separate diagrams for each.  What was necessary was reconciling activity and decisions.

So first,  I talk about how we should be putting learners in the place to make decisions like they’ll need to be making  after the learning experience.  We need to put them in a context, and then a particular event triggers the need for a decision. And then there are options for actions to take.  From the design point of view, there are correct answers, and  wrong answers. These wrong answers, of course, should reflect where learners go wrong, reflecting reliable misconceptions. People don’t make errors randomly, mostly, but instead reflect inappropriate models being brought to bear.  And after their choices, there are consequences. I like for those consequences to be represented first, before the external feedback comes in.  This is just a better multiple choice question (or other canned interaction), but…

If the consequences of the initial decision  lead to a new situation and new decisions, now we’re talking a full scenario (whether implemented via branching or a full simulation-driven experience). Note that this is also the structure of a game.  In fact,  this emerged from game designer Sid Maier’s quote about how games are a series of interesting decisions. Hence, serious games are a series of interesting and important decisions!  And, of course, this is programmed in advance (if we’re not talking about online role playing), so learners get feedback without necessary human intervention (though there’re powerful benefits to collecting discussion  around the learning challenge).

However, I also have  characterized learning as a series of activities, and those activities generate some work product and are (ideally) annotated with reflections.  These  products can (and arguably should be)  cast as a response to some storyline that has them in a role related to the ones they’re likely to be in after the learning experience (even with some exaggeration).  These are complex outputs that are unlikely to be aut0-marked, and can be the basis of either or both of peer or mentor review.

The benefits here are that when we make the work product reflect real practice, we’re developing a suite of outcomes beyond just the content. We can require different formats  –  presentations, spreadsheets, documents  –  developing modeling and communication skills. We can require group work, developing interpersonal skills. And we’re developing time management and project management skills as well. The tradeoff is the amount of mentoring time.

The challenge, then, is to identify the differences, and then think about when you’d use each.  The obvious difference is the simpler  structure  for decisions.   While a branching scenario or programmed simulation/game is more than one decision, it’s still more linear than  creating a product.  Developing a product is typically a series of many decisions! Hence the difficultly for auto-marking, but also the power for learning. It depends on the learning outcome you need, of course.  Now, too many activities in a short period of time could tax instructor time, so the best answer (as in many things) is to have a blend.

That’s my reconciliation of activity and decisions.  Does it make sense to you?  What did I miss?

Soraya Dorabi opened the second day of the FocusOn Learning conference with a presentation on how data is changing learning and performance. Hampered by technology hiccups, Soraya talked about the ways in which all digital platforms generate data and how that data could be leveraged to support personalized education. She also raised the issue of the ethical entailments.

Scott Dadich, editor-in-chief at Wired, opened the eLearning Guild’s FocusOn Learning conference with a keynote on Designing the Future. He presented three meta-narratives – stories that emerge and transcend an individual article – that he said define the future. Transportation is being fundamentally being transformed by applying network thinking. Virtual reality is growing, but the disappearance of the ‘device’ can transform our experience of presence. And machine learning means we may not comprehend the intelligent behavior that emerges.  Interesting stuff!

I’ve been reading a few other books, and have written up some book reviews on two of them.

For the Revolution Reading List, I  strongly encourage you to read Amy Edmondson’s  Teaming, it’s a great review of the needed changes for organizations to embrace innovation.  My eLearn Mag review is here.

For no specific list, but as a book that was really transformational for my thinking, Todd Rose’s  The End of Average  really helped point out the problems with our current obsession with simplistic evaluations of people.  My review for eLearn Mag is here.

And some thoughts on Doug Engelbart, a visionary who’s contributed greatly  to our thinking can be seen in this article for Learning Solutions, here.

As always, I welcome hearing your thoughts on these, or your own recommendations!

David Kwong wowed the Learning Solutions audience with amazing tricks and a bit of insight into the nature of magic based upon our brains.

As usual, there’re a number of events queued up for the coming months:

I’ll be at Learning Solutions doing a couple sessions, one on measurement, one on culture, next week March 16-18 in Orlando. Both key issues  in the ‘revolution‘.

And I’ll be at FocusOn Learning June 7-10 in Austin, with a workshop on mobile cognition, an introductory mlearning session, and a talk on context.

I’ll also be keynoting the International Conference on eLearning in the Workplace June 15-17 in New York.

There’re a couple more that may be showing up, and of course there’re some special events for clients happening in various places as well.  If you’re going, say ‘hello’!

A comment on my earliest blog post (thanks, Henrik), made me realize that this post will mark 10 years of blogging. Yes, my first post came out on January 14th, 2006.  This will be my  1,200th  post (I forced one in yesterday to be the 1199th so I could say that ;),  yow!  That’s 120 a year, or just under every 3rd day.  And, I am happy to add,  2,542 comments (just  more than 2 per post), so thanks to you for weighing in.

It’s funny, when I started I can’t really say it was more than an experiment.  I had no idea where it would lead, or how.  It’s  had some challenges, to continue to find topics, but it’s been helpful.  It’s forced me to deliberately consider things I otherwise might not have, just to try to keep up the momentum.

I confess I originally had a goal of 5 a week (one per business day), but even then I was happy if I got 2-3. I’m gobsmacked at my colleague  Harold  who seems to put out a post every day.  I can’t quite do that. My goal has moderated to be 2 a week (very occasionally I live with 1 per week, but other weeks like when I’m at conferences I might have 3 if there are lots of keynotes to mind map).  Typically it’s Tuesday and Wednesday, for no good reason.

I also try to have something new to say every time. It’s hard, but forcing myself to find something to talk about has led to me thinking about lots of things and therefore ready to bring them to bear on behalf of clients.   I think out loud relatively freely (particularly with the popularity of Work and Learn Out Loud and Show Your Work).  And it’s a way to share my diagrams, another way to ‘think out loud’.  And I admit that I don’t share some things that are either proprietary (until I can anonymize them) or something I’m planning on doing something with.

And I’ve also resisted commercializing this.  Obviously I’ve avoided the offers to exchange links or blog posts that include links for SEO stuff, but I’ve even, rightly or wrongly, not allowed ads.  While it  is the official Quinnovation blog, it’s been my belief that sharing my thinking is the best way to help me get interest in what I have to offer (extensive experience  mapping a wide variety of concepts onto specific client contexts to yield  innovative yet practical and successful solutions).  I haven’t (yet) followed a formula to drive business traffic, and only occasionally mention my upcoming events (though hopefully that’s a public service :).  There’re other places to track that.

I’m also pretty lax about looking at the metrics. I do weekly pop by Google Analytics to see what sort of traffic I get (pretty steady), but I haven’t tried to see what might improve it.  This is, largely, for me.  And for you if your interests run this way. So welcome, and here’s to another 10 years!  Who knows what there will be to talk about then…or even next week!

To close off the DevLearn conference, Natalie Panek (@nmpanek) told of her learning journey to be a space engineer with compelling stories of challenging experiences.  With an authentic and engaging style, she helped inspire us to keep learning.

Adam Savage gave a thoughtful, entertaining, and ultimately moving talk about how Art and Science are complementary components of what makes us human. He continued telling stories that kept us laughing while learning, and ended on a fabulous note about being willing to be vulnerable as a person and a parent.  Truly a great keynote.