Today I attended David Pogue’s #DevLearn Keynote.  And, as a DevLearn ‘official blogger’, I was expected to mindmap it (as I regularly do). So, I turn on my iPad and have had a steady series of problems. The perils of living in a high tech world.

First, when I opened my diagramming software, OmniGraffle, it doesn’t work. I find out they’ve stopped supporting this edition! So, $50 later (yes, it’s almost unconscionably dear) and sweating out the download (“will it finish in time”), I start prepping the mindmap. 

Except the way it does things are different. How do I add break points to an arrow?!?  Well, I can’t find a setting, but I finally explore other interface icons and find a way. The defaults are different, but manage to create a fairly typical mindmap.  Phew.

So, I export to Photos and open WordPress. After typing in my usual insipid prose, I go to add the image. And it starts, and fails.  I try again, and it’s reliably failing. I reexport, and try again. Nope. I get the image over to my iPhone to try it there, to no avail.

I’ve posted the image to the conference app, but it’s not going to appear here until I get back to my room and my laptop.  Grr. 

Oh well, that’s life in this modern world, eh?

The following was prompted by a discussion on how education has the potential to be disrupted.  And I don’t disagree, but I don’t see the disruptive forces marshaling that I think it will take.  Some thoughts I lobbed in another forum (lightly edited):

Mark Warschauer, in his great book Learning in the Cloud (which has nothing to do with ‘the cloud’), pointed out that there are only 3 things wrong with public education: the curricula, the pedagogy, and the way they use tech; other than that they’re fine. Ahem. And much of what I’ve read about disruption seems flawed in substantial ways.

I’ve seen the for-profits institutions, and they’re flawed because even if they did understand learning (and they don’t seem to), they’re handicapped: they have to dance to the ridiculous requirements of accrediting bodies. Those bodies don’t understand why SMEs aren’t a good source of objectives, so the learning goals are not useful to the workplace. It’s not the profit requirement per se, because you could do good learning, but you have to start with good objectives, and then understand the nuances that make learning effective. WGU is at least being somewhat disruptive on the objectives.

MOOCs don’t yet have a clear business model; right now they’re subsidized by either the public institutions, or biz experiments.  And the pedagogy doesn’t really scale well: their objectives also tend to be knowledge based, and to have a meaningful outcome they’d need to be application based, and you can’t really evaluate that at scale (unless you get *really* nuanced about peer review, but even then you need some scrutiny that just doesn’t scale.). For example, just because you learn to do AI programming doesn’t mean you’re ready to be an AI programmer.  That’s the xMOOCs, the cMOOCs have their own problems with  expectations around self-learning skills.  Lovely dream, but it’s not the world I live in, at least yet.

As for things like the Khan Academy, well, it’s a nice learning adjunct, and they’re moving to a more complete learning experience, but they’re still largely tied to the existing curricula (e.g. doing what Jonassen railed against: the problems we give kids in schools bear no relation to the problems they’ll face in the real world).

The totally missed opportunity across all of this is the possibility of layering 21C skills across this in a systematic and developable way. If we could get a better curricula, focused on developing applicable skills and meta-skills, with a powerful pedagogy, in a pragmatically deliverable way…

Lots of room for disruption, but it’s really a bigger effort than I’ve yet seen someone willing to take. And yet, if you did it right, you’d have an essentially unassailable barrier to entry: real learning done at scale. However, I’m inclined to think that it’s more plausible in the countries who increasingly ‘get’ that higher ed is an investment in the future of a country, and are making it free, and make it a ‘man on the moon’ program. I’m willing, even eager to be wrong on this, so please let me know what you think!

Several events are coming up that I  should mention (“coming to a location near you!”):

If you’re anywhere near  Austin, you should check out the upcoming eLearning Symposium  May 7 and 8. I’m speaking  on the L&D  Revolution  I’m trying to incite, and then offering a half day  workshop to help you get your strategy going.  There’s a nice slate of other speakers to help you dig deeper into elearning.

I’ll also be speaking on Serious eLearning at Callidus Cloud Connections in Las Vegas May 11-13.  If you’re into Litmos, or thinking about it, it’s the place to be.

If you’re near Atlanta, I’ll be busting learning myths in an evening session  for the ATD Chapter on the 2nd of June, and then running a learning game  workshop on the 3rd.  You’ll find out more about learning and engagement; you can  and should  add game elements to your learning design.  I’m serious when I say that “learning can, and should, be hard fun“.

And  I’ll be touting the needed L&D  Revolution up in Vancouver June 11, keynoting the CSTD Symposium.  There’s a great line up of talks to raise your game.

I  would love to meet  you at one of these events; hope to see you there (or there, or there, or there).

Juliette LaMontagne closed the Learning Solutions conference with the compelling story of the Breaker project, connecting kids to real world experiences.

Michael Furdyk gave an inspiring talk this morning about his trajectory through technology and then five ideas that he thought were important elements in the success of the initiatives he had undertaken. He gave lots of examples and closed with interesting questions about how we might engage learners through badges, mobile, and co-creation.

As a fan of comics and animations (read: cartoons) in learning, I was pleased to see a small mention of comics in a twitter discussion (triggered by this post). When I lauded the claim, I was asked what I think of machinima, and I had to think for a bit.  My feelings are mixed, so it’s probably worth it to think them through out loud.

So, first, machinima are animations made by using characters in 3D virtual worlds or computer games.  They share the look and feel of whatever platform is used, which can range from cartoon-like to quite complex.  Similarly, their speed can range from quite slow to pretty fast.

One particularly attractive feature, which I hadn’t really thought of, is that they may be easy ways to create animation.  As Karl Kapp (professor at Bloomsburg College and clear thinker on games, virtual worlds etc) mentioned in the exchange, they can be great for inexpensively creating animations. And that’s a good thing, if you get the animations you want to use.

My concern has to do with the output of the animations. Many times, I find the complexity of computer graphics containing too much unnecessary detail.  And when surfing the web for some other examples, I found ones where the dialog was too slow (which I’ve seen in other animation forms as well, I confess).  So I worry about matching the detail  of output to the need, despite the cost.

Now, as Karl also mentioned, they’re good for procedural tasks. This certainly could be true, as the extra detail would help contextualize. However, is it better than a video?  Certainly if you can expand or contract the scale, so you’re seeing it at the necessary level of detail, not the only real one that video can provide. So for minute details, this would be really good!

As the original respondent suggested, it’s better to be there (e.g. in game) rather than watch, and I’d certainly agree to that, as you can negotiate some of the other issues that might be confusing.  And of course social learning adds value in and of itself.

So, the question is, when is machinima useful?  I wouldn’t want to use it  just because of cost; if you’re not getting the right characteristics, it might be a false economy. If it’s producing output within a range of acceptability at a reasonable cost, or really capturing the affordances of virtual worlds, I think it makes sense.  And I’m willing to be wrong. What are your thoughts?

Arianna Huffington kicked off ASTD’s international conference with a very engaging presentation covering the four pillars to thrive. Alternately funny and wise, it was a great start.

Soren Kaplan gave a keynote on innovation that nicely pulled together a number of strands around how to break through some of our cognitive traps.