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Clark Quinn’s Learnings about Learning

Meta-learning in Moscow

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I was reflecting on the benefits of travel, and recalled a ‘learning’ experience I underwent involuntarily more than 20 years ago. I’d gone to Moscow to speak at a conference, and determined to venture on my own to the Kremlin for a scheduled tour of the museum.  I had an underground map, and headed off to the station nearest me.  The route apparently had a change of train required. The ticket seller wasn’t very friendly, but I managed to somehow meet the necessary requirement to head down underground.

The real event started when I got off the requisite number of stops along the line. It turns out that the map I had wasn’t in Cyrillic characters that the underground was labeled in, and apparently I hadn’t correctly identified the station I started from. (There was no Cyrillic – Latin mapping; it wasn’t a good guidebook.) So there I was, at some random point under Moscow, without any idea about what station I was at.  Worse, no one seemed (willing) to speak English.

Somewhat concerned, I started looking for clues. This  was a transfer station, in that there were two different lines coming together.  I went back and forth between the two lines, looking for further clues that I could use to determine where I was. Eventually I noticed that one line had a split at the end, and there was only one on the map, so I now knew one of the two lines. I recall that I counted the number of stops to determine which station I was at, and then I was good to go, and I found my way to the station nearest the Kremlin, on my map.  My adventures weren’t over, however.

From there, I surfaced, and looked for which direction to head. It was totally overcast, so there were no shadows to tell direction.  And I couldn’t see any of the landmark structures from where I’d emerged.  I had no idea where to go!  Was I going to have to abandon my quest and quit?

Again, I got systematic: I decided to walk in each direction as far as I could and still know where the station was. It was the second path that let me finally see a landmark (St. Basil’s? I no longer remember) and I found my way.   I saw the museum and met my colleagues for a safe journey back to the hotel.

This remains the most overt conscious problem-solving I ever recall (followed by the time I locked myself in a building right before the grad school entrance exam, and had just a short period of time to escape without setting off the fire alarms).  It took effortful thinking, systematicity, and persistence.

It’s not often these situations occur, but it’s illuminating to explore the requirements, and think about the thinking skills required.  These are perhaps the most valuable investment an organization can make, getting concrete about learning and problem-solving, instead of expecting them.  Given the way our school curriculum has been structured, they’re not likely to come from formal education.  So think about how folks will have to increasingly face more complicated situations, and the skills they might require.  Are you and your people ready?

Making Sparks Fly

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Last night I did a presentation for the San Diego chapter of ISPI titled ‘making sparks fly’. I used that concept to talk about a couple of my favorite topics: deeper instructional design, and social learning.

In the former, it’s about two things: getting the real cognitive underpinning right,  and the emotional content, both integrated in a natural and elegant way.  So you start with your objectives (at a high enough level, addressing real business needs). Then you immediately develop deep practice with core decisions embedded in meaningful contexts. You need sufficient practice to not get it wrong, as opposed to just getting it right. Then we elaborate with model-based concepts and story-based examples.  All introduced in ways that engage the emotions as well as the mind, and closing that process off similarly addressing the emotional as well as the cognitive.  The point being, if you’re going to do formal, do it right.

From there, I segued off to talk about social: the power of the additional processing you get from social learning.  This includes sharing ideas, and collaborative work.  Then, systematically looking at tools like blogs, wikis, profiles, feeds, and more for both formal and informal learning.  The notion is that thinking and working ‘out loud’ are, in the right culture, better than not.

Formal learning (and I didn’t discuss performance support, after all it  was ISPI :) addresses the optimal execution that will be just be the cost of entry going forward, while continual innovation requires the creative friction, the interpersonal interaction that generates new ideas.  You need to have good learning and good performance support on those processes you can identify, but then you need to create the environment where folks are helping one another solve the new problems that arise, including new ideas.  Engaging the learner, and the interaction, are both sparks to take what we do to the next level.

There’s more: culture, mindset, L&D role, and we touched on that, but in the broader picture, you want to start with social and performance support, only doing formal when you absolutely have to (as it’s dear). We need to stop doing formal only, and badly. We need to cover the spread, and do all well.  Or else…

The ‘Role’ of Compliance

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I’m not an expert on compliance training. I haven’t suffered through it, and I haven’t been asked to design it. But I know it’s a monkey on the back of the industry, and I know we have to address it. So how? I think there are two main barriers.

The first is the regulatory aspect. Much like I really think the problem holding back better for-profit schools is that the accreditation process isn’t informed enough about pedagogy, I think the agencies that oversee required learning don’t really focus on the right thing. When you are mandating the requirement by seat time, you’re missing the point. Really, you should have competencies associated with objectives. Compliance decoupled from outcomes is just a legal bulwark, not a meaningful prevention of behavior.

Of course, we could be spending that time doing more than a knowledge dump. I think there are two parts: helping people define the situation, and then providing them with skills to address it. Whether it’s ethics, harassment, or some other topic, if you’re just raising awareness you’re not equipping people, and if you’re just providing responses, you’re not helping them understand when it makes sense.

I’ve previously addressed the awareness issue, when I talked about shades of grey. The point being that seldom are things black and white, and the best way to help learners understand the situation is to give them scenarios and discuss in groups whether and how a situation qualifies. Having this done in groups, and then having a reflection session facilitated by an expert on the topic would really help learners get value. Even online, having them share their initial thoughts, and then see some other discussion would be valuable to get some of the benefits of social interaction.

So then the question becomes one of how to equip the learners to deal with the situations. There are always mandated policies, but they’re not always as easy to apply as suggested. First of all, I think role-plays make great sense here. You can use scenario tools for asynchronous situations, or just traditional role-play in the classroom. What’s important is that you consider these processes with problematic examples. So, for example, trying to do behavior coaching with a passive-aggressive individual. You might have someone who’s facing such a problem role play the tough individual to deal with, and another member of the class can try to apply the principles. Again, you’re venturing out into the grey that acknowledges it’s never as clear cut and easy as it seems.

Of course, the latter pedagogies don’t guarantee anything (learning is probabilistic, after all), and you’ve still the barrier that there’s little real reason to care given the current way the requirements are structured, but at least you have the opportunity to make the process less onerous for the learner and have a greater likelihood of actually accomplishing something meaningful in the workplace. Someone familiar with compliance want to weigh in on how I’m off-base?

#PSS13 Opening Panel Mindmap

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The opening session for the eLearning Guild’s Performance Support Symposium was an insightful panel moderated by Allison Rossett, with panelists Rose Lawyer of Huntington, John Low of Carney, and Matthew Henzel of American Express on their experiences with performance support (PS) initiatives. Interesting points included taking a holistic perspective, emphasizing change management, and future directions. I note that in some cases my interpretation is not their words :).

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Content or experience

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I continue to have a problem with the term content as a component of what our field does.  I think there are potential problems with the label, so let me make them clear.

What we do is create content.  In elearning, we create introductions and concept presentations, we portray examples, and we make interactivities that provide practice.  Even in F2F training, we have content and structure around actions we ask our learners to take.  At the end of the day, much of what we’re working on is content that is communicated or triggered by learner actions.

However, I think there’s a problem with thinking of it that way. I believe we need to focus on the activity, not on the content. What’s important is the learner’s experience that is created by sequencing content and learner actions, not the content itself.  You could present content in different ways (for instance, labeled slides, narrated slideshow, or video) and it’s be semantically equivalent (and please don’t bring up Clark & Kozma), at least for our purposes here.

The problem is that if we focus on content, it becomes too easy to think that content presentation is equivalent to learning. Even if we test knowledge of the content afterwards, it’s not going to lead to meaningful outcomes.  Thinking about producing content makes it easy to go astray.

The alternative, however, is still uncertain. Technologically, it makes sense to talk about content management systems, but learning management systems above that is the wrong language.  While ‘course management systems’ addresses the real function of such systems, ideally we’d instead be thinking about ‘experience management systems’. Except I don’t think we really have those right now.  You might say that trainers or mentors or coaches are that, and I might agree in the latter sense, certainly, though I’m looking for a better branding for the technology infrastructure.

There’s now an Experience API that provides some infrastructure for creating such an experience management system, but there’re still some intermediate steps needed. Fingers crossed.

Ok, so I’m  thinking out loud about our language and what the implications are, but I’m a big fan of reflection and I think it’s useful to stop once in a while and think about where we’re at and how we’re doing.  I welcome your thoughts.

Making Hard or Easy

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Our brains are good at certain things, and not so good at others. We’re good pattern-matchers and meaning-makers, but not so good at doing things by rote. We make mistakes, almost by necessity (evolutionary advantage: if you do something a little different by chance and it’s better, it can get rewarded and more likely).  And we simplify the world, partly to save energy for what we care about, but also because complexity is taxing.

And, in general, this is good.  Our simplifications help us cope, make us more effective.  However, given our nature, at times this can fail us.  We may think we’ve taken a necessary step when we haven’t.  Henry Petroski, in  To Engineer is Human, helps us understand that we continue to push boundaries and take consequent risks.  Atul Gawande, in  The Checklist Manifesto, helps us understand the usefulness of support if we’re not going to make mistakes.

But sometimes this expediency can mask complexities and lead us astray.  For a simple example, the term ‘learning management system’ can actually lead us to believe we’re achieving learning, instead of courses.  And just because you have a course doesn’t mean something was learned.

There are many ways we can mislead ourselves.  We can talk about a concept that we all realize has to be true, that learners differ, and then believe we can identify how someone learns.  We may eventually be able to do so, but existing instruments aren’t valid, and learners change in different contexts. Plus, if we label learners as X or Y, we may limit them.  When I humorously compared the ‘generational differences’ argument to age discrimination, someone deeply involved in that field corrected me that real age discrimination is a serious problem not to be taken lightly!

It may seem like an ‘angels dancing on the head of a pin‘ type of argument, but we have to be careful of the words we use and their import.  We have to carefully consider the ways in which phrases can be used, or misused, and perhaps structure our use of language appropriately.  It’s branding, and perhaps we need to treat it as such.  At least, be careful of what terms you use and what inferences you’re making easy and which you might be inadvertently making hard.

Esther Quinn (1924-2013) RIP

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EstherQuinnEarly this morning, my mother died.  She’d been wanting to go;  having lost one leg to bad circulation and with continuing pain in the other for the same reason, her quality of life wasn’t great despite the loving care my brother and family provided.  She needed help to get around, and hated to impose.  She’d already outlived all her siblings, and fortunately her passing was relatively quick and painless.

She had led a most interesting life; she grew up in Germany in a slightly privileged family (with a few servants), including during the time of World War II.  The war was tough on the family; while one of her two twin brothers was lost to leukemia, the other lost his life as a fighter pilot.  Her firm but loving father was briefly imprisoned for not being an ardent proponent of Hitler, but as a community official the local townspeople advocated for his release.  Their house was bombed during the course of the war, but they had escaped to the countryside home of their family friends.  I remember my mom telling me about heading with a friend to that region, and ducking under trees at times to avoid planes machine-gunning the field!

She was anorexic for a time, and so had to spend time in the hills of Czechoslovakia to recuperate, escaping some of the war. She also studied nursing in Switzerland, again avoiding some of the carnage, and felt remorse in both cases.  She was also  embarrassed  about getting credit for not participating in a war-hawking May Day parade because the real reason wasn’t principled objection but instead that she didn’t want her birthday preempted.  For the rest of her life she was always looking to help others.  She was sympathetic to the disabled, as her father had lost his arm in the first world war, yet never let that slow him down.

After the war, she headed to the New York to stay with her aunt, and worked taking care of an elderly lady.  She grew tired of being cold, and headed west by bus. She almost stopped in New Mexico, but ended up continuing on to Los Angeles, where she worked in a hospital, and ended up meeting my father, Nives.  She never regretted leaving her native land and family, though she did miss them.

My folks got married, and she subsequently became a mother to me and then my brother Clif.  With no proximal family of hers, she had to become quite independent, also as my father worked long hours.  She kept us well fed, becoming a good cook and a strong advocate of natural foods long before such became popular.  A good education was also a priority, and she took us to museums regularly as well as advocating for summer school and other activities.  Frugal too (and occasionally penny-wise and pound-foolish, as she’d laughingly admit), our regular vacations were camping except for the occasional trips to Germany to visit her family.  And she was capable: she knitted us sweaters, sewed, gardened, and had a ‘can do’ attitude.

She eventually went back to nursing when we were old enough, and was a revered fixture in the local emergency room for many years (though we had to restrain her from telling injury tales at the dinner table).  She and my father remained active in politics and social efforts; after retirement they did considerable traveling but also volunteered time when home. She was always heading off to go shopping for the abused women’s shelter or to deliver something for somebody in need.   She also was continually restless, courtesy of an overactive thyroid gland, and it was a family joke that she’d say she was finally going to sit and watch a movie, but soon she’d be up making snacks or doing some other thing around the house.

The thing that I grew to recognize and appreciate was how much my mother was a  people person.  Our house regularly had visitors, often from far away.  My mom had the gift of really listening – she loved hearing others’ stories about life –  and the next time she met you she would remember and ask.  And help if she could.  As a consequence, my folks always had invitations to visit, and people they met on their travels were always stopping through on their way elsewhere.

She never thought she was smart or wise, and yet she was both.  She cared and her varied experience and endless curiosity meant she often had something useful to say.  Her brain remained strong long after her body began to fail her.  Despite the travails of infirmities, she continued with good cheer.

She was gentle, kind, thoughtful, and good, and we were very very lucky to have her.  Rest in Peace.

Supporting Cognitive Performance

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It’s clear that our brains aren’t the logical problem-solvers we’d like to be.  The evidence on our different thinking systems makes clear that we use intuition when we can, and hard thinking when we must. Except that we use intuition even when we shouldn’t, and hard thinking is very susceptible to problems.  Yet we need to have reliably good outcomes to solving problems or accomplishing tasks.  What can we do?

The answer, of course, is to use technology to fill in the gaps, when we can.  We can automate it if we totally understand it, but the best solution is to let technology (and design) do what it can, and let our brains fill in what we do best.  So, when there’s a problem or task that needs to be accomplished, and it requires some decision making, we should be doing several things.

To start, we should be looking at the scope of possible situations, and determine what’s required.  We should then figure out what information can be in the world (whether a resource or in other’s heads), and what has to be in the performer’s repertoire.  We want to design a solution system, not just a course.

Recognize that getting things into human heads reliably is problematic at best.   It takes considerable work to develop that expert intuition: considerable practice at least.  So the preference should be to design either a really good support system that helps in characterization of the problem, and a dialog that helps determine what of the possible solutions matches up with the situation.

It can just be information in the world, such as a job aid or checklist, or an interactive decision support tool. Or, it could be a social network of resources such as tools and videos created by others that’s usefully searchable and the ability to ask questions of the community and get responses.  It’s likely a probabilistic decision here: what is the likelihood that the network has the answer, versus what’s the possibility that we can design support that will cover the range of problems to be faced?

The point is that support design is a necessary and very viable component of performance solutions, and one that isn’t being used enough.  I’m looking forward to the upcoming eLearning Guild’s Performance Support Symposium in Boston as a way to learn more, and hope to see you there!

Stop training! Or, how to get there from here

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One of the things I’m wrestling with right now is the transition from where we’re at to where we should be. I’ve already said we  have to change, the question is how.  A number of us have talked about what the future could and should look like (including but not limited to my ITA colleagues), but how do you get there from here?  Whether it’s 70:20:10 or some other model, there simply  has to be a better way.

Right now, many organizations have training operations going on: people traveling to a location to sit down and have knowledge dumped on them, perhaps including a knowledge check: show up and throw up.  With smile sheets to evaluate the outcome.  And/or we have elearning: knowledge dump and test, or virtual classrooms where we do the same spray and pray.  And it doesn’t work; it can’t.  Well, it certainly is not going to lead to any meaningful outcome.

Granted, this is a gross stereotype, and in particular situations the training is hands on, there’s lots of practice, and maybe blended so the knowledge necessary is learned beforehand.  Yes, this can lead to some real skill acquisition.

And don’t even bring up ‘compliance’.  Sure, I know you have to do it, and until we get government to stop thinking seat time and  content presentation is the same as behavior change, and lawyers to only care about CYA,  we’ll be stuck with it.  That, apparently, is just the cost of doing business.  I’m talking about the things that matter to your company. Your skills, your ability to do.

And we need to stop it.  I think the first step is to kill all training.  When you raise your head up and start talking about “but how are we going to meet this need”, then you start thinking anew: how can we go ‘world first‘, performance support 2nd, and meaningful practice last?  Once you find you’ve exhausted all other options, then you might realize that formal training is needed, but it could and should be focused on  doing, not telling.

This is only part of the picture, and perhaps I’m being deliberately controversial (who, me?), but it’s one way to be forced to think anew about what we’re doing and how we can help.  We have to change, and we need to start figuring out how to get there.  I’m open to ideas.  I’ve heard some others, but that’s another post.  What are your ideas?