Learnlets

Secondary

Clark Quinn’s Learnings about Learning

Experience, the API

by 8 Comments

Last week I was on a panel about the API previously known as Tin Can at #DevLearn, and some thoughts crystallized.  Touted as the successor to SCORM, it’s ridiculously simple: Subject Verb Object: e.g. “I did this”, such as ‘John Doe read Engaging Learning’ but also ‘Jane Doe took this picture’.  And this has interesting implications.

First, the API itself is very simple, and while it can be useful on it’s own, it’ll be really useful when there’re tools around it.  It’s just a foundation upon which things can be done.  There’ll need to be places to record these actions, and ones to pull together sequences of recommendations for learning paths, and more.  You’ll want to build portfolios of what you’ve done (not just what content you’ve touched).

But it’s about more than learning.  These can cross accessing performance support resources, actions in social media systems, and more. This person touched that resource. That person edited this file.  This other person commented.

One big interesting opportunity is to be able to start mining these.  We can start looking at evidence of what folks did and finding good and bad outcomes.  It’s a consistent basis for big data and analytics.  It’s also a basis to start customizing: if the people who touched this resource were better able to solve problem X, other people with that problem maybe should also touch it. If they’ve already tried X and Y, we can next recommend Z.  Personalization/customization.

An audience member asked what they should take back to their org, and who needed to know what.  My short recommendations:

Developers need to start thinking about instrumenting everything.  Everything people touch should report out on their activity.  And then start aggregating this data.  Mobile, systems, any technology touch. People can self report, but it’s better to the extent that it’s automated.

Managers need to recognize that they’re going to have very interesting opportunities to start tracking and mining information as a basis to start understanding what’s happening.  Coupled with rich other models, like of content (hence the need for a content strategy), tasks, learners, we can start doing more things by rules.

And designers need to realize, and then take advantage of, a richer suite of options for learning experiences.  Have folks take a photo of an example of X.  You can ask them to discuss Y.  Have them collaborate to develop a Z.  You could even send your learners out to do a flash mob ;).

Learning is not about content, it’s about experience, and now we have ways to talk about it and track it. It’s just a foundation, just a standard, just plumbing, just a start, but valuable as all that.

Honored

by 6 Comments

At the recent DevLearn conference, David and Heidi (the two-cofounders of the eLearning Guild) punk’d me.  Under the pretense of having me assist the keynote speaker, they had me sit at the front of the stage with another purpose in mind.

As background, the Guild is explicitly labeled and designed to reflect the original concept of an association of  craftsmen  in a particular trade.  The notion is that elearning professionals will be members of the guild to stay abreast of new developments, and interact with their peers.  Inherent in this is the notion of participants starting as apprentices and moving gradually to the center of a community of practice.  Consequently, the Guild hosts a number of things: online conferences (forums), Learning Solutions (an online magazine), research reports, discussion forums on LinkedIn, and of course their excellent conferences.

eLearning Guild Award

Heidi and David decided, apparently, that they wanted to reward those who were contributing, who were serving as defacto ‘masters’ of the community, following the historic traditions.  Consequently, they were reviewing who did what, who was writing, researching, and presenting, and apparently one name kept appearing at the top of the lists.   Mine.

Now, you have to understand that I have made no effort to see who was doing what; I see certain names regularly appear on their speaker lists, as well as new ones. I know a number of people have been involved in research, and they’re always getting new authors for the magazine. But I literally had no idea how much I did compared to others, so this was a complete surprise.

So they called me up on stage and bestowed upon me the honor of being the very first Guild Master, handed me this great chunk of gorgeous glass, all with me somewhat stunned and embarassed.  They have stated an intention to honor others at following conferences, which will be great.  I like how they view their role, think it’s valuable, and they strike the right balance in making a viable business that serves a community.  They continually experiment as well, and that’s a good thing.

Needless to say, I’m truly honored that they noticed and deemed me worthy.  It’s not always you get recognized for doing what you love, and when you do it’s humbling.  I’m very grateful to them, and the kind comments others have made subsequently.  And thanks to you for the feedback you’ve provided on my thoughts via this blog, helping me develop my understanding so I am better equipped for what I do. I  am passionate about helping people perform better through technology, and as I often joke “this is what I would be doing even if I were independently wealthy (and you’re welcome to make that happen :)”.

I am truly pleased if what I’ve contributed has helped, and can only hope that I can continue.

Interviewed about mobile

by 1 Comment

Denise VanderLinde, a  student from Florida Gulf Coast University, interviewed me on mobile.  Here’s the (largely unedited) transcript she provided for me:

  1. What is your definition of mobile learning? Using a mobile device to make us more effective, either in the moment or developing us over time. A mobile device is a small portable device that is with us all the time and we are doing something with it because of where we are.
  2. Would you consider a laptop a Mobile Device? A laptop is not normally considered a mobile device and this topic has been discussed and argued at length, in fact, amongst industry leaders who concur that they are essentially ‘mobile desk tops‘. ‘Pocket-able devices‘ such as tablets and phones are considered mobile devices generally. Phones are usually used to access some information quickly and then it is put away and iPad or other tablet can be used for content creation and can be used for more long-term usage.
  3. Can you tell me about your success story of using mobile technology for learning (or training, or performance improvement)? My company doesn‘t create solutions so much as helping people come up with the strategies to do it. When I was designing solutions, though, a cell phone technology provider approached us to supplement a face to face training course on negotiation to be delivered via the phone. I designed a solution that incorporated (amongst other things) a quiz with 19 elements that were deemed important subject matter that trainees should know cold, 10 little mini scenarios trainees might be subject to, performance support for 16 stages of negotiation and the questions trainees should be asking themselves at each stage.
  4. What important development trends do you see coming down the pike in mobile learning? Context sensitive; we have the capability now but we‘re not taking advantage of it yet. The opportunity to know where people are (GPS chip) and what they are doing via their mobile calendars. That way we can tailor what we pull or push to/from individuals based on their locations and what sorts of meetings they attend and on what subjects etc. to meet individual‘s needs better.
  5. What important problems do you think still need to be resolved in mobile learning?
    1. Cross Platform issue/ lack of standards – html 5 not standard yet but if it were would be great but there will be, of course, resistance by software companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft etc.
    2. I would love to see productivity tools available to enable users to design/write their own apps that meet their needs better.
    3. Thinking that M-learning is just ‘courses on a phone‘ is a change that we‘ve got to make. It‘s much more than that. It‘s about the 4 C‘s: Content, Communicate, Capture and Compute.
  6. Does your firm work predominantly with corporations or do you also work with teachers, schools and/or school boards in improving educational technology use in the classroom setting?   I haven‘t done much mobile K-12 but have done some higher education mobile work but most work in mobile has been corporate. People have their mobile device with them all the time so it‘s a great way to distribute knowledge to the world, not just one head.
  7. Do you find corporate and/or school staff still seem reluctant to use technology or do you see that trend shifting in more recent years? I haven‘t experienced much resistance unless people are asked to use their personal device that they pay for themselves. That is not going over so well but, overall, if you have the right culture, there hasn‘t been much resistance.
  8. Is there anything else at all that you would like to share at this time regarding mobile technology? The one that starts going hand in hand with mobile is to begin to think in a deeper way about Content Systems, about Content Modeling and Content Architectures. It‘s going to support mobile initially and that personalization going forward. I wrote an article on this topic and another is coming out soon in Learning Solutions Magazine.

 

Learning There

by Leave a Comment

A respected colleague recently suggested Andy Clark’s Being There as a read to characterize the new views of cognition, so I checked it out.  The book covers the new emerging views of cognition, grounded in the connectionist revolution and incorporating a wide variety of neural and robotic studies. The interesting thing to me are the implications for learning and instruction.

The book makes the case that the way we think is not only heavily tied to our contexts, but that we co-construct the world in ways that affect our thinking in profound ways.  Studies across economic behavior, animal cognition, simulation studies, and more are integrated to make the point that they way we think is very different than the models of conscious minds sitting in meat vehicles.  Instead, we’re very driven from below and outside, and our conscious thinking is rare, hard, and language based.  Moreover, the constructs we create to think affect our thinking, making it easier. We automate much not only through learning, but we externalize.  And, our representations and understanding are very much constructed ‘on the fly’ in each new situations, as opposed to existing abstract and robust.

This isn’t easy reading.  Clark is a philosopher of mind, and covers much complex research and deep neuroscience.  The emergent picture, however, is of a mind very different than the cognitivist model.  I’m grateful that while I pursued my PhD in Cog Psych, the research going on in our co-shared lab by Rumelhart and McClelland on connectionist networks sensitized me to this viewpoint, and Hutchins work on Cognition in the Wild was similarly taking place at the same time.   Despite the challenge, there are important reasons to get our minds around this way of thinking.

The notion that providing abstract knowledge will lead to any meaningful outcome has already pretty much been debunked both empirically and theoretically.  What these models seem to suggest is that what can and will work is deep scaffolded practice and guided reflection, based upon a situated cognition. For other reasons, this is the model that Collins and Brown had in Cognitive Apprenticeship, and now we’ve a more solid philosophical basis for it.  (I also think that there are rejoinders to Kirschner, Sweller, & Clark, and Anderson, Reder, & Simon; discussing how language, including writing, is social, and that iterations between abstract models and meaningful practice is guided reflection.)

This model suggests that language is our differentiator, and that much of our higher level cognition is mediated through language.  There’s a reason consciousness feels like a dialog.  Much of our processing is beneath consciousness, and things we monitor and develop through language become compiled away inaccessible to language.

The point, to me, is that the activity-based learning model I’ve proposed has both bottom up grounding in new cognitive models, theoretical framing from anchored instruction and social constructivism, as well as empirical validity from apprenticeships and work-place learning. We need to start aligning our learning design to the cognitive realities.