Learnlets

mLearning 3.0

18 July 2012 by Clark 2 Comments

Robert Scoble has written about Qualcomm’s announcement of a new level of mobile device awareness. He characterizes the phone transitions from voice (mobile 1.0) to tapping (2.0) to the device knowing what to do (3.0). While I’d characterize it differently, he’s spot on about the importance of this new capability.

I’ve written before about how the missed opportunity is context awareness, specifically not just location but time. What Qualcomm has created is a system that combines location awareness, time awareness, and the ability to build and leverage a rich user profile. Supposedly, according to Robert, it’s also tapped into the accelerometer, altimeter, whatever sensors there are. It’ll be able to know in pretty fine detail a lot more about where you are and doing.

Gimbal is mostly focused on marketing (of course, sigh), but imagine what we could do for learning and performance support!

We can now know who you are and what you’re doing, so:

a sales team member visiting a client would get specialized information different than what a field service tech would get at the same location.
a student of history would get different information at a particular location such as Boston than an architecture student would
a person learning how to manage meetings more efficiently would get different support than a person working on making better presentations

I’m sure you can see where this is going. It may well be that we can coopt the Gimbal platform for learning as well. We’ve had the capability before, but now it may be much easier by having an SDK available. Writing rules to take advantage of all the sensors is going to be a big chore, ultimately, but if they do the hard yards for their needs, we may be able to ride on the their coattails for ours. It may be an instance when marketing does our work for us!

Mobile really is a game changer, and this is just another facet taking it much further along the digital human augmentation that’s making us much more effective in the moment, and ultimately more capable over time. Maybe even wiser. Think about that.

A game? Who says?

11 July 2012 by Clark 1 Comment

I just reviewed a paper submitted to a journal (one way to stay in touch with the latest developments), and all along they were doing research on the cognitive and motivational relationships in the game. They claimed it was a game, and proceeded on that assumption. And then the truth came out.

When designing and evaluating learning experiences, you really want to go beyond whether it’s effective or easy to use, and decide whether it’s engaging. Yes, you absolutely need to test usability first (if there’s a problem with the learning outcomes, is it the pedagogy or the interaction?), and then learning effectiveness. But ultimately, if you want it optimally tuned for success, pitched at the optimal learning level using meaningful activities, it should feel like a game. The business case is that the effectiveness will be optimized, and the tuning process to get there is less than you think (if you’re doing it right). And the only real way to test it is subjectively: do the players think it’s a game.

If you create a learning experience and call it game, but your learners don’t think it is, you undermine their motivation and your credibility. It can be relative (e.g. better than regular learning) as you might not have the resources to compete with commercial games, but it ought to be better than having to sit through a page turner, or you’ve failed.

There are systematic ways to design games that achieve both meaningful engagement and effective education practice. Heck, I wrote a whole book on the topic. It’s not magic, and while it requires tuning, it’s doable. And, as I’ve stated before: you can’t say it’s a game, only your players can tell you that.

So here were these folks doing research on a ‘game’. The punchline: “students, who started playing the game with high enthusiasm, started complaining after a short while, ‘this is not a game’, and stopped gameplay”. Fail.

Seriously, if you’re going to make a game, make it demonstrably fun. Or it’s not a game, whether you say so or not.

Emergent & Semantic Learning

10 July 2012 by Clark 2 Comments

The last of the thoughts still percolating in my brain from #mlearncon finally emerged when I sat down to create a diagram to capture my thinking (one way I try to understand things is to write about them, but I also frequently diagram them to help me map the emerging conceptual relationships into spatial relationships).

What I was thinking about was how to distinguish between emergent opportunities for driving learning experiences, and semantic ones. When we built the Intellectricity© system, we had a batch of rules that guided how we were sequencing the content, based upon research on learning (rather than hardwiring paths, which is what we mostly do now). We didn’t prescribe, we recommended, so learners could choose something else, e.g. the next best, or browse to what they wanted. As a consequence, we also could have a machine learning component that would troll the outcomes, and improve the system over time.

And that’s the principle here, where mainstream systems are now capable of doing similar things. What you see here are semantic rules (made up ones), explicitly making recommendations, ideally grounded in what’s empirically demonstrated in research. In places where research doesn’t stipulate, you could also make principled recommendations based upon the best theory. These would recommend objects to be pulled from a pool or cloud of available content.

However, as you track outcomes, e.g. success on practice, and start looking at the results by doing data analytics, you can start trolling for emergent patterns (again, made up). Here we might find confirmation (or the converse!) of the empirical rules, as well as potentially new patterns that we may be able to label semantically, and even perhaps some that would be new. Which helps explain the growing interest in analytics. And, if you’re doing this across massive populations of learners, as is possible across institutions, or with really big organizations, you’re talking the ‘big data’ phenomena that will provide the necessary quantities to start generating lots of these outcomes.

Another possibility is to specifically set up situations where you randomly trial a couple alternatives that are known research questions, and use this data opportunity to conduct your experiments. This way we can advance our learning more quickly using our own hypotheses, while we look for emergent information as well.

Until the new patterns emerge, I recommend adapting on the basis of what we know, but simultaneously you should be trolling for opportunities to answer questions that emerge as you design, and look for emergent patterns as well. We have the capability (ok, so we had it over a decade ago, but now the capability is on tap in mainstream solutions, not just bespoke systems), so now we need the will. This is the benefit of thinking about content as systems – models and architectures – not just as unitary files. Are you ready?

Piecing together collaboration and cooperation: The Coherent Organization

3 July 2012 by Clark 8 Comments

In an insightful piece, Harold Jarche puts together how collaboration and cooperation are needed to make organizations work ‘smarter’, integrating workgroups with the broader social network by using communities of practice as the intermediary. This makes a lot of sense to me, and I was inspired to take a look at the practices within those categories. (Jay Cross has explored different facets of the implications of this way of thinking and talks about how we are building on this.)

In this depiction,we see behaviors of effective collaboration within work groups, such as coaching each other, using good practices for brainstorming, the elements of a learning organization, being willing to admit to problems, and being willing to lose if you don’t lose the lesson.

At the next level, communities of practice need to continue to evolve their practices, sharing issues and working together to resolve them. Within these communities, sharing pointers as well as deeper thoughts are mechanisms for ‘stealth mentoring‘ and explicit mentoring is valuable as well.

At the outermost level, social networks are about tracking what’s happening and who knows what, looking for developments in related fields as mechanisms for improving designs, and sharing practice is a way to give back to the community.

At the intersections, you need practices of both sharing outward and bringing inward, always looking for fresh inspiration and valuable feedback. The transparency provides real value in developing trust among the constituencies.

I put reflection underpinning all of these, as a core practice. Reflection is absolutely critical to continual improvement in every area.

Note that the firewall tends to cross the middle of the diagram, and by blocking access you’re effectively cutting off a portion of the corporate brain!

This should not by any means be considered definitive, as it’s my first draft, but I think it helps (me, at least) think about what practices could accelerate an organization to be both effective and efficient, able to move nimbly to deliver ongoing customer delight by continual innovation while executing as well. We’re thinking about this as the ‘Coherent Organization’, aligning the flows of information, and aligning the work with the organizational goals. As always, I welcome your feedback: what should be added, removed, modified, etc.

Stealth mentoring

2 July 2012 by Clark 3 Comments

I was looking for any previous post I’d made about stealth mentoring, so I could refer to it in a post I was writing, and I couldn’t find it. It’s a concept I refer to often (and have to give credit to my colleague Jay Cross who inspired the thought), so here’s my obligatory place holder.

When someone is thinking and learning ‘out loud’, e.g. putting their deeper reflections on line via, say, a blog (er, like this one, recursively), they’re allowing you to look at where and how their thinking is going. When they also are leaving a trail of what they think is interesting (e.g. by pointing to things on Twitter or leaving bookmarks at a social bookmarking site), you can put together what’s interesting to them and what their resulting thoughts are, and start seeing the trajectory of their thinking and learning.

In formal learning, we can think of modeling behavior and cognitive annotation, the processes covered in Cognitive Apprenticeship as a development process. In a more informal sense, if you had a leader who shared discussions of their thinking with you, you’d consider that mentoring.

Similarly, here, with a difference. If they’re blogging and tweeting, or otherwise leaving tracks of their thinking, they can be mentoring you and not even know it. You’re being a stealth mentee! So, if you can find interesting people who blog and tweet a lot, and you follow their blogs and tweets, they can be mentors to you!

I strongly recommend this path to self-development. One of the ways to accelerate your own growth, part of your personal knowledge management path, is to mentor folks who represent the type of thinking you believe is interesting and important. By the way, don’t just consume, interact. If they say something you don’t understand or disagree with, engage: either you’ll learn, or they will.

And, as an associated caveat, I strongly recommend that you also similarly share your thinking. You can be not only stealth mentored, but folks who read and comment become actual real mentors for you, shaping your thinking. The feedback I’ve gotten through comments on my blog has been extremely beneficial to improving my own thinking, and I’m very grateful.

I really do think this is an important opportunity for personal self-development, and it’s a benefit of the increasing use of social media. I hope you are practicing learning out loud and leaving traces of what’s interesting you as you wander hither and yon. I think it’s something an app like Tappestry could provide as well, leveraging the Tin Can API, where you might more explicitly see a richer picture of what someone’s doing. But I’m getting into the weeds here, so I’ll simply point out that there’s an opportunity here. You owe it to others to think and learn out loud, and then can take advantage of others who do so with a clear conscience.

An integrating design?

27 June 2012 by Clark 8 Comments

In a panel at #mlearncon, we were asked how instructional designers could accommodate mobile. Now, I believe that we really haven’t got our minds around a learning experience distributed across time, which our minds really require. I also think we still mistakenly think about performance support as separate from formal learning, but we don’t have a good way to integrate them.

I’ve advocated that we consider learning experience design, but increasingly I think we need performance experience design, where we look at the overall performance, and figure out what needs to be in the head, what needs to be in the world, and design them concurrently. That is, we look at what the person knows how to do, and what should be in their head, and what can be designed as support. ADDIE designs courses. HPT determines whether to do a job aid (the gap is knowledge), or training (the gap is a skill). I’m not convinced that either really looks at the total integration (and willing to be wrong).

What was triggered in my brain, however, was that social constructivism might be a framework within which we could accomplish this. By thinking of what activities the learners would be engaged in, and how we’d support that performance with resources and other learners and performers as collaborators when appropriate, we might have a framework. My take on social constructivism has it looking at what can and should be co-owned by the learner, and how to get the learner there, and it naturally involves resources, other people, and skill development.

So, you’d look at what needs to be done, and think through the performance, and ask what resources (digital and human) would be there with the performer, the gap between your current learner and the performer you’d need, and how to develop an experience to achieve that end state. The notion is what mental design process designers may need going forward, and what framework provides the overarching framework to support that design process.

It’s very related to my activity framework, which nicely resonates as it very much focuses on what you can do, and resourcing that, but that framework is focused on reframing education to make it skills focused and developing self learning. This would require some additions that I’ll have to ponder further. But, as always, it’s about getting ideas out there to collect feedback. So, what say you?

Sims as CTA

26 June 2012 by Clark 1 Comment

I had several great conversations over the course of last week’s #mLearnCon that triggered some interesting thoughts. Here’s the first:

I was talking with someone charged with important training: nuclear. We were talking about both the value of sims to support deep practice, and the difficulty in getting the necessary knowledge out of the subject matter expert (SME). These converged for me in what seemed an interesting way.

First, the best method to get the knowledge out of the heads of SMEs is Cognitive Task Analysis (CTA). CTA is highly effective, but also very complex. It requires considerable effort to do the official version.

A different thread was also wrapped up in this. Not surprisingly, I believe simulation games are the best form of deep practice to help cement skills. I believe so strongly I wrote a book about it ;).

And the cross-pollination: I believe that we’ll be passing on responsibility for defining curricular paths to competency in areas to the associated communities of practice. Further, I believe we will have collaboratively developed sims as part of that path, where we use wikis to edit the rules of the simulation to keep it up to date.

The integration in this context was to think of having the SMEs collaborate on the design of the sim as a way to make the necessary tacit knowledge explicit. It would make their understanding very concrete, and help ensure that the resulting sim is correct. Of course, they might rebel in terms of exaggerating and basing the practice in fantastic contexts, but it certainly would help focus on meaningful skills instead of rote knowledge.

The barrier is that experts don’t really have access to what they know, so having a concrete activity to ground their experience in practical ways strikes me as a very concrete way to elicit the necessary understandings. CTA is about detailed processes to get at their tacit knowledge, but perhaps sim design is a more efficient mechanism. It could have tradeoffs, but it seems to disintermediate the process.

OK, so it’s just a wild idea at this time, but I always argue that thinking out loud is valuable, and I try to practice what I preach. What think you?

5 Phrases to Make Mobile Work

20 June 2012 by Clark 2 Comments

Today I was part of a session at the eLearning Guild’s mLearnCon mlearning conference on Making Mobile Work. For my session I put my tongue slightly in cheek and suggested that there were 5 phrases you need to master to Make mLearning Work. Here they are, for your contemplation.

The first one is focused on addressing either or both of yourself or any other folks who aren’t yet behind the movement to mobile:

How does your mobile device make you smarter?

The point being that there are lots of ways we’re all already using mobile to help us perform. We look up product info while shopping, use calculators to split up the bill, we call folks for information in problem-solving like what to bring home from the grocery store, and we take photos of things we need to remember like hotel room numbers or parking spots. If you aren’t pushing this envelope, you should be. And if folks aren’t recognizing the connection between how they help themselves and what the organization could be doing for employees or customers, you should be helping them.

The second one focuses on looking beyond the initial inference from the phrase “mlearning”:

Anything but a course!

Here we’re trying to help our stakeholders (and designers) think beyond the course and think about performance support, informal learning, collaboration, and more. While it might be about augmenting a course, it’s more likely to be access to information and people, as well as computational support. Mobile learning is really mobile performance support and mobile social.

The third key phrase emphasizes taking a strategic approach:

Where’s the business need?

Here we’re emphasizing the ‘where’ and the ‘business’. What’s important is thinking about meeting real business needs, with metrics and everything. What do the folks who are performing away from their desks need? What small thing could you be doing that would make that activity have a much more positive impact on the bottom line?

The fourth phrase is specifically focused on design:

What’s the least I can do for you?

It’s not about doing everything you can, but instead focusing on the minimal impact to get folks back into the workflow. Mobile is about the 20% of the features that will meet 80% of the need. It’s about the least assistance principle. It’s about elegance and relevance.

From there, we finish by focusing on our providers:

Do you have a mobile solution?

Look, mobile is more than just a tactic, it’s a platform, and you need to recognize it as such. Frankly, if a vendor of an enterprise solution (except, perhaps, for computationally intensive work like 3D rendering and so on) doesn’t have a mobile solution, I reckon it’s a deal-breaker. This is where mobile is really the catalyst for change: it’s bringing a full suite of technology support whenever and wherever needed, so we need to start thinking about what a full suite of support is. What is a full performance ecosystem?

So there you have it, the gist of the presentation. If you master the concepts behind these phrases and employ them judiciously, I do believe you’ll have a better chance of making mlearning work.

BJ Fogg #mLearnCon Keynote Mindmap

19 June 2012 by Clark Leave a Comment

BJ Fogg, known from his work on persuasive technology, talked about making persistent behavior change via tiny habits. Very interesting research with important implications both personally and commercially.

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