Learnlets

Last week, I posted about a model where a system could provide a sage who looks at the events of your life and provides support.  I want to elaborate that model by looking at it in a different way.

The notion here is that you have events in your life, across the bottom. And you have some learning goals, e.g. to learn about project management, and about running meetings.  You might get some initial content about those two goals, but then let’s focus on developing that learning over time.

The events in your life give you a chance to use them as learning experiences, not just performance opportunities.  If there are not enough in your life, you might have interstitial activities (those in dashed lines), but you can be developed across learning goals abcd, and uvwxyz, both through delivered experiences, and with learning wrapped around real experiences.

Let me make that latter clearer.  Say you’ve got some event like project work, and an associated learning goal (e.g. concept ‘d’ in a curricula).  A system could see the calendar entry for the project work and, through tagging or other semantic means, recognize the relationship with learning goal ‘d’.  Then, some relevant activation and concept material might precede the event, an aid could appear during, and either a self-evaluation metric or a connection to a live person could happen afterward.  Delivered, for instance, through mobile devices.

The goal is to use the events in your life as learning opportunities as much as possible (or preferable).  We can also mix in some simulated practice (e.g an alternate reality game) if it’s not occurring at a sufficient rate in real life, but the goal is to match the learning development plan to the rate at which we effectively learn.  And, to be clear, we do not  learn effectively by a one-off knowledge dump and a quiz, as much of what we do actually works out to be.

As I’ve mentioned before, we have the magic, the sufficiently advanced technology Arthur C. Clarke talked about, to hand.  We should start using it to develop us towards our goals in appropriate ways.  The opportunity is there; who’s ready to seize it?

A number of years ago, I wrote an article  (PDF) talking about how we might go beyond our current ‘apart’ learning experiences.  The notion is what I call ‘layered learning’, where we don’t send you away from your life to go attend a learning event, but instead layer it around the events in  your life. This is very much part of what I’ve been calling slow learning, and a recent conversation has catalyzed and crystalized that thought.

Think about the sort of ideal learning experience you might have.  As you traverse the ‘rocky road’ of life, imagine having a personal coach who would observe the situation, understand the context of the task and the desired goal, and could provide some aid (from some sack of resources) that could assist you in immediate performance.  Your performance would improve.

Let’s go further. This sage, moreover, could draw from some curricula (learning trajectories) and prepare you beforehand and guide reflection afterward so that real performance event now becomes a learning opportunity as well, helping you understand why  this particular approach makes sense, how to adapt it, and more.  In this way, the sage moves from performance coach to learning mentor.

One step further would be to have learning trajectories not only about the domain (e.g. engineering) but also about quality, management, learning, and more.  So learners could be developed as learners, and as persons, not just as performers.

Now this would be ideal, but individual mentors don’t scale very well.  But here’s the twist: we can build this.  We can have curricula, learning objects, and build a sage via rules that can do this.  Imagine going through your workday with a device (e.g. an app phone or a small tablet) that knows what you’re doing (from your calendar), which triggers content to be served up before, during, and after tasks, that develops you over time.  We can build the tutor,  develop and access the curricula and content, deliver it, track it.

I hope this is clear.  There are other ways to think about this, and I’ll see if I can’t capture them in some way; stay tuned.  The limitations are no longer the technology, the limits are between our ears.  Reckon?