This morning’s mLearnCon keynote was by journalist Amber MacArthur. She talked about the intersection of mobile and social, though mostly talking the social side. Definitely a fun presentation with lots of humorous examples.
Jeremiah Owyang mLearnCon keynote mindmap
Jeremiah Owyang, analyst at Altimeter, keynoted the opening day of the eLearning Guild’s mLearnCon conference. He talked about the intersection of mobile and social, talking mobile definitions, organizational structures, and core transitions, using a metaphor of bees.
Integration (or not)
I’ve recently been asked about what industries are leading in the use of (choose one: mobile, games, social). And, in my experience, while there are some industries (medicine in mobile, for example), it’s more about who’s enlightened enough yet. Which made me think a little deeper about what I do, and don’t see.
What I do see are pockets of innovation. This company, or this manager, or this individual, will innovate in a particular area. Chris Hoyt has innovated in social learning for recruitment for PepsiCo, and is now branching out into mobile. One company will do games, another mobile, another social. And that’s ok as a starting point, but there’s more on the table. You want to move from tactics to strategy.
I want to suggest it’s better if someone higher up sees that tying the elements together into a coherent system is the larger picture. You don’t just want the individual tactics, but you want to see them as steps towards the larger picture. At the end of the day, you want your systems tied together in the back end, providing a unified environment for performance for the individual. And that takes a view of where you’re going, and the appropriate investment and experimentation.
I recall (but not the link, mea culpa) a recent post or article talking about the lack of R&D investment in the learning space (let me add, the performance space overall). That is, folks aren’t deliberately setting aside monies to fund some experimentation around learning. Every learning unit should be spending 3-5% of the budget on R&D. Is that happening? If so, it’s not obvious, but I’m happy to be wrong.
I really struggle to find an organization that I think is getting on top of this in a systematic way: that has realized the vision, is aligning tactics to organizational outcomes, and is looking to integrate the technologies in the backend to capitalize on investment in content systems, social media systems, portal technologies, and learning management systems. This can also be customer-facing as well, so that you’re either meeting customer learning needs around other products or services, or delivering learning experiences as a core business, but still doing so in a coherent, comprehensive, and coordinated approach.
I am working with some folks who are just starting out, but I think the necessity to link optimal execution with continual innovation is going to require much more thorough efforts than I’m yet seeing. Am I missing someone? While I love to hear about exemplary individual efforts, I’d really like to hear from those who are pulling it all together as well.
Chris Dede Keynote Mindmap
Chris Dede opened the Innovations in eLearning keynote with a speech that very much resonated with me and reflected things I’ve been blogging about here since Learnlets started, but has had the opportunity to build. His closing comment is intriguing: “infrastructures shape civilization”.
He talked about teaching skills to deal with wicked problems and developing new literacies, using MultiUser Virtual Environments.
CERT and performance support
I’ve just completed Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) training (except a final live drill in a nearby neighborhood), and I’ve been impressed with the thought that’s gone into the task. The situation is that in a major emergency natural or man-made: tsunami, terror attack, tornado, hurricane, explosion, or in our case, earthquakes, the capabilities of first-responders (police, paramedics, fire) will be overwhelmed.
The plan is that volunteer teams trained to take initial action as a mechanism to save lives. The situation would be grim. If it’s needed, there will be life-threatening injuries, death, damage, and more. And even trained responders will be under considerable stress.
Consequently, the design is very focused, making sure the volunteer responders are safe, not going beyond their training, and first identifying and categorizing the help needed, before actually taking any action. It’s hard to think about having to barely help someone (particularly, say, a child) and moving on, but that’s what will achieve the best result overall, as they repeatedly tell us.
To facilitate, they’ve done an impressive job of providing resources to optimize the chances for success. They’re focused on communication and task support as really the two key things. In addition to the training, they’ve provided resources and very specific performance support tools.
If and when such an event happens, everyone knows where they’re supposed to report, and how to get going. The first thing found is a folder that as soon as you open it, it starts telling you exactly what to do. If you follow the directions, you’ll be led to create a team, check in, and head off on the first area needing to be searched.
There are guidance forms for everything, and even simple things like blank paper behind a template with cutouts to store info, then share via radio. Then you rip out the sheet, and another blank one is behind.
It’s hard to remember everything you’re supposed to do (only 2 people do the physical search, one scribes, one leads; call out to see if anyone’s there first; assess structural safety; mark what’s found and move on, the list goes on). But there are tools and job aids for everything, so it’s hard to go wrong. And that’s important, because this will likely be a situation where cool and calm are out the window.
It’s reassuring to see the thought that’s gone into the tools we have to use. I hope I never have to, but I feel better knowing that if I do, there’s a lot of well-designed support. I recommend both that you consider getting CERT training, and also look at how they’ve taken a very tough task and broken it down into a command situation.
Explicating process
I think supporting performance is important, and that we don’t do enough with models in formal learning. To me, another interesting opportunity that’s being missed is the intersection of the two.
Gloria Gery’s original vision of electronic performance support systems was that not only would they help you perform but they’d also develop your understanding so you’d need them less and less. I’ve never seen that in practice, sad to say.
Now it might get in the way of absolute optimal performance, but I believe we can, and should, develop learner understanding about the performance. If the performance support is just providing rote information so that the learner doesn’t have to look it up, that’s ok. But if, instead, the performance support is interactive decision support, the system could, and should, provide the model that’s guiding the decisions as well as the recommendations.
This needn’t be much, just a thin veneer over the system, so instead of, after asking X and Y, recommending Z, saying “because of A and B, we’ve eliminated C and recommend Z” or somesuch.
It could also be making the underlying model visible through the system. Show the influence of the answers to the questions to competing alternatives, for instance.
All in all, I believe it’s better that performers understand what’s behind recommendations, because then they can internalize those models both to reduce the need for the system and to be able to infer when to go beyond the system.
Helping people understand and use models is a powerful form of meta-learning, to me, and a 21st century skill folks will be needing. Why are we missing the opportunity to help develop those skills?
Engagification
The latest ‘flavor of the month’ is so-called gamification. Without claiming to be an expert in this area (tho’ with a bit of experience in game design), I have to say that I’ve some thoughts both positive and negative on this.
So what is ‘gamification’? As far as I can tell, it’s the (and I’m greatly resisting the temptation to put the word ‘gratuitous’ in here :) addition of game mechanics to user experiences to increase their participation, loyalty, and more. Now, there are levels of game mechanics, and I can see tapping into some deeper elements, but what I see are relatively simple things like adding scoring, achievements (e.g. badges), etc. A colleague of mine who released a major learning game admitted that they added score at the end to compensate for the lack of ability to tune further and needing to release to appease investors. I get it; there are times that adding in gamification increases bottom lines in meaningful ways. But I want to suggest that we strive a little bit higher.
In Engaging Learning, I talked about the elements that synergistically lead to both better effectiveness of education practice, and more engaging experiences. These weren’t extrinsic like ‘frame games’ (tarted-up drill-and-kill), but instead focused on aligning with learner interests, intrinsic elements of the task, and more. This means finding out what drives experts to find this intriguing, a role that learners can play that’s compelling, meaningful decisions to make, appropriate level of challenges, and more. That’s what I’m shooting for.
The benefits of intrinsic motivation instead of extrinsic have been studied since the late 70’s in work by Tom Malone and Mark Lepper. In short, you get better outcomes when people are meaningfully engaged rather than trivially engaged. Dan Pink’s book Drive lays out a wealth of related research that suggests we need to avoid rewards for rote performance and instead should be focusing on helping folks do real tasks. I can’t remember where I first heard the term ‘engagification’, but that’s just what I’m thinking of.
To me, it’s the right way take gamification, focus on intrinsic motivation. If we’re gamifying, we’re covering up for some other deficiency, I reckon. Yes, there may be times that intrinsic motivation is hard to find (e.g. to get fit), but that probably means we haven’t tried hard enough yet. I recall recently hearing about gamifying kids math problems; yes, but rote problems are the wrong thing to drill. Can’t we find the intrinsic interest in math, solving real problems (like the ones they’ll see in the real world, not on tests)? I reckon we could, and should. It would take more effort initially, but the payoff ought to be better.
Perhaps gamify if you have to, but only after you’ve first tried to engagify. Please.
Getting iNtimate
In a recent post, I talked about the difference between a smartphone and a tablet (substitute PDA for smartphone if that’s how you roll). I’ve been thinking more about that, and have wondered about the effects of a particular phenomena.
In my experience, I have found the relationship with a tablet to be more ‘intimate’ (to use the technical term :). What I mean here is I hold it close instead of arms length and I touch the device itself, not some intermediary peripheral. Even using a touch interface to swipe and pinch (ooh!) is qualitatively different that point and click. The question is, what does this mean for the outcomes of the interaction, rather than the interaction itself?
Cognitively, if you’re closer to the interaction, more engaged with the content, it would seem plausible that more would ‘stick’. Particularly compared to a desktop, where you might be distracted by the shiny objects (new messages, whether email, IM, or whatever).
And I’m perfectly comfortable with that alone, and inclined to believe that what you experience with a tablet comes close to what you experience with a book: it’s a dedicated interface (by and large) for consuming content, and it’s a directly tactile interaction as opposed to one that’s indirect. I’d suggest that it’s plausible that a tablet experience is cognitively more tangible than what’s represented through a laptop or desktop.
Now, how about the emotional experience? Is there anything there? Is that intimacy anything more than just a minimization of distance? Here I’m on more tentative ground, but I’d be inclined to believe that the more direct experience is more emotionally engaging, coupling a sensory experience with the cognitive. Would that have a beneficial influence? I can’t say.
What I can say is that when we couple the more immediate experience of a tablet with the power of digital interaction, we’re moving into area that has real potential to accelerate the learning experience. If we can interact with an engine-driven simulation, a serious game, we’re combining an intimate experience with an engaging one, and beginning to combine two powerful experiences in ways that may allow the whole to be greater than the sum of the parts. But wait, there’s more!
First, however, let me add in a recent discovery: I was alerted to a new form of app for the iPad, a combination of a comic book and interactive games. While this particular instance, Imaginary Range, is purely entertainment focused, I was intrigued by the approximation of an experience I’ve been interested in co-opting for learning purposes. I’ve long been an advocate of the comic strip format (aka manga or graphic novels) as a communication tool because of the ability to add meta-cognitive annotation (thought bubbles), strip away unnecessary contextual details, low bandwidth requirements, trans-cultural familiarity and more. The ability to use a powerful story with meaningful interactions is pretty intriguing, capitalizing on what we’re talking about.
The extra dimension to cap off this trifecta is to add in the social element: so learners can reflect on their experience compared to others, or even better, collaborate. When we can have tablets providing ways for learners to interact with content, each other, and a learning mentor, we have a potentially transformative environment. And that’s worth getting involved with.
eLearning Guild Mobile Learning Research Report now available
I’ve had my head down on a couple of projects, but I can now announce one of them: the eLearning Guild’s Mobile Learning Research Report is now available. This is a timely release to help set the context for their upcoming mLearnCon mlearning conference. (And, yes, I’m speaking, running a pre-conference workshop, all the usual. :)
In it, I review the latest trends in the mobile market, and then synthesize the results of the Guild’s member surveys. Here’s the marketing blurb:
Mobile learning is not just a fad. It is instead a transformative opportunity both for learning, and the learning organization. Mobile learning means both augmenting formal learning, and moving to performance support, informal, and social learning as well. If you have not yet done so, it is now both possible and desirable to put in place a mobile experiment to create an mLearning strategy articulated with the overall learning, performance, and technology strategy.
The actual implementation of mLearning is growing faster in some capabilities than others. According to eLearning Guild research data collected from thousands of members worldwide, the use of mLearning for social networking and communication is more prevalent than it is for the development of custom applications, with 38.1% of organizations either implementing, designing, or building the business case for social networking and only 25.7% for custom application development. Of those who have conducted an mLearning implementation, 50% are seeing positive returns.
In this report, author Clark Quinn begins his examination of mobile learning by establishing a foundation with some context and a discussion of devices and major categories of application. Clark then analyzes eLearning Guild research data about how people are currently using mobile, and discusses implementation issues, before taking a look to the future.
The report is free for all paid members of the eLearning Guild, with plenty of other benefits. Check it out.
Alternate Pedagogies and Experiences
In writing about mobile for higher education, other than meeting learner administrative and information needs, I obviously focused more on the formal learning roles mobile devices could facilitate. And one of the things that has been of interest to me is looking differently at pedagogies.
Traditional
In the traditional view, we activate the learner’s interest, we present them with the concept, we provide examples, we have them practice (with feedback), and we conclude the learning experience. I think this makes sense cognitively, but it doesn’t make sense when we start considering the learner’s emotional side. Unless we open up the learner emotionally, I reckon the rest of the effort won’t stick. We can do this with the intro, but there are other approaches.
Navigable/adaptive
For one, we don’t need to stick to the traditional order. At least with elearning, we can make the order navigable, allowing the learner to choose what they want to see. We took that approach when we developed a course on speaking to the media (which had some other innovations too) back around 1997. It was also seen at UNext. We provided a ‘follow the bouncing ball’ path for uncertain learners, but anecdotally we found half the audiences, presumably confident self-learners, explored in other approaches than the recommended approach.
This approach also provides the necessary structure to support adaptive systems, which can present different objects at different times. We used this approach when developing the Intellectricityâ„¢ system that adapted the learning experience based upon learner characteristics.
Problem-based
The approach I typically refer to as the problem-based approach (similar approaches are seen in case-based, project-based, and service learning) essentially puts the problem, an overarching practice, first. By showing the learner the type of problem this learning experience will help you address, you build in the emotional side. Now they’re understanding why this is important, and are motivated to go explore the concept, examples, and perhaps do trial practices before it matters. This is the pedagogy that drives the interest in serious games, embedding meaningful practice in a compelling context.
The problem-based approach more closely mimics the motivation learners will feel when faced with real performance contexts, and makes the content more meaningful. Engaging the learner in meaningful practice provides experience for reflection, and shifts the instructor to be a facilitator and guide instead of a content presenter.
The point, of course, is to think more broadly about the learning experience, tapping into intrinsic motivation, whether for learning or for the problem, and start embedding what we know about the emotional side of learning into the learning experience.