Learnlets

Snake Oil and (April) Fools

4 April 2011 by Clark 4 Comments

For April Fool’s of this year, we (the Internet Time Alliance, with large credit to Jane and Harold) posted a message on our site:

The Internet Time Alliance (ITA) has spent much of the past year on a mission.

We have located and assembled a huge collection of informal learning content.

Today we’re publishing it and offering a free subscription to all individuals as well as corporate rates.

“Without content there is no learning. Repositories of informal learning content
such as this will underpin much of the social and informal learning over the
next 5 years.”
Lois Kean, CLO, Polar Foil LLC*

Sign up today for the ITA Informal Learning Collection!

Clicking the link took you to another page where we explained:

The Ultimate Content Collection for All Your Informal Learning Needs!*

*Nothing but snake oil here, folks.

The Internet Time Alliance can help you navigate the snake oil and work smarter with Informal and Social Learning. Any time after April Fool‘s Day, that is

While the ad was a joke, the issue is real: folks can still believe that there’s no learning without formal content. That may be true for novices, but those who know what they’re doing and what they need can very well learn from resources they find on their own, and from each other!

The content may be out there, or it may have to be co-created, but it can’t be in the hands of formal designers and it can’t all be found in the corporate resources. As things get more complex and faster and more unique, the need for access to others and the rich resources of the internet are a bare minimum. There’s a role for formal learning and formal content (e.g. performance support), but supporting learners to have access to a much richer suite of resources than an L&D team can design can really empower people. Moreover, having them help each other and create new understandings and knowledge is the key to making progress in this new, faster, world.

We’re seeing companies succeed with these approaches, in small instances and across the organization. It’s not that there isn’t a role for formal content, it’s just that, as my colleague Charles Jennings talks about, the 70:20:10 rule (individuals tag valuable learning as coming 70% from the workplace, 20% from mentoring/coaching, and only 10% from formal leaning) suggests that our investments in effort and support are not matched to the value of the contribution.

You do want to go beyond just formal learning. It may seem we go over the top, but I’ve found that if you want to get people to Y, you have to talk about 2Y to have any chance. If you just talk about Y, you’ll get them to .5Y. And we really believe that the benefits – a more positive workplace, a more nimble organization, greater innovation and problem-solving – significantly outweigh the relatively low costs.

So, what’s it going to be, snake oil or social and informal learning?

*Lois Kean is an anagram of SnakeOil and Polar Foil is an anagram of April Fool

Pedagogical Cycle

30 March 2011 by Clark Leave a Comment

In a recent post, I was trying to communicate the benefits of social learning: the additional processing that occurs while negotiating a shared understanding. Interestingly, the diagram I designed to accompany the post and communicate the concept was not well received. C’est la vie. As this was to be the representation on a slide talking about social learning, I was forced to come up with another way to communicate the concept. Instead of focusing on exactly the same concept, I decided to take another tack. The idea I’m communicating is how our model of learning has changed.

The first organized learning was really accomplished through apprenticeship: an individual would come to a task developing some artifact or performing some task, and would perform some minimal component in the context of the overall work. As we developed more abstract concepts, we moved to a dialog, where individuals would express their understanding, and others would engage in a conversation until agreement (even to disagree) was reached. Then, for efficiency reasons, we moved to a classroom model, where one individual would propose knowledge and the others would recite it.

The latter model has some problems, not least that the little learning would dissipate quickly, as it was typically knowledge focused and only applied in abstract ways. Such learning situations can be well-done, but only to the extent that there are meaningful tasks and learners are supported in accomplishing those tasks.

In other words, we move back to the apprenticeship model. Learning research has largely converged on a model that say we learn best when we are motivated and applying our knowledge to solve problems we realize are important, and are supported both with information resources and scaffolding, and reflection is guided around that performance. My favorite model is Collins & Brown’s Cognitive Apprenticeship, influenced by anthropological work and abstracting across several great pieces of work to create an integrated approach that still seems relevant.

In short, we’re looking backwards to how we learned naturally and bypassing a learning approach that is driven more by industrial and agricultural constraints than cognitive and social ones. We can certainly use technology to augment this approach, and we’re more aware of the nuances, but in taking a step back we’re taking a major step forward. How about that!

Thinking through social learning

24 March 2011 by Clark 5 Comments

In preparation for our webinar with Citrix and the eLearning Guild, I’ve been thinking through the benefits of learning socially, specifically for formal learning. I’ve articulated before that I think it’s about processing, but I like to try to capture my thinking in a graphic, and hadn’t done so before. I did so now, and thought I’d share it.

In this representation, an individual, in creating an output such as a blogpost or a response to a discussion question in a forum, or a response to an assignment, has to do some reasonably robust processing. Typically, by going from thought to an external representation, you find that you’ve got some gaps and have to fix them. Eventually, however, you come up with what you think is right. And you submit it, say, in formal learning, and eventually may get feedback from an instructor.

But consider where you share that representation, and someone else comments in a way that indicates a different perspective, say in the discussion forum or to your post; then you may have to rethink what you said in light of that alternate viewpoint. You have to do some additional processing.

Then go further: suppose that a team has to come with a convergent answer. Then you might get a number of cycles of expressed viewpoints, additional processing (by all members of the team), sufficient to come to an agreed-upon view. Then you have lots of alternate ideas, and re-processing going on. That, to me, is the power of social learning. In that process of negotiation, you are thinking again and again about a topic, let alone with additional input and viewpoints.

Now, there are lots of nuances that have to go into this, such as designing an assignment that has enough ambiguity or challenge to have sufficient variety in viewpoint, but not so much as to lead to an inability to eventually agree.

This, of course, also is what happens in informal learning, if we end up discussing a problem to solve, or even just blog our thoughts and get comments. As Jay Cross says, the most powerful learning technology is conversation. It’s even better, however, if there’s a resulting artifact, a representation that captures the understanding, as the externality reduces the opportunity for misinterpretation.

So, does this representation make sense to you?

Pseudoteaching

17 March 2011 by Clark 4 Comments

As a nice complement to my last post on Understanding by Design, comes this piece on Pseudoteaching that Donald Taylor (who runs the excellent UK Learning Technologies conference) pointed out. The premise is that much teaching that appears good to both the instructor and observers is really ineffective. And this is instructive in a couple of ways.

First, it’s easy to believe that if you’re preparing, and presenting eloquently, you are communicating. And that isn’t necessarily so. For learning to stick, there are several necessary components, the most important being that the learner needs to be engaged in meaningful activity. That’s not likely the case in the classroom where learners are in your control. Now, if you’re giving meaningful assignments before the lecture, and then extending the learning afterward, you have a chance. Otherwise, the content is likely to fall on deaf ears.

And, to fend off the hoary old canard about why do we attend conferences then (and I give a lot of talks): if people are doing meaningful activity, like their jobs, then a presentation related to their work can serve as a valuable reflection opportunity. So, speaking to practitioners makes sense: it can provide new insights, inspiration, and more. But not for learners who don’t have meaningful activity and aligned content resources.

Which brings me to the second point, you need to start with thinking about what you want learners to be able to do after the learning experience, and then align assessment and learning materials accordingly. Like the post author, I too probably was “doin’ a Lewin” when I first started lecturing, but I coupled it with meaningful and challenging assignments. And not as well as I now would do, but I improved over time and if I ever get a chance to be an instructor again, I will continue to improve (I’ve got some courses or a program I’d love to run).

It’s real easy to delude ourselves that good production equals good learning, but the evidence is to the contrary. Similarly, it’s easy to convince ourselves that we’ve given the learners the necessary information. That doesn’t work either. You’ve got to understand learning, formally or intuitively (and the latter is not the way to bet), and align the elements to succeed.

That’s if a significant skill-shift is what’s needed, and there are lots of times a course isn’t the answer. But when it is, get it right. Please. We really can’t afford to waste money and time like it is all too easy to do.

Understanding by Design

16 March 2011 by Clark 1 Comment

I have long advocated, in consonance with sound learning principles, that in a good design process works backwards:

start with the desired outcomes as capabilities,
align assessment to the outcomes,
and then design the learning experience to achieve those outcomes.

This shouldn’t be new. Recently, I was pointed towards Wiggins & McTighe’s Understanding by Design, which turns out to be a curricular approach predicated on just such lines. I am of mixed feelings.

First, I am thrilled to see someone in formal education talking about looking at more meaningful outcomes, particularly aimed at “clarify learning goals, devise revealing assessments of student understanding, and craft effective and engaging learning activities”. This is something I’ve been trying to argue for in my work with formal education, e.g. with publishers, schools, and more. It’s a more enlightened approach to design.

On the other hand, it’s sort of like my reaction when we investigated what should be covered in continuing medical education and were told that we should proselytize evidence-based medicine: “what have they been doing ’til now?!?!” I continue to be amazed at how folks go about things in ways that do not reflect what we understand about doing things well. And what I’ve seen of their 6 Facets of Understanding seem a bit vague (and mea culpa, I have not read their thorough exposition, but it seems like YAT, Yet Another Taxonomy), though I’m perfectly willing to be wrong about that.

Interestingly, they apparently do not recommend applying this approach to individual lesson plans, and instead constrain it to curriculum level goals. I can see how the focus should be on the goal, not the time-frame, and I personally believe in spreading out learning over a longer period of time.

It’s nice to have another label to attach to good design, so I laud the initiative, and hope we can get more good design, and more understanding, in our schools and everywhere else.

On Homework

15 March 2011 by Clark 6 Comments

In the ‘getting it off my chest’ department:

I gave a talk to a national society last week on the future of learning. An off-hand comment on ‘homework’ got more interest than I expected. My point was that there are limits to reactivation. However, given the battles I know so many are having with schools on homework, and we too, some thoughts.

The underlying mechanism, roughly, for learning is associations between related neurons (and, at a bigger scale into patterns). However, our brains saturate in their ability to associate new information. Some activation a day is about all a brain can take. Re-activating is key, over time. That is, the next day, and the next. And, of course, the feedback should come quickly after the effort (not the next day). And, let’s be real: some kids need more practice than others. Why aren’t we adapting it? And are we really rewarding achievement? In elementary school, my first-born noticed that by being smart, he got more work than the other kids with the ‘stretch’ assignments, and wondered why being smart was punished!

So, in theory, a light bit of homework on a topic that was first visited in prior days might make sense. So you see it on Monday in class, say, and then visit it again in homework. Note that reactivating it in class the next day in a slightly more complex problem is better. And, as, John Taylor Gatto has hypothesized, everything we need to learn in K6 really ought to take only 100 hours to learn, if the kids are motivated. With the feedback coming the next day, it will also be harder for the learner to be able to make the connection. This post I found while verifying the 100 hour claim is fascinating on the amount of time really necessary.

However, that’s not what we see. I’ve seen my kids complaining about trying to solve more of the same problems they saw in school that day. That’s not going to help. And it’s too much. If every teacher wants to get an hour out of them, they’d be overloaded with homework. This is middleschool, but the same problem manifests in K6, and I’m only dreading what comes next.

And then we get the ‘coloring’ assignments. I’m sure the argument is something along the lines of ‘by seeing the information represented as they color, they’ll remember it’. Sorry, no. If they’re not applying the information, or extrapolating from it, or personalizing it, processing it, it’s not going to lead to anything but prettier classrooms for open house. I’m sorry, but don’t spoil my child’s youth to pretty up your room. And it’s very clear that, at least in our school, largely the mothers are doing it.

And then there is the weekend homework. I’m sorry, but I do believe kids are entitled to a life, or at least most of one. Why have work hanging over them on the weekend? Now, if you give them long term projects and it replaces some homework, and they decide to put it off ’til the weekend, well, I suppose that’s ok, because I think interesting overarching projects are valuable (and bring in important meta-skills). So then there’s the homework assigned on Friday that’s due on Tuesday, so supposedly you can get it done on Monday so it’s not really homework, but who do you think you’re fooling?

So, my first-born got hammered with homework the first year of middle school. Worse, it was idiosyncratic; so it was luck of the draw whether your kid got a teacher who assigned lots of homework. My school admitted that while the math teachers were pretty much in synch, the science department had great variability, and didn’t explicitly admit that they can’t do anything about it (*cough* tenure *cough*). This had been going on, but now my better half had me behind her as she rallied the other mom’s into a persistent force against what was happening. There’s now a homework policy, which still gets violated (oh, this is a honors class at highschool level, so we have to assign weekend homework). Nope, sorry, don’t buy it.

My second has not been hammered by the first year of homework (luck of the draw, the science teacher who doesn’t believe in homework), and hasn’t had her love of schooling squelched. The first, however, has had to have serious support by us to not turn off completely. I really believe that the middle school (a good one) has a belief that the only way to deal with all these coddled elementary school students is to hammer them the first year. Frankly, I’m not convinced that most kids are ready for middle school in 6th grade. But I’m getting away from my point and getting personal…

Some reactivation, within limits of the overall load can’t keep kids tied to desks hours after school’s out, can be understandable, but I’m inclined to believe that it’s not really that necessary. If we tap into motivation, we can accelerate learning and get more utility out of school. Doing the same problems at night, overloading from too many classes, and weekend homework don’t really provide enough advantage to justify such assignments.

I’m not sure whether they’re teaching the principles of homework to teaching students, and whether there’s any education of existing teachers from whatever path, but we’ve got to get it right. If Finland can get by minimal homework, I reckon we can too.

Game Implications

14 March 2011 by Clark Leave a Comment

Eileen Clegg asked me some questions as part of a report she’s doing for the Future of Talent Institute.

1. How do you think gaming will change the landscape for people in charge of recruiting, developing and retaining top talent?

Gaming is an optimized performance environment, with all that entails. First, a game can both help individuals understand what a particular company is about (e.g. Sun’s games to introduce their business units), and what the job is like (e.g. America’s Army). It can also serve as a filter or aptitude test, where the better the individual performs, the better a candidate they’re likely to be. There are a couple of armed/military services around the world that have challenging games to test aptitude (a Scandinavian navy, and the British SAS, if memory serves).

Then, once an employee is onboard, games are the best practice environment next to real world mentored practice, and the latter doesn’t scale well (real practice can be expensive, both to develop and as a consequence of failure; individual mentors are similarly expensive). You can build contextually immersive practice with the depth to achieve mastery. The effort to convey what the job is like and to really develop people (instead of just knowledge dump) is a good incentive to employees to stick with the company, I believe.

Overall, I think that organizations that can take advantage of gaming to provide meaningful practice and assessment are leveraging the most powerful formal learning tool available and will have the competitive advantage.

2. What do you think is “least understood” about gaming right now?

Where do I start? Two things top my list.

First, is the belief that gaming is just ‘tarted-up quiz shows’, when it’s really truly challenging and effective learning practice.

Second, that it has to cost millions of dollars, when instead games can be done on reasonable budgets to meet many organizational needs.

The challenge is in the design, not the development costs, and if you get the design right the development may be quite affordable and the outcomes very effective.

3. What is the best quote from your new book to help us understand the gameification of the corporate world?

“The step from convenience to context-specific, however, provides a new opportunity. A mobile-specific type of game, augmented reality games (or ARGS), has the activity layered on top of real life, taking advantage of when and where you are to drive interaction.”…this form of learning has the potential to be more than effective, but to be truly transformational, and you should be primed to look for opportunities to take the learning experience to the next ‘level’.”

BTW, I did write augmented reality, and many would argue that I mean ‘alternate reality games’, and I do think those have wild potential as well, but here I am talking about context-specific games, and that would be augmented reality.

« Previous Page