Learnlets

During a summer internship at NASA, many years ago, I met a researcher who was conceptualizing the interface property of ‘explorability’. I can’t claim that I accurately can communicate the nuances of Jean-Marc Robert‘s model, but I was intrigued with the notion. The idea that interfaces could differ on the extent that they supported experimentation and subsequent comprehension seemed valuable. The requisite property would be predictability, requiring consistency, and learnable interfaces would empower users.

A related concept is Andi diSessa‘s ‘incremental advantage’, where he proposed that interfaces should elegantly allow the investment by a user to learn more to provide more power. So his Boxer software environment supported gradual addition of concepts to yield more computational capability. The underlying notion of ‘the more you learn, the   more you can do’ again seems like a user-empowering concept.

Fast-forward a few years, and as a newly-minted academic using HyperCard for student interface design projects, I recognized that the notion of buttons, fields, and backgrounds provided a reasonable implementation of the ideas of explorability and incremental advantage. I proposed that the key idea was supporting correct inferences about how to make things happen. Interestingly, the English-like nature of HyperTalk supported both some correct and some incorrect inferences about making more complex logic.

As a side note, a combination between software design supporting a strong conceptual model, and software training that builds the model (not rote procedures), strikes me as a learning approach that is far more powerful but seldom seen.   Similarly for other learning outcomes, models are powerful thinking tools that we do not leverage sufficiently.

The reason I mention this is two-fold; I want to bring this concept to light, and to build on it. As I mentioned before, I think we need to make editable environments to support collaborative tool building. This will become more important, going forward, for reasons that I intend to elaborate across two subsequent posts. Stay tuned!

The Learning Circuits Blog Big Question of the Month is “Does the discussion of “how the brain learns” impact your eLearning design?”   My answer is in several parts.

The short answer is “yes”, of course, because my PhD is in Cognitive Psychology (really, applied cognitive science), and I’ve looked at cognitive learning, behavioral learning, social constructivist learning, connectionist learning, even machine learning, looking for guidance about how to design better learning experiences.   And there is good guidance.   However, most of it comes from research on learning, not from neuroscience.

The longer answer has some caveats.   Some of the so-called brain science ranges from misguided to outright misleading.   Some of the ‘learning styles’ materials claim to be based in brain structure, but the evidence is suspect at best.   Similarly, some of the inferences from neural structures are taken inappropriately.   There’s quite a bit of excitement, and fortunately some light amidst the heat and smoke.   In short, there’s a lot of misinformation out there.

At the end of the day, the best guidance is still the combination of empirical results from research on how we learn, a ‘design research’ approach with iterative testing, and some inspiration in lieu of what still needs to be tested (e.g. engagement).   I think that we know a lot about designing effective learning, that is based in how our brains work, but few implications from the physiology of the brain.   As others have said, the implications at one layer of ‘architecture’ don’t necessarily imply higher levels of phenomena.   We’ve lots to learn yet about our brains.

As with so many other ‘snake oil’ issues, like multigenerational differences, learning styles, digital natives, etc, brain-based learning appears to be trying to sell you a program rather than a solution. Look for good research, not good marketing.   Caveat emptor!

Many years ago, I responded to a broad query by Jefferey Bonar asking what was the interface metaphor we really wanted.   I responded something to the effect of wanting ‘magic’.     This was in the early days of the desktop metaphor, and we were already looking to go beyond, and I was looking for the ultimate metaphor of control.

Now I didn’t mean magic in the ‘legerdemain’, sleight-of-hand type of thing, nor the magic I feel when sitting on the deck on a warm summer evening with my family, but instead the classic form with incantations, artifacts, etc. What I really wanted was to be empowered, and the best metaphor for total power I can imagine is having the ability to bring things into being, to have questions answered, to control the world with mere gestures and commands. And yet, even that has to have some structure.   As Clay Kallam wrote in a recent column comparing two recent fantasy books:

“The plot of both books relies heavily on the magic, but Coe is careful to explain how his works and its limitations and impact.   Drake seems to just call on some whenever it suits him, and nothing is explained.”

So, what I meant was that there was rigor underlying the metaphor of magic, rigor that roughly parallels the structures of programming languages.   For example, Rob Moser (my PhD student) prototyped a game for his thesis that taught programming via learning to cast magic spells in a fantasy world.   My vision was that in any place you wanted to, you could learn the underlying magic (language) to accomplish what you wanted, but if you didn’t, you’d be able to buy artifacts (e.g. wands, crystal balls, etc) that did specific things that you wanted without having to program.

The reason I mention this, before you think I’m going off with the fairies and unicorns, is that there are reasons to start thinking about magic.   As Arthur C. Clarke has said:

Any truly advanced technology is indistinguisable from magic.

And I really think we’re there. That is, our technology has advanced to the point that the technology is no longer a barrier.   We can truly bring any information, any person (at least virtually), anywhere we want.   We can augment our world with information to make us substantially more effective: we can talk through ‘mirrors’ (video portals) to others, actually seeing them; we can bring up ‘demons’ (agents) to go find information for us, we can send out commands to make things happen at a distance, we can unveil previously hidden information about the environment to start making conceptual links between there and our understanding to make us smarter.

There’s more required, such as Andi diSessa’s “incremental advantage”, and more accessible ways to specify our intentions, but with really powerful metaphors emerging (styles is something everyone should get their minds around), with gestural interfaces, and the ability to control games with our bodies, and with augmented reality aka Heads-Up Displays for civilians, we’ve got the tools.   What we need is the perspectives and the will.

This is important from the point of view of designing new solutions.   Years ago, when I taught interface design, I told my students that one of the pieces in their exploration of the design space should be to imagine what they would do when they had ‘magic’.   To be more specific, once you’ve gathered the requirements, before you see what others have done and start limiting yourself to pragmatics, imagine what you’d do with no limitations (ok, except mind-reading, I’m just not going there).   Given that among our cognitive architectural pre-dispositions is to prematurely converge on solutions, we need lateral input.   By exploring the possibilities space in a more unhampered way, we might come across a solution that’s inspired, not tired, and revolutionary, not evolutionary.

This, however, is not just interface design, but specifically learning and performance support design.   What would you do if you had magic to help meet your learning and performance needs?   Because you have it.   Really.

So think magically, not in the trivial sense, but in the sense that we have awesome powers at our command.   The limitations are no longer the technology, the limits are between our ears (and, occasionally, in our wallets or will).   Go forth and empower!