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Clark Quinn’s Learnings about Learning

7 questions from the University of Wisconsin-Stout ID Program

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The program at the University of Wisconsin-Stout Online Professional Development’s Instructional Design program regularly asks someone to answer a series of questions from their students. I think these sorts of efforts are worthwhile to see a variety of different ideas, and consequently I agreed. Here’re the questions and my answers as presented to the students:

Learning Design Evangelist Clark Quinn Answers Questions
June 2010

1. Are there any critical gaps in knowledge that you frequently encounter in the ID industry?

Clark:

Several: The first is folks who only know the surface level of ID, not understanding the nuances of the components of learning (examples, concepts, etc), and consequently creating ineffective designs without even being aware. This is, of course, not the fault of those who’ve taken formal training, but many designers are transported from face-to-face training without adequate presentation.A related problem is the focus on the ‘event’ model, where learning is a massed event, which we know is one of the least effective mechanisms to lead to long-term retention.

Another gap is a focus on the course, without taking a step back and analyzing whether the performance gap is caused by attitude, motivation or other issues besides skills and knowledge. The Human Performance Technology approach (ala ISPI) is a necessary analysis before ADDIE, but it’s too infrequently seen.

The last is the lack of consideration of the emotional (read: affective and conative) side of instructional design. Most ID only focuses on the cognitive side, and despite the efforts of folks like John Keller, Michael Allen, and Cathy Moore, among others, we’re not seeing sufficient consideration of engagement.

2. In a world where technology changes daily, do you feel we place too much emphasis on the latest and greatest delivery method? Do you foresee a future where higher education is delivered primarily through distance learning?

Clark:

Yes, we do see ‘crushes’ on the latest technology, whereas we should be focusing on looking at the key affordances and matching technologies appropriately to need. I’m a strong proponent of the potential of new technologies to create new opportunities, but very much first focused on the learning outcomes we need to achieve. Which is why I have complicated feelings about the future of higher ed. In a time of increasing change, I think that the new role of higher education will increasingly be to develop the ability to learn. The domain will be a vehicle, but not the end goal. Which could be largely independent of place, but I liked the old role of new and independent mentorship beyond family and community, and always felt that there was a socializing role that university provides. I’m not quite sure how that could play out via technology mediation, but I do note the increasing role of social media.

3. Is there an elearning authoring tool you would endorse?

Clark:

Paper and pencil. Seriously. I wrote many years ago of a design heuristic, the double double P’s: postpone programming, and prefer paper. An associated mantra of mine is “if you get the design right, there are lots of ways to implement it; if you don’t get the design right, it doesn’t matter how you implement it”. Consequently, I prefer the cheapest forms of prototyping, and rapid cycles of iteration, and you can do a lot with post-it notes (e.g. the Pictive technique from interface design).

4. What impact, if any, do you think that the shortened attention span habits dictated by most social media will have on e-learning?

Clark:

I think that you should be very careful about media-manufactured trends. Our wetware hasn’t changed, just our tolerance of certain behaviors. We’ve always had short attention spans, it’s just that our schooling forced us to mask it. We’ve also been quite capable of multi-tasking (ask any single parent), but it does provide a detriment to performance in each task, or cause the task to take longer. (Other seriously misconstrued ideas include digital natives, learning styles, and generational differences).

I think we should look to learning that optimizes what’s known about how we learn (and see Daniel WIllingham for a very apt critique of brain-based learning), which includes smaller chunks over a longer period of time. That’s just one component of a more enlightened learning experience predicated on a longer-term relationship with a learner.

5. Is there current research that shows whether employers view fully online degrees programs any different than a traditional degree program? Do employers care that an applicant may have not attended any face to face classes while earning an advanced degree?

Clark:

Frankly, this is research I haven’t really tracked. I do know recent research shows that online is better than face-to-face, but most likely due to quality of design (instructors aren’t necessarily experts in learning design, sadly) than media.

6. What skills are critical to the survival of a new ID professional? What skills must be focused upon in the first three critical years of business?

Clark:

The skills that are necessary are much more pragmatic than conceptual. While I’d love to say “knowledge of learning theory”, and “enlightened design”, I think in the initial stages proper time/project management will probably pay off more immediately. Also, the ability to know what rules to break and when. That said, I think you absolutely need the domain knowledge, but street smarts are equally valuable.

However, the core one is the ability to learn effectively and efficiently. I argue that the best investment a business could make is not to take learning skills for granted but document them, assess them, and develop them. Personally, I’ll say the same: the best investment you can make is in your ability to learn continuously, eagerly, even joyously.

7. What areas of growth do you see in the ID market?

Clark:

With lots of caveats, because I’m involved in many:

Right now I’m seeing growth in the social learning space. Understanding and taking advantage of social learning is trendy, but offers the potential for real learning outcomes as well. Naturally, the only problem is separating the snake oil from the real value. My involvement in the Internet Time Alliance is indicative of my beliefs of the importance.

I think the whole ‘cloud’/web-based delivery area is seeing some interesting growth too, with everything from rich internet applications to collaborative authoring. The opportunities of web 3.0 and semantic technologies are still a ways off, but I think the time is right to start laying the foundations (caveat, I generally find I’m several years ahead of the market in predicting when the time is ripe).

An area that I’m seeing a small uptick in is engagement, fortunately, the use of games and scenarios. Having a book out on the topic makes it gratifying to see the growth finally taking off.

And mobile is finally taking off! Having just left the first biz-focused mobile learning conference, I was thrilled to see the amount of excitement and progress. (Snake oil disclaimer: I’ve been on the stump for years, and finally have a book coming out on the topic. :)

Wizardly Collaboration and HyperCard

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I was talking to my colleague Harold Jarche the other day about the changes in work needs and it triggered a thought. Normally, when we talk about performance support and collaboration, we think of creating job aids. Yet I believe that, increasingly, interactive performance support will be more valuable in generating meaningful outcomes. It occurred to me that there was a missed opportunity: editable wizards.

Now, when I talk about wizards, I mean software tools that interact with us to ask some questions and then can use that information to do complex things for us like filling out our taxes or configure our email. This is fine for things that are static, but increasingly, things are dynamic. The question then becomes how we make more flexible, less brittle, tools.

In content, we are using wikis as tools that are open for collaborative updating. Wikipedia of course being the best known example. These are powerful ways for a community to keep a body of knowledge up to date. Can we have an intersection?

The idea that occurred to me was to have collaborative wizards; wizards written in a simple but reasonably powerful language that are open for editing. Rather than Wikzard, I thought I’d call it a Wizki (pronounced “whisky”, of course :).

Admittedly, having a simple but powerful language is non-trivial, but then I was reminded of HyperCard (which several of us reminisced about fondly just a short while ago). HyperCard was a simple environment to build applications in, with the property of ‘incremental advantage‘ that Andi diSessa touted years ago. Imagine having a collaborative HyperCard! It could be done.

Of course, there are other simple programming environments (Scratch comes to mind), but we really need a simple (and cross-platform!) environment to develop applications again, and moreover a collaborative one is the next logical step in user-generated content.

I reckon it is past time to develop passive content, and start sharing interactions. What do you say?

I’ve been podcasted!

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Rob Penn, CEO of SuddenlySmart (makers of SmartBuilder, one of the new breed of authoring tools), interviewed me last fall about engaging learning: game design, simulations, etc.   It followed one by Professor Allison Rossett of SDSU (also available at the site).

I always find it hard to listen to myself (my voice sounds much better in my head :), and the audio is a little murky, but I hit the usual important notes about focusing on decisions that learners need to be able to make, getting challenge right, capturing misconceptions, and more.

Rob also gets me to discriminate between simulations, scenarios, and games (simulations are just models, scenarios have an initial state and a goal state learners should get to, you can tune a scenario into a game), and I also elaborate how you go from multiple choice, through branching scenarios, to full simulation driven engines (jumping off from Rob’s question instead of first answering it, mea culpa!).

Feedback welcome!

Mobile Affordances

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It occurred to me for several reason to think about mobile from the perspective of affordances.   I’d done this before for virtual worlds, and it only seems right to do the same for mobile learning. So off to Graffle I went…

The core is portable processing power that is synced back into the environment.   On top of that, we can have ubiquitous connectivity, we can connect to sensors that can recognize the world (e.g. cameras) and our context (e.g. GPS), and we can design capabilities that provide us content and computations power.

From those, we can link the content presentation with connectivity to communicate with others, take that capture and reflect upon it or share with others for their support and mentorship, we can be connected with people in context for live support, and we can layer content upon the context as augmented reality.

These capabilities can be layered. So using interactive content could be mobile games.   When linked with augmented reality, we can start having alternate reality games.

This is a first cut, so I welcome feedback.   What am I confounding? What am I missing?

Mobile as Main Mode

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As I was booking my travel to San Diego for the eLearning Guild’s mLearning conference, mLearnCon (June 15-17), I thought about a conference focusing on mobile learning versus the regular, full, elearning conference or even a full training conference (congrats to Training magazine pulling a phoenix).   And I wondered how much this is a niche thing versus the whole deal.

I'm speaking badgeNow, I don’t think all of everything needs to be pulled through a mobile device, but the realization I had is that these devices are going to be increasingly ubiquitous, increasingly powerful, and consequently will be the go-to way individuals will augment their ability to work. Similarly, increasingly, workers will be mobile.   Combining the two, it may be that support will be expected first on the personal device!   While the nature of the way the device will be used will differ, desktops for long periods of time, mobile devices for short access, the way most ‘support’ of tasks will occur will be via mobile devices.

That is, people will use their mobile devices to contact colleagues, look for answers, access materials and tools ‘in the moment’.   The benefits of desktops will be tools to do knowledge work, and there will be needs for information access, and colleague access, and collaboration, but increasingly we may want that when and where we want.

I’m thinking mobile could become the default target design, and desktop augments will be possible, versus the other way around.   While you might want a desktop for big design work where screen real estate matters.   For example, I’m designing diagrams on my iPad. I wouldn’t want to do it on my iPhone, but I am glad to take it with me in a smaller form-factor than a laptop.   I may take back and polish on the laptop, but my new performance ecosystem is more distributed.   And that’s the point.

Increasingly, we expect at least some access to our information wherever we are.   (Yes, there are some folks who still eschew a mobile phone. There are people who still avoid a computer, or even electricity!)   Mostly, however, we’re seeing people finding value in augmenting their capabilities digitally.   And so, maybe we increasingly need to view augmentation as the baseline, and dedicated capability as the icing on the cake for specialized work.

This may be too much, but I hope you’re seeing that mobile is more than just a niche phenomenon.   There are real opportunities on the table, and real benefits to be had. I’m surprised that it took so long, frankly, as I figured mobile was closer to ready-for-prime-time than virtual worlds. Now, however, while there are still compatibility problems, mobile really is ready to rock. Are you?

Apple missing the small picture

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I’ve previously discussed the fight between Apple and Adobe about Flash (e.g. here), but I had a realization that I think is important.   What I was talking about before was the potential to create a market place beyond text, graphics, and media, and to start capitalizing on learning interactivity. What was needed was a cross-platform capability.

Which Apple is blocking, for interactivity.

Apple allows cross-platform media players, whether hyperdocs (c.f. Outstart, Hot Lava, and Hybrid Learning) and media (e.g. video and audio formats are playable). What they’re not is cross-platform for interactivity.

Now, I understand that Apple’s rabidly focused on the customer experience (I like the usability), and limiting development to content is a way to essentially guarantee a vibrant experience.   And I don’t care a fig about the claims about ‘openness’, which in both cases are merely a distraction.   Frankly, I haven’t missed Flash on my iPhone or iPad.   I hardly miss it on my browser (I have a Firefox extension that blocks it unless I explicitly open them, and I rarely use it; and I browse a lot)!

What I care about is that, by not supporting cross-platform programs that output code for different operating systems (OS), Apple is hurting a significant portion of the market.

I came to this thought from thinking about how companies should want to go beyond media to the next level. There will be situations where navigable content isn’t enough, and a company will want to provide interactivity, whether it’s a dynamic user order configuration tool, a diagnostic tool, or a learning simulation.   There are times when content or a web-form just won’t cut it.

Big companies can probably afford dedicated programming to make these apps come to life on more than one platform: Windows Mobile, WebOS, Blackberry OS, Android, and iPhone OS (they need a name for their mobile OS now that the iPad’s around: MacOSMobile?), but others won’t.

What are small to medium sized companies supposed to do? They’d like to support their mobile workers with smartphones regardless of OS, but when they’re that 1-few person shop, they aren’t going to have the development resources.   They might have a great idea for an app, and they probably have or can get a Flash programmer, but won’t have the capabilities to develop separately across platform. And no one’s convinced me that HTML 5 is going to bring the capability to even build Quest, let alone a training game with characteristics like Tips on Tap.

Worse, how about not-for-profits, or the education sector?   How are these small organizations, with limited budgets, supposed to expand the markets?   How can anyone develop an ability to transcend the current stranglehold of publishers on learning content?

Yes, the cross-platform developer might not carry the latest and greatest features of the OS forward, but they’re meeting real needs.   There are the ‘for market’ applications, and the pure content plays, but there’s a middle ground that is going to increasingly comprehend the potential, but be shut out of the opportunity because they can’t develop a meaningful solution for their limited market that just needs capability, not polish.

I get that Flash isn’t efficient.   I note that neither Adobe or Apple talk about their software development practices, so I don’t know whether either use some of the more trusted methods of good code development like agile programming, PSP & TSP, or refactoring, but I think that doesn’t matter.   While I think in the long run it would be to their advantage, I think that even a slow and even slightly buggy version of a needed app would be better received and more useful than none.

I don’t have the email address to lob this at Steve directly like some have, but I’d like to see if he can comprehend and address the issue for the people caught in the situation where delivering interactivity could mean anything from more small-to-medium enterprise success, to meeting a real need in the community, to lifting our children to a higher learning plane, but they don’t have much in the way of resources.

Quite simply, a cross-platform interactivity solution really doesn’t undermine the Apple experience (look at the Mac environment), as it’s likely to be a small market. Heck, brand it as a 2nd Class app or something, but don’t leave out those who might have a real need for an easy cross platform capability.

I’m curious: do you think that the ability to go beyond navigable content to interactivity in a cross-platform way could be useful to a serious amount of people in a lot of little different pockets of activity?