Learnlets

Mobile Learning

26 October 2009 by Clark 5 Comments

In addition to speaking on mobile design with David Metcal at the Mobile Learning Jam at DevLearn, and with Richard Clark on pragmatic mobile development, I’ve got a contract with Pfeiffer for a mobile learning book. Yep, I’m writing another book. Flat learning curve, eh?

Seriously, I’m excited about the opportunity, because I’ve been on the stump for mobile for years, and think the market is right for mobile to finally contribute to organizational performance like I’ve believed since I wrote an article on the topic back in 2001. Consequently, I’m glad that Pfeiffer thinks the time is right for a practical book on the subject.

To make it a practical book, however, I need input. I hope to talk to some of the experts in the field, but I also want to hear from you. What do you think should be covered? What are your concerns? What are your hot-button issues? In short, what would be required to make the mlearning book for those of you charged with designing learning solutions? I don’t want to write a book for the sake of writing a book, I want to provide a useful guide. Please, let me know. Comments here are welcome, or other forms of contact, are welcome as well. Thanks!

Business Significance and Best Principles

23 October 2009 by Clark Leave a Comment

Businesses need research. They may need it at the pure research level, whether following, sponsoring, or conducting pure research, but they definitely need it internally. Regularly, reliably, repeatably. And not just in core products and services, but in internal operations, core things like how organizations learn.

To be clear what I mean, organizations need to explore other ways to do things: new ideas, better processes, new tools. The continual exploration of improvements is what drives innovation, and of course, success. And what I don’t mean is pure research, it’s very much what I think of as action research.

At core, I see it as viewing a particular problem, looking at principles that provide insight how to address it, determining what would be a successful outcome, developing a draft approach, and tuning it until you either determine it’s a success (or not). At the end, you should use your learnings from the exercise to reflect back upon the principles, and refine them and your understanding.

Note that the criteria for success or not does not have to be ‘statistically significant’. When I was leading a team developing an advanced system, I said we needed “business significance”: results good enough to provide us an advantage. These were trained scientists, but they got what I meant.

Also, I’m not talking about looking at ‘best practices’, but instead proposing an approach of best principles. As I’ve previously mentioned, they may not work in your context. Now, if you look at those best practices and abstract out the underlying principles, linking them to the broader body of knowledge, then you’re using them intelligently. While practices are hard to adapt to a new context, principles, having already been abstracted, are easier to apply, and the underlying conceptualization has been performed to draw upon previously existing knowledge.

You may find it useful to bring in some expertise around those best principles to help determine a particular approach. Of course, organizations should be giving their employees time to keep up with the latest thinking, so they’re able to keep track of, and tap into, the best principles going around, but that doesn’t always happen: 60% of those who filled out our CLO survey said that their people didn’t talk about outside trends that shaped their business, and 77% admitted that their people weren’t growing fast enough to keep up with the needs of the business.

The point being, organizations should be regularly looking to principle for the problems and needs they’re facing, making experiments and tuning while testing the outcomes against their business needs, and steadily improving. Even failures, if lessons are learned (and shared) are valuable. Are you exploiting best principles to business significance, and increasing competitiveness?

Publish or Perish

22 October 2009 by Clark Leave a Comment

I wrote an opinion piece over at the eLearn online magazine on the challenges educational publishers face and some ideas about the changes in thinking (and skills) they need. I welcome your thoughts.

The Formal/Informal Continuum

21 October 2009 by Clark 1 Comment

In some client work I’m doing, I’m helping out an effort to establish a Web 2.0, social, informal, [enter your own bizbuzz phrase here] strategy. Despite the hype, this looks to be a real value proposition for them. They’ve serious needs in terms of deep knowledge retiring, acquisitions to integrate into a streamlined operation, and more.

As a consequence, I’ve been talking to folks within this large organization who are embarked on various social media efforts. Some are instituted from different organizations, like under the CIO, and others have emerged from the learning function with the organization. The interesting thing is how the actions are blurring the notion that there are tight boundaries between formal and informal.

In two separate cases, the solution emerged as a realization that the ability of the learning organization to continue to meet the growing rate of change (both in the rate of changes, and the increasing complexity), is not keeping up with the need. There’s also a recognition that empowering the users to take control is a real opportunity. In one case, they’re rolling out a wiki that they’re initially populating, but are already in the process of devolving access and the ability to contribute. In another, they’re making accessible the resources for users to choose what to film or software activity to capture, to make their own little ‘learnlets’ and make available.

Is this performance support? Is this formal learning? Is this social or informal learning? It doesn’t matter! What matters is that these are areas where the learning function can and should contribute! However, it’s blurring the line between control of learning design, responsibility for curriculum, and more. And this isn’t an abrogation of responsibility, but instead a necessary extension of the learning function scope, on principle, and a pragmatic response to a changing world.

There was a separate instance where the KM group was developing a wiki for similar needs, e.g. the growing body of knowledge. However, there were two reasons why they could benefit from the learning function as well. For one, they’re focusing on developing rich semantic underpinnings that will facilitate smart search and rule-driven complex behaviors (read: opportunistic and customized information). This is great and important work (I love this stuff, it’s Web 3.0), but they won’t actually be putting in useful information for another year! There’s an immediate need that needs to be addressed here. The second one comes from when they are ready to move forward; they’ll benefit from the learning function’s experience in both gathering knowledge and in supporting rolling out access to the learners themselves.

There was also a definite recognition that the proliferation of resources was a problem to make accessible, and to govern the lifecycle of, and to message the updates. These are clearly central roles, and require an understanding of learning. And more. I’ve argued that learning designers need to understand information architecture and information design as well, and this only reinforces that message, but, those fields share much foundational knowledge and the extension isn’t onerous.

The bigger picture is to go beyond the individual initiatives, figure out ways to scale the approaches enterprise-wide, to make the breadth of resources systematically organized, and to remove redundancies and inefficiencies. By coordinating the technical sophistication of the Information Services group with the learning function (and other strategic alliances), this organization has a real opportunity to tap into the collective intelligence of it’s employees, and get a handle on the continuous innovation that will be required in the increasingly competitive market. But it only happens by some systematic work to streamline the effort, otherwise there will still be bottlenecks to effectiveness and redundancies to hamper efficiency.

There’s still a role for formal at one end, and I haven’t really exposed the alternative mechanisms supporting the far end of collaboration, but here I wanted to focus on the gray area in the middle and the necessity of not trying to artificially create a boundary.

Game-based meta-cognitive coaching

15 October 2009 by Clark 1 Comment

Many years ago, I read of some work being done by Valerie Shute and Jeffrey Bonar that I later got a chance to actually play a (very small) role in (and even later got to work with Valerie, definitely world-class talent). They had developed three separate tutoring environments (geometric optics, economics, electrical circuits), yet the tutoring engine was essentially the same across all three, not domain specific. The clever thing they were doing was tutoring on exploration skills, varying one variable at a time, making reasonable increments in values to graph trends, etc.

Subsequent to that, I got involved again in games for learning. What naturally occurred to me was that you could put the same sort of meta-cognitive skill tutoring in a game environment, as you have to digitally create all the elements you’d need to track anyways for the game reasons, and it could be a layer on top. While this would work in a single game (and we did put a small version into the Quest game), it would be even better on top of a game engine. I even proposed it as a research project, but the grant reviewers thought that while a good idea, it was too ambitious (ahead of my time and underestimated :).

The reinterest in so-called 21st century skills, the kind Stephen Downes so eloquently calls an Operating System for the Mind, reawakens the opportunity. These skills are manifested in activity, and require an understanding of the activity to be able to infer approaches and provide feedback. In a well-defined arena like a designed game environment, we can know the goals and possible actions, and start looking for patterns of behavior.

Game engines, with their fixed primitives, make it easier to define what goals are and consequently to specify the particular goals and makes looking for patterns more generally definable. Thus, in a game, we can see whether the learners’ exploration is systematic, whether their attempts are as informative as possible, and possibly more.

This is also true of virtual worlds, although only when designed with goals (e.g. from a simulation to a scenario, whether tuned into a game or not). The benefit of a virtual world is, again, the primitives are fixed, simplifying the task of defining goals and actions.

Of course, building particular types of interaction (e.g. social), particular types of clues (e.g. audio versus visual) and looking for patterns can provide deeper opportunities. Really, such performance is initially an assessment (one of the facets of what we were doing on the Intellectricity project was building a learner characteristic assessment as a game), and that assessment can trigger intervention as a consequence. For any malleable skill, we have real opportunities.

Given that much of what is necessary are abilities to research , evaluate the quality of sources, design, experiment, create, and more, these environments are a fascinating opportunity. I’m not in a situation to lead such an initiative, but I still think it’s a worthwhile undertaking. Anyone ‘game’?

Ignoring Informal

14 October 2009 by Clark 4 Comments

I received in the mail an offer for a 3 book set titled Improving Performance in the Workplace. It’s associated with ISPI, and greatly reflects their Human Performance Technology approach, which I generally laud as going beyond instructional design. It’s also by Pfeiffer, who is my own publisher, and they’re pretty good as publishers go. However, I noticed something that really struck me, based upon the work I’ve been doing with my colleagues in the Internet Time Alliance (formerly TogetherLearn).

The first volume is really about assessing needs, and design, and it includes behavioral task analysis and cognitive task analysis, and even talkes about engagement strategies in simulation and gaming, video gaming. The second volume includes performance interventions, and includes elaerning, coaching, knowledge management, and more (as well as things like incentives, culture, EPSS, feedback, etc. The third volume’s on measurement and evaluation.

All this is good: these are important topics, and having a definitive handbook about them is a valuable contribution (and priced equivalently, the whole set is bargain-priced at $400). However, while I don’t have the book to hand to truly evaluate it, it appears that there are some gaps.

In my experience, some issues are not behavioral or cognitive but attitudinal. Consequently, I’d have thought there might be some coverage. There was a chapter in Jonassen’s old Handbook on Research in Ed Tech on the topic, and I’ve derived my own approach from that and some other readings. When they get into tools, they seem to miss virtual worlds, and they seem to have a repeat of the straw-man case against discovery environments (many years ago it was recognized that pure discovery wasn’t the go, and guided discovery was developed). It bugs me that I can’t find the individual authors, but I do recognize the names of one of the editors. But these aren’t the biggest misses, to me.

Overall, there seems to be no awareness of the whole thrust of social and informal learning. Ok, so Jay’s book on Informal Learning is relatively new, and the concrete steps may still be being sorted out, but there’s a lot there. Or perhaps it’s covered in Knowledge Management (after all, Marc Rosenberg’s been deeply involved in ISPI and wrote the Beyond e-Learning book). Yet it seems a bit buried and muddled, and here’s why:

I’m working with a client now, and one of my tasks is surveying how they’re using social media. A group responsible for technical training (and they’re an engineering organization) recognized that they weren’t able to keep up with the increasing quantity and quality of changes that were coming. Rather than do a performance improvement intervention, they realized that another opportunity would be to start putting up information and inviting others to contribute. They put up a wiki, and first maintained it internally, and then gradually devolved some of the responsibility out to their ‘customers’.

The point is, how does that fit into the traditional paradigm? And yet, increasingly, we’re seeing and recommending approaches that go beyond the categories that fit here. I wonder if their metrics include the outputs of enabling innovation. I wonder if their interventions include expertise finders and collaboration tools. I wonder if their analyses include the benefits of ‘presence’.

Times are changing, faster and faster. I think these books would’ve been the ideal thing, maybe 5 years ago. Now, I think they’re emblematic of a training mindset when a larger perspective is needed. These come into play after you’ve identified that a formal approach is needed. They use a phrase of a ‘performance landscape’, but their picture doesn’t seem to include the concepts that Jay includes in his ‘learnscape’ and I as the ‘performance ecosystem’.

Virtual World Affordances, updated

8 October 2009 by Clark Leave a Comment

VWAffordances Corrie Bergeron (@skydadddy) pointed out that I hadn’t really accounted for the ability to create a persona, a representation of yourself via avatar that reflects how you’d like to be perceived. Chuck Hamilton did have it in his list, and I thought it was implicit in the alternative to anonymity, but on reflection, I think it does deserve it’s own affordance, and implications for reputation.

Of course, you’ll have a persona regardless, if you’re present in the world, but the ability to customize one is the unique opportunity.

The question then becomes, how do you use this representation? Caroline Avey (@aveyca) presented a wide variety of uses of virtual worlds that ACS is exploring, and some are really not things that require long term personas, but are instead ways for folks to come together independent of geography for introductions of new products or other events. Similarly, other uses of virtual worlds may be better configured with other combinations of affordances. Different environments have different implementation of the affordances, or the ability to limit the capability of some (ie not have customizable avatars or not support agency) to meet particular event needs.

Understanding your virtual world goals can help determine what affordances are critical, and support your design criteria (and tool choice). That’s my intention, at any rate. I really appreciate feedback that helps me refine the models I develop, advocate, and use. Thoughts and comments always welcome.

Extending Virtual World Affordances

6 October 2009 by Clark 3 Comments

I recently attended the 3DTLC conference, as I reported before. Chuck Hamilton presented on his (IBM’s) take on affordances on virtual worlds. Given that I’ve opined before, I asked for more detail on their take, and he was kind enough to forward to me their definitions. I like what they’ve done, but it led me to try to refine what I see as some confounding (they actually separate several of their 10 into two separate ones), and try to capture what I think are core, what can be enabled, and what then arise from those capabilities.

I start with what I think are the core affordances of virtual worlds, that there’s a 3D world, that you can visit, and that’s digital. From there, I see that you can enable others to be there (social), you can enable action (agency), the world can be kept around (persistent), and it can be made accessible broadly (e.g. through the internet).

If you choose to enable those (and you should, in most cases), you get some emergent properties. Chuck talked about a universal visual language, and you certainly can both tap into, and establish, visual cues. The scale does not have to be real, but can indeed scale down to and up to any size you want, in part or all.

You can choose to be anonymous, but if you don’t and choose to have a representation that is active over time, you can establish a reputation.

By being active, you can also enable practice opportunities such as simulations, scenarios, and games. If agency includes not just interaction, but creation, and you have social, you can have co-creation (one of the most exciting opportunities for informal learning). The persistence of your activity creates the opportunity to capture traces for reflection, e.g. ‘after-action review’.

The fact that it’s digital means it can be augmented with external capability: media, applications, and more. Also, you can be at least geography-independent, if not chronologically-independent.

This is a preliminary stab at trying to trace the initial, potential, and consequently emergent affordances, by no means do I think it’s the definitive answer. Feedback solicited!

The worst of best practices and benchmarking

5 October 2009 by Clark 4 Comments

In a recent post, Jane Bozarth goes to task on ‘best practices’, which I want to elaborate on. In the post, she talks about how best practices are contextualized, so that they may work well here, but not there. She’s got a cute and apt metaphor with marriage, and she’s absolutely right.

However, I want to go further. Let me set the stage: years ago as a grad student, our lab was approached with the task of developing an expert system for a particular task. It certainly was something we could have done. Eventually, we asked what the description was for the ideal performance, and were told that the best source was the person who’d been doing it the longest. Now, people are fabulous pattern matchers, and performing something for a long time with some reflection on improvement likely could get you some really good performance. However, there are some barriers: experts no longer have access to their own performance; without an external frame of reference, they can get trapped into local maxima; and other phenomena of our cognitive architecture interfere with optimal performance (e.g. set effects, functional fixedness). I’ve riffed on this often; it’s compiled and they tell stories about what they do that have little correlation to what they actually do. We didn’t end up taking up the opportunity. So it may be the best out there, but is it the best that can be?

And that’s the problem. Why are we only looking at what the best is that anyone’s doing? Why not abstract across that and other performances, looking for emergent principles, and trying to infer what would on principle be the best? That is, if it hasn’t already been documented in theory and is available (academics do that sort of thing as a career, and in between the obfuscation there are often good thoughts and answers). The same with benchmarking: it’s relatively the best, not absolutely the best.

I’ve largely made a career out of trying to find the principled best approaches, interpreting cognitive science research and looking broadly across relevant fields (including HCI/UI, software engineering, entertainment, and others) to find emergent principles that can guide design of solutions. And, reliably, I find that there are idea, concepts, models, etc that can guide efforts as broadly dispersed as virtual worlds, mobile, adaptive systems, content models, organizational implementation, and more. Models emerge that serve as checklists, principles, frameworks for design that allow us to examine tradeoffs and make the principled best solution. I regularly capture these models and share them (e.g. my models page, and more recent ones regularly appear in this blog).

I’m not saying it’s easy, but you look across our field and recognize there are those who are doing good work in either translating research into practice or finding emergent patterns that resonate with theoretical principles. It’s time to stop looking at what other organizations are doing in their context as a guide, and start drawing upon what’s known and customizing it to your context, and then having a cycle of continual tuning. With the increasing pressures to be competitive, I’d suggest that just being good enough isn’t. Being the best you can be is the only sustainable advantage.

Let’s see: copy your best competitor, and keep equal; or shoot for the principled best that can be in the category, and have an unassailable position of leadership? The answer seems obvious to me. How about you?

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