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Y A (Yet Another) Misleading Mobile Marketing Post

23 January 2019 by Clark Leave a Comment

Is this YAMMMP? I suppose I can’t address every one, but I think picking a few here and there are perhaps instructive. And, maybe, a bit fun. So there was a post on 5 mobile learning strategies. I’m a wee bit opinionated on mobile learning, so I thought I’d have a look. And, of course, it seems to be a random selection. I guess there’s a requirement to regularly put out stuff, but it seems they get someone to make stuff up scattershot, for the sake of marketing. And while the advice isn’t bad, it’s just random bits of advice trying to create the appearance of expertise. Worse, it’s really not specific to mobile, and, therefore,…misleading.

The first recommendation was to do ‘microlearning‘. The worst part was their definition: short suggest of learning and performance support. Let’s just throw everything together! Yes, small chunks of content are good. Because they match how our minds work. But this (differentiated) is not unique to mobile, it’s good advice over all! Of course, with nuances about the formal (e.g. not just putting your course through the shredder and stream out the bits).
The next recommendation was for ‘gamification’. Er, no. Now to be fair, they do say “gamification for serious learning”, but how do we know whether they mean immersive learning environments, or points, badges, and leaderboards? The former’s good, the latter is, I suggest, not so valuable. But again, this is undifferentiated, so it’s not obviously good advice.
On to the ubiquitous ‘video’! Yes, video can be valuable, but not generically. It can be overdone, and can intrude in a variety of ways. For instance, the audio might be inappropriate in certain contexts, and hands-free may require a visual focus that can’t be distracted. Moreover, using video appropriately again isn’t unique to mobile.
And another statement that’s not unique to mobile: look to social learning. Yes, of course, social learning’s good. And, with mobile populations equipped with devices and ‘downtime’, it can be valuable. But it’s valuable regardless of device. When it’s possible, it can add value. The obvious rises again.
And, finally, personalization. Yes, great. So personalize via the small chunks from microlearning. Again, why unique to mobile? Love the idea, but hate that it’s presented as part of a mobile strategy instead of a learning strategy.

Look, I’m a fan of mobile, obviously. But while mobile’s niche is performance support, what’s unique to mobile is context. Do something because of when and where you are. And this article has entirely missed it. And the other critical element is to think of mobile as a platform. It’s not a device, it’s not an app, it’s a unique delivery channel for many possibilities. Your initial exploration can be either of the microlearning components, but recognize that as soon as you use it, you’ll be expected to do more. And thinking platform is the key strategy here.

I understand that their intention is self-serving, these are things they can do. But pretending these are core strategies is misleading. And that’s the problem I’d like you to learn to detect. Go to the core affordances, and then drill down. I’ve talked about my own five mobile approaches, for instance. Don’t work up from what you can do until you know what that is doing to advance your capabilities as well. That is what’s strategic.

Bringing Transformation to Life

9 January 2019 by Clark 1 Comment

I’m going to be delivering a mobile learning course for a university this spring. Consequently, I’m currently beginning the design. I need to practice what I preach in the sense of good learning design, so I’m working through the usual decisions. The real question I have is whether I can make it transformative. There are limitations, but one of my mantras is about design having many possible development forms. So…I’ve got to make a good stab at it. Here’s my preliminary thinking on bringing the course to life.

I’ve actually been working a lot on the design of university learning experiences. There have been several instances in the past year or two that have really pushed my thinking in this space. This naturally includes application-based instruction, as well as meaningful (and minimal) content, and good assessment design. It’s been handy for this!

Naturally, Designing mLearning will be the text (The Mobile Academy is focused on formal education, and these students are focused on the workplace). As it turns out, the book isn’t written in the order I want to deliver the course. So while I’ll have specific readings each week, I’ll instead recommend that the students read it in one go (it’s not a long book), and that two different cuts through the material will be a better learning experience.

I’m also thinking about the assignments: having them do meaningful things. E.g. designing solutions. Also, in the right order, to facilitate useful processing. I suppose I should worry about whether the workload will be too much However, as it’s a compressed course the expectations per week are higher. And I will argue that I’m having them do more than consume, so the workload’s ok.

The important thing, to me, is getting the emotional trajectory right. I reckon I need an aspirational goal up front, and then ensure I deliver. It needs to work on a week-by-week basis and overall. I’m making sure they’re doing the right things, and then I’ll fine-tune. I like the chance to integrate my thinking and put a stake in the ground. It’ll be interesting to see how it goes.

As a side note, mobile seems (to me) to be resurrecting. I would think it’s now mainstream, but some folks are still getting started. Hey, it makes sense, so better late than never! Where are you in mobile?

Developing learning to learn skills

13 November 2018 by Clark 5 Comments

I’m an advocate of meta-learning, that is: learning to learn. Not just because it’s personally empowering, but because it can and should be organizationally empowering. The problem is, little is talked about how to develop it. And I have to say that what I do see, seems inadequate. So I thought I’d rant, for a post, on what is involved in developing learning to learn skills.

First, of course, you have to identify what they are! What are learning to learn skills? Harold Jarche’s PKM is a good start, talking about seek > sense > share. Obviously, there’s more to it than just that, so it’s about seeking actively but also setting up systems to continually feed you new, potentially tangential thoughts. And how to evaluate what you get. Then, it’s about being able to process the inputs in ways that help you understand, or do, something new. What does it mean, in practice? Finally, of course, it’s about sharing, in two ways. For one, contributing to others’ questions and work. Then it’s also sharing your own thoughts and work.

That’s (largely) working alone, but there are also specifics about how you work and play well with others. Do you know how to best manage the process of solving a problem together? How can you ask questions, and answer them, in ways that people will recognize and participate? People need models and frameworks that guide performance.

Of course, just knowing this isn’t enough. There are some necessary additional steps. The first is evangelizing and sharing the best principles for working together. So, people have to know about the principles, and be encouraged to use them. And even be rewarded, whether just with praise or actual promotion of their successes. There should also be models, examples. So L&D should be practicing what they preach, and working and learning ‘out loud’. Show, and narrate, your own work! And, this is still not enough.

Most importantly, you have to develop the skills. Actively. So, content about them, and examples are good. But learning is, at core, about mentored practice. And it can’t be in the abstract, it’s about doing it with real tasks. You can set up such opportunities in your formal learning (and should), but you should also be coaching around real work.

At least, you should be facilitating proper approaches in public forums, like social media. You can quietly coach individuals about good practices if they’re off target. You can point out, as a meta-discussion, when people are learning effectively. Annotate the thinking behind what learners can and should be doing.

The worst thing is to leave it to chance, or assume your learners are effective self-learners. The evidence is that they’re not. Sadly, our education system doesn’t do a good job of this. Nor do our organizations. But we could. This is about more effective innovation, really. Learning manifests as new ways of doing things. Innovation is about better ways of doing things. If we evaluate our learnings and apply the ones that are improvements, we’re innovating. Both for specific needs and as a ongoing background process. And if indeed innovation is the only sustainable differentiator, this is the best investment you can make for the organization.

And, if you’re truly contributing to the central success factor in the organization, you’re becoming essential to the organization. As you should be. So seize the opportunity, and make meta-learning a priority. Develop learning to learn skills consciously, and conscientiously. It’s an innovative, and valuable, thing to do :).

Competencies and Innovation?

30 October 2018 by Clark Leave a Comment

This may seem like an odd pairing, so bear with me. I believe that we want to find ways to support organizations moving in the direction of innovation and learning cultures. Of course, I’ve been on a pretty continuous campaign for this, but I’m wondering what other levers we have. And, oddly, I think competencies may be one. Let me make the case for competencies and innovation.

So I’ve gotten involved in standards and competency work. Don’t ask me why, as I have no better answer than a) they asked, and b) the big ‘sucker’ tattoo on my forehead. Of course, as I’ve said before, the folks that do this stuff (besides me, obviously) are really contributing to the benefit of our org. Maybe I felt I had to walk the talk?

In the course of the one that was just launched, we identified a number of competencies across the suite of L&D activities. This included (in addition the more traditional activities) looking at how to foster innovation. This means understanding culture and the change processes to get there, as well as knowing how to run meetings that get the best outputs. It’s about being prepared for both types of innovation, fast (solve ‘this’ problem) and slow (the steady percolation of ideas).

Thus, the necessary skills are identified as a component of a full suite of L&D capabilities. And the hope, of course, is that people will begin to recognize that there are parts of L&D they’re not addressing, and move to take on this opportunity. I hope that it’s becoming obvious that the ability to facilitate innovation is an organizational imperative, and that there’s a strong argument for L&D to be key. This is on principle, and pragmatically, it’s a no-brainer for L&D to find a way to become central to org success, not peripheral.

However, leaving that to chance would be, well, just silly. What can we do? Well, two things, I think: one is to help raise awareness, the other is to provide support. A suite of skills aligned to this area is a ‘good thing’ if it known and used. Working on the know has been an ongoing thing (*cough*), but how can we support it?

Again, two things, I think. One are examples where people have put in place programs where they’ve oriented themselves in this direction and documented benefits. The other is to provide scaffolding; support materials that help folks implement these competencies. And I believe that’s coming.

“Systematic creativity is not an oxymoron” (I may need to make a quip post about that). And this is an example. Think of brainstorming, for example. It can be useful, or not. When done right, the outcomes are much better. And similarly in lots of ways, the nuances matter. If we define, through competencies, what suites of knowledge matter, we bring awareness to the possible outcomes. And the opportunity to improve them.

It may be an indirect path, to be sure, but it’s a steady, and real one. In fact, to say “we want to innovate, but how” and have a suite of specific sets of knowledge on tap to point people to, is pretty much next to the fastest path. Showing people the benefits and the path to obtain them is key. It’s even self-referential: let’s innovate on making innovation systematically embedded in organizations! ;) So, keep on experimenting!

The Optimistic View

6 June 2018 by Clark Leave a Comment

In yesterday’s post, I quipped about how L&D wasn’t doing well, and I want to clarify my perspective. Because, you see, I’m an optimist! I really only complain to create improvement. And so let me wax philosophical about why we can and should be hopeful about L&D.

Organizations need to learn. And they learn as a function of individuals learning, alone and together. This learning can be ineffective or effective; there are skills involved. And yet, assuming these skills isn’t a safe bet.

And this is a big picture: it’s as much about informal learning as it is formal. Or, so should it be. We need to be ensuring our formal learning is working, but learning is a continuum that extends beyond the course. Evidence shows that we learn through social interaction and through our own work experience. If we only do formal, we’re missing a large part (estimates are around 80%).

And here’s the thing: who in the organization besides L&D should be doing this? Who else understands how we learn? Ideally, of course, we do know this, but let’s make that a working assumption (if you want help here, that’s what I do ;).

So, if we take what we know about learning, individual and social, and apply that, what happens? If we share policies and practices around tools that facilitate learning (curation, creation, collaboration), what is the organizational benefit? We can be facilitating and spreading best principles to optimize and accelerate organizational knowledge.

I want to suggest that facilitating the learning of the organization, particularly in this era of increasing change and competition, is the key to organizational success. Thus, L&D has the opportunity to be not peripheral but central! And that, to me, is not only desirable, but right.

Hence, I’m optimistic. And I’ll keep pushing us to achieve the potential that’s on the table. Ready to join me?

Tools and Design

11 April 2018 by Clark 2 Comments

I’ve often complained about how the tools we have make it easy to do bad design. They make it easy to put PPTs and PDFs on the screen and add a quiz. And not that that’s not so, but I decided to look at it from the other direction, and I found that instructive. So here’re some thoughts on tools.

Authoring tools, in general, are oriented on a ‘page’ metaphor; they’re designed to provide a sequence of pages. The pages can contain a variety of media: text, audio, video. And then there are special pages, the ones where you can interact. And, of course, these interactions are the critical point for learning. It’s when you have to act, to do, that you retrieve and apply knowledge, that learning really happens.

What’s critical is what you do. If it’s just answering knowledge questions, it’s not so good. If it’s just ‘click to see more’, it’s pretty bad. The critical element is being faced with a decision about an action to take, then apply the knowledge to discriminate between the alternatives, and make a decision. The learner has to commit! Now, if I’m complaining about the tools making it easy to do bad things, what would be good things?

That was my thinking: what would be ideal for tools to support? I reasoned that the interactions should represent things we do in the real world. Which, of course, are things like fill in forms, write documents, fill out spreadsheets, film things, make things. And these are all done through typical interactions like drag, drop, click, and more.

Which made me realize that the tools aren’t the problem! Well, mostly; click to see more is still problematic. Deciding between courses of action can be done as just a better multiple choice question, or via any common form of interaction: drag/drop, reorder, image click, etc. Of course, branching scenarios are good too, for so-called soft skills (which are increasingly the important things), but tools are supporting those as well. The challenge isn’t inherent in the tool design. The challenge is in our thinking!

As someone recently commented to me, the problem isn’t the tools, it’s the mindset. If you’re thinking about information dump and knowledge test, you can do that. If you’re thinking about putting people into place to made decisions like they’ll need to make, you can do that. And, of course, provide supporting materials to be able to make those decisions.

I reckon the tool vendors are still focused on content and a quiz, but the support is there to do learning designs that will really have an impact. We may have to be a bit creative, but the capability is on tap. It’s up to (all of) us to create design processes that focus on the important aspects. As I’ve said before, if you get the design right, there are lots of ways to implement it!

Stay Curious

18 October 2017 by Clark Leave a Comment

One of my ongoing recommendations to people grew out of a toss-off line, playing off an advertisement. Someone asked about a strategy for continuing to learn (if memory serves), and I quipped “stay curious, my friends”. However, as I ponder it, I think more and more that such an approach is key.

I was thinking of this trend the other day as “intellectual restlessness”. What I’m talking about is being intrigued by things you don’t understand that have persisted or recently crossed your awareness, and pursuing it. It’s not just saying “how interesting”, but recognizing connections, and pondering how it could change what you do. Even to the point of actually changing!

It also would include pointing interesting things to other people who would benefit. This doesn’t always have to happen, but in the spirit of cooperation (in the Jarche sense), we could and should contribute, curate, when we can. And, ideally, leaving trails of your explorations that others can benefit from. Writings, diagrams, videos, what have you, helps yourself as well as others.

I was reminiscing that more than 30 years ago, on top of my job designing educational computer games, I was already curious. I still have copies of the magazines containing reviews I did (one hardware, one software), as well as a journal article based upon undergraduate research I was fortunate to participate in.

And that persistence in curiosity has led to a trail of artefacts. You may have come across the books, book chapters, articles, presentations, etc. And, of course, this blog for the past decade and more. (May it continue!) However, I’m not here to tout my wares, but instead to point to the benefit of being curious.

As things change faster, a continuing interest is what provides an ongoing ability to adapt. All the news about the ongoing changes in jobs and work isn’t likely to lessen. Staying curious benefits you, your colleagues and friends, and I reckon society in general. You want to look at many sources of information, track tangential fields, and be open to new ideas.

This isn’t just your choice, of course, ideally your organization is supportive. These lateral inputs are a component of innovation, as is time to allow for serendipity and incubation. Orgs that want to be able to be agile will need this capabilities as well. I suppose organizations need to stay curious as well!

Habits of Work #wolweek

7 June 2017 by Clark Leave a Comment

It’s Working Out Loud (WOL) Week, and that’s always a valuable time for reflection. It so happens that the past few weeks I’ve been working with an organization, and they were ripe for WOL. The problem was what, specifically, should they do to make this work? They had barriers. My (off the cuff) recommendations were around creating some habits of work.

For context, they’re a very distributed organization, and have been for decades. They’ve a number of locations spread around over a space of hundreds of miles. As a consequence, they’re well-practiced at a variety of distance communication modalities. They have well-equipped video conferencing rooms, social media tool, and of course email. And yet, their communication is very formal. They’re busy of course, so while they recognize the benefits of sharing better, it’s hard for them to implement.

There would be rewards, of course. They have distributed teams supporting the same sorts of actions. Various job roles do similar work with a variety of stakeholders, and would benefit by sharing best practices, creating communities of practice around those job roles. However, for a variety of reasons, including ineffective use of the available tools, time pressures, and general lack of awareness and practice, the practices not in play.

As part of my ‘critical friend‘ role, I made some suggestions, including working out loud. They asked for specific steps they might take. So what’d I recommend? Several things:

Narrating their work: they need to find a way to represent their progress on each project, and include a ‘rationale’ that captures the thinking behind their decisions.
Creating communities: they should establish a group (with whatever tool) for each role, and do some community management around it to generate dialog and learnings.
Walking the walk: if the leadership (not of the overall organization, just the leaders of this learning unit, at least to start ;) practices the working (and failing) out loud, it would be motivation to others. It runs better when everyone sees it’s safe to make mistakes as long as you share lessons learned).

This was off the cuff, and I might have suggested more, but this is a reconstituted list that I think captures some major necessary areas. It’s about practices that build the culture. These will need support, but they are the core ideas that can drive a move to a more open, sharing workplace. One that leads to continual improvement and innovation.

Artificial Intelligence or Intelligence Augmentation

12 April 2017 by Clark Leave a Comment

In one of my networks, a recent conversation has been on Artificial Intelligence (AI) vs Intelligence Augmentation (IA). I’m a fan of both, but my focus is more on the IA side. It triggered some thoughts that I penned to them and thought I’d share here [notes to clarify inserted with square brackets like this]:

As context, I’m an AI ‘groupie’, and was a grad student at UCSD when Rumelhart and McClelland were coming up with PDP (parallel distributed processing, aka connectionist or neural networks). I personally was a wee bit enamored of genetic algorithms, another form of machine learning (but a bit easier to extract semantics, or maybe just simpler for me to understand ;).

Ed Hutchins was talking about distributed cognition at the same time, and that remains a piece of my thinking about augmenting ourselves. We don’t do it all in our heads, so what can be in the world and what has to be in the head? [the IA bit, in the context of Doug Engelbart]

And yes, we were following fuzzy logic too (our school was definitely on the left-coast of AI ;). Symbolic logic was considered passe’! Maybe that’s why Zadeh [progenitor of fuzzy logic] wasn’t more prominent here (making formal logic probabilistic may have seemed like patching a bad core premise)? And I managed (by hook and crook, courtesy of Don Norman ;) to attend an elite AI convocation held at an MIT retreat with folks like McCarthy, Dennett, Minsky, Feigenbaum, and other lights of both schools. (I think Newell were there, but I can’t state for certain.) It was groupie heaven!

Similarly, it was the time of emergence of ‘situated cognition’ too (a contentious debate with proponents like Greeno and even Bill Clancy while old school symbolics like Anderson and Simon argued to the contrary). Which reminds me of Harnad’s Symbol Grounding problem, a much meatier objection to real AI than Dreyfuss’ or the Chinese room concerns, in my opinion.

I do believe we ultimately will achieve machine consciousness, but it’s much further out than we think. We’ll have to understand our own consciousness first, and that’s going to be tough, MRI and other such research not withstanding. And it may mean simulating our cognitive architecture on a sensor equipped processor that must learn through experimentation and feedback as we do. e.g. taking a few years just to learn to speak! (“What would it take to build a baby?” was a developmental psych assignment I foolishly attempted ;)

In the meantime, I agree with Roger Schank (I think he was at the retreat too) that most of what we’re seeing, e.g. Watson, is just fast search, or pattern-learning. It’s not really intelligent, even if it’s doing it like we do (the pattern learning). It’s useful, but it’s not intelligent.

And, philosophically, I agree with those who have stated that we must own the responsibility to choose what we take on and what we outsource. I’m all for self-driving vehicles, because the alternative is pretty bad (tho’ could we do better in driver training or licensing, like in Germany?). And I do want my doctor augmented by powerful rote operations that surpass our own abilities, and also by checklists and policies and procedures, anything that increases the likelihood of a good diagnosis and prescription. But I want my human doctor in the loop. We still haven’t achieved the integration of separate pattern-matching, and exception handling, that our own cognitive processor provides.

The change is here

1 March 2017 by Clark 2 Comments

For a number of years now (at least six), I’ve been beating the drum about the need for organizations to be prepared to address change. I’ve argued that things are happening faster, and that organizations are going to have to become more agile. Now we’re seeing the evidence that the change has arrived.

Two recent reports highlight the awareness. Gallup released a report on The State of the American Workplace recently that talks about the lack of engagement at work. Deloitte also released a report, Rewriting the rules in the digital age, that documents trends shifting the office environment. With different perspectives, they both overlap in discussing the importance of culture. It’s about creating an environment where people are empowered and enabled to contribute.

The Gallup report concludes with new behaviors for leaders and managers. The first point for leaders is to use data and focus on culture. This, to me, involves leveraging technology and creating an environment. L&D could be leading using performance data captured through the ExperienceAPI, and facilitating the culture shift in courses and developing coaching. Their prescription for managers is to move to be coaches (and again, L&D should be both developing the skills and facilitating the processes). And employees need to take ownership of their own development, which means L&D should focus on both meta-learning and ensuring resources (curation and creation) as well.

The second report is the more interesting one for me, because it’s about the trends and the ways to adapt. The top two trends are the Organization of the future (c.f. The Workplace of the Future :) and Careers and learning. The former is about redesigning organizations to become agile. The latter is about a redefinition of learning. They are a wee bit old-school, however, as while they do discuss innovation throughout, it isn’t a core focus and their definition of learning doesn’t include informal learning. It’s still a top-down model. But again, clear opportunities for L&D.

The key leverage points, to me, are learning and technology. And here I mean more self-directed and collaborative learning conducted not formally, but facilitated. Social learning really can’t be top-down! Important technologies are for communicating and collaborating, as well as tools to search and find resources.

And while the focus is on HR, including recruitment and leadership, I reckon that L&D should have a key place here, as indicated. The world’s changing, and L&D needs to adapt. It’s time to innovate L&D to support organizational innovation. Are you ready?