John Seely Brown spoke eloquently on extreme learning for coping with extreme change, e.g. now. He talked about how extreme learning resembles play and challenged us to create environments where imagination could flourish.
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Starting Strategy
If you’re going to move towards the performance ecosystem, a technology-enabled workplace, where do you start? Partly it depends on where you’re at, as well as where you’re going, but it also likely depends on what type of org you are. While the longer term customization is very unique, I wondered if there were some meaningful categorizations.
What would characterize the reasons why you might start with formal learning, versus performance support, versus social? My initial reaction, after working with my ITA colleagues, would be that you should start with social. As things are moving faster, you just can’t keep ahead of the game while creating formal resources, and equipping folks to help each other is probably your best bet. A second step would then likely be performance support, helping people in the moment. Formal learning would then backstop for those things that are static and defined enough, or meta- enough (more generic approaches) that there’s a reason to consolidate it.
However, it occurred to me that this might change depending on the nature of the organization. So, for example, if you are in an organization with lots of new members (e.g. the military, fast food franchises), formal learning might well be your best starting point. Formal learning really serves novices best.
So when might you want to start with performance support? Performance support largely serves practitioners trying to execute optimally. This might be something like manufacturing or something heavily regulated or evidence based, like medicine. The point here would be to helping folks who know why they’re doing what they’re doing, and have a good background, but need structure to not make human mistakes.
Social really comes to it’s fore for organizations depending on continual innovation: perhaps consumer products, or other organizations focused on customer experience, as well as in highly competitive areas. Here the creative friction between individuals is the highest value and consequently needs a supportive infrastructure.
Of course, your mileage may vary, and every organization will have places for all of the above, but this strikes me as a potential way to think about where you might want to place your emphasis. Other elements, like when to do better back end integration, and when to think about enabling via mobile, will have their own prioritization schemes, such as a highly mobile workforce for the latter.
So, what am I missing?
#itashare
Assessing online assessments
Good formal learning consists of an engaging introductions, rich presentation of concepts, annotated examples, and meaningful practice, all aligned on cognitive skills. As we start seeing user-generated online c, publishers and online schools are feeling the pressure. Particularly as MOOCs come into play, with (decreasingly) government funded institutions giving online content and courses for free. Are we seeing the demise of for-profit institutions and publishers?
I will suggest that there’s one thing that is harder to get out of the user-generated content environment, and that’s meaningful practice. I recall hearing of, but haven’t yet seen, a seriously threatening repository of such. Yes, there are learning object repositories, but they’re not yet populated with a rich suite of contextualized practice.
Writing good assessments is hard. Principles of good practice include meaningful decisions, alternatives that represent reliable misconceptions, relevant contexts, believable dialog, and more. They must be aligned to the objectives, and ideally have an increasing level of challenge.
There are some technical issues as well. Extensions that are high value include problem generators and randomness in the order of options (challenging attempts to ‘game’ the assessment). A greater variety of response options for novelty isn’t bad either, and automarking is desirable for at least a subset of assessment.
I don’t want to preclude essays or other interpretive work like presentations or media content, and they are likely to require human evaluation, even with peer marking. Writing evaluation rubrics is also a challenge for untrained designers or experts.
While SMEs can write content and even examples (if they get pedagogical principles and are in touch with the underlying thinking, but writing good assessments is another area.
I’ve an inkling that writing meaningful assessments, particularly leveraging interactive technology like immersive simulation games, is an area where skills are still going to be needed. Aligning and evaluating the assessment, and providing scrutable justification for the assessment attributes (e.g. accreditation) is going to continue to be a role for some time.
We may need to move accreditation from knowledge to skills (a current problem in many accreditation bodies), but I think we need and can have a better process for determining, developing, and assessing certain core skills, and particularly so-called 21st century skills. I think there will continue to be a role for doing so, even if we make it possible to develop e necessary understanding in any way the learner chooses.
As is not unusual, I’m thinking out loud, so I welcome your thoughts and feedback.
Robinsons’ Performance Consulting
As a consequence of my previous post and the commented revelation, I checked out the Robinsons’ Performance Consulting. The book really takes a different approach to what I was talking about so I suppose it’s worth delineating the difference.
What I was talking about was how learning & development groups should be looking not only to courses, but also performance support and social media as components of potential solutions to organizational needs. It naturally includes a focus on aligning with business needs, but takes a rich picture of opportunities to have impact.
The Robinsons’ book is more focused on ensuring the project you’re working on is addressing the real problem. It rightly has you stepping back to look at the business problem (the gap between how things should be, and how they are), and the reasons why these gaps exist. Then, you should be designing solutions that address all the needs, and systematically solve the problem.
There are two really good things about their approach. The focus on the real problem is designed to prevent using a solution that may be familiar, but may not really solve the problem. This was similar to my complaint. The other thing is they’re willing to go beyond courses for solutions, looking at incentives, job aids, work process redesign, etc.
On the other hand, it’s not clear to me that they would be able to incorporate potential social solutions in their repertoire. When should you have people go to their network? An interesting question, but not one that obviously flows out of their approach.
Regardless, I think the rigor of the book (and it’s nicely complemented by exercises, examples, etc.) makes it a worthy contribution. I suspect that too many L&D groups might not be willing to push as hard as needed to make sure that the solution being developed is pointed to by a thorough analysis (as many of their examples point out), and this book gives you guidance and tools to do the job. There’re also some end chapters on being a successful consultant that could be valuable to practitioners as well. Well worth a read.
Increasing our responsibility
I ranted a couple of weeks ago about how we need to move out of our complacency and make a positive change. As I sometimes do, I stumbled upon a diagram that characterizes the type of change I think we need to be considering.
The perspective riffs off of the concept of the relative value of formal versus informal learning methods shift as performers move from novice to expert. (And, as I’ve previously noted, what’s considered in/formal changes depending on if you’re the performer or designer.) And, too often, we tend to restrict our interventions to the formal side, yet there are lots of things we can be doing on the informal side.
Largely, however, I see learning and development (L&D) groups as focusing exclusively on novices, or to beginning practitioners, and leaving practitioners and experts on their own. Even if they’re addressing these more advanced audiences, they tend to use the ‘course’ as the vehicle, when it’s not really necessary. These audiences know what they need to know, and just want that useful information, they don’t need the full preparation that novices do. Novices don’t know what they need to know nor why it’s important, so we provide all that in a course model. We can be much more telegraphic to advanced performers, and the value of social networks starts kicking in here too.
The point I’m trying to make is that we can, and should, take responsibility for the rest of the performers. We can assist their performance, hence the term we’ve been preferring in the Internet Time Alliance: performance consultant. This implies facilitating performance across the organizational roles, top to bottom and from beginner to expert.
I’d like to suggest that L&D groups need to become focused on facilitating organizational performance, which includes but is not limited to training. It’s going to benefit the organization, it’s going to lead to greater strategic contributions and associated value, and it’s an approach that will likely preclude a long slow march to irrelevance and extinction. Better the folks that understand how we learn and perform (and if you don’t, what are you waiting for?) take responsibility than having it devolve by default to business units and/or IT, eh?
#itashare
Games & Meaningful Interactivity
A colleague recently queried: “How would you support that Jeopardy type games (Quizzes, etc.) are not really games?” And while I think I’ve discussed this before, I had a chance to noodle on it on a train trip. I started diagramming, and came up with the following characterization.
I separated out two dimensions. The first is differentiating between knowledge and skills. I like how Van Merriënboer talks about the knowledge you need and the complex problems you apply that knowledge to. Here I’m separating ‘having’ knowledge from ‘using’ knowledge, focusing on application. And, no surprise, I’m very much on the side of using, or doing, not just knowing.
The second dimension is whether the learning is essentially very true to life, or exaggerated in some way. Is it direct, or have we made some effort to make it engaging?
Now, for rote knowledge, if we’re contextualizing it, we’re making it more applied (e.g. moving to the skills side), so really what we have to do is use extrinsic motivation. We gamify knowledge test (drill and kill) and make it into Jeopardy-style quiz shows. And while that’s useful in very limited circumstances, it is not what we (should) mean by a game. Flashy rote drill, using extrinsic motivation, is a fall-back, a tactic of last resort. We can do better.
What we should mean by a game is to take practice scenarios and focus on ramping up the intrinsic motivation, tuning the scenario into a engaging experience. We can use tools like exaggeration, humor, drama, and techniques from game design, literature, and more, to make that practice more meaningful. We align it with the learners interests (and vice-versa), making the experience compelling.
Because, as the value chain suggests, tarting up rote knowledge (which is useful if that’s what we need, and sometimes it’s important, e.g. medical terminology) is better than not, but not near as valuable as real practice via scenarios, and even better if we tune it into a meaningful experience. Too often we err on the side of knowledge instead of skills, because it’s easy, because we’re not getting what we need from the SME, because that’s what our tools do, etc, but we should be focusing on skills, because that’s what’s going to make a difference to our learners and ultimately our organizations.
What we should do is be focusing on better able to do, moving to the skill side. Tarted up quiz shows are not really games, they’re simplistic extrinsic response trainers. Real, serious, games translate what Sid Maier said about games – “a series of interesting decisions” – into a meaningful experience: a series of important decisions. Practicing those are what will make the difference you care about.
Yvonne Camus #LSCon Keynote Mindmap
Yvonne Camus closed the conference with a stirring talk on success under extreme circumstances as an Eco-challenge winner.
Daniel Coyle #LSCon Keynote Mindmap
Daniel Coyle gave a wonderfully funny, passionate, and poignant keynote, talking about what leads to top performance. Naturally, I was thrilled to hear him tout the principles that I suggest make games such a powerful learning environment: challenge, tight feedback, and large amounts of engaging practice. With compelling stories to illustrate his points, he balanced humor and emotional impact to sell a powerful plea for better learning.
Aaron Dignan #LSCon Keynote Mindmap
In a clever talk, Aaron Dignan used game theory to talk about how to improve the workplace.
Robert Ballard #LSCon Keynote Mindmap
Robert Ballard gave a personal and inspiring tale of exploring the world’s oceans and using technology to broaden reach.
