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#AECT17 Conference Contributions

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So, at the recent AECT 2017 conference, I participated in three ways that are worth noting.  I had the honor of participating in two sessions based upon writings I’d contributed, and one based upon my own cogitations. I thought I’d share the thinking.

For my own presentation, I shared my efforts to move ‘rapid elearning’ forward. I put Van Merrienboer’s 4 Component ID and Guy Wallace’s Lean ISD as a goal, but recognized the need for intermediate steps like Michael Allen’s SAM, David Merrill’s ‘Pebble in a Pond‘, and Cathy Moore’s Action Mapping. I suggested that these might be too far, and want steps that might be slight improvements on their existing processes. These included three thing: heuristics, tools, and collaboration. Here I was indicating specifics for each that could move from well-produced to well-designed.

In short, I suggest that while collaboration is good, many corporate situations want to minimize staff. Consequently, I suggest identifying those critical points where collaboration will be useful. Then, I suggest short cuts in processes to the full approach. So, for instance, when working with SMEs focus on decisions to keep the discussion away from unnecessary knowledge. Finally, I suggest the use of tools to support the gaps our brain architectures create.   Unfortunately, the audience was small (27 parallel sessions and at the end of the conference) so there wasn’t a lot of feedback. Still, I did have some good discussion with attendees.

Then, for one of the two participation session, the book I contributed to solicited a wide variety of position papers from respected ed tech individuals, and then solicited responses to same.  I had responded to a paper suggesting three trends in learning: a lifelong learning record system, a highly personalized learning environment, and expanded learner control of time, place and pace of instruction. To those 3 points I added two more: the integration of meta-learning skills and the breakdown of the barrier between formal learning and lifelong learning. I believe both are going to be important, the former because of the decreasing half-life of knowledge, the latter because of the ubiquity of technology.

Because the original author wasn‘t present, I was paired for discussion with another author who shares my passion for engaging learning, and that was the topic of our discussion table.  The format was fun; we were distributed in pairs around tables, and attendees chose where to sit. We had an eager group who were interested in games, and my colleague and I took turns answering and commenting on each other’s comments. It was a nice combination.  We talked about the processes for design, selling the concept, and more.

For the other participation session, the book was a series of monographs on important topics.  The discussion chose a subset of four topics: MOOCs, Social Media, Open Resources, and mLearning. I had written the mLearning chapter.  The chapter format included ‘take home’ lessons, and the editor wanted our presentations to focus on these. I posited the basic mindshifts necessary to take advantage of mlearning. These included five basic principles:

  1. mlearning is not just mobile elearning; mlearning is a wide variety of things.
  2. the focus should be on augmenting us, whether our formal learning, or via performance support, social, etc.
  3. the Least Assistance Principle, in focusing on the core stuff given the limited interface.
  4. leverage context, take advantage of the sensors and situation to minimize content and maximize opportunity.
  5. recognize that mobile is a platform, not a tactic or an app; once you ‘go mobile’, folks will want more.

The sessions were fun, and the feedback was valuable.

#AECT17 Reflections

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Ok, so I was an academic for a brief and remarkably good period of time (a long time ago). Mind you, I’ve kept my hand in: reviewing journal and conference submissions, writing the occasional book chapter, contributing to some research, even playing a small role in some grant-funded projects.  I like academics, it’s just that circumstances took me away (and I like consulting too; different, not one better). However, there’re a lot of benefits from being engaged, particularly keeping up with the state of the art. At least one perspective… Hence, I attended the most recent meeting of the Association of Educational Communications & Technology, pretty much the society for academics in instructional technology.

The event features many of your typical components: keynotes, sessions, receptions, and the interstitial social connections. One of the differences is that there’s no vendor exhibition. And there are a lot of concurrent sessions: roughly 27 per time slot!    Now, you have to understand, there are multiple agendas, including giving students and new faculty members opportunities for presentations and feedback. There are also sessions designed for tapping into the wisdom of the elders, and working sessions to progress understandings. This was only my second, so I may have the overall tenor wrong.  Regardless, here are some reflections from the event:

For one, it’s clear that there’s an overall awareness of what could, and should, be happening in education. In the keynotes, the speakers repeatedly conveyed messages about effective learning. What wasn‘t effectively addressed was the comprehensive resistance of the education system to meaningful change.  Still, all three keynotes, Driscoll, Cabrera, and Reeves, commented in one way or another on problems and opportunities in education. Given that many of the faculty members come from Departments of Education, this is understandable.

Another repeated emergent theme (at least for me) was the need for meaningful research. What was expressed by Tom Reeves in a separate session was the need for a new approach to research grounded in focusing on real problems. I’ve been a fan of his call for Design-Based Research, and liked what he said: all thesis students should introduce their topics with the statement “the problem I’m looking at is”. The sessions, however, seemed to include too many small studies. (In my most cynical moments, I wonder how many studies have looked at teaching students or teacher professional development and their reflections/use of technology…).

One session I attended was quite exciting. The topic was the use of neuroscience in learning, and the panel were all people using scans and other neuroscience data to inform learning design. While I generally deride the hype that usually accompanies the topic, here were real researchers talking actual data and the implications, e.g. for dyslexia.  While most of the results from research that have implications for design are still are at the cognitive level, it’s important to continue to push the boundaries.

I focused my attendance mostly on the Organizational Training & Performance group, and heard a couple of good talks.  One was a nice survey of mentoring, looking across the research, and identifying what results there were, and where there were still opportunities for research. Another study did a nice job of synthesizing models for human performance technology, though the subsequent validation approach concerned me.

I did a couple of presentations myself that I’ll summarize in tomorrow’s post, but it was a valuable experience. The challenges are different than in corporate learning technology, but there are interesting outcomes that are worth tracking.  A valuable experience.

Tom Reeves AECT Keynote Mindmap

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Thomas Reeves opened the third day of the AECT conference with an engaging keynote that used the value of conation to drive the argument for Authentic Learning. Conation is the component of cognition that consists of your intent to learn, and is under-considered. Authentic learning is very much collaborative problem-solving. He used the challenges from robots/AI to motivate the argument.

Mindmap

Transparency

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I believe that transparency is a good thing. It builds trust, as it makes it hard to hide things.  And trust is important. So, in the spirit of transparency, it occurred to me to share a little bit about me and this blog. Here I lay out who I am, why I write it, and what I write about.

You can find out more via the ‘about Clark Quinn’ link in the right column, but in brief, I saw the connection between computing and learning as an undergraduate, and it’s been my career ever since. It’s not just my vocation, but it’s my avocation: I  enjoy exploring cognition and technology. And while I’ve done the science and track it, what I revel in (and have demonstrable capability for), is applying cognitive and learning science to create new approaches and fine-tune existing ones.  Learning engineering, if you will.

And, for a variety of reasons, I do this as a consultant. I make my living providing strategic guidance for clients.  I speak at events, and write books, but my main income is from consulting. Which means you  should hire me.  I assist organizations to improve their processes and products, both tactically and strategically. My clients have been happy, and find it’s good value. What you get are unique ideas that are practical and yet effective. Ideas you aren’t likely to have come up with, but are valuable. I really do Quinnovate! Check out the Quinnovation site for more.    Of course, I do have to live in the real world, and so I need to find ways to do this that are mutually beneficial.

Yet generating business isn’t why I write this blog.  I started writing this blog as an experiment and originally tried to write 5 days a week (but was happy if that ended up being 2-3 times a week).  My commitment now is 2 per week (which rarely yields 1 or 3).  And I haven’t monetized it: there’s no advertising, and while I occasionally talk about where I’m speaking or the like, I haven’t used this as a way to sell things. Hopefully that can continue.

So, the reason I write is to think ‘out loud’.  It’s largely for me: it makes me think. I’m just always curious!  I’ve previously recounted the story about how I was on a panel answering questions from the audience, and one of my fellow panelists commented that I had an answer for everything. And the reason is in the ongoing attempt to populate the blog, I’ve looked at lots of things. As my client engagements have been in many different areas, I also have wide-ranging experience to draw upon.  And I just naturally reflect, but getting concrete: diagramming and/or writing, provides additional benefits.

Thus, the process of continually writing (for over 10 years now) means I’m looking at lots of things, reflecting on them, and sharing my thoughts. I also make a point to look at related fields, and look for connections. I also look at what’s happening with technology. In general, I look with a critical eye, as I was trained as a scientist.  I think that’s valuable as well, because there still is a lot of nonsense trotted out, and there’s always some new buzzword that’s being loosely tossed about. Blogging’s given me cause to continue to tune my thinking, and at least some folks have commented that they’ve found it useful.

Mostly I write about things related to technology, learning, and individual and organizational implications. It includes diversions to innovation, design, wisdom, performance support, and the like, because they’ve implications for practice. In many ways I see approaches that aren’t well aligned with how we think, work, and learn, and that strikes me as both a shame, and an opportunity to improve. And that’s what I enjoy, finding ways to improve what we do.

So that’s it: I blog to facilitate my understanding, because cognitive science and technology  is my passion. It isn’t a direct business move.  I do need to make a living, and prefer to do it in the area of my passion, and fortunately have been successful so far.  (Which isn’t to say you shouldn’t find a reason to use me, there are never enough opportunities to assist in improvement, and I’m not a sales person ;).  And yes, this life is a learning experience all in itself!  I hope this is clear, but in the interests of transparency I welcome your inquiries and comments. Stay curious, my friends.

 

Innovative Work Spaces

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working togetherI recently read that Apple’s new office plan is receiving bad press. This surprises me, given that Apple usually has their handle on the latest in ideas.  Yet, upon investigation, it’s clear that they appear to not be particularly innovative in their approach to work spaces.  Here’s why.

The report  I saw says that Apple is intending to use an open office plan. This is where all the tables are out in the open, or at best there are cubicles. The perceived benefits are open communication.  And this is plausible when folks like Stan McChrystal in  Team of Teams are arguing for ‘radical transparency’.  The thought is that everyone will know what’s going on and it will streamline communication. Coupled with delegation, this should yield innovation, at the expense of some efficiency.

However, research hasn’t backed that up. Open space office plans can even drive folks away, as Apple’s hearing. When you want to engage with your colleagues and stay on top of what they’re doing, it’s good.  However, the lack of privacy means folks can’t focus when they’re doing heavy mental work. While it sounds good in theory, it doesn’t work in practice.

When I was keynoting at the Learning@Work conference in Sydney back in 2015, a major topic was about flexible work spaces. The concept here is to have a mix of office types: some open plan, some private offices, some small conference rooms. The view is that you take the type of space you need when you need it. Nothing’s fixed, so you travel with your laptop from place to place, but you can have the type of environment you need. Time alone, time with colleagues, time collaborating. And this was being touted both on principled and practical grounds with positive outcomes.

(Note that in McChrystal’s view, you needed to break down silos. He would strategically insert a person from one area with others, and have representatives engaged around all activities.  So even in the open space you’d want people mixed up, but most folks still tend to put groups together. Which undermines the principle.)

As Jay Cross let us know in his landmark  Informal Learning,  even the design of workspaces can facilitate innovation. Jay cited practices like having informal spaces to converse, and putting the mail room and coffee room together to facilitate casual conversation.  Where you work matters as well as how, and open plan has upsides but also downsides that can be mitigated.

Innovation is about culture, practices, beliefs,  and   technology.  Putting it all together in a practical approach takes time and knowledge to figure out where to start, and how to scale.  As Sutton and Rao tell us, it’s a ground war, but the benefits are not just desirable, but increasingly necessary. Innovation is the key to transcending survival to thrival. Are you ready to (Qu)innovate?

Simulations versus games

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At the recent Realities 360 conference, I saw some confusion about the difference between a simulation and a game. And while I made some important distinctions in my book on the topic, I realize that it’s possible that it’s time to revisit them. So here I’m talking about some conceptual discriminations that I think are important.

Simulations

As I’ve mentioned, simulations are models of the world. They capture certain relationships we believe to be true about the world. (For that matter, they can represent worlds that aren’t real, certainly the case in games.). They don’t (can’t) capture all the world, but a segment we feel it is important to model. We tend to validate these models by testing them to see if they behave like our real world.  You can also think about simulations as being in a ‘state’ (set of values in variables), and move to others by rules.  Frequently, we include some variability in these models, just as is reflected in the real world. Similarly, these simulations can model considerable complexity.

Such simulations are built out of sets of variables that represent the state of the world, and rules that represent the relationships present. There are several ways things change. Some variables can be changed by rules that act on the basis of time (while countdown timer = on, countdown = countdown -1). Variables can also interact (if countdown=0: if 1 g adamantium and 1 g dilithium, Temperature = Temperature +1000, adamantium = adamantium – 1g, dilithium = dilithium – 1g).  Other changes are based upon learner actions (if learner flips the switch, countdown timer = on).

Note that you may already have a simulation. In business, there may already exist a model of particular processes, particularly if they’re proprietary systems.

From a learning point of view, simulations allow motivated and self-effective learners to explore the relationships they need to understand. However, we can’t always assume motivated and self-effective learners. So we need some additional work to turn a simulation into a learning experience.

Scenarios

One effective way to leverage simulations is to choose an initial state (or ‘space of states’, a start point with some variation), and a state (or set) that constitutes ‘win’. We also typically have states that also represent ‘fail’.  We choose those states so that the learner can’t get to ‘win’ without understanding the necessary relationships.   The learner can try and fail until they discover the necessary relationships.  These start and goal states serve as scaffolding for the learning process.    I call these simulations with start and stop states ‘scenarios’.

This is somewhat complicated by the existence of ‘branching scenarios’. There are initial and goal states and learner actions, but they are  not represented by variable and rules. The relationships in branching scenarios are implicit in the links instead of explicit in the variables and rules. And they’re easier to build!  Still, they don’t have the variability that typically is possible in a simulation. There’s an inflection point (qualitative, not quantitative) where the complexity of controlling the branches renders it more sensible to model the world as a simulation rather than track all the branches.

Games

The problem here is that too often people will build a simulation and call it a game. I once reviewed a journal submission about a ‘game’ where the authors admitted that players thought it was boring. Sorry, then it’s not a game!  The difference between a simulation and a game is a subjective experience of engagement on the part of the player.

So how do you get from a simulation to a game?  It’s about tuning.  It’s about adjusting the frequency of events, and their consequences, such that the challenge moves to fall into the zone between boring and frustrating. Now, for learning, you can’t change the fundamental relationships you’re modeling, but you can adjust items like how quickly events occur, and the importance of being correct. And it takes testing and refinement. Will Wright, a game designers’ game designer, once proposed that tuning is 9/10’s of the work!  Now that’s for a commercial game, but it gives you and idea.

You can also use gamification, scores to add competition, but, please,  only after you first expend the effort to make the game intrinsically interesting. Tap into why they  should care about the experience, and bake that it.

Is it worth it to actually expend effort to make the experience engaging?  I believe that the answer is yes. Perhaps not to the level of a game people will pay $60 to play, but some effort to manifest the innate meaningfulness is worth it. Games minimize the time to obtain competency because they optimize the challenge.  You will have sticks as well as carrots, so you don’t need to put in $M budgets, but do tune until your learners have an engaging and effective experience.

So, does this help? What questions do you still have?

My policies

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Like most of you, I get a lot of requests for a lot of things. Too many, really. So I’ve had to put in policies to be able to cope.  I like to provide  a response (I feel it’s important to communicate the underlying rationale), so I have stock blurbs that I cut and paste (with an occasional edit for a specific context).  I don’t want to repeat them here, but instead I want to be clear about why certain types of actions are going to get certain types of response. Consider this a public service announcement.

So, I get a  lot of requests to link on LinkedIn, and I’m happy to, with a caveat. First, you should have some clear relationship to learning technology. Or be willing to explain why you want to link. I use LinkedIn for business connections, so I’m linked to lots of people I don’t even know, but they’re in our field.

I ask those not in learntech  why they want to link. Some do respond, and often have a real reason (shifting to this field, their title masks a real role), and I’m glad I asked.  Other times it’s the ‘Nigerian Prince’ or equivalent. And those will get reported. Recently, it’s new folk who claim they just want to connect to someone with experience. Er, no.  Read this blog, instead. I also have a special message to those in learntech with biz dev/sales/etc roles; I’ll link, but if they pitch me, they’ll get summarily unlinked (and I do).

And I likely won’t link to you on Facebook.  That’s personal. Friends and family. Try LinkedIn instead.

I get lots of emails, particularly from elearning or tech development firms, offering to have a conversation about their services.  I’m sorry, but don’t you realize, with all the time I’ve been in the field, that I have ‘goto’ partners? And I don’t do biz dev: develop contracts and outsource production. As Donald H Taylor so aptly puts it,  you haven’t established a sufficient relationship to justify offering me anything.

Then, I get email with announcements of new moves and the like.  Apparently, with an expectation that I’ll blog it.  WTH?  Somehow, people think this blog is for PR.  No, as it says quite clearly at the top of the page, this is for  my  learnings about learning.  I let them know that I pay attention to what comes through my social media channels, not what comes unsolicited.  I also ask what list they got my name from, so I can squelch it. And sometimes they have!

I used to get a lot of offers to either receive or write blog posts. (This had died down, but has resurrected recently.)    For marketing links, obviously. I don’t want your posts; see the above: my learnings!   And I won’t write for you for free. Hey, that’s a service.  See below.

And I get calls with folks offering me a place at their event.  They’re pretty easy to detect: they ask about would I like to have access to  a specific audience,…  I have learned to quickly ask if it’s a pay to play.  It always is, and I have to explain that that’s not how I market myself.  Maybe I’m wrong, but I see that working for big firms with trained sales folks, not me. I already have my marketing channels. And I speak and write as a service!

I similarly get a lot of emails that let me know about a new product and invite me to view it and give my opinion.  NO!  First, I could spend my whole day with these. Second, and more importantly, my opinion is  valuable!  It’s the basis of 35+ years of work at the cutting edge of learning and technology. And you want it for free?  As if.  Let’s talk some real evaluation, as an engagement.  I’ve done that, and can for you.

As I’ve explained many times, my principles are simple: I talk ideas for free; I help someone personally for drinks/dinner; if someone’s making a quid, I get a cut.  And everyone seems fine with that, once I explain it. I occasionally get taken advantage of, but I try to make it only once for each way (fool me…).    But the number of people who seem to think that I should speak/write/consult for free continues to boggle my mind.  Exposure?  I think you’re overvaluing your platform.

Look, I think there’s sufficient evidence that I’m very good at what I do. If you want to refine your learning design processes, take your L&D strategy into the 21st century, and generally align what you do with how we think, work, and learn, let’s talk.  Let’s see if there’s a viable benefit to you that’s a fair return for me. Lots of folks have found that to be the case.  I’ll even offer the first conversation free, but let’s make sure there’s a clear two-way relationship on the table and explore it.  Fair enough?

 

 

What is the Future of Work?

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which is it?Just what is the Future of Work  about? Is it about new technology, or is it about how we work with people?  We’re seeing  amazing new technologies: collaboration platforms, analytics, and deep learning. We’re also hearing about new work practices such as teams, working (or reflecting) out loud, and more.  Which is it? And/or how do they relate?

It’s very clear technology is changing the way we work. We now work digitally, communicating and collaborating.  But there’re more fundamental transitions happening. We’re integrating data across silos, and mining that data for new insights. We can consolidate platforms into single digital environments, facilitating the work.  And we’re getting smart systems that do things our brains quite literally can’t, whether it’s complex calculations or reliable rote execution at scale. Plus we have technology-augmented design and prototyping tools that are shortening the time to develop and test ideas. It’s a whole new world.

Similarly, we’re seeing a growing understanding of work practices that lead to new outcomes. We’re finding out that people work better when we create environments that are psychologically safe, when we tap into diversity, when we are open to new ideas, and when we have time for reflection. We find that working in teams, sharing and annotating our work, and developing learning and personal knowledge mastery skills all contribute. And we even have new  practices such as agile and design thinking that bring us closer to the actual problem.  In short, we’re aligning practices more closely with how we think, work, and learn.

Thus, either could be seen as ‘the Future of Work’.  Which is it?  Is there a reconciliation?  There’s a useful way to think about it that answers the question.  What if we do either without the other?

If we use the new technologies in old ways, we’ll get incremental improvements.  Command and control, silos, and transaction-based management can be supported, and even improved, but will still limit the possibilities. We can track closer.  But we’re not going to be fundamentally transformative.

On the other hand, if we change the work practices, creating an environment where trust allows both safety  and accountability, we can get improvements whether we use technology or not. People have the capability to work together using old technology.  You won’t get the benefits of some of the improvements, but you’ll get a fundamentally different level of engagement and outcomes than with an old approach.

Together, of course, is where we really want to be. Technology can have a transformative amplification to those practices. Together, as they say, the whole is greater than the some of the parts.

I’ve argued that using new technologies like virtual reality and adaptive learning only make sense  after you first implement good design (otherwise you’re putting lipstick on a pig, as the saying goes).  The same is true here. Implementing radical new technologies on top of old practices that don’t reflect what we know about people, is a recipe for stagnation.  Thus, to me, the Future of Work starts with practices that align with how we think, work, and learn, and are augmented with technology, not the other way around.  Does that make sense to you?

A Bad Tart

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Good learning requires a basis for intrinsic interest. The topic should be of interest to the learner, a priori or after the introduction. If the learner doesn’t ‘get’ why this learning is relevant to them, it doesn’t stick as well. And this  isn’t what gamification does. So tarting up content is counter-productive. It’s a bad (s)tart!

Ok, to be clear, there’re two types of gamification. The first, important, and relevant type of gamification is using game design techniques to embed learning topic into meaningful series of decisions, where the context and actions taken affect the outcomes in important ways, and the challenge is appropriate.  However, that’s not the one that’s getting all the hype.

Instead, the hype is around PBL (which, sadly isn’t Problem-Based Learning but instead is Points, Badges, & Leaderboards).  If we wrap this stuff around our learning, we’ll make it more engaging.  And, at least initially, we’ll see that. At least in enthusiasm. But how about retention and transfer?  And will there be a drop-off when the novelty wears off?

Yes, we can tart up drill-and-kill, and should,  if that’s what’s called for (e.g. accurate retention of information). But that’s not what works for skills. And the times it’s actually relevant are scarce. For skills, we want appropriate retrieval.  And that means something else.

Retention and transfer of new skills requires contextualized retrieval and application to decisions that learners need to be able to make. And that’s scenarios (or, at least, mini-scenarios).  We need to put learners into situations requiring applying the knowledge to make decisions. Then the consequences play out.

If you’re putting your energy into finding gratuitous themes to wrap around knowledge recitation instead of making intrinsically meaningful contexts for knowledge  application, you’re wasting time and money.  You’re not going to develop skills.

I actually don’t mind if you want to tart up  after you’ve done the work of making the skill practice meaningful. But only  after!  If you’re skipping the important practice design, you’re letting down your learners. As well as the organization.  And typically we don’t need to spend unnecessary time.

Please, for your learners’ sake, find out about  both  sorts of gamification, distinguish between them, and then use them appropriately. PBL is ok when rote knowledge has to be drilled,  or  after  you’ve done good practice design.

FocusOn Learning reflections

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If you follow this blog (and you should :), it was pretty obvious that I was at the FocusOn Learning conference in San Diego last week (previous 2 posts were mindmaps of the keynotes). And it was fun as always.  Here are my reflections on what happened a bit more, as an exercise in meta-learning.

There were three themes to the conference: mobile, games, and video.  I’m pretty active in the first two (two books on the former, one on the latter), and the last is related to things I care and talk about.  The focus led to some interesting outcomes: some folks were very interested in just one of the topics, while others were looking a bit more broadly.  Whether that’s good or not depends on your perspective, I guess.

Mobile was present, happily, and continues to evolve.  People are still talking about courses on a phone, but more folks were talking about extending the learning.  Some of it was pretty dumb – just content or flash cards as learning augmentation – but there were interesting applications. Importantly, there was a growing awareness about performance support as a sensible approach.  It’s nice to see the field mature.

For games, there were positive and negative signs.  The good news is that games are being more fully understood in terms of their role in learning, e.g. deep practice.  The bad news is that there’s still a lot of interest in gamification without a concomitant awareness of the important distinctions. Tarting up drill-and-kill with PBL (points, badges, and leaderboards; the new acronym apparently)  isn’t worth significant interest!  We know how to drill things that must be, but our focus  should be on intrinsic interest.

As a side note, the demise of Flash has left us without a good game development environment. Flash is both a development environment and a delivery platform. As a development environment  Flash had a low learning threshold, and yet could be used to build complex games.  As a delivery platform, however, it’s woefully insecure (so much so that it’s been proscribed in most browsers). The fact that Adobe couldn’t be bothered to generate acceptable HTML5 out of the development environment, and let it languish, leaves the market open for another accessible tool. And Unity or Unreal provide good support (as I understand it), but still require coding.  So we’re not at an easily accessible place. Oh, for HyperCard!

Most of the video interest was either in technical issues (how to get quality and/or on the cheap), but a lot of interest was also in interactive video. I think branching video is a real powerful learning environment for contextualized decision making.  As a consequence the advent of tools that make it easier is to be lauded. An interesting session with the wise Joe Ganci (@elearningjoe) and a GoAnimate guy talked about when to use video versus animation, which largely seemed to reflect my view (confirmation bias ;) that it’s about whether you want more context (video) or concept (animation). Of course, it was also about the cost of production and the need for fidelity (video more than animation in both cases).

There was a lot of interest in VR, which crossed over between video and games.  Which is interesting because it’s not inherently tied to games or video!  In short,  it’s a delivery technology.  You can do branching scenarios, full game engine delivery, or just video in VR. The visuals can be generated as video or from digital models. There was some awareness, e.g. fun was made of the idea of presenting powerpoint in VR (just like 2nd Life ;).

I did an ecosystem presentation that contextualized all three (video, games, mobile) in the bigger picture, and also drew upon their cognitive and then L&D roles. I also deconstructed the game Fluxx (a really fun game with an interesting ‘twist’). Overall, it was a good conference (and nice to be in San Diego, one of my ‘homes’).