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FocusOn Learning reflections

27 June 2017 by Clark Leave a Comment

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’).

Nathalie Nahai #FocusOnLearn Keynote Mindmap

21 June 2017 by Clark Leave a Comment

Nathalie Nahai opened the second day of the FocuOn Learning conference. In a rapid fire presentation, she covered 7 principles that engage individuals into behaviors. With clear examples from familiar online experiences, she portrayed how these things work. Admirably, she finished with a call to ethical behavior.

Some new elearning companies ;)

23 May 2017 by Clark 1 Comment

As I continue to track what’s happening, I get the opportunity to review a wide number of products and services. While tracking them all would be a full-time job, occasionally some offer new ideas. Here’s a collection of those that have piqued my interest of late:

Sisters eLearning: these folks are taking a kinder, gentler approach to their products and marketing their services. Their signature offering is a suite of templates for your elearning featuring cooperative play. Their approach in their custom development is quiet and classy. This is reflected in the way they promote themselves at conferences: they all wear mauve polos and sing beautiful a capella. Instead of giveaways, they quietly provide free home-baked mini-muffins for all.

Yalms: these folks are offering the ‘post-LMS’. It’s not an LMS, and instead offers course management, hosting, and tracking. It addresses compliance, and checks a whole suite of boxes such as media portals, social, and many non-LMS things including xAPI. Don’t confuse them with an LMS; they’re beyond that!

MicroBrain: this company has developed a system that makes it easy to take your existing courses and chunk them up into little bits. Then it pushes them out on a schedule. It’s a serendipity model, where there’s a chance it just might be the right bit at the right time, which is certainly better than your existing elearning. Most importantly, it’s mobile!

OffDevPeeps: these folks a full suite of technology development services including mobile, AR, VR, micro, macro, long, short, and anything else you want, all done at a competitive cost. If you are focused on the ‘fast’ and ‘cheap’ side of the trilogy, these are the folks to talk to. Coming soon to an inbox near you!

DanceDanceLearn: provides a completely unique offering. They have developed an authoring tool that makes it easy for you to animate dancers moving in precise formations that spell out content. They also have a synchronized swimming version. Your content can be even more engaging!

There, I hope you’ll find these of interest, and consider checking them out.

Any relation between the companies portrayed and real entities is purely coincidental. #couldntstopmyself #allinfun

A ‘Critical Friend’?

16 May 2017 by Clark 1 Comment

I’m participating in an engagement, and they were struggling to define my role. Someone mentioned that I’m serving as a ‘critical friend’, and the others cottoned on to it. I hadn’t heard that term so I explored, and liked what I found. Thought I’d share it.

So, ‘critical friend‘ is a term that originated in the education sector. The prevailing definition is:

a trusted person who asks provocative questions, provides data to be examined through another lens, and offers critiques of a person‘s work as a friend. A critical friend takes the time to fully understand the context of the work presented and the outcomes that the person or group is working toward. The friend is an advocate for the success of that work.

What’s key to me is that the role involves being committed to the success of the endeavor, but also being provocative. The latter is about asking the hard questions and bringing in outside input that wouldn’t likely be considered otherwise. And I believe, based upon what I’ve dug into for innovation, that this is a valuable role.

So what I’m doing is getting to know the situation, rapidly consuming lots of documents, interviewing people, and sitting in on other information gathering sessions, to get to know what’s up. Then I’m floating some ideas that I think they really need to consider. The ideas are contrary to the path they’re planning on but I’ve buttressed them with some strong arguments. They make not take on all of them, but at least they’ll have explicitly considered them.

I’ve played this role specifically in a number of different situations (in fact, in some sense you could consider most of my engagements to have at least a facet of this). I like to think that my 30+ years of work across cognition, technology, learning, design, and organizational implementation, with corporations, education institutions, government agencies, and not-for-profits, as well as my stockpiling of models, means I’ll generate some lateral and valuable thoughts in almost any situation. That’s certainly been the case to date. And I really do want to help people achieve their goals.

It’s a fun, though challenging role. You have to get up to speed quickly, and be willing to offer ideas. I pride myself on also being able to suggest ways to accomplish ideas that aren’t obviously implementable at the first go (all part of Quinnovation ;).

When you’re looking at some change, getting some critical friend support on principle is a good idea. People challenging you for your own best interest isn’t always easy, but the outcomes are pretty much always worth it. So, who’s your critical friend?

Clarifying Microlearning

9 May 2017 by Clark 5 Comments

I was honored to learn that a respected professor of educational technology liked my definition of micro-learning, such that he presented it as a recent conference. He asked if I still agreed with it, and I looked back at what I’d written more recently. What I found was that I’d suggested some alternate interpretations, so I thought it worthwhile to be absolutely clear about it.

So, the definition he cited was:

Microlearning is a small, but complete, learning experience, layered on top of the task learners are engaged in, designed to help learners learn how to perform the task.

And I agree with this, with a caveat. In the article, I’d said that it could also be a small complete learning experience, period. My clarification on this is that those are unlikely, and the definition he cited was the most likely, and likely most valuable.

So, I’ve subsequently said (and elaborated on the necessary steps):

What I really think microlearning could and should be is for spaced learning.

Here I’m succumbing to the hype, and trying to put a positive spin on microlearning. Spaced learning is a good thing, it’s just not microlearning. And microlearning really isn’t helping them perform the task in the moment (which is a good thing too), but instead leveraging that moment to also extend their understanding.

No, I like the original definition, where we layer learning on top of a task, leveraging the context and requiring the minimal content to take a task and make it a learning opportunity. That, too, is a good thing. At least I think so. What do you think?

Top 10 Tools for @C4LPT 2017

19 April 2017 by Clark Leave a Comment

Jane Hart is running her annual Top 100 Tools for Learning poll (you can vote too), and here’s my contribution for this year. These are my personal learning tools, and are ordered according to Harold Jarche’s Seek-Sense-Share models, as ways to find answers, to process them, and to share for feedback:

Google Search is my go-to tool when I come across something I haven’t heard of. I typically will choose the Wikipedia link if there is one, but also will typically open several other links and peruse across them to generate a broader perspective.
I use GoodReader on my iPad to read PDFs and mark up journal submissions. It’s handy for reading when I travel.
Twitter is one of several ways I keep track of what people are thinking about and looking at. I need to trim my list again, as it’s gotten pretty long, but I keep reminding myself it’s drinking from the firehose, not full consumption! Of course, I share things there too.
LinkedIn is another tool I use to see what’s happening (and occasionally engage in). I have a group for the Revolution, which largely is me posting things but I do try to stir up conversations. I also see and occasionally comment on posting by others.
Skype let’s me stay in touch with my ITA colleagues, hence it’s definitely a learning tool. I also use it occasionally to have conversations with folks.
Slack is another tool I use with some groups to stay in touch. People share there, which makes it useful.
OmniGraffle is my diagramming tool, and diagramming is a way I play with representing my understandings. I will put down some concepts in shapes, connect them, and tweak until I think I’ve captured what I believe. I also use it to mindmap keynotes.
Word is a tool I use to play with words as another way to explore my thinking. I use outlines heavily and I haven’t found a better way to switch between outlines and prose. This is where things like articles, chapters, and books come from. At least until I find a better tool (haven’t really got my mind around Scrivener’s organization, though I’ve tried).
WordPress is my blogging tool (what I’m using here), and serves both as a thinking tool (if I write it out, it forces me to process it), but it’s also a share tool (obviously).
Keynote is my presentation tool. It’s where I’ll noodle out ways to share my thinking. My presentations may get rendered to Powerpoint eventually out of necessity, but it’s my creation and preferred presentation tool.

Those are my tools, now what are yours? Use the link to let Jane know, her collection and analysis of the tools is always interesting.

Leveraging Technology

29 March 2017 by Clark Leave a Comment

I was listening to a tale recounting a time when an organization was going through a change, and had solicited help. And the story surprised me. The short story is that the initial approach being taken weren’t leveraging technology effectively. And it led me to wonder how many organizations are still doing things the old way.

So the story was of a critical organizational change. The hired guns (the typical consulting agency) came into to do their usual schtick, interviewing some people and making recommendations. The problem was, there was no way to interview an appropriately representative sample, and consequently the outcome was going to be less than optimal. The resulting plan was large. dd

In this situation, a colleague stepped in and managed to arrange to use a social platform to do a better job of sharing the intentions and soliciting feedback. You might not be surprised to hear that the subsequent process also yielded greater buy-in. The process resulted in a fine-grained analysis of the plan, with some elements continuing to be executed by the initial partner, others taken on internally, and others discarded. The ultimate cost was reduced far more than the cost to implement this extra step.

The missed opportunity, it turns out, was that the process used didn’t get scaled and implemented for further changes. Some outside factors removed the instigator responsible for the change and it had been done as a ‘stealth’ operation, so awareness wasn’t spread. The hired guns, already entrenched, went back to business as usual.

The eye-opener for me was the fact that the approach initially taken wasn’t leveraging technology. In this day and age, that strikes me as completely unjustifiable! They were better able to support transparency and communication, and as typically happens that yielded both better outcomes and better engagement. Of course, that’s the point of the revolution, getting smarter about aligning technology with how our brains think, work, and learn. It’s just that I forget how far we still need to go.

Just thinking through changes, at every stage of initiatives there’s a benefit:

collecting data and determining the issue, via surveys and discussion
developing ideas and approaches in collaboration (transparently, showing your work)
sharing visions about the resulting approach
providing support for expected problems
collaborating to address the unexpected problems
maintaining focus through the change
celebrating successes

All these can be facilitated through technology in powerful ways that can’t be done across geographies and timezones without tech.

So here’s my question to you. Is your organization leveraging technology appropriately? And this is both at the level of L&D, and then also organization wide. Is your L&D group working transparently, leveraging social media to both support effective performance and continue to develop? And then are you using that experience to spread the possibilities throughout the organization? That’s the opportunity on tap, and I would really like to see L&D leading the way. Heck, we’re supposed to be the ones who understand how people learn, and when it comes to change, that’s learning too. Let’s own this!

Learning Design Insights

7 March 2017 by Clark 4 Comments

I attended a recent Meetup of the Bay Area Learning Design & Technology, and it led to some insights. As context, this is a group that meets in the evening maybe once or every other month or so. It’s composed of students or new graduates as well as experienced-practitioners. The topic was Themes from a Hat (topics are polled and then separate discussions are held). I was tapped to host the Learning Design conversation (there were three others: LMS, Measurement, and Social Learning), and that meant that a subset of the group sat in on the discussion. We had four separate discussions for each group, so everyone had a chance to discuss every topic (except us topic hosts ;).

I’d chosen to start with 3 or four questions to prompt discussion:

What is good learning design?
Are you doing good learning design?
What are the barriers to good learning design?
What can we do to improve learning design?

In each case, we never got beyond the first question! However, in the course of the discussions, we ended up talking quite a bit about the others. I confess that I’m a just a wee bit opinionated and a stickler for conceptual clarity, so I probably spoke too much about important distinctions. Yet there were also some valuable insights from the group.

First, it was a great group: enthusiastic, with a wide range of experience and backgrounds. Folks had come into the field from different areas, everything from neuroscience to rabbinical practice! And there were new students still in a Master’s program, job seekers, and those who were active in work. Everyone contributed. While it meant missing #lrnchat, it was worthwhile to have a different experience. And everyone was kind enough to understood when I had to have my knee up as rehab (thanks!).

The responses to the first question were very interesting: what is good learning design? While most everyone talked about features of the experience, we also were talking both the outcome and the process. There even emerged a discussion about what learning was. I offered the traditional (behaviorist) description: a change in behavior in the same context, e.g. responding in a different (and presumably better) way. I also mentioned my usual: learning is action and reflection; instruction is designed action and guided reflection.

One element that appeared in all four groups was ‘engaging’. Exactly that word. (Only once did I feel compelled to mention that Engaging Learning was the title of my first book! ;) There were other terms that encompassed it, including ‘experience’, ‘stimulating’, and ‘motivating’. I was pleased to see the recognition of the value! To define it, discussion several times ranged across things like challenging practice and making it meaningful to learners.

Another element that reoccurred was ‘memorable’. It seemed what was meant was ‘retention’ (over time until needed) rather than the learning experience was worth recalling. This did bring up a discussion of what led to retention and a discussion of spaced learning. That is, the fact that our brains can only strengthen associations so much in one day before sleep is needed. Slow learning. Reactivation.

That same discussion came up with another repeated term: micro learning. There appeared to be little differentiation between different interpretations of that term, so I made distinctions (as one does ;). People too often use the term micro learning to mean looking something up just when needed (such as a video about how to do something). And that’s valuable. Yet it can lead to successful performance in the moment without any learning (e.g. forgotten shortly thereafter). Which is fine, but it’s not learning! Microlearning might be some very small thing that can be learned right in the moment, but I reckon those are rare. What I really think micro learning could and should be is for spaced learning. I think that to do that successfully is a non-trivial exercise, by the way.

We covered other topics about design, too. In at least one group we talked about SME limitations and how to work with them. We also talked about the benefits of collaboration, and knowing your audience. And engaging the audience, making the learning meaningful to them and the organization. Minimalism came up in several different ways as well, not wasting the learner’s time.

One question had arisen in discussion with colleagues, and I took the opportunity in a couple groups to ask about their design practices. The question was how frequent was the process of giving a course demand to a designer and having them work alone from go to whoa. It varied, but it seemed like there was some of that, there was also a fair bit of both collaboration at least at certain points, and some iterative testing. This was heartening to hear! Doing performance consulting and meaningful measurement, however, did appear somewhat challenging.

Overall, there’s an opportunity for some deeper science behind elearning, yet I was very heartened by the enthusiasm and that the design processes weren’t as ‘solitary waterfall’ as I feared. So, who’s up for a deeper learning science workshop? ;)

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?

Another model for support

22 February 2017 by Clark Leave a Comment

I was thinking about today’s post, wherein I was talking about a couple of packages that might help organizations move forward. I was reflecting back on some previous posts about engagement models, and was reminded of a more recent one. And I realized this has played out in a couple of ways. And these approaches did provide away to develop the organization’s abilities to develop better learning. So this is another model for support for developing at least the learning side of the equation.

In a couple of instances , I’ve worked with organizations on a specific project, but in a particular way. For each, my role was to lead the design. In one case, it was for a series of elearning modules. My role was to develop the initial template that the rest of the content fit. Note that this isn’t a template for tarting it up, but instead a template about what the necessary elements and details around them were to ensure that the elements (e.g. intro, concept, practice, etc) both fit together and reflected the best learning science. In a more recent instance, it was on a specific focus, but there were several modules that used a similar structure.

What happens, importantly, is that by working collaboratively, we learn together. Each of these organizations was in the business of developing content, but they were looking to raise their game. So, for instance, through leading the Workplace of the Future project but sharing the thinking behind it, by working out loud in that sense, it’s possible to develop a shared understanding. And in the latter case, though they’d read the Deeper eLearning series, they got a lot more out of working it through with me. (And, I’ll suggest, more than also reading the subsequent blog posts I wrote about the project.)

In each case, we created an overall template for the learning, and then detailed what the elements for the template were, and the critical components. When we applied it, usually with me doing it first, and then handing off. It’s really a Cognitive Apprenticeship approach.

So, it’s a slightly more involved approach, with a much more variable scope, but in conjunction with other approaches I’ve mentioned like critiquing content or design processes, it’s one way to get a jump on deeper learning science. Just trying to think of models that can support improvement, and that’s what I’m trying to push.

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