Search Results for: engag

Aligning

25 August 2015 by Clark 2 Comments

I’m realizing that a major theme of my work and the revolution is that what we do in organizations, and what we do as L&D practitioners, is not aligned with how we think, work, and learn. And to that extent, we’re doomed to failure. We can, and need to, do better.

Let’s start with thinking. The major mismatch here is that our thinking is done rationally and in our head. Results in cognitive science show, instead, that much of our thinking is irrational and is distributed across the world. We use external representations and tools, and unless we’re experts, we make decisions and use our brains to justify them rather than actually do the hard work.

What does this mean for organizations and L&D? It means we should be looking to augment how we think, with tools and processes like performance support, helping us find information with powerful search. We want to have open book learning, since we’ll use the book in the real world, and we want to avoid putting it ‘in the head’ as much as possible. Particularly rote information. We should expect errors, and provide support with checklists, not naively expect that people can perform like robots.

This carries over to how we work. The old view is that we work alone, performing our task, and being managed from above with one person thinking for a number of folks. What we now know, however, is that this view isn’t optimal. The output is better when we get multiple complementary minds working together. Adaptation and innovation work best when we work together.

So we don’t need isolation to do our work, we need cooperation and collaboration. We need ways to work together. We need to give people meaningful tasks and give them space to execute, with appropriate support. We need to create environments where it’s safe to share, to show your work, to work out loud.

And our models of learning are broken. The trend to an event comprised of information dump and knowledge test we know doesn’t work. Rote procedures are no longer sufficient for the increasing ambiguity and unique situations our learners are seeing. And the notion that “practice ’til they get it right” will lead to any meaningful change in ability is fundamentally flawed.

To learn, we need models to guide our behavior and help us adapt. We need to identify and address misconceptions. We need learners to engage concretely and be scaffolded in reflection. And we need much practice. Our learning experiences need to look much more like scenarios and serious games, not like text and next.

We’re in an information age, and industrial models just won’t cut it. I’m finding that we’re hampered by a fundamental lack of awareness of our brains, and this is manifesting in too many unfortunate and ineffective practices. We need to get better. We know better paths, and we need to trod them. Let’s start acting like professionals and develop the expertise we need to do the job we must do.

#itashare

Teasing apart cooperation and collaboration

4 August 2015 by Clark 6 Comments

There have been a couple of recent proposals about the relative role of cooperation and collaboration, and I’m trying to make sense of them. Here are a couple of different approaches, and my first take at teasing them apart.

Dion Hinchcliffe of Adjuvi tweeted a diagram about different types of working together that shows his take. He has coordination as a subsidiary to cooperation and on to collaboration. So coordination is when we know what needs to be done, but we can’t do it alone. Cooperation is when we’re doing things that need to have a contribution from each of us, and requires some integration. And collaboration is when we’re working together with a goal but not clear how we’ll get there. I think what’s core here is how well defined the task is and how much we contribute.

In the meantime, Harold Jarche, my ITA colleague, as a different take. He sees collaboration as working together to achieve a goal that’s for the organization, whereas cooperation goes beyond. Cooperation is where we participate and assist one another for our own goals. It’s contribution that’s uncoupled from any sense of requirement, and is freely given. I see here the discussion is more about our motives; why are we engaged.

With those two different takes, I see them as different ways of carving up the activities. My initial reaction is closer to Dion’s; I’ve always seen cooperation as willingness to assist when asked, or to provide pointers. To me collaboration is higher; it’s willing to not just provide assistance in clearly defined ways such as pointers to relevant work, answering questions, etc, but to actively roll up sleeves and pitch in. (Coordination is, to me I guess, a subset of cooperation.) With collaboration I’ve got a vested interest in the outcome, and am willing to help frame the question, do independent research, iterate, and persist to achieve the outcome.

I see the issue of motivation or goal as a different thing. I can cooperate in a company-directed manner, as expected, but I also can (and do) cooperate in a broader sense; when people ask for help (my principles are simple: talk ideas for free; help someone personally for dinner/drinks; if someone’s making a quid I get a cut), I will try to assist (with the Least Assistance Principle in mind). I can also collaborate on mutual goals (whether ITA projects or client work), but then I can also collaborate on things that have no immediate outcome except to improve the industry as a whole (*cough* Serious eLearning Manifesto *cough*).

So I see two independent dimensions: one on the effort invested, just responding to need or actively contributing; and the other on the motivation, whether for a structured goal or for the greater good.

Now I have no belief that either of them will necessarily agree with my take, but I’d like to reconcile these interpretations for the overall understanding (or at least my own!). That’s my first take, feedback welcome!

SME Brains

30 June 2015 by Clark 1 Comment

As I push for better learning design, I’m regularly reminded that working with subject matter experts (SMEs) is critical, and problematic. What makes SMEs has implications that are challenging but also offers a uniquely valuable perspective. I want to review some of those challenges and opportunities in one go.

One of the artifacts about how our brain works is that we compile knowledge away. We start off with conscious awareness of what we’re supposed to be doing, and apply it in context. As we practice, however, our expertise becomes chunked up, and increasingly automatic. As it does so, some of the elements that are compiled away are awarenesses that are not available to conscious inspection. As Richard Clark of the Cognitive Technology Lab at USC lets us know, about 70% of what SMEs do isn’t available to their conscious mind. Or, to put it another way, they literally can’t tell us what they do!

On the other hand, they have pretty good access to what they know. They can cite all the knowledge they have to hand. They can talk about the facts and the concepts, but not the decisions. And, to be fair, many of them aren’t really good at the concepts, at least not from the perspective of being able to articulate a model that is of use in the learning process.

The problem then becomes a combination of both finding a good SME, and working with them in a useful way to get meaningful objectives, to start. And while there are quite rigorous ways (e.g. Cognitive Task Analysis), in general we need more heuristic approaches.

My recommendation, grounded in Sid Meier’s statement that “good games are a series of interesting decisions” and the recognition that making better decisions are likely to be the most valuable outcome of learning, is to focus rabidly on decisions. When SMEs start talking about “they need to know X” and “they need to know Y” is to ask leading questions like “what decisions do they need to be able to make that they don’t make know” and “how does X or Y actually lead them to make better decisions”.

Your end goal here is to winnow the knowledge away and get to the models that will make a difference to the learner’s ability to act. And when you’re pressed by a certification body that you need to represent what the SME tells you, you may need to push back. I even advocate anticipating what the models and decisions are likely to be, and getting the SME to criticize and improve, rather than let them start with a blank slate. This does require some smarts on the part of the designer, but when it works, it leverages the fact that it’s easier to critique than generate.

They also are potentially valuable in the ways that they recognize where learners go wrong, particularly if they train. Most of the time, mistakes aren’t random, but are based upon some inappropriate models. Ideally, you have access to these reliable mistakes, and the reason why they’re made. Your SMEs should be able to help here. They should know ways in which non-experts fail. It may be the case that some SMEs aren’t as good as others here, so again, as in ones that have access to the models, you need to be selective.

This is related to one of the two ways SMEs are your ally. Ideally, you’re equipped with stories, great failures and great successes. These form the basis of your examples, and ideally come in the form of a story. A SME should have some examples of both that they can spin and you can use to build up an example. This may well be part of your process to get the concepts and practice down, but you need to get these case studies.

There’s one other way that SMEs can help. The fact that they are experts is based upon the fact that they somehow find the topic fascinating or rewarding enough to spend the requisite time to acquire expertise. You can, and should, tap into that. Find out what makes this particular field interesting, and use that as a way to communicate the intrinsic interest to learners. Are they playing detective, problem-solver, or protector? What’s the appeal, and then build that into the practice stories you ask learners to engage in.

Working with SMEs isn’t easy, but it is critical. Understanding what they can do, and where they intrinsic barriers, gives you a better handle on being able to get what you need to assist learners in being able to perform. Here are some of my tips, what have you found that works?

Embrace Plan B

17 June 2015 by Clark Leave a Comment

The past two weeks, I’ve been on the road (hence the paucity of posts). And they’ve been great opportunities to engage around interesting topics, but also have provided some learning opportunities (ahem). The title of this post, by the way, came from m’lady, who was quoting what a senior Girl Scout said was the biggest lesson she learned from her leader, “to embrace Plan B” ;).

So two weeks ago I was visiting a client working on upping their learning game. This is a challenge in a production environment, but as I discussed many times in posts over the second half of 2014 and some this year, I think there are some serious actions that can be taken. What is needed are better ways to work with SMEs, better constraints around what makes useful content, and perhaps most importantly what makes meaningful interaction and practice. I firmly believe that there are practical ways to get serious elearning going without radical change, though some initial hiccups will be experienced.

This past week I spoke twice. First on a broad spectrum of learning directions to a group that was doing distance learning and wanted to take a step back and review what they’d been doing and look for improvement opportunities. I covered deeper learning, social learning, meta-learning, and more. Then I went beyond and talked about 70:20:10, measurement, games and simulations, mlearning, the performance ecosystem, and more. I then moved on to a separate (and delightful) event in Vancouver to promote the Revolution.

It was the transition between the two events last week that threw me. So, Plan A was to fly back home on Tuesday, and then fly on to Vancouver on Wed morning. But, well, life happened. All my flights were delayed (thanks, American) on my flight there and back to the first engagement, and both of the first flights such that I missed the connection. On the way out I just got in later than I expected (leading to 4.5 hours sleep before the long and detailed presentation). But on the way back, I missed the last connecting flight home. And this had several consequences.

So, instead of spending Tuesday night in my own bed, and repacking for the next day, I spent the night in the Dallas/Fort Worth airport. Since they blamed it on weather (tho’ if the incoming flight had been on time, it might’ve gotten out in time to avoid the storm), they didn’t have any obligation to provide accommodation, but there were cots and blankets available. I tried to pull into a dark and quiet place, but most of the good ones were taken already. I found a boarding gate that was out of the way, but it was bright and loud. I gave up after an hour or so and headed off to another area, where I found a lounge where I could pull together a couple of armchairs and managed to doze for 2.5 or so hours, before getting up and on the hunt for some breakfast. Lesson: if something’s not working, change!

I caught a flight back home in just enough time to catch the next one up to Vancouver. The problem was, I wasn’t able to swap out my clothes, so I was desperately in need of some laundry. Upon arriving, I threw one of the shirts, socks, etc into a sink and gave them a wash and hung them up. (I also took a shower, which was not only a necessity after a rough night but a great way to gather myself and feel a bit more human). The next morning, as I went to put on the shirt, I found a stain! I couldn’t get up in front of all those people with a stained shirt. Plan B was out the door. Also, the other shirt had acquired one too! Plan C on the dust heap. Now what? Fortunately, my presentation was in the afternoon, but I needed to do something.

So I went downstairs and found a souvenir shop in the hotel, but the shirts were all a wee bit too loud. I didn’t really want to pander to the crowd quite so egregiously. I asked at the hotel desk if there was a place I could buy a shirt within walking distance, and indeed there was. I was well and truly on Plan D by this time. So I hiked on out to a store and fortunately found another shirt I could throw on. Lesson: keep changing!

I actually made the story part of my presentation. I made the point that just like in my case, organizations need not only optimal execution of the plans, but then also the ability to innovate if the plan isn’t working. And L&D can (and should) play a role in this. So, help your people be prepared to create and embrace Plan B (and C and…however many adaptations they need to have).

And one other lesson for me: be better prepared for tight connections to go awry!

Got Game?

28 April 2015 by Clark 1 Comment

Why should you, as a learning designer, take a game design workshop? What is the relationship between games and learning? I want to suggest that there are very important reasons why you should.

Just so you don’t think I’m the only one saying it, in the decade since I wrote the book Engaging Learning: Designing e-Learning Simulation Games, there have been a large variety of books on the topic. Clark Aldrich has written three, at least count. James Paul Gee has pointed out how the semantic features of games match to the way our brains learn, as has David Williamson Shaeffer. People like Kurt Squire, Constance Steinkuhler, Henry Jenkins, and Sasha Barab have been strong advocates of games for learning. And of course Karl Kapp has a recent book on the topic. You could also argue that Raph Koster’s A Theory of Fun is another vote given that his premise is that fun is learning. So I’m not alone in this.

But more specifically, why get steeped in it? And I want to give you three reasons: understanding engagement, understanding practice, and understanding design. Not to say you don’t know these, but I’ll suggest that there are depths which you’re not yet incorporating into your learning, and you could and should. After all, learning should be ‘hard fun’.

The difference between a simulation and a game is pretty straightforward. A simulation is just a model of the world, and it can be in any legal state and be taken to any other. A self-motivated and effective self-learner can use that to discover what they need to know. But for specific learning purposes, we put that simulation into an initial state, and ask the learner to take it to a goal state, and we’ve chosen those so that they can’t do it until they understand the relationships we want them to understand. That’s what I call a scenario, and we typically wrap a story around it to motivate the goal. We can tune that into a game. Yes, we turn it into a game, but by tuning.

And that’s the important point about engagement. We can’t call it game; only our players can tell us whether it’s a game or not. To achieve that goal, we have to understand what motivates our learners, what they care about, and figure out how to integrate that into the learning. It’s about not designing a learning event, but designing a learning experience. And, by studying how games achieve that, we can learn how to take our learning from mundane to meaningful. Whether or not we have the resources and desire to build actual games, we can learn valuable lesssons to apply to any of our learning design. It’s the emotional element most ID leaves behind.

I also maintain that, next to mentored live practice, games are the best thing going (and individual mentoring doesn’t scale well, and live practice can be expensive both to develop but particularly when mistakes are made). Games build upon that by providing deep practice; embedding important decisions in a context that makes the experience as meaningful as when it really counts. We use game techniques to heighten and deep the experience, which makes it closer to live practice, reducing transfer distance. And we can provide repeated practice. Again, even if we’re not able to implement full game engines, there are many important lessons to take to designing other learning experiences: how to design better multiple choice questions, the value of branching scenarios, and more. Practical improvements that will increase engagement and increase outcomes.

Finally, game designers use design processes that have a lot to offer to formal learning design. Their practices in terms of information collection (analysis), prototyping and refinement, and evaluation are advanced by the simple requirement that their output is such that people will actually pay for the experience. There are valuable elements that can be transferred to learning design even if you aren’t expecting to have an outcome so valuable you can charge for it.

As professionals, it behooves us to look to other fields with implications that could influence and improve our outcomes. Interface design, graphic design, software engineering, and more are all relevant areas to explore. So is game design, and arguably the most relevant one we can.

So, if you’re interested in tapping into this, I encourage you to consider the game design workshop I’ll be running for the ATD Atlanta chapter on the 3rd of June. Their price is fair even if you’re not a chapter member, and it’s great deal if you are. Further, it’s a tried and tested format that’s been well received since I first started offering it. The night before, I’ll be busting myths at the chapter meeting. I hope I’ll see you there!

Personal Mobile Mastery

23 April 2015 by Clark Leave a Comment

A conversation with a colleague prompted a reflection. The topic was personal learning, and in looking for my intersections (beyond my love of meta-learning), I looked at my books. The Revolution isn’t an obvious match, nor is games (though trust me, I could make them work ;), but a more obvious match was mlearning. So the question is, how do we do personal knowledge mastery with mobile?

Let’s get the obvious out of the way. Most of what you do on the desktop, particularly social networking, is doable on a mobile device. And you can use search engines and reference tools just the same. You can find how to videos as well. Is there more?

First, of course, are all the things to make yourself more ‘effective’. Using the four key original apps on the Palm Pilot for instance: your calendar to remind you of events or to check availability, using ToDo checklists to remember commitments to do something, using memos to take notes for reference, and using your contact list to reach people. Which isn’t really learning, but it’s valuable to learn to be good at these.

Then we start doing things because of where you are. Navigation to somewhere or finding what’s around you are the obvious choices. Those are things you won’t necessarily learn from, but they make you more effective. But they can also help educate you. You can look where you are on a map and see what’s around you, or identify the thing on the map that’s in that direction (“oh, that’s the Quinnsitute” or “There’s Mount Clark” or whatever), and have a chance of identifying a seen prominence.

And you can use those social media tools as before, but you can also use them because of where or when you are. You can snap pictures of something and send it around and ask how it could help you. Of course, you can snap pictures or films for later recollection and reflection, and contribute them to a blog post for reflection. And take notes by text or audio. Or even sketching or diagramming. The notes people take for themselves at conferences, for instance, get shared and are valuable not just for the sharer, but for all attendees.

Certainly searching things you don’t understand or, when there’s unknown language, seeing if you can get a translation, are also options. You can learn what something means, and avoid making mistakes.

When you are, e.g. based upon what you’re doing, is a little less developed. You’d have to have rich tagging around your calendar to signal what it is you’re doing for a system to be able to leverage that information, but I reckon we can get there if and when we want.

I’m not a big fan of ‘learning’ on a mobile device, maybe a tablet in transit or something, but not courses on a phone. On the other hand, I am a big fan of self-learning on a phone, using your phone to make you smarter. These are embryonic thoughts, so I welcome feedback. Being more contextually aware both in the moment and over time is a worthwhile opportunity, one we can and should look to advance. I think there’s much yet, though tools like ARIS are going to help change that. And that’ll be good.

Road trip(s)!

16 April 2015 by Clark 1 Comment

Several events are coming up that I should mention (“coming to a location near you!”):

If you’re anywhere near Austin, you should check out the upcoming eLearning Symposium May 7 and 8. I’m speaking on the L&D Revolution I’m trying to incite, and then offering a half day workshop to help you get your strategy going. There’s a nice slate of other speakers to help you dig deeper into elearning.

I’ll also be speaking on Serious eLearning at Callidus Cloud Connections in Las Vegas May 11-13. If you’re into Litmos, or thinking about it, it’s the place to be.

If you’re near Atlanta, I’ll be busting learning myths in an evening session for the ATD Chapter on the 2nd of June, and then running a learning game workshop on the 3rd. You’ll find out more about learning and engagement; you can and should add game elements to your learning design. I’m serious when I say that “learning can, and should, be hard fun“.

And I’ll be touting the needed L&D Revolution up in Vancouver June 11, keynoting the CSTD Symposium. There’s a great line up of talks to raise your game.

I would love to meet you at one of these events; hope to see you there (or there, or there, or there).

Michael Furdyk #LSCon Keynote Mindmap

26 March 2015 by Clark 3 Comments

Michael Furdyk gave an inspiring talk this morning about his trajectory through technology and then five ideas that he thought were important elements in the success of the initiatives he had undertaken. He gave lots of examples and closed with interesting questions about how we might engage learners through badges, mobile, and co-creation.

The subtleties

13 January 2015 by Clark Leave a Comment

I recently opined that good learning design was complex, really perhaps close to rocket science. And I suggested that a consequent problem was that the nuances are subtle. It occurs to me that perhaps discussing some example problems will help make this point more clear.

Without being exhaustive, there are several consistent problems I see in the elearning content I review:

The wrong focus. Seriously, the outcomes for the class aren’t meaningful! They are about information or knowledge, not skill. Which leads to no meaningful change in behavior, and more importantly, in outcomes. I don’t want to learn about X, I want to learn how to do X!
Lack of motivating introductions. People are expected to give a hoot about this information, but no one helps them understand why it’s important? Learners should be assisted to viscerally ‘get’ why this is important, and helped to see how it connects to the rest of the world. Instead we get some boring drone about how this is really important. Connect it to the world and let me see the context!
Information focused or arbitrary content presentations. To get the type of flexible problem-solving organizations need, people need mental models about why and how to do it this way, not just the rote steps. Yet too often I see arbitrary lists of information accompanied by a rote knowledge test. As if that’s gonna stick.
A lack of examples, or trivial ones. Examples need to show a context, the barriers, and how the content model provides guidance about how to succeed (and when it won’t). Instead we get fluffy stories that don’t connect to the model and show the application to the context. Which means it’s not going to support transfer (and if you don’t know what I’m talking about, you’re not ready to be doing design)!
Meaningless and insufficient practice. Instead of asking learners to make decisions like they will be making in the workplace (and this is my hint for the first thing to focus on fixing), we ask rote knowledge questions. Which isn’t going to make a bit of difference.
Nonsensical alternatives to the right answer. I regularly ask of audiences “how many of you have ever taken a quiz where the alternatives to the right answer are so silly or dumb that you didn’t need to know anything to pass?” And everyone raises their hand. What possible benefit does that have? It insults the learner’s intelligence, it wastes their time, and it has no impact on learning.
Undistinguished feedback. Even if you do have an alternative that’s aligned with a misconception, it seems like there’s an industry-wide conspiracy to ensure that there’s only one response for all the wrong answers. If you’ve discriminated meaningful differences to the right answer based upon how they go wrong, you should be addressing them individually.

The list goes on. Further, any one of these can severely impact the learning outcomes, and I typically see all of these!

These are really just the flip side of the elements of good design I’ve touted in previous posts (such as this series). I mean, when I look at most elearning content, it’s like the authors have no idea how we really learn, how our brains work. Would you design a tire for a car without knowing how one works? Would you design a cover for a computer without knowing what it looks like? Yet it appears that’s what we’re doing in most elearning. And it’s time to put a stop to it. As a first step, have a look at the Serious eLearning Manifesto, specifically the 22 design principles.

Let me be clear, this is just the surface. Again, learning engineering is complex stuff. We’ve hardly touched on engagement, spacing, and more. This may seem like a lot, but this is really the boiled-down version! If it’s too much, you’re in the wrong job.

« Previous Page