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Vale Joe Miller

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This is a name you’re not likely to know, but I can’t let his passing go without comment.  Joe was an intensely private person who had a sizable  impact on the field of technology in learning, and I was privileged to know him.

I met Joe when my colleague Jim “Sky” Schuyler, who had hired for my first job out of college, subsequently dragged me back from overseas to work for him at a new company: Knowledge Universe Interactive Studios (KUIS).  I’d stayed in touch with Sky over the years, and I was looking to come back at the same time he had been hired to lead KUIS’s work to be an ISP for the KU companies, but also to create a common platform.  I was brought on board to lead the latter initiative.

To make a long story short, initially I reported to Sky, but ultimately he moved on and I began to report to the CEO, Joe, directly.  Sky had said that he liked working for people smarter than himself, and if indeed Joe was such this was quite the proposition, as Sky was not only a Northwestern PhD but a wise colleague in many ways. He’d been a mentor and friend as well as a colleague, and if Sky (reticent as he is) thought highly of Joe, this was high praise indeed.

I got to know Joe slowly. He was quite reserved  not only personally but professionally, but he did share his thinking.  It quickly became clear that not only did he have the engineering chops of a true techy, he also had the strategic insight of an visionary executive.  What I learned more slowly was that he was not just a natural leader, but a man with impeccable integrity and values.

I found out that he’d been involved with Plato via his first job at Battelle, and was suitably inspired to start a company supporting Plato. He moved  to the Bay Area to join Atari, and  subsequently was involved with Koala Technologies, which created  early PC (e.g. Apple) peripherals.  His trajectory subsequently covered gaming as well as core technology, eventually ending up at Sega before he convinced the KU folks to let him head up KUIS.  He seemed to know everyone.

More importantly, he had the vision to understand system and infrastructure, and barriers to same. He was excited about Plato as a new capability for learning. He supported systems at Koala for new interface devices. He worked to get Sega to recognize the new landscape.  In so many ways he worked behind the scenes to enable new experiences, but he was never at the forefront of the public explanation, preferring to make things happen at the back end (despite the fact that he was an engaging speaker: tall, resonant voice, and compelling charisma).

In my short time to get to know him, he shared his vision on a learning system that respected who learners were, and let me shape a team that could (and did) deliver on that vision.  He fought to give us the space and the resources, and asked the tough questions to make sure we were focused. We got a working version up and running before the 2001 crash.

He continued to have an impact, leading some of the major initiatives of Linden Labs as they went open source and met some challenging technical issues  while negotiating cultural change to take down barriers.  He ended up at SportVision, where he was beginning to help them understand they were not about information, but insight.  Unfortunately, I didn’t have much view  into what was happening there, as it was proprietary and Joe was, as I said, private.

Joe served as a mentor for me.  I found him to have deep values, and under his austere exterior he exemplified values of humanity and compassion.  I was truly grateful when I could continue to meet him regularly and learn from him as he expressed true interest as well as sharing his insights.

He was taken from us too early, and too quickly.  He fought a tough battle at the end, but at least was surrounded by the love of his life and their children as they passed.  Rest in Peace.

Update: there’s a memorial site for Joe, http://www.josephbmilleriii.com where you can leave thoughts, view pictures, and more.  RIP.

Rethinking Design: Curriculum

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In addition to yesterday’s post about pedagogy, I also mentioned the need to get deeper on curriculum as well.  The notion is that we need to redefine curriculum as a way to get away from a content base, and start moving to an activity base.

a task-centered curriculumThe focus is on creating a curriculum that has tasks at it’s core, and these tasks are tasks  like the learner will be expected to be performing  in the world.  These tasks can be viewed as competencies that, if the learner possesses them, there is evidence that they are prepared to perform.

The goal is to choose tasks, with the final task likely being chosen  first and working backwards (as in Understanding By Design) to determine what needs to be done.  From each chosen ‘task’ will be a suite of activities that comprise the pre-, in-, and post-class activities, but here we are focusing on the overall curriculum before we get into the individual pedagogy.

Note that the content is subsequently chosen to support successful execution of the tasks, and is not presented to the learner but is, instead, made available to them at the time of the task.  The goal is to have them process the content in service of accomplishing the task, an approach more consonant with our cognitive architecture. We’re more likely to remember information we’ve had to process rather than information we’ve just been presented with.  Information that a learner can recite is unlikely to be activated at a relevant time (“inert knowledge) unless it’s been applied, and the focus should be on the application, not the recitation.

Again, this turns out to be  very much the approach of Roger Schank of  Socratic Arts as well, but emerged from my own thoughts and frustrations before I found out about the Story-Centered Curricula.  Of course, I referenced the Goal-Based Scenarios in my book on learning (game) design, but I hadn’t been aware of his curricular processes at the time of this or my Reimagining rant pointed to above.

There’re more details required to fully flesh out the process here. I reckon it’d be easier to do with an employer than faculty, but even with faculty, I reckon if you can get more than one in a room, focus on decisions, and help them understand the power of activity-focused learning, it’ll work. Fingers crossed ;).

Rethinking Design: Pedagogy

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In thinking through how to design courses that lead to both engaging experiences and meaningful outcomes, I’ve been working on the component activities.  As part of that, I’ve been looking at elements such as pedagogy in pre-, in-, and post-class sessions so that there are  principled reasons behind the design.

Pre-, In-, & Post-Class activities  So, here I’m  looking at trying for guidance  to align what happens in all three sections.  In this  case, two major types of activities have emerged: more procedural activities, such as using equipment appropriately; and more conceptual activities such as making the right decisions of what to say and do.  These aren’t clearly discriminated, but it’s a coarse description.

Of course, there’s an introduction that both emotionally and cognitively prepares the learner for the coming learning experience.

So for conceptual tasks, what we’re looking to do is drive learning to content.  In typical  approaches, you’d be presenting conceptual information (e.g. ‘click to see more‘) and maybe asking quiz questions.  Here, I’m looking to make the task of processing the information to generate  something,  whether a document, presentation, or whatever,  and that the processing is close to the way the information will be used.  So they might create a guide for decisions (e.g. a decision tree), or a checklist, or something that requires them to use the information. (And if the information doesn’t support doing, it’s probably not necessary.)  As support, in a recent conversation I heard that interviewed organizations said that making better decisions were the keys to better job performance.

Whereas in the procedural approach, we really want to give them practice in the task. It may be scaffolded, e.g. simplified, but it’s the same  practice that they’ll need to be able to perform after the learning experience. Ideally, they’ll have to explore and use content resources to figure out how to do it appropriate, in a guided exploration sense, rather than just be given the steps.

In both  cases, models are key to helping them determine what needs to happen.  Also in both cases, an instructor should be reviewing their output. In the conceptual case, learners might get feedback on their output, and have a chance to revise their creation.  In the case of the practice, the experience is likely a simulation, and the learner should be getting feedback about their success.  In either case, the instructor has information about how the cohort is doing.  So…

…for in-class learning, the learners should be reflecting on their performances, and the instructor should be facilitating that at the beginning, using the information about what’s working (and not).  Then there should be additional activities that the learners engage in that require them interacting with the material, processing (conceptual) or applying (procedural) it with each other and then with facilitated reflection.

Finally, the learners after class should be getting given elaborative activities.  In the case of the conceptual task, coming up with an elaborated version or some additional element that helps cement the learning would be valuable.  The practice or activity should get fleshed out to the point where the learner will be capable of appropriately acting after the learning experience, owing to sufficient practice and appropriate decontextualization. The goal is for retention over time and transfer to all appropriate situations.

Am I making sense here?

Click to learn less

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All too often, when I review content, I see a recurrent interaction. And I really can‘t figure out why, except a thorough lack of understanding of learning, and a determination to put interaction in regardless. Click here to learn more.

It‘s not just the next button I‘m railing about here, but instead that, on a screen, there‘ll be n things, tabs, boxes, something, with the instructions to ‘click to learn more‘. The point being that information is available but not directly. It appears that the designer has a lot of content to present, and yet just presenting lots of content is obviously wrong, so we‘ll make it more interactive by chunking it up and then showing it iteratively with clicks. That‘s more interactive, yes?  Yes, and it‘s bad. Two problems: the content, and the interactions.

First, if you‘ve got so much content to present, it‘s a strong indicator that something‘s wrong. People aren‘t good at remembering large bits of information. They retain gist, not details. If you‘re presenting a lot of content, you‘re undoubtedly presenting too many details. Put the detail in the world if it has to be accessible. And my guess is that lots of it is ‘nice to have‘, not ‘must have‘. If it really has to go in the head, you are really going to have to do a lot more than just have them read it, you’ll need drill and kill. Instead, find the core model that predicts the right actions, and have them learn the model. Then give them practice in applying it, which leads to the second problem.  Reading once just isn’t going to have much impact.

Learners should be having meaningful interaction. The learner should be using the content to do something. Which isn‘t a click each, it‘s a click the right one. It‘s making a choice, taking an action, applying the knowledge in context to make a decision. What will make a difference to the organization is not the ability to recite knowledge (leave that to videos, documents, chatbots, what have you), but instead the ability to make better decisions.

You can do the ‘reveal’ in certain circumstances, such as to present an example: present the initial situation, then reveal to show the complication, then reveal to show the solution, and the results. (Here‘s the story: click here to see the problem that arose, click here to see the alternatives considered, click here to see the decision made, click here to see the consequences). So, it might be a somewhat engaging way to present an example, but good writing would trump that. Or you might have alternative actions and click to see the consequences of that action. Which wouldn‘t make sense if there were a right answer, or you should immediately be getting them to first commit to a choice and then provide feedback.

Where does this come from? I think it comes from the fact that Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) don‘t have access to most of what they actually do, but they do have access to all they know, so they tend to put out information. There are processes to get around this, but designers have to have the gumption to stand up to knowledge dump on the part of the SMEs and fight to find out how that information is used. It‘s not necessarily easy (though it gets easier with practice), but it is necessary.

So, please, avoid the ‘click here to learn more‘ and instead look for ‘click here to choose an action to take‘.

Benign role-playing

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In #lrnchat  a couple of weeks ago on anxiety in learning, Shannon Tipton suggested that role plays are the worst.  Now, I know Shannon and respect her (we’re in synch, her Learning Rebels  movement very much resonates with my Revolutionary tendencies), so this somewhat surprised me.  We debated it a bit on twitter, and we thought maybe we should make the argument more extended, so here’s my take.

Her concern, as I understood it, was  role plays where a subset get up and play roles in front of the room are uncomfortable.  That is, there’re roles and goals, and they’re set up to illustrate a point.  And I can see that type of role play might create a problem for a non-assertive person, particularly in an uncomfortable environment.    (She mentions it here, and see the extended explanation in the comment.)

Now, a favorite model of mine is Ann Brown and Anne-Marie Palincsar’s reciprocal teaching.  In this model (generalized from the original focus on reading), everyone takes  a turn performing (including instructor) and others critique the performance.  Of course, there have to be ground rules, such as talking about the performance not the person, making it safe to share, small enough steps between tasks, etc.  However, the benefits are that you internalize the monitoring, becoming self-monitoring and self-improving.

As another data point, I think of the Online Role Playing as characterized by Sandra Wills, Elyssabeth Leigh, and Albert Ip.  Here, learners take roles and goals and explore virtually over time.  The original one they reference was done by John Shepherd and Andrew Vincent and explored the mideast crisis. Learners got engaged in the roles, and the whole process really illuminated the tensions underlying the topic.

When I put these together, I see a powerful tool for learning.  You should design the roles and goals to explore a topic, and unpack an issue.  You should prep learners to help them do a fair job of the role. And, most of all, you have to make it safe.  The instructor should be willing to take on the challenging role, and similarly be seen to fail, or maybe everyone does it in groups so no one group is in front, then you facilitate a discussion.  I’ve done this in my game design workshop, where everyone pairs up and alternates being a SME and being an ID.

I understand that performing is an area of fear for many, but I think that role playing can be a powerful learning experience without anxiety when you manage the process right.  Bad design is bad design, after all (PowerPoint doesn’t kill people…).  What say you?

Align, deepen, and space

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I was asked about, in regards to the Serious eLearning Manifesto, about how people could begin to realize the potential of eLearning.  I riffed about this once before, but I want to spin it a different way.  The key is making meaningful practice.  And there are three components: align it, deepen it, and space it.

First, align it. What do I mean here?  I mean make sure that your learning objective, what they’re learning, is aligned to a real change in the business. Something you know that, if they improve, it will have an impact on a measurable business outcome.  This means two things, underneath. First, it has to be something that, if people do differently and better, it will solve a problem in what the organization is trying to do.  Second, it has to be something learning benefits from.  If it’s not a case where it’s a cognitive skill shift, it should be about using a tool, or replaced with using a tool. Only use a course when a course makes sense, and make sure that course is addressing a real need.

Second, deepen it.  Abstract practice, and knowledge test are both less effective than practice that puts the learner in a context like they’ll be facing in the workplace, and having them make the same decisions they’ll need to be making after the learning experience.  Contextualize it, and exaggerate the context (in appropriate ways) to raise the level of interest and importance to be closer to the level of engagement that will be involved in live performance.  Make sure that the challenge is sufficient, too, by having alternatives that are seductive unless you really understand. Reliable misconceptions are great distractors, by the way.  And have sufficient practice that leads from their beginning ability to the final ability they need to have, and so that they can’t get it wrong (not just until they get it right; that’s amateur hour).

Here’s where the third, space it, can come in.  Will Thalheimer has written a superb document (PDF) explaining the need for spacing. You can space out the complexity of development, and sufficient practice, but we need to practice, rest (read: sleep), and then practice some more. Any meaningful learning really can’t be done in one go, but has to be spread.  How much? As Will explains, that depends on how complex the task is, and how often the task will be performed and the gaps in between, but it’s a fair bit. Which is why I say learning  should be expensive.

After these three steps, you’ll want to only include the resources that will lead to success, provide models and examples that will support success, etc, but I believe that, regardless,  learners with good practice are likely to get more out of the learning experience than any other action you can take. So start with good practice, please!

Changing Culture: Changing the Game

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I previously wrote about Sutton & Rao’s Scaling up Excellence, and have now finished a quick read of Connors & Smith’s  Change the Culture, Change the Game.  Both books cover roughly the same area, but in very different ways.  Sutton & Rao’s was very descriptive of the changes they observed and the emergent lessons.  Connors & Smith, on the other hand, are very prescriptive.  Yet both are telling similar stories with considerable overlap.

Let’s be clear, Connors & Smith have a model they want to sell you.  You get the model up front, and then implementation tools in the second half. Of course, you  aren’t supposed to actually try this without having their help.  As long as you’re clear on this aspect of the book, you can take the lessons learned and decide whether you’d apply them yourself or use their support.

They have a relatively clear model, that talks about the results you want, the actions people will have to take to get to the results,  the beliefs that are needed to guide those actions, and the experiences that will support those beliefs. They aptly point out that many change initiatives stop at the second step, and don’t get the necessity of the subsequent two steps. It’s a plausible story and model, where  the actions, beliefs, and experiences are the elements that create the culture that achieves the results.

Like Kirkpatrick’s levels, the notion is that you start with the results you need, and work backward.  Further, everything has to be aligned: you have to determine what actions will achieve the new results, and then what new beliefs can   guide those new actions, and ultimately what  experiences are needed  to foster those new beliefs.  You work rigorously to only focus on the ones that will make a difference, recognizing that too much will impact the outcome.

The second half talks about tools to foster these steps. There are management tools,  leadership  skills, and  integration steps.  There’s necessary training associated with these, and then coaching (this is the sales bit).   It’s very formulaic, and makes it sound like close adherence to these approaches will lead to success.  That said, there is a clear recognition that you need to continually check on how it’s going, and be active in making things happen.

And this is where there’s overlap with Sutton & Rao: it’s about ongoing effort, it requires accountability (being willing to take ownership of outcomes),  people must be  engaged and involved, etc.  Both are different approaches to dealing with the same issue: working systematically to make necessary changes in an organization. And in both cases, the arguments are pretty compelling that it takes transparency and commitment by the leadership to walk the talk.  It’s up to the executives to choose the needed change, but the empowerment to find ways to make that happens is diffused downward.

Whether you like the more organic approach of Sutton & Rao or the more formulaic model of Connors & Smith, you will find insight into the elements that facilitate change.  For me, the synergy was nice to see.  Now we’ll see if these are still old-school by comparison to Laloux’s  Reinventing Organizations,  that has received strong support  from some  colleagues I have learned to trust.

#itashare

 

From Content to Experience

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A number of years ago, I said that the problem for publishers was not going from text to content (as the saying goes), but from content to experience.  I think elearning designers have the same problem: they are given a knowledge dump, and have to somehow transform that into an effective experience.  They may even have read the Serious eLearning Manifesto, and want to follow it, but struggle with the transition or transformation.  What’s a designer to do?

The problem is, designers will be told, “we need a course on this”, and given a dump of Powerpoints (PPTs), documents (PDFs), and maybe access to a subject matter expert (SME).  This is all about knowledge.  Even the SME, unless prompted carefully otherwise, will resort to telling you the knowledge they’ve learned, because they just don’t have access to what they know.  And this, by itself, isn’t a foundation for a course.  Processing the knowledge, comprehending it, presenting it, and then testing on acquisition (e.g. what rapid elearning tools make easy), isn’t going to lead to a meaningful outcome. Sorry, knowledge isn’t the same as ability to perform.

And this ignores, of course, whether this course is actually needed.  Has anyone checked to see that if the skills associated with this knowledge have a connection with a real workplace performance issue?  Is the performance need a result of a lack of skills?  And is this content aligned to that skill?  Too often folks will ask  for a course on X when the barrier is something else.  For instance, if the content is a bunch of knowledge that somehow you’re to magically put in someone’s head, such as product information or arbitrary rules, you’re far better off putting that information in the world than trying to put it in the head.  It’s really hard to get arbitrary information in the head.  But let’s assume that there is a core skill and workplace need for the sake of this discussion.

The key is determining what this knowledge actually supports  doing differently.  The designer needs to go through that content and figure out what individuals will be able to  do that they can’t do now (that’s important), and then develop practice doing that. This is so important that, if what they’ll be able to do differently, isn’t there, there should be push back.  While you can talk to the SME (trying to get them to talk in terms of decisions they can make instead of knowledge), you may be better off inferring the decisions and then verifying and refining with the SME.  If you have access to several SMEs, better yet get them in a room together and just facilitate until they come up with the core decisions, but there are many situations where that’s not feasible.

Once you have that key decision, the application of the skill in context, you need to create situations where learners can practice using it.  You need to create scenarios  where these decisions will play out. Even just better written multiple choice questions that have: story setting, situation precipitating decision, decision alternatives that are ways in which learners might go wrong,  consequences of the decisions, and feedback.  These practice attempts are the core of a meaningful learning experience. And there’s even evidence that putting problems up front or at core is a valuable practice.  You also want to have sufficient practice not just ’til they get it right, but until they have a high likelihood of not getting it wrong.

One thing that might not be in the PDFs and PPTs are examples.  It’s helpful to get colorful examples of someone using  information to successfully solve a problem, and also cases where they misapplied it and failed.  Your SME should be able to help you here, telling you engaging stories of wins and losses.  They may be somewhat resistant to the latter; worst case have them tell them about someone else.

The content in the PDFs and PPTs then gets winnowed down into just the resource material that helps the learner actually able to do the task, to successfully make the decision.  Consider having the practice set in a story, and the content is available through the story environment (e.g. casebooks on the shelves for examples, a ‘library’ for concepts).  But even if you present the (minimized) content and then have practice, you’ve shifted from knowledge dump/test to more of a flow of experience.  The suite  of  meaningful practice, contextualized well and made meaningful with a wee bit of exaggeration and careful alignment with learner’s awareness, is the essence of experience.

Yes, there’s a bit more to it than that, but this is the core: focus on  do, not dump.  And, once you get in the habit, it shouldn’t  take longer, it just takes a change in thinking.  And even if it does, the dump approach isn’t liable to  lead to any meaningful learning, so it’s a waste of time anyway.  So, create experiences, not content.

 

Peeling the onion

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I’ve been talking a bit recently about deepening formal design, specifically to achieve learning that’s flexible, persistent, and develops the learner’s abilities to become self-sustaining in work and life.  That is, not just for a course, but for a curriculum.  And it’s more than just what we talked about in the Serious eLearning Manifesto, though of course it starts there.    So, to begin with, it needs to start with meaningful objectives, provide related practice, and be trialed and developed, but there’s more, there are layers of development that wrap around the core.

One element I want to suggest is important is also in the Manifesto, but I want to push a bit deeper here.  I worked to put in that the elements behind, say, a procedure or a task, that you apply to problems, are models or concepts.  That is, a connected body of conceptual relationships that tie together your beliefs about why it should be done this way.  For example, if you’ve a procedure or process you want people to follow, there is (or should be) a  rationale  behind it.

And  you should help learners discover and see the relationships between the model and the steps, through examples and the feedback they get on practice.  If they can internalize the understanding behind steps, they are better prepared for the inevitable changes to the tools they use, the materials they work on, or the process changes what will come from innovation.  Training them on X, when X will ultimately shift to Y, isn’t as helpful unless you help them understand the principles that led to performance on X and will transfer to Y.

Another element is that the output of the activities should create scrutable deliverables  and  also annotate the thoughts behind the result.  These provide evidence of the thinking both implicit and explicit, a basis for mentors/instructors to understand what’s good, and what still may need to be addressed, tin the learner’s thinking.  There’s also the creation of a portfolio of work which belongs to the learner and can represent what they are capable of.

Of course, the choices of activities for the learner initially, and the design of them to make them engaging, by being meaningful to the learner in important ways, is another layer of sophistication in the design.  It can’t just be that you give the traditional boring problems, but instead the challenges need to be contextualized. More than that (which is already in the Manifesto), you want to use exaggeration and story to really make the challenges compelling.  Learning  should   be hard fun.

Another layer is that of 21st Century skills (for examples, the SCANS competencies).  These can’t be taught separately, they really need to manifest across whatever domain learnings you are doing. So you need learners to not just learn concepts, but apply those concepts to specific problems. And, in the requirements of the problem, you build in opportunities to problem-solve, communicate, collaborate, e.g. all the foundational and workplace skills. They need to reappear again and again and be assessed (and developed) separately.

Ultimately, you want the learner to be taking on responsibility themselves.  Later assignments should include the learner being given parameters and choosing appropriate deliverables and formats for communication.  And this requires and additional layer, a layer of annotation on the learning design. The learners need to be seeing  why the learning was so designed, so that they can internalize the principles of good design and so become self-improving learners. You, for example, in reading this far, have chosen to do this as part of your own learning, and hopefully it’s a worthwhile investment.  That’s the point; you want learners to continue to seek out challenges, and resources to succeed, as part of their ongoing self-development, and that comes by having seen learning design and been handed the keys at some point on the journey, with support that’s gradually faded.

The nuances of this are not trivial, but I want to suggest that they  are doable.  It’s a subtle interweaving, to be sure, but once you’ve got your mind around it (with scaffolded practice :), my claim is that it can be done, reliably and repeatedly.   And it should.  To do less is to miss some of the necessary elements for successful support of  an individual to become the capable and continually self-improving learner that we need.

I touched on most of this when I was talking about Activity-Based Learning, but it’s worthwhile to revisit it (at least for me :).