The legendary Steve “The Woz” Wozniak was the opening keynote at the 3rd International Conference of e-Learning and Distance Learning. In a wide-ranging, engaging, and personal speech, Steve made a powerful plea for the value of the thoughtful learner and intrinsic motivation, project-based learning, social, and self-paced learning.
Bob Pike launched the third and final day of ASTD’s Middle East and North Africa event with a keynote that took some well-established principles of good learning design and put his own unique and engaging spin on them. Along the way he discussed learning styles (in a different phrase) and generations. And he certainly practices what he preaches.
The Principals of the Internet Time Alliance decided to take a collective look ahead to the new year, and share our predictions. You‘ll see overlap but also unique perspectives:
Charles Jennings
An increasing number of organisations, independent of size, nature or location, will acknowledge that their traditional training and development models and processes are failing to live up to the expectations of their leaders and workforce in a dynamic and global marketplace. Some will take steps to use their financial and people resources and exploit new ways of working and learning. Others will be hamstrung with outdated skills, tools and technologies, and will be too slow to adapt. A confluence of technology and improved connectivity, increasing pressures for rapid solutions and better customer service, and demands for higher performance, will force the hands of many HRDs and CLOs to refocus from models of ‘extended formal training‘ to place technology-enabled, workplace-focused and leader-led development approaches at the core of their provision. We will move a step or two closer to real-time performance support at the point of need.
Clark Quinn
We‘ll see an increasing use of mobile, and some organizations will recognize the platform that such devices provide to move the full suite of learning support (specifically performance support and informal learning) out to employees, dissolving the arbitrary boundaries between training and the full spectrum of possibilities. Others will try to cram courses onto phones, and continue to miss the bigger picture, increasing their irrelevance. Further, we‘ll see more examples of the notion of a ‘performance ecosystem‘ of resources aligned around individual needs and responsibilities, instead of organized around the providing silos. We‘ll also see more interactive and engaging examples of experience design, and yet such innovative approaches will continue to be reserved for the foresightful, while most will continue in the hidebound status quo. Finally, we‘ll see small starts in thinking semantic use in technology coupled with sound ethnographic methods to start providing just such smart support, but the efforts will continue to be embryonic.
Harold Jarche
People who know nothing about connectivism or collaborative learning will profit from MOOC‘s. Academics and instructional designers will tell anyone who wants to listen just how important formal training is, as it fades in relevance to both learners and businesses.The ITA will keep on questioning the status quo and show how work is learning and learning is the work in the network era – some will listen, many will not.
Jane Hart
Many traditional-thinking organisations will waste a lot of time and energy trying to track social interventions in the hope that they can control and manage “social learningâ€. Whilst those organisations who appreciate that social learning is a natural and continuous part of working, will acknowledge that the most appropriate approach they can take is simply to support it in the workplace – both technologically and in terms of modelling new collaborative behaviours. Meanwhile, we will continue to see individuals and teams bypass IT and T&D departments and solve their learning and performance problems more quickly and easily using their own devices to access online resources, tools and networks.
Jay Cross
2013 will be a great year. As William Gibson wrote, “The future‘s already here. It‘s just not evenly distributed yet.†The business world will become a bit more complex — and therefore more chaotic and unpredictable. Moore‘s Law and exponential progress will continue to work their magic and speed things up. Learning will continue to converge with work. Increasingly, workers will learn their jobs by doing their jobs. The lessons of motivation (a la Dan Pink) and the importance of treating people like people will sink in. Smart companies will adopt radical management, putting the customer in charge and reorganizing work in small teams. Senior people will recognize that emotions drive people — and there are other emotions in addition to passion. Happy workers are more engaged, more productive, and more fulfilled. What‘s not to like?
David Jonassen passed away on Sunday. He had not only a big impact on the field of computers for learning, but also on learning itself. And he was a truly nice person.
I had early on been a fan of his work, his writing on computers as cognitive tools was insightful. He resisted the notion of teaching computing, and instead saw computers as mind tools, enablers of thinking. He was widely and rightly regarded as an influential innovator for this work.
I also regularly lauded his work on problem-solving. The one notion that really resonated was that the problems we give to kids in schools (and too often to adults in training) bear little resemblance to the problems they’ll face outside. He did deep work on problem-solving that more should pay attention to. He demonstrated that you could get almost as good a performance on standard tests using meaningful problems, and you got much better results on problem-solving skills (21st century skills) as well. I continue to apply his principles in my learning design strategies.
I had the opportunity to meet him face to face at a conference on learning in organizations. While I was rapt in his presentation, somehow it didn’t work for the audience as a whole, a shame. Still, I had the opportunity to finally talk to him, and it was a real pleasure. He was humble, thoughtful, and really willing to engage. I subsequently shared a stage with him when he presented virtually to a conference I was at live, and was thrilled to have him mention he was using my game design book in one of his classes.
He contributed greatly to my understanding, and to the field as a whole. He will be missed.
I was engaging in a mobile strategy session with a small not-for-profit the other day, and naturally it became an overall technology strategy session, as you really can’t do mobile strategy without considering social media strategy, learning technology strategy, even enterprise technology strategy. Mobile is a platform for all of the above, and you
One of the questions they struggled with was their social media strategy, as they were (as many people are) struggling with their existing workload. And there are lots of elements that can, and should, play a role. But their problem was really much simpler.
They had a Facebook page, and a twitter account, and a blog they had a placeholder for, and they couldn’t figure out how they were going to populate these. They were naturally concerned about what to blog, what to put on the Facebook page, what they would tweet about, and how they’d get the content for it, and keep it up.
The interesting thing was as we discussed it, talking about what a wide variety of material would make sense: reviews of relevant articles, updates about courses, etc, they started realizing that the content they needed was regularly being produced already. One enthusiastic staff member was always sending emails about things they should pay attention to. They also had notices about courses they were offering. And there was a regular stream of events that occurred.
It became clear that there was a lot of content available from their various channels, what they needed was curation. I was reminded of the fabulous job David Kelly does in curating conferences, and it’s largely the same set of skills (here’s Jane Hart interviewing Dave on the topic). Curation in many ways seems just an external manifestation of Harold Jarche’s Personal Knowledge Management (an extension of the share part of seek-sense-share).
It seemed plausible that they could give a few hours a week to a young person eager to add ‘social media’ to their resume who would do a minor bit of editing and get this to their blog. They wondered whether Facebook should have the same, and in this case the answer appeared to be ‘yes’ (blog allows RSS, some folks don’t go onto Facebook), and then the tweet stream could be for shorter pointers, announcements from the posts, whatever.
The result was that they had a simpler path to a coherent approach than they had realized. There’s more: it’s an org change and there’d have to be the usual messaging, incentives, etc. It’s only a start, but it gets them going while they develop the longer term strategy integrating mobile, web, social media, etc. Do you have a social media strategy in place, and is there emergent content from within your organization?
At the recent DevLearn, several of us gathered together in a Junto to talk about issues we felt were becoming important for our field. After a mobile learning panel I realized that, just as mlearning makes it too easy to think about ‘courses on a phone’, I worry that ‘learning experience design’ (a term I’ve championed) may keep us focused on courses rather than exploring the full range of options including performance support and eCommunity.
So I began thinking about performance experience design as a way to keep us focused on designing solutions to performance needs in the organization. It’s not just about what’s in our heads, but as we realize that our brains are good at certain things and not others, we need to think about a distributed cognition solution, looking at how resources can be ‘in the world’ as well as in others’ heads.
The next morning in the shower (a great place for thinking :), it occurred to me that what is needed is a design process before we start designing the solution. To complement Kahnemann’s Thinking Fast and Slow (an inspiration for my thoughts on designing for how we really think and learn), I thought of designing backward and forward. Let me try to make that concrete.
What I’m talking about is starting with a vision of what performance would look like in an ideal world, working backward to what can be in the world, and what needs to be in the head. We want to minimize the latter. I want to respect our humanity in a way, allowing us to (choose to) do the things we do well, and letting technology take on the things we don’t want to do.
In my mind, the focus should be on what decisions learners should be making at this point, not what rote things we’re expecting them to do. If it’s rote, we’re liable to be bad at it. Give us checklists, or automate it!
From there, we can design forward to create those resources, or make them accessible (e.g. if they’re people). And we can design the ‘in the head’ experience as well, and now’s the time for learning experience design, with a focus on developing our ability to make those decisions, and where to find the resources when we need them. The goal is to end up designing a full performance solution where we think about the humans in context, not as merely a thinking box.
It naturally includes design that still reflects my view about activity-centered learning (which I’m increasingly convinced is grounded in cognitive research). Engaging emotion, distributed across platforms and time, using a richer suite of tools than just content delivery and tests. And it will require using something like Michael Allen’s Successive Approximation Model perhaps, recognizing the need to iterate.
I wanted to term this performance experience design, and then as several members workshopped this with me, I thought we should just call it performance design (at least externally, to stakeholders not in our field, we can call it performance experience design for ourselves). And we can talk about learning experience design within this, as well as information design, and social networks, and…
It’s really not much more than what HPT would involve, e.g. the prior consideration of what the problem is, but it’s very focused on reducing what’s in the head, including emotion in the learning when it’s developed, using social resources as well as performance support, etc. I think this has the opportunity to help us focus more broadly in our solution space, make us more relevant to the organization, and scaffold us past many of our typical limitations in approach. What do you think?
Last week I was on a panel about the API previously known as Tin Can at #DevLearn, and some thoughts crystallized. Touted as the successor to SCORM, it’s ridiculously simple: Subject Verb Object: e.g. “I did this”, such as ‘John Doe read Engaging Learning’ but also ‘Jane Doe took this picture’. And this has interesting implications.
First, the API itself is very simple, and while it can be useful on it’s own, it’ll be really useful when there’re tools around it. It’s just a foundation upon which things can be done. There’ll need to be places to record these actions, and ones to pull together sequences of recommendations for learning paths, and more. You’ll want to build portfolios of what you’ve done (not just what content you’ve touched).
But it’s about more than learning. These can cross accessing performance support resources, actions in social media systems, and more. This person touched that resource. That person edited this file. This other person commented.
One big interesting opportunity is to be able to start mining these. We can start looking at evidence of what folks did and finding good and bad outcomes. It’s a consistent basis for big data and analytics. It’s also a basis to start customizing: if the people who touched this resource were better able to solve problem X, other people with that problem maybe should also touch it. If they’ve already tried X and Y, we can next recommend Z. Personalization/customization.
An audience member asked what they should take back to their org, and who needed to know what. My short recommendations:
Developers need to start thinking about instrumenting everything. Everything people touch should report out on their activity. And then start aggregating this data. Mobile, systems, any technology touch. People can self report, but it’s better to the extent that it’s automated.
Managers need to recognize that they’re going to have very interesting opportunities to start tracking and mining information as a basis to start understanding what’s happening. Coupled with rich other models, like of content (hence the need for a content strategy), tasks, learners, we can start doing more things by rules.
And designers need to realize, and then take advantage of, a richer suite of options for learning experiences. Have folks take a photo of an example of X. You can ask them to discuss Y. Have them collaborate to develop a Z. You could even send your learners out to do a flash mob ;).
Learning is not about content, it’s about experience, and now we have ways to talk about it and track it. It’s just a foundation, just a standard, just plumbing, just a start, but valuable as all that.
Last week’s #lrnchat touched on an important topic, experience design. I’ve talked about this before, but it’s worth taking several different cuts through it. The one I want to pursue here is the notion of transformative experience design.
A number of years ago, now, Pine & Gilmore released a book talking about an Experience Economy. In it, they posited that we’d gone from the agricultural economy, through a product and service economy, to what they termed an ‘experience economy’: where people paid for quality experiences. You can see this in themed cruises & restaurants, Apple’s product strategy, Disney, etc. I think it’s a compelling argument, but what really struck me was their next step. They argued that what was due next was a ‘transformation economy’, where people paid for experiences that change them (in ways that they desire or value).
And I argue that that’s what my book Engaging Learning was all about, how to create serious games, which really are experiences with an end in sight. The point here is not to tout the book, but instead to tout that a meld of experience design and learning design, learning experience design, is the path to this end.
There are things about experience design that instructional design largely ignores: emotion, multiple senses, extended engagement. While I feel that not enough has been written systematically about experience design (interface design yes, but not the total cross-media picture, e.g. Disney’s Imagineering), their intuitive approaches acknowledge recognizing the ebb and flow of emotions – motivation, anxiety – and beliefs about one’s role (epistemology, there I said it).
On the other hand, learning design is (properly done) grounded in cognitive science, with empirical results, but is incomplete in breadth. We know what we do, but our view is so limited!
Together, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. It’s about thinking beyond content, it’s about contextualizing, designing to “bewitch the mind and ensnare the senses”. Really, it’s about creating a magic experience that transcends content and truly is transformative. Are you ready to take that next step?
I’ve had my head down on a major project, a bunch of upcoming speaking engagements, some writing I’ve agreed to do, and…(hence the relative paucity of blog posts). That project, however, has been interesting for a variety of reasons, and one really is worth sharing: ID isn’t easy. We’ve been given some content, and it’s not just about being good little IDs and taking what they give us and designing instruction from it. We could do it, but it would be a disaster (in this case, that’s what we’re working from, a too-rote too-knowledge-dump course). And it’s too often what I’ve seen done, and it’s wrong.
SMEs don’t know how they do what they do. Part of the process of becoming expert is compiling away the underlying thinking that goes on, so it moves from conscious to subconscious. So when the time comes to work with SMEs about what’s needed, they a) make up stories about what they do, or b) resort to what they’ve learned (e.g. knowledge). It’s up to the ID to push back and unpack the models that guide performance. Yet that’s hard, particularly when they’re not domain experts, and SMEs have issues.
It takes a fair bit of common sense (remarkable by how uncommon it is), and willingness to continually reframe what the expert says and twist it until it’s focused on how they make decisions. There’re formal processes call Cognitive Task Analysis when you need them, but a ‘discount CTA’ approach (analogous to Nielsen’s ‘discount usability‘) would be appropriate in many cases.Such an approach includes getting some really good examples of both successes and failures of the task under consideration, and working hard to extract the principles that guide success. But SMEs can’t be order takers; they have to be willing to fight to understand what decisions do learners need to make that they can’t make now, and how to make those decisions.
It really helps to either have a deep background in the field, or a broad background. You can get the former by teaching ID to a SME, or having an ID work in a particular field for a long time. The latter works if you’re more in the ‘gun for hire’ mode. You then need, however, a broad knowledge that you can draw upon to make some reasonable inferences. That’s what I typically do, as my deep expertise is in learning design, but fortunately I’m eternally curious (used to lie on the floor with a volume of the World Book spread out in front of me). Model-based and systems thinking help immensely.
You really have to work hard, use your brain, draw upon real world knowledge and go to the mat with the material. If you’re not willing to do this, you’re not cut out to be a learning designer. There’s much more, understanding the way we learn, experience design, and more, but this is part of the full picture.
I just reviewed a paper submitted to a journal (one way to stay in touch with the latest developments), and all along they were doing research on the cognitive and motivational relationships in the game. They claimed it was a game, and proceeded on that assumption. And then the truth came out.
When designing and evaluating learning experiences, you really want to go beyond whether it’s effective or easy to use, and decide whether it’s engaging. Yes, you absolutely need to test usability first (if there’s a problem with the learning outcomes, is it the pedagogy or the interaction?), and then learning effectiveness. But ultimately, if you want it optimally tuned for success, pitched at the optimal learning level using meaningful activities, it should feel like a game. The business case is that the effectiveness will be optimized, and the tuning process to get there is less than you think (if you’re doing it right). And the only real way to test it is subjectively: do the players think it’s a game.
If you create a learning experience and call it game, but your learners don’t think it is, you undermine their motivation and your credibility. It can be relative (e.g. better than regular learning) as you might not have the resources to compete with commercial games, but it ought to be better than having to sit through a page turner, or you’ve failed.
There are systematic ways to design games that achieve both meaningful engagement and effective education practice. Heck, I wrote a whole book on the topic. It’s not magic, and while it requires tuning, it’s doable. And, as I’ve stated before: you can’t say it’s a game, only your players can tell you that.
So here were these folks doing research on a ‘game’. The punchline: “students, who started playing the game with high enthusiasm, started complaining after a short while, ‘this is not a game’, and stopped gameplay”. Fail.
Seriously, if you’re going to make a game, make it demonstrably fun. Or it’s not a game, whether you say so or not.