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Transcending Experience Design

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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?

Learning Design isn’t for the wimpy

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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.

A game? Who says?

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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.

Stealth mentoring

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I was looking for any previous post I’d made about stealth mentoring, so I could refer to it in a post I was writing, and I couldn’t find it. It’s a concept I refer to often (and have to give credit to my colleague Jay Cross who inspired the thought), so here’s my obligatory place holder.

When someone is thinking and learning ‘out loud’, e.g. putting their deeper reflections on line via, say, a blog (er, like this one, recursively), they’re allowing you to look at where and how their thinking is going.  When they also are leaving a trail of what they think is interesting (e.g. by pointing to things on Twitter or leaving bookmarks at a social bookmarking site), you can put together what’s interesting to them and what their resulting thoughts are, and start seeing the trajectory of their thinking and learning.

In formal learning, we can think of modeling behavior and cognitive annotation, the processes covered in Cognitive Apprenticeship as a development process. In a more informal sense, if you had a leader who shared discussions of their thinking with you, you’d consider that  mentoring.

Similarly, here, with a difference.  If they’re blogging and tweeting, or otherwise leaving tracks of their thinking, they can be mentoring you and not even know it. You’re being a stealth mentee!  So, if you can find interesting people who blog and tweet a lot, and you follow their blogs and tweets, they can be mentors to you!

I strongly recommend this path to self-development. One of the ways to accelerate your own growth, part of your personal knowledge management path, is to mentor folks who represent the type of thinking you believe is interesting and important.  By the way, don’t just consume, interact.  If they say something you don’t understand or disagree with, engage: either you’ll learn, or they will.

And, as an associated caveat, I strongly recommend that you also similarly share your thinking.  You can be not only stealth mentored, but folks who read and comment become actual real mentors for you, shaping your thinking. The feedback I’ve gotten through comments on my blog has been extremely beneficial to improving my own thinking, and I’m very grateful.

I really do think this is an important opportunity for personal self-development, and it’s a benefit of the increasing use of social media. I hope you are practicing learning out loud and leaving traces of what’s interesting you as you wander hither and yon. I think it’s something an app like Tappestry could provide as well, leveraging the Tin Can API, where you might more explicitly see a richer picture of what someone’s doing.  But I’m getting into the weeds here, so I’ll simply point out that there’s an opportunity here. You owe it to others to think and learn out loud, and then can take advantage of others who do so with a clear conscience.

An integrating design?

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In a panel at #mlearncon, we were asked how instructional designers could accommodate mobile.  Now, I believe that we really haven’t got our minds around a learning experience distributed across time, which our minds really require.  I also think we still mistakenly think about performance support as separate from formal learning, but we don’t have a good way to integrate them.

I’ve advocated that we consider learning experience design, but increasingly I think we need performance experience design, where we look at the overall performance, and figure out what needs to be in the head, what needs to be in the world, and design them concurrently.  That is, we look at what the person knows how to do, and what should be in their head, and what can be designed as support.  ADDIE designs courses.  HPT determines whether to do a job aid (the gap is knowledge), or training (the gap is a skill).  I’m not convinced that either really looks at the total integration (and willing to be wrong).

What was triggered in my brain, however, was that social constructivism might be a framework within which we could accomplish this.  By thinking of what activities the learners would be engaged in, and how we’d support that performance with resources and other learners and performers as collaborators when appropriate, we might have a framework.  My take on social constructivism has it looking at what can and should be co-owned by the learner, and how to get the learner there, and it naturally involves resources, other people, and skill development.

So, you’d look at what needs to be done, and think through the performance, and ask what resources (digital and human) would be there with the performer, the gap between your current learner and the performer you’d need, and how to develop an experience to achieve that end state.  The notion is what mental design process designers may need going forward, and what framework provides the overarching framework to support that design process.

It’s very related to my activity framework, which nicely resonates as it very much focuses on what you can do, and resourcing that, but that framework is focused on reframing education to make it skills focused and developing self learning. This would require some additions that I’ll have to ponder further.  But, as always, it’s about getting ideas out there to collect feedback. So, what say you?

Sims as CTA

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I had several great conversations over the course of last week’s #mLearnCon that triggered some interesting thoughts.  Here’s the first:

I was talking with someone charged with important training: nuclear.  We were talking about both the value of sims to support deep practice, and the difficulty in getting the necessary knowledge out of the subject matter expert (SME).  These converged for me in what seemed an interesting way.

First, the best method to get the knowledge out of the heads of SMEs is Cognitive Task Analysis (CTA).  CTA is highly effective, but also very complex.  It requires considerable effort to do the official version.

A different thread was also wrapped up in this.  Not surprisingly, I believe simulation games are the best form of deep practice to help cement skills.  I believe so strongly I wrote a  book  about it ;).

And the cross-pollination: I believe that we’ll be passing on responsibility for defining curricular paths to competency in areas to the associated communities of practice.  Further, I believe we will have collaboratively developed sims as part of that path, where we use wikis to edit the rules of the simulation to keep it up to date.

The integration in this context was to think of having the SMEs collaborate on the design of the sim as a way to make the necessary tacit knowledge explicit. It would make their understanding very concrete, and help ensure that the resulting sim is correct. Of course, they might rebel in terms of exaggerating and basing the practice in fantastic contexts, but it certainly would help focus on meaningful skills instead of rote knowledge.

The barrier is that experts don’t really have access to what they know, so having a concrete activity to ground their experience in practical ways strikes me as a very concrete way to elicit the necessary understandings.  CTA is about detailed processes to get at their tacit knowledge, but perhaps sim design is a more efficient mechanism. It could have tradeoffs, but it seems to disintermediate the process.

OK, so it’s just a wild idea at this time, but I always argue that thinking out loud is valuable, and I try to practice what I preach. What think you?

Tony O’Driscoll #iel12 Keynote Mindmap

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Tony O’Driscoll kicked off the Innovations in eLearning Symposium with an entertaining and apt tour of the changes in business owing to information change, and the need to adapt. My take was that organizations have to become in a more organic relationship with their ecosystem by empowering their people to engage and act. His final message was that the learning community are the folks who have to figure this out and engage.

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Getting Pragmatic About Informal

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In my post on reconciling informal and informal, I suggested that there are practical things L&D groups can  do about informal learning.  I’ve detected a fair bit of concern amongst L&D folks that this threatens their jobs, and I think that’s misplaced.  Consequently, I want to get a wee bit more specific than what I said then:

  • they can make courses about  how  to use social media better (not everyone knows how to communicate and collaborate  well)
  • share best practices
  • work social media into formal learning to make it easier to facilitate the segue into the workplace
  • provide performance support for social media
  • be facilitating the use of social media
  • unearth good practices in the organization and share them
  • foster discussion

 

I also noted “And, yes, L&D interventions there will be formal in the sense that they‘re applying rigor, but they‘re facilitating emergent  behaviors that they don‘t  own“. And that’s an important point. It’s wrapping support around activities that aren’t content generated by the L&D group. Two things:

  1. the expertise for  much doesn’t reside in the L&D group and it’s time to stop thinking that it all can pass through  the L&D  group (there’s too much, too fast, and the L&D group has to find ways to get more efficient)
  2. there is expertise in the L&D group (or should be) that’s more about process than product and can and should be put into practice.

So, the L&D group has to start facilitating the sharing of information between folks. How can they represent and share their understandings in ways the L&D group can facilitate, not own?  How about ensuring the availability of tools like blogs, micro-blogs, wikis, discussion forums, media file creating/sharing, and profiles, and  helping communities learn to use them?  Here’s a way that L&D groups can partner with IT and add real value via a synergy that benefits the company.

That latter bit, helping them learn to use them is also important.  Not everyone is naturally a good coach or mentor, yet these are valuable roles.  It’s not just producing a course about it, but facilitating a community around  these roles.  There are a lot of myths about what makes brainstorming work, but just putting people in a room isn’t  it.  If you don’t know, find out and disseminate it!  How about even just knowing how to work and play well with others, how to ask for help in ways that will actually get useful responses, supporting needs for blogging, etc.

There are a whole host of valuable activities that L&D groups can engage in besides developing content, and increasingly the resources are likely to be more valuable addressing the facilitation than the design and development.  It’s going to be just too much (by the time it’s codified, it’s irrelevant).  Yes, there’ll still be a role for fixed content (e.g. compliance), but hopefully more and more curricula and content will be crowd-sourced, which increases the likelihood of it’s relevance, timeliness, and accuracy.

Start supporting activity, not controlling it, and you will likely find it liberating, not threatening.

 

Educational Game Design Q&A

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I was contacted for a research project, and asked a series of questions. Thought I’d document the answers here, too.

Q0. How many years have you been designing educational games?

Over 30, actually, off and on.  Started with my first job out of college, designing and programming educational computer games.  Been a recurrent theme in my career since then.

Q1. Please walk us through your process for creating an educational game from concept to implementation. Please use one of your games as an example.

A long answer is the only option (it’s a big process).  Using a design framework of Analysis, Specification, Implementation, and Evaluation:

Analysis

For any educational task, you have to start by looking at what your design objective is: you need to document what folks should be able to do that they can’t do now. I argue that this is most importantly going to manifest as an ability to make better decisions, ones that the learner doesn’t reliably make now.  It’s complicated, because SMEs don’t always have access to how they do what they do, and you have to work hard.  This isn’t unusual to learning  design, except perhaps the focus on skills.

Then, you need to know how folks go wrong; what are the reliable misconceptions. People don’t tend to make random mistakes (though there is some randomness in our architecture), but instead make mistakes based upon some wrong models.

You also need to know the consequences of those mistakes, as well as the consequence of the right answer. Decisions tend to travel in packs, and if you make this one wrong, you’re then likely to face that other one. You need to know what these are.  (And the probabilities associated with them).

In addition, you need to know the settings in which these decisions occur, as many as possible.

And you need to know what makes this task inherently interesting (it is).  Here’s where the SME is your friend, because they’re so passionate about this they’ve made it the subject of their expertise, find out what makes them  find it interesting.

Specification

With this information, you address those aligned elements from effective education practice and engaging experiences.    You need to find a storyline that integrates what makes the task interesting with the settings in which the decisions occur.  I like a heuristic I heard from Henry Jenkins: “find a role the player would like to be in”. Exaggeration is a great tool here: e.g. you’d likely rather be working on the ambassador’s daughter than just another patient.

You need to make those misconceptions seductive to get challenge. You don’t want them getting it right unless they really  know their stuff.

You need to handle adjusting the difficulty level up at an appropriate rate; you might have complications that don’t start until after they’ve mastered the interface.

You need to specify characters, dialog, rules that describe the relationships, variables that code the state of the game, a visual (and auditory) look and feel.  The UI expressed to the learner, and more.

You’ll need to specify what the ‘perspective’ of the player is in relation to the character.

Overall, you need to nail meaningfulness, novelty, and the cycle of action and feedback to really get this right.

Finally, you need to specify the metrics you’ll use to evaluate your creation. What will be the usability goals, educational outcomes, and engagement metrics that will define you’re done?

Implementation & Evaluation

I’m a design guy, so I don’t talk so much about implementation, and evaluation follows the above.  That said…

The tools change constantly, and it will vary by size and scope. The main thing here is that you will  have to tune.  As Will Wright said, “tuning is 9/10ths of the work”.  Now that’s for a commercially viable game, but really, that’s a substantial realization compared to how complex the programming and media production is.

Tuning requires regular evaluation.  You’ll want to prototype in as low a fidelity as you can, so it’s easier to change.  Prototype, test, lather, rinse, repeat.  (Have ever 3 words ever sold more unnecessary product in human history?)

There’s much  more, but this is a good first cut.

Q2. Describe your greatest success, challenge, failure.

My greatest success, at least the most personally rewarding in terms of feeling like making a contribution, is definitely the Quest game. When you’re making a game that can save kids’ lives, you’ve got to feel good about it. On no  budget (we eventually got a little money to hire my honors student for a summer, and then some philanthropic money to do a real graphic treatment), we developed a game that helped kids who grow up without parents experience a bit of what it’s like to survive on your own (goal: talk to your counselors).  Interestingly, I subsequently got it ported to the web as a student project (as soon as I heard about CGI’s, the first web standard to support maintaining ‘state’, I realized it could run as a web game), and it still runs!  As far as I know, BTW, it’s the first web-based serious game ever.

My greatest challenge was another game you can still play on the web.  We’d developed a ‘linear scenario’ game on project management for non-project-managers, and they liked it so much they then asked for a game to accompany it.  But we’d already accomplished the learning!  Still, we did it.  I made the game about just managing to cope with missing data, scope creep, and other PM issues, so engineers could a) understand why they should be glad there were  project managers, and b) that they shouldn’t be jerks to work with.

Biggest failure that I recollect was a team brought together by a publisher to work with the lead author on a wildly successful book series.  There was a movie script writer who’d become a game designer, and me, and a very creative team. However, we had a real problem with the SME, who couldn’t get over the idea that the ‘game’ had to develop the concept without getting mired in the boring details of particular tools. We would get progress, and then generate a great concept, and we’d be reined back in to “but where’s the tool simulation”?  Unfortunately, the SME had ultimate control, not the creative team, and the continuing back and forth ultimately doomed the project.

Q3. When determining game play is avoiding violence an issue? Q4.  Is accounting for gender an issue when creating games?

I answered these two questions together; I don’t shy away from controversy, and believe that you use the design that works for the audience and the learning objective.  I believe education trumps censorship.  I argued many years ago (when Doom was the GTA of the day) that you could get meaningful learning experiences out of the worst of the shoot-em-ups.  Not that I’d advocate it.  Same with gender.  Figure out what’s needed.

As a caveat, I don’t believe in gratuitous violence, sex, or gender issues, (Why is sex more taboo than violence? I don’t get it.) but I believe you need to address them when relevant in context. In ways that glorify people, not violence or intolerance.

Q5. How did you develop your creation process?

I went from ad h0c at the start to trying to find the best grounding for process possible.  Even as an undergrad I had received a background in learning, but as a grad student I pursued it with a vengeance (I looked at cognitive, behavioral, constructivist, ID, social, even machine  learning looking for insight).  At the time, the HCI field was also looking at what made engaging experiences, and I pursued that too. The real integration happened when I looked systematically at design and creative processes: what worked and what didn’t.  Using the learning design process as a framework (since folks don’t tend to adopt new processes whole-cloth, but tend to modify their existing ones), I worked out what specifically was needed in addition to make the process work for (learning) game design.

Q6.  How do you work? Individually? As a team? If so, how do you develop a team?

Euphemistically, I work however anyone wants.  I seldom really do individual, however, because I have no graphic design skills to speak of (much to my dismay, but a person’s got to know their limitations, to paraphrase the great sage Harry Calahan).  Also, I strongly believe you should source the full suite of talent a game design needs: writing, audio, graphic, programming, UI, learning design, etc.  Naturally, in the real world, you do the best you can (“oh, I can do a good enough job of writing, and you can probably do a good enough job of audio as well as the programming”).

Q7. Is there a recipe for success in this industry? If so what is it and what would you say your biggest lesson has been so far?

My short answer is two-fold. I immodestly think that you really have to understand the alignment between effective practice and engaging experience (there’re lots of bad examples that show why you can’t just shove game and instructional designers into a room and expect anything good). Second, you have to know how to work and play well with others.  Game design is a team sport.

And finally, you really, really, have to develop your creative side.  As I tell my workshop attendees: I’ve got bad news, you have a big job ahead of you; if you’re going to do good serious game design, you’re going to have to play more games, go to more amusement parks, read more novels, watch more movies. It’s a big ask, I know, an onerous task, but hey, you’re professionals.   But you also have to be willing to take risks. Much to m’lady’s dismay, I argue that I continue to have to crack bad jokes as practice to find out what works (that’s my story, and I’m sticking with it).

If you can get a handle on these three elements: understanding the alignment, able to convince people to work with you on it, and push the envelope, I reckon you can succeed. What do you reckon?

Thinking well and, well, not so well

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A number of books have crossed my path for a variety of reasons, and there’re some lessons to be extracted from three of them.  All have to do with looking at how our brains work, and some lessons therefrom.  There have been quite a bit of kerfuffle about ‘brain-based learning’, of which too much is inappropriate inferences from neuroscience to learning.  What I’m doing here is not that, but instead reporting on three books, only one of which has an explicit discussion of implications for both education and work. Still, valuable insight comes from all three.

Let me get the negative stuff out of the way first, a book that a number of folks have been excited about, Joshua Foer’s  Moonwalking with Einstein, just did nothing for me. It’s a great tale well told, but the lessons were only cautionary. In it, a journalist gets intrigued enough with remembering to train sufficiently to win the US memory championships (apparently, globally, a relatively minor accomplishment).  He reveals many memory tools to accomplish this, and points out some potential fraud along the way.  He also concludes that despite this heightened ability, there is little relevance in the real world.  We have devices that can be our memory now, and the need for these skills is questionable at best.  All in all, little benefit except to be skeptical.

A second book, Daniel Kahnemann’s Thinking Fast and Slow, is a different story. Kahnemann, and his late long-time collaborator Amos Tversky, conducted some seminal research in how we make decisions (essential reading in my grad school career).  And the best way to convey how we do this, as Kahnemann tells us, is to postulate two separate systems. Not surprisingly one is fast, and one is slow.  The book is quite long, as Kahnemann goes through every phenomenon of these outcomes that they’ve discovered (often with collaborators), but each chapter closes with some statements that capture the ways your thinking might be wrong, and ways to compensate. It could use more prescriptions and less description (I started skimming, I confess), but understand the two systems and the implications are important.  It’s a well-written and engaging book, I just wish there was a ‘take home’ version.

The fast system is, essentially, intuition. This comes in many ways from your experience, and experts in a field should trust their intuition (there’s a strong argument here for hiring someone with lots of experience) in their area.  In areas where expertise is needed, and you don’t have it, you should go to the slow system, conscious rational thought.  Which is very vulnerable to fatigue (it taxes your brain), so complex decisions late in a day of decision are suspect.  If your decision is commonplace, you can trust the fast system, and many times you’ll be using the slow system just to explain the decision the fast system came up with, but we’re prone to many forms of bias.  It’s a worthwhile read, and tells us a lot about how we might adapt our learning to develop the fast system when necessary, and when to look to the slow system.

Finally, Cathy Davidson’s written Now You See It, a book that takes an attentional phenomena and builds a strong case for more closely matching learning and work to how we really think.  (I was pointed to it by a colleague who complained that my learning theory references are old; I still take my integration of learning theory as appropriate but nice to see that more recent work reflects my take on the best from the past. :) The phenomena is related to how our attention is limited and we need help focusing it.  For a dramatic demonstration of this phenomena, view this video and follow the instructions.  Her point is that what and how we pay attention does not reflect our current schooling systems nor our traditional work environments.  She uses this and myriad examples to make a compelling case for change in both.  On the learning side, she argues strongly for making learning active and meaningful (a view I strongly support), and start using the technology. On the other side, she talks about the new ways of working consonant with our Internet Time Alliance views.  It’s very readable, as it’s funny, poignant, apt, and more.

I highly recommend Cathy Davidson’s book as something everyone should understand.  Like I said, I wish there were a ‘Readers Digest Condensed‘ version of Kahnemann’s book.  It’s worth having a look at if you’re responsible for decisions by folks, however, and at least the first few chapters if you’re at all responsible for helping people make better decisions.