President Bill Clinton riveted the crowd with a keynote covering a broad swath of problems. His solutions include systems thinking and positive dialog. Engaging and powerful.
Search Results for: engag
Motivation & Gamification
The initial Learning 3.0 conference (well-done, Phillip, Julie, & Leah) was held in conjunction with The Motivation Show, a large conference (dwarfing our little group) and Expo on incentive and recognition programs. And it’s thought-provoking.
First, you have to know that while I understand sales commissions and rewards, because they *work*, I don’t like them. It seems to me to be rewarding a behavior of convincing people to buy things they might not otherwise do. And, yes, I know that there’s a move to solution selling (through one of my partners I’ve done a fair bit of work on sales), but still, solution selling hasn’t always worked (partly because it often isn’t implemented well: e.g. the incentives are still aligned with product selling).
So you can imagine my reaction as I walked the motivation expo hall on the last day. Aisle after aisle of vacation destinations, gourmet foods, luxury items, and more. It would’ve been a great shopping experience if you were well-heeled and this wasn’t focused on corporate buyers.
And I became curious. We’d heard that there are incentives for many things: health, safety, and more. I’d heard of rewarding innovation. I wondered if, as I cynically believed, this was largely for sales rewards instead of those other things. And while I couldn’t get the answer as clearly as I wanted, it wasn’t as bad as I’d thought.
What I found was that sales was something less than a quarter, consumer promotions roughly a quarter, business gifts roughly another quarter, and employee recognition rounded out the last quarter. So, 70-75% or so was on the transaction side and the rest was for employees. Moreover, talking to one of the recogntion system vendors, it became clear that this trend was new; that sales *had dominated, but they were moving to recognizing that this could apply more broadly (tho one of the venue folks noted that the show had shrunk from years before).
And I think it makes sense. Look, there are product and service designers working to come out with new and better products that better serve the market, and increase sales. And, as one of the attendees I shared lunch with noted, if the learning group offers improved sales training and product training, and it creates a delta in sales, why don’t they get a share?
Now, this whole incentive ‘motivation’ thing is “gamification”. They’re creating simple reward things that increase behaviors, but they’re extrinsic, not intrinsic (cf the distinction between gamification and what I call engagification). And, as Dan Pink’s “Drive” says (as did the keynote by the former CEO of Texas RoadHouse), intrinsic awards work better.
I think I’ll stand by my belief that sales incentives can end up creating a situation where people are rewarded for getting people to do things that they’re not inclined to do. And while some may argue that it is in the best interest (e.g. getting people to be safe, or exercise, or eat better, which I’d argue folks largely would like to do), in general I reckon most folks wouldn’t like to buy things that they might not otherwise purchase. And for those who think I’m being too harsh on sales, let me ask what they think would happen if those incentives went away and sales folks were on salary only. Would you have happier consumers?
Look, I’m still happy to do the best I can to make sales training and product skills the best it can be (and I’ll suggest that the design principles I espouse will do that as well as it can be done), because it is largely independent of the rewards structure. I just want that, as a society, we might want to look at the tradeoffs. When teachers impact society in more important ways (granted, in my opinion), I think we might want to be looking at increasing their performance more than sales folks. Reckon?
Three core foundations for online learning
The wise Ellen Wagner has a neat post about what should be the ‘ten commandments’ of online learning. I agree with them, and recommend them to you. I have thought about it in a slightly different, but similar frame.
I came up with this as I was trying to suggest what the core value propositions (yeah, I said it, deal with it) of an online offering should be. And I tried to frame it the way I thought Steve Jobs might:
An absolutely killer learning experience- We don’t just develop your understanding, we develop you
- We’re your partner for your success
What I mean by a killer learning experience is one that is engaging and effective, ie all the principles of Engaging Learning. It’s a pedagogy that’s challenging, meaningful, relevant, tightly coupled, and more. It’s also social, having you learn with others, not just on your own.
Developing the person means not only developing their knowledge of the topic, their degree, but also their success factors. That includes things like helping them develop a portfolio of work, developing skills in working with others, communicating, etc. In essence, layered on top of the domain knowledge are 21st century skills, which are likely to be the only lasting value you can provide learners (c.f. Father Guido Sarducci’s 5 Minute University).
And finally, it’s about not just providing the content and having the learner sink or swim, but instead actively looking at the learner’s performance, finding ways to scaffold the learning and being attentive to signals of potential trouble. It’s data-driven adaptivity to the individual learner, coupled optimally with human intervention. And competency-based, so the learner has clear indications of what they need to do.
We can do this, on a cost-effective basis, and I reckon it’s going to be the only sustainable differentiator to be a successful provider. The only question then becomes: who’s going to bring it all together? The market is waiting.
Quinnovation ‘to go’
The travel schedule is booting up again, and I’ll be hither and yon speaking about this and that for a good part of the coming two months. More specifically:
- From 2-3 Oct I’ll be running a two day elearning strategy workshop at Learning 3.0 in Chicago. If you want to get above the individual tactics and see how the pieces fit together, and work on a plan for you and your org, I hope to see you there. Then on Tuesday the 4th, I’ll be talking about creating Engaging Learning.
- Then, on 12 Oct in Laguna Niguel at the CLO Fall Symposium, I’ll be joining with my ITA colleagues Jay Cross and Jane Hart to talk about controversial issues for CLOs. This will be fun and worthwhile, as we will be aiming at some sacred cows.
- It’s off to Las Vegas at the beginning of November for DevLearn, where I’ll be running a mobile learning strategy session on the the 1st. If you want to get beyond just designing a one-off, and look at the broader picture of how to make mobile a part of your solution, it’s the place to be.
- That’s followed by Learning 2011 in Orlando Nov 6-9, where I’ll be hosting an author session for Designing mLearning.
- I’m still not done, as I head later that week to DC to speak to the local ASTD chapter with a talk on mobile learning and a social learning workshop. That latter will talk about both formal and informal learning, as well as looking at the different tools.
- And, to cap it off, I’ll be presenting at the Canadian Society for Training & Development’s annual conference in Toronto on Friday the 18th of November, looking forward and more broadly at the role of learning in the organization.
That may seem like a lot (and it is), but traveling on only one continent will seem easy after this past May-August ;). I hope to see you at one or more of these learning events!
Social Cognitive Processing
In an earlier post, I tried to convey the advantages of social activities in formal learning from the cognitive processing perspective, but my diagram apparently didn’t work for everyone. I took another shot for a presentation I gave on mobile social at the Guild’s mLearnCon, and I thought I’d raise it here as well.
I’m going through this diagram line by line, from the top.
If you go from just having an idea (first line) to trying to capture it as a product (next), whether a diagram or a screed, to communicate to some hypothetical reader, you find out that you might not have thought it out fully (the first benefit to having a personal journal, e.g. blogging). And you do some processing to generate that product.
Then, if someone actually reads it, they do some processing.
If they write a response, they do more processing to crystalize their thoughts.
Then, the author, when reading it, also does some more processing.
If someone else reads it, that person does some processing, and if they write a comment, well, the process continues.
The author could then write a reply to one or both, and that causes even more processing. And so on.
And this is good. Processing is part of learning, and focused processing is part of good learning design. So, having learners capture and communicate their thoughts is a valuable learning activity. It can be personal reflections, e.g. “what does this explain in my past” or “what will I do differently in the future”, or responses to a question.
If other learners are asked to read and constructively comment (not just “great post”), you can get valuable learning outcomes.
This extends to the social learning situation. Here, you have every learner contribute their initial thoughts on a group assignment (recommended).
Then, every learner reads the other proposals, and they start to put out their integrated ideas.
As they negotiate a shared understanding as a group response, some great processing is happening.
Ultimately, they create an outcome that’s richer than what they’d create on their own.
If you’ve created the right amount of ambiguity in the project, you’ll get some great discussions. The processing benefits here are because the learners will bring somewhat different interpretations and experiences to the project, and that diversity allows a mre robust understanding to emerge.
Consequently, I suggest that social learning adds benefits to the learning experience beyond what individual assignments can achieve. You can mimic some of these effects by staging additional information, but it’s not quite as effective as individual learning (nor near as engaging).
So, does this make sense? And, hopefully, inspire you to find ways to add social interaction into your learning experiences? It’s not unique to social media, but social media give you a channel to bring these benefits to learning whenever and wherever.
Immersion or collaboration?
In something I’ve just been involved in, I realized I had a question. I’m a fan of scenarios (read: serious games), to the point that I’ve written a book about how to design them! I’m also a fan of social learning, and consequently argue for the benefits of collaborative assignments. They both have the opportunity for powerful outcomes. The question, naturally, is which makes sense when?
This is an important question, to the point that I’ve recommended it as a critical hiring criteria: that a candidate can not only articulate when you should do which, but also articulate how to do both. Really, if you’re responsible for learning design, you need to go farther: when would you use scenarios, role-plays, or collaborative assignments? How would you capitalize on the experience, formatively? How would you design such a practice?
This gets into not only your pedagogical philosophy, but also your meta-cognitive ability. Before you read my answer, take a moment and think: what’s my answer? Seriously: what is your answer?
In short. my take is on the nature of the task the learners will be performing in the real world. Will they be performing individually, or will they be working as a member of a team? There are processing differences (I do recommend that there is collaborative reflection after an individual learning scenario, to get meaningful processing). Regardless, the core nature of the real world task should be closely aligned to the practice situation. If they’ll perform alone, make it a scenario. If they’ll work in a group, make it a collaborative task, or a multi-player scenario/role-play.
Regardless, it’s worth checking: who’s your audience, what are your learning goals, and what is the most appropriate practice. So: immersion, or collaboration?
WIIFL
What’s In It For Learners?
In organizations, we talk about addressing WIIFM (What’s In It For Me). As a key component of motivation, we want to connect to individuals viscerally. With my focus on engagement in learning, I’ve felt it’s important to address the conative (anxiety, motivation, etc) of learners as well.
What I’ve meant by this has included having introductions that viscerally capture the consequences of the knowledge (positive or negative, dramatically or comically; I’ve a predilection for comically negative), help them connect the learning to the broader context of the world, help them understand why it’s important for them, remove anxiety, etc. I believe we need to open up learners emotionally as well as the well-known benefits of activating relevant knowledge cognitively.
I was just writing up a list of what would need to change for schools to be effective, and as I was riffing on epistemology (having learners understand and take responsibility for learners), it occurred to me that we needed to address the WIIFM, and I realized it’s about WIIFL. We need to explicitly address what makes the learning experience valuable to learners. I’m sure we’ve all heard learners say something like “I’ll never use this”. If it’s true, bin it. If it’s not, then help them see it.
On a set of content I was lead on the design of (math), I created the spec for our introductions to show how the content would get used in real life, and then we worked through meaningful examples and practice items. In another set of content I created the engagement for, we used a professional cartoonist to create a comic that introduced every section.
We don’t emphasize enough helping learners understand why they should care, so is it any wonder why they question the WIIFM? And it’s not presenting the learning objectives that we use to design, it’s a more coherent story that uses, essentially, marketing to get them to get it.
Ask yourself, if and when you’re creating a learning experience: WIIFL. If you do, you can either eliminate unneeded content, or help learners connect in a motivating way. If you don’t, you risk learners tuning out and staying away. Which isn’t a worthwhile investment of time and money.
Digital Helplessness(?)
Recently, I’ve been hearing quite a bit of concern over the possibility that reliance on digital, and increasingly mobile, technology may make us stupider. And I don’t think this is just easy to dismiss. In a sense, it could be a case of learned helplessness, where folks find themselves helpless because after using the tools, folks might not have the information they need when they don’t have the tools.
Recently announced research shows that folks change what they remember when enabled with search engines: they don’t remember the data, but instead how to find it. Which could be a problem if they needed to know the data and are not digitally enabled in some context.
As has also been conveyed to me as a concern is whether folks might not engage in learning about their environs (e.g. when traveling), and in other ways miss out on opportunities to learn when dependent on digital devices. Certainly, as I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been concerned about how disabled I feel when dissociated from my digital support (my external brain). Yet is there a concern?
My take is that it might be a concern if people are doing it unconsciously. I think you could miss out (as m’lady points out when I am reading instead of staring out the window every moment as we take the train through another country :) on some opportunities to learn.
On the other hand, if you are choosing consciously what you want to remember, and what you want to leave to the device, then I think you’re making a choice about how you allocate your resources (a ‘good thing’). We do this in many ways in our lives already, for instance how much we choose to learn about cooking, and more directly related, how much to learn about how to do formatting in a word processing program.
Yes, I’ve been frustrated without my support when traveling, but that’s chosen (which does not undermine my dismay at the lack of ability to access digital data overseas). I guess I’m arguing for chosen helplessness :). So, what are you choosing to learn and what to devolve to resources?
A jot of design
Ordinarily, I don’t even look at vendor products when offered free trials. I like to remain unbiased, and not give free advice. I retain the right to look at what interests me, not what might be commercially expedient (a perverted legacy of my academic tenure, no doubt :).
However, two things interested me about this particular offer. First, it was an iPad app supporting design. Given that I’m very much about improving design, *and* quite into mobile, this was of interest. Second, I mistakenly thought it came from Michael Allen’s company Allen Interactions, and he’s not only been an early advocate of engaging design, but also he’s a supremely nice guy to complement his smarts. It turns out, of course, that I jumped too fast to a conclusion, and it’s really from Allen Communications. Oh well. I’m talking about DesignJot, btw.
Now, I’m not going to give a formal review, because instead I want to use this as an opportunity to reflect on supporting design. Though you’ll likely get some idea of what it does and how.
Briefly, this app takes Allen Communications analysis and design process, using the acronym ANSWER, and provides support for using it. You initiate a new project and then get support for design by having questions and even subtopics and questions under that rubric that you fill out for analysis. That information then populates some initial parts of the design support, which then guides you to define strategies and sub-components. There are note-taking and sketching tools too.
The notion of supporting the design process is not new, certainly it was key in the toolset used by one of the major content developers in the past, and such performance support is a good idea. Scaffolding process is an obvious outcome of how our brains work (systematic creativity is not an oxymoron), so the question becomes one of what process you are using as your guide. Without any guidance about ANSWER, I did a spot-check for one of my heuristics and it wasn’t in there. Overall, there seem to be some good and odd things. Using someone else’s particular process may not be your cup of tea, and while you can add your own questions, youcan’t, as far as I could tell, add to the template.
There are some hiccups, e.g. I was surprised that some of the information isn’t carried forward, and some of the interface is a bit counterintuitive (e.g. home button sort of to the right but close to the middle). On the other hand, there are handy tips for many if not all of the steps.
The choice of making it an iPad app is interesting and understandable. It certainly makes it easy to carry around as you talk to SMEs, etc., and that makes it reason enough. The output functions are interesting, however, seeing it produces a ‘project’ file which I *think* only works with another instance of the iPad project (e.g. sharing), or PDFs. Which isn’t bad, as it’s not clear what else you might use, but I might prefer a more manipulable format like an Excel or HTML output that I might post-process.
I think the idea of creating performance support tools on mobile platforms makes a lot of sense. Whether you want to trust to their choice of questions and structure is another question. Overall, it’s an interesting business move, an interesting mobile move, and an interesting chance to reflect on the design process.
A Storied History
Rothenburg ob der Tauber (RodT) is a charming small town that has retained it’s medieval nature through both design and chance. The story is interesting, but more interesting for my purposes here is how You can learn that story.
One of the opportunities available in Rothenburg is the Night Watchman’s Tour, where a local dressed up as a night watchman walks you through various stops around town and tells Rothenburg’s history. You pay at the end, so you could skip paying, but after the experience it is definitely worth the money.
The story telling is interesting; it’s very personal, starting with the life and role of the night watchman, a low class (because of ignorant prejudice) but important job. Across the course of the talk, the perspective becomes one of a proprietary interest in the city itself. The events are recited with a very causal but also human level of detail (e.g. how the post-war administrator’s mother’s connection to RodT saved the town). There is a self-deprecating humor that leavens the message.
Also interesting is the story-telling style. The character speaks with great projection, but also in an almost sing-song style. There are somewhat odd but engaging emphases. It’s hard to characterize (I couldn’t reproduce it), but it worked.
As my lad said, it’s the most interesting history he’s ever learned. And that, I think, says a lot. Don’t neglect the power of story, as Roger Schank would have us remember. Wrap up the details in a narrative that ties it together, as our brains are optimized for understanding in this way.