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Virtual Worlds: Affordances and Learning

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Two days ago I attended the 3D Teaching, Learning, & Collaboration conference, organized by Tony O’Driscoll.   I’ve previously posted my thoughts on virtual worlds, but I had a wee bit of a revelation that I want to get clear in my head, and it ties into several things that went on at the conference.

First, let me say that the day of the conference I got to attend was great, with lots of the really involved folks there, and every evidence (including the tweet stream) that the second day was every bit as good.   Tony talked about his new book with Karl Kapp, Chuck Hamilton spoke on lessons learned through IBM’s invovlement in Virtual Worlds, Koreen Olbrish chaired a panel with a number of great case studies, to name just a few of the great opportunities.

Chuck listed 10 ‘affordances‘ of virtual worlds, expanding a list Tony had previously started.   There was some debate about whether affordance is a good term, since not everyone knows it, but I maintain that for people who need it, it’s the right term and that we can use some term like ‘inherent capability’ for those who don’t.   I had some quibbles with Chuck’s list, as it seemed that several confounded some issues, and I hope to talk with him more about it.

Tony also presented, in particular, some principles about designing learning for virtual worlds (see slide 17 here).   Interestingly, they aren’t specific to virtual worlds, and mirror the principles for designing engaging learning experiences that come from the alignment of educational practice and engaging experiences I talk about in my book.   Glad to see folks honing in on principles for creating meaningful virtual world experiences!

The revelation for me, however, was linking the social informal learning with virtual worlds.   Virtual worlds can be used for both formal and informal learning, they’re platforms for social action.   I’ve had the formal and informal separated in my mind, but needn’t.   I’ve been quite active in social learning to meet informal learning needs with   my togetherLearn colleagues, but have always written off virtual worlds as still having too much technical and learning overhead to be worth it unless you have a long-term intention where those overheads get amortized.

What’s clear is that, increasingly, organizations are creating and leveraging those long term relationships.   ProtonMedia even announced integration of both Sharepoint and their own social media system with their virtual world platform, so either can be accessed in world or from the desktop. There were a suite of examples across both formal and informal learning where organizations were seeing real, measurable, value.

The underlying opportunities of virtual presence are clear, it’s just not been clear that it’s significantly better than a non-immersive social networking system.   Certainly if what your people need to formally learn, or informally network on is inherently 3D, but the contextualization is having some benefits.

Some issues remain. At lunch I was talking to some gents who have a system that streams your face via webcam onto your avatar, so your real expressions are represented.   That’s counter to some of the possibilities I see to represent yourself in virtual worlds as you prefer to be seen, not as how nature commands, but there are some trust issues (and parental safety concerns as well).

Still, as technical barriers are surpassed, and audiences become more familiar with and comfortable in virtual worlds, the segue between formal and social networking can be accomplished in world making a virtual business office increasingly viable.   It may be time to dust off my avatar and get traveling.

Driving formal & informal from the same place

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There’s been such a division between formal and informal; the fight for resources, mindspace, and the ability for people to get their mind around making informal concrete.   However, I’ve been preparing a presentation from another way of looking at it, and I want to suggest that, at core, both are being driven from the same point: how humans learn.

I was looking at the history of society, and it’s getting more and more complex. Organizationally, we started from a village, to a city, and started getting hierarchical.   Businesses are now retreating from that point of view, and trying to get flatter, and more networked.

Organizational learning, however, seems to have done almost the opposite. From networks of apprenticeship through most of history, through the dialectical approach of the Greeks that started imposing a hierarchy, to classrooms which really treat each person as an independent node, the same, and autonomous with no connections.

Certainly, we’re trying to improve our pedagogy (to more of an andragogy), by looking at how people really learn.   In natural settings, we learn by being engaged in meaningful tasks, where there’re resources to assist us, and others to help us learn. We’re developed in communities of practice, with our learning distributed across time and across resources.

That’s what we’re trying to support through informal approaches to learning. We’re going beyond just making people ready for what we can anticipate, and supporting them in working together to go beyond what’s known, and be able to problem-solve, to innovate, to create new products, services, and solutions.   We provide resources, and communication channels, and meaning representation tools.

And that’s what we should be shooting for in our formal learning, too. Not an artificial event, but presented with meaningful activity, that learners get as important, with resources to support, and ideally, collaboration to help disambiguate and co-create understanding.   The task may be artificial, the resources structured for success, but there’s much less gap between what they do for learning and what they do in practice.

In both cases, the learning is facilitated. Don’t assume self-learning skills, but support both task-oriented behaviors, and the development of self-monitoring, self learning.

The goal is to remove the artificial divide between formal and informal, and recognize the continuum of developing skills from foundational abilities into new areas, developing learners from novices to experts in both domains, and in learning..

This is the perspective that drives the vision of moving the learning organization role from ‘training’ to learning facilitator. Across all organizational knowledge activities, you may still design and develop, but you nurture as much, or more.   So, nurture your understanding, and your learners.   The outcome should be better learning for all.

Learning Experience Creation Systems

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Where do the problems lie in getting good learning experiences? We need them, as it’s becoming increasingly important to get the important skills really nailed, not just ‘addressed’.   It’s not about dumping knowledge on someone, or the other myriad ways learning can be badly designed.   It’s about making learning experiences that really deliver.   So, where does the process of creating a learning experience go wrong?

There’s been a intriguing debate over at Aaron (@mrch0mp3rs) Silver’s blog about where the responsibility lies between clients and vendors for knowledge to ensure a productive relationship.   One of the issues raised (who, me?) is understanding design, but it’s clearly more than that, and the debate has raged.

Then, a post in ITFORUM asked about how to redo instructor training for a group where the instructors are SMEs, not trainers, and identified barriers around curriculum, time, etc.   What crystallized for me is that it’s not a particular flaw or issue, but it’s a system that can have multiple flaws or multiple points of breakdown.

LearningExperienceDesignSystemThe point is, we have to quit looking at it as design, development, etc; and view it not just as a process, but as a system. A system with lots of inputs, processes, and places to go wrong.   I tried to capture a stereotypical system in this picture, with lots of caveats: clients or vendors may be internal or external, there may be more than one talent, etc, it really is a simplified stereotype, with all the negative connotations that entails.

Note that there are many places for the system to break even in this simplified representation.   How do you get alignment between all the elements?   I think you need a meta-level, learning experience creation system design. That is, you need to look at the system with a view towards optimizing it as a system, not as a process.

I realize that’s one of the things I do (working with organizations to improve their templates, processes, content models, learning systems, etc), trying to tie these together into a working coherent whole. And while I’m talking formal learning here, by and large, I believe it holds true for performance support and informal learning environments as well, the whole performance ecosystem.   And that’s the way you’ve got to look at it, systemically, to see what needs to be augmented to be producing not content, not dry and dull learning, not well-produced but ineffective experiences, but the real deal: efficient, effective, and engaging learning experiences. Learning, done right, isn’t a ‘spray and pray’ situation, but a carefully designed intervention that facilitates learning.   And to get that design, you need to address the overall system that creates that experience.

The client has to ‘get’ that they need good learning outcomes, the vendor has to know what that means.   The designer/SME relationship has to ensure that the real outcomes emerge.   The designer has to understand what will achieve these outcomes.   The ‘talent’ (read graphic design, audio, video, etc) needs to align with the learning outcomes, and appropriate practices, the developer(s) need to use the right tools, and so on.   There are lots of ways it can go wrong, in lack of understanding, in mis-communication, in the wrong tools, etc.   Only by looking at it all holistically can you look at the flows, the inputs, the processes, and optimize forward while backtracking from flaws.

So, look at your system.   Diagnose it, remedy it, tune it, and turn it into a real learning experience creation system.   Face it, if you’re not creating a real solution, you’re really wasting your time (and money!).

Complicit Clients

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I regularly rail against cookie-cutter learning design, boring elearning, etc.   I like to blame it on designers who don’t know the depths of learning behind the elements of design, and perhaps also on managers who don’t work to ensure that the learning objectives are tied closely to meaningful business outcome.   And I think that’s true, but of course there’s another culprit as well: clients who just ask for the same old thing!

I regularly work with a couple of partners who use me when there’s a need to go to the ‘next level’, whether it’s to mobile, pushing the engagement envelope, or working more strategically (that’s one of the way I help clients, too).   However, too often they’re just asked to turn content into courses, and the clients don’t care that the learning objectives in that content are too low-level, too knowledge-focused, completely abstract or de-contextualized, and generally not meaningful.   Now, my partners generally push back a bit, trying to help the client realize the value of a deeper design, but many times the client doesn’t want to put any more money in, doesn’t want to think about it, they just want that course up with a quiz (even with a pre-test!, *shudder*).   And my partners will go along, because creating elearning is their business and they can’t just turn away work.

And I’ve heard that from in-h0use departments as well.   As one of the attendees at my strategic elearning workshop a couple of months ago said, the managers from other business units say “just do that stuff you do” and don’t want any deeper thought into it.   They want it fast, based upon the content, and apparently don’t care that it isn’t going to lead to any meaningful change.   Or don’t know the difference. Hey, they learned that way, so it must be OK, right?

However, I think we owe it to the learners, to those clients, and to ourselves to start educating those clients, internal or external, about good learning.   You’ve got to know it yourself first, of course, but once you’re doing it anyway, there’s really no extra overhead at the first level.   But you want to start pushing back: “what’s the behavior that needs to change/”, or “what decisions do they need to be able to make that they can’t make correctly now?”   And, we need to ask “how will you know that it’s changed? What are the metrics that you’re trying to impact?”   Once you’ve got them thinking about measurable change, you have the opportunity to start talking about meaningful impact and good design to achieve outcomes.

Frankly, you can’t complain about relevance to the organization if you’re not fighting to achieve better outcomes, ones that matter.   So, educate yourselves, improve your processes, and then fight to be doing more meaningful stuff.   Hey, we’re supposed to be about learning, and marketing our services is really about good customer education! Get them educated, and get to be doing more meaningful and consequently rewarding design.

Virtual Worlds #lrnchat

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In last night’s #lrnchat, the topic was virtual worlds (VWs).   This was largely because several of the organizers had recently attended one or another of the SRI/ADL meetings on the topic, but also because one of the organizers (@KoreenOlbrish) is majorly active in the business of virtual worlds for learning through her company Tandem Learning.   It was a lively session, as always.

The first question to be addressed was whether virtual worlds had been over or underhyped.   The question isn’t one or the other, of course.   Some felt underhyped, as there’s great potential. Others thought they’d been overhyped, as there’s lots of noise, but few real examples.   Both are true, of course.   Everyone pretty much derided the presentation of powerpoints in Second Life, however (and rightly so!).

The second question explored when and where virtual worlds make sense.   Others echoed my prevailing view that VW’s are best for inherently 3D and social environments.   Some interesting nuances came in exploring the thought that that 3D doesn’t have to be our scale, but we can do micro or macro 3D explorations as well, and not just distance, but also time. Imagine exploring a slowed down, expanded version of a chemical reaction with an expert chemist!   Another good idea was for contextualized role plays.   Have to agree with that one.

Barriers were explored, and of course value propositions and technical issues ruled the day. Making the case is one problem (a Forrester report was cited that says enterprises do not yet get VWs), and the technical (and cognitive) overhead is another.   I wasn’t the only one who mentioned standards.

Another interesting challenge was the lack of experience in designing learning in such environments.   It’s still new days, I’ll suggest, and a lot of what’s being done is reproductions of other activities in the new environment (the classic problem: initial uses of new technology mirror old technology).   I suggested that we’ve principles (what good learning is and what VW affordances are) that should guide us to new applications without having to have that ‘reproduction’ stage.

I should note that having principles does not preclude new opportunities coming from experimentation, and I laud such initiatives.   I’ve opined before that it’s an extension of the principles from Engaging Learning combined with social learning, both areas I’ve experience in, so I’m hoping to find a chance to really get into it, too.

The third question explored what lessons can be learned from social media to enhance appropriate adoption of VWs.   Comments included that they needed to be more accessible and reliable, that they’ll take nurturing, and that they’ll have to be affordable.

As always, the lrnchat was lively, fun, and informative.   If you haven’t tried one, I encourage to at least take it for a trial run. It’s not for everyone, but some admitted to it being an addiction! ;)   You can find out more at the #lrnchat site.

For those who are interested in more about VWs, I want to mention that there will be a virtual world event here in Northern California September 23-24, the 3D Training, Learning, & Collaboration conference.   In addition to Koreen, people like Eilif Trondsen, & Tony O’Driscoll (who has a forthcoming book with Karl Kapp on VW learning) will be speaking,   and companies like IBM and ThinkBalm are represented, so it should be a good thing. I hope to go (and pointing to it may make that happen, full disclaimer :).   If you go, let me know!

Making designing good learning easier

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On my last post, I got a comment that really made me think.   The problem was content coming as PPTs from SMEs, and the question was poignant: “Given limited time and resources on a project how can you plan in advance to ensure that your learning is engaging and creates effective outcomes?”   I commented a reply, but I’d like to elaborate on that.

I like the focus on the ‘planning’ part: what can you do up front to increase the quality of your learning outcomes?   It’s a recursive design problem: people need to be able to design better, what training, job aids, tools, and/or social learning can we develop to make this work?   Having just done this on a project where a team I was a member of   were responsible for generating a whole curriculum around the domain, I can speak with some confidence about how to make this work.

First, are the tools.   Too often, the templates enforce rigor around having the elements, rather than about what makes those elements really work.   So, on the project, I not only guided the design of the templates, but the definitions associated with the elements that helped ensure they accomplished the necessary learning activities.   For example, it’s no good to have an introduction that doesn’t activate the relevant prior experience and knowledge, doesn’t help the learner comprehend why this learning is important, or even accomplishes this in an aversive way (can you say: “pre-test“?   :).   This is the performance support component, that helps make it easy to do things well and more difficult to do the wrong thing.   Similarly with ensuring meaningful activity in the first place, etc.

Next is the understanding.   This comes both by creating a shared understanding in the team, and then refining the process, making the outcome a ‘habit’.   First, I’d worked with some of the team before, so they shared my design principles, then I presented and co-developed with the client that understanding.   Then, as first draft content came out, I’d critique it and used that to tune the template, and the understanding amongst the content developers.

The involvement in refining the design process took some time, but really paid off as the quality of the resulting output took a steep increase and then stabilized as good quality learning experience yet reproducible in a cost-effective way and sustainable and manageable way.

As I’ve mentioned before, the nuances between bad elearning and really effective and engaging content are subtle to the untrained eye, but the outcomes are not, both subjectively from the learner’s experience, and objectively from the outcomes.   You should be collecting both those metrics, and reviewing the outcomes, as they both provide useful information about how your design is working (or not) and how to improve it.

If it matters, and it should, you really should be reviewing and tuning your processes to achieve engagement and learning outcomes.   It’s not more expensive, in the long term, though it does take more work.   But otherwise, it’s just a waste of money and that is expensive!   You’ll end up in the situation Charles Jenning’s cites, when”you might as well throw the money spent on these activities out the window.”   Don’t waste money, spend the time assuring that your learning design processes achieve what they need to.   Your organization, and your learners, will thank you.

Creating Stellar Learning

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Getting the details right about instructional design is quite hard, or at least it appears that way, judging from how many bad examples there are.   Yet the failures are more from a lack of knowledge rather than inherent complexity.   While there are some depths to the underlying principles that aren’t sufficiently known, they can be learned.   However, a second level of embedding systematic creativity into the process is another component that’s also missed, however this time it’s from a broken process more than a lack of knowledge.

What we want are learning solutions that really shine: where the learning experience is engaging, efficient, and effective.   Whether you’re creating products for commercial sale, or solutions for internal or external partners, you want to take your learning experience design to the next level.   So, how does an organization improve their learning design process to create stellar learning?

Let’s go through this, step by step.   First, you’ve got to know what you should be doing. I’ve gone on before about what’s broken in learning design, and what needs to be done.   That can be learned, developed, practiced, and refined.   Ideally, you’d have a team with a shared understanding of what really good learning is composed of and looks like. But it’s not just the deep learning.

There’s more: the team needs to develop both the understanding of the learning principles, and a creative approach that encourages striking a balance between pragmatic constraints and a compelling experience.   Note that creating a compelling experience isn’t about wildly expensive productive values, but instead about ensuring meaningfulness, both of the content, and the context (read: examples and practice). The learners have to be engaged cognitively and emotionally, challenged to work through and apply the material, to really develop the skills. If not, why bother?   Again, it’s not about expensive media; it can be done in text, for crying out loud! (Not that I’m advocating that, but just to emphasize it’s about design, not media.)

I find that it’s not that designer’s aren’t creative, however, but that there’s just no tolerance in the system for taking that creative step.   Yes, it can be hard to break out of old approaches, but there has to be an appreciation for the value of creating engaging experiences.   I will admit that initially the process may take a bit longer, but with practice the design doesn’t take longer, yet the results are far better.   It does, however, take a shared understanding of what an engaging experience is just as it takes the understanding of the nuances of creating meaningful learning.

And that level of understanding about both deep learning and creative experience design can be developed as a shared understanding among your team in very pragmatic ways (applying those principles to the design of that learning, too).     It’s just not conscionable anymore to be doing just mediocre design.   It won’t lead to learning and is a waste of money, as well as a waste of learner’s time.

That covers the design, and even a bit of the process, but what’s needed is a look at your design tools and processes. And I’m not talking about whether you use Flash or not, what I’m talking about is your templates.   They can, and should, be structured to support the design I’m talking about.   Too often, the constraints in existence stifle the very depth and creativity needed, saddling them with unnecessary components and not requiring the appropriate ones.   Factors that can be improved include templates for design, tools for creation, and even underlying content models!   They all have to strike the balance between supportive structure and lack of confinement.

Look, I’ve worked numerous times on projects where I’ve helped teams understand the principles, refine their processes, and yielded far better outcomes than you usually get.   It’s doable!   Yes, it takes some time and work, but the outcome is far better. On the flip side, I’ve reliably gone through and eviscerated mediocre design, systematically.   The point is not to make others look bad, but instead to point out where and how to improve product.   Those flaws from the teams that developed it can be remedied.   Teams can learn good design.   My goal, after all, is better learning!

A caveat: to the untrained eye, the nuances are subtle.   That’s why it’s easy to slide by mediocre design that looks good to the undiscerning stakeholder.   Stellar design doesn’t seem that much better, until you ascertain the learner’s subjective experience, and look at the outcomes as well.   In fact, I recall one situation where there was a complaint from a manager about why the outcome didn’t look that different.   I walked that manager through the design, and the complaints changed to accolades.

You should do it because it’s the right thing to do, but you can justify it as well (and when you do walk folks through the nuances, they’ll learn that you really do know what you’re talking about).   There’s just no excuse for any more bad learning, so please, please, let’s start creating good learning experiences.

Conferencing Reflections

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Last week I presented a workshop on strategic learning as an opening act to ASTD’s 2009 International Conference (ICE), which was followed by DAU/GMU’s Innovations in eLearning (IeL) conference.   It was a study in contrasts, and a great learning experience.

Obviously, the focuses (yeah, focii, bugger it) are different.   ICE is huge, and for all training and development, while the IeL conference is smaller and focused on elearning.   There’s much more to see at ICE, but it’s also appears to be run as a revenue opportunity, where as IeL is designed to provide the latest thinking to a select community (DAU & GMU stakeholders), and appears to be a cost-center.

ICE should be able to be interpreted as a ‘state of the industry’ snapshot, representing the audience’s interests and needs.   As such, there are some serious concerns.   During the keynote on Blue Ocean Strategy (greatly descriptive, less prescriptive utility), colleagues overheard audience members asking “what’s in it for me?”     I can’t think of anything more relevant to organizations than looking ahead and trying to come up with answers for the increasingly turbulent times!

There were some social media sessions, and people ‘getting’ the message, likewise some other topics, but there was similarly good attendance at pretty ordinary stuff. Sure, you do need to learn about assessment, and how to cartoon (a great session, BTW), but there wasn’t the sense of urgency I reckon should be felt.

The expo hall also was scarily populated with generic leadership training, university degrees, flashy examples of elearning that didn’t have much substance, and of course the ubiquitous   ‘styles’ assessments (of which the less said, the better).   That is, plenty of other reasons to worry about the current concerns of the average conference attendee.   Aren’t they needing something more?   Support/responsibility beyond the classroom?

Granted, these conferences are planned out close to a year in advance, so it may not reflect current concerns as much as those of half a year or more ago, but it seemed little different than one I attended several years ago.   C’mon!   There were plusses, of course, not least of which were chances to meet colleagues I’d heard of or interacted with but not had the pleasure of meeting face to face, including Rae Tanner, Dave Ferguson, Craig Wilkins, and Gina Schreck, as well as reconnecting with folks including Marcia Conner and Wendy Wickham.   And I was pleased that there was WiFi access throughout the conference!   Kudos to ASTD for getting that right.   The lack of tweets from the conf can’t be laid at ASTD’s feet.   And the team (e.g. Linda, et al), keep the sales pitches in sessions to a minimum.

The IeL conference, on the other hand, was a whole different story. Way smaller, and deliberately focused on technology-mediated learning & the cutting edge.   The keynotes by Vint Cerf and Will Wright were both awesome in scope and depth, truly visionary stuff.   The sessions were more targeted specifically at my interests, and again it was a great chance to hook up with some new colleagues, including Koreen Olbrish and Aaron Silvers, and similarly connecting with colleagues like Marks Oehlert & Friedman. And there was more tweeting of sessions in this small conference than ICE, but given the audience that wasn’t as unexpected as you’d think.

I can’t say that one conference was better than the other for me or for their audiences.   I got to present what I was really interested in at ICE, versus doing a talk for IeL that met their request rather than my passion (tho’ it was within my capability and I did my usual due diligence to make it accurate, worthwhile, and at least moderately engaging). However, the good thing at IeL is that people were really looking not just at training, but at where they really needed to be for organizational learning, and how technology could help.   And that’s the most important thing, to be looking ahead.   What I missed at ICE was people really trying to do more than just their job.   And I’m perfectly willing to be wrong about that.

It’s just that I think there’s a coming crisis in organizational learning, and the answers are not doing training better. Formal learning will be part of it, but training as it’s currently delivered will not, and there’s so much more.   Here’s hoping that message starts getting heard.

Context & learning environments

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I was talking with Gina Shreck, who I’d known through Twitter, at a Sun-sponsored happy hour about new learning environments. She’s been quite active in Virtual Worlds (VW), and I was describing an Augmented Reality Game (ARG), and it came to me that there are some really meaningful similarities.

We know from research like John Bransford’s Anchored Instruction and Brown, Collins, & Duguid’s Situated Cognition that learning works better in context (even if you spread across contexts to generalize).   What I realized is that both approaches are really using technology to bring context for learning into vivid relief.   I’ve been active in games for learning because it provided meaningful practice, and of course VW’s can be used to host games in (realizing that VW‘s aren’t inherently games, but instead are just environments), and so are ARG’s.

Even when designed for learning, the point is to try to enrich the context.   Web-based games are the easiest, but there are times when more full contextualization is necessary, and the different environments offer different affordances or capabilities.

Despite the overhead, VWs are immersive in that your avatar is totally ‘in world’, and you can design that world to be anyplace/anytime you want it to be.   You can design the contingencies the way you want.   While most valuable for 3D, it may also be important for when total difference is necessary.   Specific examples include building real world structures that must be explored or investigated, for learning purposes.

On the other hand, ARGs are set in the real world, but specific constraints can be introduced.   You can have specific events, materials, and people (real or virtual) appear in the world you want.   Again, you want to develop associated decision making for those explored contexts.

The reason to use an ARG is to develop the ability to develop the capability in situ, that is, as close to the real world context as possible, whereas VWs can add extra dimensions, or work for contexts that are too expensive or dangerous to do live.   That’s also true for non-VW games as well, of course.

The point is to minimize distance and maximize transfer from learning context to real world application.   The overhead to take advantage of these sorts of capabilities is dropping quite rapidly. The goal is to discover the degree and type of contextualization needed (as well as pocketbook, of course), and decide what environment offers the necessary depth and value to achieve the outcomes you need.   However, you need to understand the full repertoire of tools available, and their affordances, to optimally choose an approach.   So, game on!

Designing on demand

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Yesterday I had the pleasure of working with a team on a grant to use games as a context to conduct high stakes cognitive assessments.   The cognitive tasks for assessment are remarkably abstract, e.g do this particular discrimination task (ie look at a string of four characters and signal if one is a vowel), sometimes while monitoring another situation or as an attention-distractor from another task, but the tasks that they are matched to range from very expensive to life-saving..   The goal is to establish a baseline, and then look for decrements at particular instances before a crucial task, indicating lack of readiness.

The interesting thing is the challenge of placing these tasks in a meaningful context.   It’s creative, and consequently fun.   It’s also collaborative, and when you get divergent contributors in a safe environment, you can really get productive synergy going.   We got together the night before for a meal and some social lubricants, and the next day spent hours in a conference room discussing, whiteboarding and generally designing.

One of the problems is that there have been diverse project specifications from the granting organization, and lack of access to the intended audience. We had some feedback that there should be minimal ‘story’, and very clearly that if the audience doesn’t perceive value, they can ignore the activity completely.   Also, there were some important constraints on how much we could change the core task without invalidating the deep research base.   Fortunately, a background in cog psych as well as having the minds behind the tests with us allowed a reasonable guess.   Still, a bit of a challenge.

We focused in early on the value, and I brought up that if the cognitive activity produces improvements in ability, that it’s training as well as assessment, and the audience cares very much about being able to do the job.   That hadn’t been determined to date, but may be available.   We also talked about marketing the value, and if the assessment can in this case (as it has in the past) serve as a very accurate predictor of performance (e.g. detecting a decrement in performance without prior knowledge), that may provide the necessary motivation.

When it comes to design, I’ve made a claim before that you can’t give me an objective I can’t design a game for (I reserve the right to raise the objective ‘high’ enough, but have yet to be proved wrong; it’s an outcome of the engaging learning framework), and this isn’t an exception. In fact, we came up with numerous possible settings, originally for what we were told of the mission, and then for a more near-term mission.   We also came up with relative degrees of abstraction from real (e.g. closely aligned to real task) to essentially arbitrary (like Tetris has little correlation to real time).   The fact of the matter is, you can embed meaningful tasks in appropriate contexts, and tune into a game no matter what the objective is.   It just takes systematic creativity (not an oxymoron), as in the heuristics I’ve talked about previously in two spots.

Since we don’t yet have access to the audience (though we know who they are), I suggested that we need to mock up several different plausible looks and trial them when they do get access (they’re working on that).   They had talked to some stakeholders, but that’s not reliable, for reasons I related to them.   In the process of designing the Quest game, we talked to the counselors who worked with these ‘at risk’ youth, who suggested this issue was smart shopping and cooking.   Fortunately, we then got to talk to some of the youth themselves, who responded “yeah, that’s important, but what’s really important is…” and proceeded to give us a set of relationships that then became key to the game.   Lesson: don’t just listen to the managers, or just the trainers, or just…all those are important, but they may not be right.

It was easy to consider a number of degrees of story ‘depth’, and visual styles to go with each.   At least, they’re in my head, but I went out and grabbed screenshots of various things that could serve as models.   You want the game mechanics to reflect the cognitive task, but you can wrap a number of different looks round that. We’ll pull together our notes, get some storyboards generated, but we managed to sketch out five separate games for what evidence suggests are likely to be the most important skills.

And that’s the real lesson, that it can be done, reliably and repeatedly.   And that’s important, because if you can’t, then it’s all well and good to talk about the value of games as learning environments, but it’s a waste of time if you don’t have an associated design process.   Fortunately, I can still comfortably say: “learning can, and should, be hard fun“.