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Collective intelligence patterns

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I had the good fortune to get to meet Tom Malone way back when he was working on what makes computer games fun (cited in my book).   I stopped by PARC (then the geek’s Mecca), and got to bask in the environment that produced the GUI on top of Doug Engelbart’s mouse.

I knew Tom then went on to be a thought leader out of the Sloan School of Management, studying office work and then higher levels of activity, leading to a recent book “The Future of Work”.   I happened to meet him again at an event at IBM’s Almaden Research Center, and he was gracious enough to remember me and discuss his work (I challenged him about his ‘guilds’, since they still can’t get reasonable healthcare that businesses can get, don’t get me started).

I mention this backstory to show the trajectory of thought leadership he’s had (and yet still remain a really nice guy).   He just spoke at the celebration of Doug Engelbart’s work, and while I couldn’t attend, I was looking for blog postings and found his slide deck.

You (should) know I like models, and he’s gone beyond talking about how web 2.0 social networking can facilitate work, to actually analyze and distill some underlying principles. In his presentation on The Landscape of Collective Intelligence, he comes up with four characteristics of design patterns (or genes, as he calls them): What (strategy), Who (staffing), How (structure & process), & Why (incentives/alignment).   This is a really nice systematic breakdown into patterns tied to real examples.

For Who, he distinguishes between a hierarchical arrangement and a crowd, the latter being a more random structure.   He focuses on the latter.   For Why he breaks it out into Money, Love, & Glory.   For What, it’s Create a solution or Decide on an issue.   How is whether you’re having it independent or dependent.   The latter two work out to a nice little matrix with collection, collaboration, many-to-many, and group decision.

I really liked his statement that “failure to get motivational factors right is probably the single greatest cause of failure in collective intelligence experiments”.   That’s insightful, and useful.

The implications for informal learning are obvious, I’ll have to think more about formal learning.   Still, a great foundation for thinking about using networks in productive ways.   Definitely worth a look.

Does Education Need to Change?

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George Siemens asks in his blog:

1. Does education need to change?
2. Why or why not?
3. If it should change, what should it become? How should education (k-12, higher, or corporate) look like in the future?

I can’t resist not answering.   1. ABSOLUTELY!   Let me count the ways…

K12 Education is broken in so many ways. We’re not engaging our students in why this is important, we’re not giving them problems to solve that resemble the ones that they’ll face outside, we’re focusing on the wrong skills, we don’t value teachers, we’ve crumbling infrastructure, we’ve beggared the budgets, the list goes on.

We need new curricula and new pedagogy at least. We should be focusing on 21st century skills (not knowledge): systems thinking, design, problem-solving, research, learning to learn, multimedia literacy, teamwork and leadership, ethics, etc; my wisdom curriculum.   We need pedagogies that engage, spiral the learning around meaningful tasks, that develop multiple skills.

We need this at K12, at higher education, and in the workplace.   We need technology skills infused into the curriculum as tools, not as ends in themselves.   We need teachers capable of managing these learning experiences, parents engaged in the process and outcomes, and administrations educational and political that ‘get’ this.   We need learners who can successfully segue into taking control of their learning and destiny.

Yes, a tall order.   But if we don’t, we basically are hobbling our best chances for a better world.   Look, the only way to have functioning societies is to have an educated populace, because you just can’t trust governments to do well in lieu of scrutiny. So, let’s get it started!

Coping personally, organizationally, and societally

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Having just come back from DevLearn (which rocked; my hearty thanks to all participants and organizers), and now engaged in the Corporate Learning Trends conference (free, online), I’m seeing some repeated themes, and interests.   It’s a busy time, since we‘re deeply engaged in the latter, but some messages are coming through so powerfully that I’ve got to reflect on them.

In this time of economic uncertainty or outright fear, one of the resonant themes is ‘how to cope’. Marcia Conner, one of our forward thinkers, is going to be talking about the topic of coping tomorrow at 10 AM PT, and I’m looking forward to it!I believe that’s important at the societal level as well.   We need to invest in our capabilities when things are down so we’re poised to capitalize on the upswing. Jay invited me to share his breakfast byte at DevLearn on the topic.

We brainstormed with the attendees, and came up with some interesting points.   At the personal level was to be nimble, strategic, and develop yourself.   Tony Karrer talked today about investing in knowing how to use the tools effectively, building upon all the tools that Robin Good and Jane Hart had described yesterday (simply amazing tools).

The organization level of that is to develop infrastructure and capability.   Dave Pollard today talked about moving from Knowledge Management 1.0 to 2.0, empowering people to self-help. What can you do to foster creativity and innovation on a shoestring when you can’t cope with full-fledged initiatives?   Can you get a small social networking tool initiative going that can help people help each other?

A couple of recurrent themes were selling this to management, and managing the proliferation of tools.   For the former, I reckon it’s about helping more than just novices, but providing self-help.   It depends, of course, on what your needs are and consequently what you choose to implement, but the outcomes can clearly be linked to organizational goals and problems, like reducing time-to-information, increasing productive collaboration, and sharing.   For the problem of tracking the tools, I think the key are the needed affordances.   I’ve been focused on finding the affordances of the tools, but it’s another thing to think about the affordances an organization needs and map tools into them.   Briefly, it’s about collaborative representations (prose, graphics), pointers to relevant topics, etc.   More work to be done here, I reckon.

These topics are being discussed at the Corporate Learning Trends social site this week (and ongoing, hopefully) and you can join in.

Note that I think these are relevant societally as well.   We developed some serious infrastructure through the WPA, and the Interstates, and it’s crumbling.   At some point you need to build it back up (rebuild differently?) to meet the needs.   That may increasingly be things like networks (and healthcare) as well as things like bridges.   I think this is key to thinking about how to invest for the tough times; focus internally until times get good again and be poised to rebound.   It’s like your body rebuilding while you’re asleep so you can restart the new day. Of course, you need to have hoarded the resources.   May be a way short-term shareholder returns damage long-term survivability?

Here’s hoping the economic situation is short and mercifully gentle, and that you all survive and prosper!

‘Novel’ learning about reading

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I like to read.   These days, I confess I seldom find time to read a full non-fiction book, but try to find the ‘readers digest’ condensed version on the web.   Time/money.   But I do still read novels, as enjoyment.   However, I’m reading differently than I used to.

As a Father’s Day present, my family took me to a used book store to load up on fun novels. I picked up a couple from recommended series of books, and two of them really were a revelation.   One was written in a very ‘street’ language, and very elliptical, and I had to work hard to understand (it also sort of presumed previous experience with the series). The other was a recent book from a familiar series, but was in the first person present, and also was hard work to read, requiring cognitive ‘leaps’ to make sense.   The revelation was that both books kept me to the end, not that I’d choose to have those experiences again.   It taught me a lot about how far we might be able to stretch our audience to stay engaged.   That is, if we’ve set up a compelling story line, or have other ways of ensuring motivation.

Another lesson comes from another series, where the protagonist’s reflections on society are revelatory to me.   It’s fiction, but the description of what the character sees resonates with what I see my partners doing in successful conversations with clients, and I’m always looking to learn to be better at what I do.

From the game design point of view, these are important reasons to read different genres of books (ok, so I’m lax on reading bodice rippers, I have to have some limits), but my learning here is that reading different author’s styles (and their stylistic explorations) give you two things: an exposure to the breadth of what will work, and some insight into how other people can parse the world.

So, as I tell my workshop attendees: “you have a tough assignment ahead of you, you’ve got to spend more time exploring the breadth and depth of entertainment to add to the repertoire of solutions you can bring”.   And there’s something to be said about a hot tub, a cold beer, and a good book…

Design: design as search

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A four-part series on design, barriers, and some heuristics to improve outcomes:

I found my passion in learning technology.   I took most of a computer science degree (after flirting with biology, and…) before designing my own major combining CS with education.   I went back to grad school to learn a lot about cognition and learning.   I took a rather eclectic approach, going beyond cognitive approaches to include behavioral approaches, instructional design, social learning theories, constructivist learning theories, even machine learning.   (I continue that today.)

As I took very much an ‘applied‘ approach (not doing pure research, but interpreting research to meet real problems, now known as “design-based research” in the edtech field, but close to the more general ‘action research‘), and was teaching interaction design, I started looking at design processes in that same eclectic way. (NB: I‘ve also tracked ‘engagement‘, as those who‘ve read the book or heard me speak on games know).   I looked at interface design processes, and instructional design processes, heck, I looked at architectural, industrial, engineering, and graphic design processes. And I realized some things that I‘ve talked about in various places but haven‘t written about for over 10 years, and yet I think are still relevant.   I‘m going to talk here about design, our cognitive (and other) barriers to design, and my plan is to subsequently post about a suite of heuristics I‘ve come up with to minimize the consequences of those barriers.

Design can be characterized as a search of a ‘solution‘ space. Think of all the possible solutions as this n-dimensional space or cloud, and outside the cloud are designs that wouldn‘t solve the problem, like the old approach we were using; inside the cloud are possible solutions).   Sometimes we can evolve an existing design incrementally to solve the problem, and sometimes we combine previous solutions to create a new one (or so some theories say).   Another way to think about it is we have this infinite solution space, and then we start putting in constraints that limit the space (must cost less than $50K, must be doable in six weeks, must work in our technical environment, etc).   Constraints are actually good, as they limit the space we have to search.   However, too often when we consider all the constraints, we‘ve just made the space the null set; we‘ve excluded any solution. Then we have to relax constraints: reduce scope, increase budget, etc.

One of the problems is prematurely limiting our search. It turns out that our cognitive architecture has biases that may limit our search long before we consciously look at our options.   We may only search a limited space nearby our prior experience, and only achieve what‘s know in search as a ‘local maximum‘, as a good solution for part of the space but not the best solution overall (a ‘global maximum‘). We need to know the barriers, and then propose solutions around those barriers.   Coming up: Functional Fixedness, Set-Effects, Premature Evaluation, and the ever-dreaded Social issues.   Stay tuned!

Second: https://blog.learnlets.com/2008/09/design-our-barriers/

Third: https://blog.learnlets.com/2008/09/design-the-first-heuristics/

Fourth: https://blog.learnlets.com/2008/09/design-final-heuristics/  

Killer Game App?

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Martine asked on the Serious Games list what the killer app was for ‘serious games’ list, and it prompted some thinking.

As I‘ve suggested before, Pine and Gilmore say that after the product and services economy is the ‘experience’ economy, that we’re in now, where we pay for experiences.   A good example is Apple, which makes buying and owning Apple products more than a product/service, but an experience (think also: themed restaurants/travel, amusement parks, etc).

They argue that the next phase is the ‘transformation’ economy, where experiences will transform us.   Read: learning.   I’ll suggest serious games is a component of that transformation experience, and the principles underlying ‘engaging learning’ (engaginglearning.com), designing learning games, are the principles for designing those transformative experiences.

However, it occurs to me that the killer app may just well be a game-based high-stakes assessment.   Why?   Assessment is important, and tough to do well.   Simulation is the closest thing to real performance, and consequently should provide the highest fidelity assessment.   You have to perform to succeed (read: win the game).

A number of years ago I was leading an R&D project building an intelligently adaptive learning system, using learner characteristics.   We started with a profiling instrument to develop the basis for adaptation, but intended to build a game-based environment to assess learner’s ‘styles’ (c.f. my rant on learning styles) as the basis for adaptation.   I think this idea could be extended for many important skills.

There’s no reason, for instance, that SimuLearn’s Virtual Leader couldn’t be a leadership assessment as well as a learning environment (if you buy their leadership model).   In fact, any assessment use would naturally (ala problem-based learning) serve as the basis for a learning experience as well.

So, my take on the killer app for games (besides games already being the killer app for elearning :), is high-stakes assessment.   This is a test: what do you think?

Motivation by Behavior Change

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Clive Shepherd blogs this idea from Richard Middleton, about two possible dimensions that might affect your learning goals: how motivated your learners are, and how ‘big’ the behavior change is:

The quick notion is that if you’ve a small change and high motivation, it can be very lean.   Lower motivation requires more engaging presentation, and once you start having big changes you’ll need lots of practice, and when the learner isn’t interested or is resistant, you’ll really have to ramp up the engagement (tuning it into a game).

There are lots of other dimensions (e.g. maybe it doesn’t even require rapid elearning, but just an information update), but this is certainly a good way to look more richly at the design task and how it might be addressed.   And looking richly at your learning task is where you get more creative learning solutions (read: learning experience designs).

Future of the Book?

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Last nite was the NextNow event on the future of the book/publishing/? Jay Cross really helped by adding significant data around and input to the discussion; a very public thanks.   He’s also blogged it, with video.   We had a very diverse audience of around 30 or so; many were authors, there were CEOs & entrepeneurs, artists and musicians, noted scientists, and more. Many shared one or more of my own publishing experiences, including as author, board member of a not-for-profit that publishes, editorial board member of a journal, and, of course, as a blogger.

After introductions, which already raised many issues, Jay walked us through the history of the book (Guttenberg was an entrepreneur, the first totable book was sized to fit in saddle bags), and we talked about the pros and cons of books.   We discussed our varied experiences with publishers, and there were quite a few unhappy ones.   Then we got into the issues.

As I mentioned earlier, Jay and I had come up with a few, including editorial ‘voice’ (who’s vetting the information), interactivity, volatility, ownership, and money.   Interestingly, as the discussion continued, others emerged.   Michael Carter raised an interesting point, that we were conversing about books and publishers, and they’re not the same things, and that it was really about matching ignorance with knowledge.   He also mentioned that the current chapter and book size is arbitrary, which is something I’ve seen in textbooks.   Christine Walker mentioned how our cognition might change without the book experience.   There was considerable optimism about setting information free, which I didn’t squelch with my concern about the need for ‘filters’.

We covered the ‘collected papers’ model, where proactive instructors or good editors choose appropriate contributions to a definitive compilation (with my note that most instructors just want to choose a text, and there are compilations that are just vanity projects without a representative or definitive sampling for the topic).   We also talked about marketplaces, and Laleh Shahidi mentioned a learning object model of content, of which there’ve been several experiments (including Propagate, a system that Peter Higgs launched way back around 1998!).   One of the ideas would be to have several authors to choose from, but then you’d need ‘templates’ for topics, with agreed structure.   One of the current situations is that authors present totally different takes on subjects.

At the end, it appeared that publishing is about 4 things:

  • development: the right choice of message and author for the knowledge gap
  • production: the right choice of presentation of the information
  • marketing: the right marketing of availability to need
  • money: the business model that surrounds the first three

The interesting thing is that with the internet (and on-demand printing), the production costs have essentially hit zero. There’s clearly a role for editorial choice, but at some point everyone can publish, and we need ways to find what we want, which is really about the marketing, which was clearly where many authors (including yours truly) felt that they were let down.   We heard of an interesting experiment in viral marketing, with Amy Jussell mentioning a blog-produced book. The question is whether such an effort is replicable. Of course, there’s still the cachet that comes with having a publisher choosing.   The flip-side is tha traditional publishers still take months from final manuscript to final print.

So, no answers, but lots of interesting issues.

Future of Publishing?

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Based on a strange twist of circumstance, Jay Cross and I will be leading a discussion on the future of publishing in an online era here in the Bay Area next Monday (July 28).   He and I prepared some days ago, and came up with several issues, including who owns IP, new business models, moving from content to experience, increasing rates of change, and more.

The fact of the matter is that the day of the (non-fiction) book is at an inflection point.   That’s not to say we won’t still want to read books from time to time, at least those of us ‘of an age’ ;).   But what, where, when, and how will be our primary sources of information, moving forward?   My book cover

Certainly there are some interesting experiments going on.   On ITFORUM, Bev Ferrell and others have been citing a number of initiatives of self-publishing and open textbooks.   Certainly fodder for thought (particularly when I’m working with publishers on several projects, and have had a book published!).

We aren’t providing answers, but we’ll be with a very knowledgeable cohort and hope to work through to some interesting ideas.   If you’re in the area, and are interested, let me know and I’ll lob coordinates at you.

Model madness

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Well, if you happened to hit my blog between yesterday and today, you might’ve noticed some slight changes to the format.   Unintentional.   I’ve just started tweeting (using Twitter), and had seen how your tweets could appear in a window in your blog.   I wanted to do the same, but my blog template is old.   I wanted to look at another template so I clicked on it, and it installed the new theme, not just giving me information.   Which wiped out the header and some of the customization on my sidebar.

I pinged my ISP, who’s also a friend/colleague/mentor, and was my boss a couple of times.   Sky let me know that the themes are just different sub-directories that get swapped between, and if I just clicked on another theme I’d eventually get mine back.   Which worked, and it’s now back, but there’s a lesson in there.

First, I’m reasonably tech literate.   I programmed for a living (for Sky, actually) before I went back to grad school.   I’ve maintained a knowledge of what tech can do, though I no longer maintain fluency in any languages.   I’ve maintained, updated, and have customized my sites as well (this blog, my book site, and my company site).   However, my understanding is more conceptual these days; e.g. while I know what CSS is and why it’s good and you should use it, I’m pretty much at the crayon level with it.

However, the lesson is that having taught interface design (and studied with Don Norman) I know that the interface could be doing a better job of helping me build a conceptual model of how my blog site operates.   They recently changed the blog entry interface, and actually made it worse because the ‘tag’ interface is no longer on the screen initially, it’s hidden down below and you need to scroll to get to it (which means I forget sometimes).   But overall, I really don’t understand where and how they’re using files to compile this site.

Now, I also don’t know PHP (or javascript, or Python, or… the point being that there are so many different web technologies I can’t keep up with them all; it’s not how I add value to the endeavors I’m engaged in), but I’ve managed to muddle through adding things to the files like the Feedblitz signup (if you want to read via email, like I do).   The old interface made it really hard to find a file to edit that you hadn’t edited recently, and the new one’s better (some things get worse and others get better, but really things should steadily get better). I realize web interfaces are going to be weaker than application ones, but it doesn’t have to be this hard.   Of course, as far as I know it’s free, so I shouldn’t complain too much.

Still, one of the things we know is that if there is a conceptual model underlying how something’s implemented, making that conceptual model clear (or even available) will help people work with a system when they’re using it intermittently.   There’re no clues for me in WordPress.   Now, their working assumption for people who’ve installed their own copy is that they’re reasonably facile with PHP and probably more regularly generating code, so maybe I’m not one of their target users.   Still, there’s little to be lost, and a lot to be gained by making the underlying model clear.

I do recommend you read Don’s Design of Everyday Things book, which helps explain why mappings and models are powerful guides to action. Everyone who designs solutions for others should read it; it’s an easy and short read, and it will definitely change the way you look at the world.   In a positive way, and that’s a good thing, I reckon.   Oh, and do include conceptual models in your learning designs. It leads to much more persistent and flexible performance.