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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.

Am I deluded?

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As you should know, my book Engaging Learning: Designing e-Learning Simulation Games was published back in 2005.   I was just talking to them about some other possible projects, and the question arose about why it hadn’t been more successful.   I had my story, but I’d welcome your feedback.

I’m quite proud of the book, I have to say; I believe it accomplished what I intended it to, which was to lay out a principled framework about why games are effective for learning, and then give you a systematic process to go about designing them, along with some hints and tips.   It came out at a time when interest was peaking about using games to meet learning needs.   So, why didn’t it fly off the shelves?   My answer is severalfold:

  • It wasn’t marketed well.   My publisher basically sent a few copies to reviewers, and then did little.   I may have not been proactive enough in letting them know my speaking engagements, but I did do a lot of speaking and writing.   That may not have been leveraged sufficiently.
  • The unique contribution, that this book is about how to design learning games, wasn’t really communicated.   That is, while some books tell you about why it’s important, this was the only one that really gives you a design process.   (And still is, as far as I can tell.)
  • At the same time, lots of other books came out that were about games for learning, authors including Johnson, Gee, Shaffer, Aldrich, Koster, and more. They had a different proposition, but some were higher profile for a variety of reasons, and the sheer quantity created confusion.

Now, there are other possible reasons, including most obviously that the book isn’t any good.   I’ve received very nice comments from people who’ve read it, but one of the few Amazon reviews isn’t very nice (I noticed only recently).   So, I could be self-deluded.   Also, I’m not a great self-promoter (that is, while I’m convinced that I’m quite good at what I do, I’m not very active in going out and selling that idea to people).     I probably should’ve been more forward in getting those who told me they liked it to write Amazon reviews (please, feel free!).

I’d really welcome feedback on this, as I did try to make a unique and valuable contribution, and still expect that the book could have ‘legs’ if I can figure out where I might refocus some of my or my publisher’s efforts.   They did mention that they’ve reorganized their marketing department ;).   Comments?   Honest and constructive encouraged as well as supportive.

Expert vs designer: who wins?

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We had quite the heated discussion today on a project I’m working on, and one of the emergent issues was whether ‘the expert’ dictates the objectives, or whether the developer could change them. I recognized that this is not only an issue in our process going forward (read: scalability), but it’s also a larger issue.

In this case, the design that was presented by the developer to the expert (this is a simplification, our team process is more complicated than this :) ) didn’t match the expert’s expectation. (This was an artifact of a bad choice of language at the beginning that confounded the issue.) However, the expert expected to present the objectives, and the game would be designed to achieve that objective. Which I would agree with, but with one caveat.

My caveat is two-fold. First, experts aren’t necessarily masters of learning. Second, they may not actually have access to the necessary objectives: expertise is ‘compiled’ and experts don’t necessarily know how they do what they do! (An outcome of cognitive science research, it’s something I talk about in my ‘deeper elearning’ talk and also my white paper on the topic, .pdf) In this case the experts will be instructors on the topic, so presumably they’re both aware of content and learning design, but we all know courses can be too much knowledge, not enough skill.

Now, as Sid Meier said, “a good game is a series of interesting decisions”, and my extension is that good learning practice is a series of important decisions. I claim that you can’t give me a learning objective I can’t make a game for, but I reserve the right to move the objective high enough (in a learning taxonomy sense). Similarly, I can see that an expert might bring in an objective that’s not appropriate for any number of reasons: too low a level, not something individuals would really have difficulty with, or not important in the coming years, and the developer might not recognize it as wrong from the point of view of domain expertise, but when mapping a game mechanic onto it would realize it’s wrong because it’s an uninteresting task (or they’re more closely tied to the audience, often being younger, more tech-savvy, etc).

So, I believe (and it’s been my experience) that there’s of necessity a dialog between the source of the domain knowledge, be it expert, professor, whatever, and the designer/developer/whatever. When it comes to objectives, once the expert understands the developer’s point, they do get the final say on the necessary task & skills, but they need to be open to the developer’s feedback and willing to work with them to produce a design that’s both effective and engaging. My book is all about why that’s a doable goal and how to, but in short the elements that make learning practice effective align perfectly with the elements that make an engaging interactive experience (and so say many authors, including Gee, Prensky, Aldrich, Johnson, Shaffer, the list goes on).

Similarly, the developer has to design the game experience around the objective, and while the expert may provide feedback about aesthetic preferences or information helping to establish the audience, at the end the developer has final say on the engagement. With good intentions all around, this will work (with bad intentions, it won’t work regardless :).

Which is, of course, where the team ended up, after an hour of raised voices and frustration. All’s well that ends well, I reckon. Are your experiences or expectations different?

Work at learning; learning at work

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I agreed to be part of the third edition (this coming Monday) of Dave Ferguson’s Work/Learning Blog Carnival, and I start from a contrarian perspective, because I think “learning can, and should, be hard fun“. That is, properly done, learning is a positive experience, where you’ve balanced the challenge, set up the initial meaningfulness, have the learner playing an interesting role, providing the appropriate support and feedback, etc. I suppose the point is that the ‘hard’ part of the fun is work, but it isn’t toil or tedium. So, the distinction between the two is suspect. However, my principles about engaged learning are typically when we design the experience for another, but the topic here is, to me, self-learning.

And I do believe passionately in self-learning; if I’m not learning, I may as well be dead. Play is learning, and I intend to keep playing.. :) So I blog, and talk to colleagues, and continually challenge myself with new tasks (like accepting this opportunity). But I do it mindfully, deliberately pacing the challenge, searching for personal meaningfulness, and finding the fun in it all. I take responsibility for making it hard fun. I think the most successful people are those who can find not a balance, but an integration between work and learning.

Let me take it to the next step, now, talking about organizational learning. In addition to the obvious implications of how we design learning experiences, I think the less obvious implication, but perhaps the more important one, is helping people to become not only toiling self-learners, but joyful self-learners.

To me, the increasing rate of change means that fixed competencies – the notion that an organization can anticipate, design, and deliver the needed learning – is going to go away. The true competitive advantage will not be in just hiring the needed skills, but in developing folks who can continue to self-learn. Too many are still tied into the “we can hire the talent”, but the folks who’ve done well in school have succeeded in a system that doesn’t match the way the world outside of school works. And there’ll be increasing competition for the folks who demonstrably can succeed in a dynamic environment. Trusting that you can acquire sufficient talent seems like a riskier bet than instilling that capability in the organization.

Imagine really unleashing your organization. Yes, it’s Senge’s Learning Organization, and more. We know what this entails, but I’m still searching for organizations who really want to execute against it.

(Serious) Games in 5 paragraphs

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Just as I did for mobile, here’re 5 paragraphs on games:

Serious Games (or, to be Politically Correctâ„¢, Immersive Learning Simulations) have hit the corporate learning mainstream, so you should be asking yourself: “why are people excited” Quite simply, because games (I‘m not PCâ„¢) are probably the most pragmatically effective learning practice you can get. Sure, mentored real performance is the ideal, but there are two potential hiccups: scaling individual mentors has proven to be unrealistically expensive, and mistakes in live practice often are expensive, dangerous, or both. Why do you think we have flight simulators?

For principled reasons, the best learning practice is contextualized, motivating, and challenging. Interestingly, so are the most engaging experiences. It turns out that the elements that cause effective educational practice line up perfectly with those that create engaging experiences. Thus, we can safely say that learning should be ‘hard fun‘.

Then the issue becomes if we can do this reliably, repeatably, and on a cost-effective basis. It turns out that the answer to this question is also in the affirmative. While you can‘t just shove gamers and educators in a room and expect the result to work (all the bad examples that led to ‘edutainment‘ becoming a bad word are evidence), if they understand the alignment above, systematically follow a creative process (no, systematic creativity is not an oxymoron; why do we have brainstorming processes?), and are willing to take time to ‘tune‘ the result, we can do this reliably.

The question is really: when to use games. The answer for engine-driven (read: programmed, variable) games is when we have a need for deep practice: when there are complex relationships to explore, or making the change will be really hard. Branching scenarios are useful when we want to experience some contextualized practice but we don‘t need a lot of it. And the principles suggest that at minimum, we should write better multiple-choice questions that put learners into contexts where they must make decisions where they‘re applying the knowledge, not just reciting it.

And, yes, we can spend millions of dollars (I can help :), but for many needs we may not need to. While there isn‘t any one tool that lets us do this, there are a number of cost-effective ways to develop and deliver on the resulting design. As I like to say “if you get the design right, there are lots of ways to implement it; if you don‘t get the design right, it doesn‘t matter how you implement it”.

Further resources include:

  • My book on designing games
  • The eLearning Guild’s Research Report on ILS
  • The Serious Games site
  • Clark Aldrich’s blog on learning games
  • My other game blog posts

Evaluating Serious Games (er, ILS)

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I’ve been working with a group creating the rubrics for evaluating submissions in a 2nd Life serious game competition. It’s an interesting issue, as there’re broad variances in what folks are thinking. As a reaction to a draft consensus of opinion, I rewrote the criteria to be evaluated as:

Learning
Comprehensiveness of alternatives to right answer
Match of game decisions to learning objectives
Appropriateness of feedback

Usability
Appropriate interface match to action
Interface navigation

Game
Naturalness of feedback mechanism
Continuity of experience
Seamlessness in embedding decisions into game world
Appropriateness of world to audience
Relevant to irrelevant action ratio
Appropriate challenge balancing
Level of replay (linear, branching, engine-driven)

I know this can be done better.     Your thoughts?

It’s an effort to combine my aligned elements from both education and engagement (the theoretical basis for my book on learning game design): clear goals, balanced challenge, thematic context, meaningfulness of action to story, meaningfulness of story to player, active choice, direct manipulation, integrated feedback, and novelty (see below), with the more standard elements necessary to make a successful online experience.

Alignment of Engagement and Game Elements

I find it useful to revisit principles from another angle, as it gives me a fresh chance to put a reality-check on my thinking. I think my older model holds up (and has continued to over the years), and the extras are not unique to learning games. Some elements cross boundaries, such as feedback having to components: one being the relation to the learning, and the other to the action.

The principles state that, done properly, the best practice (next to mentored real performance) ought to be games. Or, as I like to say: “Learning can, and should, be hard fun!”

Big Question: Learning Design for Digital Natives? Bugwash!

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This month’s Learning Circuit’s Blog Big Question of the Month is: Do we design learning different for digital natives? My short answer is no, but let me elaborate, as I’ve gone off on this in various places but not here (as far as I can see), and I think there’s something importantly wrong going on here

Let’s start with the hypothesis: that these digital ‘natives’ are fundamentally different than us – they’re immersed in a digital world, are better multi-taskers, and need more immersive and engaging learning environments.

My take is a twist on this. The old ways of learning are wrong for everyone; the instructivist model of tell & test doesn’t work for the new generation any more than it did for the old one! It was designed for industrial efficiency in delivery, and wasn’t worried about effectiveness as it was really a filter to higher-learning for those who *could* learn in this way.

So we do need to do new learning design, immersive and engaging, but for everyone, as it brings in the elements we’ve lost. We used to have apprenticeships, and we’ve gone away from this. We need to get back to contextualized task performance with learning layered on, for everyone! No wasted time, no dull and plodding content push, but instead meaningful action and appropriate information nuggets.

Look, the differences in this new generation are more attitudinal than mental skill set. Ask any mother about multi-tasking! It’s not about catering to them, it’s about the best learning for everyone.