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Clark Quinn’s Learnings about Learning

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The Latest Goldrush

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My first job out of college was designing and programming educational computer games on the old Apple ][, TRS-80 Model 1 (shudder), etc (a couple of my better-known products were FaceMaker & Spellicopter). At that time, these initial PCs were new, and people were excited. A whole bunch of folks came out to ‘Silicon Valley’ (before it really had that label) and started saying that they could program applications for these machines. Some great companies were formed, including the Learning Company, and some great applications, including Visicalc. But also a whole bunch of other companies sprung up, and eventually there was a crash. Out of the ashes, some good companies survived but also some good ones failed.

The reason I tell this story is not to show how old I am (I was a child prodigy, honest ;), but because that was my first experience with a gold rush mentality. What I mean here is when something new becomes perceived as an opportunity, and a whole bunch of people jump on the bandwagon and try to make money off of it. I’ve subsequent seen the same story repeat with multimedia, the internet, and online learning.

I think I’m seeing it now in Serious Games. There’s a lot of good stuff going on, don’t get me wrong, yet I think I’m also seeing a lot of people jumping on the bandwagon who are the equivalent of the ‘snake oil’ salesman: talking a good game but not really ‘getting’ what’s important. I’m afraid that the consequence of hype and disappoints will be a backlash against this new incarnation of a great idea just as there was against the previous version, ‘edutainment’. I do see a lot of good things happening, and for once I hope I’m just being an alarmist.

There’s nothing wrong with a company with game experience looking to this new area as a potential business opportunity, but I hope they do so with more than just a token nod to the learning side. I don’t believe you can put game designers and instructional designers in a room together and get an optimal outcome. I think you need to have a language to do so (hence Engaging Learning). So, I’ve a clear interest and bias, but I truly believe what I say. And it’s my blog anyway…

Evaluating learning game design quality

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The quest has raged on and on: where’s the data on how effective games are? And the problem has continued: well, how do you evaluate the quality of the design of the game? Because, unless you feel confident the game is designed properly, you can’t decide whether a bad outcome (or even a good one) is due to the game, or something else. We have criteria for instructional design, but how can we compare?

I think this is an important issue that may be the biggest barrier we’ve had to trying to get the data people are demanding: real evaluations of games. There are other barriers: people doing evaluations but not wanting to publicize it as a competitive advantage, doing games but not evaluating them, but I’d argue that it’s hard to compare until you feel you’re comparing a well-designed game to a well-designed alternative. Clark Aldrich has done some good independent evaluation with Virtual Leader, and demonstrated improvements, but I’d like to see more on different scopes of games, in different domains, for a range of cognitive skills (and, as always, I’m not talking about tarted-up quiz show ‘frame games’ but meaningful cognitive decisions).

So, it occurred to me, the answer is in a framework for game design. Which, ahem, is what my whole book is based upon. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before, frankly. And, before you accuse me of too much self-serving thinking, I do want to point out that I’ve been looking for other systematic frameworks for learning game design, and haven’t found them.

I’ve read Prensky, Aldrich, Gee, and now am on Shaffer, (and others, but these are the ones who’ve been writing specifically about learning games) and I see great stuff, but I haven’t seen what I can term a systematic design approach other than mine (again, I know how this sounds, but such a design approach was my very specific goal and opportunity). They all cover at least some elements of design, and I made an effort to review their approaches and make sure they didn’t have anything I didn’t at least explicitly consider.

And I’m happy to be wrong, but I have tried to be fairly exhaustive because I do care. And I’m sure there’s more richness that can be wrapped around what I’ve done (I’ve added some thoughts myself since the book came out), but I still think the core framework is sound and I’ve been looking at this for over 10 years (since my first article on the topic came out) and really more like 25 (when I first told my boss at DesignWare that we could be doing much more meaningful games than spelling drills).

So, what’s my point? I think that maybe what could be done and hasn’t been is to operationalize (a word I used to hate, but don’t have a better one to hand) my framework as an evaluation instrument as well as a design framework. It’s tough, because how do you evaluate how well the story integrated the decisions? Yet that’s what you have to come to grips with. It’s not something I can do in my copious spare time (independent, with children; what’s spare time?), but I think there’s an argument to be made that it’d be a useful contribution for someone to do. Ph.D. thesis, anyone?

Learnlets in virtual worlds?

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Martine from Angils (a European-centric serious games group) asked me:

I just had a look at your blog and was interested in your views about virtual worlds and MMOs for selling learnlets…Many of the large service organizations I have spoken with are dealing with this type of proposition for some of their clients – where SL will be the test-bed for them to then develop their own virtual world for including the selling of learnlets.

My thoughts on learnlets originally were more that they could be viable commercially through websites, but certainly there’s no inherent barrier to them existing and being desirable in virtual worlds/MMOs. If one could provide a demonstrably effective and subjectively appealing experience for a skill in demand, there should be a potential transaction basis.

My thing, of course, is how to systematically design them to be effective and engaging. I’ve yet to find a better framework than the one I developed, but then I may be biased…;)

On the bigger scale, worlds for the sale of learnlets, I suppose it’s a virtual university with mini-courses. I’ve been trying hard to understand the value proposition for virtual worlds, as the overhead is high to get what I think are the unique contributions (e.g. co-creating models) but others are convincing me the personal aspect of building your own character and the social aspects are both ‘sticky’.

So, how do you build an interesting social life around the learnlets? Studying together, and learning together (learning can be more effective socially), so ways to find cohorts to do it together would be the selling point. And, of course, you’d need a way for people to connect and jointly experience meaningful and effective learning. You’d probably have different sizes (read: scopes) of the learning, and ideally you’d have different ‘styles’, different cohort sizes, etc.

One model would be a world just for this, another would be a way to integrate this into an existing world, whether 2nd Life, Entropia, or elsewhere where there’s an economy.   There clearly are ranges from paying someone else to do it (or purchasing the result) or learning to do it yourself.   Some of it naturally has to be available in the environment, but extensions or emergent capabilities could be a market.   It’s Pine & Gilmore’s ‘transformation’ economy (the last stage of the experience economy), virtually. Whether and how anyone locks it up is a different issue.

Imagineering

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Last week we went down to LA to visit my Mother for her birthday, and to take the kids to Disneyland for a day (after the other trips we’ve taken for family reasons, including my Dad‘s rememberance). It was a great trip for all reasons, but the Disney experience had a lesson for me.

We had almost no lines the whole day even for top rides like the Matterhorn, Pirates of the Caribbean, Indiana Jones, etc. We caught Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride early, but late in the day went back to Fantasyland to hit Pinocchio, Snow White, & Peter Pan (none of which I’d been on in more years than I care to admit). We went on the first two, since the line for Peter Pan was substantially longer.   Finally we bit the bullet and got in line for Pan, and then I understood why people were waiting for it. Peter Pan was a substantially better ride, for important reasons.

Now, each of these rides has a ‘license’ (in the game industry, companies with ‘properties’ such as Lord of the Rings will license them to companies to make accompanying games, and no one else can make a competing game) they have to align with. The trick, then, is to make the ride a compelling experience in and of itself, as well as use the story associated with the license. With games, sometimes the experience *is* the story, that is you play James Bond in GoldenEye, and other times it’s another story with the same character (e.g. Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis).

In a ride, the experience should be good on it’s own, whether or not you know the story. So, for example, our kids never got into the Pinocchio movie and consequently don’t know the story. Nor had they seen the Disney version of Peter Pan. Yet the Peter Pan ride was just very cool: you float out over the city in a sailing ship and into the stars, before coming down and flying around Neverland. While in Pinocchio, you basically just see the events in the story (with the one caveat of being eaten by the whale, which is scary). And Snow White didn’t even have a real ending, suddenly you’re just out!

Disney’s Imagineering has done amazing things, and those rides are old, but there’s a lesson here about getting the experience right, so that not only is the story referenced, but the rider actually has an interesting experience. That holds for learning game (er, Immersive Learning Simulation) design, too, where you don’t just want cognitive practice of important decisions, but you’d like the learner to be emotionally engaged. As I tell my workshop attendees, it’s not about designing content, it’s about creating an experience! So, think wholistically and create an environment that hooks you from the beginning, creates interesting emotional trajectories, and provides a feeling of closure at the end.

iQuiz, not quite

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With the ubiquitousness of the iPod, I’ve been looking for more to do with it than just play audio and video, but Apple’s kept a tight rein on the software (my fear for the iPhone, too). I was discussing it with my colleagues over beer (there’s that blogger/learning/beer thing again ;), and Jim Schuyler subsequently pointed me to the fact that not only have they recently released iQuiz, but allowed you to create your own quizzes. In addition, Aspyr has released a free iQuiz maker, which simplifies the task (if it doesn’t get confused, which it seemed to in a trial run). iQuiz supports both true/false, and multiple choice, with scoring.

Now, this sounds really great, and it can be, but there’re some qualifications. First, while there’s feedback possible for the true/false answer, there’s no specific feedback for the multiple choice questions (which I generally like better than true/false). If you can’t give any feedback for a wrong answer, you can’t learn from the question (yes, you can be motivated to go back and learn, e.g. listen to the podcast again or go read something). Really, you should be able to provide separate feedback for each wrong answer of a multiple choice (since your alternates to the correct answer should reflect prior misconceptions).

A second level of capability that would be really cool would be conditional branching depending on your response. This would let you build branching scenarios, which could really be powerful (giving you most of the power of full learning games).

We hand cobbled together (read: wrote and programmed in Brew) both quiz questions and scenarios (non-branching, but with several stages and specific feedback) on mobile phones for a project, and I still think it’s a good idea to supplement learning, albeit not a full learning situation by itself.

It’s clear Apple’s focused on creating fun with the iPod; they have trivia quizzes available, and talk about making the same to share with and challenge your friends. However, they’re only a small step away from making a really powerful learning adjunct that could make a big draw for the corporate elearning market. And they’re just one other step away from both a whole new market of fun (scenario stories for your friends), and another majorly powerful learning adjunct.

Now with all that caveat aside, for those learning situations where you do want to drill knowledge (and we overdo it so please use it sparingly and focus on skills), and you’ve got the backstop of resources so they can quickly go back and get it right, you’ve got another learning tool available on an increasingly ubiquitous platform. And a platform that has already demonstrable learning capability of podcasts and vidcasts (I was told of one group of engineers who asked for their colleagues’ white papers be read into podcasts so they could read them on their drives; a great success!).

I’ll keep hoping that there’ll be a way for small text scenarios (or even with images; built in Captivate 2 or SimWriter or SmartBuilder?) to be loaded onto iPods, but I’ll even look forward to quizzes with feedback for the different answers.

Partner & customize

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April’s Learning Circuits blog big question is: ILT and Off-the-Shelf Vendors – What Should They Do? The problem is that ILT and OTS vendors are producing canned product in an increasingly flexible and changing world. Their products take time to develop, and there’s much competition from what you can find free-to-air on the web. What’s a vendor to do?

I believe there’s a pyramid of basic business stuff at the bottom, vertical market specialization in the middle, and then there’s organization-proprietary stuff at the top. The top should be custom-developed in house. Another cut through this is the stuff that every novice needs to know, the middle ground where practitioners need updates as things change, and then at the top there’s the ongoing negotation of understanding among experts. This is a framework that has helped me think through the tools we use for elearning, but also helps me think through how to address this problem.

There are several sorts of basic business needs: specific tool skills (e.g. spreadsheet use), basic business comprehension (e.g. ROI, Sarbanes-Oxley), and interpersonal skills (e.g. communication, negotiation). At the next level up, we have vertical market specifics, such as financial (e.g. what defines ‘insider trading’) and health (e.g. federal regulatory procedures). I think there’s a role for vendors of shelfware in both these markets. However, they’ve got to get better, as most of what I’ve seen isn’t informed by what we know about learning.

So, for instance, the ILT vendors need to wrap the F2F experience with preparation, and subsequently support the learners afterwards, ideally creating a community. And the software vendors need to find ways to tap into the benefits of social learning, by having at least virtual meetings, and again building community.

So the ILT and OTS folks ought to partner, and distribute what’s best done asynchronously through OTS stuff and what’s done better F2F. Also, we probably need to find new business models. For example, training for software and processes should be provided free by the tool vendors. So the shelfware vendors need to develop it in conjunction with the tool/service vendors. I think, similarly, that vertical markets should create associations that partner with a vendor to get cost-effective solutions developed to serve those markets (and that’s happening). Those will be the only roles for shelfware vendors, and they’ll be limited.

Other than that, those hoping to build a library and milk it like a cash cow are probably doomed unless they are the ones that create the demonstrably superior learning that’s optimally efficient in time, optimally effective in outcome, and optimally engaging in experience. Pine & Gilmore tell us that the next step beyond the experience economy is the transformation economy, experiences that change us in ways we are interested in (and that’s what Engaging Learning is all about!). And those that do create it will be the ones who partner with vendors or associations, or own the market in that space.

Taiwan Game Design Workshop opportunity

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I’ll be offering the game design workshop in Taiwan as part of the DIGITEL 2007 conference (“The First IEEE International Workshop on Digital Game and Intelligent Toy Enhanced Learning”.   It’s only the second time it’s offered in Asia, and it’s offered at a very good price compared to what it usually costs at most US conferences.   If you’re anywhere near (Japan, Korea, China), it’s probably the cheapest opportunity you’ll get for this typically well-reviewed workshop (I work hard to make it good, and keep improving it).   I’d love to see you there.

Wisdom

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Sorry I haven’t been posting, but my (reasonably short) paper on Learning Wisdom has been this week’s topic of discussion over at ITFORUM. ITFORUM’s a group of largely university-based faculty and staff in instructional technology, but the regulars are people who are quite knowledgeable about learning, technology, and the cultural constraints around them. My paper this week was the second one I’ve written for them; the first appeared 10 years ago, and was the basis of my book Engaging Learning.

In this paper, I’m asking questions about what is wisdom, how you could teach it, what a wise curriculum and pedagogy would be, and how technology might facilitate wisdom. Though admittedly few, there have been great contributions from around the world, with thoughts on whether you can assess wisdom, what elements might contribute, and more.

It’s clear that the issue is striking a chord, but it’s also a ‘hard problem’, as came up in an earlier discussion on the topic. Still, it’s my personal mission, and I’m sticking with it.

December’s BIG Question(s)

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Once again, it’s the Learning Circuit’s BIG Question, which is really 3 questions:

  1. What will you remember most about 2006?
  2. What are the biggest challenges for you/us as head into 2007?
  3. What are your predictions for 2007?

So, what will I remember most about 2006? Probably that it was the Year of the Game. Gaming became mainstream (we moved it out of the ’emerging’ track at TechKnowledge, for example). Whether called Serious Games, Simulations, Scenarios, or whatever, it’s definitely crossed the chasm. That’s not to say it’s ubiquitous, or even well done yet, but it’s definitely playing a role in many more organizations, and it’s on more people’s radar.

It’s also been a year of more strategic use of eLearning. The progression on my models page is one way I’ve been thinking about it (feedback welcome), but increasingly I’m seeing folks interested in road maps to address organizational performance by leveraging their IT investment in more intelligent ways, not just purchasing an LMS and acquiring content to meet training needs.

The biggest challenges will be executing successfully to take eLearning to the “next level”, whether it’s tactics like improving the instructional design or adding eCommunity to strategies about changing the customer role. It’s too easy to take half-baked approaches: have one workshop run, or engage one improvement initiative without applying the organizational change implementation thoughts that accompany these initiatives.

It’s also important to focus on the goals, not the tools. Getting the design right is the hard part, not figuring out what technology implementation can render the design.

My predictions for 2007 are first that mobile learning will cross the chasm like Games have. It’s on the cusp, and I’m hearing lots of different buzz going around. The capabilities are pretty mature now, and the integration is now possible, so that we have a whole new set of affordances or capabilities that provide some real performance opportunities.

I also think that the hype will go off podcasts and blog and wikis as phenomena, and they’ll take their rightful place as power tools in our suite of resources. This is not to diminish them in the least, they’re valuable tools at the higher level for collaboration and communication, but we’ll start looking at the larger picture, about why we need collaboration and communication and start developing systemic approaches, not experimenting with them as one-offs.

We’ll see greater awareness of the necessity of what I call performance ecosystems and Jay Cross has termed ‘Learnscapes’ (a nice term, I may have to adopt it). We’ll start seeing a recognition that individuals need a unified and richly populated playground with all sorts of resources and ways to extend our understanding and our capabilities.

And I fervently hope we’ll begin to recognize that we can’t assume that if we build it, they will learn, but we have to develop a learning culture, that we need to develop our learners’ ability to learn, that we have to recognize, take responsibility for, and foster meta-learning (learning to learn).

While this is not my last message of the year I hope, this is a great opportunity to thank everyone for a very interesting year, and send my best wishes that the coming year be the best yet for all of us.

77 Steps?

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Jimmy Atkinson passed on this list of 77 Ways to Learn Faster, Deeper, & Better. Maybe he knows I’m keen on meta-learning, or learning to learn, and there are some nuggets in here. No one’s suggesting, I’m sure, that you should go for all of them, but you might want to graze the list and incorporate one or two into your existing approaches.

Being a better learner is one of the key differentiators, going forward (it’s part of my curriculum, which I discussed previously). I admit I haven’t scrutinized the list in fullness, though I might add “engage yourself”, that is, finding your own ways to make the content meaningful if the instructor hasn’t, such as creating examples where it would be important to you.

Still, having more guides to becoming a better learner is a ‘good thing’ (see also Marcia Connor’s Learn More Now). Learn on!