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Clark Quinn’s Learnings about Learning

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A game? Who says?

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I just reviewed a paper submitted to a journal (one way to stay in touch with the latest developments), and all along they were doing research on the cognitive and motivational relationships in the game. They claimed it was a game, and proceeded on that assumption.  And then the truth came out.

When designing and evaluating learning experiences, you really want to go beyond whether it’s effective or easy to use, and decide whether it’s engaging.  Yes, you absolutely need to test usability first (if there’s a problem with the learning outcomes, is it the pedagogy or the interaction?), and then learning effectiveness. But ultimately, if you want it optimally tuned for success, pitched at the optimal learning level using meaningful activities, it should feel like a game.  The business case is that the effectiveness will be optimized, and the tuning process to get there is less than you think (if you’re doing it right).  And the only real way to test it is subjectively: do the players think it’s a game.

If you create a learning experience and call it game, but your learners don’t think it is, you undermine their motivation and your credibility.  It can be relative (e.g. better than regular learning) as you might not have the resources to compete with commercial games, but it ought to be better than having to sit through a page turner, or you’ve failed.

There are systematic ways to design games that achieve both meaningful engagement and effective education practice. Heck, I wrote a whole  book  on the topic.  It’s not magic, and while it requires tuning, it’s doable. And, as  I’ve stated before:  you can’t say it’s a game, only your players can tell you that.

So here were these folks doing research on a ‘game’. The punchline: “students, who started playing the game with high enthusiasm, started complaining after a short while, ‘this is not a game’, and stopped gameplay”.  Fail.

Seriously, if you’re going to make a game, make it demonstrably fun. Or it’s not a game, whether you say so or not.

Educational Game Design Q&A

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I was contacted for a research project, and asked a series of questions. Thought I’d document the answers here, too.

Q0. How many years have you been designing educational games?

Over 30, actually, off and on.  Started with my first job out of college, designing and programming educational computer games.  Been a recurrent theme in my career since then.

Q1. Please walk us through your process for creating an educational game from concept to implementation. Please use one of your games as an example.

A long answer is the only option (it’s a big process).  Using a design framework of Analysis, Specification, Implementation, and Evaluation:

Analysis

For any educational task, you have to start by looking at what your design objective is: you need to document what folks should be able to do that they can’t do now. I argue that this is most importantly going to manifest as an ability to make better decisions, ones that the learner doesn’t reliably make now.  It’s complicated, because SMEs don’t always have access to how they do what they do, and you have to work hard.  This isn’t unusual to learning  design, except perhaps the focus on skills.

Then, you need to know how folks go wrong; what are the reliable misconceptions. People don’t tend to make random mistakes (though there is some randomness in our architecture), but instead make mistakes based upon some wrong models.

You also need to know the consequences of those mistakes, as well as the consequence of the right answer. Decisions tend to travel in packs, and if you make this one wrong, you’re then likely to face that other one. You need to know what these are.  (And the probabilities associated with them).

In addition, you need to know the settings in which these decisions occur, as many as possible.

And you need to know what makes this task inherently interesting (it is).  Here’s where the SME is your friend, because they’re so passionate about this they’ve made it the subject of their expertise, find out what makes them  find it interesting.

Specification

With this information, you address those aligned elements from effective education practice and engaging experiences.    You need to find a storyline that integrates what makes the task interesting with the settings in which the decisions occur.  I like a heuristic I heard from Henry Jenkins: “find a role the player would like to be in”. Exaggeration is a great tool here: e.g. you’d likely rather be working on the ambassador’s daughter than just another patient.

You need to make those misconceptions seductive to get challenge. You don’t want them getting it right unless they really  know their stuff.

You need to handle adjusting the difficulty level up at an appropriate rate; you might have complications that don’t start until after they’ve mastered the interface.

You need to specify characters, dialog, rules that describe the relationships, variables that code the state of the game, a visual (and auditory) look and feel.  The UI expressed to the learner, and more.

You’ll need to specify what the ‘perspective’ of the player is in relation to the character.

Overall, you need to nail meaningfulness, novelty, and the cycle of action and feedback to really get this right.

Finally, you need to specify the metrics you’ll use to evaluate your creation. What will be the usability goals, educational outcomes, and engagement metrics that will define you’re done?

Implementation & Evaluation

I’m a design guy, so I don’t talk so much about implementation, and evaluation follows the above.  That said…

The tools change constantly, and it will vary by size and scope. The main thing here is that you will  have to tune.  As Will Wright said, “tuning is 9/10ths of the work”.  Now that’s for a commercially viable game, but really, that’s a substantial realization compared to how complex the programming and media production is.

Tuning requires regular evaluation.  You’ll want to prototype in as low a fidelity as you can, so it’s easier to change.  Prototype, test, lather, rinse, repeat.  (Have ever 3 words ever sold more unnecessary product in human history?)

There’s much  more, but this is a good first cut.

Q2. Describe your greatest success, challenge, failure.

My greatest success, at least the most personally rewarding in terms of feeling like making a contribution, is definitely the Quest game. When you’re making a game that can save kids’ lives, you’ve got to feel good about it. On no  budget (we eventually got a little money to hire my honors student for a summer, and then some philanthropic money to do a real graphic treatment), we developed a game that helped kids who grow up without parents experience a bit of what it’s like to survive on your own (goal: talk to your counselors).  Interestingly, I subsequently got it ported to the web as a student project (as soon as I heard about CGI’s, the first web standard to support maintaining ‘state’, I realized it could run as a web game), and it still runs!  As far as I know, BTW, it’s the first web-based serious game ever.

My greatest challenge was another game you can still play on the web.  We’d developed a ‘linear scenario’ game on project management for non-project-managers, and they liked it so much they then asked for a game to accompany it.  But we’d already accomplished the learning!  Still, we did it.  I made the game about just managing to cope with missing data, scope creep, and other PM issues, so engineers could a) understand why they should be glad there were  project managers, and b) that they shouldn’t be jerks to work with.

Biggest failure that I recollect was a team brought together by a publisher to work with the lead author on a wildly successful book series.  There was a movie script writer who’d become a game designer, and me, and a very creative team. However, we had a real problem with the SME, who couldn’t get over the idea that the ‘game’ had to develop the concept without getting mired in the boring details of particular tools. We would get progress, and then generate a great concept, and we’d be reined back in to “but where’s the tool simulation”?  Unfortunately, the SME had ultimate control, not the creative team, and the continuing back and forth ultimately doomed the project.

Q3. When determining game play is avoiding violence an issue? Q4.  Is accounting for gender an issue when creating games?

I answered these two questions together; I don’t shy away from controversy, and believe that you use the design that works for the audience and the learning objective.  I believe education trumps censorship.  I argued many years ago (when Doom was the GTA of the day) that you could get meaningful learning experiences out of the worst of the shoot-em-ups.  Not that I’d advocate it.  Same with gender.  Figure out what’s needed.

As a caveat, I don’t believe in gratuitous violence, sex, or gender issues, (Why is sex more taboo than violence? I don’t get it.) but I believe you need to address them when relevant in context. In ways that glorify people, not violence or intolerance.

Q5. How did you develop your creation process?

I went from ad h0c at the start to trying to find the best grounding for process possible.  Even as an undergrad I had received a background in learning, but as a grad student I pursued it with a vengeance (I looked at cognitive, behavioral, constructivist, ID, social, even machine  learning looking for insight).  At the time, the HCI field was also looking at what made engaging experiences, and I pursued that too. The real integration happened when I looked systematically at design and creative processes: what worked and what didn’t.  Using the learning design process as a framework (since folks don’t tend to adopt new processes whole-cloth, but tend to modify their existing ones), I worked out what specifically was needed in addition to make the process work for (learning) game design.

Q6.  How do you work? Individually? As a team? If so, how do you develop a team?

Euphemistically, I work however anyone wants.  I seldom really do individual, however, because I have no graphic design skills to speak of (much to my dismay, but a person’s got to know their limitations, to paraphrase the great sage Harry Calahan).  Also, I strongly believe you should source the full suite of talent a game design needs: writing, audio, graphic, programming, UI, learning design, etc.  Naturally, in the real world, you do the best you can (“oh, I can do a good enough job of writing, and you can probably do a good enough job of audio as well as the programming”).

Q7. Is there a recipe for success in this industry? If so what is it and what would you say your biggest lesson has been so far?

My short answer is two-fold. I immodestly think that you really have to understand the alignment between effective practice and engaging experience (there’re lots of bad examples that show why you can’t just shove game and instructional designers into a room and expect anything good). Second, you have to know how to work and play well with others.  Game design is a team sport.

And finally, you really, really, have to develop your creative side.  As I tell my workshop attendees: I’ve got bad news, you have a big job ahead of you; if you’re going to do good serious game design, you’re going to have to play more games, go to more amusement parks, read more novels, watch more movies. It’s a big ask, I know, an onerous task, but hey, you’re professionals.   But you also have to be willing to take risks. Much to m’lady’s dismay, I argue that I continue to have to crack bad jokes as practice to find out what works (that’s my story, and I’m sticking with it).

If you can get a handle on these three elements: understanding the alignment, able to convince people to work with you on it, and push the envelope, I reckon you can succeed. What do you reckon?

X-based learning: sorting out pedagogies and design

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It’s come up in a couple of ways how my (in progress) activity-based framework for learning is related to other models, e.g. performance-based learning.  And, looking around, I am reminded that there’s a plethora of models that have overlap.  I’ll try to sort them out.  This will undoubtedly be an ever-growing list, as there seems to be X-based learning where X = anything, and I’m sure folks supportive of their approach will let me know ;).  Recognize that these are very sketchy descriptions, intended to communicate similarities, not tease apart deep nuances.

At core is the reasoning that meaningful activities have myriad benefits.  Learners are engaged in working on real things, and the contextualization facilitates transfer to the extent that you’ve designed the activity to require the types of performance they’ll need in the world.  There’s the opportunity to layer on multiple learning goals from different domain, and 21st century skills like media communications, and if it’s social (which is a recurring theme in these models) you get things like leadership and teamwork as well.  Better engagement and learning outcomes are the big win.

First, there’s already an activity-based learning out of India!  It seems to focus on having learners do meaningful things, which very much is at core here. There’s also an activity-based curriculum, by the way, which is also the way I’m thinking of it: a sequence of activities is a curriculum.  This fits within  active learning, arguably, in that there’s a desire for the learner to be actually doing  something as the basis of learning, though the types of classroom activities of debates and discussions seem not as powerful as others cited below.

So, performance-based learning seems to be focused on assessment, having the students actively demonstrate their ability.    This is, to me, an important aspect, as cognitive science recognizes that passing a knowledge test about  something is not likely to transfer to the ability to do  (we call it ‘inert knowledge’).  That’s the point of having products of activities, at least reflection , so it sounds very much is in synergy.  This also appears to be the focus of  outcomes-based learning,  which also emphasizes actual production, but while touting constructivism seems to end up being more a tool of the status quo.  This can also be similar (and ideally should be) to competency-based learning, where there are explicit performance outcomes expected, rather than grading on the curve.

And there is problem-based learning and project-based learning.  Both focus on having learners engage in meaningful activity, with the distinction between the two having to do with whether the problem is set by the instructor, or whether the project is decided is decided by the students. There are arguments for both, of course; for me, problems are easier to specify, it takes a special teacher to help shape a project and wrap the learning goals around it.  I reckon serious games are problem-based learning, by the way.

Service learning  is another related idea, that has learners doing meaningful projects out in the community. This is activity-based and expands upon the meaningfulness by connecting it to the community.  I’ve been a fan of the Center for Civic Education’s Project Citizen as an example of this, having students try to pass legislation to improve things in their area, and consequently learning about law-making.

Inquiry-based learning shares the focus on activities of information gathering, but has primarily been based in science.    It seems to not have a goal other than exploration and understanding, with an even  more extreme view of learner control.  This seems good with a self-motivated learner, and as long as the learner is either a self-capable learner, or there’s a facilitator, it could work. This seems very similar to the MOOC approach of Siemens & Downes.  It also seems to be almost identical to the community of inquiry approach.

I frankly want an activity-based pedagogy and curriculum to support all of these models.  The benefits, and the resistance to knowledge dump and fact test forms of learning, drive this perspective.  Getting there requires a different type of learning design that one focused on standards. You need to shift, focusing on what do the students need to be able to do afterwards, and working backward from there. Understanding by design is a design approach that works backwards from goals, and if you set your outcomes on performance, and then align activities to require that performance, you have a good chance of impacting pedagogy, and learning, in meaningful ways.  I admit it surprises me that this needs to be pointed out, but I see the consequences of content-driven (forward) design too often to argue.

The point is to find an umbrella that holds a suite of appropriate pedagogies and makes it difficult to do inappropriate ones.  As Les Foltos tweeted: “We need to fan the fires for these instructional strategies. They don’t align well with standardized tests”.  Exactly.

Reimagining Learning

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On the way to the recent Up To All Of Us unconference  (#utaou), I hadn’t planned a personal agenda.  However, I was going through the diagrams that I’d created on my iPad, and discovered one that I’d frankly forgotten. Which was nice, because it allowed me to review it with fresh eyes, and it resonated.  And I decided to put it out at the event to get feedback.  Let me talk you through it, because I welcome your feedback too.

Up front, let me state at least part of the motivation.  I’m trying to capture rethinking about education or formal learning. I’m tired of anything that allows folks to think knowledge dump and test is going to lead to meaningful change.  I’m also trying to ‘think out loud’ for myself.   And start getting more concrete about learning experience design.

Let me start with the second row from the top.  I want to start thinking about a learning experience as a series of activities, not a progression of content.  These can be a rich suite of things: engagement with a simulation, a group project, a museum visit, an interview, anything you might choose for an individual to engage in to further their learning. And, yes, it can  include traditional things: e.g. read this chapter.

This, by the way, has a direct relation to Project Tin Can, a proposal to supersede SCORM, allowing a greater variety of activities: Actor – Verb – Object, or I – did – this.  (For all I can recall, the origin of the diagram may have been an attempt to place Tin Can in a broad context!)

Around these activities, there are a couple of things. For one, content is accessed on the basis of the activities, not the other way around. Also, the activities produce products, and also reflections.

For the activities to be maximally valuable, they should produce output.  A sim use could produce a track of the learner’s exploration. A group project could provide a documented solution, or a concept-expression video or performance. An interview could produce an audio recording.  These products are portfolio items, going forward, and assessable items.  The assessment could be self, peer, or mentor.

However, in the context of ‘make your thinking visible’ (aka ‘show your  work’), there should also be reflections or cognitive annotations.  The underlying thinking needs to be visible for inspection. This is also part of your portfolio, and assessable. This is where, however, the opportunity to really recognize where the learner is, or is not, getting the content, and detect opportunities for assistance.

The learner is driven to content resources (audios, videos, documents, etc) by meaningful activity.  This in opposition to the notion that content dump happens before meaningful action. However, prior activities can ensure that learners are prepared to engage in the new activities.

The content could be pre-chosen, or the learners could be scaffolded in choosing appropriate materials. The latter is an opportunity for meta-learning.  Similarly, the choice of product could be determined, or up to learner/group choice, and again an opportunity for learning cross-project skills.  Helping learners create useful reflections is valuable (I recall guiding honours students to take credit for  the work they’d done; they were blind to much of the own hard work they had put in!).

When I presented this to the groups, there were several questions asked via post-its on the picture I hand-drew. Let me address them here:

What scale are you thinking about?

This unpacks. What goes into activity design is a whole separate area. And learning experience design may well play a role beneath this level.  However, the granularity of the activities is at issue.  I think about this at several scales, from an individual lesson plan to a full curriculum.    The choice of evaluation should be competency-based, assessed by rubrics, even jointly designed ones.  There is a lot of depth that is linked to this.

How does this differ from a traditional performance-based learning model?

I hadn’t heard of performance-based learning. Looking it up, there seems considerable overlap.  Also with outcome-based learning,  problem-based learning, or service learning, and similarly Understanding By Design.  It may not be more, I haven’t yet done the side-by-side. It’s scaling it up , and arguably a different lens, and maybe more, or not.  Still, I’m trying to carry it to more places, and help provide ways to think anew about instruction and formal education.

An interesting aside, for me, is that this does  segue to informal learning. That is, you, as an adult, choose certain activities to continue to develop your ability in certain areas.  Taking this framework provides a reference for learners to take control of their own learning, and develop their ability to be better learners.  Or so I would think, if done right.  Imagine the right side of the diagram moving from mentor to learner control.

How much is algorithmic?

That really depends.  Let me answer that in conjunction with this other comment:

Make a convert of this type of process out of a non-tech traditional process and tell that story…  

I can’t do that now, but one of the attendees suggested this sounded a lot like what she did in traditional design education. The point is that this framework is independent of technology.  You could be assigning studio and classroom and community projects, and getting back write-ups, performances, and more.  No digital tech involved.

There are definite ways in which technology can assist: providing tools for content search, and product and reflection generation, but this is not  about technology. You could be algorithmic in choosing from a suite of activities by a set of rules governing recommendations based upon learner performance, content available, etc.  You could also be algorithmic in programming some feedback around tech-traversal.  But that’s definitely not where I’m going right now.

Similarly, I’m going to answer two other questions together:

 How can I look at the path others take? and How can I see how I am doing?

The portfolio is really the answer.  You should be getting feedback on your products, and seeing others’ feedback (within limits).  This is definitely not intended to be individual, but instead hopefully it could be in a group, or at least some of the activities would be (e.g. communing on blog posts, participating in a discussion forum, etc).  In a tech-mediated environment, you could see others’ (anonymized) paths, access your feedback, and see traces of other’s trajectories.

The real question is: is this formulation useful? Does it give you a new and useful way of thinking about designing learning, and supporting learning?

Making it visible and viral

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On a recent client engagement, the issue was spreading an important initiative through the organization.  The challenges were numerous: getting consistent uptake across management and leadership, aligning across organizational units, and making the initiative seem important and yet also doable in a concrete way.  Pockets of success were seen, and these are of interest.

For one, the particular unit had focused on making the initiative viral, and consequently had selected and trained appropriate representatives dispersed through their organization. These individuals were supported and empowered to incite change wherever appropriate.  And they were seeing initial signs of success. The lesson here is that top down is not always sufficient, and that benevolent infiltration is a valuable addition.

The other involvement was also social, in that the approach was to make the outcomes of the initiative visible. In addition to mantras, graphs depicting status were placed in prominent places, showing current status.  Further, suggestions for improvement were not only solicited, but made visible and their status tracked.  Again, indicators were positive on these moves.

The point is that change is hard, and a variety of mechanisms may  be appropriate.  You need to understand not just what formal mechanisms you have, but also how people actually work.  I think that too often, planning fails to anticipate the effects of inertia, ambivalence, and apathy.  More emotional emphasis is needed, more direct connection to individual outcomes, and more digestion into manageable chunks. This is true for elearning, learning, and  change.

In looking at attitude change, and from experience, I recognize that even if folks are committed to change, it can be easy to fall back into old habits without ongoing support.  Confusion in message, lack of emotional appeal, and idiosyncratic leadership only reduce the likelihood.  If it’s important, get alignment and sweat the details. If it’s not, why bother?

Slow Learning – #change11

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This is a longer post launching my week in the #change11 MOOC (Massively Open Online Course).  

Our formal learning approaches too often don‘t follow how our brains really work.   We have magic now; we can summon up powerful programs to do our bidding, gaze through webcams across distances, and bring anyone and anything to pretty much anywhere. Our limitations are no longer the technology, but our imaginations. The question is, what are we, and should be, doing with this technology?

I like to look at this a couple of ways. For one, I like to ask myself “what would my ideal learning situation be”

Stop and ask yourself that.   Go ahead, I‘ll wait.   And feel free to share!

For me, that would be having a personal mentor traveling with me, looking at my tasks, providing both support in the moment, and developing me slowly over time.   I talked about how we might systematize that in a post titled Sage at the Side.   I also talked about this model as Layered Learning.   That is, layering on learning across our life.

It‘s part of what my colleague Harold Jarche talks about when saying “work is learning and learning is work”, the notion that as organizations start empowering workers to adapt to the increasing complexity, there will be no difference between work and learning, and we‘ll have to move away from the ‘event‘ model of learning and start integrating learning more closely into our activities.   We‘ll need to have a closer coupling between our activities and the resources, creating what Jay Cross calls a workscape and I‘ve termed the performance ecosystem.   That is, having the tools to hand, including job aids, people, and skill development, but in a more systemic way.

Think about that: how would you construct an optimal performance environment for yourself?   What would it look like?   Again, feel free to share.

Would it look like an LMS over here, training away over there, job aids scattered across portals, and social networks hierarchically structured or completely banned?   Would you have spray-and-pray (aka show up and throw up) training?   Online courses that are clicky-clicky bling-bling? Resources accessible by the way the organization is siloed?   Even the simple and well-documented matter of spaced learning is largely violated in most of the learning interventions we propagate.   In short, all of this is in conflict with how the human brain works!

Look at how how we learn naturally, before schooling (what I call the 7 C‘s of natural learning). We see that we learn by being engaged in meaningful activity, and working with others.   It‘s not about knowledge dump and test, but instead about coupling engaged activity with reflection.   I like Collins, Brown, & Holum‘s Cognitive Apprenticeship as a model for thinking more richly about learning.   Other learning models are not static (c.f. Merrill‘s trajectory through CDT to ID2 to Ripples), and I believe they‘ll converge where Cognitive Apprenticeship is (albeit perhaps my slightly adulterated version thereof).   It talks about modeling, scaffolding and release, naturally incorporating social and meaningful activity into the learning process.

Taking a broader look, too many of our systems have a limited suite of solutions to choose from, and ignore a number of features that we need.   The ADDIE process assumes a course, and still doesn‘t have any real support for the emotional engagement aspect. A step above is the HPT approach, which does look at the learning need and checks to see whether the solution might be a course, a job aid, realigning incentives, or some other things. However, it still doesn‘t consider, really, engagement, nor does an adequate job of considering when connecting to a person is a more valuable solution than designing content.

And while Gloria Gery‘s seminal work on Electronic Performance Support Systems suggested that these systems could not only provide support in the moment but also develop the learners‘ understanding, I still don‘t see this in any systems in practice. Even GPSs don‘t help you understand the area, they just get you where you‘re trying to go. So we are still missing something.

I‘m really arguing for the need to come up with a broader perspective on learning.   I‘ve been calling it learning experience design, but really it‘s more.   It‘s a combination of performance support and learning (and it‘s badly in need of some branding help). The notion is a sort-of personal GPS for your knowledge work. It‘s knows where you want to go (since you told it), and it knows where you are geographically and semantically (via GPS and your calendar), and as it recognizes the context it can provide not only support in the moment, but layers on learning along the way.   And I think that we don‘t know really how to look at things this way yet; we don‘t have design models (to think about the experience conceptually), we don‘t have design processes (to go from goal to solution), and we don‘t have tools (to deliver this integrated experience).   Yet the limits are not technological; we have the ability to build the systems if we can conceptualize the needed framework.

I think this framework will need to start with considering the experience design, what is the flow of information and activity that will help develop the learner (e.g. “If you get the design right, there are lots of ways to implement it”).   Then we can get into the mechanics of how to distribute the experience across devices, information, people, etc.   But this is embryonic yet, I welcome your thoughts!

Really, I‘m looking to start matching our technology more closely to our brains.   Taking a   page from the slow movement (e.g. slow X, where X = food, sex, travel, …), I‘m talking about slow learning, where we start distributing our learning in ways that match the ways in which our brains work: meaningfulness, activation and reactivation, not separate but wrapped around our lives, etc.

There‘s lots more: addressing the epistemology of learners, mobile technologies, meta-learning & 21st C skills, and deep analytics and semantic systems, to name a few, but I think we need to start with the right conceptions.   Some of my notions of design may be too didactic, after all, and we‘ll need to couple information augmentation with meaning-making to make real progress, but I think this notion of stepping back and reflecting on what we might want to achieve and where we‘re currently inadequate is an initial step.

And now the initiative is over to you. I look forward to your thoughts.

Readings

Collins, A., Brown, J.S., and Holum, A. (1991).   .   Cognitive Apprenticeship: Making Thinking Visible. American Educator, Winter.

Quinn, C. (2004).   Learning at Large.   Educational Technology, 44, 4, 45-49.

Quinn, C. (2009). Populating the LearnScape: e-Learning as Strategy. In M. Allen (Ed.) Michael Allen‘s eLearning Annual 2009. Pfeiffer, San Francisco.

Quinn, C. (2010). Rethinking eLearning.   Learning Solutions Magazine. April.

Quinn, C. (2010). Designing for an uncertain world. Learnlets. April.

Thalheimer, W. (2006).  Spacing Learning Over Time.  Work Learning Research.

Evil Design

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In the mobile ideation session I ran today for some folks, the question came up about good and bad examples of design, and subsequent events reminded me of the topic of not just bad, but evil design. What I mean is design that is crafted to return maximal outcome to the designer, not just at the expense of the user, but even to the discomfort of the user or contrary to their intentions.  Let me cite a few examples.

First, while this has been improved somewhat, the kiosks that <my usual airline> uses to check in had a big yellow ‘continue’ button that you used to indicate you were ready to move on to the next screen. And the first couple of times in an instance it was innocuous, so you got used to using the button comfortably and automatically.  But then, you’d get the opportunity to spend some extra money – nicer seats, extra miles – and the default action, signaled by the big yellow button,was to spend the money.  This could be several hundred dollars! I fortunately didn’t get trapped (I try to get to the airport early), but I wonder how many rushing travelers inadvertently *did* manage to overspend.  I think such a design takes advantage of our cognitive architecture, falling into a pattern, in unconscionable ways.

Then, today, I was driving back to O’Hare airport from the aforementioned engagement. Following my GPS instructions and the signs, I followed the route to the airport.  Now, on the way out there was a required toll, and I drove through and paid the guy (since naturally I didn’t have a pass). The signs on the way back announcing tolls didn’t look noticeably different, and so I didn’t pay too much attention. Imagine my surprise, then, to find a toll payment arrangement requiring either a pass (which of course I didn’t have) or payment by coins.  Which I also didn’t have.  And  the amount was more than the outbound fee, so even if I tried to use change, I likely wouldn’t have enough (who keeps lots of change around these days?).

The cameras no doubt caught me sitting there looking around, then calling for help, then furiously driving on after giving the camera a frustrated glare. Of course there’s a fine if you don’t pay, but there’s no way to pay except through a long URL that’d be hard to get exactly right.  You have seven days, which in one sense is nice, but might cause you to put it off and forget.  Worse, when you do go online, you’d have to known to record the license plate state and number to be able to pay!  And, of course, it’s highly likely in the rush of travel that you’d forget to do this.  This seems designed for the sheer purpose to get more fees.  For example, paying online is more expensive than paying the original fee.  Why can they have a person outbound, and not inbound?  It’s capitalizing on expectations and putting you in circumstances that are likely to maximize your inability to pay in the initial instance.  What’s with that?

It gets worse, by the way. If you didn’t remember (and our brains aren’t good at rote memory) that the site is singular (Xtollway.com) and instead type  Xtollways.com  (a reasonable and even likely mistake), you end up at a site that looks like it can help, but instead seems to have sponsored ads and looks for clicks. If you weren’t paying attention, you could end up giving your credit card to the wrong site, and still not have paid the fine!  I’m surprised such a site can exist and not be shut down!

Our cognitive architecture has some flaws, and these can be exploited by the unscrupulous (c.f. commercial gambling).  It helps to be cognizant of it. It ranges from the designing interface, to ad campaigns, and the whole way companies conduct  business (see the Cluetrain Manifesto).

This is, BTW, at least part of the reason I don’t like gamification, as many game mechanics like adding points tap into human reactions in a way to get them to do things they might not otherwise do.  This *can* be good if it gets them to do things like lose excess weight or quit smoking, but I’d rather tap into intrinsic motivation instead.

While I’m a fan of good design, and there’s a continuum to bad design, I still prefer that to evil design.  How about you?

WIIFL

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What’s In It For Learners?

In organizations, we talk about addressing WIIFM (What’s In It For Me).  As a key component of motivation, we want to connect to individuals viscerally.  With my focus on engagement in learning, I’ve felt it’s important to address the conative (anxiety, motivation, etc) of learners as well.

What I’ve meant by this has included having introductions that viscerally capture the consequences of the knowledge (positive or negative, dramatically or comically; I’ve a predilection for comically negative), help them connect the learning to the broader context of the world, help them understand why it’s important for them, remove anxiety, etc.  I believe we need to open up learners emotionally as well as the well-known benefits of activating relevant knowledge cognitively.

I was just writing up a list of what would need to change for schools to be effective, and as I was riffing on epistemology (having learners understand and take responsibility for learners), it occurred to me that we needed to address the WIIFM, and I realized it’s about WIIFL.  We need to explicitly address what makes the learning experience valuable to learners.  I’m sure we’ve all heard learners say something like “I’ll never use this”.  If it’s true, bin it.  If it’s not, then help them see it.

On a set of content I was lead on the design of (math), I created the spec for our introductions to show how the content would get used in real life, and then we worked through meaningful examples and practice items. In another set of content I created the engagement for, we used a professional cartoonist to create a comic that introduced every section.

We don’t emphasize enough helping learners understand why they should care, so is it any wonder why they question the WIIFM?  And it’s not  presenting the learning objectives that we use to design, it’s a more coherent story that uses, essentially, marketing to get them to get it.

Ask yourself, if and when you’re creating a learning experience: WIIFL.  If you do, you can either eliminate unneeded content, or help learners connect in a motivating way. If you don’t, you risk learners tuning out and staying away.  Which isn’t a worthwhile investment of time and money.

Quick mobile thoughts

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SIM card vending machine

It’s obvious that mobile is booming, as you can tell from this shot taken as I deplaned at Heathrow Airport on my way from  mLearnCon conference to an engagement.  It made me reflect on an interesting tension that emerged at the conference.  The resolution will happen, so it’s a question of when, not if, but it’s still a pain.

I was honored to be part of a closing panel with some very clever folks (Bill Rankin, David Metcalf, Carmen Taran, Jim Box, and Richard Culatta, to be specific) responding to crowd-sourced questions.  Paul Clothier served as ringmaster, and the highest rated questions were lobbed at us.

One of the emergent themes was considering what would be really innovative mobile learning applications.  We imagined things from individual coaches to universal teachers.  All this requiring, of course, a pretty robust infrastructure.

And of course, as I sit in an airport (awaiting the 3rd and final leg of which Heathrow was the first), and recognizing that I can’t use the data plan on my phone for fear of penury, I’m still quite frustrated with the situation.  However, there is hope.

advert for a ubiquitous data package

On the wall right next to the vending machine, which I also captured, is one solution.  Here, Vodafone is offering Brits mobile internet when they travel, at a very favorable rate. This is better than the solution I thought was possible: having a service at an airport where you hire a personal wifi device for some reasonable rate of $10 a day or something that you return when you finish your trip.

My traveling companion on the post-US legs (and Internet Time Alliance colleague), Charles Jennings, resides in the UK and said that the competition between providers supports this sort of offer.   £2 is far better than the rate I was hoping for, and way better than a $1 – $20 per MB that is my current option.

Unlike some who worry that we might lose thinking skills, I’m quite happy to devolve certain tasks to my external brain, and only retain the ones I wish to keep for myself.  And once I’ve become so enabled, it’s painful to do without.  I’m glad to see some are getting viable solutions, and hoping I’ll have one soon too.  So we can come up with even more fabulous ways to accessorize our brains. Which is what we want to do!

 

The Pad and the Pod

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I had a conversation today where I was asked about the difference with a tablet versus a smartphone (or pad versus pod :).  This is something I’ve been thinking about, and some thoughts coalesced as I answered. I don’t think this is my definitive answer, but it’s worth wrestling with (learning out loud and all that).

The must-read for mobile designers, The Zen of Palm, shows data collected from years ago on the early Palm devices (Figure 1.3) which showed the difference between usage of desktops versus handhelds. The general pattern is that folks access desktops a few times a day for long periods, while handheld devices were accessed many times a day for very short periods.

I believe this is still largely true: we tend to use our smartphones and similar devices as learning/performance support as quick access to information.  While we might listen to music, that’s a different thing.   Yes, there will be times we access a video or read a document or even listen to a podcast, but the usual use is as quick access.

And I think we use tablets more like desktops.  We settle down with them for longer periods of time, and engage more deeply. They’re often about content consumption, and they may also be for content creation, in both cases more so than the smaller devices.  And I think it’s more than a quantitative difference, I really do feel it’s qualitative.  Yes, this blurs when we’re talking about 7.1″ tablets instead of 10″, but overall I think it holds.

Which naturally leads to the question of what’s the difference between a tablet and a desktop?  And here I’m on stranger ground.  I think one of the interesting phenomena of the tablet experience is the ‘intimacy’ of the experience. You’re holding the device and touching it.  It’s in your arms, instead of at arms-length.  And I believe, without having come up with empirical ways to document, that’ it’s a more personal engagement. It helps that the first successful instance, the iPad, has an overall aesthetic that’s elegant, so media look good and the user experience feels natural.  I hate the over-used phrase ‘intuitive’, but many inferences about how to use the device play out.

So, in a sense is the tablet a mobile device?  When it’s acting like a desktop: being used to take notes, for instance, I don’t really consider it a truly mobile device, but when it can be with you to meet needs that you’re unlikely to consider meeting with a laptop, and it can deliver some meaningful interaction that’s more immediate than you’d accomplish with even a netbook, a tablet definitely is a mobile device.  And there are plenty of those times.

Fundamentally, though they can share apps, I think a pad serves a different need than a pod.  I think the pod is more performance support and learning augmentation, while the pad is more full learning.  There is overlap, and each can act as the other, but if you’ve got both, I reckon you’ll find this to be the case.

Naturally, I’m still thinking that a real learning opportunity for the pad will be when they can be more than content consumption, and actually do meaningful interaction. Not just quizzes, which can be done now via mobile web, but immersive simulations and serious games.  And you can do that now, but  not in a cross-platform way. We need a standard, like ePub for ebooks, but one that supports simulation-driven interaction.  Flash could’ve been it, but the performance problems have been a barrier.  It’s not clear whether HTML5 will meet my desires, but otherwise we need something else.  When we’ve got that capability, we have a market to provide more meaningful experiences to learners.

The implications for design are to not be exclusive to either, but if you’re designing performance support, you might be thinking more pod, and if you are thinking more full task and full learning, you might be thinking more pad.  That’s what I think, what do you think?