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Learning Strategy Issues

7 December 2016 by Clark Leave a Comment

Online Educa logo The other thing that I was involved in at Online Educa in Berlin was a session on The Flexible Worker. Three of us presented, each addressing one particular topic. One presentation was on collaborating to produce an elearning course on sleeping better, with the presenter’s firm demonstrating expertise in elearning, while the other firm had the subject matter expertise on sleep health. A second presentation was on providing tools to trainers to devolve content development locally, addressing a problem with centrally-developed content. My presentation was on the gaps between what L&D does and how our brains work, and the implications. And, per our design, issues emerged.

The format was interesting: our presentations were roughly 10 minutes each. And we were using a tool (sli.do) to collect and rank questions. Then we had the audience work at their tables (in the round) to come up with their answers to the top questions, which we then collected and the panelists riffed on the outcomes. We got through three questions as a group, and I thought the outcomes were quite interesting. In short, as a rapporteur at the closing business session, I suggested that the topic ended up being about flexible work, not flexible working.

The top question that emerged had to do with how to support effective search (after I expounded on problem with the notion that it all had to be in the head). The sourced answers included crowd-sourcing the tags for finding objects, using a controlled vocabulary, and auto-analyzing the content to determine tags. I suggest a hybrid solution, in general. The interesting thing here was the audience picking up on the need to go beyond courses and start looking at resources.

The next question was how to move from a training to a performance culture. And it was another exciting development to hear them thinking this way. The solutions offered included coaching, supporting the importance of self-learning (meta-learning, yay!), and working both top-down and bottom-up. I also suggested that measuring was a likely catalyst that could begin to draw attention to outcomes (just as I reckon competencies are the lever in higher-ed).

The third question was about ensuring quality in a localized learning environment (e.g. user-generated content). The concern was that the knowledge of learning design wouldn’t necessarily be widespread. Suggestions included making the content editable for collaborative improvements, or using rankings, and scaffolding of improvement through the community. Here too, a focus on learning itself could assist.

What’s encouraging to me is that each of these questions was really about moving to a transformative viewpoint. The audience was clearly thinking ‘beyond the course’. They were focusing on supporting performers in learning, and resources, and leveraging the community, all activities consonant with the revolution.

An interesting aside came in the closing session. Several folks were mentioning a need for change, and an audience member asked “why?” He was a consultant, and his clients already seemed to be moving forward. I suggested he was seeing the best, and that many folks were not there (mentioning the Towards Maturity data as well as the problems I identified in the beginning of the Revolution book. And it’s a problem that too many people don’t yet see the missed opportunities and don’t feel the pain (and are frankly not looking).

So, there are opportunities to start taking small steps in the direction of taking on a bigger perspective and making the role of L&D more strategic. It first takes an awareness of the problems (my old line: “L&D isn’t doing near what it could and should, and what it is doing it is doing badly, other than that things are fine” :), and then a strategy to move forward. The strategy depends on where the organization is to begin with, but there are systematic principles to guide progress. That’s what I do, after all! It’s nice to see awareness growing. So, are you ready to start taking some positive steps?

Content aggregation

30 November 2016 by Clark Leave a Comment

At the recent DevLearn conference, I had a chance to present in xAPI Base Camp on Content Systems. This is a topic I’ve been thinking about since working on an adaptive learning system back in 1999-2000. And I think it’s now an even bigger big opportunity. In the course of responding to an interested attendee, I aggregated this list of my (non-blog) publications on the process, and I thought it might be useful to share them here (from most recent to earliest):

Talking about lifecycle and opportunities in the Litmos blog

Perspective from visiting the Intelligent Content conference in eLearnMag

The possibilities and necessities of adapting to context in Learning Solutions magazine

New ways of looking at learning content in Learning Solutions magazine

Moving from text to experience for publishers in eLearnMag

A discussion paper including granularity and tagging in the IFETS journal

What you see is a transition in focus. From thinking about content objects at the right granularity and with the right tagging, I transition to thinking about strategy for content publishers. Ultimately, I have shifted to looking at the learning industry and opportunities to adapt learning to context (which includes location, current task, current role, and more).

While I think that adaptivity is a ways away, I also believe that the initial efforts in getting more rigorous about content strategy, engineering, and governance are a worthwhile investment now. The benefits are in less redundancy, tighter design, tracking, and greater flexibility. The long term benefits will come from analytics, adaptivity, and contextualization. I reckon that’s an opportunity that’s hard to ignore. I’ll suggest that it’s past time to be thinking about it, and time to start acting. What about you? Are you ready?

Strategy Sessions

2 November 2016 by Clark Leave a Comment

In a previous post, I talked about a couple of instances where I worked with folks to let them ‘pick my brain’. Those were about learning design in particular, but I’ve also worked with folks on strategy. In these strategy sessions, things work a little differently.

So, in a typical strategy session, I prepare by looking at what they’ve done beforehand: any existing strategy documents. I also look at their current context, e.g. their business, market, customers, and products/services. Finally, I look at their stated goals. I also explore their stated needs, and see if there are some they may be missing. Then we get together.

I typically will spend an hour or so going over some principles, so we have a shared framework to discuss against. Then we brainstorm possible actions. We’ve prepped for this, circulating the space for topics, so people have had time to identify their individual ideas. We get them documented, diverging before converging. This may be a relatively large group, with representative stakeholders, but not so large that it can’t be managed.

Then, typically, a smaller group will take those ideas and prioritize them. To be clear, it’s informed by the context and infrastructure, so that the steps don’t just go from easier to harder, but it’s also about choosing steps that are strategic in securing credibility, building capacity, and leveraging other initiatives. At the end, however, the team I’m working with has both a general roadmap and a specific plan.

And I think this is good. They’ve gotten some new and valuable ways to think about strategy, and custom advice, all in a very short engagement. Sometimes it’s happened under the rubric of a mobile strategy, sometime’s it’s more general, but it always open eyes. In two particular instances, I recall that the outcomes they ended up focusing on most weren’t even on their radar when they started!

consulttaleslogo This is another instance of how folks can get high benefit from a small engagement. Picking my brain can be valuable, but it’s not a fair engagement unless we make it mutually rewarding. That’s not so hard to do, however. Just so you know.

Deeper Design: Working out Loud and the Future of Work

20 September 2016 by Clark 2 Comments

Over the past year, I’ve been working on a project. After I wrote the Deeper eLearning series of 6 posts with Learnnovators, we wondered what to do next. We decided to do a course together, free-to-air, and write about the process as well (a bit of Working Out Loud), with the intention was to try to do deep design on a pragmatic basis. And, just as a hint, the topic is the Future of Work, the choice of which is
part of the story. It’s a tribute to our late friend and colleague, Jay Cross, with the assistance of my colleagues in the Internet Time Alliance.

learnnovators course design example

Well, that goal was accomplished. First, there are four articles talking about the design, that Learning Solutions magazine was kind enough to host:

The first post talks about our initial plans, and how we settled on a topic.

The second post talks about our initial design decisions, scoping the overall course.

The third post talks about our detailed design decisions.

And the fourth post talks about our development process.

We intend a fifth post talking about what we learn after the release!

and now there’s also a press release that provides a link to the course. There’s an opportunity at the end of the course to leave some thoughts and comments, if you go through it (it’s designed for 20-30 minutes).

And, of course, if you do go through and want to talk about it, you can comment on the posts or here. I welcome your thoughts!

Editorializing

23 August 2016 by Clark Leave a Comment

I recently wrote about serious comics, and realized there’s a form I hadn’t addressed yet has some valuable insights. The value in looking at other approaches is that it provides lateral insight (I’m currently reading Stephen Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From) that we may be able to transfer. And the source this time is editorial cartoons.

Editorial cartoons use imagery and text to convey a comment on a current topic. The best ones portray a poignant insight into an issue of the day, via a twist that emphasizes the point to be made. They’re usually combined with a distinct visual style from each artist. They reflect some of the same thoughts that accompany internet memes (the captioned photos) but require more visual talent ;).

The common approach appears to be (and I welcome insight from others) the ability to use another context to exaggerate some viewpoint. It’s a bit metaphorical, but I think the trick is to abstract the structure from the situation to be illuminated, and to map it to another situation that highlights the relationships. So you could take some recent pop star spat and map it to a political one, or highlight an economic policy as a personal one.

As context, I happened to stumble upon an exhibition of Conrad‘s work in my college art gallery, and as he was the local cartoonist for my home newspaper (The LA Times), I recognized his work. I had the chance to explore in more detail his award-winning efforts. Agree or disagree, he made powerful comments and I admired his ability.

Now, editorial cartooning is very context-sensitive, in that what is being talked about is very much ‘of the day’. What’s being commented on may not be relevant at a later time, particularly if they conjoin a popular culture event with an issue as they often do. But the insight, looking for the twist and the way to make the point, is a valuable skill that has a role in learning design too.

In learning design, we want to make the content meaningful. There’s intrinsic interest in pretty much everything, but it may be hard to find (see: working with SMEs), and also hard to convey. Yet I believe comics are one way to do this. You can, for instance, humorously exaggerate the consequences of not having the knowledge. I’ve done that with content where we introduced each section of a course with a comic (very much like an editorial cartoon) highlighting the topic and necessity.

The point being that we can not only benefit from understanding other media, but we can appropriate their approaches as well. Our learning designs needs to be eclectic to be engaging and effective. Or, to put it another way, there are lots of ways to get the design implemented, once you have the design right.

Ambiguity Denial Syndrome?

23 June 2016 by Clark 2 Comments

I was talking with a colleague at an event one of the past weeks, and I noted down the concept of ambiguity denial syndrome. And I’m retrospectively making up what we were talking about, but it’s an interesting idea to me.

So one of the ways I start out a talk (including later today for a government agency) is to talk about chaos. I use a fractal, and talk about the properties a fractal has. You know, that it’s a mathematical formulation that paints an image from which patterns emerge, yet at any point you really don’t know where it’s going to go next.

I use this to explain how our old beliefs in an ability to plan, prepare, and execute were somewhat misguided. What we did was explain away the few times it didn’t work. But as things move faster, the fact that things are not quite as certain as we’d believe means we have to become more agile, because we can less tolerate the mistakes.

The point I’m making, that the world increasingly requires an ability to deal with ambiguity and unique situations. And our learning designs, and organization designs, and our cultures, need to recognize this. And yet, in so many ways, they don’t.

At the individual level, we’re not equipping folks with the right tools. We should be providing them with models to use to interpret and adapt to situations (explain and predict). Our learning designs should have them dealing with a wide variety and degrees of certainty in situations. And we should be testing and refining them, recognizing that learners aren’t as predictable as concrete or steel. Instead we see one-shot development of information dumps and knowledge tests, which aren’t going to help organizations.

At the interpersonal level, we should be facilitating people to engage productively, facilitating the development of viable processes for working and learning together. We know that the room is smarter than the smartest person in the room (if we manage the process right), and that we’ll get the best results when we empower people and support their success. We need them working out loud, communicating and collaborating, to get the best. Instead, we still see top-down hierarchies and solo work.

In short, we see people denying the increasing complexity that the world is showing us. Implicitly or explicitly, it’s clear that many folks believe that they can, and must, control things, instead of looking to adapt on the fly. We have new organizational models for this, and yet we’re not even seeing the exploration yet. I acknowledge that change is hard, and navigating it successfully is a challenge. But we have lots of guidance here too.

Too many processes I see reflect industrial age thinking, and we’re in an information age. We have greater capacity amongst our people, and greater challenges to address, with less tolerance for mistakes. We need to address, even embrace ambiguity, if we are to thrive. Because we can, and we should. It’s the only sensible way to move forward in this increasingly complex world. So, are you ready?

Two separate systems?

10 May 2016 by Clark Leave a Comment

I frequently say that L&D needs to move from just ensuring optimal execution to also supporting continual innovation. Can these co-exist, or are they fundamentally different? I really don’t know, but it’s worth pondering.

Kotter (the change management guru), has begun to advocate for a dual-operating system approach, where companies jointly support an operational hierarchy and an innovation network that are coupled. I haven’t read his book on the topic, but it seems to be a bit extrinsic, a way of bolting on innovation instead of making it intrinsic to the operation.

On the other hand, there is quite a bit of expression for more flexible systems, a more podular approach. Teaming or small nodes are increasingly appearing as not just for innovation, but ongoing operation. However, it’s not clear how the various different areas are coordinated, so how marketing across pods maintains coherent.

This is what led to our Coherent Organization model. The notion is that the teams are coming in from, and reporting back up through, their communities. And their communities are communicating both within, and outside of, the organization.

It’s not clear to me whether the team approach can scale to a global organization, or whether you need the hybrid model. I can see that the hybrid model would appeal to existing business folks who would be concerned about optimization in execution. I can see that the new model would at least require fundamental changes in mechanisms, and perhaps a willingness to tradeoff absolute perfection in execution to maintain continuing innovation and customer-responsiveness.

While intuitively the more biologically inspired approach sounds like the longer-term solution, it’s non-trivial in terms of creating cultures that are appropriately conducive. I think that organizational operations may be at an inflection point, and there does seem to be data that supports more radical flexibility. I think a performance ecosystem coupled with a learning organization environment is likely going to be the way to move. How you get there is part of the revolution that’s needed. Start small, scale out, etc. And I hope L&D can help lead the way.

Context Rules

15 March 2016 by Clark Leave a Comment

I was watching a blab (a video chat tool) about the upcoming FocusOn Learning, a new event from the eLearning Guild. This conference combines their previous mLearnCon and Performance Support Symposium with the addition of video. The previous events have been great, and I’ll of course be there (offering a workshop on cognition for mobile, a mobile learning 101 session, and one on the topic of this post). Listening to folks talk about the conference led me to ponder the connection, and something struck me.

I find it kind of misleading that it’s FocusOn Learning, given that performance support, mobile, and even video typically is more about acting in the moment than developing over time. Mobile device use tends to be more about quick access than extended experience. Performance support is more about augmenting our cognitive capabilities. Video (as opposed to animation or images or graphics, and similar to photos) is about showing how things happen in situ (I note that this is my distinction, and they may well include animation in their definition of video, caveat emptor). The unifying element to me is context.

So, mobile is a platform. It’s a computational medium, and as such is the same sort of computational augment that a desktop is. Except that it can be with you. Moreover, it can have sensors, so not just providing computational capabilities where you are, but because of when and where you are.

Performance support is about providing a cognitive augment. It can be any medium – paper, audio, digital – but it’s about providing support for the gaps in our mental capabilities. Our architecture is powerful, but has limitations, and we can provide support to minimize those problems. It’s about support in the moment, that is, in context.

And video, like photos, inherently captures context. Unlike an animation that represents conceptual distinctions separated from the real world along one or more dimensions, a video accurately captures what the camera sees happening. It’s again about context.

And the interesting thing to me is that we can support performance in the moment, whether a lookup table or a howto video, without learning necessarily happening. And that’s OK! It’s also possible to use context to support learning, and in fact we can provide least material to augment a context than create an artificial context which so much of learning requires.

What excited me was that there was a discussion about AR and AI. And these, to me, are also about context. Augmented Reality layers information on top of your current context. And the way you start doing contextually relevant content delivery is with rules tied to content descriptors (content systems), and such rules are really part of an intelligently adaptive system.

So I’m inclined to think this conference is about leveraging context in intelligent ways. Or that it can be, will be, and should be. Your mileage may vary ;).

Metacognitive Activity?

8 March 2016 by Clark Leave a Comment

So, as another outcome of the xAPI base camp a few weeks back, I was wondering about tracking not only learning, but meta-learning. That is, not only what activity might mean ‘learning’, but what might mean ‘meta-learning’ is happening? I started wondering about a vocabulary, but realized that you’d have to have activity that you could actually detect that was evidence of meta-learning. And I didn’t know what that was. Naturally, I started diagramming.

I started with Harold Jarche’s Personal Knowledge Mastery model of Seek-Sense-Share. This is about how you continue to learn in manageable ways, and it served as an organizing framework. To each of the elements, I attributed activities that would constitute learning in that model, and then above it I was thinking what would constitute meta-learning.

So, for seek, we start with reading what comes into your feeds, searching about particular topics, and asking questions of your network. Sensing is about reconciling what’s found with your own knowledge. So you could write or present, diagram (see what I did there?), or experiment. And then to share you can post, or comment, or send a pointer to something.

So what are actions that reflect on those actions? For seeking, you can adjust your feeds of what you follow, you can try a different search mechanism, or you can follow new people. These are all detectable, I reckon.

For sensing, I see it as a little harder. How do we know when you’re annotating a document with the underlying thinking, not just documenting your progress? How do we know when you’re explaining the thinking behind a diagram (here it’d be about my choice of vertical dimension, and spreading things below and above)? How do we know when you’re actually reviewing your experimental approach or the results?

For sharing, it’s a mixed bag. If you choose to use a different media (perhaps it’s relative, like when I created an animation after blogging for > 10 years ;), we might know. If you try out a new social media platform/channel, we can probably note that. If you’re reflecting on your comments from others, how would we know?

And this is just one way of carving it up. The point being, meta is good, but detecting and tracking it is hard. We might ask people to annotate it with tags, but that’s problematic too. I have no obvious answers, but it’s a question I had, and I’m thinking out loud about it. I welcome your thoughts, too.

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