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7 questions from the University of Wisconsin-Stout ID Program

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The program at the University of Wisconsin-Stout Online Professional Development’s Instructional Design program regularly asks someone to answer a series of questions from their students. I think these sorts of efforts are worthwhile to see a variety of different ideas, and consequently I agreed. Here’re the questions and my answers as presented to the students:

Learning Design Evangelist Clark Quinn Answers Questions
June 2010

1. Are there any critical gaps in knowledge that you frequently encounter in the ID industry?

Clark:

Several: The first is folks who only know the surface level of ID, not understanding the nuances of the components of learning (examples, concepts, etc), and consequently creating ineffective designs without even being aware. This is, of course, not the fault of those who’ve taken formal training, but many designers are transported from face-to-face training without adequate presentation.A related problem is the focus on the ‘event’ model, where learning is a massed event, which we know is one of the least effective mechanisms to lead to long-term retention.

Another gap is a focus on the course, without taking a step back and analyzing whether the performance gap is caused by attitude, motivation or other issues besides skills and knowledge. The Human Performance Technology approach (ala ISPI) is a necessary analysis before ADDIE, but it’s too infrequently seen.

The last is the lack of consideration of the emotional (read: affective and conative) side of instructional design. Most ID only focuses on the cognitive side, and despite the efforts of folks like John Keller, Michael Allen, and Cathy Moore, among others, we’re not seeing sufficient consideration of engagement.

2. In a world where technology changes daily, do you feel we place too much emphasis on the latest and greatest delivery method? Do you foresee a future where higher education is delivered primarily through distance learning?

Clark:

Yes, we do see ‘crushes’ on the latest technology, whereas we should be focusing on looking at the key affordances and matching technologies appropriately to need. I’m a strong proponent of the potential of new technologies to create new opportunities, but very much first focused on the learning outcomes we need to achieve. Which is why I have complicated feelings about the future of higher ed. In a time of increasing change, I think that the new role of higher education will increasingly be to develop the ability to learn. The domain will be a vehicle, but not the end goal. Which could be largely independent of place, but I liked the old role of new and independent mentorship beyond family and community, and always felt that there was a socializing role that university provides. I’m not quite sure how that could play out via technology mediation, but I do note the increasing role of social media.

3. Is there an elearning authoring tool you would endorse?

Clark:

Paper and pencil. Seriously. I wrote many years ago of a design heuristic, the double double P’s: postpone programming, and prefer paper. An associated mantra of mine is “if you get the design right, there are lots of ways to implement it; if you don’t get the design right, it doesn’t matter how you implement it”. Consequently, I prefer the cheapest forms of prototyping, and rapid cycles of iteration, and you can do a lot with post-it notes (e.g. the Pictive technique from interface design).

4. What impact, if any, do you think that the shortened attention span habits dictated by most social media will have on e-learning?

Clark:

I think that you should be very careful about media-manufactured trends. Our wetware hasn’t changed, just our tolerance of certain behaviors. We’ve always had short attention spans, it’s just that our schooling forced us to mask it. We’ve also been quite capable of multi-tasking (ask any single parent), but it does provide a detriment to performance in each task, or cause the task to take longer. (Other seriously misconstrued ideas include digital natives, learning styles, and generational differences).

I think we should look to learning that optimizes what’s known about how we learn (and see Daniel WIllingham for a very apt critique of brain-based learning), which includes smaller chunks over a longer period of time. That’s just one component of a more enlightened learning experience predicated on a longer-term relationship with a learner.

5. Is there current research that shows whether employers view fully online degrees programs any different than a traditional degree program? Do employers care that an applicant may have not attended any face to face classes while earning an advanced degree?

Clark:

Frankly, this is research I haven’t really tracked. I do know recent research shows that online is better than face-to-face, but most likely due to quality of design (instructors aren’t necessarily experts in learning design, sadly) than media.

6. What skills are critical to the survival of a new ID professional? What skills must be focused upon in the first three critical years of business?

Clark:

The skills that are necessary are much more pragmatic than conceptual. While I’d love to say “knowledge of learning theory”, and “enlightened design”, I think in the initial stages proper time/project management will probably pay off more immediately. Also, the ability to know what rules to break and when. That said, I think you absolutely need the domain knowledge, but street smarts are equally valuable.

However, the core one is the ability to learn effectively and efficiently. I argue that the best investment a business could make is not to take learning skills for granted but document them, assess them, and develop them. Personally, I’ll say the same: the best investment you can make is in your ability to learn continuously, eagerly, even joyously.

7. What areas of growth do you see in the ID market?

Clark:

With lots of caveats, because I’m involved in many:

Right now I’m seeing growth in the social learning space. Understanding and taking advantage of social learning is trendy, but offers the potential for real learning outcomes as well. Naturally, the only problem is separating the snake oil from the real value. My involvement in the Internet Time Alliance is indicative of my beliefs of the importance.

I think the whole ‘cloud’/web-based delivery area is seeing some interesting growth too, with everything from rich internet applications to collaborative authoring. The opportunities of web 3.0 and semantic technologies are still a ways off, but I think the time is right to start laying the foundations (caveat, I generally find I’m several years ahead of the market in predicting when the time is ripe).

An area that I’m seeing a small uptick in is engagement, fortunately, the use of games and scenarios. Having a book out on the topic makes it gratifying to see the growth finally taking off.

And mobile is finally taking off! Having just left the first biz-focused mobile learning conference, I was thrilled to see the amount of excitement and progress. (Snake oil disclaimer: I’ve been on the stump for years, and finally have a book coming out on the topic. :)

Mobile Affordances

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It occurred to me for several reason to think about mobile from the perspective of affordances.   I’d done this before for virtual worlds, and it only seems right to do the same for mobile learning. So off to Graffle I went…

The core is portable processing power that is synced back into the environment.   On top of that, we can have ubiquitous connectivity, we can connect to sensors that can recognize the world (e.g. cameras) and our context (e.g. GPS), and we can design capabilities that provide us content and computations power.

From those, we can link the content presentation with connectivity to communicate with others, take that capture and reflect upon it or share with others for their support and mentorship, we can be connected with people in context for live support, and we can layer content upon the context as augmented reality.

These capabilities can be layered. So using interactive content could be mobile games.   When linked with augmented reality, we can start having alternate reality games.

This is a first cut, so I welcome feedback.   What am I confounding? What am I missing?

The Mobile Design Workshop!

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Mobile is coming at us hard and fast. Announcements of changes in the marketplace (HP acquiring Palm in just the past week), and new devices (Google passing on the Nexus One to tout the next gen system), are coming fast and furious. The devices are out there (mobile is outselling the desktop) and the workforce is increasingly mobile (72%, according to IDC!). The question is, how do you get on top of taking advantage of mobile devices for organizational (and personal) learning?

I confess, I’m a design guy. I like to look at problems and create solutions. And I like to think that 30-odd years of practice and reflection on learning design (investigating myriad design practices, looking at design models, etc) provides some reason to think I’ve developed a wee bit of expertise on the topic.

I’m also a geek and I love tech toys. I’ve also been extremely enamored of the potential for mobile learning since Marcia Conner asked me to write a little screed on the topic 10 years ago now. It got me thinking in ways that haven’t stopped, so that I’ve been thinking and doing mobile for the past decade, and am awaiting feedback on the draft of a book on the topic for Pfeiffer.

Mobile is the killer app for deep reasons, and not surprisingly, my focus is on mobile design. As I say “if you get the design right, there are lots of ways to implement it; if you don’t get the design right it doesn’t matter how you implement it!” Design is the key. There are two things I’ve found out about mobile design:

  • you really need to think differently. It’s not about courses, it’s about augmenting (accessorizing) our capabilities, both learning and performance
  • there are some really useful models that give you a handle on thinking different.

You’ve heard me talk here before about some, e.g. the 4 C’s.

Naturally, it’s best if you work with these models a bit to really internalize them and see how they guide new opportunities to meet learning and performance needs for your folks. That’s why I’m pleased that I have the chance to offer a mobile design workshop at the eLearning Guild’s mobile learning conference, mLearnCon.

This is going to be an interactive and fun way to incorporate mobile learning into your repertoire of solution tools. Not to worry, we’ll contextualize design as well, talking about the devices, the market trends, the tools, and the organizational issues, but the focus is going to be, as it should, on design. It’s also in one of my favorite towns: San Diego, and of course there’s the rest of the conference to put the icing on the cake. I hope I’ll see you there, and get a chance to work with you on this exciting new area.

Designing for an uncertain world

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My problem with the formal models of instructional design (e.g. ADDIE for process), is that most are based upon a flawed premise.   The premise is that the world is predictable and understandable, so that we can capture the ‘right’ behavior and train it.   Which, I think, is a naive assumption, at least in this day and age.   So why do I think so, and what do I think we can (and should) do about it?   (Note: I let my argument lead where it must, and find I go quite beyond my intended suggestion of a broader learning design.   Fair warning!)

The world is inherently chaotic. At a finite granularity, it is reasonably predictable, but overall it’s chaotic. Dave Snowden’s Cynefin model, recommending various approaches depending on the relative complexity of the situation, provides a top-level strategy for action, but doesn’t provide predictions about how to support learning, and I think we need more.   However, most of our design models are predicated on knowing what we need people to do, and developing learning to deliver that capability.   Which is wrong; if we can define it at that fine a granularity, we bloody well ought to automate it.   Why have people do rote things?

It’s a bad idea to have people do rote things, because they don’t, can’t do them well.   It’s in the nature of our cognitive architecture to have some randomness.   And it’s beneath us to be trained to do something repetitive, to do something that doesn’t respect and take advantage of the great capacity of our brains.   Instead, we should be doing pattern-matching and decision-making.   Now, there are levels of this, and we should match the performer to the task, but as I heard Barry Schwartz eloquently say recently, even the most mundane seeming jobs require some real decision making, and in many cases that’s not within the purview of   training.

And, top-down rigid structures with one person doing the thinking for many will no longer work.   Businesses increasingly complexify things but that eventually fails, as Clay Shirky has noted, and   adaptive approaches are likely to be more fruitful, as Harold Jarche has pointed out.   People are going to be far better equipped to deal with unpredictable change if they have internalized a set of organizational values and a powerful set of models to apply than by any possible amount of rote training.

Now think about learning design.   Starting with the objectives, the notion of Mager, where you define the context and performance, is getting more difficult.   Increasingly you have more complicated nuances that you can’t anticipate.   Our products and services are more complex, and yet we need a more seamless execution.   For example trying to debug problems between hardware device and network service provider, and if you’re trying to provide a total customer experience, the old “it’s the other guy’s fault” just isn’t going to cut it.   Yes, we could make our objectives higher and higher, e.g. “recognize and solve the customer’s problem in a contextually appropriate way”, but I think we’re getting out of the realms of training.

We are seeing richer design models. Van Merrienboer’s 4 Component ID, for instance, breaks learning up into the knowledge we need, and the complex problems we need to apply that knowledge to.   David Metcalf talks about learning theory mashups as ways to incorporate new technologies, which is, at least, a good interim step and possibly the necessary approach. Still, I’m looking for something deeper.   I want to find a curriculum that focuses on dealing with ambiguity, helping us bring models and an iterative and collaborative approach.   A pedagogy that looks at slow development over time and rich and engaging experience.   And a design process that recognizes how we use tools and work with others in the world as a part of a larger vision of cognition, problem-solving, and design.

We have to look at the entire performance ecosystem as the context, including the technology affordances, learning culture, organizational goals, and the immediate context.   We have to look at the learner, not stopping at their knowledge and experience, but also including their passions, who they can connect to, their current context (including technology, location, current activity), and goals.   And then we need to find a way to suggest, as Wayne Hodgins would have it, the right stuff, e.g. the right content or capability, at the right time, in the right way, …

An appropriate approach has to integrate theories as disparate as distributed cognition, the appropriateness of spaced practice, minimalism, and more.   We probably need to start iteratively, with the long term development of learning, and similarly opportunistic performance support, and then see how we intermingle those together.

Overall, however, this is how we go beyond intervention to augmentation.   Clive Thompson, in a recent Wired column, draws from a recent “man+computer” chess competition to conclude “serious cognitive advantages accrue to those who are best at thinking alongside machines”.   We can accessorize our brains, but I’m wanting to look at the other side, how can we systematically support people to be effectively supported by machines?   That’s a different twist on technology support for performance, and one that requires thinking about what the technology can do, but also how we develop people to be able to take advantage.   A mutual accommodation will happen, but just as with learning to learn, we shouldn’t assume ‘ability to perform with technology augmentation’.   We need to design the technology/human system to work together, and develop both so that the overall system is equipped to work in an uncertain world.

I realize I’ve gone quite beyond just instructional design.   At this point, I don’t even have a label for what I’m talking about, but I do think that the argument that has emerged (admittedly, flowing out from somewhere that wasn’t consciously accessible until it appeared on the page!) is food for thought.   I welcome your reactions, as I contemplate mine.

Learning Tools

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Owing to sins in my past, I not only am speaking on mobile learning at the eLearning Guild’s Learning Solutions conference e-Learning Foundations Intensive session, but also introduced the tools section.   The tools will be covered by smart folks like Patti Shank, Harry Mellon, Steve Foreman, and Karen Hyder, but I was supposed to set the context.

Now, I talked about a number of things, including vendors, total cost of ownership, tradeoffs, and the development process, but I also included the following diagram attempting to capture the layers of systems that support tools, and both formal and informal. In some ways the distinctions I make are arbitrary (not to say abstract :), but still, I intended this to be a useful characterization of the space:

The point here is that on top of the hardware and systems are applications. There are assets (with media tools) you create that can (and should) be managed, and then they’re aggregated into content whether courses or resources, that are accessible through synchronous or asynchronous courses or games, portals or feeds, and managed whether through an LMS or a Social Networking System.

The graphic was hard to see on the screen (mea culpa), so I’ve reproduced it here.   Does this make sense?

iLust? Changing the game

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Yesterday, in case you’ve been living under a rock, Apple released their take on the tablet computer, the iPad.   Steve Jobs has been quoted as saying it’s “the most important thing I’ve ever done.”   And that’s saying a lot.   Like him or not, he’s changed the face of our digital lives several times: popularizing the GUI interface with the Macintosh, changing the music market with the iPod, and upending the mobile market with the iPhone.

Briefly, it’s a network-enabled thin touchscreen midway in size between the iPhone and a laptop (e.g. netbook in size).   It’s been equipped with a bookstore to complement the iPhone Store (media and apps), will play movies, music, and apps.   It’s got a moderate suite of PIM, including contacts, calendar, and notes (no ToDos, ahem), and a microphone. No camera, no phone, but does have a soft keyboard and an optional hard keyboard (would that the iPhone had one!).   It’s really just a big iTouch.   The device itself isn’t a game-changer.   Which isn’t to say it isn’t quite cool in it’s way with some mlearning opportunities.

I have several reflections on the device, from different perspectives.   The overall question is whether the iPad, too, is a game-changer.   Personally, the obvious question is: “do I have to have one?”   Which naturally leads to the performance support perspective of the device (or vice versa).   And, given my predilictions, there’s also the mlearning question.

Bill Brandon of the eLearning Guild has already opined about the mlearning potential of the iPad. He notes that it’s oriented towards content delivery, and could be a replacement for textbooks.   That, alone, is a big win, though not unique to the iPad (cf Amazon’s Kindle).   Without a camera, he notes, it’s only usable for voice or text chatting.   The form factor is nice, but it’s kind of large to slip in a pocket, and it’s really too large for elementary kids’ hands.   I still think a camera-equipped iTouch is a better form-factor for K-6.

From there, we start looking beyond content delivery to more interactive apps.   Here’s where we start seeing some real opportunity: we can start putting simulations on the device, not just content.   Interactivity is key, to me, and that’s what the iPad has over the Kindle or the Nook (tho’ Amazon has now opened up the Kindle’s Software Developers Kit, it’s still lacking color).   the possibility of running meaningful learning games is a real opportunity.   With network connectivity, it can be social as well; in addition to the internet browser there are also already dedicated FaceBook and LinkedIn apps for the iPhone.

Of course, a second opportunity is to start using the device as a way to take notes and share thinking. With email and web access, you can collaborate with others.   Can you use it to create representations to share?   Apple is coming out with iPad versions of Numbers, Pages, and Keynote (spreadsheet, word processing, and presentation software, respectively). This is, to me, a major win (with a caveat).

The ability to use the device not just for consumption, but for creation, is where we start turning this from an entertainment & learning platform into a productivity platform. If you want to not carry a laptop (or even a MacBook Air or a netbook if you’re a Windows person, both seriously worth considering), this has to have certain characteristics.   I, personally, wouldn’t need the 3G connection (meaning you have connectivity wherever you can get a cell-phone signal, not just a wi-fi hotpot), as I’m fine using my iPhone for the always-on connection.   However, I need to write.   The additional keyboard is extra weight, but the capability would be worth it (nice if it folded for travel, however).   The ability to create presentations is also a big win.

One thing is missing, however.   I diagram.   A lot (as I illustrate here).   Keynote has shapes, but it’s not a diagramming tool as yet (I checked, there’s no palette of shapes I can keep open). I don’t know if that will be remedied in the iPad specific version (with a multi-touch interface), but what would really be nice is an OmniGraffle (or Visio, for you Windows folks) for the iPad. Short of that, I’m not sure it’ll meet my needs. Which answers the question about whether I’d get one. Not without diagramming (and Brushes seems more a paint app than a diagramming, that’s not what I need).   I don’t consume a lot of music and movies. I do outline, write, and diagram.

Still, this is a significant move, for none of the above reasons.   I’ve written before about the new dynamics for the publishing industry (specifically, educational publishers).   The story is similar for other forms of publication: magazines, newspapers, and books.   eBook readers are changing that market, but only the mechanics, not the inherent nature of the experience.   It’s still about ‘reading’, not about information.   Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and now Apple, are creating a new market for the old product.   However, Apple has changed the market for a new version of the product. They’re creating the opportunity for those providers to elaborate their content with dynamic media such as video and audio, and interactive media: modifiable graphs, and of course simulations and games.

Now it’s not only possible for a publisher to create a richer, more fully information, even educational experience, but there is also a new direct channel for that endeavor.   It doesn’t have to be based on individual subscriptions to a site, but it can be arranged through a single broadly available channel.   It will, however, require the concomitant components I suggested were necessary: an understanding of user experience and content models.

I think the iPad is flawed in several ways: lack of camera & multi-tasking (and the form-factor limiting HD movie screen formats), and as yet a dearth of critical software.   However, it’s a platform, and consequently those can come in either hardware or software updates.   What it has made possible, however, is a change in business models, and that’s a more significant outcome.   Whether it succeeds is another issue, but I think the groundwork is there to make the change.   Who’s up for trying to lift their game into the new model?

What does the 20th year of the web mean?

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Gina Minks, who I know only through Twitter (@gminks), tho’ hope to meet someday, tagged me for the following Questions from On. Her post was immensely personal, and I have no such deeply significant experience, but I have been on the internet since before there was one, so I reckon I can throw out a few ideas.

The questions are:

  • How has the Web changed your life?
  • How has the Web changed business and society?
  • What do you think the Web will look like in twenty years?

How has the web changed my life? Well, that’s an interesting question.   Starting at the beginning, as an undergraduate I discovered computers and learning (I got a job managing the computer records for the office that coordinated tutoring on campus, after having been a tutor, and recognized that computers for learning was a keen idea).   I managed to convince my Provost to let me design my own major, and hooked up with two brilliant academics: Hugh Mehan and James Levin, who let me be part of a study to conduct classroom discussion via email.   This was circa 1978, but our university was on the ARPANet, and consequently we had networked computers and email.   So I had an early taste of networking capabilities and it was seen as just part of the infrastructure.

After working in the real world for a couple of years (designing educational computer games), where I got a taste of PLATO (another networked environment), I went back to grad school, where we again had networks with email, and sometime during that period I discovered UseNet, a sort of topic-based discussion board, and became an active user.   (This was before we had any idea this would be stored forever and become searchable, and movie reviews, recipes, and other such stuff I wrote back then can still be found!)   It was a great way to get ask questions, share ideas, follow certain people.

So, when I moved to UNSW for an academic position following my postdoc, I’d met some Aussie surfers online before I went, and hooked up with them for some surf sessions when I got there.   It was during that period that the web came out, following on initiatives like WAIS and Gopher that provided ways to store and find information on line.

The point is, when the HTTP protocol emerged, it wasn’t a big deal to me. I’d been immersed in a distributed digital information environment for years, and consequently one new protocol didn’t seem like that big a deal.   So in a sense I really missed the sea-change that so many people felt, and pretty naturally took advantage of creating web pages, sites, and then online content.

One big change for me, however, accompanied a subsequent development, the CGI protocol.   A student and I had developed a learning game for the Children’s Welfare Agency, and it was successfully distributed on floppy disks.   When I found out about the CGI protocol, I realized this would allow maintaining (game) state, and that we could then play games on the internet.   I had another student project port the game to the web.   It may be old-fashioned now, but I’m thrilled that it still works, 15 years later!

Since then, the web has both been a source of employment, as a channel for designing learning solutions, and the more common infrastructure for life that others have discovered (info, commerce, collaboration).   Along the way, in addition to the game, I’ve developed online conferences (back in 1996), an online learning competition (1997) streamlined online course (circa 1998), and an adaptive learning engine (1999-2000), all ahead of their time (for better and worse :).   And the innovation continues.

How has the Web changed business and society? Here I don’t have much to say in addition to what’s been written by many. It’s provided an opportunity for information to reach more people, flattening hierarchies, breaking up information monopolies, and serving as a source for democratization.

Businesses have been able to dis-intermediate the market, cutting out middle-men.   Internally, it has been possible for organizations to flatten the hierarchy, and work more effectively while distributed.   Externally, companies are able to have richer dialogs with their customers and partners.   It’s been less easy for companies to control information, as well, as the Cluetrain Manifesto and the 95 theses has alerted us to.

It’s also created new businesses and business models.   Web 1.0, producer generated content, had some impact, and I’ve argued that Web 2.0 is about user-generated content, has created new opportunities.   Web 3.0 will be even more interesting, with capabilities of delivering custom information and capabilities.   Which leads me to the last question:

What do you think the Web will look like in twenty years? I really think that the web will have become transparent. For most of us, the information access capabilities will be transparent: so ubiquitous we take it for granted.   There just will be information wherever and whenever you want it.   We’ll be surrounded by clouds that follow us that define who we are and where we’re at both physically, chronologically, and metaphorically, so that information will be available on demand in whatever ways we want.

From the production side, we’ll be creating information by our actions that will be aggregated and mined for useful ways to serve us.   We’ll have new models of learning that integrate across technologies and space to develop us in meaningful ways to empower us to achieve the goal we want.   And, most likely and unfortunately, there will be information to continue to try to sway us to do things that others would prefer we do.   I would hope, however, that we’re moving in a positive direction where we slow down our progress to the point we can make sure we’re bringing everybody along.

The opportunities are huge and potentially transformative, we just have to marshal the social will.

Finally, I’m supposed to tag two people to continue this chain letter.   My colleague Jay Cross has talked before about how the internet changed his life and it’s a great story, so I’ll suborn him here.   I’ll also ping another colleague who you should know about, Jim Schuyler, who shared several of the journeys I mentioned above.

Kapp & Driscoll nail Learning in 3D

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Karl Kapp and Tony O‘Driscoll have launched the age of virtual worlds in organizational learning by providing a thorough overview in their new book Learning in 3D. This is a comprehensive and eloquent book, covering the emerging opportunity in virtual worlds.   Replete with conceptual models to provide structure to the discussion as well as pragmatic guidance to how to design and implement learning solutions, this book will help those trying to both get their minds around the possibilities and those who are ready to get their hands dirty.

Learning in 3D Blog Stop badgeTheir enthusiasm for the opportunities is palpable, and helps bolster the reader through some initial heady material. The book is eloquently written, as you‘d expect from two academics, but both also play in the real world, so it‘s not too esoteric in language or concept.   It‘s just that the concepts are complex, and they don‘t pander with overly simplistic presentations. They get it, and want you to, too.

Their opening chapters make a solid argument for social learning.   They take us through the changes society is going through and the technology transformations of the internet to help us understand why social learning, formal and informal, is a powerful case.   They point out the problems with existing formal learning, and identify how these can be addressed in virtual worlds.

What follows is a serious statement of the essential components of a virtual world for organizational learning, a series of models that attempt to capture and categorize learning in a 3D world.   They similarly develop a series of useful ‘use cases‘ (they term them “archetypes”), and place them in context.   Overall, it‘s a well thought out characterization of the space.

Coupled with the conceptual overviews are pragmatic support.   There are a number of carefully detailed examples that help learners understand the business need and the outcomes as well as the design.   There are war stories from a number of pioneers in the space.   There is a systematic guide to design that should provide valuable support to readers who are eager to experiment, and the advice on vendors, adoption, and implementation is very practical and valuable.

The book is not without flaws: they set up a ‘straw man‘ contrast to virtual world learning.   While all too representative of corporate elearning, the contrast of good pedagogy versus bad pedagogy undermines the unique affordances of the virtual world.       I note that their principles for virtual world learning design are not unique to virtual worlds, and are essentially no different (except socially) from those in Engaging Learning.     And their 7 sensibilities doesn‘t seem quite as conceptually accurate as my own take on virtual world affordances.   But these are small concerns in the larger picture of communicating the opportunities.

This is a valuable book for those who want to understand what all the excitement is about in virtual worlds.   I‘ve been watching the space for a number of years now, and as the technology has matured have moved from thinking that the overhead was too high to where I believe that it is a valuable tool in the learning arsenal and only going to be more so. This book is the guide you need to being ready to capitalize on this opportunity.   You can get a 20% discount purchasing it directly from Amazon.   Recommended.

Content Models and Mobile Delivery

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On Friday, I had the pleasure of a conversation of Kris Rockwell, CEO of Hybrid Learning for my in-process mobile learning book. I’d sought him out because of how he was developing mobile.   Using content models to separate out the content from how it gets rendered for display, he’s creating more flexibility across devices. This combines two of my passions, and is part of a performance ecosystem strategy.

Hybrid uses DITA, a standard for wrapping definition around content, to develop their content.   He presented powerful arguments to use this open source topic-based approach.   For one, being open source, you’re not locked in to a proprietary format, yet backed by IBM it’s well supported.   Second, it’s lightweight, compared to say S1000D (which I hadn’t heard of). And, of course, it’s portable across systems, meaning your solution doesn’t die even if your vendor does!

The use of a specification for such description around the content being developed is something I argue for regardless of mobile delivery or not.   When you wrap more rigor, and more semantic granularity around your development process, you’re well on your way to an organized content governance process.   For instance, if you design into a template even for the quick one-off requests that often come through the door in learning units, you are more likely to be able to reuse that content elsewhere, and, conversely, draw upon available content to shorten the development time. Done properly, the if you update the source one place, the changes should propagate throughout the relevant content!     There are lots of cost efficiencies being found in documentation with this approach, and it should percolate into elearning as well.

What Kris is also finding, however, is a real advantage in content portability   across mobile devices. Content so developed can easily be re-rendered for different devices, if they don’t already have the capability to hand.   He argues convincingly that designing for a device is a bad approach, and designing for device-independent delivery gives you the power not only to hit more platforms but also more flexibility for new platforms that emerge.   In short, your content development costs are amortized across more delivery options and ‘future-proofed’.

There was a lot more of interest in the conversation, including layered exploration (a “drill down” navigation style) and the potential for ordinary cell phones (dumbphones) to be viable delivers of instruction.   But that’s a topic for another day.   The take home for today, however, is think content models as well as mobile.

Distributed Thinking & Learning

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A post I was pointed to reviews a chapter distributed thinking, a topic I like from my days getting to work with Ed Hutchins and his work on Distributed Cognition.   It’s a topic I spoke about at DevLearn, and recently wrote about.   The chapter is by David Perkins, one of premier thinkers on thinking, and I like several things he says.

For one, he says: “typical psychological and educational practices treat the person in a way that is much closer to person-solo”.   I think that’s spot-on, we don’t tend to train for, and design for, the augmented human, and yet we know from situated cognition and distributed cognition that much of the problem solving we do is augmented in many ways, from pencil and paper, to calculators, references, and mobile devices.

I also like his separation of task solving from executive function, where executive function is the searching, sequencing, etc of the underlying domain-specific tasks, and how he notes that just because you create an environment that requires executive functioning, it doesn’t mean the learner will be able to develop those skills.   “In general, cognitive opportunities are not in themselves cognitive scaffolds.”   So treat all those so-called ‘edutainment’ games that claim to develop problem-solving skills with great care; they may require it, but there’s little effort I’ve seen that they actually develop it.

The implication is that having kids solve problems with executive support, but without scaffolding that executive support and the gradual release of those executive skills to the learner, we’re not really developing appropriate problem-solving skills.   We don’t talk explicitly about them, and consequently leave the acquisition of those skills to chance.   If we don’t put 21st century skills into our courses, K12, higher ed, and organizational, we’re not really developing our performers.

And that, at the end of the day, is what we need to be doing.   So, start thinking a bit broader, and deeper, about learning and the components thereof, and produce better learning, learners, and ultimately the outcome performance.