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Clark Quinn’s Learnings about Learning

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Going Mobile

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I found out that where I’m going this week didn’t have coverage by Sprint. We’d be in the mountains (‘rustic’ cabins) but there is power, and I didn’t want to be completely out of touch as I was a couple of weeks ago.

I’d been waiting a year and half since my two year contract had expired, but wasn’t completely happy with any new mobile phone solutions.   At first I hoped the iPhone was the solution, but it wasn’t quite ready for primetime.   As a Palm fan (simplicity, solidity, great story about it’s design), the Centro was appealing, having full PIM (notes & ToDos as well as contacts and calendar), cut/copy/paste, a real keyboard, lots of apps, etc, but the browser’s weak, and no GPS or wi-fi is kind of a bummer.   The Treo 800W is mighty appealing, except for Windows Mobile.   I just *can’t* go there.   It’s got to be dead reliable.   Blackberry‘s just too closed for me, and Symbian‘s too odd (these are mobile OSs).

So, the iPhone 3G appealed (ok, maybe I’m an Apple fanboy, but I was a grad student in an interface design group when the Mac came out, and you had to love the leadership in user experience which has stayed market leading from then ’til this day), and the fact that ATT does claim to have coverage in the area was the kicker that got me to go wait in line Friday morning.   And, yes, I know that the iPhone 3G does not have full syncing PIM yet, nor copy/paste.   But it’s software upgradeable, and all the hooks are there. So, we’ll see.

So far, my experience is mixed.   The screen is simply awesome, and the interface is quite cool. It does sometimes take a lot of work to get to various things. It’s got a non-standard jack, so suddenly all my hands-free wires are worthless (grumble mumble); I may be forced to get a bluetooth headset for driving!   Typing’s OK.   I’ve got music loaded, and photos (but dual copies of the folder I want, and can’t figure how to delete one).   It gets email, but I managed to tap-dance over the push account I’d set up, and one of my accounts keeps complaining about connection ( I got one message only on the phone, not on my computer, and can’t forward it #$%^&!)

So, something (else) to keep me busy in the mountains. Besides prepping.   In a week, I fly off to Chicago for the Guild’s summer seminar series on Collaborative Learning, and the one on Immersive Learning Simulations.   I expect to learn heaps in the former, and think we’ve managed to design a great experience for the latter.     I do believe it will be good value, good learning, and good fun.

BTW, my brother and family stopped thru on their way back from the mountains.   Their boys have matured well of late, and it was great to see them and have them here.   Pool, wildlife museum (live fox, owls, raptors, snakes, coyote, all wounded and saved), ultimate frisbee in the park, eating, drinking.   Family is important to us.   I reckon it’s something that’s wired-in, and to be nurtured.   As well as having fun!   Hope your summer is turning out fun too.

Future of the Book?

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Last nite was the NextNow event on the future of the book/publishing/? Jay Cross really helped by adding significant data around and input to the discussion; a very public thanks.   He’s also blogged it, with video.   We had a very diverse audience of around 30 or so; many were authors, there were CEOs & entrepeneurs, artists and musicians, noted scientists, and more. Many shared one or more of my own publishing experiences, including as author, board member of a not-for-profit that publishes, editorial board member of a journal, and, of course, as a blogger.

After introductions, which already raised many issues, Jay walked us through the history of the book (Guttenberg was an entrepreneur, the first totable book was sized to fit in saddle bags), and we talked about the pros and cons of books.   We discussed our varied experiences with publishers, and there were quite a few unhappy ones.   Then we got into the issues.

As I mentioned earlier, Jay and I had come up with a few, including editorial ‘voice’ (who’s vetting the information), interactivity, volatility, ownership, and money.   Interestingly, as the discussion continued, others emerged.   Michael Carter raised an interesting point, that we were conversing about books and publishers, and they’re not the same things, and that it was really about matching ignorance with knowledge.   He also mentioned that the current chapter and book size is arbitrary, which is something I’ve seen in textbooks.   Christine Walker mentioned how our cognition might change without the book experience.   There was considerable optimism about setting information free, which I didn’t squelch with my concern about the need for ‘filters’.

We covered the ‘collected papers’ model, where proactive instructors or good editors choose appropriate contributions to a definitive compilation (with my note that most instructors just want to choose a text, and there are compilations that are just vanity projects without a representative or definitive sampling for the topic).   We also talked about marketplaces, and Laleh Shahidi mentioned a learning object model of content, of which there’ve been several experiments (including Propagate, a system that Peter Higgs launched way back around 1998!).   One of the ideas would be to have several authors to choose from, but then you’d need ‘templates’ for topics, with agreed structure.   One of the current situations is that authors present totally different takes on subjects.

At the end, it appeared that publishing is about 4 things:

  • development: the right choice of message and author for the knowledge gap
  • production: the right choice of presentation of the information
  • marketing: the right marketing of availability to need
  • money: the business model that surrounds the first three

The interesting thing is that with the internet (and on-demand printing), the production costs have essentially hit zero. There’s clearly a role for editorial choice, but at some point everyone can publish, and we need ways to find what we want, which is really about the marketing, which was clearly where many authors (including yours truly) felt that they were let down.   We heard of an interesting experiment in viral marketing, with Amy Jussell mentioning a blog-produced book. The question is whether such an effort is replicable. Of course, there’s still the cachet that comes with having a publisher choosing.   The flip-side is tha traditional publishers still take months from final manuscript to final print.

So, no answers, but lots of interesting issues.

Deeper ID: Coming FRIDAY to a browser near you!

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The eLearning Guild runs a great set of Online Forums (standard disclaimers about my involvement). They’re offering one tomorrow and Friday on Creating Innovative Instructional Content – Advanced Theory and Application, and for mysterious reasons needed a pinch-hitter.   So, my involvement continues, and I’ll be on Friday at 10:15-11:30 Pacific Time, talking about Deeper Instructional Design.

This is a topic that I continually see a need for, sad to say.   As I just wrote for the blurb: “The evidence is clear; it‘s too easy to find eLearning with a rote knowledge focus, verbose writing, boring introductions, fact recitation, useless examples, meaningless practice, and a consequent rapid atrophy of the experience.   What we want is meaningful outcomes, and what we get is a painful experience to be avoided.”

What I’ll be doing is working through the various components of instructional design: intro, concept, example, practice, and summary   (which don’t have to be used in this order, but there’s only so much a person can cover in one presentation), and talking about the cognitive and motivational underpinnings that make these elements work.   For each, I’ve specific ways to improve.   It’s not necessarily new, but too few folks seem to know about it!   Yet the research points to greater learning outcomes.

I’ll be in good company; the line-up of speakers has some known names, and some important topics.   Problem-Based Learning is definitely noteworthy, as are the Semantic Web and Competencies & Roles, and I’m personally intrigued by Video Interactive Learning Objects. The other sessions promise similarly interesting ways to rethink design.   Karen Hyder coordinates the presentations, and she is great at making sure that presenters are comfortable and presenting effectively.   So, if you’re looking for greater depth and quality in your elearning, I recommend the forum.   A great conference from your own browser in two half-day sessions!   Hope to see you there.

Mobile in perspective

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I’m not quite sure how the eLearning Guild is publishing the forthcoming articles from their research reports, but I believe it is as part of the Learning Solutions magazine, and that’s certainly the case with this first piece. Ellen Wagner, a member of the mobile research team, has a major article, with a small piece by me that’s an expansion of my earlier thoughts on mobile web. You have to be a least an associate member to download it, but associate membership is free. I’ll add that I believe the Guild is probably the best way to keep up to date on practical applications of technology for learning.

Ellen’s article is a thoughtful look at mobile learning, covering the industry trends. She points out that people are equipped with mobile devices: “the mobile workers aren’t waiting”. She says that the classic top-down doesn’t make sense, and figuring out how to make a mobile learning module does; that is, just do it. On the other hand, she also says that “to have a shot at broad adoption, mobile learning applications must be an integrated part of a larger organizational vision for building capacity”. These aren’t as incommensurate as they may seem, as those in the trenches should begin experimenting with mLearning just as they did with eLearning, and at the same time managers and executives should be looking to the broader eLearning strategy incorporating mobile (as I regularly suggest).

She points out the barriers that still exist, so that even when we’re seeing essentially ubiquitous computational and network capability, we’re seeing incompatibility across providers and platforms. There are still technology barriers to cross, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t start thinking ‘mobile’. The reasons are many, including the increasingly mobile workforce. And she acknowledges the emerging consensus that mobile learning is really about performance support. That may not be the limit, but it’s certainly the low-hanging fruit.

I highly recommend her article, as Ellen’s been deeply involved in the world of content delivery through her recent stint as the eLearning guru at Adobe, and has experience and knowledge that puts her at the forefront of thinking in this space. It’s an honor to have my little piece in the same document as hers. (NB: mine is also available separately as well, PDF).   Check it out!

Buy Smart!

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Don’t ask how my thoughts got here, but I was reflecting on the fact that the western economy is largely predicated on a free market (whether we truly achieve that is a different rant). Which, to work properly, needs consumers to be ‘optimizing’. That is, for the free market to drive improvements and fair prices, people have to vote effectively with their dollars.

Which isn’t the case. Herb Simon, the polymath who won a Nobel Prize in economics before becoming one of the world’s top cognitive scientists, coined the term ‘satisficing’ for consumer behavior. That is, folks will settle for what’s good enough. Worse, they’ll settle for how they’ve been manipulated (read: advertising).

My proof is simple (though it works better in Australia where there’s more comprehension of the example): if market pressures worked, every fish and chips shop in Australia would make perfectly light, crispy fish and chips. I mean, we know what it takes to do that. Instead, it’s real easy to find greasy, soggy fish and mealy fries. Someone is buying that fish! QED.

Which is why one of the serious games I’d really like to do is have the player try to succeed in an advertising agency. (Thought I’d written about this before but couldn’t find it. Apologies if I have.) Such a game would help folks understand just how advertising works and ideally help folks become more resistant to it.

But there’s more. I suggest (educated and interested amateur speaking) that our current system doesn’t truly allow for tracking individual contributions (or good teachers would be wealthy :). There are economic systems that do this tracking, but to my understanding, the overhead is unwieldy and ultimately impractical. So, rather than try to change the system, my simple answer is to educate folks (hence my passion for learning).

buysmartlogo-bycooltext

Where my thinking led me was to a ‘buy smart’ campaign. I wonder what we could do if we just managed to get profile to the message that folks should research the bigger picture of your purchase: looking at maintainability, repair, longevity, ideally also including environmental and social impact (can’t help it, I’m a wilderness person :). The more we look for the right choice, not just the easy or popular choice (extraneous of the immediate price pressures we’re currently seeing), the more we end up matching the assumptions of the economic system we are using. And that’s got to be better, right?

I guess it’s just that same wisdom schtick again, thinking longer term and with broader responsibilities. Yet, I can’t help thinking raising awareness could be a small step toward a better future. You think?

Summer Seminar Series

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With the caveat that I’m one of the speakers, I’d like to bring the eLearning Guild’s upcoming Summer Seminar Series to your attention. They’ve put together two back-to-back seminars that cover the latest trends.

Summer seminar series

The two seminars cover social networking, and serious games. The first seminar is led by Mark Oehlert and Brent Schenkler, who not only are fun, dynamic, individuals, but are totally into new tools. And that’s a good thing, because they’re insightful and articulate about the role these new technologies can play in organizational improvement. I track both their blogs just to keep up with what’s happening in these arenas. I’ll get to kibbitz (and learn), but they’re the two leaders of this session.

Which leaves Jeff Johannigman and myself to lead the second workshop on serious games, ILS, etc. Jeff’s got a commercially-validated track record of successful games and a consequent insight into how to create compelling experiences, and provides the perfect foil for my focus on the learning side. Of course, he’s now focused on learning, so we’ve got enough overlap to make this fun (we’ve co-presented before on games at the ILS symposium at the last Guild conference). I expect Mark and Brent will likewise kibbitz on the side in this one. We’ll augment some of the best parts of my workshop on ILS design with his insights on game design, as well as covering issues of development, corporate relevance, etc.

If you can’t tell, I’m excited about this series! I think that together, they cover some important components of acheiving the performance ecosystem: advanced ID and eCommunity. Being run by the eLearning Guild, of which I’m a fan because they do such a good job of providing value for money just reinforces the expectations that the experience will be worthwhile. So, if you’re looking to get in-depth on either topic, or better yet both, this is a great opportunity. Set your calendars for August 11-14, and definitely hope to see you there!

Mobile in 5 Paragraphs

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A colleague asked me for 5 paragraphs on mobile:

Let‘s get that straight right from the beginning: mobile learning is not about courses on a phone. mLearning is where we really bring home the message: “It‘s not about learning…it‘s about doing”, because while there are learning implications for mobile devices, it‘s really about performance support. Yes, one of the applications of mobile devices is learning augmentation, extending the learning experience over time through distributed presentations, examples, and practice, but the real opportunities are providing context-sensitive support for the mobile workforce. Increasingly, the workforce is mobile, whether directly for work or indirectly, e.g. commuting, and they have the devices (“Have you already purchased a mobile learning device” “Let me rephrase the question: do you have a cell phone” “Hello…”). Not taking advantage of it is just leaving money on the table.

The variety of mobile devices is vast, spanning media players, handheld gaming platforms, PDAs, cell phones (though that name is no longer apt; cellular technology is long gone), and, increasingly, smartphones. There are convergences, however, where many mobile devices are now phones, media players, PIM (Personal Information Management, read: contacts, calendars, memos, and ToDos), GPS, and more. If you‘re having trouble with any of these TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) BTW, you can do a search on them to get them defined.

The issues are in how to develop content and resources for these devices, and the answers stack up like a pyramid. The bottom is the proverbial “low hanging fruit”, the content you already have that can be made available “as is” or converting the files to mobile formats. So, your PDFs, your audio recordings of presentations, any videos, and of course your web pages/HTML. The next level is taking all the content you will continue to produce, and proactively capture it (if you‘re not) and ensure that it‘s an automatic feature of your process to produce mobile ready versions. The top is to develop specific mobile resources, and that‘s where we‘re reaching the tipping point: instead of custom tools, we‘re seeing the major tool providers now providing mobile output options. The mobile web is another increasing option, as more and more mobile devices include browsers. As I say, “480 x 320 is the new 1024 x 768”. Mobile is hitting the mainstream.
And, it is hitting it in many ways. There have been instances of successful courses on mobile devices, but that‘s not the sweet spot. One of the more useful options is in augmenting online or face-to-face courses.

We know learning retention fades fast unless reactivated, and mobile gives us a great way to do that. We can send out different ways of thinking about it, more examples, and even new forms of practice. In fact, we should start rethinking the course, moving to blending including mobile as part of the extended experience! The second major big win is in making accessible support for the mobile workforce. We can provide manuals, trouble-shooting, even remote part ordering, to the field engineer. We can bring customer refreshers and updates, cross-selling recommendations, and purchasing capabilities to our mobile field force. And more.

Organizationally, the workforce is more distributed, more mobile, and needing to be more opportunistic and contextually optimal. Mobile is an enabler of increased individual and organizational performance. You need to treat it like any other initiative, managing the change process, but it also leverages other changes that might be happening. Knowledge or content management, mobile device deployment, webinars, many are the initiatives that, with a marginal extra effort, make mobile an additional delivery channel and opportunity. Take advantage of this new direction!
Further resources include:

Serious About Games, and podcasting

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Lisa Neal and I have co-written an article about whether there are topics that serious games weren’t appropriate for. If you know me, you can probably guess where we come down on the topic ;).

Her blog has a bunch of interesting 10 things lists. For instance, her most recent post presents 10 reasons why text is better than podcasting. I responded:

I recall a story about an organization where the engineering groups produced white papers that the others wanted to read but didn‘t have time. The training group had someone read the white papers to make audio files, so the engineers could listen to them on their commutes. The engineers demanded more! (How often do training groups get demands for more of their services?!?!)

So, while I personally am not particularly auditory, and you make good points, there are times when they‘re the best tool for the job, as the other commenters suggest.

And, of course, there’s ‘voice’ . So, two topics of conversation. What do you say?

Learning to eLearn

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Lisa Neal’s put a nice list of hints and tips to be a better elearning professional. Her tips focus on how to get deeper into formal learning, which Scott Leslie expands in a comment. However, there are some good additions from Jay Cross and Saul Carliner about how to broaden the fields you draw upon.

The point being, you’ve got to be a consistent and persistent self-learner, which is a meta-learning topic. Things are dynamic and changing, and you’ve got to keep pushing the envelope. It takes little time (Lisa’s talking about 10 minutes per day), and yet it may be the best investment you can make personally. I’ll also argue that helping learners to learn (what Tony Karrer calls “building learning skills”) is probably the best investment an organization can make!

What are the ways you keep yourself continually learning?

Questions from the audience

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Today we held the Emerging Trends panel session at the TechKnowledge conference. We‘d intended to use an audience response system (aka ‘clickers‘), but of course the technology didn‘t work at that moment, so my colleagues (Frank Nguyen, Ann Kwinn, and Jim Javenkoski) and I winged it with questions from the audience.

Second Life came up a couple times. Joe Miller was the keynote on Wednesday, and in his far ranging and thoughtful presentation he reinforced my previous thoughts on what the fundamental learning affordances are, and helped illuminate a point that hadn‘t really gelled for me.

Using Tony O‘Driscoll‘s diagram, he elaborated on the topic of the current state of virtual worlds. In 1995, when you first looked at HTML, did you have any idea that the web would grow to where it is today? The argument is similar for Second Life, in that the first generation of the web was “Democratization of Access”, where now anyone could find information. Web 2.0 is “Democratization of Collaboration”, where you can create, share, and comment. He called virtual worlds the “3D internet”, and here it‘s the “Democratization of co-creation”.

Besides that, the panel still felt that it‘s about socialization and spatial capabilities, and, as Frank said, that if your objectives didn‘t match those, a virtual world wouldn‘t need to be your solution. I also recited the barriers that Joe had mentioned – usability, download, and processing load -as a way to reinforce the point that there‘s considerable initial investment, and I believe that such worlds make sense when you are intending to have a long-term in-world involvement.

Several questions danced around the relevance of instructional design and the teaching thereof. I pointed to the ongoing dialogs, and we generally agreed that the teaching wasn‘t as aligned to real world practice as it could be, but, as Ann pointed out, ISD principles still apply (our brains haven‘t changed).

Another question came out about the real world validity of Web 2.0. I cited an audiocast of a cutting edge project leader who used BaseCamp, Twitter, Deli.cio.us, IM, and more to keep his team aligned, and my own use of technologies to accomplish various business goals. Jim raised the point that Web 2.0 is a way to have the communication be two way, not just from the designers to the victims, er, learners.   These tools may initially take up extra time, but once ‘assimilated’, they are proving to be time-savers in productivity as well.

One individual pointed out how there seemed to be two camps of instructional technology: traditional eLearning which was instructivist and a second that was social. I agreed and pointed out how we really need to wrap instruction with collaboration from the get-go to help learners immediately recognize that dialog is part of the process and enculturate them into the community.

We also talked about the pragmatics of introductions of technology. To a question about moving the government along, I suggested that there‘s a ‘late adopter‘ advantage of avoiding mistakes (though I‘m not so certain it‘s strategy rather than inertia :), and that solid examples with ROI were the best leverage.

Another question on how to get people to use wikis seemed to suggest that in the particular instance, wikis were the wrong tool (the goal was capturing ‘stories‘). As it pushed one of my hot buttons, I suggested that we should not forget to do a proper match between need and tool, nor forget older tools in the flush of new technologies; in this case a discussion list would probably be a better tool. However, my real answer is that when the need is a resource, a wiki can be a collaboratively improved resource and the way to get participation is to make sure the resource is valuable. I would add, now, that a session I heard indicated success in using incentives to get initial participation, and that may be pragmatic, if not principled ;).

Many thanks to the participants, I thought it was a nice way to cap off the conference.