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Reimagining Learning

8 March 2012 by Clark 20 Comments

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?

70:20:10 Tech

6 March 2012 by Clark 3 Comments

At the recent Up To All Of Us event (#utaou), someone asked about the 70:20:10 model. As you might expect, I mentioned that it’s a framework for thinking about supporting people at work, but it also occurred to me that there might be a reason folks have not addressed the 90, because, in the past, there might have been little that they could do. But that’s changed.

In the past, other than courses, there was little at could be done except providing courses on how to coach, and making job aids. The technology wasn’t advanced enough. But that’s changed.

What has changed are several things. One is the rise of social networking tools: blogs, micro-blogs, wikis, and more. The other is the rise of mobile. Together, we can be supporting the 90 in fairly rich ways.

For the 20, coaching and mentoring, we can start delivering that wherever needed, via mobile. Learners can ask for, or even be provided, support more closely tied to their performance situations regardless of location. We can also have a richer suite of coaching and mentoring happening through Communities of Practice, where anyone can be a coach or mentor, and be developed in those roles, too. Learner activity can be tracked, as well, leaving traces for later review.

For the 70, we can first of all start providing rich job aids wherever and whenever, including a suite of troubleshooting information and even interactive wizards. We also can have help on tap freed of barriers of time and distance. We can look up information as well, if our portals are well-designed. And we can find people to help, whether information or collaboration.

The point is that we no longer have limits in the support we can provide, so we should stop having limits in the help we *do* provide.

Yes, other reasons could still also be that folks in the L&D unit know how to do courses, so that’s their hammer making everything look like a nail, or they don’t see it as their responsibility (to which I respond “Who else? Are you going to leave it to IT? Operations?”). That *has* to change. We can, and should, do more. Are you?

Will tablets diverge?

25 January 2012 by Clark 2 Comments

After my post trying to characterize the differences between tablets and mobile, Amit Garg similarly posted that tablets are different. He concludes that “a conscious decision should be made when designing tablet learning (t-learning) solutions”, and goes further to suggest that converting elearning or mlearning directly may not make the most sense. I agree.

As I’ve suggested, I think the tablet’s not the same as a mobile phone. It’s not always with you, and consequently it’s not ready for any use. A real mobile device is useful for quick information bursts, not sustained attention to the device. (I’ll suggest that listening to audio, whether canned or a conversation, isn’t quite the same, the mobile device is a vehicle, not the main source of interaction.) Tablets are for more sustained interactions, in general. While they can be used for quick interactions, the screen size supports more sustained interactions.

So when do you use tablets? I believe they’re valuable for regular elearning, certainly. While you would want to design for the touch screen interface rather than mimic a mouse-driven interaction. Of course, I believe you also should not replicate the standard garbage elearning, and take advantage of rethinking the learning experience, as Barbara Means suggested in the SRI report for the US Department of Education, finding that eLearning was now superior to F2F. It’s not because of the medium itself, but because of the chance to redesign the learning.

So I think that tablets like the iPad will be great elearning platforms. Unless the task is inherently desktop, the intimacy of the touchscreen experience is likely to be superior. (Though more than Apple’s new market move, the books can be stunning, but they’re not a full learning experience.) But that’s not all.

Desktops, and even laptops don’t have the portability of a tablet. I, and others, find that tablets are taken more places than laptops. Consequently, they’re available for use as performance support in more contexts than laptops (and not as many as smart or app phones). I think there’ll be a continuum of performance support opportunities, and constraints like quantity of information (I’d rather look at a diagram on a tablet) constraints of time & space in the performance context, as well as preexisting pressures for pods (smartphone or PDA) versus tablets will determine the solution.

I do think there will be times when you can design performance support to run on both pads and pods, and times you can design elearning for both laptop and tablet (and tools will make that easier), but you’ll want to do a performance context analysis as well as your other analyses to determine what makes sense.

Performance Architecture

6 January 2012 by Clark 3 Comments

I’ve been using the tag ‘learning experience design strategy’ as a way to think about not taking the same old approaches of events Ã¼ber ales. The fact of the matter is that we’ve quite a lot of models and resources to draw upon, and we need to rethink what we’re doing.

The problem is that it goes far beyond just a more enlightened instructional design, which of course we need. We need to think of content architectures, blends between formal and informal, contextual awareness, cross-platform delivery, and more. It involves technology systems, design processes, organizational change, and more. We also need to focus on the bigger picture.

Yet the vision driving this is, to me, truly inspiring: augmenting our performance in the moment and developing us over time in a seamless way, not in an idiosyncratic and unaligned way. And it is strategic, but I’m wondering if architecture doesn’t better capture the need for systems and processes as well as revised design.

This got triggered by an exercise I’m engaging in, thinking how to convey this. It’s something along the lines of:

The curriculum’s wrong:

it’s not knowledge objectives, it’s skills
it’s not current needs, it’s adapting to change
it’s not about being smart, it’s about being wise

The pedagogy’s wrong:

it’s not a flood, but a drip
it’s not knowledge dump, it’s decision-making
it’s not expert-mandated, instead it’s learner-engaging
it’s not ‘away from work’, it’s in context

The performance model is wrong:

it’s not all in the head, it’s distributed across tools and systems.
it’s not all facts and skill, it’s motivation and confidence
it’s not independent, it’s socially developed
it’s not about doing things right, it’s about doing the right thing

The evaluation is wrong:

it’s not seat time, it’s business outcomes
it’s not efficiency, at least until it’s effective
it’s not about normative-reference, it’s about criteria

So what does this look like in practice? I think it’s about a support system organized so that it recognizes what you’re trying to do, and provides possible help. On top of that, it’s about showing where the advice comes from, developing understanding as an additional light layer. Finally, on top of that, it’s about making performance visible and looking at the performance across the previous level, facilitating learning to learn. And, the underlying values are also made clear.

It doesn’t have to get all that right away. It can start with just better formal learning design, and a bit of content granularity. It certainly starts with social media involvement. And adapting the culture in the org to start developing meta-learning. But you want to have a vision of where you’re going.

And what does it take to get here? It needs a new design that starts from the performance gap and looks at root causes. The design process then onsiders what sort of experience would both achieve the end goal and the gaps in the performer equation (including both technology aids and knowledge and skill upgrades), and consider how that develops over time recognizing the capabilities of both humans and technology, with a value set that emphasis letting humans do the interesting work. It’ll also take models of content, users, context, and goals, with a content architecture and a flexible delivery model with rich pictures of what a learning experience might look like and what learning resources could be. And an implementation process that is agile, iterative, and reflective, with contextualized evaluation. At least, that sounds right to me.

Now, what sounds right to you: learning experience design strategy, performance system design, performance architecture, <your choice here>?

Making Slow Learning Concrete #change11

7 December 2011 by Clark 5 Comments

It occurs to me that I’ve probably not conveyed in any concrete terms what I think the ‘slow learning’ experience might be like. And I admit that I’m talking a technology environment in the concrete instance (because I like toys). So here are some instances:

Say you’ve a meeting with a potential client. You’ve been working on how to more clearly articulate the solutions you offer and listening to the customer to establish whether there’s a match or not. You’ve entered the meeting into your calendar, and indicated the topic by the calendar, tags, the client, or some other way. So, shortly before the meeting, your system might send you some reminder that both reiterated the ‘message’ you’d worked out, and reminded you about pulling out the client’s issues. Then, there might be a tool provided during the meeting (whether one you’d created, one you’d customized, or a stock one) to help capture the important elements. Afterwards, the system might provide you with a self-evaluation tool, or even connect you to a person for a chat.

Or, say, you’re walking around a new town. Your system might regularly suggest some topics of interest, depending on your interest showing architecture, history, or socioeconomic indicators. You could ignore them, or follow them up. Ideally, it’d also start connecting some dots: showing a picture from a previous trip and suggesting “Remember we saw an example of <this> architect use here? Well, right here we have the evolution of that form; see how the arches have…” So it’s making connections for you. You can ignore, pursue further, or whatever. It might make a tour for you on the fly, if you wanted. If you were interested in food, it might say: “we’ve been exploring Indian food, you apparently have no plans for dinner and there’s an Indian restaurant near here that would be a way to explore Southern Indian cuisine”.

Another situation might be watching an event, and having extra information laid on top. So instead of just watching a game, you could see additional information that is being used by the coaches to make strategic decisions: strengths and weaknesses of the opposing team in this context, intangible considerations like clock management, or the effects of wind.

And even in formal schooling, if you’re engaged in either an individual or group problem, it might well be available to provide a hint, as well as of course tools to hand.

The notion is that you might have more formal and informal goals, and the system would layer on information, augmenting your reality with extra information aligned to your interests and goals, making the world richer. It could and would help performance in the moment, but also layer on some concepts on top.

I see this as perhaps a mobile app, that has some way of notifying you (e.g. it’s own signature ‘sound’), a way to sense context, and more. It might ask for your agreement to have a link into the task apps you use, so it has more context information, but also knows when and where you are.

This isn’t the only path to slow learning. Ideally, it’d just be a rich offering of community-generated resources and people to connect with in the moment, but to get people ready to take advantage of that it might need some initial scaffolding. Is this making sense?

Slow Learning – #change11

3 December 2011 by Clark 18 Comments

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 workâ€, 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 â€˜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 itâ€). 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.

CLO Thinking (& Measurement)

18 October 2011 by Clark Leave a Comment

I attended the CLO Symposium with my ITA colleagues Jay Cross and Jane Hart. It was an interesting event, with a theme of “Game-Changing Learning: Development for the New Normal“, held at a classy venue on the beach, and was well-organized. (You can see Jay’s writeup here.) And the keynotes that I saw were in synch: Stephen Covey talked about the need for trust and Jon Katzenbach on how to build culture were both excellent, as was Dan Pontefract’s story on making collaboration intrinsic to Telus. At a lower level, however, the conference felt mired in the past.

Jay, Jane, and I ran a unpanel where we took questions from the audience and took turns answering it. Some folks even had trouble with the format, apparently! We got questions about how the role of the learning unit changes, about myths and new tools, and about measurement. Our riff inspired some subsequent inquiries if we could assist. Well, but of course!

A lot of the other sessions also seemed to deal with measurement. A special lunch was held specifically around creating a standard set of measurements: effectiveness, efficiency, and business impact. While the latter is business specific, the other two could be handled. Efficiency tends to mean things like amount per hour of training, etc. Effectiveness was less clear, but I’m afraid we’d see pre-post test messages instead of number of people completing the competency test (happy to be wrong). My problem here is that this stuff shouldn’t be a topic in 2011, it should be already well-practiced and in the repertoire. We should be thinking about how to start tracking meaningful activity in social networks, the value of performance support and more, not old stuff about courses. And, how to tie it back to important deltas in organizational performance.

As for addressing the social and informal metrics, while I addressed this a bit earlier, let me go a bit further. If you are putting in performance support (e.g. a portal, but *ahem*, well-designed) or social network, you should be asking yourself what it should be achieving. Is it closing more sales? Generating higher revenue per sale? How about less time spent on customer calls? If you put in an HR portal, you should expect less calls to HR. If you put in a social network among sales folks, you might expect a higher percentage of closing. Figure out what change this should affect, and then find a way to measure it. Which should be the indicator that you have a problem in the first case!

Which is not to say there weren’t good topics on tap too: leadership development for agility, bridging the gap between IT and the learning unit, informal learning, etc. But when other topics are ‘how to talk to executives’, in- or out-sourcing talent, and on-demand training, it’s clear we’re not where we can, and should, be.

“The future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed”, as William Gibson has said, but I guess my concern is with some of what is considered game-changing in an era where the new normal is continual innovation and perpetual beta. Things are moving too fast not to already have mastered the basics of measurement, and be thinking about adapting. The ability to talk ‘business’ should be a pre-requisite for the job, and the strategic issues need to be culture and collaboration. We’re getting there, but then patience has never been one of my strong suits ;).

Layering learning

8 September 2011 by Clark 3 Comments

Electronic Performance Support Systems are a fabulous concept, as pioneered by Gloria Gery back in the early 90’s. The notion is that as you use a system, and have entries or decisions to make, there are tools available that can provide guidance: proactively, intelligently, and context-appropriate. Now, as I heard the complaint at the time, this would really be just good interface design, but the fact is that many times you have to retrofit assistance on top of a bad design for sad but understandable reasons.

The original were around desktop tasks, but the concept could easily be decoupled from the workplace via mobile devices. One of my favorite examples is the GPS system: the device knows where you are, and where you want to go (because you told it), and it gives you step by step guidance, even recalculating if you make a change. Everything from simple checklists to full adaptive help is possible, and I’ve led the design of such systems.

One of the ideas implicit in Gery’s vision, however, that I really don’t see, is the possibility of having the system not only assist you in performing, but also help you learn. She talked about the idea in her book on the subject, though without elaborating how that would happen, but her examples didn’t really show it and I haven’t seen it in practice in the years since. Yet the possibility is there.

I reckon it wouldn’t really take much. There is (or should be) a model guiding the decisions about what makes the right step, but that’s often hidden (in our learning as well). Making that model visible, and showing how it guides the support and recommendations that are made, could be made available as a ‘veneer’ over the system. It wouldn’t have to be visible, it could just be available at a click or as a preference for those who might want it.

Part of my vision of how to act in the world is to ‘learn out loud’. Well, I think our tools and products could be more explicit about the thinking that went into them, as well. Many years ago, in HyperCard, you could just use buttons and field, but you could open them up and get deeper into them, going from fixed links to coded responses. I have thought that a program or operating system could work similarly, having an initial appearance but capable of being explored and customized. We do this in the real world, choosing how much about something we want to learn (and I still want everyone who uses a word processor to learn about styles!) about something. Some things we pay someone else to do, other things we want to do ourselves. We learn about some parts of a program, and don’t know about others (it used to be joked that no one knows everything about Unix, I feel the same way about Microsoft Word).

We don’t do enough performance support as it is, but hopefully as we look into it, we consider the possible benefits of supporting the performance with some of the underlying thinking, and generating more comprehension with the associated benefits that brings. It’s good to reflect on learning, and seeing how thinking shapes performance both improves us and can improve our performance as well.

Goin’ Mobile

7 September 2011 by Clark 1 Comment

This is a copy of an article I’ve written for a Wiley newsletter to promote my mlearning book.

The indicators are clear: the world is going mobile. Mobile subscriptions in the developed world are flattening out, not from lack of interest, but from saturation. People are accessing the internet more from mobile devices than desktops, and some people only access the internet via mobile! And when a small company like Google says that they‘re designing for mobile first and the desktop is an afterthought, it is safe to say mobile is on the move.

And the opportunities are huge. Through the centuries, we have continually extended our physical capabilities with tools: we‘ve developed more capable clothing to let us go to further extremes, more powerful transportation that can let us travel thousands of miles in a matter of hours, tools that can let us work on the scale of mountains or of molecules. We‘ve also used tools to augment our brains: books to serve as external memory, calculators to support our computational capability, phones to allow us to communicate at distances. Digital technology has proven to be the ultimate cognitive augment, doing exactly the things that our brains don‘t do well, so together we‘re truly formidable problem-solvers. And now, we have that capability wherever and whenever we need it. Which has important implications by itself, but there is more potential, too.

Don‘t be mislead by the label, mLearning is about so much more than courses on a phone. In fact, that‘s almost contra-indicated. What mobile learning really is about is augmenting formal learning, and augmenting performance regardless. The old â€˜event‘ model of learning really doesn‘t work very well, as our brains only can handle so much at a time. With mobile, however, we can extend that learning over time. And over space: we can turn the entire world into part of our learning environment, or to think about it another way, we can spread our learning environment over the world. Beyond learning, we can bring specific support to wherever we are: accessing information to make our shopping more effective, our understanding deeper, our interactions richer. We can access information, support our decisions, and share our experiences.

But there‘s also something unique to mobile, beyond a pocketable desktop. As the devices get more capable, they begin to know where we are, even which way we‘re facing, and they can start adding unique information specific to our current context, location-aware. We‘re just beginning to explore the possibilities, and you really do have to think differently to take advantage, but the potential is exciting. Are you mobilizing?

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