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Clark Quinn’s Learnings about Learning

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Ignoring Informal

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I received in the mail an offer for a 3 book set titled Improving Performance in the Workplace.   It’s associated with ISPI, and greatly reflects their Human Performance Technology approach, which I generally laud as going beyond instructional design.   It’s also by Pfeiffer, who is my own publisher, and they’re pretty good as publishers go.   However, I noticed something that really struck me, based upon the work I’ve been doing with my colleagues in the Internet Time Alliance (formerly TogetherLearn).

The first volume is really about assessing needs, and design, and it includes behavioral task analysis and cognitive task analysis, and even talkes about engagement strategies in simulation and gaming, video gaming.   The second volume includes performance interventions, and includes elaerning, coaching, knowledge management, and more (as well as things like incentives, culture, EPSS, feedback, etc.   The third volume’s on measurement and evaluation.

All this is good: these are important topics, and having a definitive handbook about them is a valuable contribution (and priced equivalently, the whole set is bargain-priced at $400).   However, while I don’t have the book to hand to truly evaluate it, it appears that there are some gaps.

In my experience, some issues are not behavioral or cognitive but attitudinal.   Consequently, I’d have thought there might be some coverage.   There was a chapter in Jonassen’s old Handbook on Research in Ed Tech on the topic, and I’ve derived my own approach from that and some other readings. When they get into tools, they seem to miss virtual worlds, and they seem to have a repeat of the straw-man case against discovery environments (many years ago it was recognized that pure discovery wasn’t the go, and guided discovery was developed).   It bugs me that I can’t find the individual authors, but I do recognize the names of one of the editors.     But these aren’t the biggest misses, to me.

Overall, there seems to be no awareness of the whole thrust of social and informal learning.   Ok, so Jay’s book on Informal Learning is relatively new, and the concrete steps may still be being sorted out, but there’s a lot there.   Or perhaps it’s covered in Knowledge Management (after all, Marc Rosenberg’s been deeply involved in ISPI and wrote the Beyond e-Learning book).   Yet it seems a bit buried and muddled, and here’s why:

I’m working with a client now, and one of my tasks is surveying how they’re using social media.   A group responsible for technical training (and they’re an engineering organization) recognized that they weren’t able to keep up with the increasing quantity and quality of changes that were coming.   Rather than do a performance improvement intervention, they realized that another opportunity would be to start putting up information and inviting others to contribute.   They put up a wiki, and first maintained it internally, and then gradually devolved some of the responsibility out to their ‘customers’.

The point is, how does that fit into the traditional paradigm?   And yet, increasingly, we’re seeing and recommending approaches that go beyond the categories that fit here.   I wonder if their metrics include the outputs of enabling innovation.   I wonder if their interventions include expertise finders and collaboration tools. I wonder if their analyses include the benefits of ‘presence’.

Times are changing, faster and faster.   I think these books would’ve been the ideal thing, maybe 5 years ago.   Now, I think they’re emblematic of a training mindset when a larger perspective is needed.   These come into play after you’ve identified that a formal approach is needed.   They use a phrase of a ‘performance landscape’, but their picture doesn’t seem to include the concepts that Jay includes in his ‘learnscape’ and I as the ‘performance ecosystem’.

Seed, feed, & weed

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In my presentation yesterday, I was talking about how to get informal learning going.   As many have noted, it’s about moving from a notion of being a builder, handcrafting (or mass-producing) solutions, to being a facilitator, nurturing the community to develop it’s own capabilities.   Jay Cross talks about the learnscape, while I term it the performance ecosystem. The point, however, is from the point of the view of the learner, all the resources needed are ‘to hand’   through every stage of knowledge work. Courses, information resources, people, representational tools, the ability to tap into the 4 C’s (create, contextualize, connect, co-create).

Overall, it taps into our natural learning, where we experiment, reflect, converse, mimic, collaborate, and more.   Our approach to formal learning needs to more naturally mimic this approach, having us attempting to do something, and resourcing around it with information and facilitation.   Our approach to informal learning similarly needs to reflect our natural learning.

Networks grow from separate nodes, to a hierarchical organization where one node manages the connections, but the true power of a network is unleashed when every node knows what the goal is and the nodes coordinate to achieve it.   It is this unleashing of the power of the network that we want to facilitate.   But if you build it, they may not come.

Networks take nurturing.   Using the gardener or landscaper metaphor,   yesterday I said that networks need seeding, feeding, and weeding.   What do I mean?   If you want to grow a network, you will have to:

Seed: you need to put in place the network tool, where individuals can register, and then create the types of connections they need.   They may self-organize around roles, or tasks, or projects, or all of the above.   They may need discussion forums, blogs, wikis, and IM.   They may need to load, tag, and search on resources.   You likely will need to preload it with resources, to ensure there’s value to be found.   And you’ll have to ensure that there are rewards for participating and contributing.   The environment needs to be there, and they have to be aware.

Feed: you can’t just put in place, you have to nurture the network.   People have to know what the goals are and their role.   Don’t tell them what to do, tell them what needs done.   You may need to quietly ‘encourage’ the opinion makers to participate.   And the top of the food chain needs to not only anoint the process, but model the behavior as well.   The top level of the group (ie not the CEO, but the leader of whatever group you’ve chosen to facilitate) needs to be active in the network.   You may need to highlight what other people have said, elicit questions and answers, and take a role both within and outside the network to get it going.     You may have to go in and reorganize the resources, take what’s heard and make it concrete and usable. You’ll undoubtedly have to facilitate the skills to take advantage of the environment.   And you have to ensure there’s value there for them.

Weed: you may have to help people learn how to participate.   You may well find some inappropriate behavior, and help those learn what’s acceptable. You’ll likely have to develop, and modify, policies and procedures.   You may have to take out some submitted resources and revise them for better usability.   You may well have to address cultural issues that arise, when you find that participation is stunted by a lack of tolerance of diversity, no openness to new ideas, no safety for putting ideas out, and other factors that facilitate a learning organization.

However, if you recognize that it will take time and tuning, and diligently work to nurture the network, you should be able to reap the benefits of an aligned group of empowered people.   And those benefits are real: innovation, problem-solving, and more, and those are the key to organizational competitiveness going forward. Ready to get grubby?

Guff: a conversation in 3 parts. Part 3

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A: “Ok, you‘ve got me thinking about this social learning guff.   But it sounds expensive as well as difficult.   Suppose I need a whole social media system, some big installation.   Not sure I can sell it up the chain.”

B: “One thing at a time.   First, it doesn‘t have to be expensive.   You likely already have some of the social media infrastructure, and other ways can be darn near free, but of course the rest of it does take time and effort.”

A: “Well, the cost is good news.   But I‘ve got to have payoff numbers.   Intangibles are a hard sell.”

B: “I hear you.   That‘s why it‘s worth it to take some time and do the back of the envelope numbers.   It‘s not like you can pull someone else‘s numbers off the shelf and apply them, though there are examples that can provide guidance, like the customer numbers.”

A: “Customers?   I thought this was internal”

B: “Oh, internal‘s a big opportunity, but so are conversations with customers, supply chain partners, any stakeholders that can be the source of valuable interactions.   Companies have found value crowd-sourcing new products and processes, having customer communities self-help, and even facilitating communities related to their products and services.   And, of course, there have been some spectacular mistakes by ignoring social media!   Have you heard about the cluetrain”

A: “As in ‘get a clue‘?   What is all this, crowdsourcing, cluetrain”

B: “Sorry.   Crowdsourcing is getting a lot of people to contribute ideas.   It‘s the ‘room is smarter than the smartest person in the room‘ (if you manage the process right), carried to the next level.   The Cluetrain manifesto was a marvelously foresightful and insightful recognition that with the power of the network, you no longer can control the information about your company, so you have to start having a dialog with customers.”

A: “So, we need social internal and external, eh”

B: “Yep, that‘s the idea.   And you figure out how much value you can get from your customers by having them provide you feedback, how much by making it easier to help themselves. That‘s on top of the benefits of reducing time to get answers and increasing the quality of internal ideas.”

A: “Sounds hard to quantify.”

B: “Well, it‘s not necessarily easy, but it is doable.   It just takes some time, but during that time you‘ll really be exploring the opportunities to make your company more effective.   There are big wins on the table, and it‘s kind of a shame if you ignore them or walk away.”

A: “Does this mean I can take the cost of the training department away”

B: “No, but changing it.   It‘s not replacing training, though having the social media infrastructure more effective.   Face it, most training is a waste of money not because it‘s not necessary, but because it‘s done so badly.”

A: “I‘ll say.”

B: “So why do you keep doing it”

A: “Because it‘s supposed to be important!”

B: “And it is, but if it‘s important, isn‘t it worth doing well”

A: “I suppose.”

B: “Here‘s the picture: you hire people, but they can‘t know everything they need to, you have proprietary processes, unique products, etc.   So you have some formal learning to get them up to speed, right”

A: “Yes, that‘s why we have it.”

B: “But once they‘re had formal training, they‘re not really productive until they‘ve had a chance to put those skills into play, and refine them. They become practitioners through practice. And then with enough time and guidance, they become your experts.”

A: “It‘s when they get beyond that novice stage that they‘re useful.”

B: “But that‘s when you ignore their needs, and there‘s so much more you can do. Practitioners don‘t need courses, but that‘s about all we do for them, when we should be giving them tools and resources.   Experts should collaborating, but the most we do with them typically is have them offer courses. It‘s broken.”

A: “And social media will hep with those latter two, supporting practitioners and experts.”

B: “Exactly!   And it can assist in making the formal learning better too.   But it requires expanding the responsibility of the training department to be a learning group, not removing the training department.”

A: “Isn‘t this IT?   Or maybe operations or engineering”

B: “Nope, they‘re stakeholders, but you don‘t want IT trying to facilitate conversations!”

A: “Darn right. But trainers aren‘t going to be able to do it either.”

B: “Yep, it‘s a shift, but they or at least the instructional designers should have the grounding in learning to make the shift.   It‘s a new world, and some shifts have to occur.”

A: “I‘ll say, it‘s changes for managers too.”

B: “Yep, new skills for all in learning, new roles, new ways of working. To cope with the new world in which we have to work in: faster, more agile. Eh”

A: “Got it.   Guess I‘d better get me some guff!” Grins.

Mining Social Media

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One of the proposed benefits of social media is the capture of knowledge that’s shared, taking the tacit and making it explicit.   But really, how do we do this?   I think we need to separate out the real from the ideal.

The underlying premise is that we have an enlightened organization that’s empowering collaboration, communication, problem-solving, innovation, etc (what I’m beginning to term ‘inspiration’ in all senses of the word) by providing a social media infrastructure, learning scaffolding, and a supportive culture.   Now, all these people are sharing, but are we, and can we be, leveraging that knowledge?

The obvious first answer is that by sharing it with others, it’s being leveraged.   If information is shared with the relevant people, it’s been captured for organizational use by being spread appropriately.   That’s great, and far too few organizations are facilitating this in a systematic way.   However, I’m always looking for the optimal outcome: not just the best that is seen, but the best that can be. So how can we go further?

The typical response is using data mining that focuses on semantic content: systematically parsing the discussions, and using powerful semantic tools to attempt to capture, characterize, and leverage information systemically. (Hmm, you could map out the knowledge propositions, and link them into coherent chains and then track those over time to see significant changes, even regularly re-sort to see if different perspectives are changing…oh, sorry, got carried away, enough adaptive system designing :).

In terms of social media systems, while there are analytics available, semantics are not part of it, as far as I can see.   Further, I searched on social media mining, and found out that the first international workshop will be happening in November, but it’s not happened yet. There’s an interesting PhD thesis on the topic from UMaryland, but it’s focused on blogs and recommendations. In other words, it’s not ready for prime time.

The point is, that machine learning and knowledge mining mechanisms are in our future, but not our present.   Don’t get me wrong, there are huge possibilities and opportunities here, but they’re a ways off.   So, are we back to the best that can be?   I want to suggest one other possibility.   The systemic mechanisms are nice because, set up properly, they run regardless, but there’s another approach, and that’s human processing.   For all the advances in technology, our brains are still pretty much the most practical semantic pattern matching engines going.   So how would that work?

Well, let’s go back to the role that learning professionals play. We’ve already looked at how they could change as learning units take over responsibility for the broader picture of learning in the organization.   Learning professionals need to be nurturing social learning, and that means being in there, monitoring discussions for opportunities to draw out other members, spark useful feedback, develop skills, and more.

Well, they also can and should be looking for outcomes that could be redesigned/redeveloped/reproduced for broader dissemination.   They should be monitoring what’s happening and looking for information that’s worth culling out and distilling into something that’ll really bring out the impact of that information. Turning information into knowledge and even wisdom!

Yes, that’s a greater responsibility (though it’s also fun; you shouldn’t be in the learning space if you don’t love learning!).   It’s a new skill set, but I’ve already argued that.   The world’s changing, and the status quo won’t last long anyway.   So, while you can just allow and hope that individuals will perceive the value of the information created, and even facilitate by encouraging people to participate in all the relevant communities (which will likely cross role, product/service, and more), there’s a step further that’s to the benefit of the organization and the learners.

We’ll steadily build support for that process, but it will be facilitated, and advanced, by individual practice to complement, supplement, and inform the mechanistic approaches.   Don’t ignore this role; plan for it, prepare for it, and skill for it.   Responsibility for recognizing should be shared, so that the individuals in the network are also doing it (for example, retweeting valuable information), and that’s a learning skill that should be developed.

Here’s hoping you find this valuable!

Artifacts of reflection

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The other day  John Ittelson stopped by for a visit.  I think of him as the guru of video usage in elearning, not least because of the recording studio he built in his house!  He mentioned his use of Flip camcorders, and finally a piece clicked into place that had been floating around in my thoughts.

Media PropertiesI’ve had a slight blindspot for photos and video because I peg the ‘conceptual’ meter. I recognize the value, though I don’t play with the files enough (tho’ I took a digital audio/video editing course more than a decade ago, and recently edited home videos for my wife’s birthday).  Photos and videos are really good for contextualizing, and that’s particularly valuable for examples (and practice).

The revelation was about the value of having learners capture information in situ, and sharing this for a variety of reflective opportunities.  The information captured can be performances, products, whatever.  It could also be interviews, or thoughts.

A colleague’s wife used to take an iPod with a microphone to conduct interviews.  Gina Schreck discussed giving groups of employees Flips to make videos of what their business unit does for the org, to share.  John mentioned capturing samples of teaching to share.  Having captures of actual practice is a valuable tool around which to scaffold discussion, and a powerful tool for reflection.  You can capture someone’s stories of best practices, or your own performance to review.

Note that making both other’s and personal captures available opens up the opportunity to learn more with and from others than your own reflective observations will provide, if you can be that open.  As a learning facilitator, you should provide ways for individuals and groups to capture and share thoughts, actions, events, and more.

One of the powerful things in digital performance environments (read: games, er, immersive learning simulations, and virtual worlds as was part of the discussion the other day) is the ability to capture records of action for review, too.  So look at ways to digitally track activity in learning environments (another reason to make the alternative to the right choice to be a reliable misconception!).

Reflection is powerful, and digital tools give us ways to truly leverage that power.  Reflect on that!

Conceptualizing the Performance Ecosystem

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elearningvaluenet.jpgSo I’ve been playing with rethinking my Performance Ecosystem conceptualization and visualization.   The original had very discrete components, and an almost linear path, and that doesn’t quite convey the reality of how things are tied together. I believe it’s useful to help people see the components, but it doesn’t capture the goal of an integrated system.

I’ve been wrestling with my diagramming application (OmniGraffle) to rethink it.   My   notion is that systems, e.g. content/knowledge management/learning management systems underpin the learnscape, and that on top exist formal learning, performance support like job aids organized into portals, and social media.   Mobile is a layer that floats on top, making contextually accessible the capabilities assembled below.   It’s not perfect, but it’s an evolving concept (perpetual beta, right/).

Strategic LayersSo here’s my current conception.   It took me a long time to create the circle with different components!   First I had to discover that there were tools to create freeform shapes, and then work to get them to articulate, but I like the kind of ‘rough’ feel of it (appropriate for it’s stage).

It also captures the conceptual relationships as spatial relationships (my principle for diagram creation).   At least for me.   So here’s the question: does it make sense for you?   Does it help you perceive what I’m talking about, or is it too a) coarse, b) confusing, or c) some other problem?   I welcome your feedback!

A wee bit o’ experience…

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A personal reflection, read if you’d like a little insight into what I do, why and what I’ve done.

Reading an article in Game Developer about some of the Bay Area history of the video game industry has made me reflective.   As an undergrad (back before there really were programs in instructional technology) I saw the link between computers and learning, and it’s been my life ever since.   I designed my own major, and got to be part of a project where we used email to conduct classroom discussion, in 1978!

Having called all around the country to find a job doing computers and learning,   I arrived in the Bay Area as a ‘wet behind the ears’ uni graduate to design and program ‘educational’ computer games.   I liked it; I said my job was making computers sing and dance.   I was responsible for FaceMaker, Creature Creator, and Spellicopter (among others) back in 81-82.   (So, I’ve been designing ‘serious games’, though these were pretty un-serious, for getting close to 30 years!)

I watched the first Silicon Valley gold rush, as the success of the first few home computers and software had every snake oil salesman promising that they could do it too.   The crash inevitably happened, and while some good companies managed to emerge out of the ashes, some were trashed as well.   Still, it was an exciting time, with real innovation happening (and lots of it in games; in addition to the first ‘drag and drop’ showing up in Bill Budge’s Pinball Construction Set, I put windows into FaceMaker!).

I went back to grad school for a PhD in applied cog sci (with Don Norman), because I had questions about how best to design learning (and I’d always been an AI groupie :).   I did a relatively straightforward thesis, not technical but focused on training meta-cognitive skills, a persistent (and, I argue, important) interest.   I looked at all forms of learning; not just cognitive but behavioral, ID, constructivist, connectionist, social, even machine learning.   I was also getting steeped in applying cognitive science to the design of systems, and of course hanging around the latest/coolest tech.   On the side, I worked part-time at San Diego State University’s Center for Research on Mathematics and Science Education working with Kathy Fischer and her application SemNet.

My next stop was the University of Pittsburgh’s Learning Research & Development Center for a post-doctoral fellowship working on a project about mental models of science through manipulable systems, and on the side I designed a game that exercised my dissertation research on analogy (and published on it).   This was around 1990, so I’d put a pretty good stake in the ground about computer games for deep thinking.

In 1991 I headed to the Antipodes, taking up a faculty position at UNSW in the School of Computer Science, teaching interface design, but quickly getting into learning technology again.   I was asked, and I supervised a project designing a game to help kids (who grow up without parents) learn to live on their own. This was a very serious game (these kids can die because they don’t know how to be independent), around 1993.   As soon as I found out about CGIs (the first ‘state’-maintaining technology) we ported it to the web (circa 1995), where you can still play it (the tech’s old, but the design’s still relevant).

I did a couple other game-related projects, but also experimented in several other areas.   For one, as a result of looking at design processes,   I supervised the development of a web-based performance support system for usability, as well as meta-cognitive training and some adaptive learning stuff.

I joined a government-sponsored initiative on online learning, determining how to run an internet university, but the initiative lost out to politics.   I jumped to another, and got involved in developing an online course that was too far ahead of the market (this would be about 1996-1997).   The design was lean, engaging, and challenging, I believe (I shared responsibility), and they’re looking at resurrecting it now, more than 10 years later!   I returned to the US to lead an R&D project developing an intelligent learning system based on learning objects that adapted on learner characteristics (hence my strong opinions on learning styles), which we got up and running in 2001 before that gold rush went bust.   Since then, I’ve been an independent consultant.

It’s been interesting watching the excitement around serious games.   Starting with Prensky, and then Aldrich, Gee, and now a deluge, there’s been a growing awareness and interest; now there are multiple conferences on the topics, and new initiatives all the time.   The folks in it now bring new sensibilities, and it’s nice to see that the potential is finally being realized. While I’ve not been in the thick of it, I’ve quietly continued to work, think, and write on the issue (thanks to clients, my book, and the eLearning Guild‘s research reports).   Fortunately, I’ve kept from being pigeonholed, and have been allowed to explore and be active in other areas, like mobile, advanced design, performance support, content models, and strategy.

The nice thing about my background is that it generalizes to many relevant tasks: usability and user experience design and information design are just two, in addition to the work I cited, so I can play in many relevant places, and not only keep up with but also generate new ideas.   My early technology experience and geeky curiosity keeps me up on the capabilities of the new tools, and allows me to quickly determine their fundamental learning capabilities.   Working on real projects, meeting real needs, and ability to abstract to the larger picture has given me the ability to add value across a range of areas and needs.   I find that I’m able to quickly come in and identify opportunities for improvement, pretty much without exception, at levels from products, through processes, to strategy.   And I’m less liable to succumb to fads, perhaps because I’ve seen so many of them.

I’m incredibly lucky and grateful to be able to work in the field that is my passion, and still getting to work on cool and cutting edge projects, adding value.   You’ll keep seeing me do so, and if you’ve an appetite for pushing the boundaries, give me a holler!

Strategy, strategically

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In addition to working on the technology plan for my school district, I’ve also been assisting a not-for-profit trying to get strategic about technology.   The struggles are instructive, but looking across these two separate instances as well as the previous organizations I’ve assisted, I’m realizing that there are some common barriers.

The obvious one is time. The old saying about alligators and draining the swamp is too true, and it’s only getting worse.   Despite an economic stimulus package for the US and other countries, and (finally) a budget in my own state, things are not likely to get better soon.   Even if companies could hire back everyone they’ve laid off, the transition time would be significant.   It’s hard to sit back and reflect when you’re tackling more work with less resources.   Yet, we must.

The second part is more problematic.   Strategic thinking isn’t easy or obvious, at least to all.   For some it’s probably in their nature, but I reckon for most it takes a breadth of experience and an ability to abstract from that experience to take a broader perspective.   Abstraction, I know from my PhD research on analogy, isn’t well done without support.   Aligning that perspective with organizational goals simultaneously adds to the task.   Doing it keeping both short- and long-term values, for several different layers of stakeholders, and you’re talking some serious cognitive overhead.

We do need to take the time to be strategic.   As I was just explaining on a call, you don’t want to be taking small steps that aren’t working together towards a longer-term goal.   If you’re investing in X, and Y, and Z, and each one doesn’t build on each other, you’re missing an opportunity. If you’ve alternatives A & B, and A seems more expedient, if you haven’t looked to the future you might miss that B is a better long term investment.   If you don’t evaluate what else is going on, and leverage those initiatives because you’re just meeting your immediate needs, you’re not making the best investment for the organization, and putting yourself at risk.   You need to find a way to address the strategic position, at least for a percentage of your time (and that percentage goes up with your level in the organization).

To cope, we use frameworks and tools to help reduce the load, and follow processes to support systematicity and thoroughness. The performance ecosystem framework is one specific to use of technology to improve organizational learning, innovation, and problem-solving, but there are others.   Sometimes we bring in outside expertise to help, as we may be too tightly bound to the context and an external perspective can be more objective.

You can totally outsource it, to a big consulting company, but I reckon that the principle of ‘least assistance‘ holds here too.     You want to bring in top thinking in a lightweight way, rather than ending up with a bunch of interns trying to tie themselves to you at the wrist and ankles.   What can you do that will provide just the amount of help you need to make progress?   I have found that a lightweight approach can work in engagements with clients, so I know it can be done.   Regardless, however of wWhether you do it yourself, with partners, or bring in outside help, don’t abandon the forest for the trees, do take the time.   You need to be strategic, so be strategic about it!

Measuring the right things

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For sins in my past, I’ve been invited on to our school district’s technology committee.   So, yesterday evening I was there as we were reviewing and rewriting the technology plan (being new to the committee, I wasn’t there when the existing one was drafted).   Broken up into five parts, including curriculum, infrastructure, funding, I was on the professional development section, with a teacher and a library media specialist.   Bear with me, as the principles here are broader than schools.

The good news: they’d broken up goals into two categories, the teacher’s tech skills, and the integration of tech into the curriculum. And they were measuring the tech skills.

The bad news: they were measuring things like percentage of teachers who’d put up a web page (using the district’s licensed software), and the use of the district’s electronic grading system. And their professional development didn’t include support for revising lesson plans.

Houston, we have some disconnects!

So, let’s take a step back.   What matters?   What are we trying to achieve?   It’s that kids learn to use technology as a tool in achieving their goals: research, problem-solving, communication.   That means, their lessons need to naturally include technology use.   You don’t teach the tool, except as ancillary to doing things with it!

What would indicate we were achieving that goal?   An increase in the use of lesson plans that incorporate technology into non-technology topics would be the most direct indicator.   Systematically, across the grade levels.   One of the problems I’ve seen is that some teachers don’t feel comfortable with the technology, and then for a year their students don’t get that repeated exposure.   That’s a real handicap.

However, teacher’s lesson plans aren’t evaluated (!).   They range from systematic to adhoc.   The way teachers are evaluated is that they have to set two action research plans for the year, and they take steps and assess the outcomes (and are observed twice), and that constitutes their development and evaluation.   So, we determined that we could make one of those action research projects focus on incorporating technology (if, as the teacher in our group suggested, we can get the union to agree).

Then we needed to figure out how to get teachers the skills they need.   They were assessed on their computer skills once a year, and courses were available.   However, there was no link between the assessment and courses.   A teacher complained that the test was a waste of time, and then revealed that it’s 15-30 minutes once a year.   The issue wasn’t really the time, it’s that the assessment wasn’t used for the teachers.

And instead of just tech courses, I want them to be working on lesson plans, and, ideally, using the tools to do so.   So instead of courses on software, I suggested that they need to get together regularly (they already meet by grade level, so all fifth grade teachers at a school meet together once a week) and work together on new lesson plans.   Actually, I think they need to dissect some good examples, then take an existing lesson plan and work to infuse it with appropriate technology, and then move towards creating new lesson plans.   To do so, of course, they’ll need to de-emphasize something.

Naturally, I suggested that they use wikis to share the efforts across the schools in the district, but that’s probably a faint hope.   We need to drive them into using the tools, so it would be a great requirement, but the level of technology skills is woefully behind the times.   That may need to be a later step.

One of the realizations is that, on maybe a ten-year window, this problem may disappear: those who can’t or won’t use tech will retire, and the new teachers will have it by nature of the culture.   So it may be a short-term need, but it is critical.   I can’t help feeling sorry for those students who miss a year or more owing to one teacher’s inability to make a transition.

At the end, we presented our results to the group.   We’ll see what happens, but we’ve a new coordinator who seems enthusiastic and yet realistic, so we’ll see what happens.   Fingers crossed! But at least we’ve tried to show how you could go towards important goals within the constraints of the system.   What ends up in the plan remains to be seen, but it’s just a school-level model of the process I advocate at the organizational level.   Identify what the important changes are, and align the elements to achieve it (a bit like ID, really).   If you’re going to bother, do it right, no?

(New) Monday Broken ID Series: Objectives

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Next series post

This is the first in a series of thoughts on some broken areas of ID that I will be posting for Mondays.   The intention is to provide insight into many ways much of instructional design fails, and some pointers to avoid the problems. The point is not to say ‘bad designer‘, but instead to point out how to do better design.

The way I‘ve seen many learning solutions go awry is right at the beginning, focusing on the wrong objective.   Too often the objective is focused on rote knowledge, whether it‘s facts, procedures, or canned statements.   What we see is knowledge dump, or as I‘ve heard it called: show up and throw up.   Then, the associated assessment is similarly regurgitation of what you‘ve just heard.   The reasons this happens, and why it doesn‘t work, are both firmly rooted in the way our brains work.

First, our brains are really bad at rote remembering.   We‘re really good at pattern-matching, and extracting underlying meaning.   That‘s why we use external aids like calendars.   Heck, if it‘s rote knowledge, don‘t make them memorize it, let them look it up, or automate it.   OK, in the rare case where they do have to know it, we can address that, but we overuse this approach.   And that‘s due to the second reason.

Experts don‘t know how they do what they do, by and large.   Our brains ‘compile‘ information; expertise implies becoming so practiced that the process is inaccessible to conscious thought (ask an expert concert pianist to describe what they‘re doing while playing and their performance falls apart).   We found this out in the 80‘s, when we built so-called ‘expert systems‘ to do what experts said they did,   When the systems didn‘t work, we went back and looked at what the experts were really doing, and there was essentially zero correlation between what they said they did, and what they actually did.

What happens, then, is that our Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) do recall what they studied, and toss that out.   They‘ll dump a bunch of relevant knowledge on the designer, and the good little designer will develop a course around what the SME tells them.   So, we see objectives like:

Be able to cite common objections to our product.

What‘s needed is to focus on more meaningful outcomes.   Dave Ferguson has written a nice post defending Bloom‘s skill taxonomies, and he‘s largely right when saying that focusing on what people actually do with the knowledge is critical. However, I find it simpler to distinguish, ala Van Merrienboer, between the knowledge the learner needs, and the complex decisions they   apply that knowledge to, with the emphasis on the latter.   So, I’d like to see objectives more like:

Be able to counter customer objections to our product.

The nuances may seem subtle, but the difference is important.

How does a designer do that?   SMEs are not the easiest folks to work with in this regard.   I‘ve found it useful to turn the conversation to focus on the things that the learner needs to be able to do after the learning experience.   That is, ask them what decisions learners need to be able to make that they can’t make know.   Not what they need to know, but what do they need to be able to do.

And, I argue, what will likely be making the difference going forward will be skills: things that learners can do differently, not just what they know.   I recall a case where an organization was not just looking for the learners to understand the organizational values, but to act in accordance with them (and that that meant).   That‘s what I‘m talking about!

When it comes to capturing objectives, I‘m perfectly happy with Mager‘s format of specifying who the audience is, what they need to be able to do, and a way to determine that they‘re successfully performing.   From there, you can work backwards to the assessment, to the concept, examples, and practice that will develop the skills to pass the assessment.

There‘s another step, really, before this, and that‘s determining what decision learners need to make differently or better to impact the bottom line, e.g. choosing objectives that will affect the organization in important ways, but that‘s another topic for another day.

Doing good objectives is both a skill that can be learned, and a process that can be supported.   You should be doing both.   Starting from the right objective makes everything else flow well; if you start on the wrong foot, everything else you do is wasted.   Get your objectives right, and get your learning going!