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Clark Quinn’s Learnings about Learning

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Like riding a bike…

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(Sorry for the delay, I don’t like to wait this long between blogs, but as soon as I was back from the Guild conference, and catching up with the backlog, I was off to a gig.)

We’d gotten our kids bikes, but we don’t have an ideal situation for it. Our backyard is wood deck, pebbled concrete, steep driveway (cars have had trouble getting up), and (semi-) landscaped hill. Our neighborhood is similarly largely vertical, and even the cul-de-sac is small and still somewhat with a grade. My son got on top of riding while at his cousin’s, but my daughter never did.

However, there are lots of bike paths in the flats down the hill, and my wife really wanted us to do some bike rides together. In the past couple of weeks we bought some new bikes for the kids that suited their current sizes, didn’t put training wheels on for the daughter, and tried to get them both used to the new bikes.

In the cul-de-sac, my daughter did a couple of shots of riding with us running along behind holding her up, and managed some, but never got very comfortable nor skilled. So, this past Saturday, we went down to their school playground and had them ride around.

My wife started with my daughter, and next thing I know, my daughter’s riding around on her own! Her story is that Mom let go without telling her so she thought she was ok. My wife’s story is that daughter yelled out “let go” so she did. Regardless, suddenly she was peddling on her own, turning, everything. And with a huge grin on her face; she was so thrilled! As were we.

So Sunday the family took that bike path. And I was the one with a grin on my face.

The lesson was that with the right tools, motivation, support, and environment, learning is magic. Are you making your learning experiences like that?

Course technology and assignments

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In the recent ITFORUM discussion, I had an opportunity to revisit the assignment strategy I had developed last time I taught an online course, and I thought it worth repeating here:

I had a philosophy that the major components to successful retention and transfer were for learners to connect the learning to their own life, to elaborate the material conceptually, and to apply the knowledge practically. Consequently, I had them: keep journals (e.g. blogs) with three posts per week about their own reflections on how the course materials were relevant in their lives; post answers to my posed conceptual questions on the discussion board and comment in a elaborative way on someone else’s post (the prior post to theirs, except the first person who commented on the last post); and the group assignments applying the knowledge to a posed ‘real’ problem (no hesitation about ‘exaggerating’ the importance of the situation when possible ;).

It seemed to work, as their final report (a separate task) generally correlated with the quality of the work above and overall their understanding seemed to coalesce to the desired level.

There are problems with group assignments, when some students don’t contribute sufficiently, but these days tools like wikis track who’s done what (for example, in the CentralDesktop workspace I’m working with a few colleagues on a next-gen organizational learning approach), so it should be possible to evaluate it.

Central Desktop Contribution Tracking

It’s nice that the tool diversity supports different cognitive tasks, and then the only question is whether/how to integrate them together.

Mobilized reactions

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In this (anonymous) post on the Learning Technologies conference blog, there’s a reaction to my previous post on mobile tipping point. Two pertinent quotes: “To my mind mobile learning will always be one of two things – either a niche delivery mechanism to tackle particular issues, as with BT, or (and less commonly within organisational L&D) a general delivery mechanism for ‘just-in-case‘ learning.” and “I also find it difficult to imagine mobile learning being used as the primary mechanism for a general, on-going programme of organisational learning and development.”

The response I posted:

Yes, it’s not about putting a full course on a mobile devices, it’s performance support or learning augment.
But it is about the technology to the point that once mainstream content development/authoring tools start having mobile-capable output as an easy option, it will cross the chasm, and that appears to be happening. The devices are out there, but it’s not yet easy enough to get content onto them.

It’s really about ‘just in time’ learning, not ‘just in case’, ala the Zen of Palm showing mobile use is in short amounts frequently, versus desktop. There are more ‘just in case’ delivery options including, specifically, podcasts, and ebooks, but that’s really about convenience rather than ideal opportunity. Yes, it’s another specialist tool.

However, there’s a wide swath of space under the “niche delivery mechanism to tackle particular issues” with many nuances, and really a wealth of opportunity. “mLearning” may be the wrong monicker, maybe ‘mPerformance’, but the organizational impact potential is truly worth exploring. Adventure, anyone?

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.

Future Strategy

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Jay Cross has started talking about a rethink on what ‘management’ is about. He’s spot on that focusing on execution is not sufficient, and it’s got to be about “giving everyone a voice, experiment often, power comes from below, communities are self-defining, decisions are peer-based, and just about everything is decentralized”. I think it’s fair to say that ‘administering’ business (hence the MBA) isn’t the way forward.

He then goes on to talk about the implications for training departments. His take is that “ISD lacks the framework to invent non-learning solutions. Meta-learning and flexible infrastructure are becoming more important than individual topics.” I’m a fan of meta-learning, and what he then talks about is really filling what Jay calls the ‘learnscape’, with opportunities to learn, to collaborate, and more. It’s not the LMS (see Will Thalheimer’s recent piece), it’s a whole suite of resources, channels, and more.

On ITFORUM, George Siemens just concluded a discussion about his connectivist model of learning, and how the networks are in our head and external, and that learning will be building and exploiting those networks external to augment what we know to solve new problems. Our notion of ID will be much broader than course design if it’s to succeed; we have to be about supporting people through their own learning. I was thinking the ‘training’ department of today will need to be the ‘learning partner’ of tomorrow, helping others develop resources, mentoring discussions, finding new tools.

That’s what I’m trying to help organizations do: see the bigger picture, take responsibility for the full performance ecosystem, and move to a more enlightened approach to learning and, consequently, business. It’s not only doable, it’s really the only option, don’t you think?

K-12 education and technology

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On Monday, my day started with a meeting with our local school principal. No, my kids weren’t in trouble, nor was I, but instead I’d been offering to assist in improving the use of technology in the classroom, and the new principal finally got the message. So, I’m helping out.

The funding situation is dire; everything but No Child Left Untested, and legal requirements for special education is pretty much optional and dependent on parent support. However, there are grants available, and there’s an opportunity in our local community, so I’ve been giving advice.

It’s hampered, of course, by the state standards. They’re at the level of ‘use MS Word to do X’. Which is just wrong. There’s nothing wrong with using Word, but the standard should be focusing on the goal: ‘communicate Y using a word processing program capable of X’ or somesuch. And it shouldn’t be an independent goal, but a layer on top of curriculum goals ‘Outline and then finalize an article about the local Indians using a word processing program such as MS Word’. Hey, I’m thinking it might be Google Docs or Pages!

It gets back to your curriculum goals, and I’ve already argued those should be about using tools to accomplish goals like communicate, collaborate, evaluate, etc. So, together we’re considering using the grant (which has to buy technology) to run workshops that help the teachers rewrite lesson plans to use technology as a tool (and we’ll buy some projectors so the output can be viewed).

Of course, the workshops will have to require the teachers to create files and presentations, since some of them aren’t tech-savvy. And others of the teachers believe teaching to use the tools, e.g training on PowerPoint, is the answer. However, research tells us that if we teach the tools as ends in themselves, they won’t be used as tools to accomplish goals. I suggested that we even not teach the tools, but just give the goals and have reference cards around. Sometimes I think we don’t give kids enough credit!

Of course this is all further hampered by a limited tech environment. Students can manipulate other’s files, and even misplace their own, instead of saving into a safe place. A major district level effort was to get the teachers to all put their name, phone number, and email address on their school web page.   I said that that information should be auto-populated from a data base. Of course, silly me, the district system isn’t that sophisticated.

Our kids are getting tech savvy, despite the school system, but it’s got great variation, naturally correlated with the tech savvy and financial resources of the parents, which suggests an ongoing digital divide. There’s a long road ahead of us to address the curriculum goal we really need to implement, and use the technology to support these goals. So, I’ll start on one little part, and see what can be done.

MacWorld Expo report…

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For those of you who didn’t make the trek yourself (and why would you, unless you’re a fanatic Mac user or live in the Bay Area), here’re some brief thoughts on the MacWorld Expo this year. You can mostly ignore if you don’t care about Macs, but I have to say that more people are considering or making the switch!

First, the MacBook Air is unbelievable. It’s just SO thin! It’s hard to believe it’s a full computer. The way it uses wireless to remove the need for backup and accessing CD/DVD is very well thought out. You’ll have to have another Mac (or a PC) to do media stuff, perhaps, but that’s more peripheral. And I’ve gotta love the tag line: Thinnovation (sounds so familiar :).

Microsoft’s Office 2008 for the Mac is available, and is finally reasonably priced (Home/Student Edition; I don’t need Exchange capabilities). I just bought iWork, but Pages doesn’t have outlining, plus I’ll want to read the new Office XML formats, so I snapped it up. Apparently it’ll support 3 licenses, so it covers the whole house, too. I may not trust the OS, but the apps can be a requirement. (NB: iWork covers 5 licenses, so it’s around the house too).

I also bought Parallels, the virtualization software that lets Intel-powered Macs run Windows (supposedly runs XP better than VMWare’s Fusion, the main competitor, and I’m SO not going to Vista). It supposedly lets me use the license for XP from my old copy of Virtual PC (an emulator, that was unusably slow). I don’t intend to run Office, but I sometimes need Internet Explorer with Active X for various client stuff (as I was doing last week, with some over-the-top security plan). We’ll see how it goes!

The floor was covered with neat covers for iPhones, iPods, and even your laptops, accessories like input devices (keyboards), stands and furniture, etc. Also, of course, software. There’re usually expo-only deals, so I ended up saving more than the cost of the Bart ticket and lunch by coming down (but not by much, since I didn’t buy much, the only other thing was a keyboard cover for my laptop).

Apple made other announcements besides the MacBook Air, including a hard drive-equipped wireless router to automatically handle backups for the whole network, some iPhone/iPod Touch software updates, and iTunes movie rentals. Much as I like the Air, I think that the latter is the really interesting move, business-wise. The 24 hour limit on watching time after starting will be an initial deal-breaker (we often take 2 nights to finish a movie), but other than that there’s a real potential switch here in terms of the relationship between consumer, distributor, and producer.

I’m trying to recall what else I saw that’s of interest for elearning and more. There’re some Mac training companies, but that’s not really what I mean. I guess the one thing, besides cool software like Graphic Converter and OmniGraffle, was the fact that The Brain is now Mac compatible. The Brain is a tool that lets you link concepts together in ways that reflect their conceptual relationships. Jerry Michalski has publicly been creating his brain for years now, as a great demonstration (and a personal tool). It can currently be used to collaborate via a server version that uses the web (though potentially P2P soon, apparently), and it’s the type of knowledge sharing and collaboration tools I think we need to advance organizational innovation.

All in all, a fun way to spend the day (I also got to spend some time walking the floor with mentor/colleague/friend Jim Sky). I’ll have to let you know if more reflections emerge, but as I say when I talk about mobile learning, we really have magic these days (c.f. Arthur C. Clarke’s “any truly advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”). Our limitations are between our ears, now, no longer the technology.

Knowledge marketing

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Brent Schenkler points out this connection: using web 2.0 tracking software to find out who’s commenting to whom. It’s about a company with a technology that lets you track who’s talking about what and identify the top talkers (for marketing purposes; presumably to know who to seed with information/product). Brent’s interesting point is that such technology could be used internally to track who’s talking about what within the company, and it’s a great idea. He’s talking about measuring learning outcomes but I see it more as a knowledge management tool to see who knows what.

The problem I see is that the technology first requires you to identify a topic that you want to track. Of course, you could put in a series of words or phrases of interest to the company, but how do you find what’s emergent and new in the conversations? There are KM tools that check your email to see what you know (and with ways to avoid the obvious concern about having your email checked), but your blog posts and comments, wiki edits, etc are another way to look at what you talk about (and, presumably, know).

So, a very interesting and eye-opening perspective on how we might look for who really knows what.

DevLearn thoughts

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It’s been a mad week (not going to change for a couple of weeks, yikes), what with presentations and breakfast bytes and events and…   It was a great conference (people are even raving about the food)!   Some quick thoughts while I spend time with family before my upcoming 1.5 weeks away:

There was a consistent theme in the keynotes, ones I naturally resonate with: creativity, change, and innovation.   Sir Ken Robinson opened with a witty conversation on creativity and how we all need to cultivate it.   It’s one of the elements in my notion of what a future curriculum needs to include. Paul Saffo talked about the changes that are occurring (and really suggested elearning is poised to be a real factor).   Finally,   Frans Johannsen talked about generating innovation from diversity.

Mobile is where games were 2 years ago, just at the top of the hill and gaining momentum for that downhill roll.   The pre-conference symposium was great fun, listening to David Metcalf, Judy Brown, and Ellen Wagner showing great examples, talking about great principles, etc (and Steve Wexler and Brent Schenkler in there for the research).   The audience really pitched in asking tough questions, coming up with great ideas, and really getting into it.   While I underestimated the timing on my mobile design exercise, it’s one I think I can refine and have great fun with in the future.

Games are really steaming along.   People are getting that learning has to have engagement, contextualization, be focused on meaningful change, etc.   My session on the emotional side of elearning went well, the Immersive Learning Simulation challenge organized by Mark Oehlert was a hoot, with great stuff by Brent Smith and Anne Derryberry.   The goal was to design a game to help convicts survive on the streets and not return to prison.   It was really interesting to see how what we presented all mutually reinforced.   It’d be a great team!   More will be happening on this, such as Clive Shepherd taking a shot at it on Monday supposedly.   When I get a moment, I’ll post my thoughts and approach.   We’re hoping others will take a shot and start a discussion. Not necessarily on the particular topic, but using that as a way to catalyze discussion about how to design and implement serious games, er, ILS.

My session on elearning tools went really well, I thought, generating discussion about what purposes the tools serve.   This despite the fact that the handouts were missing some graphics (grr), which I didn’t know about ’til afterward.   People were so into it that they asked if there were a way to continue.   I”ll be talking to the Guild about doing that.

There was a blogger’s bash Wed night, and Jay Cross invited some Knowledge Management bloggers from the KM World conference going on down the block.   Had a very interesting conversation with Dave Snowden who has some rather revolutionary ideas that resonate, but I’ve got to digest them a bit more.   Short version: all our categorization is useless, live in the moment ad hoc.

There may be more, but I’ve off to kid’s soccer tournaments, etc.

Graffling, and out of the (OS) Closet…

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My name is Clark and I’m a Macaholic. My grad school experience was largely around applied cognitive science, particularly interface design, and I’d followed the leading edge work at PARC that made it into the Mac (after the Lisa flopped). If you care about user experience, you sorta have to practice what you preach and use a Mac if you can (and I understand if you can’t).

I recognize that Microsoft won the workplace war (Apple shot itself in the foot), but the superior design of Apple is finally getting wider acceptance (c.f. the iPod). Not that I don’t know how to use Windows (we have a PC in the kitchen, next to a Mac), but when I want to get work done, rip my MacBook Pro out of my cold dead hands (which of course was how I felt about the Treo until the iPhone came out, now I’m split :).

The reason I bring this up, however, is to laud a program that runs on the Mac that is exemplary of how to design a program to match the way you think. I have no idea if it’s similar to Visio (which I haven’t used), but it’s superb in working the way I think about things, making it easy to do the things I want to do. And I know I’m not taking full advantage of it! It’s often amazingly intuitive (an over-hyped concept in interface design), usually knowing how I want to finish what I just initiated. I’ve had really great customer service from them as well.

This program is OmniGraffle, which is a Mac only graphing program. You’ve seen the output if you’ve looked at any of my diagrams (e.g. the models page). I went back and recreated all my diagrams in OmniGraffle once I started playing with it because it’s really close to fun to use it. And you’ve got to admit that’s a powerful thing to say about what’s essentially a tool!

My academic integrity (still extant after these years away :) means I couldn’t laud a program I didn’t really believe in, so trust me that this is truly an avid fan’s unsolicited testimony. The colleagues I’ve pointed towards it also rave. If you use a Mac and create diagrams, I recommend checking out the free trial. If you use a PC, you might try to find a way to sample it just to see what an interface *could* be (try, for example: creating a shape, then cutting it and pasting a second one and moving it where you want it, then paste again and see where it ends up).

Jane Hart had a very clever idea and surveyed learning folks’ favorite tools, but I’m particularly interested in ones you use to think better (I use diagrams as my way to model and understand the world, as well as outlines in MS Word to write). I’d welcome hearing your ThinkerTools.