What would characterize the reasons why you might start with formal learning, versus performance support, versus social?  My initial reaction, after working with my ITA colleagues, would be that you should start with social.  As things are moving faster, you just can’t keep ahead of the game while creating formal resources, and equipping folks to help each other is probably your best bet.  A second step would then likely be performance support, helping people in the moment.  Formal learning would then backstop for those things that are static and defined enough, or meta- enough (more generic approaches) that there’s a reason to consolidate it.

However, it occurred to me that this might change depending on the nature of the organization.  So, for example, if you are in an organization with lots of new members (e.g. the military, fast food franchises), formal learning might well be your best starting point.  Formal learning really serves novices best.

So when might you want to start with performance support? Performance support largely serves practitioners trying to execute optimally. This might be something like manufacturing or something heavily regulated or evidence based, like medicine.  The point here would be to helping folks who know why they’re doing what they’re doing, and have a good background, but need structure to not make human mistakes.

Social really comes to it’s fore for organizations depending on continual innovation: perhaps consumer products, or other organizations focused on customer experience, as well as in highly competitive areas.  Here the creative friction between individuals is the highest value and consequently needs a supportive infrastructure.

Of course, your mileage may vary, and every organization will have places for all of the above, but this strikes me as a potential way to think about where you  might want to place your emphasis.  Other elements, like when to do better back end integration, and when to think about enabling via mobile, will have their own prioritization schemes, such as a highly mobile workforce for the latter.

So, what am I missing?

#itashare

The perspective riffs off of the concept of the relative value of formal versus informal learning methods shift as performers move from novice to expert. (And, as I’ve previously noted, what’s considered in/formal changes depending on if you’re the performer or designer.)  And, too often, we tend to restrict our interventions to the formal side, yet there are lots of things we can be doing on the informal side.

Largely, however, I see learning and development (L&D) groups as focusing exclusively on novices, or to beginning practitioners, and leaving practitioners and experts on their own.  Even if they’re addressing these more advanced audiences, they tend to use the ‘course’ as the vehicle, when it’s not really  necessary.  These audiences know what they need to know, and just want that useful information, they don’t need the full preparation that novices do.  Novices don’t know what they need to know nor why it’s important, so we provide all that in a course model.  We can be much more telegraphic to advanced performers, and the value of social networks starts kicking in here too.

The point I’m trying to make is that we can, and should, take responsibility for the rest of the performers. We can assist their performance, hence the term we’ve been preferring in the Internet Time Alliance: performance consultant.  This implies facilitating performance across the organizational roles, top to bottom and from beginner to expert.

I’d like to suggest that L&D groups need to become focused on facilitating organizational performance, which includes but is not limited to training.  It’s going to benefit the organization, it’s going to lead to greater strategic contributions and associated value, and it’s an approach that will likely preclude a long slow march to irrelevance and extinction.  Better the folks that understand how we learn and perform (and if you don’t, what are you waiting for?) take responsibility than having it devolve by default to business units and/or IT, eh?

#itashare

A number of us are talking more about working out loud: Jane Bozarth and Harold Jarche talk about ‘narrating your work’, while I go on about ‘thinking out loud’ and ‘learning out loud’.  The point is capitalizing on the benefits that come from putting your thoughts out: people can give you feedback, helping you learn; and folks can learn from you.

And, as I’ve said before, conversations are the engine of business. You need to be interacting to be advancing.

The recent story of Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo, struck me as an interesting case.  Here she’s bringing in folks who’ve been working remotely, or to put it another way she’s not allowing telecommuting any more. While there are obvious downsides, I can think of two justifications for that step:

• to get everyone back on the same page in regards to mission and vision
• to have folks sharing more

Both of these would be good outcomes for Yahoo.  And I can see in both cases that it could be temporary: once you get the mission message shared, and have developed a culture of and infrastructure for sharing, folks could then again work from where they want.  Of course, I have no idea whether that will actually happen.

The interesting thing for me was to contemplate those folks who don’t share.  What to do?  I know of folks who are happy to sit at home and do their job, and aren’t necessarily interested in the larger picture.  What do you do? Sometimes these folks have useful skills.  And they may have their own methods of keeping up to date.  But if they’re not sharing, not contributing, what’s the overall picture?

And the thought occurred to me that those are folks that you bring in as contractors or consultants, but not as employees.  Particularly in the case of a ‘no fire’ policy, who do you want on board?  It seems to me that the employees you want are the ones who are continually learning and contributing to the organization’s overall knowledge.

Sure, there’s lots more you’d have to get right: safety to speak out loud, tolerating diversity, openness to new ideas, but having folks who are willing to learn together seems to me to be one criteria for an organization that will thrive.

So, is this a plausible component of a hiring policy?  Those who demonstrably narrate their work are the ones to attract, develop, and reward?

#itashare

In thinking about the coherent organization, a couple of realizations occurred to me.  One is about how those layers actually are replicated at different levels. The other is how those levels need to be aligned in the organization to the overall vision.

For one, those work teams can be at any level. There will be work teams at the level that the work gets done, but there’ll also be work teams at the management and even executive levels.  Similarly, there are communities of practice at all these levels as well.  Even the top level executives can be members of several communities, including as executives of their org, but also with their peers at other orgs.

Moreover, at each of these levels they need to be tapping into what’s happening outside the organization, and tracking the implications for what they do.  They need to feed back out as well (of course, not their proprietary information).

The two way flow of information has to be in and out as well as up and down.  Communication, for both collaboration and cooperation, is key.

A second necessary component is alignment.  Those groups, at every level, need to be working in alignment with the broader organization’s goals, and vision.  When Dan Pink talks about the elements of motivation in Drive, the 3rd element, purpose, is about knowing what you’re doing and why it’s important.  So organizations have to be clear about what they’re about, and make sure everyone knows how they fit. Then you can provide autonomy and the paths to mastery (the other two elements) and get people working from intrinsic motivation.

The integrated focus on communication and alignment are two keys to developing the ability to continually innovate, and cope in the increasing complexity which will make or break an organization.  That’s how it seems to me.

#itashare

We talked through how things are moving from complicated to complex (and how important it is to recognize the difference), and that organizations need to receive the wake-up call and start moving forward.  Using the Cynefin model, the value will not come from the simple (which should be automated) nor the complicated (which can be outsourced), but from dealing with the complex (and chaotic).  This won’t come from training and top down management. As I’ve said before, optimal execution will only be the cost of entry, and the differentiator (and hence the value) will be continual evaluation. And that comes from a creative and collaborative workforce.  The issue really is to recognize the need to seize new directions, and then execute the change.

One concern was whether we were talking evolution or revolution.  Rather than taking an either or, I was inclined to think that you needed revolutionary thinking (I like Kathy Sierra’s take on this), but that you fundamentally can’t revolutionize an organization short of total replacement (“blood on the streets” as one colleague gleefully put it .  I reckoned a committed change initiative to the place the revolutionary thinking pointed was what was needed.

The issue, then, is the vision and guidance to get there.  What’s needed is leadership that can lead the organization to be able to leverage complexity for success.  This will be about equipping and people to work together on shared goals: sharing, commenting, contributing, collaborating, and more.  It will be inherently experimental in an ongoing way.

What that means practically is an exercise I (and we) are continually working on, but we’ve coalesced on the top-level frameworks to form the basis of tools, and I think what’s needed are some organizations to co-develop the solutions.  Design-based research] if you will. So who’s up for working on the path to the future?

#itashare

Courses -> Search

The first is that too often we think of courses, but what’s happening these days is that people are increasingly self-helping.  Rather than take a course ‘just in case’, they’re getting the help they  need ‘just in time’.  It seems to me that we should be focusing on making sure that learners have good search skills, and searchable and well-organized portals, to ensure searching success.  Whether you view it as performance support or a ‘teachable’ moment, the fact is that learners are self-serving, going for pull solutions more.  The goal is to support performers how they want to, and are learning, rather than trying to force them into our models.

Instruction -> Coaching

As social media is more available, people are more available, and people are often reaching out to others for support rather than courses.  Whether it’s a quick query through a microblog or a full blown video chat, people are increasingly reaching out to folks for help. This is similar to the courses/search above, but sometimes they go for content and sometimes for people.  Are you making it easy to reach out to people?

Development -> Mentoring

Rather than developing people through programs, increasingly people are looking for mentoring. Programmed development is like taking the bus, when mentoring is like having a chauffeur.  It may seem extravagant, but folks like to help, and increasingly having a program of ‘each one teach one’, where those who’ve benefitted from mentoring pass it on, is workable. With digital support, this becomes both a more momentary, and longer term activity.  It’s increasingly viable, so it should be on your radar.

Read -> Watch

It used to be that to the only way to find things out was to read the manual, or a step-by-step job aid. That’s no longer true, and increasingly it’s easy to create videos that show how to do things.  So, for example, it’s now easy to create software ‘walkthrus’, and it’s not just the L&D department that are creating them.  Learners are getting them through services like Lynda.com, and creating their own with screen casting software.  Not to say reading won’t continue to play a role for concepts, but for procedures, the context and dynamism makes videos powerful.  Are you supporting video/screen cast creation, hosting, and searching?

Test -> Simulation 

The pragmatic barriers to creating simulations are falling down, and we now know that knowledge test isn’t an adequate assessment of ability to apply. We no longer have to have separate summative assessments, as digital environments can store performance as part of a portfolio of ability.  Most importantly, we can make the practice environment much closer to the performance environment.  When we’ve determined a real skill needs to be developed, we can and should be looking at rich assessments of ability.

“’til they get it right” -> “’til they can’t get it wrong”

Coupled with the above is the notion that we can move from minimal practice that isn’t sufficient to develop capability and confidence, and start providing sufficient practice to ensure ability.  We need to be spacing it out over time, and ensuring real competence, not just until folks have had a taste of it, but inadequate to develop real capability.  If it matters, we need to match practice to task and learner, and we can.

Desktop -> Mobile

People are now going ‘mobile first’, as are companies like Google.  The reality is that the mobile devices are more familiar, and more available.  People are getting in the habit of getting their support through a mobile device.  And enterprise platforms are increasingly making that solution available.  Are you enabling your workers to meet their needs with mobile?

These are just a few ways we can, and should, be shifting our thinking.  I’m sure you’ve got more, and I look forward to hearing them.

#itashare

My initial step would be to establish a social media system, supporting conversations and collaboration on work teams and communities of practice.  I’d make sure that folks could establish dialogs, work together on documents, and share files, quick pointers, and more fully developed thoughts. They’d also be able to both create and share media, video, audio, and screencasts.  I’d want to have some folks supporting the development of the use of this capability, in a performance consulting or performance strategist role.

Associated with this would be a big emphasis on transparency in communication, with the overall mission of the org percolating all the way through, and emphasizing the part each role plays in the overall picture.  Another emphasis would be on developing individual capability for self-learning.

My second step would be to set up a mechanism to support portals organized around work tasks (not by org silo), where media, files, and conversations around topics could happen.  The goal is to have tools ‘to hand’ as well as people.  Thus, any created job aids would be appropriately located. Again, with a performance strategy focus. This is related to the first point.

Finally, I’d consider formal learning to supplement the informal learning, in places where it demonstrably would add value, with a view to minimizing the use of this except where a sound business case could be made that the time spent was aligned to key business indicator, and that developing this skill was the necessary approach.  And, perhaps, on ways to effectively take advantage of the systems indicated above.  However, a longer term approach than the ‘event’ model would be used.  I’d want to track activity, not just content and assessment.  Compliance and onboarding, typically roles for formal learning, would have a different look than currently.

I’d supplement this with mobile access, and ultimately start looking for ways to add contextual support.  I’d be looking for  business impact across the board. I’d probably structure this as a performance unit, and ensure that the staff are trained to look at the full suite of opportunities to improve performance including social, and consider the emotional side – motivation, anxiety, and confidence – as well as the cognitive.

This is all hypothetical, of course, but I think it’s illustrative of a different way of approaching this.  I think that the way things are going: changing faster, dealing with more ambiguity ,and requiring more ingenuity and innovation, require a different approach than the assess, prepare, rollout model.  The focus increasingly is on supporting people meeting their needs, instead of attempting to meet their needs.  Organizations have to be more nimble, and this approach starts there and works back, instead of the other way around.

#itashare

I had, as Harold’s original model provided the basis for, separate groups for Work Teams, Communities of Practice, and Social Networks.  Within each were separate elements.

In Work Teams, I had included: share problems, co-coach, assist, brainstorm effectively, continuous feedback, welcome contributions, learn from mistakes, align with mission, narrate work, champion diversity, and measure improvement.

Under Communities of Practice I listed: document practice, leave tracks, workshop issues, share examples, co-mentor, discuss principles, continually refine practice, think ‘out loud’, and share concerns.

And in Social Networks I had put: share, contribute, listen, care, interact, and discuss values.  I also had connecters between the groups, each ways, so Work Teams were connected to Communities of Practice by bringing in outside ideas and sharing progress, while Communities of Practice were linked to Social Networks by tracking related areas and sharing results.

What I couldn’t claim was that this was the exhaustive list.  I’d put them in there with some thoughts of both putting in and taking out, but I wanted to go further.

What I did was separate out each of the three areas, and start grouping like terms together (I just took all the terms in the above diagram and dropped them into a new diagram, and started sorting). As I did so, some commonalities emerged. I ended up with the following diagram, which is very much a work in progress.  What I’m trying to get to is the set of behaviors that would be essential for such an organization to succeed, ultimately coming up with a set of dimensions that might be useful as an assessment.  What emerged is a characterization of several different areas within which behaviors fall, which is useful because then I can look for missing (or redundant) elements.

In addition to the connecting tasks, we see several overarching types of behaviors.  Besides the connection between the areas, they grouped like I show here.

Sharing is individual putting out things, which is less pro-active and interactive than actually contributing.  That distinction isn’t quite clear to me either, but sharing might be more pointers to things where contribute is a more substantial contribution.  Which means my elements may not be properly categorized.

Monitoring is both watching what’s going on and pro-actively evaluating outcomes.  Does this need to be broken out into two separate areas? Personal is where you’re working with a specific person (or recipient thereof).  And the culture dimension is where you’re actively aware of and reviewing the underlying values behind what you’re doing.

By no means do I consider this ‘done’, but I share it as part of my commitment to practicing what I preach, thinking ‘out loud’.  This will get refined.  I most certainly welcome your thoughts!

#itashare

Do we work top down, or bottom up?  In the course of the conversation it occurred to me that given the model we propose, that you can’t just have the broader social network create it, and you can’t even really build a community of practice (CoP).  The smallest unit is the working group; how could we use that?

The thought that struck me was creating a working group who’s goal was to create a CoP around being a Coherent Organization. That is, they’d have to understand the principles, start defining and discussing it, document the opportunities, and start disseminating the ideas through the organization.  Inherently, it has to be viral, and the most effective way to introduce a virus is by inoculation.

The idea then is that the mission of the working group is to develop a community of practice around understanding and implementing developing communities of practice. It’s a bit recursive or self-referential, but it’s the seed that needs to sprout.  Seeding it is the action that’s needed to get it going, and then some feeding needs to happen.  While it’s possible that a self-supported initiative could survive, having some external support may make sense in making this happen.

Yes, I’m assuming that the end result is desirable and possible.  The former is, I think, reasonably well accepted (short form: working effectively is a necessary survival tactic, going forward), even if the path to get there isn’t.  I’m suggesting that this is a path to get there. It’s not easy; it takes persistence, support, all those things that make organizational initiatives succeed, with an understanding of the strategies, policies, and cultural adjustments needed.  Yet I’ll suggest that it is doable.  Now, it’s time to do it!

#itashare

I think back to the Coherent Organization, and how folks are collaborating and cooperating in moving the organization forward. There’s lots of thinking going on, in many ways. Folks are solving problems in formal or informal working groups in many ways, whether achieving organizational goals directly, developing themselves together, and furthering the frontiers of their field in a variety of ways. Individual cognitive load we address through providing resources and tools. How do we reduce collective load?

In short, by making access to social networks, to collaborative media, as easy and ‘ready to hand‘ as possible. We want the focus to be on the task, not the tools. It’s about co-creating a performance ecosystem that works fluidly, seamlessly integrating the different resources we need.

It’s cultural as well as structural. You need to remove the barriers to working well, facilitating the ability to constructively interact by welcoming diversity, sponsoring psychological safety, soliciting new ideas, and providing space and time for reflection. You need leaders who walk the talk, learning out loud.

You can’t do this if you don’t understand how folks work and play together, and what it takes to get you there and stay there. The field continues to develop, but you need to be explicit about how this happen, and actively work to minimize interference with effective flow: communication and work.

#itashare

I wasn’t going to bother to say why I answered no before I get to the point of my post, but then I noticed that more than half of the respondents say it is, (quelle horreur), so I’ll get that out of the way first. If your mobile solution isn’t doing something unique because of where (or when) you are, if it’s not doing something unique to the context, it’s not mlearning. Using a tablet like a laptop is not mlearning. If you’re using it to solve problems in your location, to access information you need here and now, it’s mobile, whether pocketable or not. That’s what mlearning is, and it’s mostly about performance support, or contextualized learning augmentation, it’s not about just info access in convenience.

Which actually segues nicely into my main point. So let’s ask, when would you want a tablet instead of a pocketable when you’re on the go? I think the answer is pretty clear: when you need more information or interactivity than a pocketable can handle, and you’re not as concerned about space.

Taking the first situation: there are times when a pocketable device just can’t cope with the amount of screen real estate you need. If you need a rich interaction to establish information: numerous related fields or a broad picture of context, you’re going to be hard pressed to use a pocketable device. You can do it if you need to, with some complicated interface design, but if you’ve the leeway, a tablet’s better.

And that leeway is the second point: if it’s not running around from cars to planes, but instead either on a floor you’re traversing in a more leisurely or systematic way, or in a relatively confined space, a tablet is going to work out fine. The obvious places in use are hospitals or airplane cockpits, but this is true of factory floors, restaurants, and more.

There is a caveat: if large amounts of text need to be captured, neither a pocketable nor a tablet are going to be particularly great. Handwriting capture is still problematic, and touchscreen keyboards aren’t industrial strength text entry solutions. Audio capture is a possibility, but the transcription may need editing. So, if it’s keyboard input, use something with a real keyboard: netbook or laptop.

So, that’s my pragmatic take on when tablets take over from pocketables. I take tablets to meetings and when seated for longer periods of time, but it’s packed when I’m hopping from car to plane, on a short shopping trip, etc. It’s about tradeoffs, and your tradeoff, if you’re targeting one device, will be mobility versus information. Well, and text.

The point is to be systematic and strategic about your choice of devices. Opportunism is ok, but unexamined decisions can bite you. Make sense?

So, let’s start with a performance model. This model came from a look at how people act in the world and I was reminded of it during a conversation on informal learning. Most of the time, we’re acting in well-understood ways (e.g. driving), and we can keep our minds free for other things. However, there may be times when we can’t rely on that well-practiced approach (say, for instance, if our usual route home is blocked for some reason). Then we have a breakdown, and need to consciously problem-solve. Ideally, if we find the solution, we reflect on it and make it part of our well-practiced repertoire.

So what I wanted to do was use this understanding to think about how we might support performance. What support do we need at these different stages? I propose that when we have a breakdown, ideally we find the answer, either as an information resource, or from a person with the answer. Some of the time, we might identify a real skill shift we need, and then we might actually take a course, but it’s a small part of the picture.

If we find the answer, we can go back into action, but if we can’t find the answer, we have to go into problem-solving mode. Here, the support we need differs. We may need data to look for patterns that can explain what’s going on, or models to help find a solution, or even people. Note, however, that the people here are different than the people we would access for the answer. If there were a person with the answer, we would’ve found them in the first step. Here it’s likely to be good collaborators, people with complementary skills and a willingness to help.

If and when we find the answer, then we should share that so that others don’t have to do the same problem-solving, but can access the resource (or you) in the first step. This step is often skipped, because it’s not safe to share, or there’s just not a focus on such contributions and it’s too easy to just get back to work without recognizing the bigger picture. This is one of the components of what Harold Jarche means by ‘narrating your work‘, and I mean in ‘learning out loud’. If it’s habitual, it’s beneficial.

The connection that I see, however, is that there’s a very strong relationship between this model, and the coherent organization model. At the first step, finding the answer, likely comes from your community of practice or even the broader network (internal or external). This is cooperation, where they’re willing to share the answer.

At the second step, if you get to problem-solving, this is collaboration. It may not just be in a work group (though, implicitly, it is a work group), but could be folks from anywhere. The bigger the problem, the more it’s a formal work group.

The point is that while the L&D group can be providing some of the support, in terms of courses and fixed resources, at other times the solution is going to require ‘the network’. That is, folks are going to play a part in meeting the increasing needs for working. The resources themselves are increasingly likely to be collaboratively developed, the answer is more likely ‘out there’ than necessarily codified in house.

There’s going to of necessity be a greater shift to more flexible solutions across resources and people, to support organizational performance. The performance support model will increasingly require an infrastructure to support the coherent organization. Are you ready?

A colleague of mine who was working at Claris suggested how cool this new tool was going to be, and I taught myself HyperCard while doing a postdoc at the University of Pittsburgh’s Learning Research and Development Center. I used it to prototype my ideas of a learning tool we could use for our research on children’s mental models of science. I then used it to program a game based upon my PhD research, embedding analogical reasoning puzzles into a game (Voodoo Adventure; see screenshot). I wrote it up and got it published as an investigation how games could be used as cognitive research tools. To little attention, back in ’91 .

While teaching HCI, I had my students use HyperCard to develop their interface solutions to my assignments. The intention was to allow them to focus more on design and less on syntax. I also reflected on how the interface encapsulated to some degree on what Andi diSessa called ‘incremental advantage’, a property of an environment that rewarded greater investments in understanding with greater power to control the system. HyperCard’s buttons, fields, and backgrounds provided this, up until the next step to HyperTalk (which also had that capability once you got into the programming notion). I also proposed that such an environment could support ‘discoverability’ (a concept I learned from Jean Marc Robert), where an environment could support experimentation to learn to use it in steady ways. Another paper resulted.

I also used HyperCard to develop applications in my research. We used it to develop Quest for Independence, a game that helped kids who grew up without parents (e.g. foster care) learn to survive on their own. Similarly, we developed a HCI performance support tool. Both of these later got ported to the web as soon as CGI’s came out that let the web retain state (you can still play Quest; as far as I know it was the first serious game you could play on the web).

The other ways HyperCard were used are well known (e.g. Myst), but it was a powerful tool for me personally, and I still miss having an easy environment for prototyping. I don’t program anymore (I add value other ways), but I still remember it fondly, and would love to have it running on my iPad as well! Kudos to Bill and Apple for creating and releasing it; a shame it was eventually killed through neglect.

In these situations, there are typically cases that are very white, others that are very black, but most end up somewhere in the middle, with a fair degree of ambiguity. And the concerns of the governing body are various. In one instance, the body was more concerned that you’d done due diligence and could show a trail of the thinking that led to the decision. If you did that, you were ok, even if you ended up making the wrong decision. In another case, the concern was more about consistency and repeatability. You didn’t want to show bias.

However, the training doesn’t really reflect that. In many cases, they point out the law (in the official verbiage), you work through some examples, and you’re quizzed on the knowledge. You might even workshop a few examples. Typically, you are to get the ‘right answer’.

I’d suggest that a better approach would be to give the learners a series of examples that are first workshopped by small groups, with their work brought back to the class. The important things are the ways the discussion is facilitated, supported, and the choice of problems. First, I think they’re given the problems and the associated requirements, guidelines, or regulations. Period. No presentation beforehand, nothing except reactivating the relevance of this material to their real work.

I’m suggesting that the first problem they face be, essentially, ‘white’, and the second is ‘black’ (or vice versa). The point is for them to see what the situation looks like when it’s very clear, and for them to get used to using the materials to make a determination. (This is likely what they’re going to be doing in real practice anyway!) At this point, the discussion facilitation is focused on helping them understand how the rules play out in the clear cases.

Then they start getting grayer cases, ones where there’s more ambiguity. Here, the focus of discussion facilitation is to start emphasizing the subtext: either ‘document your work’, or ‘be consistent’, or whatever. The amount of these will depend on how much practice they need. If the decisions are complex, they’re relatively infrequent, or the decisions are really important, they’ll need more practice.

This way, the learners are a) getting comfortable with the decisions, b) getting used to using the materials to make the decisions, and c) recognizing what’s really important.

I’m relatively certain that this may be problematic for some of the SMEs, who may prefer to argue for right/wrong answers, but I think it reflects the reality when you unpack the thinking behind the way it plays out in practice. And I think that’s more important for the learners, and the training organization, to recognize.

Of course, as they work in groups, the most valuable way to support them may be for them to have the coordinates of other members of their group to call on when they face really tough decisions. That sort of collaboration may trump formal instruction anyway .

Second, I’ll be presenting on mobile at the eLearning Guild’s Performance Support Symposium in September in Boston. Would welcome seeing you there. Also will be doing a deeper ID session for Mass. ISPI while I’m there.

Third, I’ll be keynoting the MobilearnAsia conference in Singapore at the end of October. It’s the first in the region, and if you’re in the neighborhood it should be a great way to get steeped in mobile.

Finally, I’ll be at the eLearning Guild’s DevLearn in November, presenting my mobile learning strategy workshop, among other things.

If you’re at one of these events, say “hi”!

For the sake of argument, let’s assume that the work is well-produced, and explore some levels of differentiation in quality of the learning design. So let’s talk about a lack of worthwhile objectives, lack of models, insufficient examples, insufficient practice, and lack of emotional connection. These combine into several levels of quality.

The first level is where there aren’t any, or aren’t good learning objectives. Here we’re talking about waffly objectives like ‘understand’, ‘know’, etc. Look, I’m not a behaviorist, but I think *when* you have formal learning goals (and that’s not as often as we deliver), you bloody well ought to have some pretty meaningful description around it. Instead what we see is the all-to-frequently observed knowledge dump and knowledge test.

Which, by the way, is a colossal waste of time and money. Seriously, you are, er, throwing away money if that’s your learning solution. Rote knowledge dump and test reliably lead to no meaningful behavior change. We even have a label for it in cognitive science: “inert knowledge”.

So let’s go beyond meaningless objectives, and say we are focused on outcomes that will make a difference. We’re ok from here, right? Er, no. Turns out there are several different ways we can go wrong. The first is to focus on rote procedures. You may want execution, but increasingly the situation is such that the decisions are too complex to trust a completely prescribed response. If it’s totally predictable, you automate it!

Otherwise, you have two options; you provide sufficient practice, as they do with airline plots and heart surgeons. If lives aren’t on the line and failure isn’t as expensive as training, you should focus on providing model-based instruction where you develop the performer’s understanding of what’s underlying the decisions of how to respond. That latter gives you a basis for reconstructing an appropriate response even if you forget the rote approach. I recommend this in general, of course.

Which brings up another way learning designs go wrong. Sufficient practice as mentioned above would suggest repeating until you can’t get it wrong. What we tend to see, however, is practice until you get it right. And that isn’t sufficient. Of course, I’m talking real practice, not knowledge test ala multiple choice questions. Learners need to perform!

We don’t see sufficient examples, either. While we don’t want to overwhelm our learners, we do need sufficient contexts to abstract across. And it does not have to occur in just one day, indeed, it shouldn’t! We need to space the learning out for anything more than the most trivial of learning. Yet the ‘event’ model of learning crammed into one session is much of what we see.

The final way many designs fails is to ignore the emotional side of the equation. This manifests itself in several ways, including introductions, examples, and practice. Too often, introductions let you know what you’re about to endure, without considering why you should care. If you’re not communicating the value to the learner, why should they care? I reckon that if you don’t convey the WIIFM, you better not expect any meaningful outcomes. There are more nuances here (e.g. activating relevant knowledge, etc), but this is the most egregious.

In examples and practice, too, the learner should see the relevance of what is being covered to what they know is important and they care about. These are two important and separate things. What they see should be real situations where the knowledge being addressed plays a real role. Then they should also care about the examples personally.

It’s hard to be able to address all the elements, but aligning them is critical to achieving well-designed, not just well-produced learning. Are you really making the necessary distinctions?

I’ve been reviewing some content for a government agency. This is exciting stuff, evaluating whether contract changes are valid. Ok, it’s not exciting to me, but to the audience it’s important. And there’s a reliable pattern to the slide deck that the instructor is supposed to use: it’s large amounts of text.

Again, exciting stuff, right from the regulations. But that’s important to this audience; I actually don’t have a problem with it. The problem is that it’s all crammed on one screen! Why is this a problem?

It’s not a problem for printing. You wouldn’t want to waste paper, and trees, printing it out. So being dense in this way isn’t bad. No, it’s bad when it’s presented.

When it’s presented, there is some highlighting of the important things. But if you were to hear someone go over the three wordy bullet points on one screen, you’d be hard pressed to follow. However, if you spaced the same screen out three times, one for each bullet point, , you’d support cognitive load more appropriately. You’re using more screens, but covering the same material in the same time, you’re just switching between screens emphasizing the separate points. And you don’t have to put each bullet point on a separate screen; to help maintain context you could have the same text but only the relevant one clear and the others greyed out or blurred.

Hey, screens are cheap. In fact, they’re essentially free! Using more screens when presenting doesn’t cost any more. Really! You can address each point clearly, maintaining context but helping focus attention. It’ll help the instructor too, not just the students.

Ok, so there is one cost. Maintaining a separate deck for printing and projecting could be some extra management overhead. But for one, who’s better at policies and procedures than the government? More seriously, I often will have a slide in my deck that’s a prose version of something I convey graphically, e.g. the five slides I use to present Brent Schlenker’s five-ables of social media (findable, feedable, linkable, taggable, editable). In the presentation I have a slide with an image for each. For print, I hide those five and show the one text one. It’s not that hard. The same principle could be used here, the full slide for printing, the three equivalents for presenting.

There are times when you want more slides. They’re simpler, more focused, and better support maintaining context and focus. Don’t scrimp on the slides. It’s better to have slides with not so much text, but if you must, space it out.

The notion is there that you’re mobile when you’re not at your desk with your desktop or even laptop. Now, sometimes you have a laptop with you, but increasingly I think it’ll be tablet or just a pocketable device (and see my earlier distinctions around those, particularly that laptops don’t typically count). When you’re at your desk, you’re clearly using your desktop or laptop for work, and you’re not mobile.

With the caveat that if the organization is blocking access to some sites (e.g. any search term like ‘game’ or social media site like Facebook and Twitter), you’re highly likely to use your mobile device to get around this. Rightly so, I must say. Increasingly your network is part of your brain and your solution set, and anyone who’d block it is keeping you from being as effective as possible. If they’re worried about, or you really aren’t using it for work purposes, the problem is not the network.

Now, you can be out of your particular workspace but still in either your own office, a satellite office, or even in someone else’s office (e.g. client or partner’s office), but you’re in an office. You may be having meetings, making a site visit, whatever. I reckon attending a conference or a workshop is similar. There you are mobile, unless you’ve lugged your desktop with you (umm, no). Again, increasingly it’ll be a tablet or a pocketable.

And there’s the particular situation of being ‘on the go’, when you’re actually in motion, in a way station (in a shop, restaurant, coffeeshop, or pub), or even some place where there’s no real seating (factory floor, for example). There you’re far more likely to be using your pocketable device in opposition to the laptop or tablet.

You’ll still be accessing your social network, too. More so; you’ll not only getting answers and assistance, but updating people as well.

There are a couple of unique situations. One is attending a virtual meeting. At your desktop, you’d use it. When in another context, you can use your laptop or your tablet. It’s not quite as feasible with a pocketable device (though that will change). Your mobile, but your part of an out-of-context or virtual context event, so it’s conceptually distinct, though practically it may not be.

The other is context-specificity. If the device is doing something unique because of where or when you are, it’s really a different situation than accessing just any content or capability you need. Particularly if the interaction is context-specific. And capturing your context, with media, really is a different category.

The point I’m trying to make is that, particularly in the middle category, mobile is more ubiquitous than you think. You know you’re mobile when you’re not at your desk. And that’s an increasing amount of the time for most people. Which is healthier anyway.

I’ve written before about how the missed opportunity is context awareness, specifically not just location but time. What Qualcomm has created is a system that combines location awareness, time awareness, and the ability to build and leverage a rich user profile. Supposedly, according to Robert, it’s also tapped into the accelerometer, altimeter, whatever sensors there are. It’ll be able to know in pretty fine detail a lot more about where you are and doing.

Gimbal is mostly focused on marketing (of course, sigh), but imagine what we could do for learning and performance support!

We can now know who you are and what you’re doing, so:

• a sales team member visiting a client would get specialized information different than what a field service tech would get at the same location.
• a student of history would get different information at a particular location such as Boston than an architecture student would
• a person learning how to manage meetings more efficiently would get different support than a person working on making better presentations

I’m sure you can see where this is going. It may well be that we can coopt the Gimbal platform for learning as well. We’ve had the capability before, but now it may be much easier by having an SDK available. Writing rules to take advantage of all the sensors is going to be a big chore, ultimately, but if they do the hard yards for their needs, we may be able to ride on the their coattails for ours. It may be an instance when marketing does our work for us!

Mobile really is a game changer, and this is just another facet taking it much further along the digital human augmentation that’s making us much more effective in the moment, and ultimately more capable over time. Maybe even wiser. Think about that.

When designing and evaluating learning experiences, you really want to go beyond whether it’s effective or easy to use, and decide whether it’s engaging. Yes, you absolutely need to test usability first (if there’s a problem with the learning outcomes, is it the pedagogy or the interaction?), and then learning effectiveness. But ultimately, if you want it optimally tuned for success, pitched at the optimal learning level using meaningful activities, it should feel like a game. The business case is that the effectiveness will be optimized, and the tuning process to get there is less than you think (if you’re doing it right). And the only real way to test it is subjectively: do the players think it’s a game.

If you create a learning experience and call it game, but your learners don’t think it is, you undermine their motivation and your credibility. It can be relative (e.g. better than regular learning) as you might not have the resources to compete with commercial games, but it ought to be better than having to sit through a page turner, or you’ve failed.

There are systematic ways to design games that achieve both meaningful engagement and effective education practice. Heck, I wrote a whole book on the topic. It’s not magic, and while it requires tuning, it’s doable. And, as I’ve stated before: you can’t say it’s a game, only your players can tell you that.

So here were these folks doing research on a ‘game’. The punchline: “students, who started playing the game with high enthusiasm, started complaining after a short while, ‘this is not a game’, and stopped gameplay”. Fail.

Seriously, if you’re going to make a game, make it demonstrably fun. Or it’s not a game, whether you say so or not.