• Starting Strategy
• Increasing our responsibility
• Hire the ‘loud’?

All posts by date

• Rethinking eLearning
• Optimizing Learning
• Social Networking: Bridging Formal and Informal Learning
• Are You Committing Learning Malpractice?
• Populating the LearnScape: e-Learning as Strategy (PDF)
• Publish or Perish: Educational Content at a Crossroads
• Making It Matter to the Learner: e-Motional e-Learning

• Starting Strategy (0)Clark QuinnIf you’re going to move towards the performance ecosystem, a technology-enabled workplace, where do you start?  Partly it depends on where you’re at, as well as where you’re going, but it also likely depends on what type of org you are.  While the longer term customization is very unique, I wondered if there were some ...
• Increasing our responsibility (0)Clark QuinnI ranted a couple of weeks ago about how we need to move out of our complacency and make a positive change.  As I sometimes do, I stumbled upon a diagram that characterizes the type of change I think we need to be considering. The perspective riffs off of the concept of the relative value ...
• Hire the ‘loud’? (0)Clark QuinnIn thinking about how organizations can ‘learn’, it strikes me that everyone needs to be simultaneously learning and teaching.  How does that happen?  I think it can be scaffolded, but it may also be an inherent trait. A number of us are talking more about working out loud: Jane Bozarth and Harold Jarche talk about ‘narrating ...
• Aligning coherency (0)Clark QuinnIn 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 ...
• Leadership for Complexity (0)Clark QuinnThe other meme from the retreat event last weekend was the notion of leadership for complexity.  A few of us decided to workshop a topic around performance, leadership, and technology.  We realized technology was only a means to an end, and the real issue was how to move organizations to optimal performance (e.g. the Coherent Organization). ...
• Old -> New (0)Clark QuinnMy ITA Colleague Jay Cross had a hangout over the weekend and the conversation rolled around to the role of L&D in the new era (related to yesterday’s post). I’ve previously addressed how we can now be using tech for more of the full suite of performance, but it occurred to me that there are some ways we ...
• Starting from scratch (0)Clark QuinnFrom a conversation with my ITA colleagues, talking about the (self-imposed) death of L&D that Charles wrote about, Jane wondered what we might do if we were starting from scratch.  I decided to take this on, thinking about an org that was already in operation, with it’s goals, processes, and practices, and what I might ...
• Detailing the Coherent Organization (0)Clark QuinnAs excited as I am about the Coherent Organization as a framework, it’s not done by any means.  I riffed on it for a Chief Learning Officer magazine, and my Internet Time Alliance colleagues have followed up. However, I want to take it further.  The original elements I put into the diagram were ad-hoc, though ...
• Inoculating the organization (0)Clark QuinnI was having a discussion the other day with my ITA colleague Jay Cross, and the topic wandered over to how to use the social approaches we foster under the umbrella of the Coherent Organization to help organizations become one. And I went feral. Do we work top down, or bottom up?  In the course of ...
• Organizational Cognition (0)Clark QuinnA recent post on organizational cognitive load got me thinking (I like this quote: “major learning and performance initiatives will likely fail to achieve the hoped-for outcomes if we don’t consider that there is a theoretical limit to collective throughput for learning”). I do believe organizations have distributed thinking that they apply to solving problems. ...
• The Tablet Proposition (0)Clark QuinnRJ Jacquez asks the question “is elearning on tablets really mlearning“.  And, of course, the answer is no, elearning on tablets is just elearning, and mlearning is something different.  But it got me to thinking about where tablets do fit in the mlearning picture, in ways that go beyond what I’ve said in the past. I wasn’t ...
• Coherent performance (0)Clark QuinnI’ve been revisiting performance support in preparation for the Guild’s Performance Support Symposium next month, and I’m seeing a connection between two models that really excite me. It’s about how social and performance support are a natural connection. So, let’s start with a performance model. This model came from a look at how people act in ...
• HyperCard reflections #hypercard25th (0)Clark QuinnIt’s coming up to the 25th anniversary of HyperCard, and I’m reminded of how much that application played a role in my thinking and working at the time. Developed by Bill Atkinson, it was really ‘programming for the masses’, a tool for the Macintosh that allowed folks to easily build simple, and even complex, applications. ...
• Shades of grey (0)Clark QuinnIn looking across several instances of training in official procedures, I regularly see that, despite bunches of regulations and guidelines, that things are not black and white, but that there are myriad shades of grey.  And I think that there is probably a very reasonable way to deal with it.  (Surely you didn’t think I ...
• Quinnovation online and on the go (0)Clark QuinnFirst, I have to tout that my article on content systems has been published in Learning Solutions magazine.   It complements my recent post on content and data. 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 ...
• Levels of eLearning Quality (1)Clark QuinnOf late, I’ve been both reviewing eLearning, and designing processes & templates. As I’ve said before, the nuances between well-designed and well produced eLearning are subtle, but important. Reading a forthcoming book that outlines the future but recounts the past, it occurs to me that it may be worthwhile to look at a continuum of possibilities. ...
• More slides please… (0)Clark QuinnReally?  Yes.  Let me explain: 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. ...
• You know you’re mobile when… (0)Clark QuinnI was thinking about the different ways you can be mobile, and I think it’s broader than most people think.  So I tried to capture it in a diagram.  For once, I’m not particularly happy with it, but in the spirit of ‘thinking out loud’… The notion is there that you’re mobile when you’re not ...
• mLearning 3.0 (0)Clark QuinnRobert Scoble has written about Qualcomm’s announcement of a new level of mobile device awareness. He characterizes the phone transitions from voice (mobile 1.0) to tapping (2.0) to the device knowing what to do (3.0).  While I’d characterize it differently, he’s spot on about the importance of this new capability. I’ve written before about how ...
• A game? Who says? (0)Clark QuinnI just reviewed a paper submitted to a journal (one way to stay in touch with the latest developments), and all along they were doing research on the cognitive and motivational relationships in the game. They claimed it was a game, and proceeded on that assumption.  And then the truth came out. When designing and ...
• Emergent & Semantic Learning (0)Clark QuinnThe last of the thoughts still percolating in my brain from #mlearncon finally emerged when I sat down to create a diagram to capture my thinking (one way I try to understand things is to write about them, but I also frequently diagram them to help me map the emerging conceptual relationships into spatial relationships). ...
• Piecing together collaboration and cooperation (0)Clark QuinnIn an insightful piece, Harold Jarche puts together how collaboration and cooperation are needed to make organizations work ‘smarter’, integrating workgroups with the broader social network by using communities of practice as the intermediary. This makes a lot of sense to me, and I was inspired to take a look at the practices within those ...
• Stealth mentoring (0)Clark QuinnI was looking for any previous post I’d made about stealth mentoring, so I could refer to it in a post I was writing, and I couldn’t find it. It’s a concept I refer to often (and have to give credit to my colleague Jay Cross who inspired the thought), so here’s my obligatory place ...
• An integrating design? (0)Clark QuinnIn a panel at #mlearncon, we were asked how instructional designers could accommodate mobile.  Now, I believe that we really haven’t got our minds around a learning experience distributed across time, which our minds really require.  I also think we still mistakenly think about performance support as separate from formal learning, but we don’t have ...
• Sims as CTA (0)Clark QuinnI had several great conversations over the course of last week’s #mLearnCon that triggered some interesting thoughts.  Here’s the first: I was talking with someone charged with important training: nuclear.  We were talking about both the value of sims to support deep practice, and the difficulty in getting the necessary knowledge out of the subject ...
• 5 Phrases to Make Mobile Work (0)Clark QuinnToday I was part of a session at the eLearning Guild’s mLearnCon mlearning conference on Making Mobile Work.  For my session I put my tongue slightly in cheek and suggested that there were 5 phrases you need to master to Make mLearning Work.  Here they are, for your contemplation. The first one is focused on ...
• BJ Fogg #mLearnCon Keynote Mindmap (0)Clark QuinnBJ Fogg, known from his work on persuasive technology, talked about making persistent behavior change via tiny habits. Very interesting research with important implications both personally and commercially.
• The Wedge in the Door (0)Clark QuinnWhen I started talking about mobile, I thought it was interesting adjunct to desktop computing. In fact, in my early (2000) article on mobile learning, I said “Soon there will be essentially no distinction between mLearning and elearning.”  And I admit that I was wrong.  At least partly.  Let me explain. It depends on how you ...
• Jane Hart #iel12 Keynote Mindmap (0)Clark QuinnJane Hart, in her personable style, told a compelling story of the what, why, and how of informal learning. She suggested it was about self-directed learning, that it’s already happening, but that there are valuable ways the L&D group can as…
• Mitch Kapor #iel12 Keynote Mindmap (0)Clark QuinnMitch Kapor shared his passion for and belief in the need for computers to help address the problems in education. He was clearly concerned about the low ranking of the US in STEM, and talked about the promise of tech when used appropriately. He cited…
• George Siemens #iel12 Keynote Mindmap (0)Clark QuinnGeorge Siemens delivered an enlightening talk contextualizing analytics, tying the need for more effective coupling in decision making with new types of data.
• Reconciling Formal and Informal (1)Clark QuinnRecently, there’s been a lot of talk about informal learning, which ends up sounding like formal learning, and this can be confusing. So I’ve been trying to reconcile these two viewpoints, and this is how I’m seeing it.

  There are really two viewpoints: that of the learning and development (L&D) professional, and that of the performer. ...

• Mobile Work (0)Clark QuinnI’m regularly trying to do two things: explore mobile capabilities, and get folks to think more broadly about how we can support performance in the organization. I was asked to flesh out a proposed title for a stage at the upcoming mLearnCon, and thought about trying to map the 4C’s of mobile to the major ...
• Social Learning, Strategically (0)Clark QuinnIncreasingly, as I look around, I see folks addressing learning technology tactics; they’ll make a mobile app, they’ll try out a simulation game, they’ll put in a portal. And there’s nothing wrong with doing each of these as a trial, a test run, some experience under the belt. However, in the longer term, you want ...
• Beyond Execution (0)Clark QuinnIn a recent post, Harold Jarche talks eloquently about moving into the networked era, and practices of workscaping. He points to this insightful model by Jane Hart, showing the bigger picture supporting performance in the workplace, or what I like to call Big L learning.

  What occurs to me, however, is that there are two separate ...

• Social media budget line item? (0)Clark QuinnWhere does social media fit in the organization? In talking with a social media entrepreneur over beers the other day, he mentioned that one of his barriers in dealing with organizations was that they didn’t have a budget line for social media software.

  That may sound trivial, but it’s actually a real issue in terms of ...

• Sharing Failure (0)Clark QuinnI’ve earlier talked about the importance of failure in learning, and now it’s revealed that Apple’s leadership development program plays that up in a big way. There are risks in sharing, and rewards. And ways to do it better and worse.

  In an article in Macrumors (obviously, an Apple info site), they detail part of Adam ...

• Levels of ‘levels’ (0)Clark QuinnI was defending Kirkpatrick’s levels the other day, and after being excoriated by my ITA colleagues, I realized there was not only a discrepancy between principle and practice, but between my interpretation and as it’s espoused. Perhaps I’ve been too generous.

  The general idea is that there are several levels at which you can evaluate interventions:

  whether ...

• Performance Architecture (0)Clark QuinnI’ve been using the tag ‘learning experience design strategy’ as a way to think about not taking the same old approaches of events über ales. The fact of the matter is that we’ve quite a lot of models and resources to draw upon, and we need to rethink what we’re doing.

  The problem is that it ...

• Failing to Learn (0)Clark QuinnMy colleague Harold Jarche pointed me to a post by Dave Snowden about deliberative practice, which I found interesting for a facet not part of the key article (which makes worthwhile points). Among a list of important requirements for meaningful activity that is part of effective learning (i.e. it’s not just 10K hours of practice ...
• Social Cognitive Processing (0)Clark QuinnIn an earlier post, I tried to convey the advantages of social activities in formal learning from the cognitive processing perspective, but my diagram apparently didn’t work for everyone. I took another shot for a presentation I gave on mobile social at the Guild’s mLearnCon, and I thought I’d raise it here as well.

  I’m going ...

• Sage at the Side (0)Clark QuinnA number of years ago, I wrote an article (PDF) talking about how we might go beyond our current ‘apart’ learning experiences. The notion is what I call ‘layered learning’, where we don’t send you away from your life to go attend a learning event, but instead layer it around the events in your life. ...
• Working Smarter (0)Clark QuinnWork smarter, not harder.
  Have you heard that? I did, in my first job out of college; my boss said it, but it wasn’t clear what it meant. What does ‘work smarter’ mean? I already thought I was working smarter. Well, as I’ve learned (in conjunction with my ITA colleagues), it means ...
• Goin’ Mobile (0)Clark QuinnThis is a copy of an article I’ve written for a Wiley newsletter to promote my mlearning book.
  The indicators are clear: the world is going mobile. Mobile subscriptions in the developed world are flattening out, not from lack of interest, but from saturation. People are accessing the internet more from mobile devices ...
• A new literacy? There’s an app for that (0)Clark QuinnThe ubiquity of powerful mobile devices able to download applications that enable unique capabilities, has led David Pogue to coin them “app phones“. Similarly, the expression “there’s an app for that” has been part of widespread marketing campaign. However, it turns out that apps are more than just on phones. Facebook has ...
• Are You Committing Learning Malpractice? (0)Clark QuinnOdds are your organization is failing your learners in a variety of predictable but inexcusable ways.
  We know what good learning is. The ways that formal learning, performance support and social learning work best are well known. Unfortunately, they are not practiced reliably in what organizations deliver.

  The reasons for bad learning aren’t surprising but the overall ...

• Social Media Metrics (0)Clark QuinnI continue to get asked about social learning metrics. Until we get around to a whitepaper or something on metrics, here’re some thoughts:
  Frankly, the problem with Kirkpatrick (sort of like with LMS’ and ADDIE, *drink*) is not in the concept, but in the execution. As he would say, stopping at level 1 or ...
• Thought trails (0)Clark Quinn
  I’ve riffed before about virtual mentorship, and it resonated again today. We were getting a tour of one of the social platforms, organized as many are around tasks, questions, and dialog. While implicitly it could support tracking a group’s progress, separate thoughts as recorded through blogs and tweets aren’t a natural feature. Yes, ...
• Harnessing Magic (0)Clark QuinnThis is the extended abstract for the presentation I’m leaving today to give in Berlin at Online Educa on mobile learning on Dec 2.

  Increasingly, workers are mobile. When we look not only at field-deployed individuals, but also those who occasionally must travel to meetings, make site-visits, are away at conferences and workshops, or even ...

• Designing for an uncertain world (0)Clark QuinnMy problem with the formal models of instructional design (e.g. ADDIE for process), is that most are based upon a flawed premise. The premise is that the world is predictable and understandable, so that we can capture the ‘right’ behavior and train it. Which, I think, is a naive assumption, at least in ...
• Rethinking e-Learning (0)Clark QuinnThe opportunity we now have is to use technology to move from an event-based learning model that we know to be ineffective, to a more distributed and contextualized environment that elegantly spans the continuum from formal learning to performance support. And this is not science fiction – we have the tools we need now. Even ...
• Publish or Perish: Educational Content at a Crossroads (0)Clark QuinnIt’s not news that we’re experiencing increasing change. The quantity of information available is growing astronomically, new offerings are increasingly quick to be copied, businesses are under pressure to do more with less, and the internet is a disruptive force, threatening all manner of content industries.
  Organizations have to become more nimble, more agile. Optimal execution ...
• Populating the LearnScape: e-Learning as Strategy (0)Clark QuinnExtract: While adaptation and change are necessary for continued success, neither organizations nor individuals find them easy. Information, communication, and learning technologies offer assistance, although no single solution fits all organizations or all individuals. Author Clark Quinn explores e-learning, information portals, and e-communities in a quest for a coherent understanding of the options and a ...
• Optimizing Learning (0)Clark QuinnWe’re in a new age. Organizations can no longer be dependent on training to meet their learning needs. When things changed slowly, we could train people and trust that they could perform or be coached to do their jobs. That day has passed. The steady acceleration of information creation and advances in technology has reached ...
• Social Networking: Bridging Formal and Informal Learning (0)Clark QuinnThe recognition that learning is 80% informal suggests that we need to support natural connections between people who can help one another. And we can distribute that support between employees, partners, or customers. You can see real benefits, but you’ve got to have a way to think about them!
  There’s been much justifiable excitement about social ...
• Making It Matter to the Learner: e-Motional e-Learning (0)Clark QuinnAt core, you want to design experiences, not just learning. You can’t make learners learn, you can only create environments that are conducive to learning, and to increase your likelihood of success, you’ll want to engage learners emotionally as well as cognitively. … tart by explicitly considering, designing, and supporting the emotional components that help ...

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Clark Quinn is an innovator who successfully blends broad experience in new technologies with deep understanding of how humans think, learn, and perform to achieve meaningful outcomes. Through his books, articles, speaking, and work, Clark communicates a clear vision of how we can be achieving organizational goals through smarter design.

Whether busting myths about learning, providing deeper insight into the important elements of design, or creating inspired new solutions to real needs, Clark has demonstrated an ability to communicate and apply theoretically grounded and research based principles to organizational imperatives. Clark’s innovations have included the first web-based serious game, an early web conference, mlearning designs, content architectures, and more. He has provided strategies for Fortune 500 companies, government, not-for-profits, and the education sector, working successfully with stakeholders at all levels.

While an undergraduate, Clark recognized the connection between learning and information technologies, designing his own major in what then was called Computer Based Education. After a stint designing and programming educational computer games at DesignWare (including award-winning titles FaceMaker and Spellicopter), Clark returned to UC San Diego for a Ph.D. in applied cognitive science. His postdoctoral fellowship at UPittburgh’s Learning Research and Development Center was followed by an academic position at the University of New South Wales, teaching interface design and researching learning technology. He spent time at two Australian government initiatives in online learning before returning to the US to lead the design and development of an intelligently-adaptive learning system.

Clark’s goal is the appropriate use of technology, including the full spectrum of human and capabilities and goals. He’s been a leader in talking about how to consider the emotional side of learning as well as cognitive, not using learning when the problem isn’t a lack of skill, incorporating social into both formal and informal learning, cutting through the hype to the real affordances of technology, and promoting the value of learning to learn. These are the necessary steps to really start helping organizations deliver on meaningful improvement.

Clark Quinn leads us through the necessary stages of development. He provides precisely what you need to know: systematic, logical coverage of how to create simulations and games that engage the learner and create the compelling learning experience we all dream about. ~ Donald Norman (on Clark’s first book: Engaging Learning)

…consistently demonstrated an imaginative (but also down-to-earth) ability to help the rest of us successfully to achieve the integration of advanced technology with the real world of learning. ~ James Burke

Clark Quinn sets the pace for a swift race toward mobile everything. His thought-leadership and focus on solutions that work make him the one to watch, to read, and to learn from now!” ~ Marcia Conner (on Clark’s second book, Designing mLearning)

… provided us the ability to improve the engagement of our product while retaining the educational and technical sophistication of our solutions … professional, creative, and adds significant value …” ~ Charlie Gillette

Clark Quinn gives aspiring learning technologists a crash course in what it will take to harness the power and potential of mobile learning in higher educational settings. He has given us a comprehensive, engaging guide for creating mobile learning solutions that inspire anytime, anywhere, and on whatever device one chooses.” ~ Ellen Wagner (on Clark’s third book: The Mobile Academy)