Games Based Learning 2010 and Techno-guano

I'm very excited about Games Based Learning 2010 next week (and, if you're in London it would be great to meet up at the free Open Evening on Monday 29th). So excited, in fact, that I Skyped organiser and disruptive activist Graham Brown-Martin to find out more.

Here's our conversation broken up into soundbites which works as a menu for the things I'm looking forward to talking to people about at #gbl10 and to you, on this blog and on Twitter.

On Second Life:

The future isn't about 3D, it's about totally mmersive environments. We've all been spoiled by Snow Crash.

On the iPad:

The world changes on April 3rd. People have had the choice of where they want to work – the office or the factory. But people don't want to work in offices, they want to work anywhere.

On games as art:

There is an opportunity for gaming to become the/a defining art of the 21st Century. At the moment, people are still confused about the impact of games because of the different levels of adoption. There's always a danger that we don't give them the seriousness that they deserve. Teachers only know “broadcast” so how do they respond when a kid says they want to be a games designer? The status of games are low – there's cinema and then there's TV and somewhere below that there are games. Why is that?

On engaging people in science:

Engaging people in STEM is difficult and our Victorian teaching methods have resulted in a generation who only want to go on X-Factor. Why don't we take this seriously?

On educational games:

Don't ever start to make educational games; they will fail. There are nuns in Milan teaching RE with Grand Theft Auto 4. That's what we should be doing, making more use of COTS games. Nintendogs is being used in all kinds of ways in Scotland pulling in things from right across the curriculum.

On education and technology:

The technology is technoguano; the same teaching methods but with technology on top – then we blame kids' behaviour on ADHD and treat it with ritalin.

On the problem of games teaching 'content':

Constructivism is hard in a 1:30 environment. But when people are constantly connected, they can do a lot more. Gaming is an inception point: a place to jump off from and motivate people to learn.

On learning from different sectors;

#gbl10 is not just about schools. We want to bring people together - people from different sectors don't spend enough time together. At Reboot Britain, I spoke to an HR director from [a major multinational] who said they were completely changed by the experience of hearing from some primary school teachers (note: they're speaking at #gbl10 too, so I'll let you know how that goes).

On eLearning and corporations:

Godawful eLearning is so tedious and it doesn't deliver. But business needs ROI and nobody's proved game-based learning works yet. The corporate world needs to look at their intake (male and female, as we now know that girls play more than boys). The new intake will affect business processes which will affect how we offer 'learning' at work.

Business processes are informed by media. This 'new' medium and game mechanics will inform business processes. Therefore corporations will have to take notice.

On mobile learning:

When did learning stop being mobile? Why do schools have to be a building in an age of ubiquitous connectivity?

So, that's what Graham has to say and some of the themes people will be talking about at #gbl10.

Me, on what I want to talk about:
Literacy is morphing (has morphed) into something unpredictable that I'm not sure any of us truly understand. (There's a whole load of web-ink spilled on 'Digital Natives. Are they really different or is it overblown? After all, we're all middle-aged on Twitter... Spend 10 minutes quizzing my ten-year-old nephew on how he and his friends use their mobile phones at school and you'll rapidly be disabused of any doubts - how many of you consider bluetooth to be the number one priority on your phone?)

There have always been educationalists who have been technophiles and asked the big question: how can we put this technology to use? But, as Ira Socol has pointed out, that's the wrong question - we've got things totally back to front. Perhaps it's the same with games. The question we have to ask about games and learning is not, "How can we help people learn with games?" But, how can we help people learn to play games better?

Conservation of Complexity: 2

Last post: highlighted some research which showed that sometimes books and long unwieldy blocks of text can be effective because they make you work hard to understand them.

This post: simple social media tools can be effective platforms for learning because they combine the hard work of the long text with good usability.

The first thing to say about Twitter is, like Google, it's decidedly not simple to use:

"Why are Yahoo! and MSN such complex-looking places? Because their systems are easier to use. Not because they are complex, but because they simplify the life of their users by letting them see their choices on the home page: news, alternative searches, other items of interest. . ."

(There's loads of stuff written about Twitter. Here's some recent stats showing around 80% of users have fewer than 100 followers and/or followees, for instance. But this post isn't about Twitter except as an example of Social Media so I'm leaving Twitter observations to this: read The Complexity of Simplicity which got me thinking about all this and provided most of the links and quotes for this post. Every time I use the word 'Twitter', it's interchangeable with other examples of Social Media. Twitter's just my favourite.)

The value of Twitter comes from Gradual Engagement:

"An example . . . is the search experience on Google. Though often cited as an example of a simple design, Google search was actually built for expert users. According to Product VP Marissa Mayer:

“Novice users will enter ‘tell me when it will snow in NY today’ and get no valuable results. Soon thereafter, they will end up typing ‘weather new york’ and see that the results are more valuable. Voila! An expert user. The learning curve in search is steep, but quick.”

Enabling this experience, however, requires all the computational power that an engineering powerhouse like Google can muster. Not all companies have such capabilities."

Twitter does - it's us (or, more likely, you). And it's this powerhouse that opens up learning possibilities through progressive disclosure.

Progressive disclosure's another usability term.
On complex websites and software it means that certain features are kept hidden from users until an opportune moment (like the advanced bits of the Google). But on Twitter this could mean a couple of things - either you follow new people or you un-ignore certain kinds of Tweets as they stream past you in the timeline (like some of the hashtagged #chat groups eg #KMers or #lrnchat). It could even mean that you begin to participate in these conversations.

We know that progressive disclosure is effective for learning how to use systems. (And learning geeks will be able to find theoretical analogues in their own domain.) And a good reason for this might be that we get our base units for learning mixed up. We're trained to think of learning objectives as units of 'content' but, for me at least, the base unit is just as likely to be time. Some things just can't be rushed.

Don't Make Me Write a Big Honking Report!
Here's Steve 'Don't Make Me Think!' Krug again, talking about the $3-8k pricetag for an expert usability review of a web site:

Note that I didn't mention a written report. I've come to the conclusion that very few of my clients actually derive much benefit from having one, and a) they take a long time to write, and b) writing is really hard work, so I try to avoid it if at all possible. If a client absolutely needs a “big honking report” so they have something to show to the person who's signing the check, I can do one, but it's likely to double the price.

So how does Steve Krug report back to clients? A 'series of long conference calls'. And, if you think about it, this makes sense. Conversation's a good example of The Complexity of Simplicity. And conversation epitomises gradual engagement/progressive disclosure. Importantly, conversation's also hard work - there's little chance of burying your irreducible complexity in a "big honking report" in a conference call.

In the previous post, I gave an example of a conversation that I learned from on Twitter. That conversation has happened over a period of months. And many of the people involved had no idea they were taking part.

Somebody is discussing the thing I want to learn to do next on Twitter right now. It's a massive free-for-all conference call and it's hard work. But it's working out well for me.


Next post: I'm going to have a crack at defining what 'usability' means for hypergogues.¹ Which I said I'd do this post, but ran out of space. I'd love to know how you feel about 'borrowing' ideas from UX people for learning design - are there any other areas/people/sources I should be checking out? I'd also love to know whether you found the ideas mentioned in the previous post to be credible - can learners really achieve more by reading a book than by multimedia eLearning courses?

¹Yes, I know that you don't know what 'hypergogue' means - it's all the people who help people learn at work or in life (but who don't necessarily have the word 'teacher' on their passport). Think of them as teachers in schools run on a wirearchical basis.

Further reading:
I've long had an interest in what the usability people have to teach us Learning & Development types. Here are the people who influenced this post. Any ideas for others gratefully received.
Luke Wroblewski
Jakob Nielsen
David Hamill
Steve Krug
Adaptive Path

And, it's quite expensive, but I recommend Mental Models by Indi Young
Finally, here's a round-up of another useful usability concept for learning designers - Personas

Conservation of Complexity: 1

Don't Make Me Think! is Steve Krugman's layperson's usability bible, which these days, like Hamlet, is full of clichés. Usability on the web means, among other things, accepting the fact visitors to your site won't read the lovingly-crafted text, except in passing as they scan for the next link.

Learning designers are less interested in the idea of usability than they are in the idea of efficiency. How can we transfer learning in the least wasteful and most effective way?

And a possible answer is:
Dual-code segmented learning materials to encourage long-term memory storage through the integration of  synchronised/aligned dual channels and ensuring distractions are weeded out even as context is signalled.¹

Or, in other words, multimedia eLearning. Less Don't Make Me Think! and more Don't Waste My Time! What could be wrong with that?

Everybody Tweeted a link to this:

Dumbfounded citizens from Maine to California gazed helplessly at the frightening chunk of print, unsure of what to do next. Without an illustration, chart, or embedded YouTube video to ease them in, millions were frozen in place, terrified by the sight of one long, unbroken string of English words.

"Why won't it just tell me what it's about?" said Boston resident Charlyne Thomson, who was bombarded with the overwhelming mass of black text late Monday afternoon. "There are no bullet points, no highlighted parts. I've looked everywhere—there's nothing here but words."

"Ow," Thomson added after reading the first and last lines in an attempt to get the gist of whatever the article, review, or possibly recipe was about.

From: Nation Shudders At Large Block Of Uninterrupted Text on The Onion / via Mark Changizi

And then I found myself having in this conversation on Twitter with Donald Clark (@iOPT) and Julie Dirksen (@usablelearning):

6:26 PM Mar 9th	iOPT	Screencasts in software training allow the learners to learn faster and more accurately in the short term; however …
6:26 PM Mar 9th	iOPT	learners using text based training were faster and more accurate in the long term.
6:27 PM Mar 9th	iOPT	Generally speaking, learning that requires more of a learner leads to poor immediate performance but good long term performance.
6:29 PM Mar 9th	usablelearning	RT @iOPT Generally speaking, learning that requires more of a learner leads to poor immediate performance but good long term performance.
8:22 PM Mar 9th	iOPT	@BFchirpy @usablelearning Tweets based on series of research - viewing seems to be more passive than when you have to read and process.
8:25 PM Mar 9th	iOPT	@BFchirpy @usablelearning Passive works best for short term performance - you mimic what you see, but doesn't stick in the long term
8:26 PM Mar 9th	BFchirpy	@iOPT Makes perfect sense to me. Been working on my theory of the half-baked for a while now... http://bit.ly/cuuS6H Reading = add an egg
8:27 PM Mar 9th	usablelearning	@iOPT @bfchirpy Very interesting (makes sense to me, provided that they actually do read). Worry about infantalising learners. Reference?
8:32 PM Mar 9th	iOPT	@usablelearning @bfchirpy "Lessons for a Rapidly Changing Workforce" by two psychologists - Quinones & Ehrenstein -highly recommended
8:36 PM Mar 9th	iOPT	@usablelearning @bfchirpy Will they read? Learners prefer the easy way. That's whats wrong w/ level 1 Evals - they pick the easy way out.
8:36 PM Mar 9th	BFchirpy	@iOPT Is it fair to summarise: increasing extraneous cognitive load to learning materials can increase long-term performance improvement?
8:40 PM Mar 9th	iOPT	@BFchirpy That sounds right to me!
8:40 PM Mar 9th	usablelearning	@BFchirpy hmm, is increased extraneous cog load the independent variable, or is it level of effort in acquiring more the point? /@iOPT
8:40 PM Mar 9th	BFchirpy	@iOPT @usablelearning Laser-like focus on Learning Objectives, minimal cognitive load = deferral of complexity?
8:42 PM Mar 9th	BFchirpy	@usablelearning Good call. Not sure how to separate extraneous from the metacognitive - though I've previously thought that obvious. Hmmm / @iOPT
8:43 PM Mar 9th	usablelearning	@iOPT @bfchirpy too often there isn't really a good reason to read it, so learners don't #notstupid
8:44 PM Mar 9th	BFchirpy	@usablelearning @iOPT Did you both read the piece on 'stability bias'? Learners overestimate memory-power and underestimate value of study.
8:47 PM Mar 9th	BFchirpy	Stability bias = people don't rate value of study/effort in learning http://bit.ly/bF0Cno [PDF] @usablelearning @iOPT @flowchainsensei
8:49 PM Mar 9th	usablelearning	@BFchirpy @iOPT yep -- I think that relates > more effort requiring more brain activity creating longer lasting effects
8:50 PM Mar 9th	BFchirpy	@usablelearning @iOPT We often forget that the primary function of the brain is to *prevent* thinking.*
		*Kathy Sierra put this much much better when she said, “Brains pay attention to what brains care about, not necessarily what the conscious mind cares about.”

Larry Tesler's another usability expert who:

". . .came up with the Law of Conservation of Complexity. I postulated that every application must have an inherent amount of irreducible complexity. The only question is who will have to deal with it.

Because computers back then were small, slow and expensive, programs were designed to be compact, not easy to use. The user had to deal with complexity because the programmer couldn't. But commercial software is written once and used millions of times. If a million users each waste a minute a day dealing with complexity that an engineer could have eliminated in a week by making the software a little more complex, you are penalizing the user to make the engineer's job easier."

I'm guessing that learning's the same. People who design learning-at-work programmes based on slavish Cognitive Load principles probably believe they're shouldering the responsibility for the 'irreducible complexity' of learning. I'm working hard on this design so you don't have to think! But by increasing the 'usability' of their learning materials, they could merely be postponing the hard work of learning.

You can't think for somebody else any more than you can eat or drink for them.

Back to books?
Reading 'frightening chunks of print' is only one way to 'require more of a learner'. Games, projects, social interactions - even actual work (heaven forbid!) - are all cognitively demanding environments suitable for improving long-term performance.


Next post: I'm going to suggest that Social Media apps are particularly apt for learning. And to try to make the case that Learning & Development people need to develop a better understanding of what 'usability' means.


¹Further reading:

• Nine Ways to Reduce Cogntive Load in Multimedia Learning [PDF]
• An Introduction to Efficiency in Learning (sample chapter) [PDF]
• I can't find any good links (ie not behind a paywall) to Quninones and Ehrenstein's Training for a Rapidly Changing Workplace

Training Departments: Indispensable but replaceable

Arthur's taught himself to read and write in Japanese.* His Japanese grandparents bought him an 'Anpan-Man* Computer' (a bit like a Speak & Spell toy) and this inexpensive handheld mLearning-eLearning device seems to have been enough.

How is it possible my son's taught himself to read and write Japanese on his own using only a £10 toy when expensive teachers are only just beginning to manage that now in English after six months of school? Could we replace his teachers with cheap plastic toys?

Before you get cross, the answer is, of course, no. Not yet, at any rate. But I'm less sure about Training Departments and Higher Education. First, how did he learn to read and write Japanese with a toy?

Two possible answers to that question:

1. eLearning is suited to Japanese spelling.
It's tempting to say that Japanese spelling is 'easier' than English. And it's true that, once you learn the characters in Japanese, you can pretty much read and write anything. The absurdity of this poster-child of spelling reform, Ghoughpteighbteau is simply not possible in Japanese (see if you can guess the name of this vegetable without clicking through - it's a bit like 'ghoti', except the 'gh' is from 'hiccough' not 'enough').

But Japanese kana are simply more suited to eLearning. The Anpan-Man Computer gives you immediate feedback on anything you've spelled in a way not possible with English. How would an English spelling computer respond to 'ghoti' or 'Spek & Spel' other than to say INCORRECT? Whereas Anpan-Man will tell you exactly what you've spelled, even if it's nonsense. By trial and error, my son was able to learn how to spell things like, "I like trains," or "I did a poo," and practice long past the time that any human, no matter how loving, would have got bored teaching him.

2. His teachers taught him Japanese without even trying.
They use synthetic phonics at Arthur's school - the 'synthetic' refers to the way children are taught to 'blend' sounds together to make words. They also do a lot of work on developing fine motor skills. All the kids at his school do cursive writing, for instance.

Anpan-Man would have struggled to teach him the synthetic part of synthetic phonics. He didn't really pick up the computer and properly play with it till he'd gained the confidence to start sounding out words. And as for the actual pen-holding part, there's no way he could have learned to write in Japanese without the hours of practice he got in writing English at school.

Confluence
There's a huge confluence of events and activities enabling my son to learn to read and write Japanese (and English). We're really good at teaching people to write at this age. The fact that it's much harder to teach people to write when they're older has more to do with how we've designed society than how the brain is designed (I think, you know where the comments button is).

At the centre of the confluence are the teachers. At this age, they do an amazing job of tying all the play and the toys and the enthusiasms together in a way that nothing else could.

Effluence
The Training Department (or Higher Education faculties) may well be the best qualified people to 'tie things together' in the workplace. But they're rarely there in the teams, on projects or with managers. More importantly, they don't benefit from a confluence of events that has evolved to help people learn. It's just as likely they'll have the exact opposite.

The talents of the Training Department will always be indispensable. But the way things are organised now, they're often replaceable.

*In two of the three main scripts. The third and most important, kanji, will be a different story. For example, it's unlikely he'll learn the more advanced kanji (eg things like 'eat' and 'drink') till he's at High School. For an indication why this might be, have a look at this turn-of-the-century Chinese typewriter. Chinese languages use the same character set as the Japanese kanji.

Anpan-Man is a Japanese cartoon about a bunch of superheroes, mostly made of bread - 'Anpan' means 'red-bean-jam-filled-bun' - who fight the cute but evil Baikin-Man, or Germ Man. The plot typically involves Anpan-Man, along with Little Melon-bread and Baby-Man, defending some other less able bread-based lifeform. Baikin-Man usually manages to damage his bread-head, rendering him helpless - until the baker arrives in the nick of time with a new head. Anpan-Man then delivers the fabled 'An-punch' (or 'azuki-bean-paste punch) and all is well with the world. It was apparently inspired by the near-starvation of its writer in World War II and his wistful daydreams of beanjam pastries.

Arthur's also been to school in Japan for a short time. In later life, Japanese schools are really tough. But, as the picture above shows with the pink pom-poms, there's definitely a different vibe in the younger years.

Base Units and Harvard Business Press

What do Training Departments have in common with the Bangkok Post on Sunday, the Mars Climate Orbiter and Harvard Business Press? Business books are rrrrrubbish for data and information. They're inadequate for wisdom. And most of them fail at giving knowledge. Why?

Kafka on the train
We were philosophical at first. It was, after all, nobody's fault.

At the station, the electronic information boards had been down so they'd directed us to board our ten-minute ride to Croydon by hand signals and shouts. Unfortunately, it's an hour to the coast (and an hour back again) and that's where our train, an Express service, was going. Like I said, most of us were philosophical about this. Until the conductor demanded we pay an extra £45 for our seats.

There was an awed silence. Then there was pretty much the opposite of silence. One of the other passengers put it best:

Don't you get it? I don't pay for the *!%&$*ing seat! I pay you for a quick and painless journey to get to where I want to go! You should be paying me!

Harvard Business Press are similarly awe-inspiring. One way to look at their books might be through a DIKW lens. The Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom model isn't perfect but it does give a sense of some of the possible reasons for reading the book I've just finished - 260 pages which,

". . . will show why you must begin building a game strategy now - and offer practical guidelines. . ."

Data and Information
Facts and descriptions? Symbols and meanings? Pretty much any way you define data information, you'll still come to the same conclusion. Books are a terrible medium for both, with their primitive search and lack of opportunities for play.

Knowledge and Wisdom
Wisdom's difficult to define, but it's unlikely a book will make you any wiser than, say, a blog post or an article in a magazine. Wisdom's far more likely to be about the number of sources you've read than than the number of pages (in fact, it's just as likely to be a function of the books you haven't read. . .). You can compress wisdom into a book but getting it out takes time.

Which leaves knowledge.

Selling the Invisible
The first book which popped into my head when I was thinking of something which (a) helped me with 'knowledge' and (b) was relevant to this blog about learning. Selling the Invisible* has two qualities I feel I need:

• Half-baked: it's not all there. There are spaces for notes. The chapters are short. My copy is dog-eared and marked by jotted ideas for mini-projects which would confirm or deny the book's information. I've written questions and scrawled cryptic keywords, which only I would understand, referring to specific bits of personal experience data. One of the notes says simply, "Where the *!%& were you? Telephone helpline support!"
• Retellable: there's some good anecdotes. Anybody who was unlucky enough to have me as their manager knows this book.

Base units

I tweeted (by the way, you should follow me on Twitter):

"Reading another book that would work better as a slide-deck and a blog. . .

NASA wasted $326.7m on the Mars Climate Orbiter because different teams used different measurements. One team used the imperial pound-force while another was using the metric standard newton. The Bangkok Post on Sunday manages a similar trick of buffoonery when it proudly boasts of being the thickest newspaper on the market.

Harvard Business Press are like my Kafkaesque rail conductor demanding money for the seat I don't want. Like NASA and the newspapers, they've got their metrics wrong. Their publications are sold in billable units (ie books) rather than what is useful to me. The base unit of knowledge isn't bits, pounds, centimetres or facts  - but the actionable idea.

I went to the business section of my local bookshop yesterday. I couldn't find a single book that I didn't think would be better as a slide-deck and a series of blog posts. This leaves publishers with a problem - how are they going to make me pay for it? I don't know and I don't care - it's not my problem if books turn out to be an accident of paper. In Czechoslovakia, a friend told me a 'socialist' joke: did you hear about the secret policeman who went to the bookshop and asked for a metre of books? Harvard Business Press, the joke's on you.

The more perspicacious among you will, of course, have noticed I've not mentioned 'Training Departments' yet. Or degree-awarding universities. Or school. But I never stopped thinking about them the entire time of writing this.




*I'm slightly embarrassed about choosing this book. I racked my brain for a couple of days and it's the one that kept springing to mind. I tried to censor myself and thing of something cooler, but some of the others were even less cool.

Informal Learning enthusiasts: the Learning & Development profession can't afford you no more

Learning & Development professionals on the web, who are you trying to persuade? Can you try to sound a little less, erm, bonkers? - a letter to myself.

A tale of sound and fairies
Here's how I've lost work in the past. I go to a company and meet some middle managers. They want me to design a training programme. I say, "Yes, I can do that." And I can.

"But," I say.

And I begin to talk about alternatives. Have you thought about embedding this learning into a sim or a business development project? Have you consider a social learning or Knowledge Management approach? What about doing bits of this online? We all get excited. And, possibly, a little carried away.

When we part, the middle managers are beaming. We can't wait to start working with you, they say. This has been a real eye-opener. The people here are going to love this.

Throw me a bone, here. . .
It's easy to criticise Senior Managers as the pointy-head bosses from Dilbert. But, in my experience, they're not (always? often?) like that. So when they see the middle managers' excitement, they're pleased and possibly a little proud. Look, see how they've grown up and grabbed that initiative just like I've coached them to!

I live and breathe this stuff. So my thoughts about informal learning are relatively coherent. My enthusiasm is tempered with reason because my it stems from my own experiences. I've had the good fortune to work on training projects that went wrong. I've listened to learners tell me how they got more out of the lunch break than the PowerPoint presentation. I've sensed the impatience of the group summoned to compulsory training too long before/way past the time it's needed.

I've made informal learning work because I couldn't think of another way to do what I needed to do. To misquote Karl Weick, my enthusiasm is compressed expertise.

Die, heretic!
But the middle managers I spoke to ended up sounding like they've been indoctrinated into a cult. Not because they're naive or gullible. But because their enthusiasm is just that - enthusiasm. It's no wonder that their Senior Managers have expressed doubts. The stories I told at the meeting didn't survive retelling because I managed to whip up more enthusiasm than understanding.

For me, and lots of people I speak to on the web and on Twitter and around, it's time to curb my enthusiasm. To cut down on the Learning Theory. To stop thinking about how wonderful informal learning is - and, by extension, how wonderful I am.

Four things (for me) to remember:

• Formal training is not all bad. We're members of the richest societies the planet has ever seen. (Despite the Econopalypse.) We must have been doing something right. To say otherwise is disingenuous.
• Get your story straight and get good at telling it from the the perspective of customers and learners. My story is simple: informal learning is about learning coming to the learner rather than the other way round. It's about harnessing your interstitial time.
• Your informal learning stories don't need to stand up to intellectual scrutiny. They need to stand up to retelling at the water cooler and in the stairwell and during casual conversations with pointy-haired bosses.
• Learning & Development professionals separate their marketing from their actual work. In this case, perhaps we should think about the overlap? It's time to start educating our customers not selling to them.

The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous.

Who's been good at talking about Learning 2.0 from the perspective of learners and organisations rather than a theoretical or practitioner's perspective? Who manages to embrace the cutting edge but avoid demagoguery? I can't think of that many who have managed both. . .


The Karl Weick (mis)quote comes from the always enthusiastic Irmeli Aro. You should follow Irmeli Aro on Twitter. She's @connectlrmeli.