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Experience-Enabling Design: An approach to elearning design

First published May 28, 2004

L. Ravi Krishnan (ravikl-at-trina.biz), Trina Systems, India
Venkatesh Rajamanickam (venkat-at-sp.edu.sg), Singapore Polytechnic, Singapore

Table of Contents

Abstract

This paper draws inspiration from diverse media to understand what constitutes experience. In doing so, it seeks directions for building experience into design of elearning products.

By exploring other media, one discovers that building experiences is not about doing complex things. It is about doing simple things that will impact the eventual experience.Experience is the point of emotional engagement with the consumer. Today, experience drives consumption of both products and services. Products and services--irrespective of what segment they operate in--sell experiences rather than features. To achieve this, the scope of design has to extend beyond functionality, to satisfy the experiential need.

For example, a logically well-laid building plan might fulfill a functional need but not necessarily the experiential need. The functional needs could be space, plumbing, electrical etc., and the experiential need could be privacy, character of a space, mood it evokes, ambience etc. For elearning to fit into today's consumption, its design too needs to be crafted for experience.The paper contends that thinking only about the functional aspects of elearning hampers our experience outlook. It identifies strategies to overcome this conflict and to successfully engage today's learners. Through a range of examples from diverse areas such as print, documentation, presentation, and elearning, the paper illustrates how deliberate attempt to think beyond mere functionality, makes an obvious difference to the experience of the output. The cues from these examples provide directions to build elearning products that are functionally sound and experientially engaging.

Keywords: Layout thinking, experience design, elearning.

INTRODUCTION

Every time we use a product or a service, we essentially consume the experience it enables. The product is not a thing. The service is not an act. They are vehicles for the experience that their designer intends to bring about. Thus, when a designer creates a sharp, safe, and well balanced cutting knife, she is not only putting metal, plastic and rubber together, but also setting the stage for an experience of pleasure of using a good tool effectively, and a feeling of skilled accomplishment, on the part of the user. In an Internet forum, an impressed guest recalls checking into Four Seasons Hotel to find TV Guide on the bed, with a bookmark placed on the current date. What appears to be an easily attainable minor detail has resulted in a disproportionately large measure of good experience and goodwill. Likewise, compelling elearning is not about navigating content, but about staging experience.

WHAT IS EXPERIENCE?

Experience is a way in which the self relates or connects emotionally to the world. Experiencing something involves a complex set of psychophysical processes: sensation, perception, apperception, cognition, affection, and sometimes conation. Added to this, is the interplay of psychosocial factors like expectations, attitudes, needs, desires, etc.

Experience plays upon the part-whole relationship. The experience of a faulty part can affect the experiencing of the whole and vice-versa. Experience can be rich or poor, depending upon the variety of senses it plays upon and the variety of meanings it can generate.

Between 1998 and 2000, leading interaction and experience designers met under the leadership of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) to discuss the nature of design responsibility in a networked economy. They concluded that design is increasingly less about creating objects and more about creating conditions that support user experiences (Davis, Meredith & Dubberly, Hugh 2001).

Creating experiences is a challenge for any industry. There was a time when market was governed by selling and buying of commodities interpreted as simple products or things to be used in a certain manner. Today, experience is the differentiator that drives the consumption of both products and services, irrespective of the segment of industry. It is experiences that are sold or bought rather than the features of a product or a service. Features acquire relevance or irrelevance based on the way they shape experience. The product is no longer a thing but a transaction that enables experience.

Creating experience is the art of emotional, behavioral and cognitive engagement with the consumer. For example, Hollywood blockbuster movies use spectacular special effects and beautiful movie stars to emotionally engage movie audience. Many movies often cross cultural and language barriers to become hugely successful at foreign markets. That is because they exploit our primitive, biological reaction to beauty, shock, fear, sexuality, desire, danger, etc.

A well-designed product such as the knife we saw earlier, offer satisfying experience at the behavioral level. Such products provide feeling of pleasure during, and a sense of accomplishment, after the use. The experience enjoyed at the cognitive level is as a result of reflective thought. However, cognitive experience does not operate in isolation, but feeds off of the emotional and the behavioral, while at the same time biasing the behavioral (Ortony, A., Norman, D. A., & Revelle, W. 2003).

EXPERIENCE AND ELEARNING DESIGN

For elearning to be successful, it needs to be crafted for experience at all the above three levels. Psychologist Alice Isen and her colleagues have shown that positive experiences are critical to learning, curiosity, and creative thought. She discovered that people who felt good were more curious, better at learning, and were able to come up with creative solutions (Isen, A. M. 1993). The scope of design therefore, should extend beyond functionality to fulfill the need for experience.

The engagement that a learner has with the elearning material is spread out over time. It has implications for both the immediate mood at the time of 'engagement', as also, the long-term impression of the learner. Experience enablement is critical to this engagement. But experience is problematical if approached in a general way. What constitutes this experience is elusive. Its elusiveness can only be anchored in another concept ''Trust''.

An elearning course can create a satisfactory experience only if it commands trustworthiness in the way it is designed, the content it presents and the user perplexity it prevents. How do I trust the elearning product when I open it? What are the cues that generate trustworthiness in those who experience the course? An experience-centric view of trustworthiness is different from a content-centric one. For example, when Phenyl is used, its strong pungent odor inspires the trust that it will kill germs. Sure, germicides can be odorless, and all pungent things need not be germicidal. But strong associations about the germicidal power of pungency are built into the experiencing body over a period of time, and deeply entrenched in the persons' mind that any anti-germ activity is an incomplete exercise without the smell.A common mistake while working through a concept or an idea is missing out on such consistent or conflicting experiential cues that emerge during implementation. This leads to the gap between the idea and the final experience.

THE EXPERIENCE DISABLER – LAYOUT THINKING

The constraints on the designer and the expectations of the learner create a gap that is difficult to bridge. A designer thinks a great deal about what his product will be like, but the environment in which his product is consumed might change. Likewise a designer cannot control the development of expectations in the learners' minds. The designer can only control the product.This difference often leads to a layout-experience gap. A brilliant design fails because of a failure to pay adequate attention to small but decisive details that shape the final experience. To elaborate on the point, let's consider a parallel example from architecture and understand what it implies for elearning. A logically well-laid building plan might fulfill aesthetic and functional needs but may not necessarily fulfill the experience-needs. The needs that may be taken care of by an architect might be things like space, services, etc. But the architect might still miss on experience needs like privacy, lighting, ambience, etc.When a building-plan is thought of as a layout-plan one sets a certain standard for building-design. But when this layout is translated into experience, it can get far away from the expected standard. Design should be understood not as layout, but as the translation of layout into experience.The following is a case from an apartment complex. It illustrates the gap between the design of the building and the experience of living there.

Layout -- The Promise

apartment layout

The apartment complex as seen from a layout perspective is well conceived and impressive too. It promises to be a quality construction, made out of quality material. The documented instances that follow establish the gap between this layout promise and the living experience.

Layout - The Experience

stepping out

Stepping out
You step out to a world of conspicuous drainpipes and the collection ground. The landing place outside the lift is small and makes stepping out a delicately balanced act. Here one encounters the bluntness of functional thinking. Exiting from the lift is a transition from private place to public place. Such a transition is best if it is smooth, unlike the example here. The physical treatment of a building has to permit the possibility of a smooth transition between the different worlds of its dwellers.

getting in

Getting in
The void deck is the first contact with the building that outsiders have. Visitors can only find their way to the exact lift points by moving around through the deck. One can see here the sheer absences of structural orientation cues. Added to this, is the confusing maze of open and closed spaces and a gloomy and rugged floor to traverse while finding your way out of the confusion.

moving about

Moving about
There is a transition space between fully concrete flooring and the pathway. The protruded blocks of masonry accentuate the plausibility of tripping and getting hurt. This masonry work exists to fulfill the functional need of drainage. Such bad transitions stand justified from a functional perspective but considered from an experience perspective they are at all the wrong places, making transition from void deck to pathway very bumpy.

moving below

Moving below
There is no clear demarcation of covered and uncovered area. One may encounter unexpected water or other debris thrown from the top. One has to always negotiate the walking on the alert of such eventuality.

looking out

Looking out
Viewed from the layout perspective one is likely to conclude that each flat is independent as no common wall is shared between any two flats. The word independence has been translated to mean 'not sharing a common wall' which is a layout-centric interpretation. A flat that promises independent walls falls short of securing privacy of the inhabitants by permitting an unasked for mutual relationship of neighborly observation.

walking and meeting

Walking and meeting
How people and vehicles meet is an important experience-pattern for living. In this case, what distinguishes the car zone and people zone is just the use of material - one is concrete and the other is grass with stone slabs. The pathway discourages walking with its undulating surface and edges forcing reliance upon the car-path for walking around, thereby accentuating the risk of speeding vehicles knocking someone down.

HOW TO DESIGN EXPERIENCES

One may relate the above example to elearning products. Layout decisions like the course structure, navigation, media, etc., affect the experience of the product. For a learner, the ease and intuitive way of getting in, moving around and exiting are the experience factors. How do we bridge this gap between layout and experience? Four possible guidelines, which can help a designer ensure outcomes are experienced in an elearning product, are:

  1. Embrace experience as an outcome
  2. Create a shared language
  3. Narrow the gap from idea to outcome
  4. Drive constituent parts towards total experience
Bridging the gap between layout thinking and experience outcome

Figure 1: Bridging the gap between layout thinking and experience outcome

1. Embrace experience as an outcome

The first step in bridging the gap between layout and experience is the need to embrace experience as the outcome for the product. The architect in the previous example should not have seen his contribution as creating a layout. He should have seen his contribution as creating spaces that evoke desired experiences. He should have imagined how it feels to stand in different points in the building. The darkness of the cellar, the privacy of the bedroom and the entry points to lift are some of the experience considerations that should have influenced the thinking. Layout is just a convenient visual tool to communicate the specifications and is not the natural way of building spaces. If 2 dimensional plans disable experience thinking for architecture, layout grids do for pages in a book, course curriculum does for learning. This is not to undermine layout thinking. We need to acknowledge that layout is not the end but a means to attain experience outcome.Case – Dorling Kindersley publications
Let us examine how experience considerations have made a difference and enabled a sustained credibility for a brand.

A page designed to evoke the wonder of bicycle

Figure 2: A page designed to evoke the wonder of bicycle

Dorling Kindersley, popularly known as 'DK' is a household name in children publications. DK evokes feeling of finely printed glossy visual books rich with photographs and illustrations. By themselves all of these are not impossible qualities to achieve by several others in publishing today. What is so unique about DK? DK consistently distinguishes itself in making its book an experience to the readers. There is one experience that any of DK books so consistently provide - 'generate awe about the world around us'. The design team of DK page after page ensures the awe and wonder of the world is experienced. Such awe cannot be built by simply putting a high quality picture and some text. There is a deliberation to combine pictures and text in ways that enables readers to connect with the world by demystifying details and yet retaining the wonder. This must not be possible if designers do not embrace experience as an outcome. Let us examine one page from the book to see how various design elements induce the desired experiences in the reader.
  1. ''A cycle is a complex object''
    When all the parts are put in a page the complexity of the object is revealed. We like to believe that a cycle is complex and that natural expectation is fulfilled when we see 'so many parts' in one page.
  2. ''A cycle has more parts than I thought!''
    By dissecting the cycle into so many parts it kind of surprises the reader on the number of hidden parts to the few visible parts that externally one sees in a real cycle.
  3. ''There are parts that go with each other''
    At one level the complexity is revealed and at the same level with the proximity of parts it is made so easy to relate which parts go with which one.
  4. ''There are big parts and small parts''
    The comparative sizes are so subtly revealed that one can make scale comparison of any disparate components in the cycle.
  5. ''Now I can name the parts of a bike''
    By having the label of each part close to it the child is encouraged to learn the name while focusing on a part. There could have been numbered components with a legend at the bottom. But this would have spoilt the experience.
  6. ''It is like my cycle''
    The use of photographs is also a deliberate attempt to get the child see a 'real' cycle. Furthermore, photographs lend themselves to realism and colourfulness – both of which appeal to young children.

2. Narrow the gap from idea to outcome

A seemingly impressive design idea can cease to be effective when implemented. This happens because translation of an idea involves narrowing ones own gap in thinking. The 'first idea' always leads to disastrous implementation. The 'first idea' always comes as an expectation from the customer. One needs to cultivate a method of detachment by distancing oneself from the idea in order to evaluate its validity. Common decisions like choice of the photograph or illustration or icons to depict an idea involve the narrowing down of an idea into executable outcomes. Experience as a need and expectation becomes the criterion that challenges such outcomes. For example, if the use of a certain photograph seemed like an obvious choice, it might not seem so, when considered experientially, and a replacement might be warranted.

Case – Use of characters in corporate presentations

Corporate presentations feel the need to add flavour by interspersing text with visuals. The visuals are mostly stylized clipart predominantly cartoonish characters. It is believed that clipart will break the monotony of content.

Transformation from detailed representation to effective minimalism

Figure 3: Transformation from detailed representation to effective minimalism

Though as an idea there is a merit in most of the implementations one will see the clipart sticking out. The content or the idea gets diluted with clipart grabbing the attention. In some cases the clipart are so much out of style and out of context with the tone of the presentation that it greatly undermines the value of presentation. Here is a case to demonstrate how the idea of use of characters by deliberate narrowing from the idea to outcome resulted in a powerful implementation (Ravi Krishnan L. 2001).

Parameters and thinking that went into the process of narrowing down:

  1. The original idea is the first reaction to characters. With details like this one will grab a lot of unwarranted attention and debate on race, colour, sex, age, dress etc.
  2. Use characters that represent both the company and the customer. A slight change of colour that can consistently identify them
  3. The characters also need to be shown in more than one context if they stay meaningful throughout the presentation
  4. The character needs to have just enough details to communicate without being intrusive
  5. The style should enable seamless integration with multiple contexts in which it will be shown
  6. The character should help get across abstract ideas
  7. The characters should be flexible for scaling and manipulation without altering the style.

3. Create a shared language

A product involves several specialists pooling their expertise together. Designing experiences is possible only when there is a shared language amongst the contributors to the product. This shared language should capture the mission of the outcome in a simple language that enables everyone to link his or her contribution for the final experience of the product. Specificity helps remove ambiguity. Rather than the adjectives that tend to be very broad in their meaning and liable for multiple interpretations, the language has to be very precise to correctly orient the efforts. Designer's role in establishing this shared language is key to get the team to shift to experience as the outcome.

Case – Use of shared language for an elearning product to train volunteers of Red Cross

The purpose of the product was to train volunteers from any part of the world on setting up of a warehouse at the disaster site. After working out the various specifications of the product the team came out with a shared language, at a glance. This directed the team to dig out patterns that at a glance stand for and incorporate them. The interface, the treatment of the content, choice of colour, style of writing, style of illustration and several other aspects worked together to generate the at a glance feel in the end (Trina Systems. 2002).

Content treatment to enable experience at a glance

Figure 4: Content treatment to enable experience at a glance

The use of the shared language at a glance did the following for the team
  1. Made end purpose recognizable: For many team members, the end outcome might feel distanced from the activity they are performing. But each and every contribution go to build the outcome. So shared language becomes a practical way to keep the end purpose recognizable by one and all.
  2. Helped contributors to self validate their contribution: Individual contributors are the best judge of how well their contribution can make or break the outcome. This language constantly goads self-validation. As it captured at the level anyone can connect each ones prior experience of at a glance helped refine their own contribution.
  3. Generated self-mandated discipline: Especially in a design team there can be difficulties of resolving conflicts. In this case the complimenting of visuals and text was the biggest challenge. A little more detail or text could have disturbed the balance. The language helped to sensitively establish this balance as the contributors disciplined themselves.

4. Drive constituent parts towards total experience

Time and again in elearning products, we see brilliant experience being achieved in constituent parts, but the product experience as a whole falls short. This problem is more pronounced in team efforts where individuals in team possess different levels of skill and command varying degrees of influence over the final outcome. Each of the team members should extend or underplay their own contributions keeping the final experience in view.

Case – Visual explainers in El Pais

El Pais is a Spanish news website that provides reconstruction of events such as accidents and crimes. Their style of documentation, commonly known as visual explainers (Nichani. M and Rajamanickam. V, 2003) has become a genre for news depiction on the Web. A key objective of these explainers is to explain visually by giving the reader a vicarious experience of the event. This example explains the collision of two trains triggered by an automobile veering off a nearby highway. The key to recreating experience for an event like this one is to establish the role of geography, the cause, the chronological sequence, and the facts of the objects involved. All of these factors have to be communicated effectively with right amount of detail and emphasis to make sure the viewer experiences the incident as authentic as possible.

Well considered parts forming an effective whole

Figure 5: Well considered parts forming an effective whole

  1. Presenting the geography: Establishing geography lets the viewer get the bearings on the topography of the event. The designers have chosen the top view because the key components are the highway and the tracks below. One may notice the view is closer when the first collision happens and gets wider during the second collision. Through this the difference in scale of collision is established. The viewer is able to experience the fact that a small vehicle has triggered a catastrophic collision.
  2. Pointing the cause: While showing the cause the exclusive trigger that set the event is important. For instance here the vehicle that triggered the event is the only one shown. By not showing the rest one still gets the feel it is a busy highway. It would have been redundant to show movement of other vehicles. This discipline of calculated depiction comes from the emphasis on what is important.
  3. Showing the sequence: The sequence in which the geography, the objects and the trigger interact over time determines the extent of the mishap. There is a specific detail in each of those components that are critical to appreciate the event. The narration needs to connect all these details precisely to make sense of these components. This visual explainer brings about in a significant way the interplay of all of these factors.
  4. Communicating the facts: Experience of an event enhances with the knowledge of associated facts. Too little may lead to an incomplete experience, while too much may result in information overload. In this case, the El Pais designers have struck an optimum balance by providing limited information related to locations, locomotives, wagons, and history of train accidents.

CONCLUSION

So how does the foregoing discussion connect with the elearning context? The answer lies in the commonality of certain principles across diverse spheres of human enterprise. Layout-experience gap is not unique to elearning, as the comparisons in this article might have amply illustrated. The guidelines derived from these examples provide us a framework for experience-enabling design that helps designers to get away from layout thinking and focus on the outcome. Experience-enabling design requires questioning, reflecting and drawing on links between product and its experience.

REFERENCES

This paper was presented in May 2004, at the Global Conference on Excellence in Education and Training, Singapore Polytechnic.

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Interactive Decision Objects

First published March 29, 2004

Patrick Lambe, Maish Nichani and Ryan Yacyshyn

Background

Interactive Decision Objects (IDOs) are the result of an experimental project that the three of us did almost two years ago. Back then we realised the limitations of the learning object perspective in a corporate setting and brainstormed ideas for coming up with something more apt for business decision makers.

Maish had just read W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne's article on "strategy maps" in the Harvard Business Review, and was particularly struck by the interaction between the use of data and information, and the conversation of experienced managers in the proposed methodology. Patrick had just written his paper on "The Autism of Knowledge Management" (note: PDF file) decrying the simplistic focus on lego-brick approaches to learning objects, and pointing out that we (humans) use a range of naturalistic knowledge artifacts in the real world for transporting knowledge around, some of them (such as models, frameworks and stories) remarkably good at moving or eliciting tacit knowledge between their users. Why weren't KM and e-learning more versatile in their approach to knowledge objects, rather than having their very narrow focus on content packaging and transport?

The two issues came together in this project. We realised (as anyone who has studied strategy will realise) that there is a wide range of very rich frameworks and models in common use that are amenable to this approach, not just the Kim and Mauborgne strategy map. Examples might be Porter's Five Forces and Value Chain, Ansoff's Matrix, or the McKinsey Seven S framework. We got as far as working with Ryan to build a series of five experimental models using common and less common frameworks, but have not been able to progress further on this project due to our full-time commitments (the Yahoo groups we started at that time has been deleted too!). However, we do think that the project and the demos we created have potential and if put into the public domain under a Creative Commons licence, might stimulate some of the badly needed innovation we currently miss.

What are Interactive Decision Objects (IDOs)?

The IDOs are an interactive framework for decision-making. For example, consider the case of a group (or an individual) wanting to analyse competitors to review existing strategy. View this step-by-step guide to see how the Competitor Analysis IDO can be used in this case.

IDO Characteristics

Here are some important characteristics of an IDO:

So this brings up a working definition of an IDO: an interactive decision object enables decision making by encouraging knowledge-based conversations in context.

Smells of knowledge management doesn't it?

IDO and Knowledge Management (KM)

The characteristics of the IDO make it ideal to represent the dual faces of knowledge management: explicit and tacit.

Consider the same event of a manager using the IDO to discuss competitive strategy with his group.

In encouraging conversations in context, an IDO enables the sharing of experiences, opinions and intuitions on competitive strategy, all of which are tacit in nature, but very necessary for effective decision making. It also presents a framework into which an array of explicit knowledge sources can be poured, checked and deployed.

By taking notes and snapshots of certain milestones in the discussion, the manager makes a record, the second explicit part, for later reuse and debrief. Because it is highly contextualised by the IDO, this explicit part is likely to have far more impact than a simple coding of conclusions and decisions in report format, and divorced from the IDO.

Now take this leap of imagination (because we didn't get this far): what if the record automatically meta-tags itself and finds its way into the corporate repository? Another manager searching for work done on competitive strategy can easily find the tool in the repository and either reference the outcomes (explicit) or reuse it for his own purpose (tacit+explicit), thereby adding more tacit and explicit knowledge into the knowledge pool.

So, in KM parlance, the IDO not only creates knowledge stocks , but also catalyses knowledge flows.

IDO and Learning Objects

Too much talk around "learning objects" revolves around the systems and the architecture of learning object repositories: not even particularly on the content itself. The little talk there is around learning object content is heavily dependent on a mechanistic instructional design approach that is suspiciously close to software design methodology, has very little relevance to innovative content design outside the world of e-learning, and actually belittles the learning object's raison d'être: reusability. Much of the learning object content, as it turns out, cannot be reused.

The current dilemma with reusability revolves around content and its granularity: increase granularity (chunk it more) and you get more reuse (theoretically) but the problem with increased granularity is that you have to reduce the context (which then makes the content specific, not reusable).

To tackle this dilemma of creating content that has both context and reusability, we need to turn the entire premise of content and context head over heels. Instead of working with existing or pre-defined content we need to work more with the ability to create or generate content in context. This is what the IDO enables: to create content in context using a decision-making framework. As we pointed out earlier, there are lots of these frameworks out there in the real world.

So here are some distinctions:

Learning Objects IDO
Content driven Framework driven
Contains predefined content Content is generated in use
Difficult to reuse (in practice) Easily reusable
Focused on dispersing instruction Focus on knowledge sharing and understanding
Designed to accommodate delivery platforms Designed to accommodate people's knowledge and decision processes
Most appropriate to content driven environments (like schools) Most appropriate to knowledge-driven environments (like corporates)
Difficult to adapt to changing needs Highly adaptive
End-game is to meet an assumed knowledge gap End-game is to facilitate practical, social deployment of knowledge
Primarily explicit knowledge Both explicit and tacit knowledge

IDO Demo Kit

So here's the demo kit, which includes 5 frameworks.

Download IDO Installer (.zip file, 3MB)

Let us know if you have any problems using this application. You can use the comments feature of this article to post your problems. More importantly, please let us know of your experiences in using it and your ideas of adapting it to other frameworks and scenarios.

Enjoy!

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Dan Saffer: Why I Blog my Postgrad Course

First published February 25, 2004

Meet Dan Saffer. He's pursing a master's degree in interaction design at Carnegie Mellon. I've never met Dan in the flesh, nor are we virtual friends, but I know a lot about his course: not just about his curriculum, but about the classes he attends, the activities he does, the reading list he gets, the guest lecturers he meets, and the projects he designs. No, I don't practice telepathy: it's just that Dan blogs his course.

Now, I know that I'm learning at lot from Dan's blog, odannyboy, but what about Dan: How does blogging the course affect his learning? I interviewed him to find that out.

- Maish Nichani

What is your background?

Dan: My background isn't particularly interesting. I grew up in Baltimore and in San Francisco. I did my undergraduate education at UCLA, where I created my own major. After college, thinking I wanted to use my degree in dramatic literature, I went to work first as a copywriter for TV Guide, then as an editorial assistant at a book publisher in New York. I taught myself HTML and soon found myself working for dotcom startups and interactive agencies. My last job was as an interaction designer for Ameritrade, the online brokerage company.

What are you studying?

Dan: About two years ago, I decided that I needed to be better trained to do the work I was doing and for the jobs I eventually wanted to get. So I started looking for graduate programs that would do that. I only found one that I was really happy with and that's where I am now, finishing up my first year in the Master's of Design, Interaction Design program at Carnegie Mellon.

Why do you blog your course?

Dan: I got the idea from a second year IxD student, Chad Thornton. When I was looking for a program, I came upon his blog, brightlycoloredfood. On it, he sporadically posted small tidbits about the courses he was taking. Once I got into the program, I thought to myself, wow, wouldn't it be great to have my courses down in detail? Both for myself (since I have a terrible memory), and for others who might be interested in what you learn in such a program. So I started the blog, beginning with my preparations to go to school.

In a way, it's about justifying the personal and actual expense of leaving work and going back to school: something I could point to and say, see, that's why I'm doing this, this is what I learned. This is why it was worth it.

And like I said, I have a terrible memory. I knew that if I didn't capture my experiences and notes in some sort of format, I'd probably forget a lot of it. I use my own blog a lot, as a device to jog my memory.

How has blogging helped your learning? (Really, do you learn anything new? Does your perspective change? Can you recall any such learning episodes?)

Dan: Like almost every other student, I take notes, furious notes, during class time. I spend a lot of time with my laptop open in front of me, typing away. I don't get a lot of synthesis and analysis time. That's what the blog is for. I use it to rewrite my notes, and in doing so, I reconstruct what I've learned for myself.

It's a great tool for learning because I have to basically teach/explain what I've just learned to people that weren't there and who may or may not have any context for what it is I'm talking about.

When I first started the blog, I mistakenly thought that people would sort of follow my whole experience, from beginning to end. I have no idea why I had that totally ridiculous, narcissist fantasy. I do have many people that do read the blog like that, but I also have a large number of people who search for things like "Definition of Design" and "Moodboards" and end up randomly on my site, reading individual entries. Once I realized that, it changed my writing style.

Often, once I start an entry about a class, I realize that there is a better way to structure the information than how the teacher presented it. And so I restructure it for clarity. And by doing that, you learn the material better.

I should also mention that for my Design Studio class, my project team is using a blog as a virtual "project room" for a project we're doing with Microsoft this semester. It's much better than email for keeping information in a central place, viewable by all.

Has blogging helped you increase your learning network? (Who replies to your blog entries? How has it affected your relationship with your classmates? With your instructors?)

One thing that is interesting about blogging my classes is that other students and professors are aware of it and react in different ways. Some find it great, others, an intrusion on their privacy. The opinion has even been expressed that this information is ours, it belongs to the graduate students and faculty of CMU, and that I shouldn't be posting any of it. And there is some truth to that, although no blog entry is ever going to completely capture the experience of going to school and sitting in classes. There is so much that goes uncaptured. And, truthfully, there have been a few things I've learned that I have kept to myself, that I don't blog. I occasionally feel that something I learn is mine to hold onto and not share with my readers.

I am also very concerned that I don't pass off the content of my blog as my own thoughts. I occasionally worry that professors or guest speakers will ask me not to blog or that readers will think that, say, Dick Buchanan's ideas on ethics in design are my own. I try to give credit where credit is due, but I also don't want every paragraph to be burdened by the clunky, X professor thinks that...

Probably because a majority of my readers are using my RSS feeds, I don't get a lot of commentary on my blog. Either that, or else no one is interested smile Interestingly, a majority of my comments come from Rob Adams, a Master's student in HCI at CMU. Rob and I have taken several classes together, and our blogs often reflect similar content and we have discussions that get passed back and forth between our two sites, in comments and dueling entries.

I'd also note that a healthy percentage of my readers are people in other graduate programs (or who want to be).

If you were to stop blogging today, how would it affect you? ( How would it affect your learning ability?)

Dan: Well, for one thing, I would suddenly have a lot more time! I didn't realize how long it would take to do some of these entries--sometimes up to two or three hours for a long post about an involved class. But the time spent doing them is time well spent. I use my own blog as much as anyone. I know I'd retain less over the long run, and be less able to put the things I'm learning into a more complete context.

Lately, a lot of the things I'm learning in different classes have all started to come together; they all seem to be talking about similar things or things are starting to fit into patterns. Some of this is intentional, some probably not. But I doubt I would have been able to see those patterns as clearly without the blog. There's something about putting your entire coursework together in one place that allows you to more easily make that kind of analysis.

Do you find any limitations with current blogging software features and functions? (If you could change/add some features, what would they be?)

Dan: RSS readers, in general, take away from the interactivity of blogs. There's no easy way to incorporate comments into the xml feed, so that cuts down on the comments you get. I got more comments when I was on Blogger and didn't have an RSS feed like I do now with MovableType. There is a way to do this, but it isn't easy and the comments don't display with the feed itself.

The actual input mechanism for MovableType isn't the greatest, so I use Kung-Log (now Ecto). It lets me save drafts and has other features that help with extensive blogging, especially with multiple blogs.

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Notes from KM Asia 2003

First published November 11, 2003

The KM Asia 2003 conference was held in Singapore on 4-6 November. Thanks to the Ark Group, the conference organizers, I got a press pass to attend the conference. Here are my notes on the conference.

The conference hall was smaller and there were fewer vendors as compared to last year. Even the usual big banners and free magazines were sadly missing. I guess this was to be expected, given the economic battering the Asia-Pacific region has gone through lately. When asked the on the reasons for holding the conference, the business development manager of the Ark Group said, "We thought it necessary to keep the conversations going." And in that respect the conference was a success.

A large percentage of the audience, it seemed, had some KM project in place, and were attending the conference either to seek legitimacy for what they were doing, or to learn about what they ought to be doing. This was evident in the more-than-usual number questions asked at the end of some sessions. Those sessions that did not evoke such reactions were the ones where the audience was paying deference only to the perceived "expert-like hairstyle."

A couple of things were quite apparent at the conference:

Here are some notes from key presentations.

Tom Davenport gave his presentation via a video link from Boston. His presentation was on embedding KM into business processes. The classic example, which he quotes often, is the Partners HealthCare case. The case goes something like this:

Tom's HBR article "Just–in–Time Delivery Comes to KM" describes this case at length.

Tom also commented on the importance of structure when content proliferates. His advise: understand content architecture, taxonomies, thesauri, meta-knowledge, and multimedia. Here Tom seems to promote the marriage of KM and Information Architecture.

The other illustrious Tom, Thomas Stewart, was present in the flesh and presented using only transparencies. His presentation -- Intellectual Capital and the Real 'New Economy' -- was based largely on his book, The Wealth of Knowledge.

Here are some key points from his presentation:

There are 3 knowledge-strategy families:

  1. Instilled Knowledge (smart products)
  2. Distilled Knowledge (knowledge as a product)
  3. Black Box Strategies (knowledge services)

His intellectual capital model was as follows:

HSBC's Steve Ellis made a fantastic presentation. Unfortunately, I missed that presentation, but Patrick Lambe of Straits Knowledge (also check out his Green Chameleon website) agreed to share his thoughts on the presentation.

Who really tells the truth in knowledge management these days? Steve Ellis of HSBC took the prize of the whole event for gut wrenching honesty. He started by pointing out that his slides held no HSBC logo because he was presenting his personal views and not the official ones of HSBC. The reason for that cautionary clause became immediately transparent as Steve launched into a striking account of how his KM initiative at HSBC had not exactly failed miserably, but had stumbled badly. Battered, but still passionate about KM, Steve positively incarnated the ethic of knowledge sharing and learning from failure, in the most powerful KM presentation at a conference I've seen.

Learning points?

  • Don't try to sell KM, sell the benefits
  • The culture has to be ready for KM, so find a bit of it that is ready
  • Winning hearts and minds is easy – getting action is tougher
  • Nobody wants to hear about the long term – move fast and get quick wins

Steve also presented the most quotable version of the undercurrent of techno-scepticism present throughout the conference: "If another technology vendor tells me they can solve all my KM problems with their solution, I'll punch them."

Thanks for the write up Patrick.

The other presentations I found useful were related to taxonomies. Siemens presented their taxonomy for managing 50 million pages, and the National Library Board Singapore presented theirs for managing 100 libraries.

The taxonomies in both cases were quite simple and basic, which is true for taxonomies in general, but as both presentations rightly pointed out, it is the taxonomy building process that is the most difficult and complex.

Some guidelines were presented:

I guess this was the IA connection that Tom Davenport was talking about.

For more information, check out Boxes and Arrow's in-depth treatment of Controlled Vocabs.

On the whole, KM Asia did manage to keep the conversations going. I'm pretty sure that the audience got a few actionable points to work on. The reason I'm so sure is because the "core group" of companies attended this conference, unlike the powerless types that attend e-learning conferences (at least here in Asia). These core group decision makers will take the lessons learnt from this conference and put them into practice. And the discipline as a whole will benefit from it.

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Going the “Simulation Way”: Q&A with Clark Aldrich

First published November 03, 2003

E-learning has a special kind of love for simulations. It's not the head-over-heels, holding-hands variety, but the "Intolerable Cruelty" type of awe, respect and admiration variety, where the love is in the tension of the interaction. And all the audience (learners in our case) wants is for them to "just do it."

Clark Aldrich has done just that. He's gone ahead and created a leadership simulation, Virtual Leader, and written a book, Simulations and the Future of Learning, to share his experiences in creating the simulation and to offer a roadmap for those interested in going the "simulation way."

Having read his book and gone through Virtual Leader, I'm beginning to fully appreciate the value of simulations, and more importantly, the thrill of learning.

Here's a Q&A with Clark that focuses on getting detailed insights for going the simulation way.

- Maish

elearningpost:You've said, "organizations that care the most about training use simulations", and such organizations are the ones that have "no margin for error-as in, if their employees are not trained, people die." Airline pilots, soldiers, civil defense, baggage screeners etc. would nicely fall into this category, but what about those requiring day-to-day learning and training --the sales guy who needs to know the right strategy or the manager who needs to know more about motivation. Would simulations be the right approach for such situations too?

Clark: Simulations have been developed in these life-critical areas not because they are cool, or fun, or gee-whiz, but because they work, and they are often the only thing that works. These organizations cared so much about simulations that they both custom built software and also custom built hardware, over years and years. The need for custom built hardware has diminished significantly or gone away as computers and graphics cards have gone through the recent revolution, making simulations more accessible.What is left is the software. Organizations that care about a given dynamic skills will either have to build their own (small s) simulation or buy and perhaps modify an off-the-shelf (big S) Simulation.

elearningpost: What do you think of "low-fidelity" simulations like MSNBC's Baggage Screener?

Clark: A: This is a great example of a (small s) simulation. Four (small s) simulations are being used today: branching stories, virtual products (such as this one), interactive spreadsheets, and reskinned games. These all are well understood, very different from each other, and great ways to get started. But they do not produce the results of (big S) simulations, and so are only an incremental step.

elearningpost: Can you describe the relation between your "primary colors of content" and learning effectiveness?

Clark: Sure. Let me start a little bit indirectly. Some of us remember the coming of microwave ovens. These are great examples of technology, as they were oversold, captured the imagination of consumers and futurists, and in fact turned out to be only a partial solution that at best was two steps forward, one step back from conventional ovens. We collectively got over our rapture around this technology, and ended up understanding it and using it for where it actually helps.

Let's look at books also as technology. The advantages of books are mind-boggling. But the limitations of books have not fully been appreciated and compensated for, namely the amount of content that had to be ignored to make the medium work. There is the old quip that you can't learn how to ride a bicycle from a book. Lectures and movies have the same limitations. The alternative to books for learning used to be labs and apprenticeships, all very expensive and unscalable.

What computer games introduced is content that is much richer than books, but just as scalable. There are two additional types of content that computer games bring to the conversation. One content type (or color) is systems based, and the other is cyclical (or interface) based. Systems based content exposes users to complex interactions, allowing them to ping the system in various ways and watch the results. I believe learning that does not involve understanding a system is vacant, and of no real use beyond learning simple processes.

Cyclical content addresses muscle memory, which is just as critical in soft skills such as public speaking, negotiating, dealing with difficult people and situations, as it is with hitting a tennis ball. From a simulation perspective, cyclical content is dealt with at the interface level. If the interface does not line up with a real task in some ways, the learning at best will be academic and not applicable.

Let me stress that I still love linear content. This should be the first step of any simulation - exposing people to some background, models, and inspiration.

elearningpost: You've devoted an entire chapter on "the myth of subject-matter experts" where you've debunked the role of the "branded experts." From your experience, what are some effective strategies to deal with SMEs in general?

Clark: I suppose that depends on how you find your SME. We started making the stupidest mistake of all - to look for SME's through well-rated professors, great speakers, and successful authors. These were all masters of linear content, which is much more distracting than useful. What turned out to be necessary was to work deeply with the best of the practitioners to generate both the systems, and the interface (where you have to make discreet often subtle interactions).

elearningpost: You've written that it was your "search and research" for content on leadership issues that led you to richer content (3-to-1 principles on leadership) and not vanilla content from branded experts. Do you think that this "search and research" on content -- and not just repurposing SME content -- will come to play a major role in e-learning design, be it simulations or otherwise?

Clark: Let me take it even more broadly than that. Simulations will impact all research organizations, be they academic or others. As simulations play-out, doctorate students will be creating not just long research papers (linear content), but complex dynamic models (systems content) and a better, almost anthropological understanding of discrete steps in a process (cyclical interface). Homework will often be in the form of spreadsheets, not just words or pictures. There will be an intellectual revolution as we go through our collective archives and look at content through these new lenses. In the same way that feminism or Marxism created mini-revolutions of looking at traditional content through new eyes, so will the simulation (massive) revolution force us to re-examine and recreate. We will eventually look back at today's classrooms the same way we look back at doctors before pharmaceuticals, with a sense of pity and smugness.

elearningpost: Developing simulations is serious business. You mention that Virtual Leader required a "dialog system", a "physics system", and an "artificial intelligence" system to work, all of which require advanced technical skills. How do you see simulations going mainstream with such a high development barrier?

Clark: My question would be the reverse: why would we expect the learning industry to be truly effective without this kind of deep knowledge and work? Can you imagine that question asked to any other industry? How can pharmaceuticals ever go mainstream if we need experts creating them, and they take many years to produce? How can automobiles every make it to the big league if we need highly trained individuals designing them, and they take more than quarter to spit out?

The question is not that of money - a huge amount of money is spent on education every year on this planet. It is a matter of discontent with how things are, a vision of how things could be, bravery to try what is unknown, and business model to pull it off (both from the vendor and implementer perspective).

elearningpost: What was the composition and skill set of the team that developed Virtual Leader?

Clark: Virtual Leader consumed about 15 man-years (MYs) of resources.

The team had a core of five people (10 my's), ranging from people who built the entire 3D graphics and game engine from scratch to people who took all of my AI metacoding and making it real. These were hard-core game programmers.

We had 4 people for 6 months doing some leadership, anthropological, and cognitive science work (2 more MYs). We brought in a team of 6 animation and graphic specialists for four months (2 more MYs).

We used a small pick-up team to do the launcher and tracking pieces (.5 more my). The rest were things like voice talents, visual designers, etc.

elearningpost: What are some of the points to consider when giving an elevator pitch for going the "simulation way"?

Clark: I can make the broad observation that you made as well: those organizations that care about training use simulations.

My pitch to use Virtual Leader specifically in an organization is easy enough - I can make employees 38% more valuable to their managers. To an academic organization, I say - your students will learn more and care more in less time.

But the biggest problem right now to pitching a broader simulation based curriculum is that there are not enough truly great business simulations out there, nor organizations that have a competency in rolling them out.

The other point that has to be compensated for is that simulations right now is a loaded word. Everybody thinks they know what a simulation is, and everybody's view is different.

elearningpost: What are some resources, apart from your excellent book, that would help designers get a foothold into the world of simulations? Are there cheap tools we can use to get our hands dirty? What about professional courses?

Clark: Most people tell me, essentially:

  1. My corporation/institution created/bought a lot of low-cost content.
  2. The end-learners were not impressed.
  3. Simulations are the hot new thing.
  4. How can we cheaply build a lot of simulations?

That thinking will kill simulations as an approach, and if there is a backlash against simulations in the next year, it is because a lot of people cheaply made simulations. Having said that:

For those who are looking long term, get a book about programming computer games. The most important thing is to do something. In most cases, the challenge will be not just around creating simulations, but successfully launching them in an academic or corporate setting.

For those interested in learning more on Virtual Leader/SATFOL, join the discussion at http://www.simulearn.net/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl

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5 Questions with Gerry McGovern

First published September 25, 2003

I had the opportunity to query Gerry McGovern, widely acknowledged web content guru, on some knowledge management and e-learning issues that were bothering me. Here is the short Q&A session I had with him. Gerry's two books, Web Content Style Guide and Content Critical, are required reading for anyone interested in creating user-centered content. His website has tons of information on web content design. While your 're there, check out his popular New Thinking newsletter too.

1) Making knowledge management work seems to elude many, where do you think the problems lie?

Gerry: The area is still fuzzy and lacks definition. I read a definition of a knowledge worker recently which said that you're one if your boss doesn't know what exactly you do and you don't know either. I think there's so much sloppy thinking around the area. So much that is vague. Many knowledge workers feel that they are so special they can't be measured; that each one of them must do things their own unique way. Well, that's all great fun, but it does very little for business. Basically, we need to focus more on management of knowledge.

2) Knowledge sharing and quality of content -- there seems to be a proportional correlation here, but then David Weinberger would argue on the "importance of writing badly". What's your take on this?

Gerry: What David Weinberger writes about is all well and good if you've lots of time. Personally, I have zero interest in reading people who just shoot off emails. I'm not interested in someone's deeply held inarticulate beliefs. I'm interested in their considered opinion on a subject. The very foundation of management is that it takes a considered, logical, clinical and scientific approach to problems. I think the reason so many organizations have a disdain for knowledge management is because it's full of people writing badly.

3) What's your opinion on the use of weblogs in KM and e-learning?

Gerry: Can be useful, up to a point. Let's be brutally honest here. Most people don't have very much to say. A commercial organization is not about encouraging creative writing. It's about making profit. Where is the time coming from to write all these weblogs? Could it be used more productively in other areas?

4) "Boring" is the most common adjective used to describe e-learning courses. Do you think the omission of web writing skills in most Instructional Design curriculum has something to do with it?

Gerry: It's hard to write well. It's hard to be interesting, to be clear. Often, managers just don't recognize that investing in quality writing can deliver a much better return than allowing poor quality writing to be published.

However, e-learning shouldn't necessarily strive to be 'fun'. Work can be boring, but you get paid for it. Learning isn't a form of entertainment. It's about hard work a lot of the time. We shouldn't forget that.

5) How would you stress the importance of writing well to a budding Instructional Designer?

Gerry: I think writing is essential. E-learning is learning with content, and the key content online is words. How well you write -- how well you choose the words on the page -- will have a critical impact on how successful you are.

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Interactive Visual Explainers-A Simple Classification

First published September 01, 2003

Maish Nichani (maish-at-elearningpost.com) & Venkat Rajamanickam (venkat-at-elearningpost.com)

Introduction

Visual representations have been used since the dawn of human civilization to communicate - to reveal the hidden, illustrate the intricate, explain the complex and illuminate the obscure.

Constructing visual representation of information is not mere translation of what can be read to what can be seen. It entails filtering the information, establishing relationships, discerning patterns and representing them in a manner that enables a consumer of that information construct meaningful knowledge.

Edward Tufte in the introduction to his book Visual Explanations, writes that those who discover an explanation are often those who construct its representation. Indeed, the need for such visual explanations of information is no more urgent now than ever.

In recent years, information has increased manifold in quantity and become more complex in quality, while strategies for communicating them have remained largely unchanged. This is especially true for information found on the Web. With ever decreasing attention spans of our potential audience, educators, writers, politicians, preachers, companies, organizations, and entertainers are forced to reinvent their strategies to communicate their intent.

In this article, we explore one such strategy by a discipline that seems to have figured out how to deal with the challenge.

Interactive Journalism

There is a subtle movement taking shape in online journalism. It is movement that is borne out of the desperate need to engage and excite news consumers in the post-information age. Dissemination of information and news breaking has given way to interaction, participation and involvement of consumers in news making. It is called interactive journalism or visual journalism.

In July 2001, Pew Center released a report titled "New Attitudes, Tools and Techniques Change Journalism's Landscape". The report consulted top newspaper editors in the US who voiced the need to have more two-way connections with readers. They wanted newspapers to rise above the stigma of being merely a "disseminator of facts" and play a more active role. They wanted to be "news explainers" first.

The editors rank "news explainer" first among six specific roles that newspapers can play. "News breaker" comes in second; "investigative watchdog," third; "catalyst for community conversation" and "community steward" follow. The role of "disseminator of just the facts" finishes last.

The news explainer role became more evident after 9/11. Online news websites like MSNBC, Sun Sentinel, BBC, Newsweek, Washington Post, El Pais and El Mundo made the effort to visually explain the events from different angles. As it was a sincere and empathic effort, readers loved it, and the practice caught on; as an article on the topic put it -- The Eagle has Landed.

What are Interactives?

Interactives are one of the first experiments in interactive journalism. They are brief Web-based interactive visual explainers. They are designed to explain complex concepts or ideas. Of late, they are usually created in Macromedia Flash or Macromedia Director. Since the practice is new, different names are used to describe it -- "Flash Infographics", "Motion Graphics", and "Interaction Graphics" are some we've come across. We like "Interactives" because it embodies interaction--the building block of the Web--and thus does not bring across any preconceived notions from the print world.

To satisfy your immediate curiosity, take a look at an Interactive -- MSNBC's Baggage Screener.

Why the Need for a Classification?

As we studied several examples of Interactives, we began to see distinct types of visual treatment and interactive strategies emerge, which were used for presenting different types of information about events, processes, mechanisms, cause and effect or phenomena.

As these strategies are found again and again in portrayals of explanations, we felt it useful to distil a simple classification system based on these Interactives. We hope this classification system will help communicators decide on what strategy and treatment to choose when.

Here are few benefits of having this classification:

The Classification

The classification is based on the representation of the communicative intent. The categories are listed below:

Visual Explainers (root)

Each category in the classification is explained below.

A Simple Classification of Interactives
Category Objective Characteristics Examples-Interactives
Narratives The objective is to explain by giving the reader a vicarious experience of the intent through a story. Stories (fact, fiction, faction) told with a distinct point of view. These include anecdotes, personal stories, business stories, case studies, etc.

>> View Analysis
Instructives The objective is to explain by enabling the reader to sequentially step through the intent. Step-by-step instructions explaining how things work or how events occur.

>> View Analysis
Exploratives The objective is to give the reader an opportunity to explore and discover the intent. These usually allow readers to discover the intent themselves by active exploring and sensemaking.

>> View Analysis
Simulatives The objective is to enable the user to experience the intent (usually a real world phenomena.) These allow readers to experience the intent themselves.

>> View Analysis

Notes on the Classification

Links

Conclusion

This article is an attempt to better understand interactive journalism and to explore its application in other fields. The simple classification provided a satisfying framework for research. The classification was created after analyzing scores of Interactives, from award websites -- Webbys, SXSW, Malofieg, etc. to online news websites -- MSNBC, Sun Sentinel, NY Times, BBC, etc. to meta-websites like Nixlog, Poynter, and Visual Journalism. But even then, we do acknowledge that there could be reasons to refine this classification, especially to cater to the requirements of different practices such as e-learning. So, if you feel the need to alter the classification, do voice your thoughts in the comments section.

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Learning by Design

First published July 27, 2003

Learning design is an ill-structured domain. Only reflective experimentation can reveal what works and what does not. Even then, what works in one situation may not work in another. But insights gleaned from such experiments do find their way into common practice, making it more robust and more attuned to meet current requirements. "Learning by Design" is Stuart's experiment with e-learning design. It is ironical that Stuart chooses to remain anonymous (see reason below) but we all can benefit from his observations. - Maish Nichani ()

Stuart, Senior Learning Designer for a leading UK bespoke e-learning company (Stuart chooses to remain anonymous as his ideas do not necessarily reflect those of his company). Stuart can be contacted at .

Rediscovering design

When you read about Instructional Design, you probably find yourself coming across the same topics time and time again.

There's one word that doesn't crop-up very often: design. Strange, given that it stares us in the face everyday when we look at our job title: Instructional Designer.

In this article, I want to share my enthusiasm for design and show how it can help us provide better learning experiences for people.

Learning engineers?

In the e-learning industry, those of us who are concerned with content tend to call ourselves Instructional Designers. In an awful lot of companies, I believe we act more like learning engineers.

What do I mean by that? Well, engineers mainly concern themselves with applying trusted techniques and processes to new situations. There tends to be a focus on the functional elements of a solution and its robustness.

The same approach seems rather prevalent in our industry. Many e-learning companies follow a set process. It probably follows something like this:

There are many variations of this set approach, but they all follow a rather rigid step-by-step methodology.

What are the advantages of this approach? It's reliable and produces satisfactory results, it's easy to manage and it's cost effective (lots of re-use).

Now, what's wrong?

A more eloquent criticism of the approach can be found in an earlier article on this website: empathic learning.

This is where my enthusiasm for design comes in: I feel it gives us a new way to think about our work and a way out of our current predicamentÉpossiblyÉ

Are we designers?

At this point, some of you may be dubious about seeing yourself as designers. It's hard to shake design's associations with wacky creative types and visual stylists. Perhaps a better model to hold in your head is that of the garden designer:

I believe our work has the same issues; it's just a different medium.

The value of design

I think there is now a real value in seeing ourselves as part of the larger design community. Why is this?

When we choose to view ourselves as designers, we suddenly open up vast opportunities for learning and development. The design community offers us a rich reservoir of knowledge, skills and inspiration that we can apply in our own domain.

The rest of this article explores some of the immediate ways we can benefit from taking on this new perspective.

Attitude

Designers seem to share a set of attitudes that are helpful in producing exciting and innovative solutions:

I believe this attitude is a prerequisite for moving our industry forward and producing e-learning that is great rather than merely good. I also believe it is an attitude that can be cultivated. How do we begin this journey? One easy way is to start looking at the products we produce with a critical eye. Starting to become dissatisfied with the current situation is a first step towards looking for new ways of doing things.

Another step in this journey is to spend more time watching learners using our programmes, especially learners new to the medium:

In product design, more and more large companies are hiring individuals with observation skills (ethnographers, anthropologists and psychologists) to help them see with beginner's eyes; to understand how people and technology really interact and to see opportunities for new developments. I think the e-learning community would also benefit from this attitude.

Process

There is much we can learn from the fluid development process used by most designers:

Immersion -> Incubation -> Generation -> Evaluation

This process is an excellent vehicle for generating new and unique solutions, rather than just forcing new problems into existing solutions. I describe this process in more detail below. A much more eloquent description of this process can be found in a previous article on empathic learning; another related article is learning personas.

Immersion

Designers immerse themselves in the situation they are designing for. Designers are especially interested in unexpected issues and Ôhidden' problems/information.

We too can benefit from doing much more detailed research. Start by performing the tasks to be learnt and asking the following questions:

Then, look at the context of the learning:

Take the time to really learn about the audience, being especially careful to avoid stereotypes. Learn about them in all their diversity, with all of their unique qualities, abilities, attitudes and needs. How are you going to cater to this audience? How are you going to meet their unique needs?

Incubation

After designers have immersed themselves in the problem at hand, they have the wisdom to leave things alone for a while. This gives the mind time to integrate the disparate information and for the sub-conscious to get to work.

In my own Instructional Design work, I have often found this to be the most fruitful stage of the whole design process.

Generation

Now comes the time to generate some solutions. Designers actively seek to come up with as many possible ideas and solutions as possible. For a moment, they set aside the constraints and their critical minds and just attempt to generate ideas; quantity not quality. There are many creative thinking techniques that can be used at this stage (another thing we can Ôborrow' from the design community): brainstorming, concept fans, provocations, humour and inspiration from related problems.

As ideas are generated, it is usual for a few strong ideas to start to be reinforced. These usually emerge as a small set of candidate solutions to be explored further.

Exploration/evaluation

Finally, each candidate solution is explored. This will probably involve sketching, rough screen designs, mini-storyboards and possibly prototypes. Which ideas pan out? Which ideas fail under further examination? Which ideas can be combined to make something stronger? The ideas can also be explored and evaluated from a learning perspective to ensure they follow sound principles of learning design.

The remaining ideas can then undergo an even more rigorous evaluation:

Answering these questions usually leads to a final design that the designer or design team is happy to recommend to the client.

There will be those of you who will be worrying where training/learning theory fits into all this. In practice, this emerges naturally from the designer's knowledge of their field. They draw on their knowledge of learning theory to create or to modify ideas in a way that fits the principles of learning. This doesn't have to be done explicitly: a good practised learning designer automatically draws on this knowledge and critical faculty. This works in the same way as, for example, a garden designer coming up with ideas. They automatically understand those plants that will fit a garden/climate and will generate ideas accordingly.

The benefits of the process

As you can see, this process is rather different to that traditionally employed by Instructional Designers. Does it work? My company has used variations of this process on many projects and project bids and it seems to work. I've won a lot of work from large-blue chip clients using this approach. Oh, and all of these projects have had to meet demanding time-scales, budgets and technology constraints.

I think we can all benefit from playing with this process. I encourage you to try it on a low-risk project and see if you get anything from it. If nothing else, it will help you question your current process and the change might give you a well-needed boost of energy.

Development

The design community offers ideas on how we can develop as professionals.

Design critiques/peer review

When a project ends, we need to systematically evaluate the results of our efforts. We need to encourage other designers to critique our work and help us to objectively evaluate our efforts. We also need to get detailed feedback from our clients. Perhaps most importantly, we should look for opportunities to watch learners using our programmes and see what works and what doesn't so that we can apply the lessons to future projects.

Study genres/examples

I feel one way we can develop is to become better acquainted with good practice in our field and the history of our subject. I feel there is great value in studying the different Ôgenres' that have developed in our field and understanding why they arose and their strengths and weaknesses (e.g. Ôdrill and practice', Ôcognitive tools', microworlds, simulations, electronic-books, etc). There is also enormous value in studying current examples of good and bad practice to inform our future design activity.

Celebrate play/experimentation

Designers recognise the value of play and experimentation. We need the opportunity to try out novel approaches and ideas without the fear of failure or the usual business constraints. I believe every company needs to systematically build in opportunities for constructive play. Perhaps examples of your play projects could be shown in your reception for customers to look at while they wait.

I also feel that industry needs to celebrate innovation, diversity and novelty. I would love to see an annual competition or exhibition celebrating these values, perhaps in the way that car companies show-off concept cars at motor shows. I would love the competition to encourage off-the-wall ideas that do not need to meet an immediate client need.

Learn from other design disciplines

We need to actively seek inspiration by constantly exposing ourselves to many different experiences from different fields or vocations.

I would recommend you to start subscribing to design magazines from other design fields: architecture, garden design, product design, usability, interaction design and branding and marketing, etc. I would also encourage you to read the core text in these areas. Look at how designers in these fields meet the goals of their audience, how do they tackle constraints/problems, what genres have emerged, how do they practice their arts, what processes do they use? How do ideas/skills/knowledge from different fields map onto the learning design field?

Personally, I've learnt a lot from product design, architecture, usability, interaction design and systems thinking. I'm trying to make my design bookshelf as diverse as possible and I believe I've really benefited from this practice.

Summary

I believe that there is great value in experimenting with what it means to practice Instructional Design. Currently, I think our practice is too heavily influenced by economics and the demands of business and production. I also feel it has been dominated by our need/desire to find some standard principles of learning that we can rely on to produce satisfactory learning outcomes. Now, I feel that we need to explore beyond these constraints to find new ways of doing things. Only then will we move on as an industry. I suggest that one way of doing this is to look to the other design disciplines and see what we can learn.

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Q&A with Professor Karen Stephenson

First published July 07, 2003

Social Network Analysis (SNA) has been blogrolled a lot recently. SNA methods and tools are a hot topic. Whether for analyzing the spread of a virus or the spread of corporate rumors, interest in SNA is at an all time high. A few days ago, I was fortunate to have a conversation with Professor Karen Stephenson, early pioneer and world-renowned expert in the field. I took the opportunity to interview her on SNA topics around learning networks. Here is the edited version of that interview.

elearningpost: Business oriented Social Network Analysis (SNA) is getting a lot of media attention these days. Information Architects, Knowledge Management practitioners, and even Interior Designers are looking to this technique to better understand their problem spaces. But, SNA methodologies haven't changed much over the years. So why the sudden interest?

Karen: It's getting a lot of attention largely because of the major catastrophic event that punctuated everyoneÕs equilibrium -- 9/11. That was a monumental moment. People realized that human networks could undermine anything. My mantra--we are not fighting a nation, we are fighting a network--was later picked up by President Bush to describe the US stance.

Photo of Professor Karen Stephenson

Although the event happened in the US, people around the world got reoriented to the notion that networks are a powerful form of human organization. This event pushed an embryonic but growing field--SNA--into the collective consciousness.

People wanted to know that if human networks are a thing to be understood then what is the methodology by which we could understand them with.

With 9/11 people realized "why" networks were important, now they want to understand "how" to detect or diagnose them. That's where SNA--the traditional, academic approach to analyzing or trying to measure human networks--came into the foreground.

elearningpost: Do you think the Internet had something to do with it?

Karen: People have been using the Internet for sometime now but you didn't see it emerge dramatically--there was no catastrophic event that drove people's awareness of it.

Nevertheless, there is a distinction between human network and a technological network. Human networks have a life of their own quite independent of technological networks.

Although I think that the Internet has played and continues to play an important part in growing the awareness of a global web or network, at this point, I still don't think it is as far reaching as it could be. It will take more time for the Internet to grow and become a way of life. Even so, this network is very different from a human network. We are talking apples and oranges here.

As an early pioneer in this field I have been talking about human networks for a very long time--20-25 years. People knowingly nod at what I am saying, they hear my words, they understand the meaning, but it is only because of recent events over the last two years that they have quickened with a deep vicarious awareness.

elearningpost: You've stated that there are six varieties of knowledge networks in an organization. One of them is the learning network. Can you explain this network?

Karen: A Learning Network is an important contra-distinction to the other networks. Taken by itself it means something, it can stand alone, but it has greater meaning when taken together with the other knowledge networks within a community or within a culture.

In any network, relationships stand in sharp contrast to what we might call a normal disinterested transaction. If I want to get routine work done I will call Joe or Jill over here to try to get some piece of information passed along and in exchange for that maybe get some more information from them.

I don't really care whom I'm interacting with--I don't need to know them personally, I can, but it doesn't really matter--I just need to pass that information along. It is part of my job and I need to get it done--it is a transaction--plain and simple. And these kind of transactions don't necessarily require underlying trust to "grease the skids" to smooth things along.

In practice, machines perform disinterested transactions. But because humans have inefficiently adopted machines there are a lot of gaps filled with humans transacting when, in reality, a machine could probably do it.

There are all kinds of reasons for why this happens and why it does not change - regarding to workers council, labor unions, social and political policies, and industrial policies around the world, but we won't go there in this interview. Let's just say that there are countless disinterested exchanges occurring every day which fill the void among human beings--all in the name of work.

So now, what if you're going about your business doing your work and somebody comes up with a bright idea or you come up with a bright idea! With whom are you going to talk to or share this information?

Are you going to talk to this disinterested person over here with whom you have to do routine work with--No. You are going to find and seek colleagues you trust--someone you have worked with in the past or someone you are currently working with but with whom you have shared past confidences. In other words, with someone you have a stronger sense of relationship than a disinterested transaction.

There is something else going on when you want to find people with whom you want to share your idea with. You look for some other kind of meaning, not necessarily more meaning, just other kinds of meaning, which are imbued with a human quality called trust.

Recollect some of your mistakes or mess-ups. With whom did you share these stories? With someone you have a deep form of trust because you are taking painful realities and trying to implement or correct them for improving your future.

That's a Learning Network. And it really requires tremendous amounts of trust. I make mistakes all the time, but I don't share it with the world. I share it with only my closest colleagues.

The Learning Network is just that in an organization. Trust is the medium through which important knowledge--the message--is passed. And if you can understand where the leverage is within that trust network you can use it for the benefit of the entire organization.

It is a good thing to diagnose such a network. It is also a good thing to understand it. Understanding it will help you relate the findings back to some past event that may be tied to some present undertaking and thereby provide fresh insight.

elearningpost: You mentioned that trust is the medium--the container-- through which knowledge is passed, How would you relate initiatives such as office space design to building trust?

Karen: I like the way you phrased the question to me. When I said that trust is the medium and not the message, it was in the sense that trust is a container for certain types of knowledge. Now let's enlarge the scope beyond the focus on human relationships to the environment where these relationships are grown.

We are surrounded by environmental artifacts--past containers or representations of knowledge. Our environment, our workplace, and how we shape it, is another example of how we manage knowledge.

Now, you can take away the container or make the container so small, so dark, and so dismal and miserable that you can reduce human existence to something that is nasty, brutish and short. If you can do this, then it stands to reason that the opposite is also true--altering an environment in certain ways to enhance learning and creativity.

By the way, creativity and learning are entirely different networks. Once diagnosed, what you do for learning is very different from what you would do for creativity.

You can change different parts of the environment so that you can become more collaborative or more solitary for different types of work activity.

I have devised a formula--a calculus for culture, if you will--that can determine when a culture needs to enhance its creativity or its learning aspect.

We know what this means in terms of working knowledge. Now we work with architects and designers to affect these variables through the manipulation of space.

Note that that space is a contributing environmental factor--an influence--to the equation and not a causal factor. And the human network is a driving social factor, not an environmental factor. I've helped design companies like Steelcase to realize a simplified calculus that supports culture and helps them to better match their products for the user.

elearningpost: In a recent Stanford Business Magazine article, Innovators Navigate Around Cliques-- a researcher reported that, "Contrary to common assumptions, the evidence suggests that in many cases strong social ties do not provide significant new information, so it helps not to be embedded in them". Are certain types of networks more desirable than other types?

Karen: It is not the first time this idea has been out there--of course--and it's not the first time it got published either.

Trust is an oppressive power and can stagnate innovation, forcing people to forego more innovative work and instead focus their efforts on "fitting in" and belonging to a network. Sometimes if you have an idea that differs from that of others or the reigning concept of the moment, you will appear as the nail that sticks out and needs to gets hammered back down. This can be painful!

But there is a dark side to trust. You can have too much of a good thing if you will. You could trust too deeply, too much, and when that happens you commune, you change your behavior, you become like them, and you lose your sense of a larger context--one might say objectivity--and then you are not going to be innovative. Real innovation occurs not in the center, but in the periphery. For innovators to survive, they must go around these clique-ish roadblocks.

elearningpost: How is your Hubs, Gatekeepers, and Pulsetakers different from Malcolm Gladwell's Mavens, Connectors, and Salesmen?

Karen: While Malcolm's definitions are drawn from intuitive observations, mine are mathematically derived. When I met Malcolm I told him that what he was picking up intuitively at an informal level was indeed this underlying pattern about how networks are structured.

Hubs, Gatekeepers, and Pulsetakers are precise mathematical models, which do not correlate one-to-one with Malcolm Gladwell's definitions. But, for getting the message out to the general public, they can be mixed without much harm.

elearningpost: Initially, MindMapping, a creative way to brainstorm and problem solve, was an expert-driven practice. The emergence of softwares like MindManager took the practice to the common manager. Can we expect a similar evolution for SNA software?

Karen: SNA is not yet commoditized but pretty soon we're going to be commoditizing this approach. At this point it is still a high-level executive managerial tool.

One has to be careful about it though, because a commoditized tool like this in the hands of an uneducated user who does not appreciate this knowledge can cause serious damage.

I believe that it will become commoditized and when it does people will be ready. They will handle it responsibly. Humans do have a certain amount of good sense and they will not take something and abuse it. People see the value to be gained in applying a tool that is there to help them.

elearningpost: Do you think that future SNA software will offer more visualization tools? How important is visualization to SNA?

Karen: Yes and No. I'm a visual thinker myself. And if anybody defaulted to visual thinking, it would be me. Regarding SNA, I do use the visuals but I also use and rely upon the sheer mathematics of it.

You think differently with visuals and you think differently with a table of numbers. You learn different things and you need to look at them both. We need to keep that in mind when working with people of all sorts, we need to be open to hybrid forms of the methodology--that is, using this kind of visualization with the mathematical measures in a diagnostic readout that will be relevant for business or for anybody managing an organization.

Right now, it is all too customized. There is no standardized approach, as it is still a growing field. It's morphing and changing and it isn't mature enough, yet. But the field will become mature in another two or so years, and then there will be an agreed upon standard that can be used for organizational diagnostic forms.

About

Dr. Karen Stephenson is president of NetForm and a professor of management. She teaches at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. She has combined a legacy of management and 25 years of research to publish and practice with regard to the implementation of transparent technologies that enable businesses to change. She helps legacy firms to measure (and make tangible) the intangible assets of human and social capital as well as measure and insure against the associated risks of that asset.

Karen Stephenson received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Harvard University, an M.A. in Anthropology from the University of Utah, and a B.A. in Art and Chemistry from Austin College.

She can be reached by e-mail at .

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The Art of the Quick Reference

First published May 08 2003

Amy Corrigan and Eve Drinis,
Technology Solutions Company
www.techsol.com

There's something seductive about the promise of the words "quick reference". Perhaps it's the hope that there is a silver bullet to quickly solve our problems. Perhaps it harkens back to baseball card collections. Perhaps we just like gadgets. Whatever the reason, we have found quick reference cards and booklets to be popular with management and end users alike. Here we share some options and considerations for making the most of quick references, both paper and electronic, in a corporate training setting.

What Is a Quick Reference?

Definition: Let's start with a definition. A quick reference is any document or electronic performance support device that provides a concise, targeted crutch for performing specific job-related tasks.

Often, a quick reference will outline a procedure or set of facts using a set of minimal step-by-step instructions and, perhaps, lists of critical values or key conceptual diagrams. The idea is that a quick reference provides a structured means to help an employee perform a task. Quick references are typically a user-friendly shape or format to make them maximally easy to use on the job.

The following are the core elements of a quick reference:

Formats: Quick references can come in many formats, although the most popular are the quick reference card and the quick reference booklet. These are usually reproduced on distinctive paper, such as cardstock, or in a unique size to emphasize that they are different from a full manual. The following is a list of paper-based quick reference formats:

quick reference types

With the ubiquitous addition of the PC to the work environment, electronic formats for quick reference cards are also becoming popular. Examples include "the paper clip guy" from the Microsoft Office products as well as simpler electronic cue cards available in other software packages. The following are electronic formats for quick reference cards:

When Is a Quick Reference Appropriate?

Quick references are appropriate in many circumstances, either as a primary means of performance support or as a supplement to more significant interventions such as training classes. Quick references are particularly effective when supporting the performance of:

What Are the Benefits?

We have developed quick references in dozens of corporate training and performance support situations. Some of the benefits we have found are: