Making our time-lapse animation
This week we launched version 2.0 of our Social Learning platform, Curatr. To celebrate the launch we decided to create a new video describing our approach. We spent a fair amount of time thinking about what sort of video we should make – from a straight product promo, to an opinion piece or something describing Social Learning. In the end we went back to our roots to build on what makes us different - our very visual approach.
With this in mind I picked up the phone to Tim at Creative Connections, whose team I’d seen work a few months previously. Before the shoot day we spent a number of hours considering the script we would use and the visualisations we were looking to create. We consulted with Paul, our cameraman and film editor, on the best way to set up the shoot. In the end we opted to shoot full motion on a DSLR, with the camera mounted on a handy homemade rail, complete with skateboard wheels.
On the day of the shoot we worked the script for about an hour before coming up with some initial storyboards. We wanted to let the artists inject their sense of flair to the occasion, so we weren’t overly prescriptive. Once we were happy with our ideas we started committing to paper. Each image took about 12 minutes to draw and colour, apart from the Earth image which took twice as long. In between drawing we took time to re-visit our previous ideas and rehearse the script, making sure it all came together.
At the end of the day we were chuffed with what had been produced; we felt it reflected both our style and our approach. The next day I came to lay down the voice-over and somehow it just didn’t sound right. We’d made the conscious choice to have me say it, instead of someone with a decent voice, as we were producing something that was authentically ‘us’. But even then, me reciting a scripted piece sounded stilted and didn’t work. So as I sat at my desk feeling increasingly frustrated I got out my iPhone and recorded a new voice-over, made just as I said it and just as I was staring at the wall itself, not the rushes of the video.
I handed it over to Paul, expecting him to throw it back at me aghast, but he saw the potential and chopped the timings to match my ramble. Whilst we had shot in full motion, he cut it down to produce the time-lapse effect using Final Cut Pro. Ironically the voice-over sounded much better for being recorded straight to iPhone – those we did using professional equipment didn’t sound as authentic. The improvement was dramatic. I tried to re-record my ramble 20+ times in order to say something more profound (or less stupid), but I couldn’t get anything better. So we went with it.
Another half day of colour correction, syncing and titling and we were done. Then we had a 2 day argument about music. We agreed the whole piece was better when it had a constant bed of music in the background. But it was taking too much attention away from the message – there was too much going on. So the version with occasional music made it to YouTube.
In all I think we spent about a day pre-shoot, a day on the shoot and 3 days in post-production. 5 days work for 3 minutes video. Of course in reality it was more than 5 days – we had 6 people involved on the shoot day. Probably more like 12 man days in total. But we think it was worth it.
Check out the ‘making of’ video below – a time-lapse of a time-lapse. And of course, below that is the end product; our Curatr v2 video!
Learning Without Strategy
Mindmeld; there's an app for that
Last week I attended the Learning Without Frontiers conference and the Learning Technologies exhibition. LWF was a pretty profound affair. As Dan Pontefract put it; LWF is the TED of learning. Noam Chomsky opened the conference with a message on what he suggested were the two directions education could take in our lives: education as a means of enlightenment or education as a means of indoctrination. These words stuck with me as I experienced the rest of the conference and I began to link Chomsky’s thoughts back to my own world. Specifically I got to thinking about Learning Strategy and how we perhaps don’t often take a moment to envision what the future will mean for our learning initiatives.
The technology of the 2030 workplace
Ray Kurzweil spoke after Chomsky on his theory of the singularity and the role of exponential growth. Kurzweil suggests that due to the exponential nature of technological growth we are fast approaching the moment when machines allow us to develop greater than human intelligence – the singularity. Kurzweil demonstrates this growth pattern with an example; the unit value of an iPhone. He suggests that the iPhone isn’t just a few hundred times greater in unit value than the MIT supercomputers he got to play with in the sixties. These supercomputers were enormous, had little processing power and cost a fortune. As such, Kurzweil would suggest the unit value of an iPhone is in the order of billions of times greater than the MIT computer.
The iPhone is that much faster in terms of processing power, it is that much smaller in terms of physical size and it is that much cheaper, that the cumulative effect is more than a billion times greater unit value inside 50 years. And the speed of technological growth is growing; it is exponential, not linear. So severe is this effect that in just twenty years from now the unit value of the iPhone will be that much greater again; faster than anything we know today, the size of a bloodcell and available for just a few cents. This leads us towards the internet of things concept; where everything is connected and you just Google your keys when you can’t find them in the morning. In Kurzweil’s world, you can upload your brain.
Predicting what this means for the workplace of tomorrow is hardly a precise science, but we can take a stab at some likely advances. Take the way in which we interact with our technology as a starting point, specifically voice recognition…
The trouble with voice recognition is that we all remember how it started life. Spending hours with your talk-to-type software, desperately training it to recognise your sibilant s’s, only to find that you can type faster with your fingers. It hadn’t come far despite 15 years of innovation, at least not in the minds of the masses. Microsoft brought the technology back to the living room with its Kinect device. Using a Kinect for the first time has hilarious results; it’s like you’re talking to a mildly deaf alien. You shout, you mouth things slowly, you make gestures, but Kinect doesn’t understand. Then, in a state of complete exasperation, you say something normally and Kinect recognises it instantly. You start to realise that this tech has come a long way.
But hearing what you said is a minor piece of the puzzle. Understanding what you said is a far bigger deal. Siri, Apple’s voice-powered assistant for the iPhone, shines a light on this dark art when it takes your voice input and processes it with a degree of human interpretation. On my first try out of Siri I asked a question which it misinterpreted as containing the word ‘superfluous’, so I flippantly asked it if it was superfluous. Dry as you like, it gave me the dictionary definition of superfluous, as if to say “screw you”. It isn’t nearly as witty as it thinks it is. But then again, Siri isn’t nearly as new as I thought it was; the technology is four years old and that’s about a life-time in tech terms.
IBM recently set the bar in terms of natural language processing with its Watson experiment. These days the team behind Siri is working with the team behind Watson to develop software that can act as a clinical assistant to doctors. These developments have profound possibilities for the way we work, way beyond the dizzy heights of simple voice recognition. The technology goes to a new level when you can converse with your device in the same way that you might converse with someone over dinner. You wouldn’t go to dinner and write notes to each other, so why do we insist on doing it at work?
Voice isn’t the only interface to be going through an overhaul. Lord Puttnam, speaking later in the day at LWF, commented that the keyboard has lacked innovation for decades. In reality, it’s more like 135 years. We use QWERTY keyboards because this layout avoided the printing arms clashing on a typewriter. We’ve hardly innovated beyond this level of input device for many years (except the mouse and now, touch), but a combination of voice and motion capture might be about to change that. Again, the Kinect is far from perfect, but you have to remember that it is just the first device in a world of exponential technological growth. It will be twice as good next year; four times better the year after.
Again, the ability to use gesture is just a start of what this technology could do for us. As sensing technology gets better we can expect machines to start interpreting our reactions. Imagine performance support tools that know when you are feeling frustrated with something using Kinect-like devices built into tablets, laptops and smart screens. At CES Samsung showed a cracking new display which takes a window and transforms it into a desktop. Partner that with a Kinect style input device and we’re starting to move beyond the era of the keyboard and mouse.
3D printing is another fascinating area of technological development that Kurzweil touched upon. With kits available for as little as £300, the era of the 3D printer is upon us. By building up layers of material with micro-metre accuracy, a 3D printer can render a decent size object in about an hour. Today we can use a 3D printer to printer 70% of the parts it takes to build a 3D printer. The ability to ship just a handful of units to developing nations and transform their manufacturing ability overnight is close. When I can send you the schematics to print out anything, from a fork to a house, what role does manufacturing have to play in our future?
What does this mean for Learning Strategy?
Sir Ken Robinson, the king of educational soundbites, added another to his repertoire when he told the LWF audience that “the world doesn’t stop so you can teach it”. Our strategies for learning need to take a vision of the future to their very core, instead of pretending that we can stop the world to document it in a standardised curriculum format for the next twenty years.
We are teaching our children in a curriculum style that isn’t vastly different from the one taught decades ago. Already it is proving to be a completely useless tool in the making of a young person. Yesterday an entrepreneurial young guy came into my office with his CV, looking for a job. I really felt for him. It takes enormous nerve to go door-to-door handing out your CV and looking for work – in his words, any sort of work. I’d have loved to give him some, but with the greatest of respect, his qualifications rendered him useless to me. He had plenty of GCSE’s, AS levels and an NVQ, but what could the guy actually do? Nothing. What was he interested in? Nothing. What did he want to be? Anything that paid. He’d got an education but he hadn’t got a strategy.
Another example walked through my door last week in the form of a very nice chap from the local college, who came along to tell me about the apprentice scheme he was running. It aims to teach youngsters the basics of being a computer technician. It has a week of web software development included as an option. How much use is that? What role in our society is there going to be for computer technicians in years to come? When the price of a processor is a penny, a new device can be printed out at home and actual computing power migrates to the cloud, what role is there for a legion of lightly trained computer technicians?
Training computer technicians seems like a decent enough idea but the whole concept is severely lacking in foresight. It is a response to the strains of today without much view as to what tomorrow will look like. It lacks a strategy. Sadly, it’s not the only place. I had a discussion with some fellow Learning Technology attendees at the Towards Maturity stand during the conference where we discussed if Learning needed a strategy. We all agreed that it most certainly does. But looking around the exhibition, there wasn’t much to suggest that companies are taking a very strategic view on their future learning strategies. There were some exceptions – a notable one for me was a method of delivering inspirational videos to your iPhone each morning; I really liked that concept. I liked it because it was inspirational and full of possibilities for enlightenment.
In the workplace we’ve got plenty of experience in putting our educational tools to use indoctrinating our employees. We’ve taken all the technology in the world and put them to use measuring completions and competencies. Many tools on offer at the Learning Technologies conference were trying to adapt to the changing winds of education by introducing more Social and Web 2.0 style features into their products. But many LMS’ exist in a dichotomy; their core function facilitates education by indoctrination and the add-ons are trying to facilitate education by enlightenment. You can’t expect people to explore, discover and collaborate in the same space that you lecture, measure and test them. It’s like throwing a birthday party in jail. No matter how fun it seems at the time, you’re still behind bars.
It’s probably not as bad as all that; training is needed and companies convene policies in the light of strategy from which we might desire a level of conformity. But I am increasingly of the opinion that the skills we need from our workforce of the future will be the product of an enlightened education; one that is creative; one that dares to question and one which challenges the status quo.
In our future world of ubiquitous processing power, machine intelligence and manufacturing without capacity constraints, there is no competitive advantage to be found in conformity. Doing things faster or cheaper isn’t going to be part of the value proposition for many companies in the future. The real competitive advantage will come from creative flair, from innovation and design.
The scary thing is that this stuff is happening today. I opened by describing technologies that we might see in the 2030 workplace. But for children that are born today, this is the world of work that they will enter into. How will we adapt our education to prepare them for this? And perhaps more pertinently, how will the learning and development function adapt to help facilitate this shift for those of us already at work?
Harry Potter and the Half-Baked iBook
The Monster Book of Monsters is a must-read for all aspiring witches and wizards. With moving pictures and articles on every topic of note, the only real drawback to the textbook is its predisposition to take a chunk out of you. But this isn’t so different to mere muggle students, whose wallets get a chunk taken out of them by textbook purchasing on an annual basis. That was of course until Apple decided to step up to the plate…
But have they got it right? You see, I’m increasingly of the opinion that JK Rowling aimed too low with her imagination on magical textbooks. She couldn’t foresee the way in which things like textbooks would really be consumed if magic was widely available. Why on earth would you need a book?
Books were needed, textbooks specifically, because they helped solve a key social problem; the increasing demand for explicit knowledge in an unstructured world. This was the reality a few hundred years ago. We didn’t have enough teachers to stand at the front of the room and lecture students from memory. Textbooks helped this.
But today it seems fairly uncontroversial to suggest that the problems that led to the invention of the textbook aren’t necessarily ones that we still face. Explicit knowledge is in abundance. If anything it seems that too many people have started writing their thoughts down for others to read. Our collective knowledge is comparatively well organised and highly structured.
This begs a question; why is innovation in textbooks today still about books? We live in a connected world with no shortage of written words. Apple talks about revolutionising textbooks with a device that can search them. Well shit, that’s hardly magical!
I was hoping that we’d move away from eBooks towards a new paradigm that connects Open Educational Resources and invites students to put learning together for themselves – something that changes everything. Apparently that’s not happening today. Don’t get me wrong, I like that textbooks are getting cheaper – the commoditisation of these things can only really lead to their eventual demise. I guess we just aren’t quite as close as I might have hoped.
My top learning technology conferences of 2011
Curatr at Learning Technology
Last year I hit the road a fair bit and attended a number of industry conferences around the world. I thought it might be useful to reflect back some of my experiences in case anyone was wondering where best to attend this year. So, without further adieu, here are my top 6 conferences of last year (in date order):
Learning Technology – January
The UK’s premiere learning tech event was an interesting start to the year as it was the first event I attended as an exhibitor. We did it on a complete shoestring budget, less than £5k. Every expense was spared as there is no glory in hiring out a stool for £75.
It was really hard work. We had an innovative product to share (Curatr) and we had a decent story to tell. Aside from me, we don’t have a ’sales’ team, so the guys doing the talking were developers. If you happened to stop by that day you’d have talked to someone who really knew what they were talking about, which I was proud of.
By all accounts we had a good show. We got around 100 qualified leads, but our conversion rate was miserable. It did give great exposure though and I’m sure we got a less tangible boost which has gone on to serve us well.
It’s bloody hard work exhibiting; people won’t make eye contact with you and a number were outright hostile towards us. Some guys from McDonalds told us they had already got one when we showed them Curatr (lies!) and some other person picked a very verbal fight over the definition of a game. I got really pissed off to see after conference reports stating ‘no innovation’ from some of the conference attendees. Obviously didn’t see us there!
So, some rewards, some angst. We aren’t doing it again this year. I didn’t want to get stuck in a cycle of having to appear each year. I know a number of bigger providers who suggest that, perhaps more than anything, their appearance at this show is an exercise in big swinging dicks with the other providers. To not appear is a sign of troubles!
It’s certainly worth visiting and I enjoy catching up with the people I know. But it’s hard to stand out in such a big event, especially if you don’t have dosh to throw at it.
CIPD HRD conference – April
Next up I was giving a 3 hour workshop at the HRD conference. This time I was treading the hallowed floorboards of the space upstairs, looking down on the exhibition area. It’s maybe 1/3rd of the size of the learning tech exhibition and with a diverse range of products and services. There’s very little overlap between the companies here and those at learning tech.
My workshop session went well and I had 50 or so participants quite engaged with the topic (social and games based learning). One thing I did notice is that the conference attracted a crowd of budget holders, more so than I’d noticed at learning tech. And with less competition on the floor, I’d suggest this is an untapped goldmine. I heard some real crap being spouted on occasion (young people have evolved the ability to multi-task seamlessly apparently), but also saw some great stuff, like Mobile Learning really being pushed by Amit Garg and his crew from Upside Learning.
Regardless of what the hardcore l&d think about the CIPD, they pack signficant clout with people worth knowing in large organisations.
HR unconference – May
This was interesting. 60 or so HR professionals in an old warehouse, discussing topics that matter to them. The day started with a World Cafe session, with us all writing on tables and sharing thoughts to thrash out the themes for the day. These themes were then transcribed onto a massive wall to group the most popular ideas together. Finally, the rest of the day was planned out, putting the hot topics into different time slots for discussion. Best of all the whole day was captured by some very talented artists, who drew the proceedings as they were happening. Hugely clever.
It was well organised and very social. But with that said, I’m not convinced of the format per se. The direction of the day is led by the input of the participants, which is fine. But if that direction isn’t one I want to go in, then I’m forced into spending a day on topics which don’t interest me. That isn’t a possibility where the event is pre-planned and I can target sessions of interest. That said, the opposite could happen and hugely interesting conversations could emerge. It is also a vastly superior concept for getting to know people.
Learning Live – September
To Birmingham for the IITT, err, I mean LPI’s, Learning Live! For my session the room was laid out conference style, which was all wrong, but the audience got involved and got feisty, leading to a great session even though it was first thing in the morning. I got the sense most people were practitioners, perhaps not budget holders, but I could be wrong. I don’t think it matters to some extent; these are the people I need feedback from if we are to develop usable products.
Robert Winston gave a peerless keynote session, although I felt a bit for the hugely knowledgable Chris Atherton, who had largely given the same insights (only deeper) a session or two before. With that in mind, and accepting that I might be an exception, this event stood out for me with the level of insight and rigour the speakers brought to the event. There was no weak link in what I saw or heard.
The exhibition was weak however. It might have been as simple as the lighting, but the room felt huge and lacked buzz on the day of the conference proper. This will change quickly because the standard of the presentations was so high.
DevLearn – October / November
I jetted off to the desert in November for the eLearning Guilds DevLearn event. The Guild bills it as the most popular elearning tech event in the USA and I’ve no doubt it probably is! The better part of 2,000 people attended, although I strongly suspect the conference facility on offer could have held 5 times that amount. The event was split into an exhibition and conference space. The exhibition was fairly underwhelming for the most part. Not that big and a fair number of tools orientated providers. You’d have been hard pressed to find a full service elearning company like we have over here, most were specialist product companies. It’s symptomatic of the market differences more than anything else.
The conference sessions were good but there was a lot of them – too many. The session I ran was one of the best I’ve done but was poorly attended, maybe 20 people in the room. The really popular sessions were those orientated on practical and tool-based topics; think 10 ways to make articulate/captivate/LMS engaging/interactive/social/mobile.
The DemoFest event was the highlight of DevLearn for us (not least because we won best Academic Course!). It is a great idea – getting 60 people to showcase their work and the audience voting for winners. I so want to do something like this in the UK.
I had a lunch with some fellow Brits at the end of the conference and we were of the opinion that whilst tools adoption in the USA is more progressed than it is in the UK, the rigour and theory is much further along in the UK. For instance some sessions on the future of learning, given by global thought leaders, were scandalously ignored, whilst product intros were standing room only. This audience knows what it wants e-learning to be and wants the tools to make it happen better/faster/cheaper.
Online Educa, Berlin – December
My final conference of the year was Online Educa. If you’ve not been before, the layout is fairly odd. The exhibition space winds itself around the corridors of the hotel. It kind of works as you have to use the exhibition space to move in between sessions. Many stand spaces were in decent locations next to traffic because of this. Of course, a few weren’t and suffered badly as a result of being out of traffic all the time.
This was the only conference I attended all year with a truly international feel. Participants really are from all over the place. It’s big as well, another event with a couple thousand people coming through the halls. My own session was well attended, with maybe 150 people in the room. I felt like business was being done at this conference, more than I did at DevLearn or Learning Live.
The concurrent sessions I attended were all good and included the thoughts of pretty much all the prominent thought-leaders in the space. I was also invited along to the Learning Scenarios pre-workshop, which was very good. The only negative point was the keynotes, which were mostly disappointing. Hearing an EU politician tell you how important learning technology is to the future of civilization and backing that up by pointing to a €40m funding package is all well and good, but it kinda falls on deaf ears when you just spent a trillion bailing out banks.
The year ahead…
This year I’d like to do some different conferences but a few might well drag me back. In January I’ll be at Learning Tech for meetings but I’ll be spending most of my time next door at the Learning Without Frontiers event which I’m excited about attending. I will return to HRD as a panelist this year. I’m excited by what Learning Live might do in it’s second year. Berlin I can see going back also. But, I am still searching for the right USA event – neither DevLearn last year or Elliot Masie’s Learning the year before were quite right for me.
Any recommendations?
Top 50 Education and Technology Journals
I’m knee-deep in literature review at the moment for my doctorate. Such a joyous way to start the new year! Anyhow, a part of this has been to review the quality rankings of journals in the area. It was a bit of a pain so I thought I would share the results, just in case some poor unfortunate soul needs to do something similar!
Using the SJR indicator, (González-Pereira et al, 2010) available through the SCImago Journal & Country Rank portal, Journals within Social Sciences and Education were ranked according to quality score. This list was then audited for likely relevant journals to arrive at the following ranking which could be used in part for the evaluation of research quality. The audit consisted of including only those journals with relevant titles and excluding any journals without publications in the last year (2011) or those with fewer than 10 publications in the last 3 years.
| Title | SJR | Total Docs. (2011) | Total Docs. (3years) | ||
| 1 | American Educational Research Journal | Q1 | 0.089 | 30 | 100 |
| 2 | Review of Educational Research | Q1 | 0.081 | 11 | 92 |
| 3 | Learning and Instruction | Q1 | 0.062 | 71 | 139 |
| 4 | Computers and Education | Q1 | 0.056 | 224 | 723 |
| 5 | International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning | Q1 | 0.051 | 26 | 70 |
| 6 | Journal of Computer Assisted Learning | Q1 | 0.051 | 56 | 132 |
| 7 | Educational Researcher | Q1 | 0.05 | 32 | 106 |
| 8 | Educational Research Review | Q1 | 0.048 | 8 | 44 |
| 9 | Review of Research in Education | Q1 | 0.046 | 9 | 35 |
| 10 | Metacognition and Learning | Q1 | 0.046 | 20 | 45 |
| 11 | Academy of Management Learning and Education | Q1 | 0.046 | 26 | 160 |
| 12 | British Journal of Educational Technology | Q1 | 0.045 | 96 | 300 |
| 13 | Journal of the Learning Sciences | Q1 | 0.045 | 15 | 52 |
| 14 | Educational Technology Research and Development | Q1 | 0.043 | 45 | 122 |
| 15 | Instructional Science | Q1 | 0.042 | 56 | 105 |
| 16 | British Educational Research Journal | Q1 | 0.042 | 34 | 137 |
| 17 | Review of Higher Education | Q1 | 0.042 | 5 | 59 |
| 18 | Journal of Higher Education | Q1 | 0.041 | 4 | 79 |
| 19 | Australasian Journal of Educational Technology | Q1 | 0.041 | 36 | 173 |
| 20 | Research in Higher Education | Q1 | 0.038 | 52 | 115 |
| 21 | Internet and Higher Education | Q1 | 0.038 | 37 | 99 |
| 22 | Educational Technology and Society | Q1 | 0.038 | 43 | 258 |
| 23 | Active Learning in Higher Education | Q1 | 0.037 | 13 | 58 |
| 24 | Distance Education | Q1 | 0.037 | 9 | 61 |
| 25 | Innovative Higher Education | Q1 | 0.036 | 40 | 100 |
| 26 | Learning Organization | Q1 | 0.036 | 29 | 93 |
| 27 | Higher Education Quarterly | Q1 | 0.036 | 23 | 77 |
| 28 | Learning, Media and Technology | Q1 | 0.036 | 19 | 79 |
| 29 | Oxford Review of Education | Q1 | 0.035 | 14 | 144 |
| 30 | Journal of Science Education and Technology | Q1 | 0.035 | 88 | 167 |
| 31 | Harvard Educational Review | Q1 | 0.035 | 17 | 118 |
| 32 | Teaching in Higher Education | Q1 | 0.035 | 50 | 171 |
| 33 | Language Learning and Technology | Q1 | 0.035 | 16 | 81 |
| 34 | Journal of Educational Research | Q1 | 0.034 | 32 | 81 |
| 35 | Education and Training | Q1 | 0.034 | 32 | 158 |
| 36 | Journal of Interactive Online Learning | Q1 | 0.033 | 4 | 37 |
| 37 | Theory and Research in Education | Q1 | 0.033 | 10 | 46 |
| 38 | Interactive Learning Environments | Q1 | 0.033 | 16 | 66 |
| 39 | International Journal of Web Based Communities | Q1 | 0.033 | 23 | 85 |
| 40 | American Journal of Education | Q2 | 0.033 | 15 | 70 |
| 41 | International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning | Q2 | 0.033 | 49 | 86 |
| 42 | Innovations in Education and Teaching International | Q2 | 0.033 | 33 | 121 |
| 43 | International Journal of Educational Development | Q2 | 0.033 | 109 | 220 |
| 44 | Journal of Interactive Learning Research | Q2 | 0.032 | 6 | 69 |
| 45 | Technology in Society | Q2 | 0.032 | 25 | 134 |
| 46 | Journal of Management Education | Q2 | 0.032 | 29 | 141 |
| 47 | Journal of Workplace Learning | Q2 | 0.031 | 28 | 110 |
| 48 | Technology, Pedagogy and Education | Q2 | 0.03 | 16 | 77 |
| 49 | IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies | Q2 | 0.03 | 6 | 14 |
| 50 | Education and Information Technologies | Q3 | 0.029 | 34 | 88 |
Some journals were not included in this ranking, for example, Research in Learning Technology by the Association for Learning Technology, UK. The reason for omission is unclear; however, it should be taken as a sign that omission from this list doesn’t necessarily preclude quality.
I realise this is a really, really boring blog post to kick off 2012, so here’s a cat-based GIF:
References:
González-Pereira, B., Guerrero-Bote, V.P. & Moya-Anegón, F., 2010. A new approach to the metric of journals’ scientific prestige: The SJR indicator.Journal of Informetrics, 4(3), p.379-391. Available at: http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S1751157710000246.
Butchering Walruses in Berlin
During the Learning Scenarios session at #oeb11 our group coined a phrase which has got me thinking… thin innovation versus fat innovation.
We wanted to characterise the continuum of innovation that exists within organisations with a view that perhaps the ‘good times’ were over economically speaking. Thin innovation was represented by people and organisations that look to do more with what they already have. Fat innovation lay at the other end of the spectrum, where every new demand is met with a new piece of procurement, a new project, a new initiative, even if the result is little more than a work creation programme.
For a rather macabre example of thin innovation, I was watching an episode of ‘Frozen Planet’ over the weekend which featured the native people of the far north killing a walrus for food. When they got it ashore they started butchering it up into small pieces, wrapping the pieces back into sacks hewn from the Walrus skin.
I couldn’t help but think about how a typical UK organisation would have behaved in the same circumstances. Probably put out a tender for containers, or perhaps commission a study into the requirements of a suitable containment solution. When life gives you walrus, make walrus sacks. Or something…
Take a look at the Learning Scenarios website and have a think about the possible futures painted. I think there’s going to be a real need to start innovating with the resources we have to hand; curating the best bits of content and technology to help us innovate at the thin end of the continuum.
The Ubiquity of Informal Learning: Beyond the 70/20/10 Model
This post first appeared at Learning Solutions Magazine
So I’ve had a bit of a bugbear for a while and I’m starting to feel that I’m not alone. It’s 70/20/10, the oft-quoted model from which we derive that the majority of learning happens from on the job experience, as opposed to learning from peers or in a formal learning environment. That’s not to say that I think the importance we give to informal learning is wrong, far from it. It is more that I think we’ve got the wrong model at the heart of the movement.
Where’s the research?
I’ve heard plenty of people like Doug Lynch tell us there is no peer-reviewed basis for the model. I’ve searched for peer-reviewed journal literature to corroborate the model but I can’t find any, despite there being much suggestion as to a solid research basis. I’ve had conversations with a number of colleagues in academia who are generally of the same opinion — 70/20/10 is a model based on what “seems” to fit.
Unfortunately, “seems to fit” is a trend that we don’t need any more of in workplace learning. Learning Styles “seemed to fit.” There is plenty of “seems to fit” evidence for 70/20/10, ranging in quality from anecdotal blog posts to studies like the one conducted by the Education Development Center (EDC), often quoted as the basis of most “70%” work. The EDC research is often cited as providing the corroborating evidence for suggesting that 70% of workplace learning is informal in nature, but it makes no reference to the 20% or 10% part of the model. This distinction is made by Lombardo and Eichinger as a part of their “Career Architect” process; a proprietary approach to assessing and developing leadership. Here the waters muddy further as overlapping definitions kick in. What the EDC research might call informal, Lombardo and Eichinger would call “learning from others,” and the definition often changes dependent on who you speak to. It is all rather confusing and is certainly far from a concrete foundation to effect grand change.
Digging into the references a little further, many articles which put forth the 70/20/10 model cite Kevin Dobbs’ article “Simple Moments of Learning” which appeared in Training Magazine, January, 2000. This article only mentions 70% in passing, referencing another project which found this figure: the EDC study. Fortunately, the findings from the EDC study can be found in the book “The Teaching Firm,” which can be read in full online.
The Teaching Firm includes a range of case studies that attempt to verbalize the impact and intensity of Informal Learning in the workplace. While the results tend to show that informal learning does indeed happen, and it does have direct benefits to performance, the authors make no judgement as to the intensity or percentage of total learning which was informal in nature. 70% as a figure isn’t a part of the case study results or conclusions.
At this point I’m reminded of an old adage from a Professor of mine who used to remind me on a regular basis that “not all models are right, but some are useful.” Unfortunately, I’m not convinced that 70/20/10 is actually useful either.
To quote EDC’s informal learning thesis, “informal learning is ubiquitous” (p. 178). In work, as in life, informal learning has always been present. It isn’t a new idea and it certainly isn’t powered by the internet. To generalize on how much of our learning is sourced from informal happenstance is somewhat missing the point in my mind. Measuring how much of your learning is informal sounds a lot like asking for an ROI on your Social Media initiative; nice landing, wrong airport.
Allow me to indulge myself in a story to illustrate my point. My first proper job was working in the bakery department at a large supermarket chain in the U.K. Following a formal induction, I was sent out into the big wide world to learn as I went. One of my earliest pieces of informal learning came in weighing the freshly baked loaves of bread. We had to check that the batch matched the marketed weight. It became apparent that a lot of batches failed the test and when this occurred the whole lot had to go in the trash.
Upon seeing me in action a wise old colleague pulled me to one side and offered me a tip. I was doing it wrong. If the batch was underweight you took your bakers hat off and put it on top of the loaf. That brought up the average weight slightly and allowed you to print out a label to keep the batch. Of course this led to mis-selling and, potentially, a law suit. But it didn’t matter, because it made our jobs easier.
Back to today … what I believe is really important is that we maximize the effectiveness of informal learning and make sure the right habits get taught. And for that we need our good friend, formal learning.
A different model perhaps?
An oft overlooked but potentially more relevant model to illustrate the informal learning concept is that of Ebbinghaus’ Learning Curve.
Herman Ebbinghaus was a pretty remarkable chap, especially for a man working in psychology in the 1800’s. His work on memory forms the basis for much of what we practice today, and his experiments are among a few to have been reliably replicated in scientific circumstances since his first publications. Perhaps Ebbinghaus’ most-cited work in learning circles is the Forgetting Curve. However, for me, perhaps his most interesting work came in the articulation of the Learning Curve; the rate at which a person learns information.
The learning curve as a concept has been built upon at regular intervals since Ebbinghaus. Unlike many models within the field of education, the learning curve has a root in mathematics and, as its name suggests, is measurable. As such it became popular in manufacturing as a means to demonstrate how one could produce efficiencies over time.
To over-simplify things, let me suggest that the shape of the learning curve is dependent on two variables; the Learning Coefficient and the number of repetitions. Your ability to perform an action grows as you double the number of repetitions of that action at the rate specified by your Learning Coefficient. Quite literally, practice makes perfect.
The theory suggests that if you do anything enough you will get better at it. Some of that will be the tips, tricks, and techniques you pick up yourself. Some of this will come through observation of others. Some will be the product of what others tell you. We’re all wired for this informal learning process and you have a natural knack for it which varies from task to task. What formal learning can do for you is to accelerate this process by manipulating the Learning Coefficient and giving you better practice.
For instance, let me suggest you have a Learning Coefficient of 5% for picking up Microsoft Word. You start using Word to write letters for the first time and you use it once a day for 30 days. Let me suggest that your first letter took you 100 units of “effort” to complete. By the end of that first month you would have expended 2,332 units of “effort” writing letters. If you never got any better at it, it would have taken 3,000 units of effort, so your natural 5% learning curve has been of good benefit.
Now let’s say that instead of going it alone you attended a number of training sessions to help you along the way. The intervention had the effect of giving you a better understanding of the core concepts of the application, making your subsequent learning more effective; it doubled your Learning Coefficient to 10%. By the end of the month you would have expended 1,788 units of effort. That’s nearly 25% less effort with this improvement in the effectiveness of your learning.
So what’s my point?
Working out where to put your resources when faced with a model like 70/20/10 seems to be easy; go where the biggest number is, the 70%. I’m suggesting the opposite is true, certainly in the beginning. More learning does occur informally than it does formally, I don’t question that. How effective that learning is, is dependent on three things:
The Learning Coefficient,
How good your people are at learning how to learn, and
How much GOOD practice they get.
Those three points are what workplace formal learning should be about, giving you the ability to do your job more effectively. This gets to the heart of why I’m not a fan of the 70/20/10 model; it devalues this important part of the process.
People will learn on the job whatever your efforts are in enabling informal learning. The quality of that learning and the intensity with which they get good practice will be down to the formal learning which comes first. If you really want to make informal learning fly, I’m suggesting that you need to remember the Learning Curve and get the formal learning right first.
References
Using the Career Architect to Assess and Develop Leadership Competencies: http://bit.ly/nSYMUC
The Teaching Firm: http://bit.ly/ozkfxk
David Cofer, Informal Workplace Learning: http://www.calpro-online.org/ERIC/docs/pab00019.pdf (Text version here.)
Kevin Dobbs, Simple Moments of Learning: http://www.allbusiness.com/services/educational-services/4278331-1.html
David Stamps, Learning Ecologies: http://bit.ly/ouqdOG (requires ATHENS login)
NASA’s Learning Curve Calculator: http://cost.jsc.nasa.gov/learn.html
Jay Cross on Informal Learning: http://www.informl.com/where-did-the-80-come-from/
Conference paper on Informal Learning: http://bit.ly/oC34Cm
The cost of Informal vs Formal Learning: http://www.knowledgejump.com/learning/cost.html
Can Gamification avoid becoming the next business fad?
It’s official, the buzzword of 2011 is ‘Gamification’.
I say ‘official’ in the loosest possible sense but I’m going to give myself a +1 for ‘eye-catching statements’ either way.
Whilst the learning world is stealing a slow and suspicious march towards the concept of Gamification, the wider business world is setting off like Usain Bolt in hunt of the nearest KFC. The idea is simple. Computer games are engaging. Work is not. Therefore, make work like games (+2 eye-catching statements).
I’m sure it will only be a matter of time before a large consultancy firm offers to take a few million pounds off your hands to implement this new regime. For the overwhelming majority of cases I predict epic failure.
The difference between Tesco’s Clubcard and Angry Birds.
The majority of what I read and hear about Gamification shows some fundamental differences in the collective understanding of what a ‘game’ is. For the purposes of clarity, let me give two examples which I believe we can all agree on.
Tesco’s Clubcard scheme is a loyalty scheme run by a major supermarket store based in the UK. As you shop for goods, you collect points. You can redeem these points on items that Tesco thinks you might like to purchase. This is not a game, nor is it a clever interpretation of the Gamification concept.
Rovio’s Angry Birds is the best selling mobile game of all time. In the game you fling a variety of perturbed birds with special powers towards green pigs, elegantly stacked in intricate structures that would most certainly fail to achieve building regulation standards. This is a game.
I’m worried that Gamification is going to turn into a fad because some people don’t see this difference. To suggest that you can engage your employees more by making them collect points which they can redeem back against benefits (pay, holiday, flexi-time etc…) is not Angry Birds, its Tesco’s Clubcard. It is not a game, nor is it Gamification. There are many reasons why this is not a game, but let me expand on two:
- The reward is extrinsic to the activity.
- It is not fun.
The first one is enough to tell you why Gamification that looks like a Clubcard scheme won’t work. The ‘joy’ of the Clubcard scheme is in the payoff, the vouchers. Just as in the workplace, the ‘joy’ of this sort of Gamification scheme isn’t in working or doing work, but in the reward. You wanted to engage people in their work and all you did is engage people in their reward package. In short, implementing this sort of ‘Gamification’ in the workplace will bring you 3 things:
- A lot of people attempting to circumvent work in order to reach rewards (gaming the system).
- A large increase in the amount of reward you have to give out.
- A large decrease in staff engagement with the work itself.
This isn’t new. This is classic target setting behaviour with all the same pitfalls. When you create a system that is akin to the Tesco’s Clubcard scheme and call it Gamification you are adding another stone in the rocky road towards fad town.
When you boil down beyond motivation theories, flow and all sorts of other stuff, games are engaging for that second reason. They are fun. This is where Gamification starts and ends. If it isn’t fun, don’t bother.
Don’t get me wrong, I love that business is becoming open to the idea of games in the workplace. For some reason the stereotype that work and play are opposites has pervaded our lives and I’m convinced this need not be true. But I feel that we’re at a fork in the road on the term Gamification itself. If it is adopted in the Tesco’s Clubcard model not only will it fail as a long term concept but I won’t be touching it with a stick.
The future of online learning? A case study of Curatr in action…
A couple weeks ago we finished up with the facilitation of an 8 week course at the University of San Diego using Curatr, our new platform to get learners engaged in a Social Learning experience. We think the results have been pretty stunning, so I’ve put together a quick PDF case study to highlight some of the key findings. To download the PDF, please click here.
We’ve still got work to do to make the platform everyone we want it to be, that much we know. But the bottom line is that we’re already enabling learners to be really social and to significantly contribute back to the learning experience. With just a couple days work we were able to put together an experience that got the audience hooked for an average of 18 hours each. That’s an enormous return on investment, given the typical figures we see for development hours versus learning time.
Not only that, but our next course will be so much richer for the contributions of our first cohort. We’ve now got a curated base of knowledge which is some 3 times larger than when we started, all thanks to the contributions of our learners. Our learners were slowly but surely becoming teachers as they found new content, shared it with others and commented on each others findings.
I’m convinced this sort of approach is the future of online learning. It requires a minimal investment in the development of new content (of which there is plenty in the world already!) and maximises the social learning opportunities that exist for participants. Curatr is just one of the tools you could use to facilitate this approach, but its the only one I know that is both free and made by me 
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About:
Ben Betts is Managing Director of HT2, creators of innovative Learning Technologies. We specialise in taking creative approaches to solving the everyday problems facing organisations in their approach to learning and development. We are particularly keen on Social, Game-based and Mobile Learning. I'm also a Research Engineer at the International Digital Lab, Warwick University and a board member of the eLearning Network.