Do You Believe in Magic?

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. – Arthur C. Clarke, 3^rd law of prediction.

I'm not sure why, but this popped into my head during a recent interaction with my computer. I had been trying to put a picture into a document. The process is usually quite simple, find the picture in application A, highlight it, hit CTL-C, then go to application B, put the cursor where you want to insert, then hit CTL-V. Voila, you have the picture in both places. It's simple. It's easy. I have done it hundreds of times.

Except it didn't work.

I retraced my steps, clicking, copying, moving, pasting. Nothing. I tried a few times with greater care and lesser speed, but it was always the same result. Eventually I moved the picture a different way (my latest fixation is to not waste time trying to solve the wrong problem – here I wanted to move the picture, not fix or understand Windows annoyances).

Once the picture was where it belonged I started thinking about the bigger canvas and how we are supposed to conduct learning on computers. As informal tech support for a medium sized circle of friends, and as someone formerly responsible for tech support in a large corporation, I have noticed that users generally fall into two classes. There are those who have a conceptual idea of how the computer works and who need to know the specifics of how to make something new happen (or to make it happen correctly). Then there are those for whom it is simply magic.

I think the magic people are in the majority – by a lot. Stuff happens on the computer and there is no way to predict what or why. Windows start spawning windows and can't be stopped. Software stops responding and documents that hadn't been saved for hours are now gone. The network stops responding and there is no mental model that guides how to get it back. In some cases even a rudimentary understanding that shutting everything off and restarting might help is missing. Often the magic uses language to move the computer into sentience. The computer does things. The computer surfs the web. The computer got a virus. On one level it causes me to be astonished by the number of computers that are sold and that are in use, but more relevant to the subject of this blog…

I think this affects learning in two ways.

First, it places learning into a very fragile environment, one that might lock up, become unresponsive or just stop working at any moment. I have friends who are afraid to try things for fear they might break something (I think this is the single most logical explanation for the number of unsecured networks in America). So a lesson needs a new Flash player to run – uh oh. I better not download that, I might get a virus. A lesson displays a bad script error on a page – uh oh, what does that mean? Did I do something wrong? The computer wants to download updates – uh oh, I'd better not, I'm working fine right now. In any case, the learning of lesson content is over and the user begins solving the wrong problem, or just goes away.

Second, and very related to the first, it creates a cognitive distance between the learner and the material that is based on a basic distrust of the medium of instruction. How can you present a lesson on electrical safety if the user is not certain they can get to the end of the lesson safely? In the simplest terms, if I am in class with a live teacher, and I ask a question, I am pretty sure that the teacher is not going to lock up or reboot. I can focus on the lesson, and not the technology that is used to deliver it.

I am not sure if there is a resolution to this dilemma, and whether that resolution is a more reliable computer or a better mental model of how they work, but I think it will continue to affect learning on the computer until it is resolved.

R

To Entropy, or Not to Entropy

I have been preparing for a class on web based instructional design, and as a result have been considering some of the basic assumptions we make concerning the presentation space for e-learning. While the class will need to consider a variety of browsers, one that will need to take a central focus must be Internet Explorer. While I hesitate to cite Wikipedia, on the page for browser market share, the graphic for Internet Explorer looks remarkably like the old Packman graphic.

So what is the issue?

I have noticed that there is a new category of flotsam accumulating on computer screens, the unasked-for addition of toolbars. The worst, and probably the most extreme, case was a friend who asked me why his printer had stopped working. When I looked I found that his browser had added a piece of malware, in the form of an additional toolbar that had simply hijacked his printer driver. But the other thing that was apparent was that he had a LOT of toolbars. He could search using Google from the convenience of his browser toolbar. He could search using Yahoo the same way. He could also search using AOL. He could access history, favorites, an additional row of MSN tabs, and multiple windows in the event he grew bored with one.

I do not begrudge anyone the use of as many search engines or additional tools as they might want, but each of these toolbars had eroded the window for viewing content, and deposited another line of noise into the communication channel. It seemed that there was as much information around the edge of any page he was viewing as there was on it. Given the nature of most web pages, this is probably not that big a problem, but I am focused on how we learn using web pages here, and that focus presents a number of problems, some trivial and I fear, some not.

The most mundane problem for a course designer is what assumption should be made about the viewing area for course content. Will the addition of multiple toolbars force the window to scroll? While this might not be bad in cases where there is significant content below the scroll line, in the case of a page that does not have any content, but only shows a scroll line that needs to be moved to see
that there is no content, it is at best annoying.

Another issue to consider, and one that I have not yet answered to my own satisfaction (and which I suspect will be the subject of future musings) is the effect on the learner of multiple and significant distractions around the learning space. An analogous situation would be a classroom in which everyone was allowed to talk in a normal speaking voice all the time. There would be no focus for anyone on anyone or anything. It would just be noise.

I will be curious to see what the class thinks about this. I suspect the discussion will take place according to the civilized rules for discourse in place in college classrooms. Have we defined those rules for browser based education?

R

Looking at e-Learning

One of the most memorable lessons in my personal education on e-learning was delivered a number of years ago by Edward Tufte (www.edwardtufte.com) during a seminar on information presentation. He first described the battles he went through in the design of the IBM DisplayWrite screen, which required a wide variety of system status messages to be placed on lines and columns stolen from the bottom, top and sides of the display space. It reduced the usable area of the screen significantly, and it was compared to the spare elegance of the WordPerfect 4.1 screen, which had very little system information, but an incredibly usable typing space. The final item he discussed was the Microsoft Word Screen, which, after years of development and technical advances, and most significantly, after the lessons of WordPerfect, returned to stealing lines and columns from the top, bottom and sides of the screen to display the status of the system.

While it sounds amusing, it started me down a path of looking at what it was that I was doing as I created e-Learning (or at the time, CBT). it also opens the door to a discussion of a topic that many e-learning developers and on-line instructors often take for granted – that their audience is instantly able to decode any new device, display element or convention used without instruction, hesitation or frustration. That is, they assume that the audience for e-Learning is automatically literate in the language the developer is speaking, even when that language is constantly evolving.

There are several cracks in this auto-literate assumption. One is easily demonstrated and it involves devices from Apple Computer. If one judged only from the users, these devices are the highest achievement of intuitive user design – everyone is born knowing how to use these devices and that knowledge is transmitted via DNA. This may not be quite the case. Try ejecting a disk without knowing how. There is no eject button to push on the drive itself - you move the disk into the garbage. This is not intuitive. Try turning off an iPod. There is no on/off switch on the player - you press and hold the play button. This is not intuitive.

I once did research on an on-line course. The instructor described each lesson with the language of hypertext – each page could be accessed in multiple sequences at the discretion of the learner and according to their individual learning styles. But the page content was sequential. The content flowed in a very defined sequence, so however many alternatives you had where you could access the page, in fact, there was only one way that you would. But there was an additional element that had been placed on each page – the page layout required that the user scroll down to see the entire content of the page – even when there was nothing to do except confirm that there was no content beyond the bottom border of the screen. Each page re-enforced sequentiality. So we had a course that was macro-sequential and micro-sequential, but which was advertised as neither.

One of the more interesting ways to see this disconnect between intent and achievement is on a website run by Vincent Flanders. He introduces the concept of "mystery meat navigation" and there are several good examples that give everyone the chance to experience intentionally what I fear many e-Learning users stumble into and through as they fight for information.

R

 

Learning New Software, or e-Learning in Action

Over the past few days I have had the need to learn a new software package. It has been an interesting few days. I now remember why I dislike learning new software and have disliked it for a long time. The package was Adobe InDesign, and while I may criticize Adobe a bit here, I would like to add that their heart seems to be in the right place, but the e-learning experience left much to be desired.

How it happened: I needed to know how the software worked, what it did and how it was different from PageMaker, so I downloaded an evaluation copy from the Adobe website. This was advertised as a fully functional copy of the program limited only by a 30 day license. I proceeded to load it on my PC. While this was happening I received an email from Adobe with several links that would help me evaluate the software. I clicked on a link which promised a feature tour.

The senior product manager for InDesign conducted the tour. I am sure he is very good at managing the product, but my focus here is on e-learning. The only real-world equivalent I can offer for this product tour training is this: Imagine you are explaining baseball to someone who has never seen a game. You first explain that there are 9 players on a side, and then, before explaining anything else and without any further prelude, you start explaining, in detail, the intricacies of the infield fly rule.

So, although the software seemed quite impressive from his explanation, I still had no idea how to use it, and in a larger sense, I did not really know what it did. Yes it was the next generation of PageMaker, but it did so much more than PageMaker they felt compelled to change the name. Cool, but I knew PageMaker; I did not know what constituted "more than PageMaker."

I next found a section of the website that offered basic instruction. (I should also note that the website has a great deal of help – so much help in fact that it borders on unhelpful trying to wade thru it all to find what you will think is useful for a given purpose). This section was helpful, but in a way that reminded me of how all software instruction is unhelpful – I found out about specific features of the program and how to do specific actions. The problem was that what I wanted was context, and the right amount of information.

I have taken multiple classes in a variety of software, some live, some on-line, some using a combination of the two, and some using e-Learning. For some reason all these classes are organized according to the progression of menu bar items in the software. That is, starting with "File" we learn what options the File menu offers, then move to "Edit" and then through the various menu options of the program. This may work for some people, but my particular learning style finds this to be a good way to waste 1 - 5 days of my life. If I could rewrite the training it would be around some common, logical use of the program and I would provide a real world problem to be solved. Each lesson would have one problem and each would be self contained. For example, the first lesson for new users might be "creating a 1 page flyer."

Next, I would absolutely ban anyone who had anything to do with the development of the program from taking part in the development of the training for the program. Simply put, they know too much about the program and seem compelled by some dark force to try to compress the full sum of that knowledge into an introductory lesson. If you have ever taken a software class the easiest way to see this is the alternate method lesson – I.e. "you can change fonts by highlighting the text and right clicking to get to the drop down, OR, you can go to the home menu then to the font menu on the toolbar (hmmm, where is that?), OR you can click one of the present font styles on the menu bar (what are THEY?). Too much information! MapQuest has solved this problem - yes, there are multiple ways to get from Richmond to Chicago, but it doesn't try to show ALL of them!

I then found a link to a chapter in a book promising to teach me how to create a simple pamphlet. Cool, I am a sequential learner and a book implies a certain grounding in sequence. I downloaded the chapter, printed it and sat down with my computer to work through it. The first thing it wanted to confirm was that I had downloaded the chapter files before I started. I hadn't so I clicked on the file and downloaded it and then found I couldn't open it. Sigh. So I downloaded it again. Then I couldn't open it again. Great, so obviously it did not have an error on the download. I looked at the file – it was an .SITX file. What the hell was this and how did I open it? Over the next irritating 45 minutes I found it was a Mac formatted archive (easy), and I could download a free extraction program (hard – multiple offers to pay $50 for the full program before I could find one that allowed just an extraction) that would extract the files and put them on my drive. Another hour that should have been spent learning the software was tossed into the bit bucket while I played with irrelevant software solving the wrong problem.

So, to summarize this – and to provide some general info for e-Learning developers from all walks of life - Adobe did a good job of putting their software on-line, but a bad job of providing training for me. The reasons for this were several, but can be summed up under one general heading - my learning style did not match their teaching style.

BTW, after all this, the software does seem quite good.

R

The Medium is the Problem

Lately I have been having a number of conversations about computers, or more specifically, about how computers have not lived up to some perceived promise. The most often cited example is a simple observation that email has become a chore, or is filled with mostly useless spam that must be searched and discarded in order to get to the "real work" or the "real messages." I think this observation is a symptom of a larger problem and is of note for educators who are using the computer as a teaching tool. I do not yet know what to do about it, but I would like to try to explain one aspect of it here.

Way back when, at the dawn of time, when we all watched the same few channels on broadcast television and listened to vinyl records on record players that reproduced every scratch and bit of dust, there was an observer of media named Marshall McLuhan. He has often been reduced to the simplistic quote "the medium is the message." Although he wrote years before the development of the personal computer, his observations have direct bearing on what I am seeing in my own life, and in the reaction of other people to electronic learning.

I should add some additional history here – I started having computer conversations on discussion boards hosted on CompuServe in the early 1990's. At the time there was a real sense of wonder among the members of the on-line community that we had the ability to converse across distance and time, and I think it is a tribute to the depth of some of those discussions that I still have some of the archives. The one persistent memory I have of this time was looking forward to seeing what was in my email box in the morning and communicating, learning from and sharing with the on-line community. I do not do that anymore - that sense of wonder faded along with the sense of community and shared experience in a flood of unwanted and unpleasant emails, some delivered as part of a list, others just arriving in a broad wash of irrelevance.

There are a number of concepts that McLuhan brought into the language beyond the phrase most associated with him; the idea of media as an extension of man, the idea of hot and cold media, the idea that the medium changes the message. These do have relevance to electronic educators, but the one that I find myself returning to frequently of late to explain the decline of email is his concept of a "break boundary." This is the idea that as a new medium grows it gains users and attention, spreading within the confines of its initial definition until it reaches a break boundary, the point at which the system "suddenly changes into another or passes some point of no return in its dynamic processes." This is expressed differently by the question, "what does the medium flip into when pushed to extremes?" In the case of email it because very clear, it became an unwieldy chore, worse at preventing communication than the void it sought to fill. I think that the people (and I include myself here) who are complaining about email are experiencing this boundary/reversal first hand.

But so what? What does this have to do with e-learning?

There is a history of teaching with technology written by Reiser (part 1 links are available from http://www.citeulike.org/user/ablam/article/2946040 - part 2 I leave to your creative research skills) that describes the march of technology into, and out of, our classrooms. The basic theme, starting with lantern slides and continued thru every wave of technology from film strips and radio, to film and television, repeats with depressing regularity. The new technology is heralded as the solution to all our problems and is embraced enthusiastically. After several years it becomes apparent that it was not quite what we had hoped and it starts to be pushed aside. Soon, early adopters discover a new technology that promises to be the solution to all our problems. Repeat the loop.

Although I have focused on email, that is because it is the most common element among computer users. When I think of electronic learning, I see and hear lot of discussion about the next wave of teaching tools. Those discussions center on what are generally described as collaborative or Web 2.0 tools. What I see when I look at many of them is an attempt to bypass the problems or perceived limitations of the previous technology. What I am also seeing is that the cycle is shortening – email became instant messaging, but that soon had too much noise on the channel. Soon came tweeting, which seems to try to avoid the noise by remaining terse and pithy, but which runs the risk of immediately degenerating to a channel of nothing but noise (see the Verizon commercial about people sending tweets of "I am on the porch"- it is already a joke).

As I think of training, and the role of technology in training, I think we risk spending a great deal of time, money and energy to go nowhere in particular. It seems that before we fully understand, embrace and use a technology, we become bored by it and move on to the next one with exciting new bells and cool sounding whistles. The goal is not technology, it is communication.

R

Educational Informatics

Yesterday I was discussing the topic of Educational Informatics with someone, and thought I would take some of what I wrote to him, revise it a bit, and post it here for your consideration.

Long before I heard the term "educational informatics" I became aware of the general topic of information presentation at a seminar presented by Edward Tufte. During the course of the seminar we were given all of his books, along with a reproduction of Minard's graphic of Napoleon's march on Moscow. The seminar covered a variety of topics, and referenced the books and poster – in fact, one of the points of the seminar was that the information in the books could not be recreated using the technology in the conference center and so the books were the best way to communicate the information. All the discussions focused on the same basic question – how do we present information in a way that makes it useful? In this context "useful" could mean memorable, clear, or unambiguous among other things, but all these terms could be summarized by the word "true." Although Tufte did not specifically address the problem of learning, the books did allow an extensive exploration of the topic of information presentation after the seminar was over and I took advantage of the books to do just that.

At the time I was producing courseware for Verizon, and attending classes in an IT Master's program at Johns Hopkins. I began to work along two paths. I compared how the ideas that Tufte had presented in the seminar were represented in the course materials I was seeing in my classes. I also began to look at the graphics I (and others developers) were putting into the course materials we were producing. At Hopkins, the focus of my learning began to shift from the IT centered course content to the methods and technology the instructors were using to present course content to their students. At the time the tools were fairly primitive, consisting mostly of PowerPoint slides and an early version of Blackboard.

My explorations uncovered a number of writers on the subject. Tufte wrote a PowerPoint specific monograph, Vincent Flanders had a book and website around the concept of "Web Pages That Suck," or learning good design by looking at lots (and lots) of really bad design. Jakob Nielson was writing extensively on web usability. At Verizon we had a private seminar for the training department by Ben Shneiderman of the University of Maryland, and I was leading a team concerned with usability and the evaluation of training effectiveness. Simply put, I was immersed in the topic in every aspect of my professional and academic life.

After graduation from Hopkins I found that my interest had continued and intensified. I was inspired to pursue the topic further through formal education and found the Adult Education Doctoral Program at Penn State. I knew before the first class started that my research would involve how people learned on computers, even if I did not know the details or direction that work would take. As I pursued my research, what became apparent was that the existing literature was good at critiquing what was wrong, but it did nothing to suggest what should be done as an alternative. It was also not very specific to learning solutions.

As part of my dissertation process I eventually wrote and published an article on evaluating learning based web pages. It was only after I graduated that I found and read a book by Clark & Lyons entitled Graphics for Learning: Proven Guidelines for Planning, Designing, and Evaluating Visuals in Training Materials. It did quite elegantly in print what I had wanted to do in my web article.

The book covers the topic of information presentation with a specific focus on learning, but with a focus on how learning presentation works and what to do, rather than what was wrong. The book developed an excellent progression from the general to the specific, from how and why graphics are useful for learning to the 5 specific types of instruction that can be facilitated using graphics, and how those graphics differ. I have read some criticism of the book that suggests the examples are not the best that can be had, and I would agree with that criticism, but as someone who has read a great deal of the learning design literature, I think this is one of the best books on the topic I have found.

I think the book fits quite nicely under the umbrella of Educational Informatics – and I use that term because it implies that there is more to this topic than educated observers looking at web pages with an intuitive eye toward what does and does not work. It would be nice to think that there is some blend of science and art that can help us see – and learn – better.

R

Recursive e-learning

When last we discussed learning and learners, I had suggested that individual differences should be taken into account when designing learning. I will be the first to acknowledge that this is not an easy task. In addition to trying to determine what differences should be of concern, there are the minor issues of how to do that and then what to do about it. The answer may depend on how you define e-learning; as a standalone lesson (what was once called CBT when the language for this was clearer), or as an interactive on-line experience directed by a teacher (what now happens in a distance learning classroom).

There is several topics here, but for the moment I would like to focus on learners. I would like to cite some research and some anecdotal reporting to point out some of what can happen when instruction ignores the learners.

When I was preparing the research project that would be at the core of my dissertation the question arose as to which class I was going to study. My hypothesis was that an electronic classroom formed a system with three interactive elements, the students and their attitude toward instruction and information presentation, the teacher and his/her attitude toward interactive instruction and information presentation, and the on-line venue itself, and how it presented course content and allowed student interactions. After consulting with the faculty member whose class I would study it was determined that an advanced class in the program would be the best, since it presented the most stable group of students. The first class in the program sequence was disparaged since it had too much churn and I would have a problem keeping my research subjects for the duration of the semester.

The research methodology consisted of some personality and learning style instruments, along with an analysis of the class material and the content of the class discussions. What became clear over the course of the study was that the personalities of the participants were remarkably similar. The test instruments revealed that all had very similar learning styles and personalities. They all viewed the material in much the same way (as determined by interview) and all interacted on-line in remarkably similar ways. As both an on-line instructor and as a student in on-line classes this seemed very odd. Usually classes had a mix of personalities and styles. It was so odd that I began to question my methodology.

After reviewing most of what I had done with my advisor the second hypotheses (one waiting to be tested at length) was that students who liked the course and program as it existed had self-selected themselves to continue. Those who did not like on-line learning, or who disliked the presentation itself, were what constituted the churn in the early classes in the program.

In a discussion with my advisor we spoke of an accounting program that was having a problem with student involvement in the more advanced courses in the program. The program was designed to be weighted toward teaching the fundamentals of accounting in the early classes, with the more advanced classes held for years 3 and 4. There was nothing earth-shaking here, except that the advanced classes addressed topics like entrepreneurship, a subject required a measure of creativity. Class involvement was difficult at best and few students had anything to say. In analyzing the registration for the program it was determined that the focus on bean-counting fundamentals in the early classes in the program caused the more creative students to drop out and find another major. When the program was revised to address the interests of these students early on, the overall effect was one that provided a balance that benefitted everyone in the program.

So, to return to the question that started this discussion, the risk involved with creating e-learning that does not take into account learner differences is that we create a recursive e-learning that some people benefit from, and others do not. Who are they? What do they contribute? While e-learning may benefit the bottom line of the training department, it may not benefit the bottom line of the corporation.

R

What about the users?

There are a number of old jokes about computer "users," so since the focus of this effort it e-learning, let's change that term here to "learners." So, how do learners use e-learning to learn?

One thing that I find fascinating as I watch the various e-Learning pages, discussions, blogs, etc. is how often the discussion revolves around the tools used to create e-learning pages, and how rarely they focus on concerns about the user – or more specifically about how users of e-learning learn. It's as if a group of architects got together and talked about the tools of building, and the quality of materials, but ignored the larger concerns of what purpose a building should serve. I think something similar is occurring in the discussion of e-learning.

So, when "building" e-learning, I think there are two main areas that need to be addressed and which lie at the core of its creation:

• How to visualize and present the information to be learned
  
• How the learners will react to and interpret that information
  

Neither of these areas is trivial, and neither has clean and convenient answers that can be addressed by just selecting the right software, the right drop down menu and the right menu choice. All require stepping back from the technology and looking at the content and the learners. So let's take a quick look at the content, or the presentation of learning materials, and at the people who will be looking at them.

I was introduced to Information presentation at a seminar by Edward Tufte in 1994 and have been looking at computer screens with a jaundiced eye ever since. Tufte does not specialize in either computer presentation or learning, so his observations have served as a starting point for a number of interesting explorations. His work, including descriptions of his books, his seminar schedule and a lengthy question/discussion page is available at www.edwardtufte.com.

The biggest question he raises in my mind, and one I have explored at length, involves the creation of a clear mental model of the subject of a lesson. Some theories seem to suggest that if the instructor, or the creator of instruction, has such a model they should keep it to themselves and let the learner discover it on their own. In practice, I have seen instructors who have no such restriction, but simply do not create clear and memorable instruction. The how and the why of this will provide topics for this effort for some time to come.

The other issue that seems to garner no interest is the idea of learner differences. It seems trite to suggest that each learner is unique, but what I am suggesting is that each learner has an individual style that they use to process information. Do they prefer information presented sequentially, or do they prefer to explore non-sequential links on their own? Do they gather all information prior to processing it, or do they process as they go along? Without diverting too far into this topic, the type of differences I am suggesting here related to how learners would view a learning page, and consequently, how instructional designers might consider how that page is constructed.

This may be viewed as something filed under "gravity," with little or nothing that the instructional designer can do (which would also explain why it generates so little comment). In the next installment I will relate some details of research done on learner differences, some conclusions I reached as I reconsidered the results, and suggest an area that is worthy of further research.

R

The first post

I suppose the first post here should explain why it has taken me so long to establish a blog and to do what everyone else on the web has been doing for so long.

There are several concerns, but the one that I think I find the most pertinent is that for me this is a new form of writing, one that I am not currently accustomed to, and one that will take some adjustment. I will attempt to curb my attempts to over-edit, and will endeavor to make this a regular habit. That being said, I suppose this will be a learning experience for me - and I will attempt ot comment on it as I go

( - one of the more irritating things that occured as I attempted to set this up was needing to enter the secret word about 20 times before I got one that I could actually read and retype successfully. We use machines to communicate, but those same machines seem work at cross purposes with our communication and we struggle to find some mix of human/machine interaction that actually favors the human)

On the positive side, I believe that I have something to say about learning and will attempt to say it here. In addition to reading and looking at lots of information (two different activities) on web based learning, I am also pretty good at conducting experiments on myself. I will attempt to comment on these. Perhaps some will be of general interest, and perhaps some will provoke further exploration or comment.

R