Thoughts on Learning

September 7, 2011

Mobile Learning and France

Enspire Learning will offer a webinar entitled “Mobile Learning: The Low Hanging Fruit” on October 5, 2011. Click here for more information.

Many of our clients ask what role mobile learning might play at their companies. To answer that question, I typically talk about France.

A couple of years ago, my wife and I visited Normandy and Paris as part of a marathon European vacation. Before departing, we pored over Parisian movies and books to prepare for our trip. While in France, we listened to audio walking tours and consulted our French pocket guide.

If my wife and I were a company (we call ourselves Team Lisle), we’d be a case study on mobile learning. Let’s compare Team Lisle to a technology company, Company X, who needs to train its sales force.

Team Lisle:

  • Before the trip: traditional learning with movies and books
  • During the trip: mobile, just-in-time learning with audio walking tours and pocket guides

Company X:

  • Before the sales trip: traditional learning with e-learning modules and in-person classes
  • During the sales trip: mobile, just-in-time learning with short product videos and reference tools

Let’s emphasize a few points:

  1. Don’t convert an hour-long e-learning module into an hour-long course that is accessible on mobile devices. Instead, create supplements to your hour-long course in the form of small mobile tools that are handy on-the-job. That’s a long-winded way of saying that mobile learning should be short-winded.
  2. Non-mobile learning isn’t going away. The retention of complex information requires concentration, which is often more achievable in a formal learning environment.
  3. On-the-job knowledge can often be more effectively acquired and/or remembered with mobile learning, disrupting that nasty forgetting curve.

August 31, 2011

Practice Makes Performance

My professional mantra is “practice makes performance.” Beyond the fun of its alliteration, the phrase distills both the goal and means to learning – ergo, performance. Just as spiritual mantras are meant for “creating transformation”, practice is the alchemist for transforming learning into performance.

I recently read Jared Spool’s article “Developing a UX Practice of Practicing”. Essentially, he distills what required 5 years of graduate studies – my goal and means into instructional design – into several more mantras:

  • Practice to build muscle memory
  • Practice to solve problems
  • Practice to playfully explore
  • Practice regularly

In designing instructional experiences, one of the biggest challenges is providing useful and frequent practice. Along with the practice activities, we must supply learners with meaningful feedback to performance, and with opportunities for self-reflection on performance. Meaningful feedback is a mirror with two faces: the expression of mastery and the reflection of apprenticeship.
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July 6, 2011

The Promise of Computer-Based Instruction

I’ve been dreaming about the true promise of computer-based instruction since my days as a program coordinator for adult literacy services. The promise is adaptive and personalized learning. Two decades later, that promise still resides in the future – and in my imagination.

Imagine a responsive system that negotiates the route between your present-state knowledge and skills and your (or your school’s or your job’s…) learning goals. Such a system requires a profile of your current knowledge and skills, a map of the declarative and procedural knowledge and skills that fulfill the learning goals, and a logic engine to reconcile the two.

Why aren’t we there yet? Continue reading →


June 8, 2011

In Defense of Errors

You may make fewer mistakes by making more mistakes.

(Whoah… that was deep, man.)

A recent post by Dr. Heidi Halvorson on Psychology Today makes that argument. In summary, if you let yourself make mistakes, you learn from them and end up making fewer mistakes in the long run. The trick is to shift your focus from Be-Good goals, where you hope to prove how smart you are, to Get-Better goals, where you hope to learn and improve. Continue reading →


May 19, 2011

“Mike Tyson has died of dysentery.” – The Lessons of The Oregon Trail

Not really. Iron Mike, if you’re reading this, I didn’t mean anything by it.
Oregon Trail splash screen

Like many children of the 1980s, I loved The Oregon Trail, that clunky but lovable educational computer game we played in elementary school. The game allows you to name your four traveling companions, and I frequently bestowed upon them the names of popular sports figures of the time. Hence, Mike Tyson and his frequent bouts with dysentery, cholera, typhoid, measles, and broken limbs. Occasionally I’d drown him while attempting to ford a river. This was, perhaps, my revenge for being certifiably awful at Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!

The point of this post, however, is not to reminisce about my childhood (besides, Michael Bay has already destroyed it). I recently revisited The Oregon Trail (and you can too!) and found that my perspective as a training professional has changed the way I view the game. I came to a startling conclusion about my experience with the game as a child: I didn’t learn anything from The Oregon Trail.
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