Dave's Whiteboard

Koreen Olbrish of Tandem Learning has a post about using games to assess learning, and she addresses both opportunities and problems.

Games are a natural environment for assessment…in essence, they are assessing your performance just by nature of the game structure itself. Unless, of course, there aren’t clear success metrics and you “win” by collecting more and more meaningless stuff (like Farmville)…but that’s a whole other topic.

So let’s assume there are success metrics built into the game and those metrics align with what your learning objectives are.

Koreen’s main topic is game design, but I want to talk about that last idea:  
the game’s success metrics need to align with your learning objectives.

This sounds like Instructional Design 101, since it is Instructional Design 101.  Ever more fundamental — Instructional Design 100, maybe — are these questions:

What do you want people to do?
Why aren’t they doing that now?
How will this make things better?

No, the first question isn’t about instruction at all.  Nor is it about, “How do you want them to act?”

It’s about what you want people to get done.

When you can’t articulate what you want people to accomplish, it hardly matters what interventions you try.  You have no way to measure progress.  Might as well just run them all through whatever you feel like.

Making your goals less fuzzy

“Sheep dip” refers to a kind of chemical bath intended to prevent or combat infestations of parasites.  (Videos of older, plunge style and newer, spray style processing of sheep.)

Farmers dip or spray sheep because… well, I’m no farmer, but here are some guesses:

• It’s more cost-effective than diagnosing the needs of each sheep.
• A dip-tank of prevention is better than a barnful of cure.
• Sheep on their own rarely propose new pest-management processes.

Ultimately, sheep farming has a few key outputs: leather, wool, mutton.  While the sheep play an essential role, I don’t think you can successfully argue that these are accomplishments for the sheep.  So what matters is the on-the-job performance of farm workers.

Speaking of on-the-job, many industries and organizations impose mandatory, formal training.  Even there, the accomplishment shouldn’t be “training completed.”

One client delivered “equal-employment awareness” training annually to every employee.  The original charter was full of “increase awareness” and “understand importance.”  Here’s what that looked like after a lot of “how can I tell they’re more aware?”

• You can recognize examples of discriminatory behavior on the job.
• You can state why the behavior is discriminatory.
• You can describe steps for resolving the discrimination.

That’s not exhaustive (and the legal department would probably say you need to sprinkle “alleged” all over the place), but the three points are a first step toward a success metric that connects the individual and the organization.

Sometimes, it is a training problem

When people in an organization can articulate overall goals, it’s easier for them (as individuals and in groups) to think about how their activities and their results relate to those goals. They’re also likelier to be better problem-solvers, because they won’t corral every problem into a formal-training solution.

Even when a major cause of a performance problem is the lack of skill or knowledge, you benefit from revisiting those Design 100 questions:

• What are the results you expect when people apply the skills they currently lack?
• What could interfere with their applying them?
• How will this approach help them learn and apply the skills?

Slightly more diplomatic language led that EEO-awareness client to decide that knowing the date of the Americans with Disabilities Act didn’t have much impact on deciding whether, in a job interview, you can ask an applicant, “Do you have a handicap?”

I’m no expert on workplace games, but I’m pretty sure I get what Koreen Olbrish is talking about.  It’s the workplace first, then the learning goal, and then the application of good design in pursuit of worthwhile results.

The same is true for any planned effort to support learning at work. You need to focus on what’s important, on how you know it’s important, on why you think training will help.

Then you use that information to guide your decisions about how to help people acquire and apply those skills when it matters.

Mindlessly grinding out courses (instructor-led, elearning, webinars, whatever) isn’t the answer, regardless of how many completion-hours people rack up.

It’s just…well, you know.

CC-licensed images:
Bigg’s Sheep Dip (Glenovis) adapted from this photo by  Riv / Martyn.
Bigg’s Dips (yellow/black) by Maurice Michael.
Quibell’s Sheep Dips by Peter Ashton aka peamasher.

Last April, about six months after my dad died at the age of 96, I met someone whose own father had passed away at 97.  I said something about how, when a family member’s over 90, you always have an unspoken awareness of their mortality.

She agreed, but added that for her, there was also a feeling that her father had always been there and would always be.  Not a logical feeling, but a true one.  When my grandmother died, two years after my grandfather, I remember my dad saying, “Now I’m an orphan.”  He was 59.

All my siblings, as well as my mother, live in metro Detroit.  All of us went to Nova Scotia last month. The main purpose: to have a memorial mass for those who couldn’t come to Michigan for his funeral, to celebrate Dad’s life, and to bury his ashes in his beloved Cape Breton.

I find I don’t have a lot of patience with people who talk about reaching closure as if it’s a stop on the subway.  I suppose they mean well, but I can’t help hearing an implied timetable, a hint that you should define some point and then get off the emotional train.

No, when I say “closure,” I mean a kind of rethinking.  It’s figuring out how to continue your relationship with the person who’s died – and fitting that with your other relationships.

I’m managing.  I couldn’t say when, but one day, a few months after Dad died, I had been feeling sad about his absence from some event taking place.  I stopped and asked myself what was going on. The feeling cleared itself up:  ”He would have hated to miss this.”

And then he was there: I could picture him sitting the way he did in his last few years. Often quiet because of his growing deafness and fading vision; bubbling and beaming when someone sat close enough to engage with him.

I don’t idealize him.  He wasn’t the best dad in the history of the world; he was simply the best one I had.  The memorial service down home helped me see him through the eyes of old family friends, of cousins and second cousins and their children.  Unlike other family names in that small place — the local paper once had five editors, all named Macdonald — for a long time there was only one family in town named Ferguson.

And the people who gathered at Stella Maris church on a warm Saturday in July are working on the latest chapter in their relationship with the one Hughie Ferguson they’d known all their lives.

Once upon a time — the time of the first-century poet Juvenal — the phrase black swan implied something that didn’t exist.  More recently, the black swan theory refers either to highly improbable things, or to outliers with an outsized influence on events.

Of course, if you had lived in western Australia before the arrival of Europeans, black swans would have been the only ones you’d ever heard of.

Which simply says most people go with what they know.

I’ve seen something of this in online discussions about the world of work.  If all your virtual dealings are with consultants, academics, freelancers, and and the folks who contract with them, you can easily get the impression everyone’s working independently.

Even though I’m a consultant myself, I’m skeptical about that broad a generalization.  So I’m revisiting something I wrote about more than three years ago: who works where (or, who’s an employee and who’s not)?

I’m getting this information from various business and non-employer statistics published by the U.S. Small Business Administration.

• In 2008, there were 21.4 million non-employers in the U.S.  Their total receipts were $963 billion, or roughly $45,000 per firm.
  • According to the U.S. Census Bureau, a non-employer is an organization with no paid employees, with $1,000 in business receipts, and subject to federal income tax. 
    (For some reason, a non-employer in the construction industry needs only $1 in receipts to be counted.)
• In 2007, there were 120 million employees working at 6 million firms.  Total receipts were $29.8 trillion.

Certainly with the economic downturn since 2007, those figures have changed, but I doubt they’ve changed that much.  Even if every single non-employer were a unique individual, and even if none of the non-employers also had a job working for someone else, 120 out of 141 million people in the U.S. were employees.  And, as the Census Bureau says, “Most non-employers are self-employed individuals operating very small unincorporated businesses, which may or may not be the owner’s principal source of income.”

I wondered where all those non-employers worked.    Here’s a breakdown by number of non-employer firms — in other words, the fields where you’d find these folks:

• Professional, scientific, technical services: 3 million
• Construction: 2.5 million
• Real estate, rental, leasing: 2.1 million
• Retail trade: 1.9 million
  • “Store and non-store” retail — the latter would include things like catalog and home-based sales
• Other services: 3 million
  • A catchall taking in everything from equipment repair to dating services to pet care

Four of these sectors (construction, real estate, retail, and “other services”) account for almost half of all non-employers.  Though perhaps the numbers would look different if the Census Bureau had a category for “social media expert.”

Meanwhile, back where you find 120,000,000 people:

• 5.1% of employees work for firms having 0 – 5 employees.
  • The zero apparently takes in seasonal work when the work’s out of season.
• 30.3% of employees work for firms having 5 – 99 employees.
• 14.2% work for firms with 100 – 499 employees.
• 5.2% work for first with 500 – 999 employees
• 12.4% work for firms having 1,000 – 4,999 employees.
• 32.7% work for firms with 5,000 or more employees

All this to demonstrate that most Americans who work, work for someone else.  And of the 120 million who are employees, nearly half work for firms with at least 1,000 employees.

I don’t have a big conclusion to finish this off with a flourish.  I just think this kind of information helps set in context some workplace learning and performance-improvement issues.

CC-licensed image of a black swan by specksinsd.

I’ve always looked at math as a tool to be mastered and wielded
rather than subject matter to be absorbed.

– Steven Wittens

That remark on Wittens’ blog is a worthwhile viewpoint for a discussion today on Twitter about what we mean by behavior change and learning.  But let me backtrack a bit:

When my son was younger — when a computer weighed nearly as much as he did — he got interested in programming.  After a while he could create startling graphics via ray-tracing, though at the time our home computer was so slow he’d start the process before going to bed, and check in the morning to see if it was done.

I remember this passion of his, and a related one, when Stephen Downes led me to a 1K demo by Steven Wittens.  A 1K demo is a program of no more than 1,024 bytes, done as a tour de force.

You can find lots of demo contests, with lots of prizes, but the real rewards seem to be (1) “I did it!” and (2) bragging rights.

Which aren’t bad reinforcers to learning.

I don’t know anything about creating a demo, but I do know animated, focused discussion when I see it.  I can usually tell good explanation from bad, and Witten’s description of his own work is admirable.

While [generating all data on the fly to save space] might seem like a black art, often it just comes down to clever use of (high school) math…

Unlike the actual 1K demo, the code snippets here will feature legible spacing and descriptive variable names.

He explains initialization (how the demo starts) in two sentences, and then uses bullets to introduce the four main parts: activating the wires, making them visible, coloring them, and animating the camera.

You can read the explanation for yourself.  I enjoyed the addendum:

After seeing the other demos in the contest, I wasn’t so sure about my entry, so I started working on a version 2. The main difference is the addition of glowy light beams around the object.

As you might suspect, I’m cheating massively here: rather than do physically correct light scattering calculations, I’m just using a 2D effect. Thankfully it comes out looking great.

Essentially, I take the rendered image, and process it in a second Canvas that is hidden. This new image is then layered on the original.

So, whaddya think?

From my son’s experience and from the comments on Wittens’s blog, I’d say there’s a lot of informal, choose-your-path, get-into-it learning in the demo world.  Note what some of the (currently) 32 comments say:

• I always wanted to start learning more about this, but haven’t found any source for explanation. I like the step-by-step explanation that you have since it goes into the “why” any just not here’s my code. By the way, do you have any recommends for books into this topic?
• I  just wanted to chime in with another big “Thank you!” for taking the time to write this up. Like the other commenters, I’ve long been fascinated and mystified by some of these techniques, and your explanations are brilliant and accessible.
• I liked this demo so much that I took some time off my working day to port it to Flash, hoping to learn the internals of it and how it’s done… I got something 90% similar to the JS version.
  Although I was able to port the code line-to-line, I couldn’t understand many parts of it. I tried to look for some commenting somewhere on the net without results. So you can imagine how cool this article is to me!
• If anyone’s interested in having this version (AS2) please let me know.
• (Wittens, responding to a commenter:) I know there are still opportunities for shortening it by shaving off a few bytes here and there. But I find the problem in these challenges is rarely one byte. It’s usually 200-300 bytes over the limit that you have to simply throw away and replace with something much smaller and equally good.
• I would LOVE to see this as an audio visualizer. I made the visualizer on indieed.com, check out a song to see it. It’s nowhere NEAR as awesome as this.
  Would you be willing to sell a tweaked version of this to indieed (its my company) as our default visualizer for our player?
  Please email me, I’m quite impressed.

There’s a long and very technical comment with suggested improvements from Jason Knight, with a calm if sly reply from Wittens: “Be careful about optimizing blindly…you added 36 characters to save 15.”  And near the end end, after someone’s created a Flash version, other people start offering ways to improve that.

Learning and worth

At first, I thought of that last comment as some serious summative evaluation: “I want to buy this thing you made.”  In a way, thought, all the comments are.  And this is how learning really happens: you work away at something, you search for ways to achieve your goal (or maybe redefine it), and you work at the thing again until you produce a result.

Nearly all my clients have been large organizations, and their traditional models don’t always take in this reality.  Lots of people have said for a long time that talking isn’t teaching and that listening isn’t learning.  A misplaced emphasis on efficiency, often unmoored from effectiveness, tempts managers (and, let’s face it, training departments) to a throughput model.

CC-licensed ray-tracing image by Susam Pal.

Disclosure: I grew up in Detroit (and I don’t mean Livonia, let alone Auburn Hills).  My dad was an auto worker (and so was I, for one summer).  People back there say things like “Chrysler’s is doing better,” using the possessive even when the company is the subject of the sentence.

Well, Ford’s is doing well, too.  Not just in car sales, though those are on the uptick.  I’m thinking of the Ford Motor Company digital participation guidelines just posted at Scribd.  Like any large corporate, Ford doubtless has lots and lots of text somewhere, but these guidelines are a great example of sensible policy to guide employees who are using social media.

You really ought to read the whole thing for yourself, but I’m going to summarize and comment here.

Be honest about who you are.

The gist: when your online conversations relates to our business or industry, identify yourself as working for Ford Motor Company.  Say who you are without giving out detailed information.

Not too much to ask in any conversation.

Make it clear that your views are your own.

Include the following somewhere in every social media profile:

“I work at Ford, but this is my own opinion and is not the opinion of Ford Motor Company.”

“Somewhere in the profile” isn’t an onerous requirement. For nearly 10 years, in one online forum, my signature line concluded with “My opinions, not GE’s.”  In case people weren’t sure.

Mind your manners.

Treat coworkers, other personnel, customer, competitions, the company, and yourself with respect.  Don’t post offensive, demeaning, or inappropriate comments.  Respectfully withdraw from discussions that go off-topic or become profane.

I’ve seen lots of discussion about how the immediacy (and physical safety) of the Internet encourage people to be… more than assertive, let’s say.  Good for attention, not so good for reputation.  At least not positive reputation.

Use your common sense.

Keep certain business-related topics confidential.  If you’re talking about the company or the industry, focus on matters of public record.  Don’t divulge non-public company information, or personal information about others.

Remember: what happens online, stays online.

“Search engines and other technologies make it virtually impossible to take something back.  Be sure you mean what you say, and say what you mean.”

Also, consider everything you post online the same as posting to a physical bulletin board or submitting a letter to a newspaper.  Assume that reporters, competitors, and your boss will be able to read it.

Anyone who’s been online for more than three months knows this.  It’s not bad to recall it, though.

* * *

If you’ve ever worked in a corporate environment, you know that’s not the whole of it.  The guidelines tell you want to do about company intellectual property, about vehicle or repair concerns, about dealer issues.  And if you’re unsure, ask the corporate communications or legal staff for advice.

Notice: there’s nobody you have to check with and ask if you can participate in arenas like Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr.  The document says, “we have advised our personnel to observe these guidelines when participating in an online conversation regarding Ford or the automotive industry.”