As I was waiting in a queue at the station earlier on, reading Brightwave's excellent blog on my phone, I was struck by a possible contradiction. Lars Hyland suggests that mobile learning is still in the state that it's been in for a while; a kind of pilot-study no-man's land. And in terms of formal use of mobile learning, I couldn't agree more. Indeed, the history of mobile learning is littered with interesting pilot studies that appeared to go nowhere, and with repeated false dawns (I went to a presentation in the early 90s by Apple on how the Newton was going to soon replace the then very exciting new development of multimedia CBT...).

Then I read elsewhere in the same post that "social learning is the new black". Ah - now I agree 100% with that...I think, as long as we're equating "social" and "informal".

So where's the contradiction? Well, I suspect that a lot of social learning will not only be driven by mobile devices - after all, being sociable is what most were invented for - but actually, that it's already here. I think this is a case of what I was talking about in this posting when I mentioned the boiling frog. Things just change around us, smoothly and imperceptibly, and we don't notice them until the water is boiling around us.

I live in a small town in Somerset, but one local pub has banned mobiles because people keep using their phone browsers to cheat in pub quizzes. When I was at Learning Technologies last week, it was normal to see people tweeting, browsing and chatting on their phones. On the train into Bath just now there were two people reading work papers on their Blackberries. Yesterday, at a local folk club, I saw one guy looking at youtube videos of the band that was playing to see what else they did.

Isn't this mobile (social, informal) learning?

So, being an old-fashioned trainer, I thought I'd reflect briefly and see how I use my mobile devices to learn. And of course, I produced a model to help me structure my learning. It's something like this:

• Context - when I encounter a new concept or piece of information, I regularly investigate it (on my phone) to check where it fits in with my context
• Connections - I use my phone to check connections between what I know
• Confirmation - I regularly check what people are telling me, or what's being presented, in order to verify that they're right, or that I've understood it
• Comparison - a great way to try to understand something is to cCreative thinking about e-learningompare it to something else you already know; so that's what I do.
• Communication - and finally, the big one; I regularly use my mobile to talk and type with others, read and respond to their replies

Now - if what currently passes as formal e-learning managed to make me to these five things regularly, I might actually use it (as might other e-learning professionals who, sadly, don't).

A long time ago, in a long-lost blog called viral-learning.net (I hope I'm not still paying for it...), I came up with an acronym that seemed to me to capture a key shift in learner motivation.

Traditionally, in learning design circles we talk about WIIFM - "what's in it for me?". But I thought back then (2003) that things were changing and that a key motivator for learners in future would be what part of the online environment represented them, or "what of me is in it?". At the time, the kinds of expressive tools that Mark Berthelemy and myself talked about in our Learning Technologies presentation largely didn't exist. But they do now, and I've no doubt that the shift is under way.

Anyway, I found the original posting, and thought I'd reproduce it here, slightly edited. It's a bit naive and academic, but I reckon it's of relevance given the huge interest in social learning and technologies at the LT conference.

Of course people need to be motivated to take part in online learning experiences. But many developers of these experiences misunderstand what motivates people in today’s online world.

The tradition of instructional design that starts explicitly with Gagne, but stretches back through educational history, assumes that learners need to see “what’s in it for them” (WIIFM) when they start learning something. And of course this is perfectly valid. So many from this tradition use our growing understanding of people as “goal-directed agents” (Vygotsky, Schank and many others) to re-enforce the importance of WIIFM.  

But the issue of motivation is quickly getting more complicated as the online learning experiences we are creating rely increasingly on collaboration and community as core components. The social constructivists have always affirmed that learning is a social process, and with the explosion of work in the areas of Communities of Practice we now have solid frameworks with which to develop a wide range of online learning experiences.

A key driver for learning in a CoP/social context is the development of the individual’s identify within the group. Through gradually increasing their quality of contribution (through the process of what’s called “legitimate peripheral participation”), the individual becomes closely bound into the group’s growth and success, to the point where a part of their identity is bound up in the group – and in the process of learning.

People love to contribute to successful groups, particularly the natural networkers, digital natives, Gen Y's - call them what you will. 

On the other hand, we know that individualistic motivations can often be highly destructive to groups. So we’re ending up at the opposite end of the spectrum from WIIFM. We’re now encouraging learners to ask “what of me is in it?” – or WOMII. We’re also at the other end of the spectrum from the simplistic, stimulus-and-response, behaviourist origins of WIIFM, however nicely it’s dressed up in constructivist clothing. We’re thoroughly in the situated learning camp.  I’d suggest the shift of focus moves through four, thoroughly overlapping stages:

1. What’s in it for me? – WIIFM motivation; individualistic learning
2. What’s in it for us? – Teamworking; project and goal focussed
3. What of us is it it? – Collaborative learning and production
4. What of me is it it? – WOMII motivation; community and process focussed

It almost goes without saying that a WOMII philosophy strongly supports the learner’s metacognitive processes. The learner is going beyond the goal-orientation characteristic of WIIFM, to asking what of themselves is currently present in the thing they are learning about. What have they contributed? What is the process they are following, and where are they in it?

A final thought: it’s particularly important to understand WOMII motivation if you are developing educational environments for cultures other than those of the industrialised west. Communitarian cultures (see Hofstede’s model of culture ) have always bound learning, identity and community closely together. One of the reasons that “community of practice” has become such a management buzzword is because it is such a radical concept for many in the individualistic nations of the west. But it’s the natural and accepted way of learning for most of the world’s population.

Personally, I quite like the current day. I’m inspired more by 2010 themes and messages; by those who talk about saving the world (no less!) through tearing up the roots of education and learning (see the film “We are the people we’ve been waiting for”); by people like Stephen Heppell whose view is that what we should really be cultivating in people (all people, not just young ones) are 21^st Century skills, not industrial, 19^th Century ones; by experimenters like Teigland, whose students convene to progress their courses in virtual meeting places. I’m inspired more by these people than the salesmen from the year 2000, who wanted to grab me and repeat the “Martini promise” at me yet again (“learning any time anywhere, anyhow, with the help of XYZLearn, the LCMS that really sets the synapses singing”).

Jane Hart and Mark Berthelemy have already done excellent postings broadly on this theme. Their focus was mainly on the lack of interest in social learning downstairs at the exhibition (back in 2000, when we thought that the internet was a new medium for broadcasting) and outdated learning management models. My perspective is wider. I think that many – the great majority – of providers of learning content and services are colluding in a kind of mutually assured destruction (MAD) policy with their clients. For those of you who don’t remember, MAD was the strategy that kept the USSR and the USA from blowing each other up for a few decades, on the basis that neither would be stupid enough to use the systems they’d spent so long building up. In the case of learning technology it’s a case of both suppliers and buyers maintaining the pretence that they’re using networked digital technologies to help people learn; a pretence they’re happy to keep up just as long as nobody moves. But around them, things are moving. To use yet another metaphor, the water is beginning to boil around the frog, and of course the frog isn’t noticing; and maybe it won’t until it’s dead.

This is all about more than just social learning. It’s about the level of engagement people (all people, not just young ones) demand from online experiences – dammit all experiences; it’s about authenticity and honesty in communication; it’s about meeting real needs; it’s about all sorts of things that those who still live in the recently converted-from-the-classroom world of e-learning c2000 just can’t imagine. And as David Puttnam put it, “we have no future that isn’t imaginative”.

What’s going to happen if the folks from 2000 keep on peddling their wares as they are, and client organisations keep nodding (somewhat tensely) in approval? Stephen Heppell expressed it well in a kind of formula: people + technology = change. Equipped with all sorts of expressive tools and technologies, normal everyday people are going to construct and share their own learning whether their employers like it or not. They’ll just change things, messily, insecurely, haphazardly. If organisations don’t accommodate this in their cultures, structures and processes, people won’t learn what the organisations need them to. Organisations will be bypassed, first in terms of learning, then in terms of expertise, then commercially.



In response to various clients and colleagues telling me that they're fed up with the "same old same old" in terms of e-learning and learning solutions, I've set up a new network.

The Difference Engine is a network of experts in the areas of learning, design and creativity who want to offer organisations genuine creative thinking about learning, and products and services that reflect this thinking. We want to create learning experiences that people actually learn from, rather than ones that merely take the form of learning experiences (i.e. pretend to be learning experiences).

We want to respond to the kind of agenda presented by visionaries like Stephen Heppell and David Puttnam at Learning Technologies last week, and move on from the tired old models that have given e-learning such a bad name.

Incidentally, if you want to see a typically brilliant account of what really mattered at LT, read Mark Berthelemy's posting here.

If you’re in the business of e-learning, are you proud of what you do? When you’re introduced to people you’ve not met before, do you explain clearly what it is that you do, or do you fudge it? It was recently pointed out to me by a close friend that I’m never clear about explaining what I do. Significantly, I appear to avoid the word “e-learning” if at all possible, and if I mention it, I tend to apologise afterwards.

Thinking about this further, it occurred to me that over many years I’ve heard lots of my colleagues around the industry say things like “well – actually, I never learn anything much from e-learning; in fact, I’ve never completed an e-learning course in my life.” I recall a Masie conference in Dublin where he asked the audience of a number of hundred people (e-learning specialists) whether they used e-learning for their own development and almost nobody owned up.

But if I do confess to being responsible for producing e-learning, and the conversation doesn’t dry up completely, is the response generally a welcoming one? Again, over many years, the response is rarely anything like “Oh wow – that must be so interesting. And thanks for all you’ve done for me with that dynamic, interesting content you produce”. It’s usually more like “Oh – so you mean compliance, health and safety, quizzes. Nobody pays any attention to that stuff. I usually just hit the next button 45 times with my eyes shut and hope it goes away”.

What an extraordinary situation. It’s a bit reminiscent of a phrase I was sent by Dan Whiston (a fellow e-learning designer and sceptic) that was apparently used in the former communist societies of Eastern Europe. Apparently, in such dysfunctional economies it was common to believe that “we pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us”. Is it the case in our industry that “they pretend to train us, and we pretend to learn”? If so, no wonder both parties in the relationship are a little less than glowing in their accounts.

So what would e-learning look like if it really was something people were likely to learn from - rather than something that takes the form of an educational experience? Thanks Dan, for prompting this.

* * *

Update following some responses and conversations: I really appreciate Mark Berthelemy's posting here, as it outlines very clearly how he uses the online environment to learn things. He seems a lot clearer than I am, so I've set myself the task of sorting this out.

So...if you're an e-learning professional, are you clear about the reality of how you learn? How much of this self-knowledge do you apply with your clients? Or do you recommend things to them that you yourself wouldn't bother with?