Thursday evening Dan Pink, author of A Whole New Mind and Free Agent Nation, gave a rocking presentation at IDEO in Palo Alto.

“The last few decades have belonged to a certain kind of person with a certain kind of mind – computer programmers who could crank code, lawyers who could craft contracts, MBAs who could crunch numbers. But the keys to the kingdom are changing hands. The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind – creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers and meaning makers. These people – artists, inventors, designers, storytellers, caregivers, consolers, big picture thinkers – will now reap society’s richest rewards and share its greatest joys."

Creator, empathizer, artist, inventor, designer, big picture thinker: that's my self-image. That's why the counselors at Harvard B-School told me, "You're not like the other MBA students. You're smarter but you think entirely differently." If Dan has this right, little wonder that I had a quarter-century of discomfort in my career until I found my groove five or six years ago -- I was born thirty years ahead of my time.

"We are moving from an economy and society built on the logical, linear, computer-like capabilities of the Information Age to an economy and a society built on the inventive, empathic, big picture capabilities of what’s rising in its place, the Conceptual Age. A Whole New Mind is for anyone who wants to survive and thrive in this emerging world – people uneasy in their careers and dissatisfied with their lives, entrepreneurs and business leaders eager to stay ahead of the next wave, parents who want to equip their children for the future, and the legions of emotionally astute and creatively adroit people whose distinctive abilities the Information Age has often overlooked and undervalued."

What's going to be important in the Conceptual Age?

• Design
• Story
• Orchestration
• Empathy
• Play
• Meaning

Hanging chad. The Sputnik-level consciousness-raiser: bad design gets the wrong guy elected president. "We all must be designers."

Dan's daughter inquires about "story," asking why everything at Whole Foods comes from a family farm.

Dan, soon to catch the red-eye back East. I've already Amazon'd my copy of A Whole New Mind.

Hooray for the Right Brain!

Dan's blog.

Revenge of the Right Brain (Wired)

I have been so busy researching and writing that I feel I've been neglecting my blog. Here is a visual interlude, equivalent to the mood music NPR plays between items on All Things Considered. This chap is my ENT doctor:

I feel that I am being wronged by Stamps.com. The amount at stake is trivial - $150 and change, but I don't like feeling cheated nor do I think companies should be rewarded for putting legal minutiae ahead of basic fairness.

The issue in a nutshell:
Stamps.com: "To avoid being charged, simply cancel your account before the trial ends."

Jay: You don't mention that you can expect a thirty-minute wait on hold when you try to cancel. Or that there is no way to cancel by email or snail-mail. This is scurilous. (I never used their service, was one business day late in cancelling, and they refuse to close my account...and want to charge me $150+ for the year.)

To my delight, I discovered that Stamps.com is a public company. Hmmm. Where should I start?

I have the names of all of their officers and directors, but it might be more entertaining to begin with the Better Business Bureau, NASDAQ, and the S.E.C. Or I could write the top brass at their partners (Microsoft, NCR, Office Depot, CompUSA, Earthlink, Vendio, Xerox, Dymo, Peachtree, and Elibrium) to complain of unfair business practices. I could call Ernst & Young, their accountants, questioning the legitimacy of recognizing revenue for services never rendered. Or, and this might be best of all, it's not difficult to contact the Postmaster General. I'd probably do it through my Senators and Representative since their requests have a somewhat higher priority than mine. Food for thought.

This evening I sent my third request to cancel this "service" and the bill for twelve months of nothing. I'll give Stamps.com a day to respond. I predict fireworks ahead.

If you've experienced similar treatment from these guys, leave a comment or drop me a note.

---

Color coding: my email, email from stamps.com

The email thus far:

Subject: Your account no. 223 8907
To: resolution@stamps.com

On March 14, 2005, a representative of Stamps.com called me and offered a 30-day free trial of your service. He said all I would need to do to cancel the service was call you at 888-434-0055. He failed to mention that no one answers that line without a 30-minute wait.

Today I called, waited my 30 minutes, and spoke with someone named Brandy. I explained that I had never used your service and wanted to cancel. She said that since I was three days beyond the free trial period, I would have to pay for the first year's service, that is, 12 months at $15.99. I said this was absurd. She said she had no authority to change anything. I asked if she had a supervisor.

After a few minutes, Lawrence picked up on the "supervisor line." He told me rules are rules. I said I was appealing to his sense of fairness. I never used the service. It's difficult to cancel the service. He said he had to follow policy. Was there someone else I could speak with? No, there is no one else to speak with.

I told Lawrence I write magazine articles and that thousands of people read my blogs. I would write this up. I think Lawrence took this as a threat. I said that all I would do is tell the truth. Did he think it fair and reasonable to charge someone more than a hundred dollars for a service they never used? He thought so. Maybe I'll take a poll.

I request that you close my Stamps.com account, no. 223 8907. I have not used your service and am closing the account because I do not intend to.

jay

Jay Cross
Designer | Writer | Speaker | Ambassador | Marketer | Coach
510.528.3105 cell & office http://jaycross.com

each of us is alone in the universe
so is everyone else

e. e. cummings

---

Dear Mr. Cross,

Please note that our fees are not usage-based, but based on whether a customer has access to an active and available account.

After reviewing your Stamps.com account, we have determined that we will not be able to accommodate your request for a cancellation of your contract with us.

As explicitly stated in the Service Agreement, you are subject to a $15.99 fee per month during a one year term.

As reiterated in the Welcome E-mail that was sent on the day you opened the account, we allow you a 29-day trial period to cancel in order to avoid the charging of any fees.

In your case, customers signing up for the Monthly Lease Plan are given these Termination Terms prior to registration:

"Term Service Plan. If you terminate your term service plan before the end of your term, you will be required to pay an early termination fee equal to your monthly billing fee multiplied by the number of months remaining on your term. No early termination fee is charged if you terminate a term service plan in accordance with any applicable No Risk Trial time period. After the expiration of your term service plan, the terms relating to the monthly service plans apply."

We feel that 29 days is ample time to evaluate the service and cancel an account should Stamps.com not meet your current needs during that specified trial period.

While the service fees billed to your account are valid per the Stamps.com Terms & Conditions, we hope you will use your Stamps.com account for the full year.

Respectfully,

Office of the President Stamps.com Postage Group

---

To OTP, Stamps.com

I wrote you about fairness, not the specifics of your contract. Your website states,

"Can I cancel anytime? Absolutely. You can cancel your membership simply by contacting Stamps.com Customer Support. There are no cancellation fees and no commitments. To avoid being charged after your trial, simply cancel your account before the trial ends."

You don't mention that you can expect a thirty-minute wait on hold when you try to cancel. Or that there is no way to cancel by email or snail-mail. This is scurilous.

Once again, I request that you close my Stamps.com account, no. 223 8907. I have not used your service and am closing the account because I do not intend to use it.

jay

---

Dear Mr. Cross,

We have thoroughly researched your account and have comprehensively
communicated our policies as well as all possible courses of action
available with regard to this issue. The absolute resolution to this
matter has been reached and explained in detail in our previous
correspondence. There are no further avenues of action available on our
part with regard to this issue.

If you have any additional information regarding this matter that was
not previously presented or if you have a different issue you would like
us to address, please let us know so we may be of assistance.

Respectfully,

The Resolutions Group
Stamps.com PC Postage

---

May 3, 2005. Notices the CFO is an HBS grad and sent him a pointer to this page.

This afternoon I had a wonderful conversation with George Leonard about informal learning. George is the author of Education and Ecstacy, Mastery, and The Life We Are Given. He is president of Esalen Institute, a 5th degree black belt in aikido, and proof positive that aging does not impair one's ability to learn.

Patterns at Christopher Alexander's house.

The devil made me do it.

Old timers in the training biz remember the days before VNU and before Bill Communications, when Training the conference and Training the magazine were products of a small company named Lakewood Publications.

For a good while, Jack Gordon was editor of Training, which he invested with savvy and zest. Jack got the axe during some political intrigue. Tammy Galvin took the helm; Training magazine became so boring that I cancelled my subscription. About a year ago, Chris Lee took over and things are looking up. Jack Gordon is back as editor-at-large.

Jack cracks me up. In an editorial about management's perception of training, he writes, "While we're at it, here's one for top management: Does your training director find it difficult to make learning serve your desires because of the nature of your desires? If your idea of training that serves a critical need is a program that persuades employees to work more enthusiastically, for less money and fewer benefits, right up to the moment when you figrure out how to eliminate their jobs altogether, maybe the problem isn't your training director. Maybe what you really need is dumber employees."

I want to call your attention to Jack's article CLO: A Strategic Player? which flippantly and brilliantly describes the wrenching situation that keeps the training function hidden in the back room:

The vision must have sprung to life not long after the first corporate training departments crawled forth as distinct entities from the primeval ooze of the Industrial Age. It has been a theme on the conference circuit for as long as trainers have gathered in hotel ballrooms to discuss their careers. The vision is commonly expressed in the form of a sermon with a title like "Linking Training to Business Goals." A short version goes like this:

An organization's training unit should not operate in the form of a little red schoolhouse, tucked away in a corner, divorced from the vital strategic concerns of the business. It should measure its success not by the number of courses it runs or the number of people it runs through them, but rather by the impact of its efforts on critical business criteria. The training manager should not be the last to know about new initiatives or shifting priorities that will require employees to be brought up to speed. Instead, the top training person should sit in the executive meetings where those initiatives are born.

Furthermore, the top training person should have as much business expertise as educational savvy. He or she must understand what executives and line managers care about and why—by speaking to them regularly, in their language, about their concerns. Only then can training and performance-support efforts be linked to key goals and thus become a strategic driver of organizational performance. Without such a link, a training operation will always be seen as a cost center and a more-or-less necessary evil rather than as the priceless asset it ought to be.

Thus endeth the sermon.

Drat! I spent three or four hours today writing that same message (but using ten times as many words). I'm going to stash Jack's words to call up as shorthand instead of continuing to write about this over and over. If you followed a footnote to get here, use the back button on your browser to return to wherever you came from.

Earlier this week I had lunch with Duane Degler and Lisa Battle. Over tapas we talked of shifting workforce demographics, preparing for the semantic web, smart-search, and the implications of pervasive computing. Duane will be on the futures panel at the Innovations in eLearning Symposium in early June.

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Luigi Canali de Rossi AKA Robin Good dropped by yesterday. He's in from Roma shooting a "long tail" movie: esoteric but perhaps just what some audience is looking for. Tomorrow morning he's giving a press briefing on a new framework for distributing films at San Francisco's CityClub; drop by.

Robin is Mr. Collaboration. Check out Kolabora. Lose yourself in the content and news at Master NewMedia.

Damn. This always happens. I got wrapped up reading Robin's reviews and checking out various free services, stopped watching the clock, and blew off 45 minutes I did not have to spare.
Great links, courtesy of Robin:

wonderful free photo site
populicious -- skimming the cream off del.icio.us

Remember the scene in Woody Allen's wonderful movie Sleeper, where the scientists in the distant future chuckle about the old days in the twentieth century when people foolishly thought that chocolate, smoking, and junk food were bad for you? This morning's New York Times carried just such a story.

Some Extra Heft May Be Helpful, New Study Says

eople who are overweight but not obese have a lower risk of death than those of normal weight, federal researchers are reporting today.

The new study, considered by many independent scientists to be the most rigorous yet on the effects of weight, controlled for factors like smoking, age, race and alcohol consumption in a sophisticated analysis derived from a well-known method that has been used to predict cancer risk.

It also used the federal government's own weight categories, which define fatness and thinness according to a "body mass index" correlating weight to height, regardless of sex. For example, 5-foot-8 people weighing less than 122 pounds are underweight. If they weighed 122 to 164 pounds, their weight would be normal. They would be overweight at 165 to 196, obese at 197 to 229, and extremely obese at 230 or over.

Uh huh.

I happen to be 5-foot-8. I am at the lower end of the overweight range for that height. I am seriously trying to lose weight. I just lost a lot of motivation.

Maybe tomorrow I'll check out the new food pyramid.

A fantastic optical illusion site. It goes beyond the ordinary -- and offers scientific explanations of what's going on. This is akin to a magician revealing her secrets.

I found this while exploring what's popular on del.ico.us. Watch out. Follow in my footsteps, and time will disappear into a black hole. This beats checking the link lists and recommendations of pals and pundits.

Del.ico.us? It's social bookmarking.

Say what? It's user-driven, free-form metatagging.

So? Top-down metatags are a pain to create and generally reflect someone else's reality. The new bottom-up tags are so natural that tens of thousands of people are metatagging URLs, photos, and more for personal pleasure. What's more, they are using the tags for ingenious purposes. It's another example of the meme of individuals doing a better job than institutions.

I just bought my plane tickets Oakland/Phoenix for next month's Training Directors Forum. I am really looking forward to it. Most conferences gravitate to the convention cities: New York, Chicago, Washington, San Francisco, Las Vegas, El Lay, Dallas, N'awlins, Orlando, Orlando, and Orlando. People drift out of the conference and get lost at local attractions and restaurants.

Training Directors Forum will convene at Sheraton Wild Horse Pass Resort and Spa on the outskirts of Phoenix. It's a beautiful place. It's also in the middle of the Gila River Indian reservation, surrounded by Arizona desert, as isolated a place as you can find. The people who attend TDF form a community. This maximizes schmoozing opportunities. You see everyone there at least half a dozen times.

I'm not speaking at this year's event. I'm gathering stories for my book on informal learning. If you're going to join us, bring along an example of informal learning in your workplace or your life.

Photos from last year's TDF. And more. And more.

Formal learning is the authorized, official, scheduled, approved courses and workshops offered in school and by training departments. It's structured.






Informal learning is everything else that changes your behavior that's not the result of formal learning or your genetic inheritance. This includes the corporate grapevine, trial and error, calling the help desk, asking your neighbor, reading a book, watching someone who knows how, or teaching someone else. It's unstructured.

Most learning on the job is informal. Corporations invest heavily in formal. Putting the most money where it will do the least good: I call this the Spending/Outcomes Paradox.

Ted Cocheu, CEO of Altus Learning Systems, dropped by on Friday to help me brainstorm informal learning. Ted has heard me speak frequently enough to know that I'm a fanatic on the power of informal learning. (I have a habit of going overboard when making my case.) He was too polite to put it this bluntly, but I've come close to suggesting "Informal = good; formal = bad."

I realize that the good/bad formula is bogus, but I hadn't put my finger on why. Ted supplied the answer. Novices learn best through formal learning, for it provides the structure, signposts, and scaffolding a newby lacks. Old hands learn best informally, because they already have foundation knowledge, familiarity, and a framework for understanding.

The reverse of these observations is also true. Put novices in totally informal learning situations, and they'll become confused and not get much out of them. Put experienced people in a class, and they will rebel because so much of it is redundant.

For the highest return on knowledge, you need to stay above the line in this graph:



Now of course it's not that simple, for an individual may be a novice in some things and expert in others.

more to come....

Tomorrow (Friday) evening I'm heading down to SAP Labs in Palo Alto to attend Future Salon. If anyone needs a ride from/to Berkeley, contact me. The program sounds great. MIT professor Neil Gershenfeld will be presenting his research and his new book FAB:The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop--From Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication.

Ten years ago, Nicholas Negroponte wrote Being Digital, one of the first insightful books about the net. Reading it was the first homework assignment at the corporate university I led. (Amazon's algorithms were so crude that for years they recommended similar books, thinking that anyone who buys a hundred copies must really be into digitial stuff.)

Negroponte's mantra was "Bits, not Atoms." Virtualization was a fresh idea back then. So it's ironic that only a decade later, yet another MIT professor is presenting a breakthrough idea by going back to "Atoms, not Bits."

---

A history lesson for anthropologists and newbies: Negroponte's columns for Wired magazine.

Tooling around the MIT Media Lab's website, I came upon this bio of tomorrow evening's speaker:

Neil Gershenfeld is the director of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms and heads the Media Lab's Physics & Media research group. His unique laboratory investigates the relationship between the content of information and its physical representation, from molecular quantum computers to virtuosic musical instruments. Technology from his lab has been seen and used in settings including New York's Museum of Modern Art, rural Indian villages, the White House/Smithsonian Millennium celebration, automobile safety systems, the World Economic Forum, inner-city community centers, Las Vegas shows, and Sami reindeer herds.

---

Here's Neil, addressing the Future Salon. Neil's a friendly guy in person but his presentation had some geeky edges to it. And what he described is a long way from crossing the chasm. An echo in the SAP Labs cafeteria made it difficult to hear, and I have to admit that I spaced part of what Neil was talking about. I enjoyed his rescue of the "Illiberal Arts," what one called shop class in ancient times.

O'Reilly's Dale Dougherty was on hand to announce Make magazine, a new quarterly. "Martha Stewart for geeks." Maybe your father had a shop in the basement with a lathe and a table saw. He read Popular Mechanics. This is what your kid is going to have: his or her own personal fab plant that can turn an Autocad drawing into a solid model. Dale hopes that kid reads Make.

Mark Finnert, the fellow who runs the Bay Area Future Salon.

"We have some news to share that we don't think you're going to like. There's no point in dancing around it so here it is. Starting May 1st, every Meetup Group will have to pay a monthly fee. Read on for the details."

-----------

"Again, we know this may not be welcome news. Do know that we've spent countless hours exploring every possible option to avoid this. And we understand if you decide to leave. But when you consider sharing the cost among your members… when you compare us to other online offerings… when you think about how much you've enjoyed your Meetups so far… we think you'll realize that your Meetup Group is worth the price. If you agree, scroll down for the next step."

Well, it's only $9/group/month but still, I hate to see the freebies disappear.

2005 Learning Innovations Symposium
May 16 & 17, 2005
Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada

KEYNOTE PRESENTERS:
Clark Aldrich!
Jay Cross!
Stephen Downes!





Click to see how close it is




2005 Learning Innovations
Symposium Themes

* Performance Improvement
* Collaborative Learning
* Workflow Support and Real Time Systems
* Gaming and Simulations
* ePortfolios

Sign up.



Tourism New Brunswick

Most blogs have dysfunctional DNA that causes them to throw out anything more than a month old, as if only this month's ideas have merit. I periodically scoop items of lasting value from the blogstream here and pour them into our KnowledgeBase. Doing this manually is painful, so I'm investigating using a Jotspot wiki to keep up with things.

Today I updated the KnowledgeBase list of articles with these.

Extreme Learning: Decision Games, Chief Learning Officer (2005). Until recently, extensive experience was the only way to become an expert. It took decades to develop and hone one’s craft—you couldn’t teach it in a classroom. That’s about to change.

Meta-Lessons from the Net, CLO (2005). Before the dot-com bubble burst, enthusiasts loudly proclaimed, “The Net changes everything.” They were right. It has. In fact, the Internet is such a powerful metaphor that it has shaped our expectations of response time, around-the-clock access, self-directed action, adaptive infrastructure and other aspects of learning.

R&B and Workflow Learning (2005). Before long I was flipping through Rummler and Brache's Improving Performance: How to Manage the White Space on the Organization Chart. Intuition told me it was time to dig into this book.Performance: How to Manage the White Space on the Organization Chart. Intuition told me it was time to dig into this book.

Workflow Learning Gets Real, with Tony O'Driscoll, Training (2005). This same 80/20 rule applies to training. Ask workers where they learned how to do their jobs, and 80 percent of the time the answer is "at work." Most learning takes place on the job, outside the purview of formal learning. When we do conduct formal training, 80 percent of it is wasted effort: Workshops progress at the pace of the slowest participant, content is dated, the learner needs little of what's being delivered, the method of delivery is not tuned to the needs of the individual worker, motivation is absent, or timing is off. The half-life of newly learned material is three days; if learners don't use it immediately, they lose it.

A Brief History of the Term eLearning and A Lesson for Portugal, Nov@ Formação (2005). People tell me I coined the term eLearning when I started writing about it on the web in 1998. In the spring of '99, nine of the top ten links on Alta Vista for e-Learning connected to Internet Time Group.

What is Workflow Learning? (2005). Let's look at that in the context of:
* Performance-Centered Design
* Exponential Acceleration
* Living Information Systems
* Dense Interconnections

The Roots of Workflow Learning (2005). I doubt this cast of characters had ever appeared beneath the same roof before. SAP, PeopleSoft, Oracle, Saba, Docent, Click2Learn, Plateau, Knowledge Products, Siebel, Sun, Thinq, vCampus, and Global Knowledge (now OnDemand) all sat at the same table.

You may quote or reproduce any of these so long as you do not charge a fee and you give credit to Jay Cross and a link to Internet Time Group.

If you prefer, this sixteen-minute presentation is online here.

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Workflow Learning is the convergence of learning and work.


Let's explore that thought along these four dimensions:

• Performance-Centered Design
• Exponential Acceleration
• Living Information Systems
• Dense Interconnections

Performance-Centered Design

Gloria Gery, a computer trainer at Aetna Insurance, realized that training was being used as a BandAid for poorly designed systems and went on to write a book about it in 1991.


In her own words,

We must give up the idea that competence must exist within the person and expand our view that whenever possible it should be built into the situation.

Performance-centered design institutionalizes best practice on an ongoing basis, all of the time, by the least capable of performers, to enable people who don’t know what they are doing to function as if they did.

The common thread for the learning and performance support communities is this: “How do we get people what they need at the moment of need, and what form should it be in?”

‘How is Workflow Based learning different from performance support?’ Well, this is performance support on steroids – magnified, with a much higher impact. The workflow is the context, the magic filter through which we will be able to filter content, against which we have to compare default tactics. A fusion of learning and doing is on the way.

Gloria was right on target but ahead of the technology required to carry out her vision. We were honored when she became the first Felloow of the Workflow Institute. Now Gloria has moved on and is caring for high-risk bablies in Romania.

Volunteer or donate to the Romania Volunteer Program.

Exponential Acceleration

Everything goes ever faster. Time itself has sped up. Let's look at but one example, the shifting source of competitive advantage in business::


Companies used to compete on time-to-market and other measures of how quickly things were accomplished; everyone's so fast now that sheer speed is no longer a point of competitive advantage. Companies began to compete on the basis of who could bring out new models fastest. Outfits that used to bring out a new product line every other year began to do so every other month or even continuously. The next competitve frontier will be ruled by organizations that can enter and exit business models most rapidly: time-to-morph the company.

Living Information Systems

IT is becoming interoperable, loosely-coupled, cooperative, user-controlled, and virtual, but the most important factor of all is that it's becoming aware. Systems are transmitting meaning as well as information.



The advent of Web services and Service-Oriented Architecture will enable corporations to act as systems of interchangeable business processes:




Computers swapping meaning with each other will remove the human roadblocks to efficient processes:



This will decrease the biggest source of waste in organizations today: needless slack.




In time, processes will be on the lookout for process improvements 24/7:



Workflfow Learning results from optimizing the connections between people and value creation.



Organizations worldwide will be pulled into a single world network:



This network will become so valuable that there's no escaping it. It will become the world's digital nervous system. Oh, and we'll all work there.

There's always more at .

This Tuesday at 4:30 pm, I'll be opening the monthly meeting of eLearning Forum in Menlo Park with a presentation entitled What Is Workflow Learning?

Eilif has asked me not to go more than twenty minutes, so I've boiled this down to 16 minutes. You can get a preview here via Breeze (cut on your speakers).

Here's how I prep a new presentation these days. After thinking through what the audience probably wants, I choose a few major themes to explore. Whatever has been on my mind for that week is a heavy influence, so I don't kid myself that this is all for them. Presenting helps me think things through and challenges me to make them explicit. Next I rough out a PowerPoint, scavenging slides from previous talks and making new ones when I need them. Thank heavens for Google Images; five years ago I had a large clipart collection that required continual updating.

The next day I go back through the PowerPoint, smoothing transitions and improving the graphics. When it holds together, I do a dry run. Then I record a practice into Macromedia Breeze and force myself to listen to it. This gives me the timing per slide for streamlining.

In this case, I'm presenting to a small group and don't have much time. My recording was interrupted by phone calls and barking dogs, and I even neglected to narrate one slide. It's rough but meets my standards. Take a look. If you have any problems (or suggestions), please let me know.

I'll summarize the presentation in the next post.

Games that help people learn have long been a largely unrealized dream for enlightened designers and a spend-thrift, edutainment threat for corporate curmudgeons. Lately, I've been getting vibes that the enlightened crowd is winning.

Last month, Mark Oelert was raving about the Serious Games Summit and how the training industry looks moribund by comparison. Of course, Mark is such a fanatic that he totes around a laptop that weighs as much as a sack of bricks so he has sufficient horsepower to play whatever comes within reach. Mark gave me a copy of Raph Koster's A Theory of Fun, which I've found quite refreshing.

"Fun, as I define it, is the feedback the brain gives us when we are absorbing patterns for learning purposes."

Next month, my pal Clark Quinn's book, Engaging Learning: Designing e-Learning Simulation Games, will hit the stores.

"Learning is at its best when it is goal-oriented, contextual, interesting, challenging, and interactive. These same winning characteristics also define the best computer games, which suggests that the most effective learning experiences are also engaging. Learning can and should be hard fun!"

Climbing Albany Hill yesterday, my alternative to cardiac rehab, I listened to an mp3 interview with an MIT professor lamenting the ignorance of gaming in the popular press (games generate as much revenue as movies). He said kids' number one complaint about homework was that it was too hard; their number one complaint about games is that they're too easy.

And then I just came upon this paper by James Gee entitled Learning by Design: good video games as learning machines.

"Good game designers are practical theoreticians of learning, since what makes games deep is that players are exercising their learning muscles, though often without knowing it and without having to pay overt attention to the matter. Under the right conditions, learning, like sex, is biologically motivating and pleasurable for humans (and other primates). It is a hook that game designers own to a greater degree – thanks to the interactivity of games – than do movies and books."

---

"There are many good principles of learning built into good computer and video games. These are all principles that could and should be applied to school learning tomorrow, though this is unlikely given the current trend for skill-and-drill, scripted instruction, and standardized multiple-choice testing. The principles are particularly important for so-called ‘at risk’ learners, students who have come to school underprepared, who have fallen behind, or who have little support for school-based literacy and language skills outside of school.

[Some of] The Principles

Codesign. Good learning requires that learners feel like active agents (producers) not just passive recipients (consumers).

Customize. Different styles of learning work better for different people. People cannot be agents of their own learning if they cannot make decisions about how their learning will work. At the same time, they should be able (and encouraged) to try new styles.


Identity. Deep learning requires an extended commitment and such a commitment is powerfully
recruited when people take on a new identity they value and in which they become heavily invested – whether this be a child ‘being a scientist doing science’ in a classroom or an adult taking on a new role at work.

Pleasantly Frustrating. Learning works best when new challenges are pleasantly frustrating in the sense of being felt by learners to be at the outer edge of, but within, their ‘regime of competence’.

Information ‘On Demand’ and ‘Just in Time.’
Human beings are quite poor at using verbal information (i.e. words) when given lots of it out of context and before they can see how it applies in actual situations. They use verbal information best when it is given ‘just in time’ (when they can put it to use) and ‘on demand’ (when they feel they need it).


Skills as Strategies. There is a paradox involving skills: People don’t like practicing skills out of context over and over again, since they find such skill practice meaningless, but, without lots of skill practice,
they cannot really get any good at what they are trying to learn. People learn and practice skills best when they see a set of related skills as a strategy to accomplish goals they want to accomplish.

System Thinking. People learn skills, strategies, and ideas best when they see how they fit into an overall
larger system to which they give meaning. In fact, any experience is enhanced when we understand
how it fits into a larger meaningful whole. Players can not view games as ‘eye candy’, but must learn to see each game (actually each genre of game) as a distinctive semiotic system affording and discouraging certain sorts of actions and interactions.


Meaning as Action Image. Humans do not usually think through general definitions and logical principles. Rather, they think through experiences they have had and imaginative reconstructions of experience. You don’t think and reason about weddings on the basis of generalities, but in terms of the weddings you have been to and heard about and imaginative reconstructions of them. It’s your experiences that give weddings and the word ‘wedding’ meaning(s). Furthermore, for humans, words and concepts have their deepest meanings when they are clearly tied to perception and action in the world.

As if to echo Clark Quinn's words above, Gee concludes that "When we think of games, we think of fun. When we think of learning we think of work. Games show us this is wrong. They trigger deep learning that is itself part and parcel of the fun. It is what makes good games deep."

Read Gee's article: it provides examples of these and other principles in games and in education. Compared to a doctrinaire treatise on instructional design or the minutiae of task analysis, this is a breath of fresh air.