Society as a Platform for Learning

I’ve written before about the #4T2 project by Kennisnet. A while back I was interviewed by Wietse van Bruggen about a concept, society as a learning platform, that we brainstormed in a small subgroup. Below in Dutch what we discussed. You can find the original here.

Tijdens de #4T2 brainstorm op 22 juni hebben de leden van de denktank hun ideeën gepitcht en samen de meest kansrijke concepten uitgewerkt. Dit zijn concrete innovatie-activiteiten die het innovatie team van Kennisnet in het programma voor 2013 gaat opnemen.

Eén daarvan betreft de ‘maatschappij als platform voor het leren’, een idee dat is uitgedacht door Niels Gouman, Hans de Zwart, Iris van Gelder, Thijmen Stavenuiter, Frida Hengeveld en Wietse van Bruggen. In dit model wordt er binnen een soort online marktplaats een match gemaakt tussen vraag en aanbod. De maatschappij wordt daarbij gezien als de bron voor kennis en competenties. Iedereen in de maatschappij zou deze kunnen aanbieden aan lerenden. Wietse van Bruggen sprak over dit concept met #4T2-lid Hans de Zwart.

Kun je kort het idee uitleggen?

De basis van het idee is het ontscholen van de maatschappij, het demonopoliseren van de school als enige instituut waar het leren plaatsvindt. Met behulp van technologie zou2e de gehele maatschappij als platform voor het leren moeten kunnen fungeren. Met behulp van vouchers die de overheid geeft aan individuele leerlingen kunnen zij zelf beslissen voor welke skills, vaardigheden en kennis ze een voucher willen inzetten. Technologie moet helpen door als een soort makelaar te fungeren tussen vraag en aanbod. Iedereen in de maatschappij zou op een platform kenbaar kunnen maken welke skills, competentie of kennis ze iemand kunnen bijbrengen. Afhankelijk van de leervraag van de lerende kan er dan een match gemaakt worden tussen vraag en aanbod.

Als je bijvoorbeeld Japans wilt leren, dan zou je in plaats van een opleiding Japans te volgen ervoor kunnen kiezen bijvoorbeeld in een sushi restaurant aan de slag te gaan en daar Japans te leren van de koks. Of te kijken bij andere organisaties, bedrijven of individuen waar je deze skill op kan doen. Iedereen in de maatschappij kan iets bijdragen in dit systeem.

Daarnaast heeft iedere lerende een coach. Zeker voor jonge kinderen is er iemand nodig die je tot op zekere hoogte monitort, leert kennen en het brede perspectief voor blijft houden. Deze coach kan middels technologie inzichtelijk houden waar een leerling staat (ook wel learning analytics genoemd).

Wat is de onderliggende behoefte?

Met dit model kan je veel gerichter aansluiten op de behoefte van de leerling zelf. Daar sluit je nauwer op aan en het zou een efficiëntere manier van leren met diepgang kunnen zijn. Scholen zijn traditioneel gezien gericht op massa en niet op personalisatie. Door het individu veel centraler te stellen kan je veel beter gepersonaliseerd onderwijs verzorgen.

Wat verandert er door dit idee?

Als je dit echt gaat doen dan heb je het over een structurele verandering van onze maatschappij. Functies die scholen nu hebben plaats je terug in organisaties, bedrijfsleven en andere instellingen. Vakspecifieke docenten heb je eigenlijk niet nodig in dit model. Voor heel jonge kinderen zul je nog een schoolachtige omgeving willen organiseren. Maar een klassieke invulling van vakken is er niet. De lerende en de skills, competenties en kennis staan centraal, en daarom is iets als een vak niet relevant.

Welke vraag of probleem wordt hier door opgelost?

Het is een oplossing voor de steeds groter wordende disconnect tussen wat er op school en daarbuiten gebeurt. De manier waarop leerlingen communiceren, buiten school werken en bezig zijn is fundamenteel anders dan op school. Het feit dat je als leerling je telefoon soms moet uitzetten of zelfs inleveren op school is daar een symptoom van.

Welke actie zou je nu kunnen ondernemen?

Je zou kunnen spelen met het idee van een makelaar op het gebied van skills en leerervaringen. Hoe zou je een soort matchmaker machine kunnen maken die dit mogelijk maakt? Het is echter ook moeilijk om dit klein aan te pakken, omdat het zo allesomvattend is. Wat je zou kunnen doen is proberen om leerervaringen buiten school te creëren en te organiseren in plaats van dit gelijk in de realiteit van het huidige onderwijsmodel proberen uit te voeren. Het model zorgt er namelijk voor dat je heel veel dingen los moet laten. Dat kan voor scholen moeilijk zijn om te doen. Leuke voorbeelden om van af te kijken zijn bijvoorbeeld learnable.com, udemy.com en skillshare.com.

Wat gaat Kennisnet Innovatie in 2013 doen met dit concept/idee?

Kennisnet organiseert een brainstorm met potentiële partijen die aanbod kunnen bieden binnen dit model en learners, de vragenstellers binnen dit model, om het vraagstuk verder op te pakken en de werking van het marktplaats model verder uit te werken. Daarbij maken we gebruik van de ervaringen uit bestaande vergelijkbare initiatieven.

Serious Gaming, The Next Frontier for Learning?

In late October I hosted a set of Webinars titled “Serious Gaming – The Next Frontier for Learning?”.

These were very interactive webinars, or as I called them, Socratic Webinars (hat tip to Humberto Schwab). All participants had to agree to the following rules:

This is not a discussion: We are in the process of thinking together, trying to answer a few questions.
You can only speak by changing your feedback status in the online meeting to purple and only when you’ve been given the floor by me.
You can only speak if you are capable of repeating what the person before you has said and can summarize the previous 10 minutes of discussion.

Together we discussed a few questions. Below a reflection on what was discussed.

1. What is a game?

A game is hard to define. There is no single and unique set of characteristics that defines a game. Jesse Schell has listed the following set of things that we thinks a game should be (from the fabulous book The Art of Game Design):

Games are entered willfully
Games have goals
Games have conflict
Games have rules
Games can be won and lost
Games are interactive
Games have challenge
Games can create their own internal value
Games engage players
Games are closed, formal systems

My favourite definition of what a game is comes from Bernard Suits in The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia:

To play a game is to engage in activity directed towards bringing about a specific state of affairs, using only means permitted by rules, where the rules prohibit more efficient in favor of less efficient means, and where such rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity… playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.

I think he is spot-on when he sees gaming as overcoming unnecessary obstacles.

There are (at least) two problems to overcome when we want to apply serious games in a large organization. The first being that games are usually played voluntarily. This is not always the case when people are required to play a game in the learning context. The second problem is that games, by definition, use inefficient means. Inefficiency is not something that commercial enterprises are usually interested in.

Casper Hartevelt tries to untangle these problems in the book Triadic Game Design – Balancing Reality, Meaning and Play of which a lot can be read online.

Now that we are talking about definitions it makes sense to make clear that “gamification” is not really the same thing as serious games. Gamification applies game-principles to things that aren’t games (e.g. getting a badge for filing your expenses) as a way to make those things more compelling.

2. What types of games for learning (i.e. serious games or games with a purpose) exist?

To make it easier to discuss games, we created four (relatively abitrary) groups:

Games to be played by people who are physically together. This can be board games, but also physical games as icebreakers. Examples are games that can be played with the Foresight Cards or many of the activities in the book Gamestorming – A playbook for innovators, rule-breakers and changemakers. An interesting game that was mentioned during the webinars is The Accounting Game.
2D Computer Games are very often games that could also have been created as a boardgame. Quite often these games have a model behind them and give people insight into these models by letting them play with it. The 2D game that taught me the most is Hidden Agenda (very old!). An example from the energy industry is OilSim by Simprentis.
3D Computer Games usually try and give a real depiction of a particular location. The player is an agent in the game (either from a first person or a third person perspective). These games are very good to help people practice with skills in a physical world. A nice example is the Virtual Incident Management Training by CATT Lab.
Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) bring a game component into the real world, occasionally blurring the distinction between reality and the game. Probably the most famous example is World Without Oil.

In computer games it also makes sense to make a distinction between single player games and multiplayer games. The later can be synchronous (where everybody needs to be online at the same time, like X-Team’s Mission Island) and asynchronous.

Simulation aren’t necessarily games. They allow people to play with the model that is behind the simulation. If we add an “unnecessary obstacle” to the simulation (e.g. you need to finish within 2 minutes), then we have turned it into a game.

3. How can games be used for learning and for what type of learning problems?

The best way to learn is “learning by doing” or work-based learning. Games allow people to practice (more than traditional e-learning and more than most classrooms). In the standard competency progression from Awareness -> Knowledge -> Skill -> Mastery, we think that games can get people to skill and on their first steps towards mastery.

Games are especially suitable in the following situations:

When practicing in real life is too costly (or when mistakes are not acceptable)
When practicing in real life is too dangerous
When you want to practice situations that are extremely rare in real life (once-in-a-career events)
When other ways of learning can’t provide the level of complexity that is necessary (you need to be closer to reality) (see Ender’s Game for some scary science fiction in this area)

There are also people who see games as a way to motivate a younger generation to learn (they might be disconnected from the current learning practices). Games can make something that might not be very interesting more fun. Although there are some theoretical problems with this approach, it is one that is taken more and for educating children. See for example the Institute of Play or ASU’s Center for Games and Impact.

Jane McGonical, a famous game designer has written a whole book about why games can make us better and help us change the world. You can watch her TED talk here:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dE1DuBesGYM]

Games can truly be creative and transformative experiences and usually require a highly creative and reflective creator to be truly great. Take a look at the work of Kars Alfrink from Hubbub, New Games for Social Change. He has created a set of very interesting games with real social impact:

Beestenbende, a game for families in museums
Code 4, a game to create a different type of mindset in a bureaucratic organization
Pig chase, a game that humans can play with pigs

Brewster Kahle on “Universal Access to All Knowledge”

This afternoon I attended a session at info.nl in Amsterdam with Brewster Kahle who wants to create “Universal Access to All Knowledge”. He has founded The Internet Archive, a non-profit library with about 150 people. It is best known for its Wayback Machine (collecting about 5 billion web pages a month, amazingly still fitting in a container).

They are convinced that it is feasible to store all the world’s knowledge. Texts are being digitized (i.e. scanned) for representation on the screen (see Open Library for examples) and are openly available. The Internet Archive have made their own scanners pushing the costs per scanned page (mostly labour) down to about 10 cents per page. Their scanning centers now have 3,000,000 free ebooks available online (incl. 500,000 for the blind/dyslexic and 250,000 modern books available for lending) and they have about 8 million more to go. They have made a book mobile that can download and print a book for about one dollar.

They are also focusing on archiving all audio, offering unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth for free and for ever to bands who want to store their tapes online. They have over 1 million audio items in over 100 collections. They are doing similar things to moving images, making permanent archives of video sites that have gone out of business, home movies and even television (do check that one out, it makes TV news quotable and even includes a lending model for physical DVDs of TV news).

They store their 10 Petabytes of data in a redundant fashion and also store 600,000 books in a physical archive (growing fast of course).

Brewster also talked a little bit about his case against the US government when he received a national security letter from the FBI which was deemed unconstitutional with a bit of help from the EFF and from the fact that he is a library.

Daniel Erasmus from Digital Thinking Network (DTN) did a short presentation on NewsConsole which uses a big data approach and aims to collect all the world’s news and put it in an interface that allows for easy interacting with it. I’ve been using it for a while to find news in the field of learning technology. I particularly liked his key lessons from working with big data, like:

SQL won’t cut it
Big data is messy, a lot of effort goes into cleaning it up
Moving a petabyte of data is very expensive and difficult, store it correctly the first time
Testing on small subsets doesn’t work, because you get unexpected bottlenecks when you scale
It is a humbling problem

Panopticon and Why You Should Care About Your Privacy

Last night I watched the Dutch documentary Panopticon which explores our privacy in the Netherlands. Peter Vlemmix made an excellent film. Do take your time to watch it below or directly on Vimeo:

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/52165457]

Vlemmix deftly shows that many people in the Netherlands think they have “nothing to hide”, while living in a society which is increasing the level of control and eroding their privacy. Even though I follow this topic actively, the film still managed to upset me. I didn’t know that the trams in Rotterdam do facial recognition or that psychiatrists have to list the diagnosis of their patients in a centralized repository (see this Dutch article, and these Dutch sites of psychiatrists battling this DBC).

Watching the film made me angry and worried. How much further before the police will start pro-actively arresting people for what they might do even before they do it, the infamous pre-crime?. The technology is already capable.

It was interesting to see how Germany, with its Nazi and Stasi history, has much more awareness of the dangers of storing too much data. They refuse to implement the EU’s data retention policy for example.

As you can see, there is ample need for a strong Dutch voice protecting your privacy. Bits of Freedom is doing a great job defending your digital rights.

They could really use your donation.

Do Your Bit!

Closing Session of Elliott Masie’s Learning 2012

The last general session of Learning 2012 started with thanking all the people who were involved in producing the conference and making it happen. I have to commend Elliott Masie and his team for putting together a truly amazing event. He himself does seem to be an incredibly reflective practicioner and thus a great role model for other learning professionals.

The first speaker for the day was Greg Urban (from University of Pennsylvania) via live video connection. As an anthropologist he talked about why culture is important in corporations. Culture in the most modern sense of the word is whatever gets socially learned and socially transmitted. Urban thinks that learning isn’t about individuals. He thinks that from an anthropological perspective it actually is organizations that are learning. Individuals get their notions from the group: every individual is born into a culture. So this can also happen inside organizations. He has come to realize that organizations are “little tribes”. Masie asked Urban how a culture gets created in relatively new organizations. Urban’s main research interest is what forces move cultures. One important force is inertia (the fact that you have been doing it in a particular for a long time), another key force is entropy. An important concept to understand is “meta-culture” or reflexive culture, culture that looks back at other culture. This is important when creating a new company: it will have to come from there. The last force is the force of interest. He does believe that culture can be influenced, but you can’t just pick it up and change it to something else. Urban also gave us a couple of takeaways:

Be a little suspicious about the official statement of the company about what their culture is and compare it to how it really is.
Pay attentions to emotions and to stories (and maybe the rituals).

Next up was Marhall Goldsmith an executive coach who gives a lot of talks and writes a lot of books and articles. Masie and him have created a set of videos which are interesting from a content perspective (basically Marshall makes the same point using Drucker as we did in our DIY Learning session), but also very much from a process or format perspective. The short videos were easy to create and have a huge value.

Next up was Donald H. Taylor to talk about the emerging competencies in the field of learning. He has been in learning and development for 25 years. Anything that describes the skills to do something will need to be simple enough to be usable but complex enough to be useful. He is trying to create a language of skills in our field. The tool is called the LPI Capability Map. The first and most important thing you should be doing is to keep learning. Masie made a case that we need to be ferocious samplers of learning (“Who would eat at a restaurant where the chef doesn’t do a lot of eating and tasting themselves?”). There is so much stuff out there already. Do you really need to make it again? In the new producer role the curation angle should become more obvious. You aren’t creating, you are helping people find what might be useful for them. We have moved from “knowledge is power” to “information is free”. This means our role should change.

The last speaker of the conference was Nigel Paine. What excites him about learning right now is the relationship of learning to everything else. He believes it is moving into the mainstream. Learning organizations have some much impact that companies really can’t do without them anymore. Next, he shared the BBC video story once again. He thinks we should do less learning catalogs, less trying to control and more trying to be open. One tip he gives to everybody in the audience: “Get involved in culture”. From knowing, to doing, to being. There is no chance you can be a learning leader anymore if you don’t understand technology. The most important part though is that you have to be able to relate learning in the language of the business.

Masie added three more important sagely pieces of advice (which I agree fully with):

Engage yourself as a storyteller.
Become experimental: you have to be able to do an experiment without becoming too risky. Don’t do a pilot just as a first step to an implementations, do multiple pilots.
Practice your negotiation skills.

As Masie doesn’t really like feedback, he prefers feedforward, I would like to ask him the following. In the past you asked every single speaker what great book they had read recently. You didn’t do that this year. Would you please do it again next year?