Hyperlearning Creates Smarter Content

I was trolling through an article in Wired magazine when I read about a computer science student at Carnegie Mellon who is working on creating computer experiences that people can engage in synchronously with a specific goal or objective in mind.

This got me to thinking about what we do as learning developers. We are focused on creating computer-driven experiences designed to make people smarter. Our content (at least in the Web 1.0 arena) is often linear and travels one-way: computer to learner.

But what if we focused less on making sure our content was "the best it could be" before we disseminated it in a one-way route, and relied more on learners to ensure its validity, evolve it as it needs to be, and make the content smarter (as well as other learners)?

We even measure results in an old-style model: After the learner consumes the content, did performance improve? This seems slightly unbalanced, since in reality, we are rarely disciplined enough to seek and observe whether or not an improvement in performance was actually realized (and in most global working environments it is hard to determine).

By harnessing the power of hyperlearning (in this iteration: synchronously linking two or more learners) to the same content at the same time, we can enable a process wherein these linked learners will work together to make the content smarter.

In the Wired article, the student designed a matching game where two players saw the same images at the same time on different computer terminals, and added metadata describing the photos. The players theoretically built a database of search terms for the images, which after evaluation were shown to be much more accurate descriptors of the data than what a computer could produce itself (how many times have you conducted a Google image search and retrieved images that just didn't seem relevant to your original query?).

If our linked learners can be synchronously paired to our learning content, and are provided a mechanism to evaluate, reflect upon, review, and/or add to the content in real time, we would be able to detect trends that may very well help to make that content smarter.  By looping the evolved content back through the system and making it available to others, we in turn not only make the content smarter, we are able to share it to others with related interests.

That in essence is the power of social learning on a connected platform. We just need to divorce ourselves of thinking only about one-way dissemination of content. By linking learners synchronously, we will build richer learning experiences. Naturally, we provide the linked players a reward mechanism: vital to making the experience fun (otherwise, people won't do it). And of course, my bias is to design game experiences to facilitate this -- our learners would be much more interested in doing some of the "work" for us by making better content, if we let them have fun while doing it!

To begin, we have to throw off the shackles of rigid, SCORM-compliant learning management systems... but my disdain for SCORM is the subject for a longer rant...

Try one of the labeling games here. Or this really cool web treasure hunt game.

Or here for a whole mashup of linked brainpower games. 

Comments

[Rick Evans]

GENIUS!!!! PURE GENIUS!!!