The Total Learner Experience

Language Communities on the Web

Having spent many years in a language classroom, I was excited to discover the abundance of free language instruction on the web. The three I found the most impressive were Livemocha, Babbel, and Busuu. All three offer interactive language lessons for a variety of European languages while Livemocha includes a number of less traditional languages (such as Persian, Esperanto, and Urdu).  Busuu is based upon the European system of language levels (A1, A2, B1, B2…) and was selected as an official UNESCO project while Livemocha follows the American system of classes (101,102, 201…)

Here is a rundown of each:

Busuu tracks your language progress via a “language garden” where your plant has the opportunity to grow into a tree as your progress through the lessons. Busuu’s strength is vocabulary building since each lesson begins with a picture, pronunciation, English translation, and example sentence. It also attempts to have you learn the language via short passages and related questions.  Like Livemocha, there is also a writing section where other users rate your responses. This feature is the main advantage of a true online community where the website can take advantage of a speaker’s native fluency. Thus, the user becomes both the student and the teacher.

Babbel gives the user more freedom to adjust the language to their level and has a stronger focus on common phrases.  My favorite aspects of Babbel are its forum and the chatrooms. In the easy to use forum, you can ask specific grammar questions not covered in the lessons. For instance, what really is the difference between nouvel and neuf? Also, the chatroom is a quick and easy way to put your language skills to the test. It should be noted that although all three sites offer a great array of services with a paid membership, Babbel is the most limited for users not willing to pay.

Livemocha tries to incentivize its users to progress with a points system that also hands out awards at different levels. While it is rather basic, I can attest that I have continued to practice lessons simply to attain the next shiny medal available. The lessons are very structured. Each includes a section to learn vocabulary/phrases, review them, complete a writing submission, and record a spoken section. The last two sections are then rated by native speakers in the community. In a sense, this tool provides you with free teachers who correct your grammar and pronunciation. One area I would like to see them add would be grammar. This fall before visiting Turkey, I wanted to use Livemocha to learn a few phrases and sentences. However, I found it difficult to extract even basic grammar only from the vocabulary and sentences the site provides.

8 Tips for Designing an ARG (as a Learning Experience)

In November 2009 myself, Brandon, and Dolly published an article about Alternate Reality Games in the eLearning Guild's Learning Solutions e-magazine (download a copy here).

Since the article was published, several instructional designers have asked us to pull out some practical tips on how they can get started designing their own ARG. For this post, we thought we would reference eight key tips from the article that provide a starting point for you to consider as you embark on your ARG design.

1. Establish Clear Goals	Document what are you trying to achieve with the game. What are you trying to get your audience to experiment with or learn? After all, participants should be learning something while having fun. The Threshold, a game designed by Cisco had clear goals from the beginning, generating very positive feedback from players: "The Threshold was a four-week long alternate reality game designed to build teamwork, build awareness of Cisco products and services, and to provide an entertaining and fun experience."
2. Tell a Meaningful and Entertaining Story	Make your story relevant to your audience and engage them in the unfamiliar by tapping into what is familiar to them. Don't get too carried away with the story to a point you forget it's all about the audience. The designers at LAMP (Laboratory for Advanced Media Production, Australia) felt that an intriguing story about the school's production studio would motivate new students to participate in their game. The "Safesets, Sabotage and Madame Blash" mini ARG (mARG) is an excellent example of a game that has a relevant setting and background story that is sure to entice players.
3. Don't Become Overly Attached to Your Story and Characters	Be quick to adapt to your audience's responses. Let them participate in the design process as the story unfolds. Interact directly with them (via non-player characters), respond to their reactions, be prepared to change strategies, puzzles, and/or storylines to conform to how the audience is changing the game. The Cloudmarkers were a self-organized group of players involved in the famous ARG "The Beast." They initiated a Yahoo! group in order to discuss the latest findings in the game. Their discussion was closely followed by the developers and, since ARGs are normally developed as they are delivered, the developers would often include members of the group in the game plot as it unfolded.
4. Plan, Plan, Plan	Even though you need to be flexible, lay out a plan of the events and outcomes. For instance, create a flowchart of the action items such as clues, puzzles, characters interactions with the players, next moves, etc. This will make it easier for you to visualize and strategize how the game is going to be played and will give you a better idea of when, what and how to adapt. Here is an example of a flowchart being used to plan the actions in Ascendency Point, a live event for the game Perplex City.
5. Create a Reward System	No matter how cool your game design is and how engaging your characters and story are, chances are you may still have difficulty getting people to participate. Instill competitiveness and collaboration by offering rewards. Make it fun. In the Duke's Quest ARG we created, it was a challenge to get players involved without a reward system. This can be a challenge when organizing small group ARGs which tend to involve even those who might not be interested in games just for "fun's" sake. A reward system might be that extra incentive they need to get involved. The Dark Knight ARG (developed for The Dark Knight movie), had a message from the Joker requesting players to submit photos of themselves in Joker make-up in order to receive a mystery package in the mail.
6. Leverage Social Media	Consider using social media utilities to both design and deliver the game. Services such as blogs, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and others can serve as a medium for puzzle delivery and for players to interact with each other and non-player characters.
7. Have Closure	It's OK to have cliffhangers for a next instance of the game, but make sure your game has closure. Players need to feel like they've achieved something at the end. This can be a live event at which players gather with characters for a final announcement, conclude the game going over their achievements, distribute rewards or even set up expectations for a segue.
8. Play an ARG	It is true, the best way to design something effective might be to actually get your hands dirty. If you want to know how to design a good ARG, play an ARG. By actively joining a game you may learn how to relate to your audience's feelings and expectations when designing your own ARG. You can find active ARGs and read up on old games on websites and communities like ARGnet.

I hope these tips can help you get started designing your own ARG. The potential for active engagement is inherent to ARGs and may help you deliver a truly effective and experiential learning activity. I'm interested in hearing your thoughts on ARGs in general. Please feel free to contact me or add to the comments here with your responses to these questions:

• Have you designed or played an ARG before?
• Was it specifically designed to teach or motivate the audience to experiment with technology or a concept?
• What are your best practices and advice for those interested in using ARGs for learning?

10 Ways To Use Facebook for Training

Brandon: You know as I work to create social learning micro-sites on the internal corporate network, it sometimes hits me that in a lot of ways I'm just re-creating what Facebook has already hit a home run with. So, Dolly, the question for you today is: How can I leverage Facebook for training? 

Dolly: What content is best suited for Facebook? Is Facebook for content or is it for social networking and engagement? 

Well it seems that technical training, soft skills training... really any type of learning content would work. The power of the platform seems to be around the integration of peer-to-peer dialogue and sharing with the context of learning. Facebook users are collaborating by default because they are exchanging comments and creating dialogue interactively. What we need to do is make this engaging activity applicable to work/training.

Shall we brainstorm? What are the features of Facebook are conducive to training? 

OK, so let's make it a contest. Let's list 10 ways we can use Facebook for training. I mean we're professionals right? With imaginations like ours, we should be able to easily list 10 ways! Here's one way:

1. Discussion threads. People seem to love engaging in dialogue about relevant subjects. A simple discussion board functionality is key in attracting learners to a higher level of engagement.

Facebook recently took out the updates about when people commented on others' walls. I liked that and was sad to see it go. It allowed me to see what my friends were saying -- even if it was directly relevant to me AND it often introduced me to new people that I liked. You never know what tidbit of seeming off-topic information will inspire a new idea. 

 2. Class notes and links to supporting information. In academic settings I've seen many professors, trainers and facilitators add their syllabi, notes, and links to websites. I'm using Microsoft Sharepoint now to create a wiki where I will host pre-work content and activities for a workshop I am designing. A Facebook-like platform is great for this, although versioning control would be a nice-to-have. 

Sharepoint? 

Sharepoint is Microsoft's collaboration platform. A lot of people are using it for collaborative learning environments. Check out more about it here.

3. Course feedback. Students can provide feedback about their favorite or least favorite aspects of the training.

This is where a "two-way" information stream can provide excellent near real-time feedback. An instructional designer could easily move to a more "agile" design process by using Facebook's social utilities to gain "instant" feedback on instructional content. I've been using similar methods for several years by building database systems. Facebook has this functionality built in! 

4. Student Reflection. Students are required to post some "takeaway" from any training that they just completed in their status, which can help their community at large.

5. Events. If you can get out of the whole departmental competition thing, it could be really interesting to have online "events" that everyone was invited to facilitate cross-company brainstorming for new initiatives.

6. Build your personal network/brand. It's important for individuals to be able to broadcast their expertise and interests. Facebook-like platforms could become similar to an "auctioning" of skills. IBM does this now with their internal Blue Pages. Employees are encouraged to list their skills, expertise, and availability. People can search using keywords to find suitable candidates for their projects.

I like this idea. We haven't talked about LinkedIn, but it seems like this might be an internal version of that.

7. Post-classroom events (extended learning). We used this recently on a leadership training program. Although the primary component of the training course was a 3-day classroom experience, we designed pre-work activities for the cohort to participate in online, and, to ensure retention and reflection we also designed post-classroom activities. The cohort remained engaged, and continued to work on the post-class activities. One benefit were the "breadcrumbs" left behind by the cohorts... subsequent cohorts could learn from them.

 8. Games. We could do a post of different types of games. But clearly all sorts of games are popular on Facebook. I don't play, but I know that Mafia Wars, Farmville and the like have some real appeal. I could see seeking out people who had certain skill sets to form your teams. You and I play Scrabble and its knockoffs. Facebook serves as a portal to every kind of game imaginable. I could also see some scavenger hunts for content and personnel.

How many games on Facebook are designed for learning though? Quite a few I think... it's just not real obvious.

I FIRMLY believe that every activity people participate in teaches or reinforces some learning or knowledge (even if only a physical response). Even if games are not designed with education/instruction/learning in mind, they still have features that can be exploited and minded to fold in formal/planned learning opportunities. I mean, somehow they have made the most inane, tedious tasks on Farmville completely compelling. Who knew? Which leads me to think about another way to use Facebook for training:

9. Quizzes. What kind of programmer are you? What does your desk say about you? What kind of cubicle mate are you? While these are humorous, I could see some actual useful ones, like providing Myers Briggs profiles and the like. Oh, and here's the 10th (I beat you to it)!

10. Fandom. I was interested to see that the number one corporate identity on Facebook is Coke. Their presence was first created by a zealous fan. The page has become their corporate identity, and hugely popular. A lot of times employees can be the biggest fans of a company and hold the most knowledge. Creating a safe environment to tell the positives of the company can offset some of the griping that we all need to do sometimes.

Yes, but some companies are paranoid about their "intellectual property" being made public. It's akin to the music companies obsessing over DRM -- the one thing a company needs to understand about today's information revolution: you can't control everything ... so focus on influence rather than control. Comcast learned this quickly, and adopted Twitter to broadcast network statuses to its customers. Now it uses Twitter for customer support.

 I see we keep returning to the theme that companies need to have a more flexibility in this era of accessible info.

Well there are 10 ways... but there are many more. The big question for companies: are you going to build internal social platforms, or leverage the public ones? It seems like many companies will want to keep their social networks behind their firewalls. This may work in the short-run, but newer generations of workers (Millennials and the 2020 Gen) will want to be able to blend their public and work networks and profiles. That will make for an interesting dialog... maybe we can discuss that one soon? 

  

Privacy and Social Networking

One of the scriveners on one of my favorite blogs, Bitch, PhD wrote today about remaining pseudonymous while blogging honestly. This is an issue that I think about fairly often as it pertains to me directly, but I also think about it when designing.

Social networking is a buzz word at the corporate level. They want to emulate the parts of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn that support their missions, but the corporation, and us, the employees and public, want to set boundaries and limits on what happens in these spaces, for obvious, but very different, reasons.

Facebook, on one of its many recent redesigns, set a "groups" feature, where you could shuffle people into the categories of your life. There wasn't enough functionality to support the usefulness of that concept, but it has potential.

As designers, implementers and critics of social networks we need to balance the one-stop-shopping convenience of having a single-sign on, while recognizing that most people want to be allowed to stream their message to their own particular audiences.

Alternate Reality Games: Leveraging Collective Intelligence for the Enterprise

Read our new article on how to effectively use the emerging genre of alternate reality games in corporate training to increase learner collaboration and sharing. You can read the article from the eLearning Guild's newsletter, or download it.

Notes on Social Learning

I've been attending quite a few webinars and presentations on social learning and hearing a lot of different approaches, best practices, and tips about implementation -- as well as watching demos of software tools and frameworks designed to help organizations implement collaborative learning environments.

I attended a webinar hosted by HCI about "Social Software in Enterprise Learning: Getting Started" and presented by David Mallon from Bersin. Here are some notes I took:

• Mallon discussed how enterprises should encourage and enable employees to create and use "social graphs" -- networks of people based on varying "node identifiers" such as location, expertise, availability, etc. Similar to what IBM does with its Blue Pages, social graphs make it easier to locate and recruit people with the skills and/or knowledge needed for projects. Social graphs augment a person's ability to search and locate expertise. They then create pathways to connect people. Helping an employee make use of their social graph is in the best interest of the enterprise, and really is about harnessing the company's collective wisdom. 
• The discussion then moved to creating "Enterprise Learning Frameworks" (ELFs -- my acronym) -- an end-to-end map and description of a learning organization's primary components. Mallon discusssed the 70/20/10 model (70% of learning occurs informally, 20% is peer enabled, and 10% is achieved through formally curated systems). Now, with the ELF in place, the 70/20/10 model is changed to an 80/20 model where 80% of learning occurs informally through a Social Learning Environment (SLE) constructed by the organization. We all know that a company can't programmtaically meet all its learners' needs, so a SLE puts data and knowledge in the hands of the performer when they need it. The SLE helps the organization enable more self-directed, self-service, "in the moment" learning opportunities.
• Mallon discussed that there are three components of Informal learning in a SLE (I prefer to call this a "purpose-driven system that encourages informal learning"): on-demand, social, and embedded. On-demand content is made available by SMEs and/or other content-experts in a "rapid fashion" -- it could also be curated content, but the point is to make it available in a format and manner that suits the learner's situation at the time of need; the social component includes elements that help the learner expand their networks; and the embedded component include tools that are smart enough to know learner context (in a software system, on a device, etc.), and is implicit -- it helps the learner understand the success or failure of the task being performed -- potentially through a feedback mechanism.
• The ELF should also include access to tools and technologies for learners to create or modify their own content. Mallon stated that an ELF by its nature incubates a culture of learning across the organization -- a must-have before a vibrant SLE can be fostered.

Here are some best practices for beginning to implement an ELF with a SLE:

• Start simple
• Have a clear purpose
• Inventory your organization and see where collaboration and social learning already occurs
• Ask yourself "why community, why social learning"?
• Always be clear with what are you trying to accomplish
• Study your audience very well
• Architect participation: it doesn't happen on its own Your SLE will require what I call an "active agent" -- This is not a task to be performed by just anyone in the organization -- it is a next-gen skillset.
• Ensure you have a content curator
• Understand that 1% of the network contributes the most, 9% occasionally contribute, and 90% sit around and watch. Use the 1% to your advantage.
• Don't forget culture. The "learning culture" is a major element to a SLE. Help to culitvate a SLE in which sharing knowledge is welcome.
• Don't forget the 4Cs: Conversations, Content, Connections, and Collaboration: the primary elements of a SLE. 
• Don't focus on tools first, focus on the behavior needed, then find the technology to support them.