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Comics, Novels, Answering
Machines and -- Learning
Jon Warshawsky
jwarshawsky@dc.com
Meet Clark Quinn
Using American airports as a not-so-random sample,
far and away the most important software on the jet set executive's
PC is made by Microsoft. The key application? Solitaire. Sure, it's
old - dating back to Windows 2.0, maybe earlier - and the graphics
are less than spellbinding, but it has attained a rare level of
longevity in the software world. Solitaire engages and challenges.
According to researcher Clark  Quinn, challenge - not high-powered media - is one of the
foremost lessons to be applied to more educational applications.
Quinn, a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology, has a
long academic track record in both Australia and the United States,
and was most recently the head of research and development for Knowledge
Planet. Beyond research and his work with learning theory, Quinn
has designed award-winning online content, educational computer
games and websites. Twenty years ago, he launched his career with
a focus on educational games and programming.
"I was excited about the prospect - I wanted
to use adventure games to address deeper learning issues than teaching
people to type," Quinn said.
Quinn's personal quest was to find the synergies
between what makes activities fun and what makes them educational.
Ultimately, this resulted in a list of characteristics that engaged
users and learners. Number one? Words of wisdom from our old friend
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (no relation to your editor).
Challenge
According to Csikszentmihalyi, Quinn said, what
keeps you in the state of flow is the challenge. Forget speed
and graphics - start with the challenge. Technologically unimpressive
trivia games during online collaboration sessions have entertainment
value because challenge overcomes a lot of other shortcomings. The
catch is that many designers equate challenge with speed.
"Everybody thinks that we've got to make it fast
and that that makes it tough," Quinn said. "I recently saw a game
that was designed to teach a CAD (computer-aided design) package,
and you're in this 'Duke Nukem-like' environment, running around,
and every once in a while you have to build a new part for your
weapon...You stop and do this non-interesting task so you can get
back (to the game)."*
A better focus: intrinsic motivation - make the
task challenging and engaging enough that you don't need to resort
to speed.
"Is it the right level of difficulty?" Quinn
asked. "The learner should be thinking, 'I think I can do this but
I'm not quite sure. Let me try.' That's where we ought to be in
the first place. The challenge is where to start. Then it gets easier
to build the game. You don't have to spend a lot on making it fast
and on production values, because you've created interest through
the task itself."
"People play simple card games because the rules
make it challenging enough," he added. We have to design learning
games this way, that lead to learning outcomes that you care about.
Good writing
Great writing is a powerful ally when it comes
to creating engaging online experiences. According to Quinn, it
helps to use exaggeration for humor and drama. Dynamic, concise
phrasing is essential.
"One of the tricks (my team) did was to get a
comic skit writer, who does television skits, and he took what I
had condensed from the subject matter expert into a paragraph and
rewrote it into two sentences that were punchy and dynamic. I wasn't
a bad writer, but I erred on the side of traditional instructional
design writing."
Moreover, technology may not be our best friend
in the quest to create engaging scenarios, Quinn said.
Our goals are often contradictory to the trend
toward learning objects, he said. Learning objects are supposed
to be standalone, which makes it very difficult to string them together
to create a story and overall game-like experience."
Media
"People like to go to video or highly contextual
stuff," Quinn said. "Sometimes you don't need this because you don't
really want them focusing on the context - you want them focusing
on the content."
Could you use a comic strip? According to Quinn,
people are very good at figuring out a flow of action from a comic
strip, and visualizing it, and for interactions you can portray
the thought process that experts use which is usually missing in
a lot of learning. Usually these thought processes are more important
than the spoken words.
Happily, comic strips are also much less expensive
to produce than video.
Other tricks
Sometimes, simple existing technologies can do
the job. As an example, Quinn cited a course intended to help people
speak to the media for broadcast. For many, this is a fearsome task,
especially with intimidating journalists of the sort from take-no-prisoners
publications such as The Washington Post, Cappuccino
or The Wall Street Journal (before it went all soft
and colorful a few weeks ago.)
For the media course, in which subject matter
experts were ex-journalists, a live version would have been expensive
and time consuming. The team developed online content based on a
scaffolding process, in which the help and hints were gradually
removed, Quinn said. For technology, they used a programmable answering
machine on which the learner would drill down to the question to
be answered and compose a verbal message under pressure. Learners
would listen to their recorded response and critique it against
the recorded 'model' response.
The realism was impressive, the technology was
nothing special - and it worked.
Find the Angle
Some topics seem so dull that creating an engaging
online learning experience seems outside the bounds of reality.
Quinn mentioned computer auditing as a topic
that seemingly defied any kind of engaging scenario. However, if
you talk to people who do computer auditing for a living you will
get a different perspective, he said. "The people who do these audits
think that it's like playing detective. You can make this topic
exciting by finding fraud, using the investigator angle."
A Novel Approach
Beyond skills training, the principles of engagement
apply to broader categories of learning in the business world. How
do you spread the vision throughout the organization without using
boring PowerPoint slides? According to Quinn, one company addressed
organizational change through a novel, showing the transformation
through vibrant 'fiction'.
After all, there's nothing like a good story
to involve the reader.
For more information about Clark Quinn and his
work, visit www.quinnovation.com.
*Note that this was a mischaracterization
of the particular game, and while in principle I believe that we
generally can and should replace speed with cognitive challenge,
this game is more elegant in design than it is portrayed here.
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