The annual resolution post, 2015 edition

Every year I try to set some goals for myself, usually to pretty good success (except for picking yoga back up in 2014...total failure on that one).

I've been struggling with resolutions for this year, and as I've been reflecting on the past year, I think I know why: my life and time right now is not wholly my own. Being a part of a large family, and one of only two people in that family who drive, means that much of what I spend my time doing is doing for others. I don't think people talk much about that side of being in a big family, but it is the truth. You can't be selfish. You can't put yourself first. You can't only think about what you want, or what you need. You are part of something bigger than yourself, and when a big family is at its best is when everyone is working together and looking out for each other.

This is not to say that you shouldn't make time for yourself. This isn't to say that there are times when some members of the family do more than others. As one of the parents in our big family, it means my attention is often focused on keeping the family machine running smoothly. Meal planning. Laundry. Cleaning. Cooking. If I'm not doing it myself, I'm usually coordinating who is.

So this year, as co-founder of our big crazy bunch with another full time job (that pays me!) to boot, I'm cutting myself a break on my 2015 resolutions. No pressure, no guilt. I'm putting things on my list that inspire me and that I'm passionate about. Here they are...let's see how I do.

• Get that second book done. 
• Get isanno off and running. I know you probably don't know what I'm talking about here. I'm hoping by the end of 2015 you do. 
• Use my AMAZING new camera every day...I've already started a 365 day challenge for myself, maybe I'll share with you. 
• Draw something every day. Use that dusty sketchbook.
• Learn Illustrator and Photoshop and Lightroom. 
• Learn a few songs on my ukelele. I really miss playing music.
• Take care of myself. I'm not getting any younger. OK, this one is a necessity, not a passion...but I'm trying to make it a passion :)
• Do some real work with those cool Nevermind folks. Maybe that's related to isanno. Figure that out. 

And that's it. Yep, it's a long list, but it's the kind of list that's a little art, a little science and a lot of learning. It's the kind of list that I'll make time for, or that I can pretty easily squeeze in time for. It's a list that inspires me right now, to do more of the things I love and am passionate about. 

What inspires you? Are they your resolutions?

2014 in review

Facebook tried to prompt me to share their version of my 2014, but after taking a look at it, they missed so much. As I've made a habit of doing every year, I wanted to take my own look back and forward. 2014 was a tumultuous year, lots of highs with some lows thrown in there for perspective. One thing I'm learning is that being a mom, especially with 6 kiddos, means that my highs and lows are often wrapped up in theirs. Yet one of the things I'm most proud of is that I have a whole life, a whole identity outside of "mom," and many people are surprised to find out what a big, crazy family we have. I'm fiercely protective of both of those sides of my life and 2014 was a test of balance and preservation. I suspect that until these kiddos start leaving the nest, this is what life will be like.

I thought taking care of them when they were little was hard. I clearly had no idea...

So here it is, my 2014 in review, skewed toward things I did/accomplished, not the kids :)

• We spent New Year's Day at my first Rose Bowl Parade (my MSU Spartans were in the Rose Bowl!).

• My first book, Immersive Learning, was published in January. I did my first book signing in Las Vegas.

• Also in January, John and I took a belated honeymoon trip to Sonoma and drove along the Pacific Coast Highway on our way home. I highly recommend it.

• In February, we all traveled back to NJ and got to all of the Paganos and lots of snow. 

• In April, I turned 40. We took a trip to San Francisco to celebrate, including a trip to Tiffany's and Alcatraz.

• In June, we made another trip to Pennsylvania and stopped by Philly ComicCon. 

• July I got to spend with Zevon and my parents here. I miss them terribly. 

• John and I celebrated our 1st anniversary in July. 

• We went on a proper family vacation to Yosemite in August and stayed at the Bison Creek Ranch. I can't say enough about what that vacation did for my soul.

• I also completed the 21 Day Drawing Challenge in August. I really loved it. 

• AND we went to Scare LA in August. Also really loved it. (August was a great month!)

• In September we spent a weekend camping at deBenneville Pines. 

• Our honorary family member Keara was married in October and John officiated. 

• I keynoted my first conference in October. 

• We fostered Darwin in October, our big oafy pit bull. 

• October ended with DevLearn and Halloween. Enough said. 

• John turned 40 in November and we did Santa Barbara Startup Weekend as his birthday present. 

• We officially adopted Darwin in December (which no one was surprised about...).

• I celebrated my 1 year anniversary of becoming a vegetarian at the end of December.

It was a pretty awesome year, upon reflection. True, I didn't mention some of the big (BIG) challenges we had with the kids or I had with work, or how I spent the better part of November and December sick. I didn't mention my frustration with myself that I didn't learn to play my ukelele, or blog as much as I want to, or to really dig into this big idea that I've been struggling to get off the ground. I didn't mention my car accident and physical therapy. I also didn't mention just all of the "stuff" we celebrated with the kids...concerts, Math Super Bowl medals, plays, talent shows, birthdays. I didn't mention John's four improv shows.

2014 was just really, really busy.

Here's to 2015, to more adventures and more love and more learning. 

Immerse yourself in learning at #DevLearn 2014

It's almost DevLearn season! A few weeks ago, I wrote a reflection on why I go to DevLearn each year that was posted by the eLearning Guild, "Something New."

DevLearn 2013

This will be my 7th DevLearn in a row. Wow. My first year, in 2008, my fledgling company Tandem Learning attended as a new vendor. The conference was in San Jose and we had a booth out in the hallway, showing off 3D immersive environments for learning and our demo of a Virtual Territory for pharma sales training. We also hosted a wine reception, and it was there that I met many of the people in the learning industry that I call friends today. 

Over the years, I ran ARGs at DevLearn, hosted the Emerging Tech stage for a couple years, did pre-conference sessions, concurrent sessions, and even did the closing Ignite! keynote wearing a fabulous fascinator (the conference had moved to Vegas by then and I wanted to channel my inner showgirl).

DevLearn 2009: Dr Strangelearn ARG

I'm particularly excited about DevLearn this year. While there are lots of reasons, not least of which are getting to see Neil Tyson Degrasse keynote and the new location at the Bellagio, the main reason I'm excited about DevLearn 2014 is because this is the first year I'll be attending as an author. It was a long road to publishing my first book, Immersive Learning, and I'm really proud and excited to share the key themes of the book at DevLearn this year. 

Ignite! Closing keynote 2011

There's a few ways you can join me in exploring immersive design at DevLearn this year. First I'm hosting a concurrent session on Thurs, Oct 30th at 10:30 am to share real-world examples of how organizations are using immersive learning to improve performance. If you're attending DevLearn, I hope to see you there!

If you REALLY want to immerse yourself in immersive learning, please join me on Tuesday, October 28th for a full-day pre-conference workshop. We'll spend the day digging in to the immersive design process and you'll leave with an actionable design document. You'll learn how to do a thorough analysis which is critical and serves as the basis for your design, we'll walk through how to make decisions on theme, character development, storyline structure, feedback and scoring. 

We'll explore all of the different technologies available to deliver your immersive training. I'm really excited about this session, and hope you'll join me!

Other places I'll be at DevLearn? Look for me signing books on Thursday after my concurrent session (time tentatively set for 12:30pm) and maybe even a Morning Buzz session? Otherwise, I'll be attending sessions and looking forward to opportunities to connect with all of the brilliant people congregating at DevLearn this year. 

Learning by trying

Even though I wrote a book on immersive learning, one of the main premises of which is that failure is an excellent and meaningful way to learn, I still hate failing. Hate it.

I mean, come on, who likes failing? We like to win. We like to do well. We want praise and accolades and admiration, not a side-long glance that screams "do better next time" or being dismissed or worse, pitied.  Failing sucks, the consequences of failing suck, and all the "we learn the most from our mistakes" reassurances in the world don't really soothe the sting of failure. 

At the same time, we know on some level that it's true. We DO learn a lot when we fail. It makes us reflect, take stock. It makes us really look at and question our own behaviors. It makes us re-evaluate our decisions. Failure is without a doubt a teachable moment. 

I'm not talking about passive failure here. It doesn't count if you didn't actually try or if you quit. Failure without effort only teaches you that if you don't try, you can't succeed. Quitting is a completely different dynamic than failing and influenced by a number of things...quitting is a teachable moment on it's own and should supercede the associated failure. 

I'm talking about good old-fashioned "I gave it my all and it still wasn't good enough" failure. I've had a few of these in my life, as most of us have. Some of these failures taught me things about myself, some have taught me things about others, some about human nature. Some of the lessons were tough ones. 

I'm in the reflection phase of a big failure right now. This time it wasn't a personal failure; this was a process failure, a failure of a system...specifically, the legal system. 

I firmly believe you have to do what's right, even when you know you're up against the odds, even with high cost and high risk. When you know you're doing what's right, it makes the decision to try easy even if the task isn't easy. Sometimes you just have to tell the truth, even when no one believes you and even when it doesn't make things better. Sometimes you just have to jump in, try, and do your best.

This summer, my family made a decision to trust the legal system and confront a terrible situation. We knew what we were doing was right. We knew we'd have to listen to lies and that ultimately, someone who doesn't know us or anything about the situation would make a judgment. We lost. And it sucked. I want to wallow. I want to fight back. I want to scream at the universe and shake my fist in anger. I don't understand how liars win. I've spent so much time thinking about what we could have done differently. The truth is, we did our best. 

So what am I learning from this failure? I've dealt with liars and manipulators before, so charming and convincing that they were able to maintain their lies for years, hurting everyone around them. I've believed lies with all of my heart. Each time I finally realized the truth in those situations, I'd swear that I'd never be duped again. But never is a mighty long time and one thing I know I don't want to learn is to become so cynical and distrusting that I close myself off to hope, love and wonder. 

I'm seeing a similar situation here in Santa Barbara county. My dear friend Becca Claassen is fighting to make fracking illegal and she is up against the oil companies who have more money, more resources and some really charming lawyers. She's fighting against their lies; she's fight for what's right. She's fought hard and got Measure P on the ballot for November to let the voters choose. I'm so proud of her. It's hard to face the opposition every day, especially ones who have the advantage. It's hard going into a situation knowing that the odds are against you. It's hard to try when failure is likely. Even though we want to believe the David vs Goliath stories, the reason why that story is so compelling is that it's rare. 

The hard truth, the one I haven't wanted to accept, is that there are people out there who lie. Worse, a lot of those liars are so convincing that other people believe them. And truly horrifying is that people will lie to their own advantage, even when it hurts everyone around them and the people they love most. This doesn't mean that we shouldn't tell the truth. This doesn't mean that we shouldn't try, shouldn't stand up for ourselves, shouldn't do what we know is right. Even if David had been defeated, he was still better than Goliath. 

Sometimes it's not even about telling the truth or triumphing over lies. Last May, my then 6th grader Jackson participated in the Santa Barbara Math Super Bowl. Saying this kid loves math is an understatement, and it was his last year of being able to participate. The previous year, he had went with his team but didn't receive any awards. This year he was confident and excited; he had been practicing extensively for the entire year in preparation. During the awards ceremony, as they listed the 6th-1st place winners first in 4th grade, then 5th grade, and finally the 6th graders, my anxiety was growing. What if he didn't get an award? How would he feel about the effort he had put in? What would the lesson be if he had done his best and it wasn't good enough? As the names were read, I could feel his anxiety too. I'm proud to say our nervousness was for nothing; he ended up winning with a perfect score, the last name read. But it could have gone the other way, and what if it had? He would have been crushed and defeated and sad and angry. I'm sure he would have looked back on his efforts all year and questioned if he should have tried at all if the end result wasn't a victory medal around his neck. Some of his teammates, and surely most of the kids in that conference hall, had to face that reflection. I hope they learned from their efforts, not just from the end result. 

When I started Tandem Learning in 2008, the odds were against me succeeding. I knew it, but I felt like we could be successful and more importantly that I had to try. There were ups and downs and successes and failures, and ultimately with our acquisition 4 years later, I closed that chapter thankful for the journey. And I got a tattoo, a modified quote from Teddy Roosevelt: 

if she fails, at least she fails while daring greatly

We have to try. We have to risk failure. We have to know, on some deep level, that life is a marathon, not a sprint. We have to know that we can lose a battle and still win the war. We have to learn that sometimes, it's the trying, not the failure or success, that defines a person. It is in the trying and risking that we learn, not just in the success or failure. It's in the trying that we learn who we are.

How much do you know about immersive learning? Take the quiz!

I just presented a session on immersive learning at TechKnowledge in Las Vegas last week, and created this quiz as a companion piece.

How much do YOU know about immersive learning?

Note: I'm beta-testing a new quiz tool, so if you notice any bugs, drop me a note! I already notice that sometimes my feedback on each question isn't showing up... :)

Can't wait to see the results! If you like the quiz, buy the book!

Top # of reasons you should buy my new book, Immersive Learning

It's official! The book is out!

(Ok, technically you could have already pre-ordered it, but today was the official announcement from my publisher, ASTD)

Having stole my own thunder yesterday, I'd like to celebrate the official release by listing the top # of reasons to buy Immersive Learning. I don't know how many reasons I'll come up with, and I titled this blog first, so the exact number of top reasons is a mystery even to me until this post is published. Actually, I'm not even going to count :)

Here we go! Reasons to buy Immersive Learning:

• You believe that learning is better when it's not passive. 
• You've ever said "Practice makes perfect," or quoted that "How do you get to Carnegie Hall?" quote. 
• You think performance objectives are more meaningful than learning objectives.
• You've ever created an avatar. 
• You think there must be a better way to assess learning than multiple choice questions. 
• You have a smartphone. 
• You've ever played house, army, or, if you were like me, "store."
• You prefer green apples.
• You're related to me. 
• You've played one of my ARGs.  
• You want to know what an ARG is. 
• You know who the Underpants Gnomes are. 
• You work in corporate learning and want to learn a new design skill to add to your designer toolbox. 
• You work in higher education and want to engage your students in meaningful practice.
• You work as a K12 teacher and you're looking for ways to transition your classroom to Common Core.
• You want to flip your classroom or training and want to create amazing application activities with  all that time you used to spend lecturing. 
• You have a favorite character from a movie or tv show that you quote. 
• You made a resolution with me and my book can help. 
• I used you as an example in it.
• I used someone you know as an example in it. 
• You are looking for a book to give a great Amazon review. 
• You haven't spent all of your holiday money on Candy Crush yet. 
• You believe knowing something and doing it are two totally different things.
• You heard me speak at a conference and I made some sense.
• You want to design meaningful and effective learning experiences.  

I'm sure there are more! If you think of any, please add them in the comments. And thank you, THANK YOU, for all of your support!

Book release eve! Immersive Learning has left the building

Well, it's finally here. My book release.

It's been 2 1/2 years and tomorrow, ASTD Publishing will officially announce the release of my first book, Immersive Learning. While I haven't seen the actual physical copy of the book yet, I hear that it is currently on it's way. Last week, in a book marketing call, I had this surreal moment of "OMG MY BOOK IS DONE." Which is true, and has been true for awhile, but there is something pretty amazing about knowing that all of the work that went into it is now, finally, realized in an actual book that you can buy on Amazon.

My kids also think that is pretty cool.

You're going to hear a lot about my book and about immersive learning this year. I'll be speaking and blogging and organizing book clubs and collecting case studies and in general, happily talking about how to design for practice. I am thrilled to have an actual artifact that encapsulates my research, experience and design practices. I'm excited to share it with you, to talk and discuss and debate and to learn.

I thought I would be terrified, putting something so personal out there for the world to critique. But as we're on the cusp of the book launch, all I feel is joy.

So, pick up a copy of my book if you're so inclined and join in the conversation this year about immersive learning. You can even get a free chapter to see what it's all about. Or just make a training resolution with me and commit to making this year a better year for design and learning (or both).

Happy 2014 everyone and thanks for your support!

Sincerely,
Koreen Pagano, Author :) 

The happy revolutionary

I read an article yesterday on the 21 Habits of Supremely Happy People. It's a good list (and it wasn't a top 10 list, so that made me less suspicious). I've been thinking a lot about happiness lately, because I'm pretty ridiculously happy. It's taken me a long time to get here and there were a lot of missteps and big ol' mistakes that I made along the way. But here I am! Happy! And yet...

There's a big part of my personality that has always been perpetually dissatisfied. These are the parts that want to make the world better. These are the parts that want to call out injustice, the parts that get angry at the liars, the cheaters, the bullies, the mysogynists. These are the parts that want to take on new challenges. These are the parts that want to write books and start new ventures and fight against a broken status quo. The dissatisfied parts of myself are the parts that have pushed me to do the things of which I'm most proud.

Should we want to be supremely happy? Can we reconcile the complacency and contentment that comes with happiness with a desire to change the world? Can we be revolutionaries and still be happy?

I'm struggling with this. There are some days that contentment wins, and I embrace this wonderful time in my life with gratitude and appreciation. And then...the inevitable guilt: I'm not doing enough. I should be doing more. Am I wasting my life?

There are some days that the revolutionary wins. I write, I plot, I rally the troops. I get shit done. But I long to just be in the moment, to stop and read or listen to the waves or watch old Farscape episodes and just be happy.

I don't know that there's an answer, or that I'm asking a question. I do know that just being "supremely happy" or only focusing on changing the world would both leave me unsatisfied. So the eternal struggle for me is being a happy revolutionary: embracing happiness without being a sheep, changing the world without letting it jade me. 

Acknowledgments

I've just written the acknowledgments page for my (coming soon!) book and it made me pause. There are SO MANY people I'd like to thank in my life...people who have given me parts of themselves, people that taught me things about myself, and those whose failures showed me how to avoid making the same mistakes they have (no worries, I've made PLENTY of my own).

I look forward to the book being published, and for those I've thanked to know that they contributed to this milestone for me, whether they knew it or not.

It's made me think about gratitude, and how often we thank people without them really knowing what they have meant to us or brought to our lives. How, while my acknowledgments are heartfelt, they are just a glimpse into how I feel about the people who have supported me, a little hat tip to a much deeper emotion of gratitude that I carry in my heart.

We probably can't ever truly express, or make someone understand, what they mean to us or how they've impacted our lives. That shouldn't mean that we don't try, though. Maybe because it's 9/11 and this sad anniversary is a reminder that life is short and fleeting. Maybe because you get a twinge of guilt when you think about how long it's been since you've talked to your mom, or dad, or sister, or best friend. Maybe it's for no reason at all, except you are thinking of someone in your life with gratitude. Tell someone today what they mean to you, even if they'll never truly understand the place they hold in your heart. 

Flip Your Training presentation at ASTD ICE 2013 #astd2013

Yesterday I presented at ASTD ICE on how to flip your training and design for practice in the classroom. It was a full house and I had so much fun presenting! For once, I took a picture from the stage...it might be too small, but if you look closely, you'll see people in the audience with their hands raised, indicating if there was an empty seat next to them. This pic was taken right before I got started, and I was amazed at the cooperation in the audience to make sure everyone who wanted to attend could find a seat. I found out later that they put up the "Full Capacity" sign after everyone in the audience actually made sure it was really full capacity...not an empty seat in the house. That's teamwork, people. It seriously warmed my heart. I truly had the best audience at the conference.

Here are my slides, although the good stuff was in the presentation/conversation/discussion. Very excited to talk more on this topic; it's a great tie in to what I do at lynda.com and to my upcoming book, Immersive Learning. 

Flip Your Training from Koreen Olbrish

Thanks to all that attended and tweeted and waited to talk to me afterwards. Thanks especially to the gentleman who reminded me afterwards about the different rescue strategies for choking versus cardiac arrest (see? this is the guy I want in the room if I ever need rescuing!). 

I'll post more on this topic soon, as well as my reflections on ICE. Please drop me a note if you'd like more info on my presentation.

For those of you who requested: I realized I included my analysis interview questions in my book! In an effort not to cannibalize my own writing, I'll check to see if it's kosher to share it here or if it's a book "exclusive." Thanks for your interest, and patience! (this author thing is all new to me...)

The Shamification of Gamification

I'm late in getting out my post for the blog tour for Karl Kapp's new book, The Gamification of Learning and Instruction, and he kindly did not call me out on that last week...life has a way of messing with your timing sometimes. In preparation for this post, I've been reading what everyone else on the tour has been writing and trying to think of what I felt most passionately about writing. I was most interested in reading what Kathy Sierra and Clark Quinn have written, as I know where they both stand on the term "gamification," because honestly I haven't been a big fan myself.

When Karl asked me to contribute a chapter to the book and he told me the title, I'll admit I was conflicted and I told him. After all, my favorite article on gamification, written by Ian Bogost, was titled Gamification is Bullshit. Karl explained his desire to "take back the word" from the marketers and use it to our advantage. Just like my policy with my kids on using curse words, I had to remind myself that there are no inherently bad words, just words that can be used to hurt people. Somewhere along the line, gamification has become (in some circles) a four-letter word. And I'll tell you why: bad design.

It should be no surprise...any time a buzz word emerges, the bad design deluge follows. E-learning? yes. Mobile learning? yes. Virtual learning? yes.

And now, gamification. Sadly, again, yes.

Game design is not actually easy. Good game design is difficult, great game design is rare. To think that you can slap a reward mechanism on any system or pattern of behavior and suddenly its a game is naive.  To think that you can give people badges to reinforce behavior and that will translate into long-term learning and behavior change, or overall performance improvement? Really? It's not how humans learn, and its certainly not how we change.

The discussion of extrinsic motivators actually harming intrinsic motivation is critical here...we know, ultimately, people do what they want, not what they are "supposed" to do. Intrinsic motivation drives behavior long-term. Game design that can apply extrinsic motivation until intrinsic motivation is developed is what the goal of gamification SHOULD be; the reality is that badly designed gamification can actually cause learners to stop performing the desired behaviors once the rewards of the game are removed...the exact opposite of what we want to achieve.

This is why the casual use of gamification is so dangerous: the downside of bad design isn't benign or a simple waste of money. The downside of bad design is causing people to NOT do the things that will help improve their performance and achieve organizational goals. Just like medical school students are taught, the goal of gamification should be "First do no harm." The stakes are higher for bad design for the gamification of learning than for bad mobile learning or bad e-learning, and so, I'm taking my responsibility in talking about game design for learning all that much more seriously.

My chapter in Karl's book is on alternate reality games (ARGs) for learning. ARGs are an interesting blend of RPG design and gamification of "life"...they mix storyline with real-life tasks that you must complete to succeed in the game. For corporate learning, that looks like the recreation of the learners' work environment through the storyline, with the rewards/scoring mirroring how they would be evaluated and rewarded for performing successfully in their jobs. Creating an immersive learning environment that allows learners to practice in authentic contexts and rewards successful performance...is that gamification? Yes. Do I think a well-designed ARG is an example of a positive use of gamification for learning? Again, yes. And therein lies the rub.

I can't throw out the baby with the bath water. Yes, much current gamification is poorly designed and potentially harmful to accomplishing the goals its supposed to address, but there is potential for good design and learning and performance improvement when the design gets it right. We shouldn't be shaming people for embracing the concept of gamification; we should be educating people on what good game and gamification design looks like so that they can spot the bad design. As a designer of games for learning, I've worked hard to get to a place where I can talk to organizations openly about the potential of games for learning and performance improvement. It was inevitable, once that door was opened, that the snake oil salesmen would start clouding the market...and so they have.

Let's focus on the challenge of educating the market, not vilifying a word. After all, it is kinda catchy...and aren't games supposed to be challenging in order to be fun?

Defining learning experience design

I'm finishing up my book, Immersive Learning, and its by far one of the most difficult things I've ever done. Not just because writing a book is hard (it is) but because its been the perfect storm of personal and professional chaos, transition and shifting of responsibilities in my adult life, and all the while I'm trying to balance these things with writing a book...its been a challenge.

Today I got wrapped up in a conversation with some of my professional peers about experience design. I thought, hey! this is what I'm writing about! Except, it really wasn't.

The problem is that the word "experience" is used a lot lately to refer to lots of different things. When I talk about experience design, I'm talking about designing FOR experience, to provide opportunities for learners to apply their knowledge, fail, try again, see the outcomes of bad decisions, and try again, and again, and again. When I talk about experience design, I'm talking about designing for authentic practice, designing for failure. I'm referring to designing to help learners get more experience.

Where this gets tricky is that many people use experience to talk about what its like to go through training. Think of it as the roadmap, or the designer as an event planner. Think about creating a seamless experience for your audience, in our case, your learners. In this case, the hard work is shouldered by the designer to anticipate what would facilitate a better "experience" for the learner. This is commonly called User Experience Design, or UX Design, and believe me, its important, vital, to the success of learning engagement and usability of, well, anything we engage with digitally (and analog as well, but let's stick to e-learning for now).

I'm not valuing one over the other, but there is an important difference between designing a seamless experience for a learner and designing to create opportunities for learners to gain experience doing something. Its why I typically refer to what I do as immersive learning, not experience design (even though I AM designing learning experiences). It might be semantics, but these delineations are critical to talking about the different motivations and intended outcomes of how we engage in the design process.

Think about what YOU mean when you talk about experience design. Are you talking about the usability and engagement path for the learner, or are you talking about creating opportunities for practice and failure to guide learners towards performance improvement and behavior change (ie, immersive learning)? Let's define these goals and design practices clearly so that we can speak the same language even in our own field; if learning professionals can't articulate the differences amongst ourselves, what hope do we have of describing our skills, "experience" ;) and design expertise to the rest of the world?

ARG Design: My session today at the Distance Teaching & Learning conference

I'm in BEAUTIFUL Madison, Wisconsin and getting ready to present this afternoon on alternate reality game (ARG) design. I'm particularly excited about today's half-day session because most of the participants are currently working in colleges and universities, and the prospect of incorporating gaming into academic curriculum is fantastic. Having spent the last two days onsite with a corporate client reviewing the design of an ARG to train their employees on the new functionality of their soon to be released ecommerce site, I'm coming into today with recent, relevant feedback and questions on how ARGs can support education and training.

While I don't think I'll be able to transfer everything I know today in the 3-hour time slot, I'm hoping to hit on some of the basics of learning game design: the issue to be addressed (learning or performance goal), storyline, character development, scoring, and user experience.

I'll be covering these topics in the course I'm teaching this fall at Harrisburg University in much more detail (and if you're interested in registering, its a mixed live/virtual class so come join us!). As I've been developing the curriculum for that course and for writing the immersive learning design book, I've been wondering...what would do learning professionals WANT to know about these topics? If you were taking a class, or reading a book, what would you want to walk away knowing and being able to do? Looking forward to hearing your thoughts...

Coming in 2012: Immersive Learning Design (my first book!)

It's official!

As I type this, my book contract with ASTD is in the post and I'm mentally preparing for the next few months of writing my first book to be published next year: Immersive Learning Design.

I've been blogging since starting Tandem Learning, I've written articles about the many shades of immersive learning (games, simulations, virtual worlds), and I've presented at more conferences than I could easily count. But a book is a different level of reflection for me and I am thrilled to have the opportunity to take on the challenge of documenting what I actually *do.*

The goal of the book is three-fold:

• define immersive learning as a category of design that incorporates elements of games, simulations, virtual worlds and other immersive technologies, 
• describe the design process for immersive learning experiences and differentiate immersive design from traditional instructional design, and
• detail examples of how organizations have been applying immersive learning design to address business issues and corporate learning needs.

I'm sure as I get deeper into the weeds of writing, I'll be posting more about the book, asking questions of others who specialize in immersive learning design, and recruiting organizations who are willing to share their stories of immersive learning design implementations. In the meantime, I'm gonna start limbering up my typing fingers!

My Bloomfire interview: What book has inspired you?

I was so flattered to be approached for an interview by the brilliantly innovative guys at Bloomfire for an interview on their blog. The key question Nemo Chu posed to me was "what book has inspired the way I approach corporate training?"

You can see my full interview here.

It's a great question, and I'd love to hear what books have inspired you or changed the way you look at training, learning, design...

Why you should be Learning in 3D - Blog Tour Stop

It doesn't seem all that long ago that I got a call from Dr. Karl Kapp asking me if I'd mind being interviewed for his and Dr. Tony O'Driscoll's new book on virtual worlds for learning. When he told me that he wanted to talk to me about the future of virtual worlds, I have to admit, I was both excited and skeptical. Excited to be asked to talk about my grand visions of the potential of this technology I had been immersed in for the last few years, that I've tried to understand from the inside out. Skeptical that the enormity of the change that I envision, that what I really see as the future of virtual worlds, would reach far beyond what would be captured in this book. I had a real fear that after talking to me, Karl might just decide that my fanatical rantings were a bit of a bridge too far for what they wanted to achieve in writing what I knew would be the theoretical foundational text for virtual worlds for learning.

A few months later, I received the chapters I was quoted in for review. I was truly just scared to look. Again, I was caught in the delicate balance of hoping I didn't sound crazy and hoping that the book was portraying the future big enough. After doing the vanity scan, I got brave and read the preview chapters, Chapter 8: Steps to Successful Enterprise Adoption, and Chapter 10: Back to the Future.

There was good news on two fronts. I didn't sound crazy. I sounded like I was in good company.

What Karl and Tony have provided with Learning in 3D is the foundation for how learning in immersive environments happens, how different these learning environments and experiences are from other environments, and what that means to organizational learning--and structure. When people ask me where they should get started to learn about virtual worlds, I've never had a great answer...links to a variety of vendor sites, to blogs and to some of the people I follow on Twitter. Now I have an answer. This book is the first step.

What you might be surprised to learn is that one of my favorite sections of the book is actually Chapter 7: Overcoming Being Addled by ADDIE (#lrnchat rule: DRINK!). From my perspective, and granted its a biased one, one of the major barriers to successful immersive learning implementations is the lack of instructional designers who can effectively design appropriate content for these new environments. Kudos to Karl and Tony for not only acknowledging this, but beginning to tie together the granddaddy of instructional design process models with the skills and perspective of design needed for these new learning environments.

I'm honored and thrilled to have in some small way contributed to this book because, yes, they painted the big picture. They provided the rationale and issued the imperative. Learning in 3D provides the necessary background to understand not only why immersive learning environments are important, but the risk of not including them as part of your corporate learning strategy. The future is immersive, the future is contextualized, the future is empowered and engaged regardless of your physical location. The future of learning (at least part of it) is in 3D.

Buy your copy today and use the code L3D1 for a 20% discount.
Then check out the wiki or the Facebook fan page.

The book versus the blog

So I've been working on a book, for well over a year now, and its finally almost done. Recently, getting this book done has consumed most of my free time (ha!) and energy, and while I'm not making excuses, it IS a reason why this blog has been riding along in the backseat while the book was constantly calling "shotgun!" But the book is getting closer and closer to done, and I'm missing my heavy blogging days. I'm missing reflecting on conferences and projects and decision-making and instructional design and virtual worlds and gender issues and games and how scary having started this company is sometimes.

Me & my co-author/partner in crime will be wrapping this book up in the next few weeks if it kills us. I'm excited and proud and scared about putting this book out there too. But it'll be a book! A big long reflection! The mother of all blog posts! More details to come...and more blog posts too.

Three cool things you need to check out

Cool thing #1: If you've been following my conference commentary over the last year, its probably no surprise that I have some pretty clear ideas of what has made a conference good and what has made conferences not so valuable. Finally, someone is ASKING for these opinions! Check out Jay Cross's blog, answer his quick survey and give your opinion too. Love the title, PowerPoint is Tyranny. 

Cool thing #2: Nick Wilson released his free eBook, Virtual Worlds for Business, on the Clever Zebra website. Go get it and read it. I don't agree with all of his assessments, especially on the learning opportunities of different virtual world platforms. But I am SO happy to see this information being compiled and distributed. And case studies!!! Thanks Nick--looking forward to details on the upcoming conference!

Cool thing #3: Just saw Jane Bozarth's latest blog on what ID/trainer tools people DIDN'T mention they use in their daily practice...namely, ROI tools. I'm not surprised. Not just because I just blogged about this, but because I'd be willing to guess that Jane didn't get a whole lot on how people are conducting needs analyses either. Until we start bridging this gap of best practice versus actual practice, we're failing to lead our profession.

Girls and games

Why are all the serious games I've seen so male-oriented? War games, first-person shooters, disaster recovery, heck, even the sexual harassment serious games I've seen have some pretty clear overtones of male fantasy played out in the scenarios.

For better or for worse, the serious games industry suffers the same issues as the gaming industry in general. The games are typically built by young guys, and therefore the play experience is most appropriate for young guys. What about the 51% of the population that's not male?  This continues to be one of the biggest barriers to adoption that face serious games' integration into learning curriculum.

So what's different about the ladies?

Speaking in broad generalities, women interact with new environments, specifically games, much differently than men. They like to be shown what to do, and be able to practice without negative consequence or risk of failing. Men would rather just jump in and try things, more willing to learn from their mistakes. Most video games 

are set up with guys in mind: jump in, try things out, and when you've used up your "lives," you start over again.  For women, this causes anxiety and irritation, and accounts for the high attrition rates of women playing most video games. At GDC in Austin last year, I attended a session by Sheri Graner Ray who has also published this book on gender-inclusive game design. I would highly recommend anyone involved in designing games check it out.

For games designed for entertainment purposes, shame on them for not addressing known gender issues with game engagement. That's not to say that some progress hasn't been made. Nintendo has made great strides with Wii in designing gaming experiences that are pretty gender neutral, and incorporate many of the design strategies that attract girls to games. If you have any question, check out this somewhat disturbing video of kids overwhelmed with excitement getting a Wii for Christmas. Notice that just as many girls are excited as boys. While I think the video is a bit over the top and definitely biased, still, I was happy to see the reaction seemed to be "gender neutral."

For serious games designed for organizational learning, lack of acknowledgement of these gender differences and the absence of design that meets the needs of both types of engagement is an irresponsible waste of money. As more and more companies and organizations look to games to enhance learning experiences, it is critical that gender differences are addressed, or else risk the marginalization of women in your organization.

To do in '09

I don't make resolutions, but I do make lists. Resolve is finicky, but when I've got something to do on my list, there's much better chance that thing is getting done. 

Here's my business to do list for 2009, based on my learnings from 2008. 

• Get contracts in place and finalized for any outstanding agreements, and don't start any new ventures without a contract in place from the beginning (I'm sure the sharkweasel will love this one...)
• Review company financials and make adjustments on a weekly basis
• Publish my book 
• Speak/present at three or more events
• Keep up with this blog and put some energy and thought into my new company blog
• Meet 3 of my Twitter friends that I've never met in person
• Explore 3 new social media tools and determine their usefulness for learning
• Get 3 new clients 
• Realize quarter over quarter growth
• Resume the Rockstar meetings
• Establish individual performance goals for each of the Rockstars
• Hit our sales goals
• Write another book
• Hold a conference 

Not a long list, right? Just a few little things to do this year. 365 days to check 14 things off my list. Let's get this party started.