Is augmented reality the new QR code?

A few weeks ago, I saw this title to an article "Augmented reality is the new QR code" and before I even read the article I had a sinking feeling in my stomach. Although the article is more of a feel-good piece about how augmented reality is usurping QR codes, let's be honest...how many QR codes were actively being used that are now being made obsolete?

I realize that I'm running the risk of ruining my "crazy emerging tech for learning girl" reputation, but I've been here before and I've learned some lessons. When a new technology starts looking for a problem to solve, it better solve that problem elegantly and quickly or the technology faces a pretty uncertain destiny.

Yes, I'm talking about you, virtual worlds...

I love innovation and I love experimenting with the potential of new technologies. I have been known on more than one occasion to quote the catchy adage that Henry Ford probably never said: "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." I'm not about to rally against innovation. What I have a problem with is people making up issues to solve just because a new technology is on the scene.

I encountered this often when I was working in pharmaceutical sales training. You may (or may not?) be surprised at how often new medical conditions were marketed because a pharmaceutical company created a molecule that could treat it. Restless leg syndrome? Social anxiety disorder? While these conditions are certainly extreme enough to warrant treatment in some patients, I often questioned the threshold at which pharmaceutical intervention is warranted. No drug has zero side effects and any time we take medication, we are making the choice that the impact of the treatment outweighs the cost to our bodies. 

The same is true, albeit typically with less life and death impact, with new technologies introduced for learning. The issue with virtual worlds, to over simplify and grossly generalize, was that they were a new social communication tool that could address issues that no other technology could address as well, but the cost and learning curve were too steep to make virtual worlds a good investment of time and resources. Virtual worlds never tipped the cost: benefit ratio in their favor. 

Neither did QR codes. 

And now, although I am encouraged when I see augmented reality examples like IKEA that make total sense, I wonder if augmented reality will suffer the same fate. Is there enough of a need for us to augment reality, once the novelty wears off? Do we need reality to be more real and richly informed? How will our brains adapt to processing a new layer of sensory data over our already sensory-overloaded experiences in the "real" world? 

Innovation works when a need is filled in a new and intuitive way. We want things faster, easier and better. We want things that are social. We want things that only require incremental changes to our existing habits. We want things that help us achieve our goals or satisfy our basic human needs. We want things that help us solve our problems. 

If a new technology doesn't do these things, it won't achieve mainstream adoption. So come on, augmented reality...you're definitely "oooh! shiny!"...now show me what else you've got. 

So that's what she's been up to...new job! new house! new coast!

Life has a funny way of working out sometimes, and you just never know what's around the corner.

I've been quiet on the blogging front, and in social media in general, because there's just been too much life going on. Really, seriously...a lot. 

Movin' on up

First, I've taken a position at lynda.com as Senior Product Manager for lyndaCampus. It's a big change for me, getting back inside an organization again, but I am thrilled about the opportunity to work for a company that gets it. Learning is (and should be) intrinsically motivated and lynda.com provides content to enable people to learn what they need, when they need it. I'll be focusing on the higher ed and K12 markets and exploring how educators can flip their classroom, how on-demand instruction can change the dynamic of educational institutions and helping lynda.com better serve the needs of educators and learners. 

Carpinteria mural

Second, I'm moving to California. To tell you the truth, if you would have asked me 6 months ago if I'd ever move to the west coast, I'd probably have laughed. A midwest girl at heart, I adopted Philly as mine and really never thought I'd leave the mid-Atlantic. From DC to Baltimore, NYC to Boston...I love me some east coast. But when I came out to visit lynda.com for the first time in Carpinteria, just south of Santa Barbara on the 101, I fell in love. In any direction I look, there are mountains or ocean. NO LIE. It's like 75 degrees and sunny every day, and I hear that's all year round. So yes...I've added "learn to surf" to my list of to-do's this year. 

There are lots of other details...moving my crazy awesome mixed family across the country with kids and dogs and buying a house and selling a house and everything...just everything. Well, its been a lot. 

What about games and immersive learning and all that good stuff? Well, the book is still coming (slower than expected, in no small part because of all of the above) and I'll still be blogging and late this year, I'm chairing a games conference with Karl Kapp and hosted by the good folks at ASTD. You'll see me at DevLearn, hosting the Emerging Technology stage. I'm finishing up teaching a graduate course at Harrisburg University this summer, and hoping to continue teaching long after. Other exciting news is sure to be on the horizon, so stay tuned. I'm not much for sitting still and new epic adventures keep on presenting themselves. 

About 5 blocks from my new house

That is, if I can drag myself away from the beach...

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?

Geek of the Week!

When I was young, I never considered myself a geek. Sure, I spent an entire summer playing PacMan on my Atari 2600 and had calluses on my palm from the Centipede rollerball control. Yes, I was reading Shakespeare and the Lord of the Rings trilogy while my friends were reading Teen Beat magazine. My favorite toy was my remote controlled Batmobile while my friends played with Barbies.

I knew I was different, I just didn't know there was a name for it: Geek.

When I was approached by Mary a few months ago about being Geek of the Week, I was both honored and nervous. Now that I'm older, I wear the title of geek like a badge of honor. The term "geek" isn't a negative one...it refers to my tribe, the people who "get" me, who know what I'll be doing on May 4th and who don't have to ask which is my favorite Star Wars movie. Geeks will happily debate which are the better genre of zombies but know there's no debating the best genre of vampires. Geeks can answer all of your tech questions (or know how to find the answers...lmgtfy). Geeks might be highly opinionated, but at the same time, we don't judge...because we get it. We're geeks.

If I had to identify the one overarching characteristic of being a geek, its passionate interest. Whether its science fiction, technology, comic books, robots, beer or bacon...geeks love to learn. We love to talk about what we know...in essence, we love to teach. We find joy in what we do...geeks are the smartest, happiest, most confident, and most passionate people I know.

Geeking out with the Ghostbusters in Old City

Philadelphia has embraced our geeks with pride and enthusiasm. From the Philadelphia Science Festival to Philly Tech Week, our amazing blogger community, our foodies, our artists, our sports fanatics and our film community, Philadelphia is a mecca for geeks. Just last week, having an impromptu prom night dinner in Old City, we ran into the Philadelphia Ghostbusters (I mean really? How great is THAT?). And this summer, I'm looking forward to the second annual Philly Geek Awards, a celebration of all things geek in our fine city.

So thank you Geekadelphia for making me Geek of the Week. It's an honor and a privilege to walk among you. 

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?

Competencies as achievements in the game of life

As another follow up to my participation at TechKnowledge this year, I tackled some big ol' buzz words today on the Ayogo blog: learning experiences, activity streams, and game mechanics. 

My brain works at intersections and these are three major concepts that seem to be moving towards a perhaps inevitable conclusion: technology already exists to build personalized curriculum, but the challenge is, can we DESIGN to support it? 

Looking forward to your thoughts...and more panel discussions with my co-conspirators, Aaron Silvers and Reuben Tozman. 

The magic of attention and focus

Last week I attended and spoke at ASTD's TechKnowledge in Las Vegas, sitting on two panels: gamification, and learning experience design and activity streams. (If you just read that and thought "I have no idea what she's talking about," you're not alone...I'll be blogging about those topics in more detail soon.)

Yes, Teller speaks

For once, though, I actually did something in Vegas that wasn't conference related: I went to see Penn & Teller. A group of us all coordinated before the conference to get a block of tickets in the VIP section, which put us in prime position to be part of the show. If you haven't ever seen Penn & Teller, they involve the audience in many of their acts and often pull people up on stage. We must have been primed for magic, because four of us were selected at various points to assist with the show.

And I got to go up on stage for one of the acts.

About halfway through the show, Penn came into the audience, looked at me and asked, "do you wear contacts?" Now, you don't get pulled on stage at any magic show and think that it's going to be uneventful, but particularly at a Penn & Teller show, you know they are going to mess with you. Add to that, as I'm walking up on stage, that Penn is explaining to the audience that the trick they are about to perform is going to happen IN MY MIND. And the entire audience is going to get to watch. Great.

I wish I had video of what the audience could see as I was on stage, but for obvious reasons, Penn & Teller don't allow video or photography. So I'll describe to you what was going on in my mind...where all the magic happened.

When I got on stage, Penn told me to stand on an X in the middle of the stage. The auditorium lights dimmed and a REALLY BRIGHT spotlight was pointed directly at me, which meant that I couldn't see the audience at all and created a very surreal sensation of being alone with Penn & Teller on stage. Even if I was afraid of being on stage in front of a large audience (obviously I'm not), this simple lighting adjustment took the audience completely out of my attention.

Penn started telling me, and the audience, what was going to happen. He spoke fast, and if you've heard Penn Jillette speak, you know he has a deep, booming voice. He said that he was going to give me a series of commands, and that he would be asking me to open and close my eyes. When I closed my eyes, he and Teller would be placing their fingers on my eyelids (the reason why me not wearing contacts was important) and that they would also be touching my arms, my shoulders, etc. Then Penn started giving me instructions, saying my name with every command.

Penn not only has a commanding voice,
but an impressive presence (and one cool nail)

"Koreen, I want you to hold out your hands and we're going to hold your wrists. Hold on to this ring with both hands like its a steering wheel. Close your eyes, Koreen (they put their fingers on my eyelids). Visualize the ring in your hands. Listen to my voice, Koreen. See the map in your mind of where I am based on my voice. Now, Koreen, take the ring and place it over my head (I did).

And on and on it went. Opening my eyes, closing my eyes. Holding the ring, visualizing the ring. Feeling them touching my arms and shoulders. Following their instructions. Penn holding my attention on his words by saying my name over and over. At some point, I knew that it was Teller that had his fingertips on both of my eyelids. It didn't matter; my brain was focused, trying to follow directions and not embarrass myself in front of the audience that I knew was there but I couldn't see. The main "trick" was that the ring would move from not feeling like it was around my arm to "magically" hanging from around my arm.

Yes, as I was standing there up on stage, it felt like magic. My mind couldn't comprehend, with the limited data set that I had (mostly tactile), how the ring went from being in my hands or on top of my arm, to being around my arm. I didn't have a severed limb and I didn't feel the ring go through, so...it was magic. I did "get" some of what they were doing that the audience could see but I couldn't. I knew that Teller was doing most of the touching and Penn was constantly keeping my auditory attention. Honestly, it was all I could do to keep up.

The best/worst part, and no one had this information but me, was at one point, Penn told me to do something with my left hand while my eyes were closed. I realize that for most people, this would be no big deal, but I have evidently grown up with the absolute inability to remember which is my right or left hand without making the 'L' with my forefinger and thumb. When Penn said the command, I literally had a moment of panic that I didn't know which hand was my left, that I was going to use the wrong hand and mess up the trick and embarrass myself on stage. Luckily, 50/50 odds are pretty decent for Vegas and I picked the correct left.

Then it was over, the rings magically around my arms, not, then again. As I walked off the stage and back to my seat, my mind was reeling with every moment of the experience: what did I see, hear, feel...what did I know? I knew the audience had seen the "trick," but it didn't matter...all the magic HAD happened in my mind.

I have no idea where I originally heard the phrase "perception shapes reality" but its what I kept coming back to as I deconstructed my 5 minutes as a magic act assistant. For me, despite what was really happening on stage, my mind was processing the experience from the data that was available to me. My perception was that the rings suddenly appearing around my arms was magic. I had no other explanation and my mind couldn't piece together other alternatives in the time that I was on stage. From the perception of the audience, however, I had just been fooled into thinking it was magic. It was clear to me that there was a lot more going on than I knew about and the rings around my arms weren't there by magic; it was only through the strategic filtering of information to me did that become my perception.

Someone asked me after the show if I knew what was going on. Did I know that they were limiting information to me to make me believe something that wasn't true? Yes. Did I know at certain instances that Teller was touching me to distract me and Penn kept saying my name and giving me instructions to keep me focused on the things he wanted to focus my attention on so that I wouldn't pay attention to other things? Yes. Did I know that I was the only one in the room that didn't know the truth? Yes.

So why didn't I say anything? Why didn't I question? Why didn't I call them out?

I didn't want to ruin the trick, for me or for the audience. I wanted to feel the magic, even though I knew it wasn't real. I wanted that sensation of experiencing the wondrous, the unbelievable. I was motivated to play along because I knew that I would learn more through my suspension of disbelief. I was curious to see what happened if I played along.

So what has this taught me about immersive learning?

• Be honest with your audience, even when you're going to mess with their beliefs. If they know what they are getting into, they are more likely to trust the process. 
• Yes, people's perception shapes their reality. I got a crash course in how limiting your data skews your ability to come to the best, most logical, conclusion. 
• You learn more from the process than the outcome. Even when I found out later there were two rings, it didn't matter. The experience taught me about myself and was more important, ultimately, than the mechanics of the trick.
• Our brains are magical, but they have their limitations. We're just not built to handle multiple stimuli at the same time and so we start practicing selective attention. As learning designers, we sometimes use terms like "cognitive overhead" or "seductive augmentation." These are fancy ways of saying, stop distracting people from the important stuff with attention-sucking stuff that isn't important. Our attention is valuable, design to keep it focused where it should be. 
• Sometimes people WANT to believe the lie. Yep, I knew they were tricking me. It didn't matter. I wanted to be tricked. 

I had seen Penn & Teller before, when I was in college. Twenty years later, they are still amazing. After the show, they hang out in the lobby, signing autographs and posing for pictures. Teller paid me an amazing compliment (yes, he speaks!) and Penn greeted me by name. It seems that attention thing works both ways.