I’ve been actively thinking about all of the excitement I’ve been hearing recently about mobile applications for learning. I think it’s important to note that accessing performance support and learning are not the same thing.
Don’t get me wrong… I think the ways that we can provide performance support in the internet age are phenomenal. No more memorizing facts just in case you might need them. No more practicing an infrequently-needed process so it will be engraved in your brain if you had to use it. No more having to commit to long courses of study just to have enough information to hold a conversation or make basic choices in life. We don’t even need to remember phone numbers any more! Mobile apps that provide performance support are way cool, and critical to our success in an ever-changing world.
As Karl Kapp said in Gadgets, Games, and Gizmos for Learning: “Don’t educate; automate.” If we can outsource learning to performance support, let’s do it!
But most employees can’t live by performance support alone. Most of them need learning, too, and that’s different. That requires some thought and practice.
I’m not saying we don’t learn from performance support. If you follow your GPS system’s directions to Grandmom’s house a few times (spaced close enough together), you’ll probably learn the way. If you look up information in order to answer a customer question often enough, the answers will become part of your knowledge base for the future. But performance support tools aren’t designed to help you learn – they’re designed to make it easy for you to get through a task or a situation without needing to learn.
So here’s a question I’m asking myself. As a learning expert, how do I contribute to the design of performance support systems?
I’m tempted to step aside and let the performance support experts take on that challenge, but many of the learners that I hope to support are using performance support tools for informal learning. I’m guessing that there are ways to make those tools useful in that capacity that are slightly different than the ways we make performance support tools useful strictly for performance support.
Another tack I could take is to focus on simply integrating the performance support tools into a broader learning environment that also provides deeper learning tools. In other words, I could position performance support tools as learning resources and “wrap” the learning around them.
Gloria Geay brought learning professionals into the world of performance support many years ago, and folks like Allison Rosset and Bob Mosher continue to call for us to contribute in this space. I’m thinking a little research on performance support practices will help me to be more effective in supporting the design of these applications (or help me decide to leave it to other experts) as well as give me a better understanding of how to integrate them with learning.
Or maybe it’s a lot easier than I think. Your thoughts?
You’ve raised some interesting points, Catherine. But I have to disagree with your premise that performance support tools are not designed to help you learn. They most certainly are.
ePSS or BPG (business process guidance) as it is now becoming known, came about because people find it difficult to learn a large amount of ’stuff’ in order to carry out a task or set of tasks. Basic neural chemistry tells us that the transfer of elements from short-term to long-term memory is complex and almost invariably requires repetition, preferably spaced repetition, and reinforcement. And supported repetition/practice is the best way to learn. In fact, it is arguably the principal way we learn.
So Gloria and others who have followed her defined a systematised approach to overcome the shortfalls in human memory and learning – Ebbinghaus had demonstrated those shortfalls back in 1885 – and the inevitable shortcomings that thus arise in the learning process. In most cases we simply can’t learn/remember enough fast enough. So we have ‘job aids’, whether they be a notebook, a manual, or some form of sophisticated digital performance support tool to help us.
As you mentioned, once we have completed several trips to our Grandmom’s house we will internalise, and the patterns will move into long-term memory and we will have ‘learned’. So performance support helps us get to the learned state faster in simple cases such as this. In other words performance support IS designed to help us learn.
In more complex cases, where we are unlikely to ever learn what we need to know, or shouldn’t be wasting out time trying to learn ’stuff’ – such as when the content/environment is changing rapidly, when we will need the information/knowledge only rarely, when the effort of learning is greater than the benefit of knowing – then performance support fills the gap and provides us with a very useful toolset.
Charles
Thank you for taking the time to make this thoughtful comment. I often get surprised by comments and go back to the post and think to myself – “that’s what I said, but it isn’t what I meant.” This is one of those times.
What I have been noticing quite a bit is the design of performance support tools that are not meant to scaffold learning, but are actually meant to eliminate the need for learning. This is a terrific thing! I no longer need to learn complicated formulas because my software (or app) does those calcualations for me.
As you point out, there are times when performance support is meant as a scaffold to learning. What I’m wondering aloud is whether those kinds of systems are built differently. Weird example – I don’t learn phone numbers any more because my cell phone holds them. That’s performance support that replaces learning. We would create a different system if we were scaffolding learning. Some performance support systems – like a GPS – could go either way. Because we’re actively engaged in making turns and watching the road, we can learn the directions to a frequented location if we want. But those one-time trips likely don’t enter our minds at all.
I’m just considering whether there are commmon characteristics to those performance support systems that scaffold – and what we might add to the learning environment to support people who genuinely wish to learn (be able to recall or do without support) from them. We have to design (as always) with the end in mind.
Thanks again for your thoughs. I enjoyed your whitepaper on experiential learning.
[…] More on learning and performance Is application of learning different than performance? Not by performance support alone On constructing reality Mmm… I guess I’ve been on this soap box more often than I […]