DevLearn DDX – Day 2: Sponge Mode

Have you ever noticed how a cleverly placed sponge can encourage the people in your household (who shall remain unnamed) to tidy up after themselves? This kind of little nudge … and the wealth of examples and stories shared today at the DevLearn DDX conference … is the theme for this post.

Arun Pradhan of Model Thinkers is one of the most creative and inspiring people in L&D these days, a self-described curious & empathetic geek. He kicked off Day 2 with Lessons from Behavioral Economics and a rigorous session engagement via menti.com. Nothing like examining our attribution errors first thing in the morning. I’ll just leave you all with this graph.

Arun covered a lot of territory in his session, but I’ll focus on the thinking heuristics that can impact how we design learning experiences. Heuristics are cognitive shortcuts that humans make when we’re moving fast:

• Loss aversion – We attribute more weight to losses than to possible gains.
• Endowment effect – We place more value on things we own vs. things we don’t own. (I also think of this as the IKEA effect where we imbue added value on things we make ourselves.)
• Sunk cost fallacy – We overweight the value of investments we’ve put into something in the past, vs. evaluating the future value based on the current situation.
• Hyperbolic discounting – We choose a small reward now over a distant larger one. Immediate positive feedback drives behavior better than distant consequences … even very large ones.
• Paradox of choice – Offering more options engages people, but it stifles commitment to any one choice.
• Confirmation bias – We tend to value information that supports our beliefs as more useful than data that doesn’t.
• Availability heuristic – We rely on information that’s top-of-mind (things that are most recent or sensationalistic) as opposed to digging and doing our research.  
• Anchoring heuristic – We over-rely on initial information received first, vs. subsequent information. 

So if we know that people use heuristics to think quickly, and that might cause mistakes … how do we help our learners make the right decisions? The EAST framework helps: make it Easy, Attractive, Social and Timely.  

I compiled a reading list of sources Arun mentioned in his session for your shopping pleasure: (no I am not an Amazon affiliate)

• Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman
• Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, Richard Thaler & Cass Sunstein
• Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell
• Don't Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, Steve Krug
• The Design of Everyday Things, Donald Norman
• The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, Atul Gawande

Sitting in on the rest of the conference

I was super pumped to sit in on a session by Bryan Wanzer and Izzy Lara demoing their xAPI Learning Cohort project that connect an Alexa Skill to an xAPI Learning Record Store (LRS). This is such a cool example of how YOU (yes you) can use Voiceflow and Alexa to build a practice simulation for your learners, and gather detailed data about their learning via xAPI. Of course, as they played the video demo, everyone’s Alexa woke up to try to participate! (and you, yes YOU, can sign up for the xAPI Cohort for 12 weeks of free online project-based learning about xAPI)

Mike Hruska & Dan McCoy shared a number of resources you can use to leverage design thinking in your learning strategy. Their resources will be downloadable in the DDX app so I strongly recommend you head on over there to get them.

After that, I sat in on a session that begs the question: why not use xAPI? Well, John Stoll & Fred Tacon weren’t allowed to. So instead they did the heavy lifting of recreating the launch & status tracking functions that an LMS handles for you and the data transfer and storage functions that xAPI handles all so they could create a learning experience embedded right where the learners were. John & Fred kicked us off with the existential challenge faced by LXDs everywhere:

Their specific solution is one that, as they said, you probably want to do with xAPI instead, but the things they learned along the way provided an excellent roadmap for everyone.

During Tonya Riney’s session on Storytelling with Data, she brought up some essential points for us all on ethics and data distortion. Did you know that water is the #1 cause of drowning? That 100% of people exposed to water will die? Unavoidable facts, people! Chew on that for a bit. As L&D professionals we have a responsibility to present data that’s not only accurate, but also responsibly presented. Changing chart types, axes, titling and highlights are all tools you can use to ensure that the story your data tells is responsible. Visual literacy is a critical skill in a data-driven environment.

Whenever you get a chance to sit in on a session with Anders Gronstedt, be sure to do so. His sessions are chock full of real-world VR examples. When the pandemic hit this spring, I was thrilled to have my Oculus for entertainment and to escape my 4 walls for a bit. But implementing a VR experience for work on shared equipment during a pandemic? Admittedly, that gave me some pause. Anders shared some techniques for that (face barriers, disinfecting processes, etc.) but also made the case for designing an effective VR solution in the first place. One of my favorite tips from Anders is that the onboarding to the VR experience, particularly when it’s someone’s first time, is essential for a successful learning experience.  

Hadiya Nuriddin’s storytelling keynote shared insights and invoked smiles the whole time. Stories don’t magically build empathy .. people don’t magically see themselves in the story … you need to write the story to do that. How do you make the story useful for learning? It starts with the art of a fantastic interview with your subject matter expert. Hadiya shared tips and techniques on getting the story – so many that I’m just going to recommend that you pick up her book StoryTraining: Selecting and Shaping Stories that Connect.

I then caught up with the incredible Matt Pierce’s on-demand session on Lessons for L&D from YouTube Creators. Matt is the genius behind TechSmith Academy and a longtime friend & colleague from Michigan (and someone who’s helped me with my luggage at the Las Vegas airport on the way in to DevLearn in years past). He has so much to share. YouTube is the standard our learners are used to, and we are definitely competing for attention and credibility with the pros that are out there. Highlights for L&D professions include:

1. Your phone is capable of shooting really great video. After that, invest in lights and audio.
2. Take photos specifically for your video thumbnails – trust me, this is soooooo much more flattering than a mid-mouth-open screengrab from a video in motion. (see screengrab captured from a video in motion below – it took me 14 tries to get that image!)
3. Just get out there and do it! Don’t put out sheer garbage, but striving for absolute perfection will limit you from getting started and getting something out there that you can test and learn from. (My little LLAMA? heart is happy for this.)
4. Focus on your learner – Matt said if you make your video for everyone, you’re making it for no one. We can make better, stronger connections by focusing on our learners and what they need – this is why I’m such a fan of learner personas as part of the scope definition for learning design project.
5. Do what you can to make a personal connection when you’re filming. Tips here included talking to a mirror, positioning a (masked up) friend on the other side of a (socially distant) camera … even a taped image of the learner persona on the camera right by the lens. In the screen grab below, Matt’s saying “Here I am in my basement in Michigan and I can make a personal connection through video.” And he sure did. Good to see you again, friend!    

And I wrapped up my DevLearn DDX day with an Afternoon Buzz session with the super knowledgeable and always patient (and sometimes super excited about xAPI) Jeff Batt as he helped newcomers to xAPI get their bearings. Thanks, Jeff! Good to “see” you again.

And now for something slightly different.

Wednesday Oct 21 is the first of 2 Expo days at the DevLearn DDX. The Expo is free with demo sessions all day and 1:1 “Meet Now” opportunities to talk with product & service vendors. The TorranceLearning “booth” in the Expo has a Meet Now option so you can chat with Matt Kliewer, Michelle Ucar & I about Agile for instructional design, xAPI, xapi.ly the xAPI Statement Builder for Storyline, our CREW curriculum (Cultivating Racial Equity in the Workplace) or a project you’d like some help with. 

Missing the conference morning coffee break?

Then get a head start on your day and check out IDIODC Wednesday morning where Deborah Thomas, Kevin Thorn & Karl Kapp will be talking up creativity and innovative problem solving.

Want more?

Want this update in your mailbox every day while the conference is on? Just email experience-at-torrancelearning.com and we’ll add you to the list.