The other learning technology: tracking

The term 'e-learning' got over the years mostly associated with page-turning courses delivered via a Learning Management System (LMS). Maybe that is why I personally like the term 'technology enhanced learning' (TED) better as it describes what it is about: using technology to improve learning in all its facets. My career took me deep into learning platforms and content creation and it is easy to reduce Technology Enhanced Learning to LMS systems and content production and delivery tools (yes, including games and mobile stuff). But I think it is time for the learning industry to embrace 'the other learning technology' that is on the horizon: tracking. Tracking hardware and software might still be in its infancy and might initially be directed towards more profitable targets than learning per sé (eg health), but boy does it have learning potential! In this (rather long) post I'll introduce the technology and my interpretation on its potential, and in the next posts I'll review some of the tracking devices I experimented with so far.

Previously achieved by the learning industry:
We have cracked learning administration
In the pioneering days of e-learning, we adopted technology to improve the administration of learning processes. I've blogged before how the learning MANAGEMENT system (LMS) was always more about managing the administrative processes than about hard cord learning. It helped. Nowadays we actually know how much we spend on training in our companies, we have learning history records for every employee, self-service enrollment systems, etc. The LMS market is a very mature one, with lots of acquisitions and other interesting developments this year alone. The trend of the past years continues: LMS systems cannot be an island but needs integration into the wider set of 'talent' systems and enterprise software.

We nailed the "learning from content" part
Most of the technology spending for learning went to 'learning from content'. We started by converting presentations to online presentations, made multimedia page-turners, e-books, podcasts, etc. We even created serious games. For all these formats of learning content there are authoring tools. And for all these formats of learning there are delivery mechanisms (mostly embedded in the LMS but also mobile). We recognized the informal content as well and the social software to produce and distribute that. For the most part that is still all about technology to 'learn from content'. I have nothing against learning from content. In fact I think it makes a lot of sense. But I do think we got carried away too far: there is only so much you learn from content anyway. (There, I said it.) Whether or not you are a fan of the 70/20/10 model, it does illustrate there is more than learning from content. In fact, in the leadership development world I'm now in, knowledge or learning from content is hardly the deal. Especially senior leaders can tell you in 15 minutes what they need to achieve and what their strengths and weaknesses are to work on. They know. They don't need much content.

Enter the Quantified Self movement
Learning from tracking is 'the other' learning technology, and to understand it we best start looking at the Quantified Self movement. The tag line of the Quantified Self movement is ‘self knowledge through numbers’. Have a look at their site: this happy bunch of people organise meetups all around the world to tell each other about what they track in their daily lives, and what they learned from it and how they changed behaviors as a result. I attended three of these meetups in Brussels so far and found it very fascinating. I started to experiment with a few of the popular self tracking tools myself. Some of the QS folks have an almost compulsory urge to measure everything about their life and to make sense of it and as one person described it ' I attend QS meetups so I can see I'm not the only one doing this and I'm not crazy'. :-)  Others join the movement for a a number of months because they want to focus on improving a certain aspect of their life, eg they want to sleep better.

The Quantified Self movement gathers people that make their own processes to make sense based on self-tracking and to change their behaviors accordingly. Now, that is learning! Too often learning folks are happy to 'stop in the middle': to give out a certificate of ability or check for understanding, and leaving it up to the individual to actually perform/behave based on those abilities. That is stopping half way and at least in corporate circles not good enough. The harsh corporate measurement of learning is that it only took place when something changed in the end. Otherwise it may as well never have happened. Period. QS has the advantage that it goes all the way.

Right now it is mostly about mood and health
The most mature, mass-market ready and affordable self-tracking devices are currently found in two areas: for tracking mood and for tracking health related data. The graph above is taken for example from the site moodpanda.com and shows the world's mood (why is there a spike in the weekend? :-) ). One of the best known health related devices is the FitBit device, a readily available mass market product. It tracks your steps and sleep and comes with a nice app to track your food/calorie intake. For tracking sleep quality many people use the Zeo device. I have them both and will post a review on them later. On the opening picture of this post you can see me with both devices. There are also Withings scales available that will upload your weight and fat percentage to a central site every day, or the Zephir heart rate tracker. For more than a year now the QS world is (im)patiently waiting for the mybasis watch to ship: whenever mybasis solves its patent issues and mass market readiness challenges, it will track hearth rate and a few other things too in what promises to be the most advanced yet affordable self tracking device at the moment. Nike and Adidas have shipped wearable tracking devices popular with joggers. There are sites and apps out there to help you track your food intake and loose weight, etc. The best of these devices combine their tracking with nice statistics, social elements and some gamification. The point is these devices are here today, and they are designed for mass markets and they are making lots of people familiar with the 'learning through self-tracking' principles. How long before they end up in your clothes?

We are on our way to track cognition, emotion, brain activity, human interaction and more
Right now the health market is where tracking device makers position their products and earn their money. But other areas are on the way. We can track general cognitive skills/health (eg quantified-mind.com, lumosity). MIT has prototypes of sociometric badges that track human interaction. (!) Personally I'm exited about the advances we make to track basic emotions. There are various ways to track emotions: via heart rate variability (HRV), skin conductance, brain waves, facial expressions, etc. The best is to combine a few of these sensors. I'm interested in emotion tracking because it is important for leadership development to be aware and mindful of our "hot buttons" for example or for how other people interpret our faces. The booming field of neuroscience is also coming up with cheap brain wave scanners that can track what is going on in our grey box. Below are pictures of me testing out an emotion facial scanner and a picture of a gimic you can buy: the necomimi cat ear brain scanner will indicate if you are paying attention! (That should make meetings and class dynamics different!)

Over the next years we'll get better at visualizing data and mining for insights
It takes some skill and time of course to make sense of numbers or bar charts or graphs. And there might be some things we just don't want to see. To help people with sense-making from their own data, new visualizations will be essential. There is promising work on that ongoing, for example the artistic representations of the sparkvis project below on the FitBit data.

Of course, we can also use technology to mine our numbers for correlations and help us to make sense. Right now most tools will present you their data in bar charts and leave it up to you to do anything with that information. I recently joined a Motorola research experiment on Mobile Health Mashup that tries to combine various sensors and give you analytics like "You lose weight on weeks when it is warmer".

So where is the learning?
Health and mood tracking are all very well, but what about learning? After all, what tracking technology does is show us numbers, as they happen and over a long period of time. But just that does a lot. It makes us aware, it focuses our attention. As it so happens awareness and repeated attention are crucial for learning. Try it out for yourself and buy a FitBit device: just by seeing the number of steps you are taking you'll probably park the car just a bit further away to get more steps...!
More than helping us to make sense and become aware of certain behaviors, tracking provides immediate feedback and as such allows for self-experiments. A good QS'er will establish a baseline on for example his sleeping pattern, and then change one thing (eg going to bed at the same time every night) and see how that one change affects the numbers of his sleep quality. The next week he tries another change and sees its effect, etc. Tracking allows people to construct their own experimentation and learning process. It's almost doing science experiments on yourself. Sites like Edison (think, try, learn) illustrate this principle.
Not everyone is a hard core QS'er that goes wild on the idea of taking a picture every minute of his life, or keeping track of how many emails he sends every day. Not everyone has the discipline to track or take the reflection time to make sense of the data. But a lot of people can and will benefit from the principles of QS and self-tracking for short periods of time (let's say 4 months) when they are motivated to improve a certain aspect of their life or behavior and will use a particular tracker during that period.
Tracking technology will do nothing for 'learning from content'. But it does play into building awareness, giving instant feedback, assessment and impact, owning our individual learning processes, and a shame-safe learning environment. (For a bit more, please read the article "Personal Informatics for Self-Regulated Learning".)

Is tracking the new awareness?
Learning, especially learning new behaviors, starts with awareness and needs repeated attention. Leadership development for example traditionally starts with self-awareness in the form of 'leading self' programs. Tracking devices can help greatly in just showing us numbers or graphs to trigger that awareness and reinforce attention daily. Before tracking, we asked people to maintain learning journals and later portfolios to become aware, to devote attention to the topic and keep track of their own development process. The same effects can come from tracking with the added value it is factual information to reflect upon, and gathered (semi-)automatically over longer periods of time. Simply tracking your food intakes for example might uncover patterns you didn't know existed. When we get better visualizations of the tracked data, or can intelligently combine input from different sensors we can help people with a more natural form of sense-making and awareness building.
As an example is the prototype of Philips rationalizer emobracelet and emobowl that never made it to the market: the idea was to give a visual indication to stokebrokers when they were acting on high emotion instead of rational thinking.

Is tracking is the new assessment?
Tracking gives us numbers on behavior and as such gives immediate feedback. Currently assessment in the learning field comes either under the form of a test/exam typical in schools or IT certification, or in the form of psychometric instruments such as personality assessments typically found in leadership and personal development programs. In the first case it is overly focused on knowledge (which is the "half way measure"), in the latter case it is based on opinion rather than fact, and in both cases it gives scores for one particular moment in time. With tracking the feedback is immediate, factual and ongoing. It is also tracking on the end-goal rather than an intermediate one so it serves as the 'ROI' of your learning process at the same time.

Is tracking is the new shame-safe learning environment?
Producers of serious games and simulations use the statement 'fail-safe' environment. Equally, the makers of tracking hardware and software may claim the term 'shame-safe learning environment' if they ensure the tracked data is under full control of the learner. It is important learning can take place in a safe environment, with tolerance for what it takes to learn new behaviours: trial and error, failure, reflection time, discussion, etc. Whether that safe environment is a classroom away-from-work ("what happens in the classroom stays in the classroom") or a learning friendly work culture, I leave in the middle. Tracking is essentially a learning process between ourselves and the data. It's socially non-threatening. There is no shame factor to overcome here as there is in doing role-plays in front of a group, in admitting we don't know something, in having to reach out for help,... The data gives us a mirror to look into. No-one else sees it unless we want to. Trusted persons (coaches for example) or fellow QS'ers with the same goals can get access to our numbers.

Over the next posts...
I'll review some of the trackers that I experimented with over the past months. They include

• FitBit health tracker with its beautiful website and clever gamification elements
• myZeo sleep tracker with its automated coaching program
• 42goals.com goal tracking journal for any purpose
• lumosity tracks cognitive skills through a daily set of addictive games
• the health mashup experiment
• NeuroSky portable brain scanner to measure attention and relaxation levels
• SpartViz visualisation tool to make more intuitive sense of our numbers
• 23andMe.com DNA profile with ongoing research
• and more

Many questions remain of course, as this is an emerging learning technology and we have lots of experimentation to do as an industry to get it right. What are the domains this can be applied in? I don't know, but I'm kind of betting that leadership development is one of them :-) . Is this technology and approach for everyone? I don't know. Maybe it is only for those with strong self-directed learning skills but even then it is worthwhile. Can it be dangereous? Of course. Technology is morally neutral, but can be misused and data protection and ownership is crucial here. A lot of what we do gets tracked anyway. What will tracking mean over time? I haven't even started thinking about what the consequences are of having years and years of tracking data always there, not able to forget about it...

What I do know is: this looks, feels and smells like the 'other' learning technology for the years to come...
(PS and if you can't sell that to your Chief Learning Officer, sell it as mobile learning because most of these trackers are mobile devices...)