Of Learning Icons™

Studies

I set out with a pre-conceived ideal of what I would find a 'Learning Icon™' to be. Experience with using iconic visualisations of medical concepts, actions, and equipment within a trade reference manual in 1998 gave confidence to the idea. Many of the icons still survive but work to present them in a sequential manner to direct casualty management through algorithms on pages, or in PowerPoint presentations has all but died.

Their demise can be blamed squarely on 'personality decay'. This is a phenomenon I have seen throughout my career where personalities tend not to hold their post for more than 2-3-years before promotion or circumstances move them on. At one time there was a group of dynamic personalities with an interest in moving forward an idea to enhance their trade's training and service delivery: then they dissipated away from their central coral and the herding cats analogy returned. Steadily our responsibilities have changed or demanded more of our time and so the great visionary projects of 1998-2003 have decayed, too.

The vision remains, though. At last, through my Cert Ed and MSc studies, I have more of the tools I would have found useful back in those heady days. Now I also have a quandary that rather than presenting the idea well and obtaining the micro-group consensus, I need to prove the still embryonic ideas to the World in a dissertation.

See Example Learning Icon™ Link. This opens a Flash file in a new window, which may upset your browser as a pop-up or Active-x control. Please respect my intellectual property rights (Copyright© design by Pat Godfrey 2007 and Learning Icon™ Trade Mark) in your referencing to this prototype. Medical observers should recognise the content is NOT presented as being accurate; it just filled a space.

While I could so easily produce a Learning Icon™ encounter for learners and prove its worth at the local level I have found a great deal of project creep across a range of different study areas. There are those for:

• Graphic design


• Semiotics


• Cognitive theory


• Accessibility


• Historical context and cultural perception
  

to list but a few I can conceptualise myself. There are also sceptics within my research group that strongly disagree with the concept of using icons in learning and as clinical trauma instructions or as aid memoirs but then agree, on confrontation with existing text-verbose presentations and learning mechanism that icons would be an ideal solution!

Feeling on Quality

In a recent questionnaire I asked participants to draw their own icons. This was frustrating. Where graphically I had visualised clean, well-designed icons such as those you might see at the back of a luxury coach (serve beverages, toilet on board, TV, reclining seats, etc.) with instant transmission of a specified meaning, these returned in the majority as cartoons. My tutor has directed me to the Widget site. I had previously dismissed this site because, in my opinion, this is the trouble with good-intentioned people producing their own scribbled designs and making them production-run where they should only be prototypes. Yes, I'm fussy. These brilliantly conceptualised language icons look crap. My research backs up my own feelings that learners respond well to the appearance of professional investment in them. In the classroom I'd always try to make the best of the location:

• Exceptional learning design – or make best existing materiel with modern approaches and graphic / copy design


• Prepare the room


• Clean and tidy


• Light from windows or lights


• Layout of the chairs


• Desks, or no desks


• Projection equipment and orientation


• Centres of focus


• Learning materials such as handouts (not the scabby stuff you get in Uni)


• Branding of signs and materiel


• Orientation signs throughout the building


• Efficient registration


• Toilets


• Refreshments (augmented by a tea-fund if necessary)


• The way I dressed


• The pre-arrival pack explaining what was expected of the learner, and what to expect of the learning


• Certificates for a sense of achievement and record of CPD


• Efficient result data gathering and analysis

If that assists in the classroom to raise the standard of learning then why should I not take the same care when presenting on a screen?!

So, Widgets, clean them up. Send them to a graphic artist for some much-needed application of semiotic theory and, well, just take them away from the Primary School teacher's best efforts with Blue Peter manufacturing appeal and bring them up to the point where, on first view, potential users actually WANT to pay all that money for a product you can't even test-drive. Then the darn things might meet the use of the people they are so well conceived to assist.

Problematic Approach

So, with all this high-quality-driven baggage I am in a bit of a sticky wicket. I have a product that works well but requires a team of expert designers to test and complete. It's a prototype. I believe it can work. In fact, I could stake my future reputation on it J. But to prove this is going to be tricky. I need real-life buy in from a learning delivery organisation (my own will do) to risk learners' real-time outcomes on a course. I also need to take a fresh appraisal of my Technical Author's steady advice: keep it simple.

The sequencing of icons to totally replace text, even simply, resulted in the rapid creation of nearly 100 icons, and that was on step 2 of a 10-sep courseware! So, the project also now includes a rationalisation of what information is currently included in the package. This risks supporting his (and my) ideals of simple design created by instructional designers, but won't necessarily meet the SME's approval where they had created the design.

On using SMEs for icon design? This has been explored in research but seems to have missed out on one important point. The consensus designs were ALL bloody complicated cartoons with compressed representations of movement, etc. They were graphically challenging to present at 96pt, near impossible any smaller. More to do; but it's interesting how I am feeling a conflict between conceptualisation of an icon for learning and its actual design.

Perhaps this all a bit "me"? The study continues, it's not a bad quality of prototype, but it's a prototype. It'll be interesting how well it is received. More detail later…