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Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
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A number of Universities are now opening cyberspace campuses in Second Life, allowing students around the world to participate in the three-dimensional world.
When I talk about this, it’s amazing how negative educators are about the idea — something that is very much in it’s infancy, and evolving/improving on a daily basis. They compare it to learning models literally hundreds of years old and call out multiple issues:
Elliott Masie said it best five years ago, when he said “there’s no such thing as e-learning.” We never had chalkboard learning, or filmstrip learning, or overhead projector learning. It’s all just learning. The form factor will continue to evolve.
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I was in a store today, and saw a very effective example of communications.
They had a clear goal, and had identified the value to their audience.
The next time you come up with a need to communicate, make sure that you have these two key points down. The rest is easy.
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Five years ago, an innocent boy went to work in Redmond for the best software company in the world. (Ok, he was also a naive boy.) He got a whole raft of stock options. In two days, they expire.
Like the boy, they are un-exercised. Oh, well — what you don’t get paid for is experience, right?
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Jon Revelos (Director - Story Based Learning at TATA
Interactive Systems) has a great post where he posits that storytelling is the most effective means of passing knowledge from an expert to a beginner.
Using the example of “corporate earnings were 3.2 billion dollars as a data point” he shows that, depending on the story, that might be good news or bad. It might indicate an upward path, a downward path, or just general confusion.
Imagine the final step in this example chain - instead of
being given a bulleted fact, or even a graphical chart, you are provided a
compelling narrative of the events that influenced a company’s fiscal
performance Maybe a story of how a small oil and gas company played a role in
one of the largest bankruptcies in
well-understood are terms like “securities fraud” in the post
Enron/Worldcom era? Why? Because stories
were told - stories of greed, arrogance, fraud, trust, loss, and ruin - that
brought obscure accounting terms and practices out of the textbooks and into
the personally relevant world of everyday people.
I’ve always tried to follow Joseph Campbell’s “The Myth of the Hero” model, where he describes the universal pattern of storytelling.
In this study of the myth of the hero, Campbell posits the
existence of a Monomyth (a word he borrowed from James Joyce),
a universal pattern that is the essence of, and common to, heroic tales
in every culture. While outlining the basic stages of this mythic cycle,
he also explores common variations in the hero’s journey, which,
he argues, is an operative metaphor, not only for an individual, but
for a culture as well. The Hero would prove to have a major
influence on generations of creative artists—from the Abstract
Expressionists in the 1950s to contemporary film-makers today—and
would, in time, come to be acclaimed as a classic.
One of my favorite applications of this model is “Beyond Bullet Points” as described by Cliff Atkinson. He gives you a great model of how to take a typical boring PPT presentation and re-work it into something that is moving, effective and anything but boring. Each year at TechEd I would see speakers grow and improve using just this model.
“This fellow can make PowerPoint do things that I never knew could be
done at all. What he says is not difficult to do, it’s just a different
way of thinking about how to make a presentation.”
- John Matlock Amazon.com Top 500 Reviewer
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You’ve probably seen bad presentations, awful presentations, and incredibly bad awful presentations. But just in case you’d like to see it all in one place, my friend Lynn Langit has an example created by the Windows Mobile team on “What Not To Do” in a presentation.
It’s pretty amazing. Seinfeld fans may remember an episode when George decides that because all his instincts are wrong, he should just Do The Opposite of what his instincts tell him.
I’m not naming names, but I’ve seen plenty of presenters who would be well served to use this philosophy.
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I’m doing a little travel planning, and I just realized that Northwest Airlines has pretty much completely changed my flight preferences because of their web site.
Growing up in Minneapolis years ago (where NWA is based) I had numerous bad experiences, and so haven’t really used them in travel over the intervening years. But a couple of years ago corporate travel designated them as “preferred” and I had no choice. Service was ok, nothing special, but at least not all the problems from before.
But I’ve now become addicted to their online tools. I just changed a reservation in about 2 minutes on my own. I can check in and print out my boarding pass in about a minute. I can make seat changes when I check in, and almost always get a better seat than what I had. I can track my reservations, share the information, etc.
So now when I’m headed where they go, I tend to start there. The guy who will go miles for 1 cent per gallon doesn’t even care if the fare is higher.
Am I unusual?
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Now there’s a cute little app that will alert you when your printer is planning on printing all those pages that don’t really have anything on them.
They’ve got a great little viral video on their blog to give you the idea.
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Articulate has created what looks like an online LMS in what they’re calling “Articulate Online” — they say you can track how employees, customers and prospects interact with your e-learning courses, assessments and presentations.
Their bullets are:
I’m watching a little three-minute demo from Alli Star, a Product Evangelist. It’s a nice clean screen, the audio is clear, and even the animations are only a little bit jerky.
You can pull in PPT content in a couple of clicks — converting to SWF — and then you’re asked if you want to manage the content. You can launch directly from the web, get reports, share it, set permissions, or email an invite.
At least in the demo, it seemed to work very cleanly. (I’m guessing they weren’t doing the demo over a typical net connection, but I’d love to be proven wrong.)
The reports are very clean and readable, with percentages and some pretty colored bars.
Questions I’ve got:
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Do you do more than one thing at a time? How’s that working out for you?
Right now I’m reading mail, surfing Google Reader, listening to a podcast (Run-As Radio) and posting a blog item.
I have to admit that the podcast is just running in the background. Sometimes I’m listening, sometimes I’m completely focused on other tasks. But every now and then some interesting tidbit tickles the lizard stem in my brain, and I surface to listen. (It’s a technical podcast that’s above my head, but I’m interested in the concepts they’re talking about.)
I’m wondering what this means in the world of learning. I’m not sure if this should be called “subliminal” learning, “parallel” learning, or “intermittent” learning. Whoops, just paused to listen with full attention for about 30 seconds.
Most people in the “Gen X” and later do this as a matter of course — lots of IM windows, cell phone, email, etc. Does that mean that we should be designing learning in ways that learners can have several different experiences going at the same time?
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