Let Shrek Do Your Training!
It’s day two of the eLearning Guild “Implementing Mobile Learning” show (completely online, but not available on my mobile device) and I’m in a neat presentation by Scott Everhart of Vcom3D, Inc. He’s talking about using i-Pods and avatars in language and cultural training. (Many people have observed that I could really use some cultural training, so I’m trying to pay attention.)
He’s demoing a tool from his company that lets me create all sorts of avatars for training — and give them different cultural attributes. Much like Second Life, they’re all pretty good looking and younger than I am — but I’ve never seen something that was this easy to do!
How would you create an avatar to better connect to your learners, based on their cultural and/or language preferences? Could you use this to improve the effectiveness of training?
Glad To Be Out Of The Hive
I left Microsoft about nine months ago, and many days I miss it. Great people, nice campus, a private office and free soda.
But today, I downloaded a new app to try out, and it required .NET Framework 3.0. I did my search, went to Microsoft.com, and clicked download. Nothing happened. I clicked the “if this download doesn’t work” button. Nothing happened.
Cynical bastard that I am, I opened up Internet Explorer (I usually run Firefox), pasted the link in, and it worked just fine. Hmmmmm.
I looked around, and found a “UserAgentSwitcher” for Firefox — it lets me masquerade my browser as though it was IE 7. Installed it. Works fine to download, now.
Reminds me of when I was about 7 years old. There was a little kid that had a bat, and a ball. But he wasn’t willing to let anyone else touch either of them. So he just stood out there in the rain, with tears streaming down his cheeks. Eventually, he got all wrinkled and pruny. He never married, had terrible athlete’s foot, and ended up as a precinct captain for the Democratic Party.
Ok, ok — I’m kidding. He wasn’t crying.
What Can You Learn About Learning — From “Chat Help”?
I’m trying to give a certain international training organization hundreds of dollars for the privilege of attending their event — in the hope of learning something (maybe) and getting in front of potential clients (maybe). But they’ve created a wonderful new website just for me (maybe not) and it won’t let me log in.
So I clicked on the “live chat” button, and am talking with a very nice woman who’s name is probably not actually “Shannon”. I both love and hate these things, as they’re obviously at the bottom of the customer support food chain. But it’s usually easier than trying to get an actual human to answer via email. But this one has a twist — I can rate her skills in real time!
There’s a little tiny set of feedback links — a green “plus” and a red “minus”. I’m not sure if my repeated clicking on the minus button actually added up, or if it was like hitting the elevator button over and over again. Then again, it may just be a meaningless link to make me feel better.
Actually, I stopped when I realized that my feedback was about their whole system, not about Shannon. Now I feel guilty, assuming that there’s one more person out of a job in Bangalore. And it’s all my fault.
What would your learning efforts look like if this widget was at the top of every piece of content, and the results were sent — in real time — to a dashboard in the VP’s office? Or saved in a folder for your yearly review? Or pushed out to an LCD screen on the wall above your cubicle?
What other questions would you ask? Here are some of mine:
- Are you happy to be involved in this learning?
- Are you doing other work while learning?
- Will you use this in your job?
- Is this a stupid waste of time?
- Are you just clicking until it’s over?
- Would you rather be having a root canal?
- Does this fit your definition of “torture”?
- Would you do this to a terrorist?
- Does training matter to you, at all?
I dare you. Ask some of these questions — so much of our efforts to train (or encourage, or educate, or certify, or evaluate) fail because the audience just doesn’t value or understand why we’re being so mean to them.
If you get good answers to all of these, THEN we can talk about instructional theory and quality interactivity.
Amazing E-Learning: Take A Tube-Torial
I spend a lot of time making fun of crummy e-learning — sort of like shooting fish in a very small barrel. It’s time for me to start pointing out some examples of great e-learning so we can all start copying emulating the best.
Take a look at this session from Michael Pick on how to use a particular WordPress plug-in. (No, you don’t have to know anything about WordPress or even care. The point is that this five minute tube-torial is absolutely engaging.)
The production values are amazing, the audio and video really drive the learning, and things keep happening fast enough to keep my interest. Compare this to a typical “talking head” webcast about a technical topic:
Some of these are so confusing you’d think they were talking in a foreign language.
Cellcasting — Marriage of Podcasting and Cellphones
I’m sitting in an online session from the e-Learning Guild about mobile learning. This one is on the concept of CellCasts — going beyond the typical podcast model of audio droning on in your ear. Here’s a slide to explain the difference:
Robert Gadd from OnPoint Digital is talking about how his company develops and delivers this — from actually recording the learning via your phone to managing pushing it out to your audience.
There are many options included for tracking and measuring the results of this, something I haven’t heard a lot about in other forms of mobile learning. (A very large company that was presenting about this replied that their success measure was that “we talked to some of the learners and they were happy”. This didn’t really get me feeling all warm and fuzzy about the dollars spent.)
This is one of the more “instructionally sound” models I’ve seen in the mobile learning space, so it’s pretty exciting. Right now most of what I see is like the guy in the bathrobe on the street corner — shouting out to anyone who walks by.
If you’re a member of ELG, I think you have access to this presentation as an archive. I’ll post an update when I know.
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UPDATE: Here is a link to a great set of Flash demos about Robert’s product:
Prototype: Learning /Knowledge Access On Mobile Devices — Part II
To develop our first “trial” version of the little mobile app for ShoeCo, we’ll need some specs. Here’s the very first draft I’ve given out to potential developers.
ShoeCo Mobile Learning App
Base font: Tahoma, 8PT
Colors: Red, White, Blue
Images: .jpg
All pages have top link bar: Home | Search | Help
Mockups (not exact with content, just for discussion) are at:
http://www.techherding.com/?p=267
List Of Pages For Version 1.0 Of Mobile Learning App
Home
For now, this page will be hand-coded in HTML. Future versions will build this out on-the-fly, but for the demo HTML will work.
Search Input
This page is for search input. User will have a typical form input box and a “go!” button. This will run a typical WP search.
There will also be seven “canned” searches that have hot links on this page. They are:
- Recent Posts (returns the five most recent posts)
- Popular Posts (returns the five posts with highest viewing rates)
- Inventory (returns all posts tagged with “inventory”)
- Merchandising (returns all posts tagged with “merchandising”)
- Sales Update (returns all posts tagged with “sales update”)
- Audio (all posts tagged “audio”)
- Video (all posts tagged “video”)
Search Output
This page displays output from the above page. It will show all pages that are returned in the associated search.
- Most recent post is always shown first
- Title is first, followed by 25 characters of the post followed by “…”
- Title is a hot link to the post
- No date, time or other information is shown
Post Output
This page displays output from an individual post. (It is returned when the user selects a page from the search output.)
- Title is on top, in full
- Author is shown
- Text (along with images) is shown in full
- Hyperlinks must be clickable and open in existing window
- Click box and built-in form to add a comment
- Drop down to rate post – Great/Good/OK/Weak/Awful (maps to 1-5 in database)
Add A Post
This page allows users to enter information and submit. User enters data and it is submitted to the blog. All boxes are required.
- Text box for title
- Text box for content
- Dropdown for tags
- Text box for author
Help Page
For now, just HTML.
About Page
For now, just HTML
Prototype: Learning /Knowledge Access On Mobile Devices
I’m fooling around with the idea of creating a mobile app (aka something that would run on a SmartPhone, BlackBerry, etc.) that would have tiny little chunks of learning. The kicker is that I’d like to base the content in a WordPress blog — and pull all the data directly from the back-end database.
First step, do some mockups. I’ve created an imaginary company called “ShoeCo” that needs to communicate with their reps in the field — how to sell, what’s in stock, how other reps handle objections and so forth. Anyone can add information to the blog, and then it will be available to all via the mobile application.
Now — the hard part — find a developer to build it. Know anybody?
HOME SCREEN
SEARCH SCREEN
SEARCH RESULTS
Rapid Design of a Mobile Application — Using Stickies and a Pencil
Prototyping doesn’t have to take weeks and thousands of dollars. Take a look at this very simple prototype of a mobile “friend finder” system for a University. (No, I don’t know what language it is. That’s the beauty of it.)
I’m going to try this with a couple of mobile learning ideas I have.
Lecture Topics We’d Like To See
My friend Howard Gutknecht and I have been sending ideas for crazy presentation topics back and forth for the last few days, and we just might try recording a few short podcasts with these as the topics. The rules would be absolutely no preparation, always saying “yes”, and stopping before you’re done. (Those of you with any experience at improv might recognize these.)
Here’s what we’ve got:
- Top
Ten Ways To Screw Up e-Learning - The Sounds Of Snoring – Why Webcasts Usually Suck
- There Are No “Buts” In Ass-sessment
- If They Want To Do It, There’s No Need For Leadership
- The Paradigm Has To Want To Be Changed
- I’ll Have What She’s Having – Things To Come At ASTD
- Celebrity Hook-Up: Mickey and Camtasia
- Why Old People In Training Hate Technology
- There Is No “Learn” In “Lecture”
- You’d Suck At Training Even If You Got Quite A Bit Better
- There Are Only Learners and Learn-Mores
- They Aren’t Broke, So Don’t Fix Em
- Message From Deming: It’s the System that’s Stupid!
- We’ve Fallen Into Boredom And Can’t Get Up
- Just Stop Training: They Might Learn Something
- Working Hard – the Fundamental Bad Example
What do you think? Anybody else want to play?
If It Really Was Really Simple, You Wouldn’t Need “6 Ways to Enhance, Promote and Monetize Your RSS Feed”
6 Ways to Enhance, Promote and Monetize Your RSS Feed
from Mequoda Daily
Using RSS as a way to attract new visitors, create an open revenue stream, and retain your email newsletter unsubscribers.
Many publishers view their RSS feed as a self-sustaining journal, a part of their blog that is great because of the low-key and hands-off approach that it was designed for. Well we’re not sure if they’ve noticed, but there’s a whole lot more to this online publishing than recycled content. Recycled content—with class!
Luckily, monetizing your RSS feed doesn’t mean diving into the nitty gritty, it’s pretty easy, and surprisingly exciting to find your content in niches that were once unexplored territory. Here’s a list of six things you can do—today—that will attract new visitors, create an open revenue stream, retain your email newsletter unsubscribers, and will give you (or your webmaster) something to brag about at the next new media conference.
- Validate Your Feed. Having a feed with errors is the best way to lose inclusion in feed readers. FeedValidator.org will make sure your feed is valid (especially important for Podcast feeds if you want a chance of being accepted into the iTunes collection). It will give you a line-by-line error report for an easy fix.
- Create Chicklets. No, not the square-shaped gum. We’re talking about those little RSS icons you see on almost every blogger website used to recruit readers that prefer RSS to email. iFeedReaders.com has a simple “chicklet creator” tool for making them in seconds. They give you the code, and all you need to do is drop it into your website template.You can also create your own chicklets at feedforall.com.