I’m A Frat Boy At Wikiversity!
As someone who did his college years a bit later than most (I was a 39-year-old freshman) I missed out on the whole Frat Boy experience. No wild parties, no pledge week, and no naked Twister. 
But now I’ve got a chance to get in with the cool kids.
I’m now a frosh at the Wikiversity, and I’m hoping that there’s a virtual frat that would take me. I’ve got my sweater, pennant, and I’m writing the spirit song. (It’s hard to find positive words that rhyme with Wiki — icky, picky, Dickie, persnickety — so it’s taking longer than I planned.) But the tuition was right (free) and I can attend in my robe and bunny slippers.
Wikiversity is a Wikimedia Foundation beta project, devoted to learning materials and activities, located at www.wikiversity.org. Wikiversity’s beta phase officially began on August 15, 2006 with the English language Wikiversity. There are currently five language Wikiversities - English, French, German, Italian and Spanish - and new language Wikiversity projects in other languages are in development at the “beta” multilingual hub.
Go take a look, and let me know if you’d like to be in my fraternity. Our motto is “Abutebaris modo subjunctivo denuo”. (You’re gonna have to Google it — and you get one virtual credit for the correct answer.)
Change Effort: Bad Powerpoint! Bad! Bad!
If you’re thinking about change, you need warm and fuzzy support. Anyone remember the man’s prayer from the Red Green show?
“I’m a man, but I can change, if I have to, I guess.”
That about sums it up for me. But this slide on change effort is too much effort for me:
So what type of change would help, here?
- Some color — the black and white does print nice, tho
- Type that you can read, that’s consistent
- Lose the big black blocks, or at least bold the type
- Did I mention a consistent font?
- Bigger type
Now that’s change I can handle.
Can You Give Us Just A Little More Detail?
Bad Powerpoint! Bad! Bad!
Here’s a nice little slide built by some folks who work on a mission — not my personal cup of tea, but I’m glad to see people who actually step up and try to fix problems they see.
But their single slide tries to explain how they set up and execute a project. They’ve managed to use just about every color and font in the box. Lots of little type. Vertical type, going two different directions!
What could we do with this, so that people would actually understand what we do, how we prepare, etc?
Sequential Slides Let’s break this up into six separate slides that map to each of the major boxes. That would allow readable type. That would allow clipart that meant something.
Show Timeline In Meaningful Measures Unless you’re an experienced PM, you have no idea what “T-1 Weeks” means. How about September, October, November…
No Vertical Type Nuff said.
Headline “Example Project” — and keep it on every single slide
Little Words Change “dialog on the potential of hosting a project” to “talk about a project”.
Then, if you must, show a slimmed-down version of this at the end of the series.
Amazing e-Learning! Perform A Hip Replacement
Here’s another in our series of examples of incredible e-learning experiences. EdHeads.org will let you cut, cauterize, retract and replace your way to a completely new hip. The visuals are great, the little tools are very easy to use (I loved cauterizing the little blood vessels), and your surgeon looks a lot like Barbie.
They have incorporated assessments and remediation in the experience, the Flash loads quickly, the audio is great — I’m gushing, I know. But it’s really nice to see something done well. Do your learning products look like this?
Would You Share Your New-Hire Training With The Whole World?
Yesterday I saw something amazing. It was very good work, engaging, and well designed. I’m sure that newly hired employees learned a lot and it really helped with the “on-boarding” process. (What the heck is “on-boarding”, anyway? Is it like the airplanes “pre-boarding”? When you fire them, is that “off-boarding”?) I digress.
The amazing part was that this training is available live on the web for anyone to look at. Brandon Carson (of Sun Learning Services) was giving us an online demo as part of the e-Learning Guild awards for this year. He casually mentioned that we could all go and look at it — no password, no special access, no restrictions. Gosh. I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen a big corporation willing to share that stuff out. Would yours?
Here’s the description:
Presenter: Brandon Carson
Title: Chief Learning Game Officer
Company: Sun Microsystems, Inc.Description – We designed a new hire onboarding wiki that includes a social network-enabled website with custom profile pages, two immersive learning games, a rich-media Orientation e-learning Program, and other content relevant to streamlining the onboarding experience for Sun’s global new hires.
Authoring Tools – We used the Confluence wiki platform, Adobe Flash for the learning games, Orientation, and videos, and Articulate for the Benefits Presentation
Number of Students – The site is live as of 9/28, and will be accessed be every Sun new hire (~4000 people), as well as any Sun employee. The wiki site, the learning games, and all the other content are also available on the public internet for anyone interested in learning about Sun.
Time to Complete – 6 months
Problems & Challenges – We had to involve several stakeholders, including the CEO himself in the design and development. We also had to synchronize our efforts in Sun Learning Services with the HR process, as well as include all the regions spanning the globe in the development of the program. We also had to design and deliver the program to operate with a myriad of platforms and devices including Solaris, Windows, Macintosh and other OS’s. We were also introducing a new form of learning to Sun (”game-based” learning) by building two different immersive learning games.
Lessons Learned – We learned the value of testing on all platforms early in the process, we learned how to work with multiple vendors and internal customers to bring about the desired results. We also had to involve almost every business group from the CEO, to all the executive staff, to marketing, branding, legal, HR, and of course, all the global regions since we were designing for localization as well.
Why Enspire Learning Should Get Your Business
I just ran across a Christmas Holiday card from Enspire Learning. But it was amazing to see that they had actually used their core skill set to produce it. I’m always amazed that people don’t want to show off their stuff. If I’m going to hire you to produce e-learning for my company, I’d like to see some. And see that you think it works.
In this case, it does. They’ve done a nice little animation called “The Finch Who Stole e-Learning“. There are wonderful production values, a nice story, simple visuals and an engaging experience. If you can put all that into your e-learning you’ve got a winner. It’s also a nice touch that their “whos” in the village are all employees, with tiny little headshots. At the end of the clip, you can roll over every image to see who it is and what they do.
Testing This Whole "Live Writer" Thing
I’m not a huge fan of new. But I keep running across recommendations that I should consider using Live Writer. So I’ve installed it (took forever) and refused all the additional bloatware (and making Live my home page, and search, and coming to my house for a kiss on the lips) and I’m actually writing something in it.
I’m not sure exactly what’s so cool. Let’s try putting in a video.
Well, it won’t take a link from a video on my blog site:
http://www.shoeco.biz/video/shoeco_video.wmv
How about a picture?
The Best Way To Hide Information
There’s no need to have a “top secret” classification any more. Just put your information in ten-point type in a PPT slide, then show it online in a webcast with a tiny little screen. I’m watching an interesting online event from Unisfair this morning, about Mobile Security. The presenters are from bMighty.
They’re making a pretty standard lecture/speech, so I’m bored and decided to blog while listening to them drone on. (I bet lots of other “attendees” are doing the same. What new metric do we need to replace “eyeballs” in this setting? I vote for “earballs“, but I’m willing to take suggestions.)
Anyway — I digress — their PPT presentation is pretty awful:
I’m not sure what it is that the speaker is trying to tell me over there on the right, but on my huge 24″ monitor it’s completely illegible. It would really brighten up his presentation if this was broken down into a series of 5-10 quick slides. He could just do a call-out of each key point, like this:
Of course, it would be better to re-design the presentation completely, using some basic rules for any online web presentation:
- Include frequent polls to measure attendee interest and provide interactivity
- Don’t keep a single image on the screen for more than 30 seconds (So a 10-minute presentation needs at least 20 slides)
- Ask for input — through chat or audio — frequently
- Include stories, case studies, videos — anything to break up the droning sound
- Never do a webcast longer than 15 minutes — if you have more information than that, break it up into chunks so attendees can quickly find the information they need
PowerPoint isn’t bad. It’s just used that way.
Look Professional, Act Professional, Be Professional
It’s been pretty cold around here this week, and we’ve even had snow. Diane was experimenting with some winter headgear.
