The Monkeys take on Dropbox

Posted on by
2

It’s 3:00 pm. Things are looking good.

Things are looking good.

Things are looking good.

And then.

They aren’t.

It’s funny how transferring files – especially the large media files we typically work with in the elearning biz – can cause even the most Zen like of us to go apoplectic. Talk about a productivity buzz kill.

Back in the stone ages, we used to upload our media files to Jazz or Zip drives and then send them to our clients by courier. The drives were kind of expensive and the notes we included to return them usually went unheeded. Then there was FTP which saved us from using the physical drives, but came with a new set of annoyances. With FTP, came connection issues, frustrating timeout errors, slow transfer times and unfriendly interfaces too difficult for non-techies to use.

Well after years of banging our heads against the proverbial firewall, we’ve discovered a tool that actually makes file synchronization and sharing simple. It’s called Dropbox.

Dropbox? Sounds like a Kickboxing term – so what is it exactly?

Dropbox is an application that enables users to store and sync files online and between computers.

When you  install  Dropbox, the application  places a folder in your Documents folder named “My Dropbox”.  Catchy eh! You can create folders and invite other users to share it. If another user invites you to share a folder (and you accept of course), the folder will appear in your root Dropbox folder.  All you have to do to share a file is put it in the folder. Any changes made to the file from then on will automatically update on the all the computers that share the folder.

Dropbox  runs on Windows and Mac and Linux clients. It even has an iphone app if you are into that. I haven’t used it yet,  but have an iphone on my wish list so here’s hoping. We like this because we have clients and service providers who run all different types of systems and we can all still share.

Just in – Rick’s  son says the iphone app is phenomenal.  Apparently, you can view files you would not be able to with just the iphone.

Dropbox is secure – it uses SSL transfers with AES-256 encryption, and it supports revision history.

What’s so great about the revision history?

We like it because it keeps track of who made changes to a file and when – this way we always know who to blame when something screws up – just kidding.  More importantly, Dropbox stores the revisions on a secure web server  so when the monkeys mistakenly delete or overwrite a file, we can restore it.  We are on the one month recovery option, but for a small added fee you can have Dropbox keep your old files forever.

More than just file sharing

We also think it’s  great for collaboration. Although it does not allow more than one person to work in a file at the same time – Dropbox updates  changes as soon they are saved so that everyone  has immediate access to the latest and greatest version.

No monkey business here

The  Dropbox account comes with 2GB of free space that you can use for as long as you like. This is smart because it allows people to use the service for free. We have no qualms about inviting clients or service providers to use it because it costs them nothing, is secure and is really easy to use. When users get hooked on the service, like we did, it costs very little to upgrade to 50 MB of space.

What would make it better?

Dropbox was designed for personal use so there is no concept of a business account or any way to administer access for a block of users.  I won’t go into a lot of detail about the implications of this, but as a business owner who uses the occasional contractor, it would be great if I could buy some sort of group license and then assign or remove access as people come and go.

So how do the Monkeys rate Dropbox?

Ten again. Hmm. I would have given it an eleven.

Share

Tell No One. Visualizing Elearning (Part 2)

Posted on by
2

Chicken and Pig

Most of us have seen a blockbuster that has gone way overboard in terms of “visualization” — sacrificing both a comprehensible story line and any semblance of character development to the spectacle.   Sure these can be nice to look at, but, in the end, are as shallow as the latest Hollywood holographic teen idol.  Some are like a poorly made Fajita — lots of flash and sizzle but no real meat (or Tofu if you prefer) in the middle.

Having said that, as elearning developers, that’s probably not the problem most of us have to contend with. We usually have to work with budgets not big enough to buy a dozen donuts and a coffee.  Not only that, instead of creating a course on how the robots in the movie Transformers were made, we probably have to create a course on the workings of actual electrical transformers. Instead of explaining how the end of the world might come about in 2012, we are more likely to have to describe how “The International Financial Reporting Standards” put an end to old accounting practices in 2013. These are not subjects that motivate most people to reach for a bag of popcorn.

As a result, we need to figure out how to make our productions at least mildly engaging in order to hold our audience long enough that they actually learn something.  That means visualizing on a budget.

One way we can start, (and this might seem really trivial to some of you) is to use representative stock icons to replace or support onscreen text or narration.  Web sites like iStockphoto allow you to purchase some really nice 3D icon sets for your elearning projects.

Here are a few reasons to use icons:

1. They are cheap.  One set of 12 icons costs approximately $10 US. That’s not bad. You will probably have to buy more than one set to get all the images you need but still you can’t beat the price.

Piggy Bank

2. You can have a relatively uniform look and feel for your images. Since the artists usually create multiple sets of icons to cover a wide variety of areas such as multimedia, computers, environment, office icons etc., you will find many different images to represent things in roughly the same graphical style.  In addition, because these images are icons, they are usually very generic looking and can fit in with almost any project you might have.  It’s time to throw away that cheesy clip art!

Industry Icons

3. You can use one icon to represent a number of different concepts. One of the beautiful things about human beings is that they can understand abstract symbolism. Once you associate a concept with an image, people can make connection easily and immediately.

Doctor Icon

4. Icons are in vector format and can be re-sized without lose of quality and animated easily in programs like Adobe Flash.   We keep our library of icons in a Flash file as a kind of vector image library.  That way we can create little animated scenes for our projects or simply put them on the stage and export them in any number of formats and sizes.  It’s pretty handy.

To sum up, using icons allows you to “show” and not “tell” by representing concepts visually with simple, uniform, and high quality images.  They provide an inexpensive and easy way to enhance your elearning titles. You are not going to win any special-effects awards, but perhaps your project will be a little more effective and come in under budget.

Share

Tell No One: Visualizing elearning (Part 1)

Posted on by
8

Samurai Mouse

The End

Fade Out

…Oh Sorry about that. I just had to put the finishing touches on a proposal for an elearning project. Now comes the tough part: the waiting.

In the mean time, let’s get back to our topic on how to relate the “Show. Don’t tell” principle that get’s preached in screenwriting circles to our elearning projects.

One important mantra  related to “Show. Don’t tell” is: “Get in late. Get out early.” Besides being my philosophy for shopping at Wal-Mart, the idea here is that you want to get people into the action as soon as possible while, at the same time, providing context and back story in the most efficient way possible without “telling” too much—hence the “get out early” idea.

Have you ever seen a movie that takes too long to get into the meat of the story or watched a scene that was drawn-out to the point where you thought, “Ok, ok…we get it!”?  It’s painful. This type of thing is a sure recipe for a tuned-out audience because the story starts to drag.

Usually, writers of these scripts worry that the audience won’t get the back story or understand the subtle nuances of the character and so try and “tell” us what a character is like up front with lots of dialogue or flash backs before the story engages.  Sure, the set-up to a story is crucial, and the first ten pages are the most important of the entire script, but it has to be carefully crafted and very succinct. A writer should only give the audience enough information to get them started so that they can build on their knowledge later in the context of the story. The main job of the set-up is to provide a hook that propels us into the heart of the story.

Let me illustrate. Put up your hand if you’ve seen the original Karate Kid. (Come on! I’m sure you’ve tried that crane -kick-move more than once!) Despite its cheesiness, screen writers often use this movie to illustrate good screen play structure. When we first meet Mr Miyagi in the first few pages of the script, we don’t know much about him other than: a) he is the superintendent of the building that Daniel lives in, b) he seems to like Daniel right off the bat, c) he is a bit mysterious, and d) he has a dry sense of humor.

We don’t find out until much later that he was a pilot during the second world war, knows Karate, and still grieves the loss of his wife over a bottle of Saki (sorry for the spoiler). Here, at the beginning of the story, we only get enough information to know that he will be important later on. If the writer would have had Mr. Miyagi explain his whole sordid history on their first encounter with Daniel, we would have totally lost our engagement with the main character and it would have taken away from the big picture of the story.

Now let’s relate this to eLearning. Face it, a lot of  elearning titles are a little slow getting out of the gate. They take too long to get to the action, and by the time they do, we’ve lost interest in the content.  Often this comes in the form of a long-winded  introduction telling us what the course is about and the copious amount of  time (usually in the form of  text) spent describing  the objectives. It may also come in the form of instructions on how to navigate the course, use the help, how to exit, and how to avoid repetitive stress syndrome while clicking through the course intro.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for objectives and I am not saying that we shouldn’t do some of these things (or maybe I am) but we need to be careful about front-end loading our learning so that it takes a half an hour just to find out how to use a course. At the very least, we should not force people to sit through everything if they don’t want to.  We need to design our courses so that these things are self-evident. If we design for the ten percent who don’t know how to click a forward arrow, then we are in big trouble (and so is the ten percent). I think it’s always best to get our learners into the content early so that they can be hooked into it and get where they are going. If we don’t, we risk losing the ninety percent.

If you are wondering how to do this, go look at any popular kid’s video game and you will see some principles. The best ones, show kids how to use the interface while they actually do things in the game–while they are already engaged in the story. The designers of these games try their best not to take learning out of the context of the story in order to teach the kids how to do something. This takes some thought and solid user interface design but is worth it.

I have also come across elearning courses that teach how to use specialized software packages but spend more time up-front on how to navigate the software than on teaching how to use it to perform a job-related task (if they do at all). So first, you have to sit through pages on how to use the course, and then endure pages that teach you how to navigate the software. That’s just not a good use of time and it’s as boring as________. You fill in the blank. (You see what I did there? I made this blog posting interactive!)

I guess my point is, let’s teach people how to use the software to do their jobs and teach them how to use the “features” of the software in context of actually doing something. Let’s not always feel like we need to get in at the beginning, but rather, let’s get in late and get out early and maybe our learners will have some time left over to catch the next show.  Besides, personally, I find that all that front-loaded information presented out-of-context just tends to get lost in the eternal sunlight of my spotless mind.

Share

Tell No One: Visualizing elearning (Introduction)

Posted on by
6

movie_camera

You might not know this about me, or even care, but I’ve attempted to write a couple of screenplays and a couple of sit-com pilots. (I know, I know, delusions of grandeur. It’s true. But the Toronto International Film Festival is in town and I got Red Carpet fever) Actually, it’s more of a hobby than anything but it sure takes a lot of work in terms of getting to know how to write in this genre properly. From all the books I have read on screen writing, one message came out loud and clear:  when writing for the screen, we need to “Show. Don’t tell”. This is the screen writer’s mantra. I think as educators, elearning developers, and instructional designers, this, in general, should be ours as well.

The screen writer’s job is to use as few expository words as possible to convey as much information through the action and images on the screen. Dialogue or narration that explains too much simply gets in the way of a viewer’s emotional and intellectual engagement of the content. Wordy scripts often create talking-head movies that drag like The English Patient after a big meal. This might be fine for a particular niche of film, but it certainly is not accessible to the majority of people living in this age of attention deficit. We don’t simply have our character say something like “I’m tired and would really like to sit down, take my shoes off, and take a breather.” Instead, we have him slump into a chair like a rag doll, throw off his shoes and breathe a sigh as if he is trying to inflate the room with his own lung air. Each of these actions conveys a sense of how tired he is and, more importantly, what kind of tired he is. It’s richer than words because it engages our brain on more than one level. It draws us in, because we feel that we are part of an unfolding narrative that we can relate to on, not just an intellectual, but an emotional level.

Those of us who create online learning need to “Show. Don’t tell” as well.  But how can we do this when we have so much content to cover? Over the next couple of weeks, I will try and look at how we can do a better job of employing this principle and to think visually.

Share

What I learned about eLearning from The Master Chief

Posted on by
6

I remember fondly when I got my first Xbox. (I say “first” because I’ve had several since due to problems with the original one and the famous red-ring of death that plagued its successor). I also recall the intimidation I felt with the significant learning curve that faced me. My kids had been schooled in this technology from a young age but, you see, I was an old PC gamer from the days of “A Mind Forever Voyaging” and “Kings Quest” and couldn’t quite get a handle on the transition from mouse and keyboard to console controller.  As a good father, however, I was committed to this paradigm shift. I didn’t want to be like all those TV dads who were never there to blow stuff up with their kids.  I am proud to say that today, I am pretty comfortable with the console control scheme but I still tend to flail my arms around as if conducting an orchestra when playing more action oriented games. Consequently, I am not what you would call an elite player of console games.

The Master Chief

One of the most popular games of all time soon found a happy place in our home.  The Halo series by Bungie, featured an engrossing epic sci-fi story and iconic character called The Master Chief.  Even though in the real world I am more committed to peace than Ghandi, for a brief time, after cleaning the bathroom on a Saturday, I could be the Master Chief – a Spartan super soldier. He didn’t have to take out the garbage or separate the compost from the recyclables.  But, oh yes, he did take out the “trash” — in the form of our insidious galactic enemies.

Halo was a very popular game during its initial release, yet it wasn’t until after Bungie mastered the multiplayer aspect of the game in Halo 2 that it really took off.  Bungie and Microsoft, through Xbox Live enabled large amounts of players to get into “maps” and play together. They could talk to each other with microphone and a headset, add friends to a list, and collaborate online — yes and shoot each as well. My son, (gamer tag: killer_emu) was a virtuoso with a controller and quickly ascended very high up in the ranking system created for the game.  I remember watching him in awe while at the same time bemoaning the hand-eye coordination that age had pillaged from me.

Below is my fierce Gamer Tag

What really got my attention, however, was when I noticed that my son and his online friends had suddenly abandoned the game as it was intended to be played and started to collaborate to do something completely new. To my amazement, they began to cooperate and take advantage of “glitches” in the system to do things the designers did not intend. These were not things you could accomplish on your own.  You would need to stop shooting each other, at least for a while, and work together.  Because the Halo 2 game mechanics were very physics-based, players could do some very creative and interesting things within the “sandbox” environment. They could get outside of the 3D map boundaries and get into and on top of places that they were not supposed to go. They found ways to fly across maps, perform amazing jumps with vehicles, and arrange spectacular acrobatic demonstrations complete with pyrotechnics.  Teams of gamers would get together and record movies in which they displayed their creative prowess and post them on the internet.  Some, like the people who did the Red VS Blue movies, even created short films using Halo as a Machinima tool.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying this was necessarily a new phenomenon.  It had been done with other games before. But somehow I noticed it more.  Here are a couple things I learned that relate to online learning:

Freedom Fighters

Some people just like to break things — especially the rules.  For an online learning environment, this means that we need to be aware that some learners are not content to be driven “along the rails” of our learning environment. They want to get off the ride and explore on their own.  Sure, many will still follow the more linear narrative of our course like those who would play the single-player version of Halo; however, we also need to give them at least the opportunity to feel the freedom in some way.  Web 2.0 has the idea of flexibility at its core. People want a multi-faceted learning environment where they can get their own information and not necessarily be forced into single-sourcing their experience.

This means that we need to provide learners with interactivity options. We should provide the freedom to navigate around so that learners can focus on what interests them at the time instead of always driving them to a destination.  Obviously for some content, we want to make sure learners absorb critical information but we may provide branching paths or even the same information delivered in a different way to accommodate these freedom fighters. What it definitely means is that we need to be careful about forcing people to do stuff whether it’s forcing them to take multiple tries on a quiz before they can proceed, or forcing them to perform long “click this, type that” simulations in order to get to the next section.  I am not just saying we need to provide the latest cool innovation, sometimes it means scaling back our dreams for a more conservative audiences who like a simple text-based elearning course with clearly presented, accurate and succinct content.

The Principle of Accommodation

When Bungie and Microsoft saw this growing community of “glitchers,” instead of totally clamping down on this new way of playing, they decided to build the Forge system into their next release of the game. This allowed users to customize maps by changing variables in such a way that those hosting the game could create very unique game experiences. Even in Halo 2, there was a lot of customization but with Halo 3, Bungie upped the ante. Bungie responded to what was happening instead of forcing people to play it like they wanted it to be played. Game companies that fail to respond to the new ways the community thinks about their experience will quickly find themselves losing ground in the industry. Too often this still happens in education. We force people to listen to audio with no way around or crowd the screen with reams of text not essential to the learning. We don’t provide good enough navigation so users can’t find what they are immediately interested in and we sometimes don’t provide enough options for different types of learners.  Consequently learners tune out and miss some creative learning opportunities. I’m guilty of building this type of learning.

Community is King

A lot has been made of Social Networking these days. Many eLearning professionals are grappling with what this means for their training. The Master Chief taught me that people in community can accomplish things beyond what we can teach them through traditional methods.  Once gamers were given the means to collaborate online, they shared information, planned, learned and cooperated instead of competed. What I think helped was the fact that the game integrated the social networking technology. Users didn’t have to leave the game in order to learn.  They could just ask others how to do it or get them to show them. Users were involved in the material and could explore right then and there without going out of context.  For me, this means that social networking technologies must be as integrated as possible into our learning environments for those who need it. If I am doing an online course, I might want others who are taking the same course be available to chat with me if I had questions. I might want an expert available to me at set times to get more detailed information. Maybe people need to start taking elearning courses “together” in some way.  I’m not exactly sure how this would look given the various budgets and time constraints but it’s something to think about.

I realize that organizations often implement eLearning in order to cut costs and that having an online trainer available at all times might not work. But we must look for ways for people to learn from each other. When that happens, creative solutions arise. Learning should not be single-sourced.  Maybe, in large companies, we need to build in incentives for subject matter experts to share with others and the mechanism to make that possible. Maybe it’s regularly scheduled time to work on a Wiki, moderate a discussion forum, or conduct an online web seminar. Can we make teaching others part of everyone’s job instead of leaving it to the trainers?  Whatever way we can do it, we need in some way to provide that social aspect to learning for those who learn that way. Good software will enable this – but an organizational mindset that makes learning everyone’s responsibility is essential.

So these are a few things I learned from The Master Chief.

Now, anybody know what I can learn from Mario?

Share

Articulate Engage 09 – Do the Monkeys Love it?

Posted on by
1

If you want a simple way to interject interactivity into your eLearning courses, check out Articulate Engage.  The folks at Articulate describe Engage as  ”a quick and easy tool that lets you create lean-forward experiences that learners love”.  I’m not exactly sure what lean-forward means ;) — but they’re right on the money with the fast and easy part.

Even a monkey could use it

An intuitive, uncluttered interface makes Engage mind-numbingly simple to use — Not being one who likes to expend unnecessary brain power, this alone makes it a worthwhile purchase.  It’s so easy most people won’t need any instruction to use it — most simians won’t either.monkey_business

Engage comes with ten flash-based interactions that will jazz up even the most basic page turner.  Just pick one, enter your content in the template, press a button, and Bob’s your uncle.  The only challenge, and part of the fun, involves figuring out which interaction to use for your content. Just because an interaction was designed for FAQs doesn’t mean you have to use it for an FAQ.  Articulate provides excellent tutorials, demos, two really great blogs, and online forums to help get the creative juices flowing.

You can publish your content to several formats.  I especially like that you can publish to Microsoft Word.  We use this option a lot as a way to distribute the content for review although we did have some issues with Engage crashing when trying to generate the Word documents.

Here’s a labeled graphic interaction that I put together in about 5 minutes.  It uses the default settings for the colours, fonts, navigation and labels.

engage_default

Click here to see the Engage interaction

We often use the labeled graphic interaction for software training — we insert a screen image and then use the labels to highlight key elements.  The really cool thing is that you can add audio and media (image, video, Flash, even another Engage interaction) to enhance the experience.

If you explore the posted interaction, you’ll see that I nested the Engage interaction within itself a couple of times just for fun.  Some of the other interaction types handle this better but this one should give you a taste of what can be done with just a little imagination.  Ah but I digress.

A little yoga wouldn’t hurt

The thing that makes Engage great — its beautiful simplicity —  also poses a limitation. Take the presentation template for instance.  I can adjust the elements such as the colour scheme and fonts, but I want more flexibility.  Give me the ability to change the style of the player controls, the title bar and import my own buttons and arrows for the labeled and guided interactions.  We rarely use Engage on its own so would give anything (well almost) to be able to hide the title bar when integrating the interaction into a larger course.  It’s funny, you can make the background transparent but not the header bar.

I modified the colour scheme in a guided image interaction to illustrate what I mean.

engage_mods

10 out of 12 monkeys wanna do this

Within each interaction type, there are only a few places to insert text or media. This could be construed as a good thing as it forces consistency and makes it harder to screw up the design.  I find it a little restrictive.  Take my simian (sorry, I mean monkey) example for instance.  I could only add one main image in the labeled graphic interaction.  This meant that I first had to use another tool to combine all my separate monkey pictures into a single image.  I’d rather just insert the separate images and have the flexibility to move them around to get the optimal positioning.

In some interactions, I can’t re-size the imported images, videos or Flash files.  In others, I can.  Why not make them all function the same way?  There is a work around in which I can edit the sizes in the data.xml file that is produced with the published output, but this is inconvenient as I’d have to make this edit every time I publish the file.

There are options to control the playback.  Unfortunately, we rarely use the one that sets the presentation to advance by itself because there is no way for the learner to pause the playback or step back to review something they missed.  Seems to me like something people might want to do.

At the risk of sounding cranky, (I love this product honest), I have to mention the file naming convention.  When publishing an interaction, Engage always names the output file engage.swf and the content folder engage_content.  This isn’t an issue when using Engage with Articulate Presenter, but we often import multiple Engage interactions into other authoring tools such as Lectora.  Each time we publish an interaction, we have to manually rename the output files to give them unique files names; otherwise, they will overwrite one another when exported from the authoring tool.  This makes dealing with revisions a pain.

The importance of the company one keeps

Some products have great potential only to be ruined by poor marketing, sales and support.  Some companies hide their products from view forcing you to buy them before you can even see the list of features.  Here I’d like to give a shout out to Articulate.  This is one awesome company.  Not only do they provide a fully-functional 30-day trial version of  Engage, they do an excellent job of showcasing their products and building a user community. Everything from the design of their website to their excellent demos, blogs and customer support reinforce the message they believe in quality.

How to make a monkey happy

Aside from an unlimited supply of bananas, the following enhancements would really make Engage rock.

  • More interaction types  — an interactive flow chart or work flow diagram would be nice for starters. To their credit, Articulate makes the SDK available. If you have some Flash knowledge and a little imagination you can make your own interactions and even share them with the wider Articulate community. People have not grabbed on to this yet, at least the sharing part anyway. We’d like to hear what other people think might make a good interaction or any feedback from people who have tried working with the SDK.
  • Give us the option to name the output files/folder
  • Give us an option to hide the title bar.
  • Add an easy way to link different Engage presentations together.
  • Add an easy way to synch the audio with graphic labels.
  • How about a rollover option in the labeled graphic interaction?
  • Engage output currently displays at 720×540.  Give us an option to change the default size when we publish.
  • The ability to publish to PDF  or other formats — maybe even where self-playing interactions can be exported to iPod/Blackberry video or any video format for that matter.
  • The ability to publish partially “skinless” (sans border, title, etc.) — this is a feature in Adobe Captivate that I really like.

I’ve prattled on long enough.  Do the monkeys like Engage?   Why yes they do — in fact they love it.

10 out of 12 monkeys like this product

Share