April 16, 2008
I talked about the super-cool online raster-to-vector image converter tool back in January, bragging about the amazing capabilities of this online tool and raving about my favorite feature of all: it was free.
Yes, I said was free.
Alas, capitalism wins again. It is no longer Vector Magic by Stanford. It is now Vector Magic, Inc. And no longer are your online image conversions free. They now cost tokens. And tokens cost money.
Your formerly-free vector conversion will now cost you close to 3 bucks.
Now, I’m all for free enterprise. And I’m all for profiting from one’s own sweat - be it mental or physical. But there’s something about charging for something that was once free that sticks in the craw.
And honestly, $3 seems a bit steep.
For me, working for a Federal agency, getting something like this funded by the government - even at $3 a pop - takes an act of Congress. Seriously. Your government really sweats the small stuff. It’s the big ticket items they aren’t so worried about.
So a for-pay Vector Magic means no more Vector Magic for me.
It was fun while it lasted. Good luck with the whole business thing, guys.
Bah.
Posted in eLearning Development Tools 
No Comments »
April 9, 2008
Adobe unveiled its new Adobe TV site today, offering a variety of video-based instructional sessions (with real talking heads!) focused on using its vast arsenal of creative development tools.
I’ve made the obvious argument several times in the past (An Educated Customer Is a Happy (and Loyal) Customer, Adobe Video Workshop: Adobe Teaches You Adobe, eLearning Is Selling, Hold on, Kawasaki! (And Tippie Too!)) that a significant future trend in eLearning involves companies teaching current (and potential) customers how to use their products. Adobe continues to illustrate (pun?) this trend with the new Adobe TV site.
The line between marketing and education truly is becoming blissfully blurred.
If you use Adobe products (and as an eLearning developer, you almost certainly do), have a look at the new Adobe TV site.
As an appetizer, I highly recommend Caffe Fibonacci - Rufus and Tim’s Digital Kitchen, produced in a classic cooking show format. Educational and entertaining - it hits the eLearning sweet spot! Mmmmm!
Might I even be so bold as to give it an eLearning Hall of Fame nomination? Perhaps I might.
Bon appetit!
Sidenote: hey Adobe, how about ponying up some extra bandwidth and giving us the option of high-definition video? I like the full-screen viewing option, but the available resolution hardly does it justice.
Posted in Adobe, Content, eLearning Hall of Fame 4 Comments »
April 3, 2008
The debate rages among eLearning design professionals about the value of narration in eLearning. How much narration is good? Is it good for all courses? Is it good for any course?
I can’t answer any of those questions conclusively, but I can give you my opinion.
As a learner, I’m a big fan of narrated eLearning (note: when done right - more on that in a moment). For me, narration adds an important human element typically missing in eLearning. My most profound (and most enjoyable) learning experiences in school were found in listening to my favorite teachers or professors, not poring over some dry, lifeless textbook. What makes eLearning any different?
And I tend to see eLearning not as a textbook replacement, but more as a classroom-based teacher replacement. If you have a large quantity of technical information for me to absorb, don’t throw it up on click-through screens in an eLearning course. Just email me a document to read. Or better yet, give me an actual book. It’s faster. It’s easier. It’s less irritating.
Text-heavy eLearning page-turners are a mental turnoff. Period.
There are very few eLearning courses I’ve been involved with (or have taken) that didn’t benefit, or wouldn’t have benefitted, from some verbal narration.
So let’s presume for the sake of argument that narration, in most cases, can be a good thing. And let’s examine some things that can make good narration bad.
When I say “narration,” I don’t mean putting long blocks of text on screen that a narrator reads to me. As a learner, it’s frustrating to have on-screen text narrated verbatim. I (like most people) read much faster than I listen (or better said, I read much faster than the narrator can speak). So my eyes want to read ahead of what the narrator is saying. My brain eventually tunes out the narrator entirely. Either let me listen or let me read; don’t expect that I can successfully do both.
This may be a “no duh” argument to many of you, but it’s exactly what our big-dollar eLearning development vendor often creates for us (my organization, to my dismay, does outsource some of our development work - despite my protests). I may not have a Ph.D in eLearning Design, and I may not get paid $50,000 per delivered course hour, but I usually do know what works and what doesn’t work for me as a learner. And I can tell you that reading on-screen text to me does not work.
My personal experience as a learner is backed up by Richard E. Mayer’s Multimedia Learning, in which he reports that removing spoken text from the screen increases learner retention 28% and learner transfer 79%. Those are significant numbers. So if you’re going to narrate, please don’t dictate to me what I’m reading on the screen. It’s annoying. It’s frustrating. And I’ll be scrambling for the Mute button.
Or the Next button.
Now let’s move past the excessive on-screen text gripe and focus on the narration itself. Is there such a thing as good narration and bad narration? Of course.
A poor-quality narration is obviously a buzzkill. No one wants to hear a SME (or eLearning developer) breathing heavily into a $10 headset microphone patched through his budget-line corporate laptop’s cheap audio circuitry with the janitor vacuuming the office in the background. And no one wants to listen to a mumbler or to someone who sounds like they’re spitting out scripted speech. But hey, it happens. To avoid this type of problem, voice work is often outsourced to a professional. Which, in my personal experience, can create new issues.
Professional narrators in eLearning can (and often do) sound synthetic and unnatural. Too smooth, too polished. Too…er, “professional.” In fact, I think the guy who narrates many of the eLearning courses I’ve experienced is the exact same guy who narrated all those horrible science filmstrips back in school. Filmstrips??? Wow, I’m getting old. But not Filmstrip Narrator Man. That man is ageless! And he is now eLearning Narrator Man.
I wouldn’t in my wildest dreams claim to be a fantastic narrator myself, but I prefer listening to someone who sounds like a real human being (even if it’s a little rough) to some anonymous script-reading automaton who’s trying way too hard to replicate the voiceover for a summertime action movie trailer.
Am I alone in feeling this way?
And don’t get me started about those ridiculous text-to-sythesized-speech services. If you don’t care about your learning material enough to get a real human being to narrate, it must not be important enough for me as a learner to pay attention to it.
Robo-voices should be ostracized by the eLearning development community. Ostracized with extreme prejudice.
“Look Dave, I can sense you’re getting really upset about this eLearning course…”
HAL 9000, the eLearning course narrator.
I would have a hard time believing that any organization doesn’t have enough in-house talent to narrate an eLearning course. Sure, you don’t want Monotone Bob in Accounting ruining your course with his stilted, mind-numbing drone, but Veronica in Marketing has a silky-smooth voice. Or perhaps Jake the eLearning development intern would do. He has great vocal energy and can read out loud without sounding scripted. Hey, why not? “Pull up a microphone, Jake. Afterwards I’ll buy you lunch!”
eLearning narration is not a dramatic reading. It should sound natural. It should sound like, well, a really good instructor teaching a really interesting course.
Some people have the ability to read a script without sounding like they’re reading a script. And all of them aren’t professional voiceover professionals. And some of them are right there in your office! Find them. Use them.
Yes, there will be a bit of equipment and software to buy. No, you can’t record in the middle of the company cafeteria. You’re going to need some quiet space (I do mine at home). You may even want to build a poor man’s portable sound booth. Fortunately, technology has bridged the previously-wide gap between affordability and quality when it comes to audio production, and you can get set up for great-sounding narration work for a few hundred bucks. Seriously. I’ll discuss my own approach in future posts.
Many of you probably do narrate your own eLearning courses. And for that I salute you (if you do it well, of course). For those of you who do tap professional voiceover people, there’s nothing wrong with that. Not at all. But for the sake of learners everywhere (like me), try to find a narrator who knows how to, um, “keep it real.” They are out there. Really.
I’d love to hear some of your experiences with eLearning narration. What’s your approach? What do you like or dislike? Are my gripes simply the lunatic mutterings of a raving narration-obsessed madman?
Please share. I can take it.
Sidenote: and please, if you do use a professional narrator, please don’t include some cheesy stock photo of a foxy model and pretend she is my instructor.
“Hi. I’m Carmen at Corporate HQ. And not only am I a knockout with perfect teeth and a professional headshot, but I’ll also be teaching you about our company’s ISO 9001 quality management system today. With my sultry, yet flawless, professional narrator’s voice.”
Puh-lease.
It’s just insulting.
Posted in Audio, Rants, eLearning Design 11 Comments »
April 1, 2008
Do not miss 5 Secret Tips from an E-Learning Pioneer on Tom Kuhlmann’s (of Articulate) The Rapid E-Learning Blog.
You’ll LOL. You’ll cry. You’ll ROFL.
Sadly, this spoof is less ridiculous than much of the “serious” corporate training I’ve seen.
Happy April Fools’ Day to all.
Posted in Uncategorized No Comments »
March 24, 2008
OK, time to lay down some cold, hard truth. Anyone who has used both Apple Keynote and Microsoft PowerPoint for presentation work knows that Keynote absolutely, positively kicks PowerPoint’s trash to the curb when it comes to the quality of its visuals. Yes, PowerPoint has more widgets, gizmos, gadgets, and doodads, yet it still manages to pump out content that looks, well, sorta primitive. You’d think after all these versions of PowerPoint that Microsoft would finally figure it out. And I had high hopes for PowerPoint 2007. Apple had blazed a shiny trail with Keynote - surely Microsoft would, um, “pull a Microsoft” and duplicate it, right?
Sadly, I was doomed to disappointment.
Yes, there are some nice new features in PP 2007. Great features, even (layer management is a true blessing). Unfortunately, the “ribbon” interface continues to befuddle me. But ultimately, PowerPoint still doesn’t come close to Keynote in what really matters: its output.
Enter the new Web-based presentation builder, SlideRocket. SlideRocket is built upon Adobe’s AIR foundation and promises Keynote-quality slides and animations from a browser-based development tool.
So while creating online presentations isn’t necessarily of much interest to many eLearning developers (and to those who wail “Bah, PowerPoint isn’t eLearning!” I have a few words for you in a future post), imagine being able to snag some of these beautiful Flash-based animations, created quickly and easily without Flash skills via a Web-based tool, and insert them into your eLearning course via your development app of choice. Yes, it sounds delicious to me too.
My development app of choice, as I’ve mentioned before, is often Articulate Presenter (and Engage). Now, Presenter is limited in the number (and quality) of PowerPoint animations it can replicate in Flash. A limitation I had always attributed to Flash, not Presenter. In fact, despite my secret prayers for an OS X version of Presenter for Keynote (hey, a guy can dream), I always assumed Flash to be the weakest link, simply not able to allow Keynote-quality animations. However, seeing what SlideRocket is doing with Flash is truly impressive. My blame may have been misdirected. Or, to be completely fair, I should just say “the times, they are a changing.”
If PowerPoint + Articulate can’t give me the beautiful visuals I strive for, perhaps SlideRocket + Articulate can. And ultimately, what’s stopping a Web-based app like SlideRocket from eventually becoming an Articulate alternative? Why, nothing at all!
Maybe I can’t run Articulate stuff natively in OS X with Keynote-quality visuals. Not now. Probably not ever. But will a Web-based tool like SlideRocket someday give me that ability? Again, a guy can dream.
In the meantime, it’s Windows XP (Ack!) running PowerPoint (Ugh!) and Articulate via virtualization using VMware Fusion on my Mac. A kludgy and annoying solution. Visually less than refined. And hopefully not forever.
So check out SlideRocket. And perhaps even sign up for the public beta if you’re feeling like a trailblazer.
Sidenote: to the cynics who said Web-based apps would never equal desktop apps, prepare to eat much crow over the next few years.
Posted in Presentations, eLearning Design, eLearning Development Tools 1 Comment »
March 19, 2008
Tom Kuhlmann has an excellent post on the importance of visual design in eLearning (my personal driving philosophy and the reason for the eQuixotic blog) on his Rapid E-Learning Blog. Tom rightly points out the importance of visual appearance of your materials to your learners - that a visually shoddy course may immediately be perceived by the learner as a “course not worth taking.” I can’t agree with this strongly enough. I can usually tell by the first screen of an eLearning course if it’s going to be a course I’ll enjoy or despise because I can immediately tell how much regard the designer had for me as a learner by how much attention he or she paid to the look and feel of the course.
One commenter to Tom’s post mentioned it’s possible to go “overboard” on making the presentation look good. I disagree with that general premise, based on my definition of “overboard” and “looking good.” I don’t believe that extra “bells and whistles” per se equate to beautiful design - in fact, they are often its very antithesis. And I don’t agree that “rapid development” must be equated with quick, sloppy visuals (though, unfortunately, some people appear willing to live with that implied reputation). Nor that “quick” visuals need be “sloppy” at all.
I feel an example is in order.
Cabel Sasser, legendary Mac software developer and visual designer extraordinaire, gave Coca-Cola the nod for Best Packaging Redesign in his 2007 Cabel Yay! Awards (CYA).
Over the years, the classic Coke can had devolved into an eyeball-assaulting mess of visual “bells and whistles” that had no real point or purpose. These artifacts were added simply for the sake of adding them. Coca-Cola recently (thankfully) scrapped that mess and went back to the basics.
The result: brilliant visual purity.
(Nod to Cabel for the image as well)
Now from a design perspective, which of these took more “work?” Obviously the can with the 3D bubbles, the extra swooshes, the multiple colors and gradations, the drop-shadowed text - all unnecessary (and, note, work-intensive) visual noise.
Simplicity is beauty. God is not only in the details, but in the lack therein.
Yes, you can strip the senseless bells and whistles (or bubbles and swooshes) from your eLearning design while still achieving a visual appeal that will pull your learners in and hold them there until the end of your course. Once eLearning developers finally accept the fact that this not only can be done, but must be done, eLearning can start to achieve some real legitimacy with our learners.
Smart AND good looking? Absofriggenlutely! The two are not mutually exclusive, despite what some academics (who wear ugly eLearning (or ugly anything) as a badge of honor) want you to believe. You can have the best of both worlds. Hey, Natalie Portman graduated from Harvard!
Our learners deserved beautifully-designed courses. Always. Whether we create them rapidly or slowly, well, that’s entirely up to us.
And Tom, anyone with a disdain for Screen Beans is a lifelong friend of mine.
Posted in eLearning Design 3 Comments »
March 14, 2008
I recently received an email newsletter from TechSmith regarding their positive experience at Macworld in January. You’re right TechSmith, Mac users are a “great bunch!”
Now they are asking for feedback (via an online survey) from Mac users regarding Camtasia Studio (currently under development) and SnagIt (no news of plans for development yet, but I’m really hoping it happens).
If you’re a Mac-using eLearning developer (or a “Mac-curious” eLearning developer), please take a minute to give them some feedback - which will hopefully not only help them build a better Camtasia for Mac, but will inspire them to undertake a Mac version of SnagIt too.
Links:
Camtasia Studio for Mac survey
SnagIt for Mac survey
Posted in eLearning Development Tools 3 Comments »
March 5, 2008
eQuixotic is not a blog for or about graphic designers. But it is a blog for eLearning designers who really need to think more like graphic designers.
I’m not a graphic designer by training, nor technically even by profession, though graphic design is what I hope to do in my next life. Design of all kinds fascinates me. I love to study visual design and dabble in it whenever I can. Yes, I’m a hack. A noob. A rank amateur. A poseur of the highest order. But I hope that broadening my understanding of visual design translates to my eLearning design work (and why wouldn’t it?).
This will not be news to serious graphic designers, but many eLearning designers may not be aware of the documentary film Helvetica by Gary Hustwit. The film explores the history of the ubiquitous typeface Helvetica and the massive impact it’s had on visual communication worldwide. It’s a fascinating exploration of the influence the physical appearance of words has on their content: their meaning (both implied and inferred), ability to communicate, and power to persuade.I heard about this film some time ago, but only recently remembered to add it to my Netflix queue. Upon doing so, I was intrigued to see a Play button under the typical Add button on the Netflix page. While I knew Netflix had added the ability to view movies online, I hadn’t tried that option before. Of course upon clicking the button I immediately got the standard “this feature only works on Windows” disclaimer (thank you, Microsoft DRM), so I fired up VMWare and Windows XP, where I found out I had to upgrade a handful of programs (IE, Windows Media Player, who knows what else) to even get the thing to run (nope, wouldn’t work in Firefox either). Microsoft lock-in? Never heard of it! Bah. After going through the annoying and lengthy update routine, I was finally viewing the film.
Wait, I’ve digressed into an irritated anti-Microsoft rant. Sorry. Back to the topic at hand.
I sat glued to my screen for the next 80+ minutes, thoroughly enjoying this film. Beautifully shot and lovingly told, the story surprised me with its depth and appeal. I had no idea a typeface could take the leading role in a film, and do it so brilliantly. Particularly entertaining was watching how passionate both the Helvetica-loving and Helvetica-hating graphic designers are about its place in modern visual design (including some rants born from the universal designer spite toward the Microsoft-blessed ripoff of Helvetica, Arial). You could practically see the spittle fly in some of the interviews. (Next on Fox: When Graphic Designers Attack!)
And I had no idea just how ubiquitous this typeface has become in the past few decades. It’s everywhere.
Literally.
If you are an eLearning designer and you care at all about the visual impact of your learning content (and you should!), please buy/borrow/rent this film. It will surely increase your understanding and appreciation of visual design, something sadly neglected in most of the eLearning I’ve seen.
And if watching this film helps deter you from using Comic Sans in your eLearning courses, even better.
Addendum: for more typographical deliciousness, check out Typographica’s Favorite Typefaces of 2007.
Posted in Presentations, eLearning Design 3 Comments »
March 2, 2008
ASTD TechKnowledge 2008 San Antonio is over. After having had a little time to think and reflect, here’s my overall review of the event.
I don’t know if the crummy facilities last year (the dusty, smelly, doomed Riviera Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas) soured my overall impression of TechKnowledge 2007, but TechKnowledge 2008 seemed to be a definite improvement in most areas (until Day 3 anyway - more on that in a moment). The facilities were infinitely better, the frequent meals provided by ASTD were a nice bonus, and the sessions seemed better organized and of higher quality. The opening keynote by David Pogue (I’m a big fan!), while not specifically related to eLearning, was energizing and highly entertaining. I felt his pain upon learning that his Apple laptop hard drive had crashed the morning of the event and he had to scramble to recreate his presentation in PowerPoint (ack!) on a borrowed Dell laptop (ack!). Once you’ve used Apple Keynote for presentations, you realize just how crude PowerPoint is in the visuals (and live delivery) department.
But Pogue managed to pull it off, sloppy substitute slideshow and all, capping off his speech with some wildly entertaining musical parodies. Gifted writer, singer, pianist, comedian, technology luminary - what can’t this guy do? I hate you, David Pogue.
My burning jealousy aside, it was a great start to the conference. Well done, ASTD.
The sessions were, as they always are at events like these, hit or miss, but I generally enjoyed the sessions I attended and found most to be of value.
Dr. Michael Allen of Allen Interactions was inspirational, as always. I agree 100% with his comment that 90% of eLearning should be thrown away. Amen, Dr. Allen. In fact, his bleak perspective on the state of eLearning today echoes my own, which provides the foundation for my blog.
Tom Kuhlmann of Articulate gave a great workshop on adding interactions within PowerPoint for publishing in Articulate Presenter. I love that application!
I also met Tony Karrer of TechEmpower and the eLearning Technology blog (hey, we both say tomayto!), who facilitated a discussion on Web 2.0 collaborative knowledge-sharing technologies. I would like desperately to implement wikis in my organization, but significant obstacles exist, including a particularly change-averse breed of IT Nazis and a management culture that is often hostile to the democratization of information.
Now for a personal rant. You’d think as adult professionals we’d have moved beyond the “sit on the back row like skulking teens” mentality. It’s silly to have a large room with people scattered throughout, where empty seats (mostly toward the front) are legion, yet with those at the back still complaining that they can’t hear. Shameless. It’s like freshman year 101 studies again. Bah.
The Adobe Captivate 3 workshop was a revelation for computer simulation training. I’ve used Camtasia plenty, but Captivate appears to greatly streamline the process of doing instructional screencasts, and the latest version includes some very impressive additions. I must procure a copy of this software. Which, in my organization, means at least a year of begging and groveling. Sigh.
Note to Adobe: TechSmith is working on a Mac version of Camtasia. Are you going to let them show you up, or are you going to conjure up a Mac version of Captivate?
In the exhibition area, I was extremely impressed with the Unison eLearning collaborative development tool by Rapid Intake. So impressed that I need to save my thoughts on what I saw of the product for a separate blog post. Stay tuned for that.
Sadly, the event ended with more whimper than bang, with a classic final-day conference letdown. Why do half of the participants always disappear before the final day of a conference? (Note to self: perhaps it’s because they already know about the classic final-day conference letdown?)
Both sessions I attended on the final day included extensive (and worthless) breakout group activities. Aaaarghhh! Why must conference presenters punish us like this? I didn’t fly all the way to San Antonio to learn how Jane Doe from Lake Okeefenokee School District storyboards her eLearning courses. I just didn’t. Is it too much to expect that the “experts” hired to present at these sessions actually be the ones teaching us something and not relying on us to teach ourselves?
Note (plea) to ASTD: if presenters plan to include significant group breakout activities in their session, please require that they warn us in the session description. So I can go elsewhere. I hate to sound harsh and unkind, but geez - can’t we move past these trite group activities already?
And talk about ending on a sour note: the closing keynote was attended by an embarrassingly small number of participants, scattered in pitifully tiny clusters throughout the large auditorium. The motivational speaker (?) caused a collective rolling of eyes (at least within my group) with hokey cliches and flowery platitudes about positive action. Ugh. I thought we were all going to be asked to link arms and sing or something. Frankly, I would have preferred watching a video of David Pogue’s opening keynote again.
To add insult to injury, we were hurried out of the auditorium with a thumping salute to yesteryear, Who Let the Dogs Out (sadly, I am not making this up). Bleh. Wouldn’t it have been easier (and less humiliating) for the emcee to just scream “Get out!” into the microphone?
Nevertheless, we got the message loud and clear and scurried back to our hotel rooms, shaking our heads and wondering how things went so wrong at the end. What a downer.
Did anyone else share my final-day malaise, or am I just being a Negative Nancy?
I’m still waiting for the iPhone unveiling at Macworld moment at one of these eLearning conferences. Something that makes me sit up and say “Whoa!” Perhaps that is too much to expect, but I’m clinging to the hope of seeing something truly game-changing one of these days.
So the conference for me was a mixed bag. Days one and two, thumbs up. Day three, thumbs down. Way down.
TechKnowledge 2009? I’ll have to think about it.
Sidenote: did I mention that midway through the conference, I received an email from our IT department informing me that my entire training website (my primary job is development and maintenance of our training website) had mysteriously disappeared completely from the server?!? If you were at the conference and heard a shriek of utter horror and misery on Wednesday morning, that was me. Sorry about that. Thank heaven for daily backups. And thank heaven IT actually followed their daily backup protocol. A pleasant surprise indeed. So if parts of this review appear to be a little cranky, well, perhaps that was the cause of it.
Actually, dealing with the website crisis over the phone allowed me to escape some of the breakout group activities and part of the concluding keynote. Hey, sometimes bad news can be good news!
Addendum: am I piling on to note that the closing keynote not only featured a pseudo breakout activity (ack!), but the handout featured a Screen Bean as well? Sigh.
Posted in eLearning Design 6 Comments »
February 20, 2008
Common Craft are a Seattle-based husband and wife team (Lee & Sachi LeFever) with a distinct eLearning development style: they use hand-drawn paper cutouts and real live human fingers (!) for their instructional videos in lieu of fancy schmancy digital graphics and effects.Or, simply put:
We focus on simplicity, creativity and clear explanations to create videos that stick.
Nope, no abstract adult learning theory to get in the way of the message here. Just pen, paper, scissors, and a video camera. Sometimes perhaps a bit of string. This is as old school as eLearning gets. And it works!I don’t envy them all that tedious paper animation work. But I salute their unique and memorable approach. And their lengthy client list full of companies looking for something other than the same old, same old.In eLearning (and everything else), creativity is beautiful.
Posted in Presentations, eLearning Hall of Fame 1 Comment »
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I'm an eLearning developer and presentation designer looking for (and striving to create) eLearning and presentations that delight as well as educate and inform. Please join me.