Audacity

Richard E. Mayer, the author of Multimedia Learning, suggests we use narration in multimedia productions because it increases learning when animation is also used.

Audacity is an open source tool to use for recording narration. It offers:

• Record live audio.
• Convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs.
• Edit Ogg Vorbis, MP3, WAV or AIFF sound files.
• Cut, copy, splice or mix sounds together.
• Change the speed or pitch of a recording.
• And more! See the complete list of features.

In the past, I have used Captivate but the quality is not quite there with Captivate. Audacity provides a easy approach to recording, editing and exporting audio into multimedia presentations.

Skpe

Isn't life about conversations? We converse, we learn... We converse, we grow... We converse, we connect.

I can image the delight people enjoyed when they first used the telephone. Hearing the voice of a loved one far away likely made them feel immediately connected. I feel like I was able to part take in that same feeling of delight just last night when my mother, who lives in California, and I used Skype for free last night. We chatted about our day, plans for Christmas, work....everything we normally talk about except I could see her. My daughter was amazed to see her "Grammy." We even got the chance to see my mom's dog, Chaco, taking a snooze!

Web video conferencing uses technology as a way to converse and connect to the community. I learned that my mom really benefited from seeing me and my daughter as she lives alone in California.

There's really potential for using products like Skype in education, the workplace and personal lives! At work, it would be cool if a learner could use Skype to call me instead of a phone. We could discuss the problem and find a solution f2f in a convenient and efficient way. If this happens, maybe people would begin to see technology as problem solver!

Scenario Based Instruction

I am thinking about the importance of including scenario-based instruction in eLearning content. 

I read on the CITT site, they suggest using "scenario-based practice every 3-6 screens." 

Scenario-based instructions gives the student the change to apply the information in a meaningful way. For example, the content is about medical procedures to employ based on a patient's condition. A scenario can be presented to the learner about a patient with particular symptoms. The learner can choose the best option in which to employ, then based off their selection, feedback is provided. 

Scenario-based instructions are excellent options to provide learner-centered, active and authentic content. A main challenge is of course, coming up with the scenario and utilizing the right kind of authoring tools to develop the scenario.  

Instruction Package

What does it mean to deliver a powerful instructional message for online learning to our learners? 

Should we have animation, if so what kind? Does audio make the presentation better? How do we include images that enhance learning? Do we need to include a print component? 

Lots of questions....

Animation can enhance learning, and it can also be a distraction. We want to catch our audience's attention without distracting them from important instructional intent. Using animation to draw the learner to important aspects of the training is helpful as long as it doesn't confuse or take the learn off topic.

Choosing the right music can be a challenge since everyone seems to have a preference.  Sound should compliment the instruction and come in the form of narration, sound clips that supplement the learning topic...one might want to stay away from background music!

Images can speak a thousand words, but words too can compliment an image: they can be used together. Use images that add to the instructional message, don't use images a fillers. Allowing the audience to breath and enjoy whitespace can create a stage for learning, not seem empty and void. 

We would like it if we could remember everything we are suppose to learn, but our magnificent brains don't work that way, they have a tendency to forget. Providing a printable handout that reviews "key" points to help retention and provide just-in-time training.

Lots of stuff to think about...sometimes theses questions answer themselves as long as we can answer the most important question: who are our learners?

More cool tools

We saw skrbl and Picnik and Mogulus and Imagination Cubed.

There are many cool tools that we can use to design instructional messages or used to get our learners excited about an online class.

This week I was particularly interested in using Picnik as a way to edit my photos. It seems you can easily use the application to fancy up pictures.

In my free time not working or studying, I am going to play with Mogulus. It is so cool that one could create their own CNN.

I am going to show Isabela, my daughter, Imagination Cubed and see what an eight year old thinks. I think I will start with an email to her that I drew!

5650 Historical Timeline

I had some "lively" drill instructors teach classes in boot camp. They would always having an attention grabber of some sort, then they would drill down a long list of terminal and enabling learning objects. I am curious how the military put their rubber stamp on the I.D. field? Specifically, how did the military create processes and procedures for I.D.?

eLearning Management: Process, People & Product

To be responsible leaders in eLearning, we must know the roles and responsibilities for our projects.

Having a clear understanding on the process will allow for a smoother role-out and ensures content delivery and content maintenance meets the projects goals.

Having the right people fulfilling the plan's design ensures the best instruction, supportive and administrative services are delivered to the learner. For the learner to take advantage of the training, a marketing campaign should also be deployed.

The final product needs a strong foundation. Having a project plan, storyboard, learning materials and revising materials are vital to a successful eLearning project.

Know your three P's = Process, People and Product.

Cool Tools Con't..

Ning

Is a social networking site for just about everything. You can join a social networking group of like minded people to share ideas and have discussion on topics that of interested to you and your group. I joined the Ning Instuctional Design eLearning Group. It's my hope this group is lively and offers great discourse on eLearning. I joined last night, thus far not much new action. 

Pownce

Pownce allows us to send stuff like pictures, files, music messages and links to our contacts. This could be of use to groups of people wanting to share content freely with friends, family and colleagues.

Twitter

Not the most intuitive application to use. The concept to follow someone means that you can read their "twitter" posts. That's pretty straight forward, but there's not much instructions to inform you of this. Twitter posts are a lot of fun to read. People post crazy, funny stuff, like how much weight they have gained over the last week, to their opinion that our weekly reading is making them fall asleep. This stuff is way better than email! 

Cool Tools

We have been reviewing and getting "to know" about the latest and greatest tools being used on the Internet. As we know the days of communicating via email and instant messaging has given away to more interactive web tools that are redefining how we communicate.

Kindling

Using Kindling you can share your latest and greatest ideas with your inner circle. Everyone can add to the discussion and vote on the best ideas. Using this tool we certainly can record and voice our innovations. I think this is a valuable tool and I am going to share to see what other's at work think.

Skype

I have been hearing a lot of hype about Skype. This tool can put to use right away with those family members who live out of state. Skype users can talk to each other for free. I am wondering if online learners are using Skype in their online classes?

Audacity

I have recorded audio using Captivate for eLearning projects. From my experience, the quality is mainly poor due to the fact that the frequency changes between recordings and editings. I have also heard poor feedback from other eLearning developers who want to use other recording software besides Captivate. Other experienced developers recommend Audacity, I am looking forward to try it out!

ClassSpot

This idea might be the wave of the future. Students are able to interact and actively engage in real-time with content that is being displayed by the teacher. Teachers can present a slideshow and students can share their input with other students. This is coined as classroom 2.0. It sounds exciting! Will there come a day in our schools when children use laptops as much as they use a pencils and crayons? Surely presentations that are being developed for the presenter and not the learner will be quickly replaced by presentations being developed for learner interactions!

Reflections on Technology (RSS and Blogs)

Learning any new technology can be challenging for the learners, as an instructors we can forget the challenges we faced when learning new technology. When I was learning how to use Dreamweaver I was frustrated because my menu bars kept showing up in different places when I created a new webpage. I followed the same steps each time I set-up a new page, but the brain-busting misplacement of menu bars kept me bewildered. After building my pages and spending hours trying to rearrange my menu bars, I finally realized that I should have been using the "save as" command and not have been setting up new pages from scratch. Thankful I had some humor left in me that day as I rolled on the ground laughing in the simplicity of my solution.

This might not be the best example of someone learning new technology, but I think it does show that what may seem a "no-brainer" to us, might not seem so transparent to the learner of new technology.

We as instructors and introducers of those technologies should take a step back and remember what it was like to just learn about new technologies--might we start a journal now so we can better recall what it's like to be a novice--before we expect others to start using them.

There are barriers to overcome when learning how to apply new technologies to classrooms. Examples of those technologies are Blogs and RSS feeds. They can help learners grow through reflection. They provide ways to share information, which improves professionalism and increased quality. They increase creativity through self-expressive writing and conversations. But, they can't do these things by themselves. Blogs and RSS feeds are becoming more popular in eLearning, but they are not a "no-brainer" like email.

One possible solution is to create a dashboard or learner portal of some sort. Having one-stop-learning where the student can access webpages that teaches them how to use certain technology, best-practice examples of those new technologies. This dashboard should guide the learner in a step-by-step fashion and grow in content as the learner becomes more proficient.

Learning should be fun and challening, but not in the way that leaves you rolling on the floor laughing at your self. Most of all, learning technology should be be frusterating or confusing.

Ideation Blog: What's Up with all this technology

I am constantly surprised by all the new applications and web tools that are becoming available for use. As they come available, I am also constantly wondering "How can these tools be used in instructional design projects?"

Last week I was introduced to song playlist sites where one can create their personal song list to be shared openly or used personally. I also reviewed historical speeches, creative commercials, poetic movies, appealing graphs and other beautifully developed formats to look at what do they have to with instructional design and messaging.

I feel that we as designers of instruction just might need to look at the creative possibilities that can be explored when developing instructional materials. Using music or capitalizing on the creative play of typography should be fully employed. So, then, instructional materials should also be eye candy and ear candy. I think of a reason they ought not be.

Instructional Approaches to Online Teaching

Teaching online and learning online is a new to many individuals and new to the realm of education. For years learning has come from face-to-face interaction. The with the advent of a mailing system distant learning emerged when ponies carried letters to and from sender and receiver. Much of learning has come from books and only now are we thinking about how to write for the web rather than print.

In week six's discussion we investigated what kind of instructional approaches we should use for our EdWeb. People once again gravitated towards online discussions, how to motivate learners to get involved with learning, using images to transform information.

Sheri Trapp-Cordova posted a suggestion to use a map instead of text bullet points to emphasize "the importance of history in the forming the border culture of El Paso, maybe I could create a map of the area and visually show the border moving over time in relation to El Paso. This format might make it easier for learners to recall, or absorb the ideas of a changing border and what happens when one culture/nation is absorbed into another nation."

One topic I have really found fascinating is how Flash can enhance learning. Make things that happened long ago to be able to be relived, like the border between Mexico and the U.S. (even writing this blog allows be to revist discussions that took place a month ago, even now I am making new insights and connections, this is not possible with f2f instruction, even for the best note taker).

My best contribution was in my posting of an article. Here's the link. It is a study from Harvard University's School of Business regarding how to cultivate communities of practice to manage knowledge.

Although I didn't have the chance to comment on the article in my post, I hope that other's found it valuable. I hope to use some of the principles in my EdWeb and f2f training. One analogy I enjoy is creating a community of practice to function much like a park. In a park there's places to have open-space to large gatherings, closed-space to have a bench nested near flowers to intimate conversations, secluded space for reflection.

I think instructional learning technologies can allow us as the designer to create a website, much like a park space, so our learners can come into a space where their learning needs are met on many levels: places for vibrate discussion, places for reflection, places for self-paced learning, places where the images, much like scenery, can do the same as a thousand words

Online Teaching Techniques

In week five we discussed different online teaching strategies. The discussion surrounded how were going to engaged our audience using methods from Benders book. Some people were interested in how they were going to team teach the Web Conference together: have some people monitor certain activities? Or take a more collabrative approach and manage the discussions and activities together?

One topic that I gravated towards was chats. Specifically, how could chats be both reflective (to move learners up Bloom's cognitive objectives) at the same time not so overwhelming that people would have a difficult time keeping a focused conversation going all the while other people are trying to do the same thing but with another topic. Basically, too make people can spoil a learning opportunity just as too may cooks can spoil a receipt, if too much is added things can get confusing.

Bender devoted an entire section to synchronous learning, which was my Web Conference topic. I was inspired by the concept of using chats to display best practices in onlince teaching and so that learners could join conversation with others who were also interested in the same topic, thus to avoid side-bar conversations. My post was regarding that this might not be possible. Chad wondered if it could be? Dave Young said we could do it in Moodle but it might be challenging. I took this back to my team and we thought it was best to not use Moodle but keep everything within Breeze, since this is where we were going to present the synchronous event.

With this in mind, my team delivered a synchronous event in Breeze in which we had break-out discussions. This was easily accomplished with some planning. We introduced different types of synchronous tools and how they could be used using a PPT and VoIP. Then we build pods that displayed questions about the tools. We asked the participants to vote on the topic they'd like to join to make sure the number balanced out per discussion. Then we opened up the pods and have people chat for about 10 minutes. It was a great interactive experience and fun to faciliatate.

I enjoyed week's five topic discussion. I am not sure we would have had such a great interactive Web Conference if it wasn't for the threaded discussion of week five.

Formative Evaluation

What's a formative evaluation? Basically, when a instructional project is still in the design stage you seek out key individuals to provide you feedback on your design ideas. "Formative" refers to the beginning, like formative years of childhood. In designing a instructional product, the formative evaluator can can include people such as the subject matter experts or others knowledgeable about the topic, but most importantly, they should also include people who are going to be your target audience. That way, you are comparing carrots to carrots and not apples to oranges, like SMEs to a general learner.

In designing educational websites, formative evaluations take on a different form, no pun intended. To get week four's topic going, Dave Young asked us what was 'pining around in our heads' about our EdWeb. Many people reverted to their navigation. I guess I was a little behind the curve because I was more worried about how I was going to my project out to my intended audience, how was I going to sell my project to an organization so they thought it was going to benefit them.

My best contribution was "After listening to Dr. Tessmer's interview, I thought how much our EdWeb's are like a living document that under goes intensive editing. I wrote an honor's thesis in college, but the web project has many more considerations: navigability, writing for web readers, releasing to hundreds of learners at one time. One needs to pay strict attention to detail, understand web-authoring tools, and now solicit people for formative evaluations!"

Dave liked the idea of a living document, "Lots of great insights in what you wrote, Kerry! I particularly like the phrase "living document." Questions are going to crop up constantly that will need to be answered and if your approach is to be nimble and use formative evaluation effectively to answer those questions, you'll do well."

I learned much from the formative evaluation process. Life knowing which people to solicit and getting people to actually get hands-on practice before building the website.

Looking back at that conversation, I think this blog posting is like a summative evaluation of my formative evaluation.

Facilitating Online Discussions

Timing, Motivation, Organization, Focus, Patience, Silence...what makes or breaks when it comes to facilitation online?

There was lots of interactive discussion in week's three threaded discussion on the topic of facilitating online discussions. In fact, there were a total of 43 posting! Any novice online participant might feel daunted to join the discussion as if they were being asking to scale a 14,000 foot mountain when out on their first trek. Basically, how can we arouse vibrant discussion that creates a collaborative student-to-student interaction? And, how do we react when there is no response to the discussion?

There were many great suggestions. Dave Beatie suggested to use Keller's ARCS model to stir motivation--ACRS.

• Attention. Gain their attention!
• Relevance. What's in it for me? Let them know the answer to that question
• Confidence. Being able to put newly learned knowledge into action
• Satisfaction. Feeling fulfilled and reward from the learning experience.

Dave Young even chimed into the dialog by responding to posting surrounding the need to time the when to post questions, how to organize the discussion and how have patience.
" I decided to watch this thread play out because the variety of ideas being generated were very interesting! Lack of response is definitely something that can drive you crazy as a facilitator. The "wait time" strategy is important and tough to master in an online environment because of the lack of clues about why there is silence."

My best contribution regarded having a topics agenda. Know what questions to ask and when you are going to ask them. Provide the participants with a time-line for responding to the question to keep them motivated to be involved and to also know when it's time to move on to the next topic. I didn't post this in the discussion, but I also think it is important to let the learners have the option to post in older discussion knowing that the other participants might not check the posting but you as a facilitator will respond.

I offered up some facilitation tips:
"'Asking Questions That Stimulate Discussion
Asking questions in an online discussion is a bit different than in a face-to-face environment. In a face-to-face seminar the facilitator can immediately adjust his or her questioning strategies if the audience doesn’t respond to the first question asked. In an asynchronous conference, the discussion can fizzle quickly if the right question isn’t asked at the beginning. Here are some tips on asking questions to stimulate online discussion early:

• Clarify the outcome objectives for the discussion.The first question(s) should immediately start participants thinking about the important issues in the topic.
  

• Limit the number of questions that are asked at the beginning of a discussion to one or at most two. Participants will lose interest if they are expected to respond to too many issues in one discussion. If there are more than two aspects of the topic that need to be explored to meet the outcome objective for the discussion, give participants permission to respond only to one, or at most two, of the questions you have posed. Even better, ask questions later in the discussion that introduce different aspects of the topic that need to be considered.

• Ask open-ended questions to which there can be more than one “correct” response

• Ask for participant opinions on a controversial aspect of the topic or invite participants to describe their experience relevant to the topic.

• Avoid asking questions that can be answered directly from the readings or which can be answered completely by one keen respondent."

Link to the PDF: http://files.myweb.med.ucalgary.ca/files/132/files/unprotected/FacilitatorGuideSept03.pdf

Richard Stewart added that "asking the student to complete the question" is also a great way to stimulate responses.

Online facilitation is both a science and a mixture of natural human interaction. The magic is how to use what works in natural dialog in online collaboration.