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I know that it's easy to be cynical about Microsoft, but every now and then they do produce great things for free! Photo Story 3 is one of those great things, and yes it is free!

Photo Story 3 a piece of free software that you can download to your PC and use to create multimedia photo stories complete with images, transitions, effects, text, background music and your own voice narration.

• Here's a 2 minute Flash movie showing you how to use it and some of the features.
• Here is a movie I created with it to show off my Second Life office. There are two versions
• Silent with better image quality (2.1 Mb wmv)
• Lower quality one with music (500k wmv)

I know there are a lot of online Web 2.0 ap that do all of this too, but for those of us with slower, unreliable or more expensive connections, it's nice to have a bit of software that can do the job for us without using any bandwidth at all (apart from downloading it of course).

You should be able to download Photo Story 3 from here.
It's a 5 Mb download, so that shouldn't take too long even over a dial up connection.

How to use this with students
You can use it to create multimedia materials for your students, whether is for use in class or to take home for homework. Here's some things you can do:

• Create some narratives for them to view
• Create narratives which illustrate grammar points
• Create a series of pictures and words which illustrate different sounds from the Phonemic alphabet

Having software like this that can produce a professional looking end product can be really motivating for students and really help them to push themselves to produce accurate polished work. Here's some things you can get your students to do:
It's ideal for presenting the results of project work.

• Get the students to take photographs and upload them to tell their own stories to the class
• What they do each day
• What they did at the weekend / on holiday
• Stories about their family
• Get some pictures from Flickr and get the students to order them and create a story around them.

What I liked about it

• It's free
• Easy to use and quick to learn
• Really liked some of the filter effects
• Liked the way you can easily create a wide range of background musics
• File sizes were quite reasonable and exports pretty easily for a number of different devices

What I wasn't so keen on

• It's a shame that it's so limited in the the formats that it exports to (mainly different sizes of wmv) , but I guess there are plenty of converters you could use if you wanted to change it for an i-pod or something like that.
• I also thought that a bit more control over how the text was placed over the images would have been really handy.
• There's no version for MAC of course, but if you have a MAC you won't need this as you get lots of nice stuff that does all this for you ready installed when you buy it.

Photo Story 3 isn't a revolutionary piece of software by any means, but I'm sure it can be used to really engage your students in some enjoyable learning.

Hope it works for you

Best

Nik

I’m on the flight back from ASTD TechKnowledge and thought I should try to capture some initial thoughts from the conference and sessions while it was still fresh and before life clouds my memory…

I did two sessions and face time at the conference. I also had some really good lunch conversations. I found that one-on-one and small group is a fantastic way to have meaningful discussions. It’s too bad that there aren’t ways to do more of this at a conference.Are there models for this that people have seen work at different kinds of conferences?

I need to go back and look at Better Conferences, Be an Insanely Great Professional Conference Attendee to see if there were suggestions.

I read the evaluations from both sessions before I left. I always appreciate written comments thanks to the people who spent the time to write something. By in large I got very favorable evaluations on the first session and a mixed bag on the second.

The first session was an Introduction to eLearning 2.0. The slides were similar to eLearning 2.0 Presentation - ISPI Los Angeles.

I felt this session when pretty well. The audience had diverse experiences, backgrounds which always makes it challenging. Generally people were familiar with what a Wiki was, but few had ever edited a Wiki page or seen it done. At least I showed that in my session.

About 15 out of 130 were bloggers – likely on personal topics – one was politics. Only 2 people said they read my blog. Yikes.

Almost no one was familiar with social bookmarking.

How much ground can you really cover in an hour? I tried to go all the way from the overall landscape to individual tools back to the new landscape that is eLearning 2.0. That was a big challenge.

I’m going to do a similar presentation in June at ASTD ICE in San Diego. I’m going to try to work on improving the flow a bit. Otherwise, I’m not sure what I’ll change.

The Second Session was intended to be a discussion session that was eLearning 2.0 - Applications and Implications - a follow-up to the first session. I used suggestions from Conference Breakout Sessions to help me design this session.

As I said, the second session was not rated as high. I’m going to write a follow-up post around the discussion in the session and some other more detailed thoughts. But some high level thoughts... Oh, and I just saw that Kevin Jones posted his thoughts around the session: TK08 - Tony Karrer and Implementation of Social Learning.

Challenges / Mistakes

1. Needed a better session description. It was not clear that this was a discussion, Q&A with relatively little presentation.
2. I was planning for 30 and instead had more than 100 – not even sure how many more. I have not been successful getting into small group discussions at large conferences.
3. Room was way too big and hard to hear some contributions. And with that size, people were not able to get their questions asked and answered. I’m sure it was probably somewhat frustrating. However, some people said upfront that they wanted to be lurkers, so maybe it was okay for them.
4. I needed to seed the audience with more people who had hands on experience. We had about 7-10 people with real experience of different kinds.
5. People did not offer up as many examples of where they’d like to use Blogs, Wikis, Social Bookmarking as I anticipated. I thought they would be just rolling out. Especially with the survey to prompt some ideas. It would have made the session a lot more energetic. Again, seeding would have worked much better. Once I started asking for examples, that worked well. Of course, it was hard to hear.

Things that went okay / well

1. I’m really glad I didn’t do small group discussions Conference Breakout Sessions - thanks everyone for steering me away from that. It would not have been good.
2. Good examples from the audiences. Intuit – Wiki for customers to discuss tax issues. Worried about quality. In the end, updates happen in about 5 minutes if someone posts something wrong. Good adoption.
3. People were able to voice challenges that they faced and I feel we had good discussion / sharing around these challenges. Kevin said he was frustrated that he couldn't jump in and dismiss some of these more quickly. I think I should have attacked it that way instead of getting the list all at once.
   

Overall, I might try to do this again, but I’m going to have to figure out how to overcome some of this. Clearly 75 minutes is not enough to discuss eLearning 2.0, but having a discussion of eLearning 2.0 for the next 75 minutes is not quite right either. More guidance and structure would have probably been better. Hmmm … okay, I’ve got some ideas. That makes me feel a bit better.

Found via Nancy White - Visualizing Information for Advocacy: An Introduction to Information Design from the Tactical Technology Collective - a free, beautiful overview book around visual information design.

Beth Griese - posted a response Is Learning 2.0 a long tail? to my post Corporate Learning Long Tail and Attention Crisis. In it, Beth shows a graphic:



This caused us to have a good exchange. Beth tells us:

I'm thinking of "topics" as anything that an organization's people would want to learn about for their jobs. I'm not limiting that to the "traditional means" training topics, but I do limit that to things that are job-related, which is why I think the tail has a limit.

I'm thinking that the scope of the demands from our learners are finite and still within the means of a training department (with the help blending training programs and of the social knowledge of the company properly harnessed), rather than requiring the power of an Amazon-sized retailer to meet a near-infinite long tail of interests.

If I think about myself and my current and future information needs that relate to all aspects of my job, these are continually changing and growing. So, even if there was a way to define my current tail, tomorrow there's more. And when you talk about all people within an organization, well it seems clear that it's very, very large - effectively infinite. So, I'd want to make sure that we don't delude ourselves:

1. Long tail learning is effectively infinite
2. There is no way for an individual to keep up (see Kathy Sierra's The Myth of Keeping Up) much less learning and development.
3. Trying to "keep up" and putting ourselves in the producer role is not going to work.

Instead, I truly believe that the information needs are tracking the shift shown in the following graph (and Beth's graph seems to agree with this except that she cuts it off):



We have to face up to the reality that information needs are shifting and our role can either only focus on the shrinking tall end of the long tail or we can look at how we can play in the long tail where smaller audience sizes, rapidly changing content, etc. makes it such that traditional "topics" kind of approach doesn't really fit.

There's quite a bit more on the size and shape of the long tail through my post on Long Tail SEO - 60+ Articles.

Phrasr is an interesting new website that allows users to input sentences, phrases or even entire paragraphs and then turn them into illustrated slide shows using Flickr images. All you have to do is type in your phrase and click, you then get an image for each word. If you don't like the image you get then you can change them and when you are ready you just give your work a name and title a click to publish. What you then get is like a slide show of images with words.
Here's an example of what it produces. This one is based on the old expression;

• "You can take a horse to water but you can’t make it drink"

Here's another based on the first verse of a Shakespeare sonnet (130)

• Sonnet 130

Once you have created your picture phrase you can either send it to a friend by email or go to the archive and find it to copy the URL.

If you want to see just how quick and easy it is to create these then

• watch this short Flash tutorial movie (800k)
  

How to use this with students
This is going to revolutionise learning, but I can think of a few nice tasks you could use this for.

• Get students to illustrate a short poem or haiku.
• Create some idiom movies to help students remember them.
• Use the site to make revising / presenting grammatical structures structures a bit more interesting.
• Get students to write a short story and create an image version of it.
• Discuss why certain images seem more or less appropriate to illustrate various texts.

What I like about it

• This is a really simple free site that you can use to quickly create materials
• Nice variety of images

What I wasn't so keen on

• It would be nice to have an embed code for these so that you could add your finished sentences to your blog, rather than a hyper link back to the site
• Be careful some images are not appropriate for younger learners
• Some people tend to abuse sites like these, so be careful of inappropriate sentences or immature students who tend to play around.

Hope you enjoy this simple tool and find some good uses for it. Drop me a line if you have any others to suggest

Best

Nik

A reader from another country has asked me about Learning Object Tools. I asked him to clarify what they meant and the response was:

Learning Object Tools are those that allow you to create, edit and manage learning objects.

There is also a bit of language barrier. I pointed them at the Wikipedia article - Learning Object. It cites quite a few repositories and briefly mentions "Burrokeet is an Open Source Software tool that assists in the creation of Learning Objects from existing content. " This is something I'm not familiar with. I also suggested looking at LCMS products. And looking at SCORM / SCOs.

But it got me to thinking that I've really not looked at Learning Objects in quite a while - and I've not really kept up on Learning Object Tools.

So, I was hoping that someone could help me and him:

1. What are good general discussions of learning objects and learning object tools?
2. My impression is that these were a big topic about 4-5 years ago, and a lot is happening in academia, but not much is happening in corporate spaces. Is that the right impressions?
3. What are the categories of tools that represent this space?
4. What are some specific tools within those categories?
   

Any help would be appreciated.

Mohamed Amine Chatti (a fellow Eddie eLearning nominee) last two posts The LaaN Perspective, and Requirements of a PLE Framework are both interesting posts and worth reading.

His requirements for a PLE Framework include:

• Personalization
• Social features
• Social filtering
• Incorporate various Web 2.0 concepts and technologies (mashups, widgets, aggregation, OpenID, RSS, etc.)
• Flexibility and extensibility
• Web browser platform
• Aggregation/Mashups
• Ease of use

Several thoughts jumped out at me:

• The concept of a Personal Learning Environment (PLE) exists, but actual PLEs only exist as theoretical combinations of skills, methods and tools. The concept of a Personal Learning Environment Framework gets it even farther from some actual system. There will be Social Network Operating Systems that will allow us to pull together our highly personal environment. But, too much structure is not going to work.
  

• I mentioned quite a while ago (in Personal Work and Learning Environments (PWLE) - More Discussion and Personal Work and Learning Environments) that:

Knowledge work is not separate from learning.

Yes, there are times that Knowledge Workers will step away from day-to-day activities to go do developmental learning activities that may not be directly related to their day-to-day knowledge work. But that's the exception. In almost all cases work and learning is inseparable.

To me, it does not make sense to look at using one environment (an LMS or PLE) as part of learning and another environment as part of knowledge work.

That's the reason I call these:

Personal Work and Learning Environment (PWLE - pronounce p-whale)

And there's only one for me. It's the set of methods, skills, tools that I use to perform my day-to-day knowledge work activities where I acquire information, knowledge, etc.

Luckily all of the requirements that Mohamed cites apply equally well to a PWLE.

I'm curious if anyone actually sees this different? Do we gain something by separating them?

If we are going to make progress with Corporate Learning Long Tail and Attention Crisis, I think we have to think about these things in an integrated fashion.