CivieBlog

I received a question:

I am an educator in Arizona about to graduate with my Masters in Instructional Design. I wish to apply my experience designing courses for online learning; however I've searched and don't know where to begin to actually learn how to use the LMS and course design software available. I came across your blog and thought you might be able to offer some suggestions.

I have great computer skills but am not experienced in creating web courses. I've seen all sorts of elearning software- Dreamweaver, Lectora, Captivate, Flash etc etc mentioned in job ads, but don't really know which ones to choose in order to get a well rounded working knowledge of how to build a course. Do you have any suggestions where to start? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

First, a good place to start is to ask around like you are doing.

Second, I'm not 100% clear if the question is about creating good online learning experiences that include a blend of online learning techniques. For example, are you looking at becoming good at doing online sessions? If so, you might take a look at: Webinar Software - Adoption Advice and there's a lot more to designing good blended learning experiences.

However, I'm going to guess based on the list of tools that you are really talking about creating self-paced (asynchronous) eLearning experiences. So, given that, my strong recommendation (especially given the comment about having great computer skills) would be to:

1. Choose a specific course, content, audience, learning objectives, etc. Even if you never plan to deliver it, you will still learn a lot more if you aren't just playing. You need to be really trying to create something that is realistic.

2. Download a free trial of one of the more common authoring tools. My personal suggestion would be either the Articulate Free Trial or the Captivate Free Trial. A very close third would be the Lectora Free Trial. Only download one of these and really try to work through creating your course. Get a bit creative about different types of interactions. How to keep the user engaged, etc.

3. Then I would go and download a second tool out of these and try creating similar things with that tool. In this case, I might recommend choosing Lectora as it is a little different in how you work through things.

Once you've gone through this, you should be in great shape to move forward.

Oh, and did I mention that you should be blogging your experience. :)

I've been working with Steve Wexler and the eLearningGuild on the eLearning 2.0 survey and report. Some interesting data points are coming out of the study. Right now there are more than 1000 respondents. I've not really seen good numbers on what people are using as part of their day-to-day lives. Here are some numbers that confirm a bit of what we thought and a few surprises. More coming on this.

The charts below show use of different tools, sites, etc. The key is for the charts is:

• Darkest blue - daily
• Medium blue - weekly
• Light blue - monthly
• Gray - never
  

Tool Use in Corporations



Some things that jumped out at me:

• Much more blog reading that I expected. 62% read at least weekly.
• Interestingly RSS readership for "weekly" only adds up to 41%. There's clearly a gap here around the use of RSS readers.
• I'm really amazed at the gap between people who store their bookmarks online 53% vs. those who share bookmarks online: 23%. Most people who store their bookmarks, don't share them. That's a surprise. I guess they must be using a lot of tools other than delicious.
  
• LinkedIn was shown as being used monthly or more by 68% which is higher than I would have expected. I personally get a lot of value out of LinkedIn, but I wonder if other people are getting that same value.
• Facebook use is higher than I would have thought. MySpace is clearly behind in the corporate eLearning world.
• Twitter adoption is higher than I would have thought.
  

When I take a look at Tool Use as reported by people in Education ...



Some things that jumped out at me:

• Clearly Education is ahead of Corporate adoption, otherwise the numbers are fairly well aligned.
  
• There's similar sharing ratios.
  

Then to compare with adoption by people in Government.


Some things that jumped out at me:

• Despite the stereotype, people who work in government were clearly able to think outside the box and make their top choices Other1, Other2 and Other3.
  
• Government is much more like Education in adoption than Corporations. Given many of the challenges they face, I would have thought that adoption would have been more like corporations.
  

Virginia asked what the "other tools" were:

Plaxo, YouTube, LearningTown, del.icio.us/delicious, Picassa, Ning, Google Docs/Google Apps, Second Life, Blogger, iGoogle, orkut, FriendFeed, Internal workplace community, PBWiki, Xing, Digg, Friendster (really?), Pageflakes, Photobucket, Snapfish, Diigo, gather (?), gmail, Google Reader, Instant Messaging, istockphoto, LiveJournal, Multiply, Netvibes, Pandora, Wetpaint, Wikipedia, Wordpress.

Obviously, many people who marked other were using tools that fit into the categories above. But we clearly missed an opportunity to ask about community tools like Ning.


Keywords:

Podcasts, Twitter, Slideshare, Flickr, MySpace, LinkedIn, Facebook, Wiki, RSS, RSS Reader, Wikipedia, delicious, del.icio.us, blogs.

As ever I'm a fool for technology which can make images entertaining and personalise them, so when I saw this I couldn't resist it.

This site is called Yearbook Yourself and is based around the concept of the end of year school books that are so popular in some countries. The site enables you to upload an image of yourself and then import it into the style of a yearbook from any year between 1950 and the 2000s. You can then download the images as jpg files.


The site also gives you a little bit of information about what was popular in those years and plays a small music clip from that year.


So how can we use for teaching ESL EFL students?
In order to use it with your students, you or they will need to have a digital image of themselves. Ideally it should be a head and shoulders portrait with the student face on to the camera.
Here are some ideas for activities:

• Create a yearbook for your class. You could do this by getting the students to select the year when they were born and then convert their portrait to a person from that year. You could follow this up by asking students to research some important events from that year. This is easy to do, just by going to Wikipedia.org and doing a search on the year. Here's one I did on 1954 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954 The page lists lots of interesting events. You could follow this up by getting students to find out about what their parents were doing the year they were born. They could ask their parents if they remember any of the key events from that year. The students could then report back either orally or in writing to the rest of the class next lesson.

• Students could decide which year they like best. Give the students a list off 3 - 5 years and then they should create an image of themselves in each of those years (get them to do this at home). They could then email in the images or bring them to class to show and tell the other students which year suits them best and why they would like to have been around in that year.
  
  
  The 70s didn't really suit me!
  

• You could create two images of yourself and then put students in pairs. Without showing the images to each other the students would have to describe the images and decide if they are the same image or different images. Here's an example of two of myself.

• If your students are interested in fasion you could ask them to create an image of themselves in a particular year and then research the fasions from that year. This site may help them http://www.fashion-era.com/
  or
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_fashion_design
  

• Comparing students' lives with those of their parents may also be interesting. Ask the students to find out what year their parents were 16. Then ask them to create an image of themselves from the same year. Ask the students to write a text about or discuss how their lives at 16 are different from the lives of their parents at 16.
  
  
  I don't look much like my dad!
  

• Ask students to create an image of themselves from one of the years and then imagine what that person would be doing now x years later. This is a good way to get them thinking about their own future.

Why I think this is a good site for EFL ESL

• It's free to use and quite quick and easy
• I really like the novelty of seeing your image transformed
• I like the year book concept and the brief information and sound clips from the different years.
• Personalisation of tasks is always more motivating for students
  

What could be better

• It would be nice to be able to try your image in different years before you decide which one you want.
• There are some links to advertising and products in different shops. Easy to avoid though.

Anyway, I hope you and your students enjoy creating some stimulating EFL ESL materials with this site.

Related postings:

• Personalised flashcards
• Animating vocabulary
• A Picture's worth
• Manga images for EFL ESL

Best

Nik Peachey

Many of our younger and even older students are exposed to and enjoy 'Manga' type cartoon art work. 'Face Your Manga' is a site which enables you and your students to easily create manga type image avatars, so I'd like to explore a few ways we could use this site for EFL ESL development.

The site is quite easy to use and you simply click through a few steps, selecting and adjusting different aspects of your avatar's appearance. Once the avatar is complete, you simply email it to yourself and download it onto you computer as a jpg image.


How can we use this with EFL ESL students?
Here are some activities you could try.

• You could ask students to work at home and try to create an avatar that looks as much as possible like themselves. Ask the students to email their avatars to you. Print these up and then stick them round the class. When students come to class ask them to try to decide which avatars represent which students in the class. Once they have done this, try to get them to describe the features that helped them guess and which features they feel are different in the images from those of the real people.
• Create a few manga images. Then put the students in pairs. Give one student the image and ask them to describe it to their partner (not show it). The partner of each pair then has to create the same image using the website.
• Get students to create their alter ego avatar (someone who is the opposite of themselves). Ask them to bring or email the image to you. You can them print them and ask the students to work in pairs in class and describe the avatar to their partner and explain how the imaginary person is the opposite of themselves in appearance and personality etc.
• Create a set of images and ask students to work in groups or pairs to create an imaginary profile for each character ( information regarding their job, personality, living circumstances, etc). Then ask students to imagine what the relationships between them are. Lastly, ask them to create a short story or soap opera including the characters. Students can then regroup and tell other students about their characters and the story they created.
• Ask students to create an avatar of a specific person (yourself or a celebrity) then email you or bring their images to class. The students can then discuss and decide which looks more like the real person. This should produce a lot of comparing and contrasting type language ("His nose is bigger" 'The mouth is too big" etc.).

Here's an image of myself and my avatar as an example:



What I like about the site

• The ability to create images of imaginary people is really useful for EFL ESL materials creation.
• The art work is good and the number of different characters you can create is huge.
• The site is free to use
• Manga images are part of our learners' culture, so they are likely to find this more motivating
• The interface is pretty easy to use.

What I wasn't so sure about

• The site does try to charge users for immediate printing of their images. This isn't really necessary though as the quality of the emailed one is sufficient.
• You have to submit and email address in order to get the image sent to you. (You could give your students your email address so that all the images are sent to you.)
• You can create avatars which are making rude gestures! It might anyway be wise to deal with what these gestures mean and in which cultures they can be found offensive.

I hope you enjoy Face Your Manga and find these ideas useful. If you want to use an alterantive site that does a similar thing them you could have a look at my posting on DoppelMe

Related postings:

• Personalised flashcards
• Animating vocabulary
• A Picture's worth

Best

Nik Peachey

DevLearn is coming up. I just took a quick look on the eLearningGuild site and DevLearnis looking good again this year. My guess is that I'll be getting together with a few folks there to have a drink and discuss things like eLearning 2.0 (yeah, we know how to have fun).

Quite a few of the speakers are straight out of my blog roll, so I'm looking forward to seeing them.

• Clive on Learning
• Learnlets
• Corporate eLearning Strategies and Development
• e-Clippings (blogoehlert)
• Will at Work Learning
• SCORM Watch
• eLearning Weekly
• Michelle Lentz
• Mark Chrisman
  
• Lance Dublin - an honorary blogger

I'm sure I'm missing some folks. But, as a reader of this blog, you should drop a comment if you are going to DevLearn and I'll try to let you know when we are getting together. In the past, this has been quite a bit of fun (see DevLearn - Beer - Who's In? - And Where?, Boston - Beer - Bloggers - Learn.com and Beer Tasting at ASTD TechKnowledge). Including having Adobe and Learn.com sponsor events in the past. Maybe someone will want to do something similar. Maybe Tuesday night?

Or maybe we can get Michelle Lentz to figure out a place for wine?

One thing that they've kept from last year are the breakfast bytes. These were informal opportunities to discuss topics. I attended one with Will at Work Learning and it was quite an interesting discussion. Almost a beer and bloggers type discussion, but with coffee and a bit more structure.

Looking forward to seeing folks at DevLearn. Oh, by the way, I'm doing two sessions:

• The Learning 2.0 Symposium
• Work Literacy - A Key to eLearning 2.0 Success

So, drop me a note if you are going.

I personally think delicious is a great tool and I often describe it's use in presentations and workshops. It recently went through an upgrade that improved the look and performance. However, it interestingly left out a lot of what I said was missing in my post - Yahoo MyWeb better than del.icio.us, rollyo, et.al. for Personal and Group Learning from March 16, 2006.

My claim back then was the Yahoo MyWeb has some features that made it better for a lot of corporate users, and while I hate to argue for its use, the fact that two years later after Yahoo acquired del.icio.us (delicious), they've not addressed these issues is a surprise.

What were the issues I cited back in 2006?

1. Searching within the contents of my bookmarked pages
2. Page caching (so I don't lose the pages I've bookmarked)
3. Control on sharing of bookmarks (private, friends or public)
4. Categories of Friends (so I can have family, work, etc.)
5. Web Badge for Integration into my Blog

Okay, so they've addressed (a while ago) item #5. But that's really the least of the items. When you think about what knowledge workers need relative to Keep / Organize / Refind / Remind, I've discussed in The New Skills that we want to be able to keep track of everything we've seen with minimum effort. If users can't do a full-text search across their pages (or if they might lose them), then this violates this rule. Further, if they don't feel comfortable making certain saved pages public, then this also will hinder adoption.

Yahoo has so many issues these days, you'd think when there are obvious, high value features, they would attack them.

Maybe in another two years, they will do something more than skin deep.

Brain 2.0 has sparked some very interesting discussion and quite a bit of disagreement. My basic claim is that technology changes what is considered

In Does new technology reduce the need to memorise facts? Mark Frank rightly argues:

We remember things better if we elaborate on them – and there is much more scope for elaboration if you already know a lot.

The point is that knowing facts is one of the best tools for accessing and using other facts.

I don't think anyone disagrees with that. You need to attach information to other information in order to be able to recall. And you need some way to recall or bring in anything that you want to process. Creating attachment is incredibly important.

Mark in many ways get rights to the crux of the issue with his suggestion that the key question is what are the necessary facts that students (or anyone) needs to learn. And this is an age-old and likely never solved debate. As part of his argument he tells us:

There is long-standing debate as to what facts are necessary (e.g. how much history should children know?) but that has little to do with new technology and is largely a matter of values.

Now this is where I believe it gets very interesting. I believe that technology does have impact on what will be considered "necessary facts."

As a trivial example, consider the impact that cell phones have had on memorizing phone numbers. One study has shown that people over 50 have significantly better recall of important dates, phone numbers, etc. than people under 30. Why remember something that is immediately accessible in a usable form (ready to be dialed) when needed?

From my comments, in the post:

My belief is that there's a finite amount of learning time that students have. You have to make choices about what to spend your time on. And truly with access to very rich, easily accessible information sources, some time is wasted on needless facts. My earlier post on Life is an Open Book Test test talks to this. We test all the time closed book, but that's not reality. And especially now. So there's some balance that's needed. But my belief right now is that we are tending to stick with what we all accept as the right stuff to test just because that's how all of us learned and we think it represents important base knowledge.

Going back to the question of knowing the population of England in 1800, I actually think it would be far more valuable to know the paradigm that population (which can be easily accessed by doing X) compared to something like the population of London (urbanization) and/or the number of people who died in a war or by disease (net impact, is this important) are interesting questions to know to ask. Unfortunately, while that may have been the point the professor was making in my class - it certainly was not the emphasis. By the way, I couldn't tell you the population of the U.S. (my home country which I theoretically have studied in far more detail) in 1800, nor do I have any sense if urbanization was more or less in the US, etc.

The question at hand - doesn't having quick (almost immediate) access to the definition and details of concepts like urbanization, populations, state capitals, change the set of facts we define as necessary?