Made to Stick: a book that sticks!

If you have only time to read one book in 2008 do yourself a favor and buy 'Made to Stick' from the Heath brothers. Even if it is not an e-Learning book you need the knowledge in this book to design better e-Learning. As an experienced instructional designer I thought I knew all the tricks to make my learning experiences lasting ones that will be remembered by my learners. NOT…in Made to stick I found many useful tips and practical guidelines how to create more memorable messages. Time for improvements, no matter if you are a professional copy writer or an instructional designer.

In the easy to read book, Chip and Dan Heath wrote about the reasons "why some ideas survive and others die". Dan and Chip researched famous stories, urban legends, great advertisements and successful political statements. They found out that such powerful messages all have certain aspects in common. They explained their vision and ideas very well and especially the parts with practical examples (with comparisons of well defined and poor defined versions of one idea) are very helpful for a better understanding. It makes it easy to transfer the insights and adapt them to your own working field.

A simple framework is used to explain the ingredients of a sticky idea:

1. Pay attention (come with something unexpected).
2. Understand and remember (be concrete).
3. Agree/believe (make it credible).
4. Care (use emotions to let people care about your idea).
5. Be able to act on it (use the Story format).

Before you start with these ingredients you start with Simple. Together it makes the acronym SUCCESs (Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotions, Story).

With every ingredient they come up with different approaches. E.g. for making your idea credible you can use certain sources with authority ("professor X said…") but sometimes it is better to use antiauthority to get external credibility. E.g. you could get statements from people from the target group because they will accept advise from peers.

This book offers me more innovative insights than many books that specifically target on creating learning materials. Do you want your learning experiences sticky? Buy and read this book!

Webinar "Makin' Movies with Joe Brennan"

This week I attended a webinar hosted by Discovery channel and through a WebEx environment we got a 1-hour session from Joe Brennan. The title was "Makin' Movies with Joe Brennan". For the people that don't know Joe: he is quite active and has a great blog on Digital Storytelling.

About 80 people participated in his free available webinar. For me it took place at 11.00 pm and it started out with a small problem because for the audio you had to call a US phone number. And it is impossible to call a toll-free number for free. After we started the session people with the same problem entered some questions in the chat-box and they came up with the idea to use Skype. Although I frequently use Skype for chats and audio conference I never used it to call 'normal' numbers so I didn't think of using Skype. It turns out that you can use Skype perfectly for calling toll-free numbers as well.


That was my first learning result and I learned quite a bit more. Joe showed us a lot of nice and simple techniques to create e.g. special effects. By showing us examples he made clear that imagination and some insights can create attractive videos. One of the techniques Joe showed us was playing with the pace in the video. He was talking about recording while one kid was walking slowly and other people were walking at normal speed. Later on you can speed up the video till the speed of the one kid is at 'normal pace'. The result will be exiting. What I liked about how examples was the fact that they were created without a lot of sophisticated technology but with easy to use and free or cheap applications. He was also talking about applications as Microsoft Photo Story. This app can be used for educational purposes very easily. I used it myself a few times and yes: easy and nice. And for the Dutch amongst us: it is free!

For me it was good to use WebEx again, it was already a few years ago, I only expect simple VOIP with such an application. Don't know why it was not possible with this session. I also learned a lot from the discussions that took place in the chat box. It was nice to exchange ideas during the session with the other participants.


Do yourself a favour and take a look at the Discovery site because they organize free quality webinars on a regular base. Enroll and enjoy! You can even watch recorded events.

The Big Question: What did you learn about learning in 2007?

The Big Questions...asked by The Learning Circuits Blog from the ASTD. The big question is: What did you learn about learning in 2007? You can also answer this question on your blog. Pass it on!


And as we educational people know, reflection is an important 'learning aid'. It can make your learning more explicit and you have to put things in place and while your reflecting, you almost feel the transfer to your everyday life and tasks.

So I decided to grap this change to put my feet on the table and try to get back all the powerful learning insights from 2007.

I used the Pecha Kucha format again because that is such a good way to focus your mind and to force you to stick with the core message.

Please watch it (in English or Dutch) and leave your comments or answer The Big Question on your own blog or in the comments!

English:

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Dutch:

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'De Blob', from a school project to the Wii.

'De Blob' is a very successful game made by students of the Utrecht School of the Arts (HKU) and Utrecht University. It was created some time ago but I heard about it on the NLGD day two weeks ago.

De Blob

The Blob-game wants to inform the citizens of Utrecht about the upcoming project to redesign and rebuild the area of the main railway station. Great thing about the Blob game is the way you move the Blob, a big ball, through the city. The graphics look detailed and nice. One of the students posted something about their study project and THQ picked it up. The game will be on the Nintendo Wii and the DS in 2008 (of course with some extra features and extended gameplay). The title will be the Dutch one: "De Blob".

Joost van Dongen, the lead programmer, describes the game as:

It is a 3D game in which the player controls a ball of paint rolling through the city. The ball can absorb coloured NPC’s to become larger and change its colour. With the paint, the player can then proceed to paint the entire city. Almost everything is paintable: buildings, trees, cars and using the paint trace even the ground. The main goal of the game is to paint all 17 landmark buildings. Hardcore fanatics can also try to collect all 50 coins that are hidden around the level.

You can download and play the game from the students for free. It is available in Dutch and English and it is a Windows game. It is very playable with a trackball or touchpad. With the mouse is a bit annoying.

I would not consider it as an edugames because the learning objectives are very thin. And even the informative elements are quite limited. But it is fun to play, you can enjoy the graphics and the easy way you can roll De Blob around town. If you are developing games as a student: you see what it can bring you so create a great edugame and share it with us and the THQs of this world.

Some info about the THQ release:



Go download the English version or the Dutch version.

TFT tennis: move your whole screen!

Today I visited STRP Festival in Eindhoven. This Art & Technology festival offers some great dance concerts (e.g. Chemical Brothers) and it is like they say "an exhibition of about 30 art robots and/or interactive art installations, a lot of video art and artistic video clips, various Live Cinema performances, several film and documentary showings, about ten talks and lectures by artists, workshops, and a number of other projects that fall outside the scope of the above-mentioned categories."


I always like the festivals on the former Philips premises. The atmosphere within the old factory buildings is special and the festivals are often very inspiring and creative.

Today I saw an installation of Dirk Eijsbouts called TFT Tennis. This was a new way of playing a digital tennis game. You really have to move your body and your TFT screen to hit the ball. Nice interface!

Watch this short impression, not a great quality, I shot it with my photo camera. You can find more on his website.

Timeline tool for e-learning?

When I'm teaching a basic e-Learning course, one of didactical activities I do is creating a timeline with the participants. I provide them with pictures that represent a certain event (both technological as educational) in history that influenced modern e-Learning concepts. It is a great way to get into discussions about learning, about the value of each event and about the link to our learning concepts of today. It is a very interesting way of storytelling.

Recently I was reading a Dutch blog I really like and appreciate of Margreet van den Berg and she posted something about creating online timelines.

I tried one (http://xtimeline.com) and it worked pretty well. You can add events very easily and work on your project in private and when you want to share it you can do it with a select group of people or the world. The timeline can also be embedded in your website of blog (although it is running outside your frames) and your students can work together on a timeline. So it could be an interesting assignment as well.

Take a look at the example of a timeline

Whole Brain Learning!

At Learning 2007 I joined an inspiring pre-conference session of Ann Herrmann-Nehdi (HBDI) . The last weeks I was thinking about her whole Brain Thinking Model because I'm convinced that it can be a very useful model for e-Learning. I presented the model with the implications for the didactical approach at a client and we both want to use it. The project is a very innovative and challenging one and we are thinking of using learning styles in the design phase to offer the learners an optimal experience. For me the problem of most learning styles models is the limited way it can be pragmatically integrated.

Whole Brain Thinking Model
Ann worked with us on the model for about 6 hours and the whole learning experience was an example of 'teach what you preach'. During the day she was using a lot of inspiring didactical formats and I'm still using the materials she gave us, besides my own profile she also gave us posters, a hand-out, a kind of quick reference table flip-over and a set of cards.

Four different quadrants
When you fill out the questionnaire the results is a visual representation of your preferred thinking style. You will always score on every of the quadrants. On the picture you see that I score heavily on the yellow and red quadrant. There is also a dotted plotline. That is the style you prefer when acting under stress. So if you look at my preferences; I will act more extreme in the red and yellow area.

My own profile!

The graphic representation of the results is printed on a see-thru plastic sheet so you can put this on different papers. That is smart and nice. So you can see typical jobs for certain plots.

You can use the profile of yourself and others in different situations e.g. when you are having a business conversation. Clear example: you are scoring high on the blue quadrant (analyze). This means you are logical and like numbers. If you are selling a car you will talk about the power, the number of gears, the measurements of the car, the costs etc. If the customer scores in the red quadrant (personalize) he/she will not be interested in numbers but in personal stories, feelings, and the story behind the car. You will not sell if you are not aware of the differences.

Whole Brain Learning
The same goes for learning; as an instructional designer I design learning experiences that reflect my preferences. So for me it will be easy to forget to include statistical data, numbers, etc.

Learning design strategies

In the picture you see learning design strategies. Once again: you don't have to choose, you have to combine the aspects of every quadrant to make it a successful learning experience for a wide range of learners.

Stack of cards with instructional design questions

To help you to think about all the quadrants, Ann also gave us a stack of cards in 4 different colors and every card has an instructional design question or hint. If you are designing you can take a few cards from every color to get ideas.

No hocus pocus, very plain and easy to use advice. Digg into it, it will enrich you as an instructional designer and will make your learning experiences more powerful and more balanced!

Thanks Ann!

Ann gave us a lot: inspiration and useful materials!

SlideShare: educational tool

Normally I'm using SlideShare for my training sessions. It's easier to use SlideShare to publish and share it with my learners than printing hand-outs and send it per e-mail. First I used another website but since it is possible to download the presentation as well I'm a fan of SlideShare.

As a trainer I also use SlideShare for some inspiration. The only thing I missed was the story 'behind the slides'. Most of the time the slides only represent a part of the idea and the meaning. With the SlideCast possibilities it is also possible to share audio (like I did on the previous post). That really enriches the experience.

Let's focus a bit more on this. You can add an audio track to your presentation in a couple of steps. Unfortunately it is not as easy as uploading a presentation.

You have to:

1. create an MP3-file (for example with the great open source tool Audacity);
   
2. store that MP3 on a webspace on the net, it is not possible to store it at SlideShare. You can do this on your own webspace or for example for free at www.archive.org;
3. point to the url where you put the MP3;
4. synchronize the audio (line it up with the slides).

This last step works great! It is a very easy to use online tool. For me SlideShare is getting more and more useful. It is easy to embed in online learning environments, you can use full screen mode and the last feature is also nice: you can choose to share your presentation to a limited list of users or even only to yourself. So you can share it only with your learners if you want.

BTW: last week SlideShare put my pecha kucha slidecast in the spotlights and since that moment over 800 people watched it. ;-)


An impression of the audio tooling within SlideShare.

Pecha Kucha in learning!

Pecha Kucha is an attractive presentation format that originally came from artistic people in Tokyo. It forces you to bring your message effectively and attractive by setting some rules: you have only 20 slides with images and you are only allowed to talk 20 seconds per slide. This way you will finish your presentation in 6 minutes and 40 seconds.

Last week with Learning 2007 there was a Pecha Kucha night with educational shows. I found it a very inspiring format as a teaser for a further discussion and it keeps you from those 4 hours, 96 slides PowerPoint disillusions.

Yesterday I created a Pecha Kucha myself and it took me 3 hours to create it. Quite long and that is not surprising: the format force you to really focus on the essence of the subject. It is not an easy thing to do. I think I'm gonna use this format for my learners at some trainings and workshops.

See my first try about Learning 2007, click on the PLAY-button (and yes, I know it is not the best thing ;-)

| View | Upload your own

BTW: the audio possibility in SlideShare is great!!

e-Learning for a Worldwide Audience > Learning 2007

Our session at Learning 2007
Today was the big day for Erika and me because we had our session about multicultural e-Learning. It was great! We had an interesting group of people that discussed with us the implications of different cultural dimensions on e-Learning. As you know we used the model of Hofstede to define guidelines for instructional design of e-Learning for a multicultural audience. You will get more info on this when we will be finishing the Fe-ConE project. I will publish some nice and rich materials on this blog. In the meanwhile you can go to the site of our session today to get the hand-out with some practical information: www.learningwiki.com/739



People working really hard to find out about cultural aspects

Wikinomics
For the rest I went to a session of Don Tapscott. This author of Wikinomics has some interesting points on the netgeneration but it was not really new to me. The new focus was on Talent 2.0. I think this comes very close to the thesis of Joost Robben. Basic message was that for young people there is a thin or no line between work/entertainment/learning. The working environment should be fun, collaborative, customizable, authentic and fast.

Some extra nuggets of info
I went to a nice session on the use of storytelling and in particular about the educational use of Manga. This was a inspiring session and you will see more on this on my blog in the next months. I used cartoons for educational use a few times and we are now working on a cartoon kind of learning for a customer.

Wayne Hodgins was announcing a new and independent organization that will take over the role of ADL. This is the organization behind the learning standard SCORM. Because this is a worldwide used standard the learning community wants to take it away with the defence orientated ADL.

Last thing I visited was a good session (PIT training) that offers a learning experience with a real racecar. I had the same experience at the ISAGA conference. Probable an engaging way of learning although we missed the real debriefing and transfer of the regular training. Check out the video.



Last thing that interest me was the use of HD videoconferencing over the internet that was used by the Manhattan School of Music. They are using this quality connection to teach musical lessons. The called it an export and import of educational resources. Very interesting. They needed high quality because of the importance of the details. Check this student (although this is no HD after YouTubing ;-))