Images – Part 1

Over the past few days I have been involved in a series of events that have caused me to think a great deal about images and how we use them. The first was a visit from an old friend (considerations that flow from that visit will become part 1 of this), and the second was the detailing of images needed for a course I have been working on (which will be part 2).

Since my thoughts on the subject started here, let me start with my old friend.

Tony and I lived across the street from each other in a neighborhood in Brooklyn called Park Slope. At about the same time in our childhoods we got into photography. We got cameras, built darkrooms, got better cameras, got more stuff, and in general were part of (or were trying to be part of) a craft that supported enough stores that 32^nd street became known as the center of the "photo district," and which was supported aesthetically by galleries and museums all across Manhattan. We would go and spend our Saturdays wandering up and down the streets looking at the gear, and learning about the mechanics and the aesthetics of the art by taking lots and lots of pictures, and by looking at lots and lots of pictures. Pictures were some kind of magic, a way in which one could isolate and freeze a small view of the world, one based on personal aesthetics, composition and timing. Each picture had a decisive moment, which a photographer needed to recognize in order to push the button at the correct time.

One of the things that became second nature was being immersed in how photography had become part of the culture. At the time one of our jokes involved a cultural oddity that I suspect people under 30 have never seen – the slide show. It involved 35mm slides in a Kodak Carousel projector, thrown up on a wall with little if any editing on the part of the photographer. That was the joke – "I went to Italy and took these 3,000 photographs. I hope you're comfortable."

It seems as though the joke is now on us. There are images everywhere, both still and moving. And watching someone's home movies, once a source of dread and depression, are now shared by the millions on youtube (and the important point here is that they are not only shared, but watched).

The tools we use seem to have separated us a bit from the magic – what matter if there is a decisive moment – just shoot 25 frames in front of and behind it, and you'll probably capture it. At one point in my research I crossed paths with a field called visual studies – a self-defined "serious topic," easily recognized because it dealt with images that were, as far as I could tell, uniformly out of focus, poorly composed and uncentered, sort of what you would get if you set a camera to trip the shutter every 15 minutes, then tucked it under your arm and went for a walk. As I write this the thought occurs that there are those who would disagree with me, and argue for randomness and against focus.

Tony stayed with it, and became quite good. He is what was once described as a craftsman – creating carefully crafted images of technical excellence, balanced composition, and thoughtful purpose. I moved in a different direction that has led me to consider how we use images to learn, and that will become the "part 2" of this meditation.

 

A New View of Hyper-Hyperlinks

Of late I have been looking at web pages with new eyes. The cause of this is the new device I am using to view those pages, the iPad. My new view is that like most of our current communication media, the web is filled with noise, and the noise level is rising.

This is nothing new on the macro level – a search of almost any weird, irrelevant or inconsequential term will return hundreds, if not thousands or hundreds of thousands of results. "Pumpkin Chunking" returns 84,500 results, including video, pictures and Wikipedia entries. A search of "useless information" returns an amazing 23,100,000 results in 0.21 seconds. This noise is nothing new and has been commented on more than once.

However, the noise I am referring to is on a micro level, and exists on, as far as I can tell, each and every page on the web. When viewing those pages on a PC with a mouse, the noise level is only mildly annoying – a popup that appears as you hover your mouse over nothing in particular while reading, an intrusion of an ad that suddenly grows larger for no discernable reason, and which has some hidden mechanism for dismissal.

This noise escalates to a din when trying to read a web page on the iPad, due primarily to two actions that seem inherent on the iPad.

The first is the simple fact that after a time the damn thing gets heavy, and you shift it in your hand to get a better grip. Should any part of your hand hit a hyperlink on the screen you will suddenly find yourself in a new place, and on a new page. If you looked up while you shifted the device from hand to hand you might not even notice the reload, just a curious disconnect as you wonder "was this what I was reading?"

The other is related to one of the best features of the iPad, the ability to zoom by pinching your fingers on the screen and expanding. It seems there is a down side to this ability, which is the tendency I have to linger too long after the zoom. My finger is now interpreted as another mouse click, and off I go to another page I didn't really want.

The sequence (and it is now solid enough to be a sequence) is this: find something to read, load the page, see the font is too small to see, enlarge, wait for the margins to readjust to see if I need to re or un-zoom, inadvertently linger on a hyperlink, see the reload in progress, wait, go to a new and unwanted page, press back arrow, wait some more, finally read what I wanted, but now with a heightened sense of tactile caution.

I am not sure what to do about this. I realize that hyper linking is the foundation of the web, but it seems to have gotten out of control. While I have not noticed this in the courses I am developing for web delivery, it is creeping into the LMS's that are used to launch those courses. Pages that are littered with links may now become a liability rather than just something convenient. Whatever else they are, they do raise the noise level, annoying on my PC, but a serious detriment to reading web pages on the iPad.

 

 

 

Swimming in the shallows

Several years ago I conducted an experiment upon myself. The conditions were relatively simple – because I worked for the phone company and because there was the possibility of a strike, I needed to prepare for strike duty by taking about 40 hours of web based training on topics deemed necessary by the strike task force. What would that training look like, how would it feel, and how would I incorporate it within the rest of my workday.

Taking the training was actually not an unwelcome task. At the time I had just finished my dissertation on subjects relative to electronic learning and was fascinated by how they worked to effect learning. I had been involved in various stages of many of the courses that formed the core of the curriculum I would be required to take, but had never progressed through it completely. But the real motivation for the research was something else. I had also been noting that something relative to WBT was, for lack of a better description, "not right."

I had noted in my dissertation that one of the changes that had occurred in the move from CBT to WBT was the introduction of a large number of internal exits from the courseware, that is, links to the great web elsewhere. Training was simply one of many applications that ran on the desktop and I was curious to see what that actually meant.

It was not good.

As part of a virtual team I needed to have an instant messaging application open at all times, as well as regularly check my email, run or attend a variety of meetings, answer my phone, in other words, to create digitally the same access someone would provide in a large open office layout.

The first thing I noticed was that with everything going on, it was only possible to steal time in 10-15 minute increments during the day(if that long). Any training that needed to be done would be best done in the evening after the day was done, or early before it started. Then a more subtle, and much more disturbing trend, emerged. If I did try to take the training during these quiet times, I created my own disturbances, as if there were something pulling at my attention, dividing it and scattering the resulting pieces.

Over the past years I have followed a number of discussions about learning on the web that suggest that something is happening to students, a fracturing of attention that might be laid at the feet of the digital delivery systems that were becoming ever more commonplace.

Into this idea space comes Nicholas Carr's "The Shallows: What the internet is doing to our brains." I heartily recommend it. I may discuss it in greater depth at a later date, but one of the things that is fascinating me about the book, and the thing I am really focused on at the moment, is that I chose to read it via audible.com. That is, I downloaded the book to my iPod and listened to (that is "read") it in the car, when my consciousness was immune from any distractions other than what I will call the trivial details of traffic and direction.

There is a section in the book that details how we moved from oral to written traditions and the changes that occurred because of it. I find it curious that I am reversing this trend and moving back to a variant oral tradition in order to regain that moment of focused, undistracted attention. A check with audible reports that I have 187 books that I have listened to this way, and more and more I find I distinguish between books. There are some I categorize as requiring a text to hold (sometimes to be able to mark the pages with yellow highlighters and pencil notes), others that are light and easy to listen to, but still others that I would just prefer to listen to in an undisturbed, uninterrupted manner. Although I have an iPad, I have not yet created a category for books to read digitally.

Of note for those interested in e-learning: I intend to assign The Shallows to my classes, both because I find it fascinating, and because I am interested in seeing if the observations contained therein have any traction among educators. I am not sure what the alternative might be, but I am curious to discuss the topic. In the meantime, I will continue to consider it.

R

More on the iPad

First, some housekeeping.

I have toiled here without much comment, believing that my comments were either so far "out there" that no one could be bothered to comment on what I was saying either to agree or disagree with it, or that my comments were so trivial as to not bother noting. I have just found out that it may be a more pedestrian problem of the blog site not allowing comments to be posted. As soon as I find out the actual problem I will have more to say on this (probably something that notes the implications for people who were trying to learn something). In the interim, if you read something here and wish to comment prior to the repair of the site please email me at Kordel@verizon.net.

What brought this to my attention was a comment from a former colleague who wanted to know what it was that I was doing on the iPad that was so different from what I was doing on the PC. The answer is short, but I believe interesting.

Nothing much.

I have been thinking about development on a course that is targeted for dual delivery on PC's and on tablets (the iPad being the first such device). While the content is interesting it is not bleeding edge, earth shaking or something completely different. It will involve blending some video, some text, and some graphics, hopefully so that the content can be viewed, learned and shared.

So, with that relatively plain setting in mind, what have I noticed? What's the big deal?

There is not "big" deal, but rather, just a collection of small deals. If the content were to be placed on a PC, and only on a PC, there would be no concern about what happened when the screen was turned sideways. Instead we need to work on content to be viewed in a 4:3 format, and the same content converted to 3:4 content. In addition to the plain old formatting issues, the latest issue of Wired on the iPad makes some interesting use of the conversion, with ad copy that changes as the screen is turned (there may be more, I continue to explore).

The more I work without a mouse, the more I like it, but (for me at least) it places the iPad in a very specific niche. The lack of a keyboard means I will probably never use the thing to create much content, (I may answer a short email, but will not create something like this blog entry) but that is OK – I want to use it to consume content. The other thing I have noted is that I sit differently when I use the iPad. PC's (or since Apple Macs also qualify -we now need a word for keyboard/mouse equipped devices ;-) require you to sit up at a desk in order to use them. I notice that I sit back and read it more like a book. I will need to explore aspects of kinesthetic learning and see if anyone else has noted anything here. I also hold the iPad most often like a book, in the vertical format. When I wanted to read on my netbook, I got a screen rotate program. It is not comfortable, although I have used it that way. It allowed me to use the screen as if it were the right side page of a book. Close, but still different.

None of these things by themselves mean much, but as I use the device, other things that keep bubbling up. Taken together, they seem to move the thing into a new class of device.

I hope this answers the question. If you have any follow-ups hopefully I will have the problem with the blog site fixed in the next day or so.

R

iPad First Impressions: A New Medium?

A career or so in the past one of my teachers at film school said that he saw Hollywood movies change when editing equipment moved from the Moviola to the Steenbeck. The Moviola was built vertically, that is, the device had an upper reel and a lower reel, and the film moved between those two locations during viewing. The Steenbeck was a flatbed device, and the film moved from left to right across the table. For reasons that were not quite clear when this mechanical move was made, the pace of cuts, the construction of shots, and the overall feel of the movie changed.

After not touching an Apple device since 1992, I have spent the last week getting acquainted with the iPad. It has been an interesting few days. At first I thought of it as a netbook without keyboard or mouse, but I am coming to the conclusion that it is something new, something that makes me think of Moviolas and Steenbecks. I think that what is new is the conception of space that is implicit in the way the thing works.

First generation PC's showed a page. They were single tasking, text driven devices that allowed you to do some task, usually business related. The archetypical application was WordPerfect. It presented the user with a spare, blank screen that was ready for words. As I recall, as you typed it paged down, and after you had several pages you could page up to review what you had done. There were some applications that fudged this a bit. Spreadsheets existed in a potentially wide space, but even large spreadsheets seemed to assume a page by page format, as if the screen data conformed to how people needed to conceive of it. Space was two dimensional, with up and down the best options.

With the introduction of windowing systems and mice, and more specifically hypertext browsers, the screen added a new, third dimension of depth. Clicking took you into the screen. Underlined blue text implied another page waiting to be accessed (or deeper content waiting to hover over your page). Text boxes floated above the screen, links opened new browser windows that stacked on the existing screen, and unwelcome advertisements covered the screen. Tabbed browsing implied that there was something else, but more often than not, the link would open a new window, which would then add tabs.

As I have explored the iPad what I am starting to grasp is that inherent in the device is a conception of space that is less three dimensional, a la browser based windowing systems, and more two dimensional. It starts with the simple arrangement of icons on the screen, which are accessed by swiping left or right, but it is reinforced with applications like the Wall Street Journal (which appears to be generating a bit of buzz). It is not two dimensional in the old DOS/WordPerfect sense. Rather, it feels like a huge two dimensional space that can be scanned, read, reviewed up or down, right or left, as it passes under the window, in much the same way that a glass bottomed boat allows a window into the large space underneath the boat.

I am not sure what effect this will have on using the device for training - my original motivation was to look at the device for a potential training project. McLuhan said that each new medium starts with the content of an old medium, but then changes it to fit the needs of the new medium. Intel and Microsoft have announced pad projects. If this is indeed the start a new medium, the sooner we appreciate that, and begin to look at how it might be used for training, what will change, what will get better, and what will no longer work, the better off we will be.

R

 

 

When Life Changing Technology Fails

If I had to describe two bits of technology that have truly changed the way we live, the first would be the VCR/DVR and the second would be the GPS. One changed the way we look at time, the other the way we conceive of space.

Before the widespread adoption of time shifting tools the schedule of prime time television marked the passage of the week with much the same regularity as a medieval church bell sounding for evening vespers. The passage of the workweek/school week was marked by the progression from the Monday shows to the Thursday shows. (The passage of the years was marked by new shows becoming favorites, then reruns, then cancellations.) A curious side effect was the disorientation people felt as they visited across time zones and found their favorite show were on either an hour earlier or an hour later.

With the convenience of a DVR, time can be stopped, rewound or fast forwarded. If you would like to experience how pervasive this is, first get the technology, then get used to it, then check into a hotel that does not have it. The concentration that was no longer necessary now needs to be relearned. If anything at home seems interesting, and missed, just press the rewind button. 8 seconds back is one click. Two or more takes us backwards in increments of 8. One click forward skips 30 seconds. If anything is interesting enough to be watched live, the commercials are interminable.

Space was defined by driving through it, using local gas station or visitor center maps, or Rand McNally atlases (which showed multiple states and countries). Traveling any distance meant finding your starting and ending points, and then finding the best route between them, based on your particular criteria that day. Did you want to make time or take in the scenery? Arguments broke out based on different routes, and people gained status based on their knowledge of the best shortcuts. Before you started it was clear where you were, where you wanted to be, and how you would cover the distance between the two.

Then technology intervened.

My smart phone (an Android) has a GPS app that allows me to enter the starting point ("my destination" – wherever that might be, and I don't even need to know where I am to make it work), then enter my destination. A route will appear, small enough to only allow viewing the next few miles of a hundred mile journey. A voice will instruct me to turn in ¼ mile on the next leg of the journey. As this technology was tested, passed, and became part of my technology suite, a curious thing happened. I stopped conceiving of space as something I needed to know how to navigate through. Then an even more curious thing happened. The technology failed.

I had occasion to visit someone in an unknown location. No problem, I had the address and I had my GPS. A quarter mile away from the end point I lost the connection to the navigational satellite. That last ¼ mile took an hour to navigate as one initial wrong turn compounded itself. When leaving for the next leg of the journey, the GPS plotted a route that took us over 275 miles of streets, back roads, and small two-lane highways (and yes, there was a large road alternative, and no, I had not selected "avoid highways.")

We bought an atlas, then used it to take major roads. We turned on the GPS only after we had put sufficient distance between us and the last tiny-road turn-off. It was both amusing and sad. And it did illustrate just how fragile some of the technology we take for granted can be.

Going Up? : Of Interfaces and Elevators

I will be teaching a class on information visualization this summer at Harrisburg University. Last evening I attended a faculty get together at the school. Something I had noted each time I have been there combined with a project I have been thinking about all day and the result is this post. It has nothing to do with information visualization, Harrisburg University itself, teaching strategies, or anything of that nature (well at least not yet). It has to do with elevators.

I am sure that everyone has a clear and unambiguous idea of how to ride an elevator, but allow me to state that explicitly here. You walk into an office building. If necessary, you exchange pleasantries with the security folks. You are directed to the elevator bank, where you push a button on the wall to get an elevator. If necessary, you wait, and then when the doors open you get on. You select a floor, then get off as appropriate.

Except here there are no buttons on the wall. There are two banks of elevators on opposite walls. There is a podium like device in the middle of the floor, between both elevator banks, and it is used not only to summon an elevator, but to specify the floor that you want. The device then tells you which elevator you will be taking. When you get on the elevator there are no buttons to select a floor, you just go where you said you wanted to go.

So, the first thing that needs to be said is that this system works flawlessly, at least on every occasion that I have been there. I got on, elevated (or descended), and then got off. So why am I writing about it?

Because it feels odd. (is is appropriate to discuss an elevator interface as potentially "intuitive"?- is this something we can grasp?) If I were feeling philosophical I might describe it as an especially deterministic mode of travel. One cannot get on the elevator and decide, spontaneously, that some task on a different floor had been momentarily forgotten, with a quick button push all that was needed to correct the oversight. You WILL go where you said you wanted to go. Then there is the actual ride, which if taken in solitude gives one the opportunity to note the lack of any floor-select buttons, which I find somehow constricting. What if I needed to get off before I get where I'm going? Yes, I probably never would, but the lack of that ability discords.

An aside: I had a very chic phone in the kitchen. It was brushed stainless steel (actually brushed stainless plastic) in the shape of an old style wall phone. The touch tone buttons were shaped like an old rotary dial. It looked very stylish, but I couldn't use it to call people very easily. All my numbers had been stored internally in geometric patterns – the round shape made me stop and think explicitly about what number I was calling. It slowed me down and it was very annoying. Again, the thing worked perfectly, it was just odd.

So, what does this have to do with training?

I have been reviewing a large number of web based modules for a class I am working on. I have seen a large number of interfaces of late. Some are better, some are worse. The interesting ones are those that are consciously attempting to be better, but like the elevators at Harrisburg University, have not prepared me for their improvement, and which conflict with my user expectations. They lead me to ponder the differences between progress and status quo, expectation and innovation. And how to quantify intuition.

 

 

Digital Fractology: An Example

An example of Digital Fractology

(NB: I think it ironic that I was about to add this post to the blog when I allowed a Microsoft update to execute. It has crashed my computer – this is being created and posted in safe mode. More on the outcome of this at a later date)

After sharing my last entry with several colleagues several points are in need of clarification when considering Digital Fractology.

First and foremost, the conversation is not about something that has become broken, but rather, about something that is broken by design. I am not talking about a flat tire, but about a square tire. Examples of such technologies are all too prevalent, and over the past few days I have begun collecting things that I believe fit the definition. I present one of them here as illustration of the concept.

Lately, a number of web sites have taken to embedding Microsoft Bing searches into article text in the event you might need to look up strange and unfamiliar terms like "Barak Obama" or "Ronald Reagan." The result is an incredibly intrusive popup that leaps into the field of view, blotting out the text you were actually reading. A search on "annoying Bing pop ups" yields several hundred thousand results. A quick review of some of the top results reveals that, among other things, the pop ups frequently crash the browser. Many of the users were also angry with Microsoft for creating this situation, but the solution, to change a cookie setting on the browser, is neither immediate nor obvious. I suspect that most users will simply learn to live with the situation, and either accept that useless search terms will intrude on their reading, or else they will learn how to move their cursor out the way of these inadvertent annoyances. Either case is unacceptable, but is also a perfect example of Digital Fractology.

If you have an example of something you consider DF, please post it below. I am curious to see if other people are experiencing this. In the coming days I will post additional examples.

R

Digital Fractology

The title of this post is a new phrase that I will use to launch a new science – the study of broken technology. I have hinted at this several times in previous posts, but most of those were rants about particular examples that I had come upon as I went through my labors. I have experienced several more in the past day, and as I have thought about this I think that there is actually something here that needs to be examined in a systematic way. I will first attempt the draft of a formal definition, and then site some recent examples. Hopefully, I will receive some feedback on additions and adjustments to the definition.

Digital Fractology: The study of malfunctioning technology. The malfunction may be in hardware, software or inherent in the human-computer interface.

There are several assumptions in this definition. For example, it is assumed that the malfunction is not trivial, but is inherent in the design of the product. I think another way to say this is that the product is broken by design – when used in its proper configuration, it does not work properly.

Several examples may help explain this.

I recently put an HP 8500 into service in my office. It is a multifunction printer that has a great many positives – it prints well, it copies, it scans, it sets up easily in a wireless network. However, the first time you try to print an envelope you discover that there is no capacity to actually do this easily. The manual is no help, and the web is littered with user-developed work-arounds. Most result in 2 or 3 misprinted envelopes which need to be discarded. When you scan a document with the supplied software there is no way to name that document in a descriptive way. Instead you must first save it with the non-descriptive title of "scan009" (or whatever the next number in the sequence was), then go to the scan directory and rename the file. If you scanned two files at the same time, you must open one to confirm its contents. Both of these are examples of Digital Fractology.

Every morning I visit a web site for news and commentary. The first time this site loads the content is visible for a brief moment, but is then replaced with a blank page. In order to see the content, the site must be refreshed by pushing the refresh button. Once this is done, it then displays the content properly. This is not earth shaking, but it is consistent and it is broken. Another example would be the interaction between pop-ups and pop-up blockers, and the litter of unfilled mini-windows that interaction leaves upon the screen.

I described this in a post on a local technology blog with these words:

My latest fascination is with broken technology, i.e. intuitive interfaces that aren't, absolutely stable environments that crash, broadband communication channels that bottleneck, etc. This does not even venture into the willful acts of malevolence from spyware, viruses and the like. Every act of advancement seems to be matched by a retreat on a different front.

As always, the focus here is on learning technology, so let me close with a note specific to learning. Most of the things that could be described as Digital Fractology are annoying, and perhaps even more so because we have chosen to accept them rather than change them. However, when learners are trying to build new mental models, understand new ideas or work with any of the cognitive processes inherent in learning, any instance of broken technology adds to the cognitive distance between learner and content. As teachers and trainers we should simply not stand for this.

R

Beginner’s Mind, Geek’s Mind

I have been away from this effort for some time. As noted in my last post, I have been working on some tutorials to get students through the basics of learning Dreamweaver. The development of those materials has proved interesting, and now that they have been developed, and delivered, I have been considering the activity involved and results achieved.

Perhaps the most striking thing I note about myself is the change from "not knowing" to "knowing." About a month ago I knew how to create a website, but not how to create a website in Dreamweaver. I found the program frustrating and counterintuitive. After working through the issue, and constructing (in my own definition of that word) the knowledge needed to build a website in Dreamweaver I slid into knowing how to do it. I chose the word "slid" carefully, because it seems to define how my brain moved as I changed states from un-knowledge to knowledge. One moment I couldn't do it, then I had a good idea of how to do it but had not yet practiced it, then a moment later it was just another thing I could do. I suspect learning is a little bit like pain in this way; we cannot remember it very well once it is past. The act of learning passes and what we are left with is the knowledge of the subject, while the knowledge of the process of learning slips away like a bump or scrape that has healed.

Since the learning is still fresh in my mind, I can still follow its construction. When I speak here of Beginner's mind it is not quite the same as the Zen idea of openness to possibilities, but rather, an understanding a beginner needs some basic guidance in the basics. Before one can expand a mental model, there must first be a mental model. Building that should be a first, and discrete, step. What was the most frustrating to me about all the tutorials I found was the noise. That is what I mean by Geek's mind, or what I perceived as the need to pile extraneous detail onto the basic mental model until in some cases I could no longer discern the basic mental model, just the noise. I am not sure why geeks do this, but if you have spent any time at all around them I'm sure you recognize the behavior. Perhaps it is just to show off, but in this case a lesson (or multiple lessons) on cascading style sheets degenerated into huge exercises of "do this, then do this, then do this…" until the initial reason for doing anything is long lost.

The problem is that it interferes with learning. This is why I created my minimalist instruction in Dreamweaver. Yes, a lesson on cascading style sheets can cover multiple instances of amazing formatting instructions to achieve almost anything, but THIS IS NOT THE PLACE TO START! First create a mental model of a very basic CSS, and then build on it. Yes, templates can be used to create incredibly complex pages, but first, WHAT IS A TEMPLATE AND HOW DOES IT WORK IN DREAMWEAVER? How does the same menu get placed on all the pages and updated automatically? This seemingly simple idea was not part of any of the website tutorials I could find.

Because I could not find any, I took it onto myself to build some simple and easy to use tutorials that could be used to create simple mental models. What would have happened if my students did not have these models? How many would have duplicated my frustration, with the more devoted also finding a way to construct the needed knowledge from multiple different sources? This is not organized learning, it is chaos. What concerns me is the amount of chaos we accept. How many times in learning a basic program feature do we feel that "everyone else seems to know how to do this, why can't I?"

The most critical question for me is how to keep that feeling out of the e-learning that I create.

R

Web 2.0 Application Support, or the problems with latchkey apps

Over the past few days I have had the curious experience of trying to create a website in Dreamweaver, and since the overall theme of this blog is to document the ins and out of learning on and with the web, my adventure seems worthy of some comment .

The circumstances were (or seemed to be) quite simple. I am teaching a course on instructional design for e-learning. The tool selected for this task was Dreamweaver and my objective was to have the students use it to create some simple learning presentations that would illustrate the content of the course. That content focuses more on the instructional requirements of web based learning sites, and not the mechanics of creating the web site itself. Yes, there is a certain interaction, but as I described it to my students, the course covers instructional design using Dreamweaver, not Dreamweaver using Instructional Design.

The students did not have an extensive background in web design, so I started them with a tutorial on Dreamweaver CS4 which I found on the Adobe site. (http://www.adobe.com/devnet/dreamweaver/articles/first_cs4_website_pt1.html )After working through it I thought it covered the basic concepts of creating pages with Dreamweaver well, including a good overview of the page/CSS interactions. I then started to prepare a lesson and I discovered a gaping hole.

The tutorial created the Dreamweaver menu system and showed how to branch from a home page to the various child pages that might be added to a site. It also showed how to add and delete child pages and how to format the menu system. But if I created one of those pages using the same techniques shown in the tutorial, I could not navigate back to the home page. This seemed like it should be a fundamental component of creating a web site and I would have assumed a starting point in the tutorial. It should have been a simple problem, but it wasn't.

The first thing I discovered was that the books I had, and the various internet accessible tutorials all showed the same thing – I could create pages and massage the formatting with CSS, but I could not find a tutorial that explained how to create a web site, that is, 5 pages that linked to one another, all sharing the same menu structure.

Eventually I determined that one way to do this (I'm sure there are several) involved creating pages from a template, and then making updates to the template page and allowing them to be copied thru the site. My frustration came from two sources – the first was that I had experience with several web page creation programs, i.e. NetObjects Fusion and FrontPage, and I had an expectation that there would be some built in facility to assist me in creating a site (not a page) from a template. That there was not turned out to be an idiosyncrasy of Dreamweaver and something that I would need to accept.

But the other frustration and the way I found my information is why I bring it up here.

Most of the help options redirected me to adobe's website. Many redirected me to user forums. None (that I could find) sent me to the user manual for the program. There did not seem to be a user manual. As someone who has spent a large amount of time on the phone with tech support both professionally and personally, I have become accustomed to making the first step to actually look at the manual. (This was a hard lesson to learn, but it sank in after about the 10^th time some weary tech support person asked me politely if I had looked at Page127 of the manual?) Now as a good support citizen I found out that there was no manual, and they were sending me to other users. I suppose that there is some trendy Web 2.0 justification for this, but it seems like an abdication of responsibility on the part of the program authors. I wanted to go to the Index of the manual, look up "web sites….creation from template" and start there. Instead I watched some videos, read some forums, and snatched needed pieces of the puzzle from several chapters of several books.

From a learning point of view, this was constructivism in practice, and I now know a lot more about Dreamweaver, but I still feel somewhat put upon by the process I was forced to follow. I did not enjoy it. While it might be a valid business decision on the part of Adobe for an obscure or rare process or procedure, I think that building a web site should be assumed to be a fundamental desire on the part of anyone who buys the program.

This is actually a lesson in my e-learning class. Pity I did not have one of the Dreamweaver folks in there.

R

Let’s Kill e-Learning

Over the past couple of days I have been in a variety of meetings, classes and conversations about e-learning. After processing the information I have heard I am wondering (only half sarcastically) if the current goal is to kill e-learning so we can all move on to the next big thing and buy new toys…er, I mean tools.

Allow me to expand on this. The central theme of these discussions is this: most compliance training has been moved to e-learning (70% is the number that is tossed about). No one likes this training. It is described non-verbally by most by the miming of an air-mouse click-click-clicking into the air of a virtual page-turner. The only thing that seems to generate any excitement at all in compliance training is the ability to say with authority that 100% of the target audience has completed the training, as proven by the detailed LMS reports, pie charts and graphs.

Let me restate that – a larger (and growing larger percentage) of e-learning now consists of training that excites no one who is developing, delivering or taking it. Having experienced my own share of requisite compliance training I think it safe to describe it as self-administered PowerPoint presentations, and if you thought death by PowerPoint was bad when you had a presenter in front of the room, imagine it without even that minor diversion.

There are 2 responses to this. OK you say, it's not a problem because "my" training is not like that. "I" am not developing boring page turners. "I" am developing fully interactive e-learning modules that take advantage of everything I can find to increase user involvement.

Yeah yeah yeah. But where is it being delivered? On the same platform that users have come to associate with those compliance modules? So having bored someone to distraction, you now are using the same platform and think they will be excited by your training. This is a great plan. Do you also think that everyone enjoys going to the dentist?

The other logical observation is that compliance training is by definition there to ensure that everyone is compliant with some requirement. There is nothing unreasonable there - or is there? If the only reason a class is offered is to ensure that everyone has clicked the completion screen, whether or not they learn anything, then is it time to question the need for these classes? I realize that this is a naïve question.

Almost as naïve as thinking that shifting hours of self administered PowerPoint's to a learning platform will have no effect on how people view that platform, the concept of training, or the people who are requiring it.

R

New Writing, New Reading

I have been involved of late with redoing the content of my web site. It may come as a shock to some that I tend to be a bit wordy, sometimes appearing to revel in the sound of my own fingers hitting the keyboard. This is actually intentional, a sort of filter I have decided to put on this effort. My thought is that I am attempting, however successfully or unsuccessfully, to comment on things that sit in the grey area – that is, that do not have quick/binary yes/no, buy/sell, go/stay responses. This may be vanity, but I would like to think that there are issues that deserve debate, and the intention is to draw people into the debate.

On the other hand…

Of late I have been working to improve the content of my website – that place that tells people about my company and what it does. (We deliver training and consulting on e-learning). I became aware that it was in dire need of updating when I looked at it and discovered that it looked too much like this blog (see above paragraph). I needed to redo the website to grab people's attention so they would engage my services and continue to provide me with a living.

So, I have been rewriting and it has been an interesting experience. The guidelines and experts suggest that I need to change the way I write to match a new audience. My goal is not to detail those guidelines here – there are multiple web sites that can suggest how to write for the web. As a common point of reference let's accept shorter paragraphs, shorter words, more to the point, less detail as very broad strokes of the advice. Instead, I would like to pause for a moment to consider how that new style of writing affects content.

As someone who has experienced college instruction in multiple decades and with multiple technologies, I have seen something of what happens when the medium changes. When I restarted my studies in the 1990's most of the lectures were presented using PowerPoint slides. Initially I thought this was great – I would not need to scribble furiously to record the course content; instead I would have an accurate record of the lecture that I could make notes upon.

But I didn't. One problem was that teachers often did not extend much past the PowerPoint, so there was nothing to write. Another was that the slides seemed to capture the class discussion well enough that I did not need to add notes.

Then a curious thing happened – I stopped listening to the content of the class and started listening to the presentation and noting my own reactions to it.

First, a change that had occurred in the time I had been away from school. Previously teachers had covered chalkboards with information that remained in front of the class as an artifact of the previous discussions. PowerPoint was very Zen-like, existing only in the moment the slide was on the screen. In this case the spare Zen experience was not necessarily a good thing for learning. Then I noticed that writing notes actually engaged my brain in ways that watching slides did not (kinesthetic learning for those interested)…in effect, class became bad television, with everyone sitting passively and watching.

(This may be an old memory, but I remember reading way back that watching television put the brain into an alpha state, which was associated with rest, i.e., even watching a horrid natural disaster on TV is at the core a peaceful experience. I wonder if anyone has studied brains attempting to learn while watching PowerPoint slides.)

In short I noticed that I was not learning very much in classes conducted via PowerPoint (which leads back to one of the reasons for the first paragraph of this entry). It also directly affects how content is presented in e-learning courses, since most that I watch are simply self-administered PowerPoint presentations (perhaps you can use that phrase the next time someone tells you that you need to create a course quickly – just use PowerPoint - because budget is small and turnaround needs to be quick).

I continue to ponder what to do with my website.

And no, I am not going to link to it until I have revised it ;-)

R