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

 

Do You Believe in Magic?

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. – Arthur C. Clarke, 3^rd law of prediction.

I'm not sure why, but this popped into my head during a recent interaction with my computer. I had been trying to put a picture into a document. The process is usually quite simple, find the picture in application A, highlight it, hit CTL-C, then go to application B, put the cursor where you want to insert, then hit CTL-V. Voila, you have the picture in both places. It's simple. It's easy. I have done it hundreds of times.

Except it didn't work.

I retraced my steps, clicking, copying, moving, pasting. Nothing. I tried a few times with greater care and lesser speed, but it was always the same result. Eventually I moved the picture a different way (my latest fixation is to not waste time trying to solve the wrong problem – here I wanted to move the picture, not fix or understand Windows annoyances).

Once the picture was where it belonged I started thinking about the bigger canvas and how we are supposed to conduct learning on computers. As informal tech support for a medium sized circle of friends, and as someone formerly responsible for tech support in a large corporation, I have noticed that users generally fall into two classes. There are those who have a conceptual idea of how the computer works and who need to know the specifics of how to make something new happen (or to make it happen correctly). Then there are those for whom it is simply magic.

I think the magic people are in the majority – by a lot. Stuff happens on the computer and there is no way to predict what or why. Windows start spawning windows and can't be stopped. Software stops responding and documents that hadn't been saved for hours are now gone. The network stops responding and there is no mental model that guides how to get it back. In some cases even a rudimentary understanding that shutting everything off and restarting might help is missing. Often the magic uses language to move the computer into sentience. The computer does things. The computer surfs the web. The computer got a virus. On one level it causes me to be astonished by the number of computers that are sold and that are in use, but more relevant to the subject of this blog…

I think this affects learning in two ways.

First, it places learning into a very fragile environment, one that might lock up, become unresponsive or just stop working at any moment. I have friends who are afraid to try things for fear they might break something (I think this is the single most logical explanation for the number of unsecured networks in America). So a lesson needs a new Flash player to run – uh oh. I better not download that, I might get a virus. A lesson displays a bad script error on a page – uh oh, what does that mean? Did I do something wrong? The computer wants to download updates – uh oh, I'd better not, I'm working fine right now. In any case, the learning of lesson content is over and the user begins solving the wrong problem, or just goes away.

Second, and very related to the first, it creates a cognitive distance between the learner and the material that is based on a basic distrust of the medium of instruction. How can you present a lesson on electrical safety if the user is not certain they can get to the end of the lesson safely? In the simplest terms, if I am in class with a live teacher, and I ask a question, I am pretty sure that the teacher is not going to lock up or reboot. I can focus on the lesson, and not the technology that is used to deliver it.

I am not sure if there is a resolution to this dilemma, and whether that resolution is a more reliable computer or a better mental model of how they work, but I think it will continue to affect learning on the computer until it is resolved.

R

To Entropy, or Not to Entropy

I have been preparing for a class on web based instructional design, and as a result have been considering some of the basic assumptions we make concerning the presentation space for e-learning. While the class will need to consider a variety of browsers, one that will need to take a central focus must be Internet Explorer. While I hesitate to cite Wikipedia, on the page for browser market share, the graphic for Internet Explorer looks remarkably like the old Packman graphic.

So what is the issue?

I have noticed that there is a new category of flotsam accumulating on computer screens, the unasked-for addition of toolbars. The worst, and probably the most extreme, case was a friend who asked me why his printer had stopped working. When I looked I found that his browser had added a piece of malware, in the form of an additional toolbar that had simply hijacked his printer driver. But the other thing that was apparent was that he had a LOT of toolbars. He could search using Google from the convenience of his browser toolbar. He could search using Yahoo the same way. He could also search using AOL. He could access history, favorites, an additional row of MSN tabs, and multiple windows in the event he grew bored with one.

I do not begrudge anyone the use of as many search engines or additional tools as they might want, but each of these toolbars had eroded the window for viewing content, and deposited another line of noise into the communication channel. It seemed that there was as much information around the edge of any page he was viewing as there was on it. Given the nature of most web pages, this is probably not that big a problem, but I am focused on how we learn using web pages here, and that focus presents a number of problems, some trivial and I fear, some not.

The most mundane problem for a course designer is what assumption should be made about the viewing area for course content. Will the addition of multiple toolbars force the window to scroll? While this might not be bad in cases where there is significant content below the scroll line, in the case of a page that does not have any content, but only shows a scroll line that needs to be moved to see
that there is no content, it is at best annoying.

Another issue to consider, and one that I have not yet answered to my own satisfaction (and which I suspect will be the subject of future musings) is the effect on the learner of multiple and significant distractions around the learning space. An analogous situation would be a classroom in which everyone was allowed to talk in a normal speaking voice all the time. There would be no focus for anyone on anyone or anything. It would just be noise.

I will be curious to see what the class thinks about this. I suspect the discussion will take place according to the civilized rules for discourse in place in college classrooms. Have we defined those rules for browser based education?

R

Looking at e-Learning

One of the most memorable lessons in my personal education on e-learning was delivered a number of years ago by Edward Tufte (www.edwardtufte.com) during a seminar on information presentation. He first described the battles he went through in the design of the IBM DisplayWrite screen, which required a wide variety of system status messages to be placed on lines and columns stolen from the bottom, top and sides of the display space. It reduced the usable area of the screen significantly, and it was compared to the spare elegance of the WordPerfect 4.1 screen, which had very little system information, but an incredibly usable typing space. The final item he discussed was the Microsoft Word Screen, which, after years of development and technical advances, and most significantly, after the lessons of WordPerfect, returned to stealing lines and columns from the top, bottom and sides of the screen to display the status of the system.

While it sounds amusing, it started me down a path of looking at what it was that I was doing as I created e-Learning (or at the time, CBT). it also opens the door to a discussion of a topic that many e-learning developers and on-line instructors often take for granted – that their audience is instantly able to decode any new device, display element or convention used without instruction, hesitation or frustration. That is, they assume that the audience for e-Learning is automatically literate in the language the developer is speaking, even when that language is constantly evolving.

There are several cracks in this auto-literate assumption. One is easily demonstrated and it involves devices from Apple Computer. If one judged only from the users, these devices are the highest achievement of intuitive user design – everyone is born knowing how to use these devices and that knowledge is transmitted via DNA. This may not be quite the case. Try ejecting a disk without knowing how. There is no eject button to push on the drive itself - you move the disk into the garbage. This is not intuitive. Try turning off an iPod. There is no on/off switch on the player - you press and hold the play button. This is not intuitive.

I once did research on an on-line course. The instructor described each lesson with the language of hypertext – each page could be accessed in multiple sequences at the discretion of the learner and according to their individual learning styles. But the page content was sequential. The content flowed in a very defined sequence, so however many alternatives you had where you could access the page, in fact, there was only one way that you would. But there was an additional element that had been placed on each page – the page layout required that the user scroll down to see the entire content of the page – even when there was nothing to do except confirm that there was no content beyond the bottom border of the screen. Each page re-enforced sequentiality. So we had a course that was macro-sequential and micro-sequential, but which was advertised as neither.

One of the more interesting ways to see this disconnect between intent and achievement is on a website run by Vincent Flanders. He introduces the concept of "mystery meat navigation" and there are several good examples that give everyone the chance to experience intentionally what I fear many e-Learning users stumble into and through as they fight for information.

R

 

Learning New Software, or e-Learning in Action

Over the past few days I have had the need to learn a new software package. It has been an interesting few days. I now remember why I dislike learning new software and have disliked it for a long time. The package was Adobe InDesign, and while I may criticize Adobe a bit here, I would like to add that their heart seems to be in the right place, but the e-learning experience left much to be desired.

How it happened: I needed to know how the software worked, what it did and how it was different from PageMaker, so I downloaded an evaluation copy from the Adobe website. This was advertised as a fully functional copy of the program limited only by a 30 day license. I proceeded to load it on my PC. While this was happening I received an email from Adobe with several links that would help me evaluate the software. I clicked on a link which promised a feature tour.

The senior product manager for InDesign conducted the tour. I am sure he is very good at managing the product, but my focus here is on e-learning. The only real-world equivalent I can offer for this product tour training is this: Imagine you are explaining baseball to someone who has never seen a game. You first explain that there are 9 players on a side, and then, before explaining anything else and without any further prelude, you start explaining, in detail, the intricacies of the infield fly rule.

So, although the software seemed quite impressive from his explanation, I still had no idea how to use it, and in a larger sense, I did not really know what it did. Yes it was the next generation of PageMaker, but it did so much more than PageMaker they felt compelled to change the name. Cool, but I knew PageMaker; I did not know what constituted "more than PageMaker."

I next found a section of the website that offered basic instruction. (I should also note that the website has a great deal of help – so much help in fact that it borders on unhelpful trying to wade thru it all to find what you will think is useful for a given purpose). This section was helpful, but in a way that reminded me of how all software instruction is unhelpful – I found out about specific features of the program and how to do specific actions. The problem was that what I wanted was context, and the right amount of information.

I have taken multiple classes in a variety of software, some live, some on-line, some using a combination of the two, and some using e-Learning. For some reason all these classes are organized according to the progression of menu bar items in the software. That is, starting with "File" we learn what options the File menu offers, then move to "Edit" and then through the various menu options of the program. This may work for some people, but my particular learning style finds this to be a good way to waste 1 - 5 days of my life. If I could rewrite the training it would be around some common, logical use of the program and I would provide a real world problem to be solved. Each lesson would have one problem and each would be self contained. For example, the first lesson for new users might be "creating a 1 page flyer."

Next, I would absolutely ban anyone who had anything to do with the development of the program from taking part in the development of the training for the program. Simply put, they know too much about the program and seem compelled by some dark force to try to compress the full sum of that knowledge into an introductory lesson. If you have ever taken a software class the easiest way to see this is the alternate method lesson – I.e. "you can change fonts by highlighting the text and right clicking to get to the drop down, OR, you can go to the home menu then to the font menu on the toolbar (hmmm, where is that?), OR you can click one of the present font styles on the menu bar (what are THEY?). Too much information! MapQuest has solved this problem - yes, there are multiple ways to get from Richmond to Chicago, but it doesn't try to show ALL of them!

I then found a link to a chapter in a book promising to teach me how to create a simple pamphlet. Cool, I am a sequential learner and a book implies a certain grounding in sequence. I downloaded the chapter, printed it and sat down with my computer to work through it. The first thing it wanted to confirm was that I had downloaded the chapter files before I started. I hadn't so I clicked on the file and downloaded it and then found I couldn't open it. Sigh. So I downloaded it again. Then I couldn't open it again. Great, so obviously it did not have an error on the download. I looked at the file – it was an .SITX file. What the hell was this and how did I open it? Over the next irritating 45 minutes I found it was a Mac formatted archive (easy), and I could download a free extraction program (hard – multiple offers to pay $50 for the full program before I could find one that allowed just an extraction) that would extract the files and put them on my drive. Another hour that should have been spent learning the software was tossed into the bit bucket while I played with irrelevant software solving the wrong problem.

So, to summarize this – and to provide some general info for e-Learning developers from all walks of life - Adobe did a good job of putting their software on-line, but a bad job of providing training for me. The reasons for this were several, but can be summed up under one general heading - my learning style did not match their teaching style.

BTW, after all this, the software does seem quite good.

R