Month: February 2016

Webinar Critique: “10 Powerful Principles for Creating Impactful e-Learning”

For my Webinars & Synchronous Learning (INTE 5670) class, I choose to review a webinar that took place on Wednesday, February 3rd starting at 11AM Mountain Time.  It was entitled “10 Powerful Principles for Creating Impactful e-Learning.”   The speaker was Ethan Edwards, Chief Instructional Strategist at Allen Interactions, the sponsor of the webinar.   The website where I found this webinar is called Training Magazine Network.   The Adobe Connect recording can be accessed at the hyperlinked webinar title through a membership login.

The webinar lasted roughly one hour, which was the advertised duration.   In that 60-minute session, Ethan Edwards gave the registered 2000 participants, including myself, 10 tips on effective e-learning practices.   One of the principles I found interesting was number 4: Talk less.  Do more.   Often, it’s easy for an online tutorial to become text or voice-over narration heavy.   It’s better to get the learner engaged in an activity, which tied into principle number 2: Let the learner take control.   The other principles he emphasized were:

  • Don’t list formal objectives.
  • Design the end of the lesson first.
  • Create real-life experiences.
  • Design specific gestures
  • Avoid adversarial tone.
  • Use context to create meaning.
  • Stop judging and scoring everything.
  • Hold the learner accountable.

Overall, I found the content of the webinar very insightful, but the context was a different matter.  With 2000 registered users, there were limited opportunities for active, or for that matter, interactive learning strategies.  Both the audio mic or video camera options were not available for the participants.  There was a chat option in the Abode Connect platform, but with the large number of participants, there was a flood of responses.   I posed a question about the mobile flexibility of a tutorial Ethan’s company created for Dairy Queen, but the question disappeared as more people chimed in with their chat replies.

On the other hand, the presentation by the speaker was impressive.  Ethan spoke with clarity and high energy.  I could tell he really enjoyed his work.  The host, Gary Vanantwerp, did a great job of not only moderating the session, but also of checking Ethan’s microphone levels prior to the start.  The slides were simple, easy-to-read, and incorporated many aspects of CARP (repetition of simple fonts, text alignment, etc).   For the most part, there was a simple analogous color pattern of blue and green with a mix of white and black.   This presentation would have been easy to read if it had been projected on a large screen in a lecture hall somewhere.   Also, the absence of a video recording of Ethan drew my eyes to the Power Point slides while he narrated.   It felt like a valuable Khan Academy presentation, where the vanity of the instructor is secondary to the instruction.

Ultimately, this was a very professional session, but it came off more as a webcast rather than a webinar.   It would have been nice if there where more active and interactive learning opportunities, but with 2000 registered participants listening to a 60 minute session, I imagine that’s not a possibility.  Still, this session gave me some good ideas on the style and substance of an effective webinar, particularly with the CARP slide characteristics.  Plus, Ethan sparked my interest in creating a better e-learning module, which will come in handy as I build my ILT portfolio.

 

Response: Chapter 2 of “New Literacies: Everyday Practices and Social Learning”

In the past three weeks, students, like myself, in the Learning with Digital Stories class (INTE 5340) at UC-Denver have been critiquing a variety of digital stories found on the Internet. There are a rich variety of perspectives I’ve seen, from people overcoming debilitating injuries to an old man recounting his time in a Nazi prison camp. Textbook readings, however, are not my favorite assignments.   This week, we delved into the second chapter of New Literacies: Everyday Practices and Social Learning. Whereas the first chapter dealt largely with the various definitions of literacy, this next chapter covers some new territory involving the concept of practices and how that relates to literacy.

Authors Colin Lanshear and Michele Knobel creatively illustate the term “practices”, as initially defined by Andrez Reckwitz, to the reader:

“In short, practices are routinized ways of moving our bodies, handling objects and using things, understanding and describing the world, desiring and conceiving of tasks and purposes, of treating subjects and so on (p.34).”

In this explanation, I feel the term “practices” sounds very much like the word “traditions.” The phrase “describing the world” almost could be interchanged with the word “storytelling.”  Now that I think of it, this description of practices sound very similar to the concept of folklore, where certain customs, including written and oral communication, were handed down from generation to generation.  Folklore seems in play a factor into Lanshear and Knobel’s theme of literacy.  They believe that literacy “enables meaning-making to occur or ‘travel’ across space and time, mediated by systems of signs in the form of encoded text of one kind or another (p. 40).”

“Ah ha!” I thought to myself. This was the moment where I could see the emerging link between literacy and digital storytelling (even though that phrase had not been mentioned).  Whereas a much of traditional folklore involved oral communication, when the message had to be “handed down” face-to-face, “literacy” requires the message to be put in writing or some other form that ensured “permanence and transcendence” (p.40).   Personal blogs are one example of this type of literacy.  The authors tie in James Gee’s concept of “Discourse” from the previous chapter in explaining how each individual views a blog based on what particular “group” that viewer believes he or she belongs to.

The second chapter certainly did engage my interest in how our society has gone from communicating from face-to-face to Facebook.   As I mentioned earlier, I watched a digital story about a survivor of a Nazi prison camp.  His name was Sy Bakker.   I imagine that in a time before social media, broadcast journalism, or even newspapers, such a story like Bakker’s would not have survived as an oral tradition.  It’s comforting to know that with the use of camera phones, computer editing and YouTube; Bakker’s story of adversity and endurance will be available to anyone with a computer and a broadband connection.

Yet, I have not once read the phrase “digital storytelling” in these first few chapters.  Still waiting for that even bigger “Ah Ha!” moment to come.

Digital Story Critique 3: The Story of Sy Bakker

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m very interested in the topic of adversity.  My past struggles have been largely financial, but I’ve be fortunate to live out of harm’s way.  Not so for Sy Bakker, who had to endure Nazi oppression during the German occupation of The Netherlands during World War II.   Bakker, and other Charleston Retirement Community members, told their stories as part of The Charlestown Digital Story Project which involved students from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

For this critique, I focused on three assessment traits to gauge the storytelling:

  • Voice: This story is a straight “I was there” narration told by Sy Bakker himself.  There are no other soundbites.  At times, I could hear Bakker’s tone change as he described an encounter with a German soldier pointing a gun at him.  In another instance, he describes the terrible conditions at a prison camp: the straw floors, the small amounts of bread and the tiring labor tasks.  The recording is crisp, clean and easy to hear.   In a historical context, voice is important to consider since the eyewitness can give a unique account of small details of a large war.
  • Flow/pacing: The students at UMBC do a very good job of organizing the main audio elements of the story: Bakker’s narration and simple violin music.   The breaks in the narration gives the viewer a chance to reflect on Bakker’s experiences.  There is a nice flow of historical images, still photos and a picture of Sy Bakker at the time of the recording.  Pacing is important to give the viewer a chance to soak in all the historical details and gain a greater understand of what it meant to be a prisoner in a Nazi labor camp.
  • Media application: Like the comments before, the students use a simple mix of audio and video elements.  Some of the still photos are of sunsets and barren fields, which I believe gives the viewer an opportunity to briefly reflect.   It would have been nice to see additional historical photos of Bakker as a student in The Netherlands or maybe of his family in France, but such archived material may not have been available.   If there is one more thing I would have liked to have seen, it would have been some type of statement/reflection from Sy Bakker about how that time during Nazi occupation changed his life.   Maybe he could have passed along some words of wisdom to younger generations.

There are many more digital stories from The Charlestown Digital Story Project and I recommend anyone to click on the hyperlink above and check them out.

Daily Create Week 3: Julius Caesar Quote In Old West Speak

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This week’s Daily Create took a little creativity: Turn a William Shakespeare quote and use an Old West Speak Generator to create the cowboy version.  I chose the following from Julius Caesar:

“Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once.”

Here’s the Old West Speak Version.  Interesting.