I found this gem in buried in my archived bookmarks while preparing for last week’s Articulate Live ‘09 session on e-learning design.

This video is at least 4 years old, but it’s still one of my favorite examples of anthropomorphism for learning. Imagine Sesame Street meets Behind the Music.

Anyone looking for a creative approach to e-learning should take a look at the multimedia storytelling approach used in this video.

Techniques used include first person accounts from Cooper Black, interviews with his friends, family and rivals and graphic design highlights showcasing his rise, fall and rise in popularity.

Here’s a learning video worth watching. The original, wall-sized video, was created for the Lincoln Museum to “illustrate the scale, scope and tragedy of the Civil War.”

Using the ratio of 1 week:1 second, the video begins with Lincoln’s election in 1860 and concludes with the final surrenders in 1865.

This powerfully emotional video uses animated shape tweens, soundtrack and text labels to tell the story. Amazing.

Here’s a creative way of anthropomorphizing the elements.

At first glance, this one might seem like a lot of work to produce. And maybe it would be for a single person, but what would it look like if an entire class or group were assigned to produce  creative shorts?

Via Getting Things Done in Academia

From Multimedia Shooter, we find USA TODAY’s Interactive Bag of Tricks.

Included are multimedia storytelling options with published examples and a PDF job aid to hang by your desk. The examples are classic interactive storytelling components that any designer should be familiar with.

What caught my attention was the last bullet in Data-driven graphics:

“Experience with databases, queries and data scraping is fast becoming an important part of interactive storytelling.”

Now, it’s unclear just “who” is learning these new database skills, but I’ll bet they aren’t programmers or developers. Most likely, it’s a journalist, interactive designer or media designer who’s having to learn such competencies.

It’s always interesting to follow the new skills each profession is asked to learn. From doctors and lawyers (finally) learning to use the Internet, to multimedia designers learning adult learning principles, it’s all part of our professional evolution.

Be sure to download the PDF and browse the real-world examples and interactive graphics.

Kudos to Harper Collins for recently embracing the iTunes model and beginning to offer consumers the option to purchase individual chapters of books (Wall Street Journal).

As someone who purchases too many education and technology books every year, I’m anxious for other publishers to begin adopting similar models. I rarely read a tech book cover to cover but still glean a lot from most of them. Are you listening Pfeiffer? O’reilly?

I wonder how it would look if more corporate elearning courses offered similar choices?

Even today most courses unnecessarily employ full program control. Do you think users would be more inclined to take our courses if they felt they had more navigational control? Maybe.

We know from Clark & Mayer that courses targeted to novice users without a lot of prior knowledge are best designed with higher program control. This means the course follows a more rigid, prescribed path where the learner is essentially “led” through the course or module.

The idea is that novice learners will benefit from being presented the “whole picture” rather than choosing the content they “think” they need. Research validates this and I can live it.

But how much of our corporate elearning is of such complexity that it requires those formats? Does a Level 100 Workplace Harassment course really require such a deep knowledge base that users couldn’t view “Quid Pro Quo” before “Hostile Work Environment”?

Too often it seems Training and its learners are less aligned then they could be. I’ve been on both sides of the fence. I’ve consulted with companies who insisted on “compliance mode” (program control) for their users and I’ve managed internal elearning departments where I’ve taken calls from business units pleading to allow their employees to be able to take “part of the course“.

As elearning designers we need to understand there are different types of training content and our course design should reflect those differences. Not all classroom training is the same (lecture, facilitation, lab) and not all elearning is the same, either.