The 5-Point Makeover Process I want to share with you the visual copy editing process I use when folks ask us to makeover their PowerPoint and e-learning slides. Most of the time users want us to just look at the slides or course, and give some feedback on ways to improve it. They’re not asking […]
Using Improv’s Principle of Agreement to Create Better Screencasts
Last week I was watching Screenr’s Public Stream when I noticed a common theme in the screencasts: They were all perfect. Now I don’t mean perfect in terms of audio quality, lesson structure, speaker preparedness or even content relevance. They certainly covered the range in those areas:-) By “perfect” I mean perfect in that they […]
Flash CS4 for Elearning Production
Flash CS4 for Elearning Production One of the features my team is most excited about in Flash CS4 is the new object-based animation. This should significantly reduce a lot of basic elearning production times for tasks such as: Animated text and bullets; Simple image fades and transitions. Granted, Elearning is (should be) much more than […]
Rapid Development: Campaign Social Networking Style
We all know how templates enable design teams and their customers to jump over much of the upfront drudgery and focus on the important part: the content. Should it then be any surprise that newsmakers would use such templates in their social networking efforts? Barack Obama’s group obviously wanted to maximize their Flickr juice by […]
Elearning Guild Annual Gathering 2008
Elearning Guild Annual Gathering 2008 Spent the weekend putting the final touches on my Elearning Guild sim for my Espresso Learning session this week on Second Life and virtual worlds. Espresso sessions are meant to be informal and conversational without slides or handouts, however, I always prefer to have some sort of live demonstration running […]
Captivate vs. Camtasia: Blend for Best of Both Worlds
The latest versions of Captivate and Camtasia confirm the screencasting & video tutorial industry is quickly evolving. As someone who’s created web-based video tutorials for almost ten years, I’ve tried just about every screen recorder developed. I still remember recording with HyperCam back in 1998. Trying to capture anything larger than 640×480 required a high […]
Creative Elearning via Email
Lately I’ve been working on identifying some alternative and cost-effective ways for delivering training. It’s an important area of focus for my group right now. So tonight, while reading through some white papers, elearning blogs, books and forums, I received a joke via email. As someone who loves (and welcomes) interruptions, I opened and read […]
Harper Collins, iTunes and Learner Control in Elearning
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 […]
Made to Stick – Going the Extra Step in Elearning Design
One of the more meaningful books I read last year was Made To Stick. If you’re a learning professional, you need to read this book. There are many great examples on how to make ideas (read: training) “sticky”. In particular, the Beyond War scenario: Statistics are rarely meaningful in and of themselves. They will, and […]
Powers of Ten, Multimedia Communication and Flash Components
Just listened to last week’s podcast of Science Friday. Ira interviewed a guest who specializes in “big numbers” and who talked about how one goes about communicating such indescribable values. Just as I was about to shout “Eames video” at my iTunes, a caller referenced the famous Powers of Ten short film. The Powers of […]