Monthly Archives: November 2014

Social Media vs. Social Learning

Leave a reply

I’m a huge believer in social learning. Social media, not so much.

To lay my cards on the table: I was using the Internet to communicate before Tim Berners-Lee ever came up with the World Wide Web. Back in those days we used “newsgroups” to have our asynchronous group conversations. I learned a huge amount from newsgroup participants.

From Facebook, MySpace, LiveJournal, and Tumblr … almost nothing.

The technical term for people like me is “curmudgeon”. We think the old days were better and the old ways were superior.

I don’t think that about everything, but I miss the heyday of newsgroups and find Facebook and its kin irritation.

All that personal stuff is irrelevant. Objectively, when creating a learning environment in the 201x’s, we must have a social media component, simply because so much of communication between people these days uses those media. So what is their role here in IULHD?

Mostly communication: announcements, communicating with non-students, scheduling non-company events (e.g. an Open House), and so forth. In a corporate environment, services like Facebook and Twitter are just too open. Information about our internal processes and procedures and such are confidential and must not be on those services.

Broadening the definition: social media (as opposed to social media services) like blogs and scheduled web shows and Yammer can be incredibly useful for a community like this. Web shows would tie in the video we covered in our last unit (along with the podcast, a medium I personally like a lot), while blogging allows for easy, fast publication and easy, painless subscriptions to information feeds. That’s where I plan to put  most of my emphasis. (In fact, in the real world we roll out a weekly web show some time early in 2015.)

How about social learning? The thing is, most current social media don’t allow what I think of as social learning: collaboration between students. In that context, I’ve found that Google Apps is a fantastic tool for certain types of learning and collaboration. The fact that two or more people can edit the same document, and see each others’ work updated on their screens in real time, is astonishingly useful. Combine with Google’s explicitly-social media (included) like Plus and Hangouts (formerly Google Talk), and you have a really excellent package. This may be the future of social media/social learning.

Moving Images – Learning From Video

Leave a reply

In the 21’st Century, video will be an inevitable component of almost any kind of learning. Current practice already uses video as an integral part of classroom training, e-learning, and just-in-time training. It lets the student observe situations and objects rather than just read or hear about them, and it exposes the students to situations and equipment that are either too dangerous or too expensive or too distant to actually bring into the classroom.

For instance, in an industrial setting video is a great way to introduce new technicians to potentially-hazardous tasks like pipe-fitting, or to walk them through a complex task like aligning the shafts of a motor and pump before they do these things hands-on. On the interpersonal skills side, recording actors is a great way to set up scenarios from “How to Coach Subordinates” to “Brainstorming” to “Ending Arguments Without Resentment”.

Videos must of course hold the audience’s attention. Based on instructional design principles, some ways to keep eyes on the material would include:

  • Keep it short. In my experience, anything over 5 minutes should have breaks in it for some interactive task. Longer videos result in MEGO.
  • Keep it changing. There are few things more boring than a video of one person talking for more than a few seconds. Introduce scene changes, use clip art, pan across a wider frame, but don’t leave the same unchanging image on the screen for too long.
  • Keep it relevant. There is an unfortunate tendency (especially among trainers who are also SMEs) to include everything they know about a subject in training materials, including video. This is especially bad because, unlike a written reference book, the student can’t as easily just skim or skip over deep background material that is not relevant to their actual day-to-day requirements. This is related to keep it short but has a different rationale.
  • Keep it professional. In an age where people grew up watching TV and online video, low production values are extremely visible to the student, and can decrease credibility. Something as simple and not-consciously-visible as lighting a scene badly can mark it on a subliminal level as “amateur” and prevent students from taking it seriously. Something as simple as adding instrumental music in appropriate places can make a viewer subconsciously class the video as “professional” and therefore important and worth paying attention to.

Video by itself rarely constitutes a full educational treatment. It will generally be mixed with some other media, often text, voice (in e-learnings), and instructor-led activities. It’s tempting to think of this as extra work for the designer and development team, but in the author’s educational philosophy, that is thinking of it backwards. Proper instructional design begins with the student’s needs and works from that to select media, not the other way around.

That said, development resources are often finite and as a practical matter, efficiency of their use is a factor. In online asynchronous automated training (CBT, e-learning), text is generally used interspersed with video segments. Ideally video is used where needed (for instance, to demonstrate something) where text (including voice-over) is used to emphasize key points and give the learner directions. Text is enormously less-expensive to add than video, so video utilization is minimized where possible.

In Instructor-Led Training (ILT), generally a resource book of some kind (student handbook, training manual, reference manual) is given to each student, containing the key points they need. Video is used as more of a supplement. The author is not defining this is as ideal (it is not) but describing the state of the current art. As usual, video being more expensive, its role tends to be limited to things which are difficult to teach in other ways.

Of course, video does raise questions about the disabled. A hearing-impaired or visually-impaired learner may not be able to properly learn from video clips. In the United States, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires reasonable accommodations to be made for disabled workers. This might include having alternate training forms for the disabled, or something as simple as closed-captioning any YouTube videos using Google’s excellent tools for that purpose, so that the hearing-impaired can fully appreciate them. A side benefit of captioning videos: the captions are searchable by Google and other search engines, making the videos easier to find.

Of course for non-YouTube videos, closed captions can and should (and for large businesses, often must) be added in any case.

This author tends to be skeptical of the need to consider different “intelligences” explicitly when designing a video. A video will inevitably stimulate or engage Gardner’s “Visual-Spatial” axis. Tautologically, including music will likewise involve the Musical axis, showing people interacting the Interpersonal, and so forth. However, as mentioned, this author doubts the relevancy of this concern given the strong and growing body of evidence that targeting “multiple learning styles” does not offer any benefit in the real world. See Learning Styles: where’s the evidence? for one example. Fitting the video to the material being trained seems far more relevant than trying to fit it to various groups of students.

Making this video reminded me of one thing about the process: it always takes much longer than you expected. Recording and editing the voice-over for this 8-minute video took over 2 hours! Just finding the clip art used probably took 4.

And it reminded me how much I enjoy it. I just wish I had more time for it.