What blogging tells you about yourself

I realise I've been blogging intermittently for more than two years now. In the time that I've been doing it I've had bursts of creativity and feeling that I've just had to get down on the page, and other periods (much of this year if I'm honest) where the mojo has been lacking and I've not felt that I've had quite so much to say, or at least that I've been prepared to say.

But looking at the post admin pages for the blog, and at the posts that I've started and not ever finished, or bothered to post, I'm conscious that, for all the wonderful effects that blogging can have on your learning, the fact that it is public and open to the scrutiny of your peers and colleagues, clients and competitors, means that there is usually a need to be circumspect in what you commit to the page.

There are posts that I've started that I've never published since they run contrary to my employer's position on the matter, or pieces that I've re-read and dropped since they could be interpreted as a critique of work by colleagues and clients (or even my own) that some people may not intpret as being helpful. There posts where I've simply not been comfortable with the way that I've articulated by point and I've left them with the intention of coming back to edit them and, well, they're still waiting. Heck, there are even comments that I would like to have made on other people's blogs that I've pulled after typing.

Is this right? Should your employer's line on something stop you from having, or exploring, contrary points of view? Should the fear that someone may have thought you knew about something stop you using your blog to reflect on it when you have something to say? Should the thought that a piece of advice you might make to another blogger as a comment may not be politically sound, even if it is unrelated to your day job? If so, does this raise questions about how you choose to blog, and make it available? If a blog is for CPD, is it right to place it in the public domain?

My discarded comments are lost in the digital dust of cached pages and autofill memories but looking through the subject matter of unpublished blog entries I can see that there are themes to some of those abandoned posts that are telling me some interesting things about me that perhaps I should look to revisit and do something about.

I guess that this fits the adage that what is not said is sometimes as important as what is said.

Questions that this whole issue raises, what does your abandoned scribbling tell you about your self?

This post with thanks to Clive Shepherd whose own exploration of what his blog means to him and to others prompted me to commit this comment to the page, and, crucially, the 'publish post' button.

Sweet moments in web browsing

Following Cammy's discussion on seat time in elearning (far more interesting than this post btw) I found myself at the Brandon Hall site where Janet Clarey had taken up the same question.

While you are there, and hopefully adding your contribution to the debate, just check out the sweet tag cloud that seems to take its name quite seriously. Nice touch.

Snapshots of 21st century learning #1

My friend has just started his first teaching job as a graphic design lecturer at three different FE colleges.

The levels of the students varies from establishment to establishment, but he admits now that setting a research project as his first major piece of work with one group was perhaps a little optimistic.

Dismayed at the lack of progress that was being made he accompanied them to the library. The source of their problem was clear. Students would take books off the shelf and leaf through them at random, wondering how they were supposed to find what they were looking for beyond seredipity. My friend had to introduce the idea of the index and the contents pages as the crude, real-world precursors to the search function...

Getting perspective - the geophysical view

I've been working with a client in the financial sector lately, so I've had my focus directed at the markets perhaps even more than I might otherwise (not that we can avert our stares from the car crash).

So this is not really elearning related, but is instead a beautiful take on perspective in these interesting times - from a great blogger who is, I think, a Brit working in the financial sector in Tokyo.

Three tiny tools to help your course development

I am still doing a lot of work with development tools such as Articulate/PowerPoint, Captivate and most recently KSTutor, supplemented with standards such as GIMP and Kompozer.

In the line of this I have at various points had cause to look to add to my toolbox with some very nifty, but tiny micro apps. Here are three I am using at the moment:

GetColor SF: In essence a standalone version of the dropper tool offered by GIMP, Photoshop et al.

If you are working in PowerPoint you don't have the same luxury. GetColor offers a great way to get the hex value of any colour on the screen, and even save them for reference.

Arguably an essential addition to the PowerPoint learning designer's desktop.



Colour Contrast Analyser: Not sure if your imagery will meet accessibility requirements? This little app assesses contrast between colours. If you are working with the likes of Ufi you may know about this, but if you aren't, especially if you are doing your own SME-centred in-house development, this is a great way to get "free" accessibility.

This is a product of an Australian organisation called Vision Australia and a great example of an interest group that not only campaigns for equality but actually goes out there to make it easier for people to comply (overcoming inertia) after all - choosing colours wisely is essentially a 'free to implement' accessibility standard.


Sizer: A simple little tool that allows you to set the size of a window. With screen sizes now rapidly diversifying this allows you to choose to view at standard size, or to set your own sizes. Useful for viewing courses as your learners will see them, or for setting them prior to a capture session if you are using things like Captivate or KSTutor.

On the side of the good guys

From time to time I get a bit worried that what I'm doing isn't, well, "worthy". Each week I meet a group of guys to play Ultimate Frisbee. As a game it's a bit different and the crowd that gather are a bit different - renewable energy engineers, sustainable development advisors, livestock researchers, conservationists.

"So what do you do?" comes the question, to which I mumble "elearning designer". Once I've explained what elearning is, "You know, that stuff you get sat down at a computer when you join a new company and have to check off..." they roll their eyes, if they haven't completely glazed over.

Against the roll call of fascinating, planet saving jobs my team-mates boast, I feel like perhaps I could be doing something a bit more useful right now instead of taking the comfortable option of cosying up to big corporates for a living.

But then again - I could be doing stuff like this: The story of stuff.

The first "internet documentary" I've seen (as opposed to video documentaries broadcast via YouTube or similar FLV based sites), this short piece is a great example of high fidelity knowledge sharing online - easy to watch, well animated, easy to navigate (reminds of TED which is no bad thing). And it is, of sorts, elearning (without a concept checking quiz or list of objectives in sight).

But cool technical points aside, the documentary reminds me that elearning is on the right side - elearning helps to make a positive difference:

• People don't travel as much if they are participating in elearning.
• By and large we don't make huge demands on people's systems that they are forced into another cycle of consumption on their hardware - we just piggyback on a tool that is there already.
• Training online can help cut down the consumption of additional material (have you ever seen how classroom training EATS pens, paper and flipchart stands?).
• Heck, we might even expose people to interesting new ideas that make their jobs better and/or their lives more worthwhile (perish the thought)

Get ready for the goldrush?
I've heard a variety of outrageous claims for elearning's future - one I half recall is that elearning would "make the internet(?) look like a rounding error" in terms of value. I'm sure there have been many more over the generations of forms of technology assisted learning.

Well, people are using technology to learn in huge numbers now, just not in the way that was ever expected (think how many people start learning about something, anything, everyday just by firing up Wikipedia - but of course that's free). But as far as I can tell the claims have always been made on the strength of the idea itself, or a new technology.

I stumbled across a link just now to Monash University (does Australia even have any other universities?) which claimed the elearning market, including the higher education sector, was in 2008 worth US$100m - sorry I closed the link before I realised I'd want it for this rant). If recent developments in the price of fuel are anything to go by, this will be a figure that will rise sharply, and soon. As the price of fuel escalates it becomes ever harder to ignore the associated costs of running classroom events. With cool technology making the online classroom ever more appealing, people's remaining objections will only diminish. As learners become ever more accustomed to using the internet everyday,

While the current economic blip may delay the push to a more sustainable model of business from gathering the momentum it looked like it was building up last year, it will only be a matter of time before it will return with a vengence - just as soon as the "no environment, no economy" relationship finally sinks in.

For all the reasons above, but most importantly for economic reasons that will influence the decision of people with real influence - the accounting department, elearning could be about to come in to its own.

When PowerPoint is wrong...

Last week I spied, tucked on a shelf following a recent office shuffle, a copy of The Cognitive style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within, by Edward Tufte - a critique of Microsoft's infamous presentation app as an effective method of communication.

It had been bought by a colleague, who has since moved-on, who was a great fan of Tufte and skeptical of the use of PowerPoint as an authoring tool; though I'm not sure there was necessarily a direct causal link. Since I'm spending a lot of my time (ie most of it) elbows deep in slides, images and Articulate Presenter, it seemed an opportunity ripe for seizing.

It actually makes for pretty shocking reading. The central strand of evidence is the example set at NASA, where PowerPoint usurped all the traditional methods of inter-scientist communication and ended up being the de facto reporting tool - of one of the premier scientific organisations in the world. Tufte gives us reasons that show that it was patently absurd that this should happen - the inability of PowerPoint to accurately present scientific formulae is only the beginning, and other flaws in its suitability to the task at hand meant that it could be argued that Bill's beloved slideshow generator played a part in the chain of events that led to the 2003 space shuttle disaster.

The deeply hierarchical structure of the default layouts in PowerPoint comes in for particular criticism, the root cause of the tendency of users to bullet EVERYTHING, principally it seems, because they can. As a result of the layouts chosen and the implicit level of importance that the bulleting hierarchy imposes, argues Tufte, crucial aspects of evidence that pointed to the risks posed by a seemingly minor incident on launch were missed by those taking the decisions to proceed with re-entry. In the event, damage sustained to the heat shielding on one of the wings caused the shuttle to burn up as it tore through the atmosphere.

With this point firmly made, Tufte moves on to the information density of PowerPoint. If you've read Tufte at all (and I wholeheartedly recommend that you do if you haven't - try this or this), you'll know that he loves the elegant display of data. His books are full of slick maps of Japanese train timetables that merge the beauty of ukiyo-e with the simple brilliance of underground maps and neatly tabulated rows of data that at a glance allow the reader to compare multiple 1000s of pairs of data with nary a flicker of the eye. Tufte's point is that, with careful planning (and not a shortage of artistic flair in many cases) it is possible to fit extraordinary levels of comprehensible detail in to quite small spaces. Even straight forward words can achieve this effectively. Examples of text density he cites include comparing characters on a page (Guinness Book of Records, 4,600; NYT website, 4,100; BBC News website, 3,400; PowerPoint, 98-250) or characters per square inch (for the above, 162; 43; 36; 1-3 - though this will obviously become mere fractions once you project it on the wall).

In another list of examples, PowerPoint rather damning comes only second to worst in amount of detail conveyed to Pravda, the old Soviet corporate adver-zine. Enough, surely, to have all but the most die-hard Microsoft fans scrabbling for the uninstall button?

Of course, Tufte is not alone in these criticisms. The "death-by-PowerPoint" meme has been around the block a number of times, and having myself witnessed meetings and training courses where the facilitator or trainer has read every word on screen, or plumbed the darkest depths of the standard Office clip-art files for the same image as I saw in the last course. Where Tufte stands out is at least he has some measured criticisms that make it easier to avoid the same mistakes - though I'll let you go to the source for these.

And so to the, "Yes, but..."?

These criticisms are entirely fair. Scientists at a major organisation like NASA should not have been encouraged to make all their reports in PowerPoint. The established method for, well, centuries, has been the written account or report. Simply because it is established doesn' mean it always has to be this way, but as Tufte forcefully argues, they are far more suited than a slideshow to the large quantities of evidence that scientific enquiry demands be provided (after all, peer-review can't happen without it).

It's surprising that even in a an organisation as august as NASA, the modern urge to boil everything down to soundbite, or elevator pitch had taken a firm grip to the point that everyone was scurrying around clutching sheaves of slide handouts. Surely with something as serious as spacecraft re-entry with a crew of talented, dedicated people on-board warrants careful consideration of all the facts - after all, for once it is rocket science.

I think that what was missed is PowerPoint is PRESENTATION software. It is designed to assist you in presenting something. It shouldn't be the thing itself. Which would appear to be the problem at NASA and is all too often the problem that other users fall prey to - the same problem that gets characterised as "death-by-PowerPoint". The presentation itself became the focus instead simply of the medium.

PowerPoint in the context of presentations is a quick, functional way to get images, graphs and key messages on a screen, to support your main message. It is not a place to write lengthy reports - it simply isn't designed to cope.

However, if you step back from the all-too-easy-to-adopt position of the "death-by-PowerPoint" crowd, and evaluate Microsoft's bete-noire as a simple, screen orientated page layout tool that even the most ardent technophobe can get familiar with, suddenly you can begin to evaluate it in a new light, and it this use that I will look at in my next piece: "...and when PowerPoint is right."