The world of rapid e-learning more accessible with #Xerte joining #articulate – with thanks to @terrymc #uoltech #edtech

Are you after rapid e-learning tools that help you create accessible online resources? Then check out what happened last week when I started testing Xerte, as well as my thoughts on how Xerte fits in with another rapid e-learning favourite of mine: Articulate Studio.

What’s the best way to have a productive e-learning afternoon? As the regular participants to the European Articulate Conference would no doubt agree, the recipe is simple:

• invite a bunch of cool people (in this case the University of Leeds Learning Technologists Network)
• put a cool e-learning tool they’ve not had much experience with on the menu (Xerte – also see this JISC TechDis Xerte resource)
• source an exciting and well-informed but also chilled-out and by-no-means-pushy presenter (@terrymc)
• set a challenge (“Let’s push Xerte and see how it handles multimedia, as well as see whether it plays nicely with our VLE/LMS – Blackboard 9.1″)
• provide cake (one chocolate and one carrot worked well as my own cheesecake was not really worth writing home about) and one pineapple (odd? it got great reviews, though, and made the session even more informal )

Xerte is a cool rapid development tool. Lots of folks have written about it and it keeps growing. The following reflects my own experience of it, so if I get stuff wrong, please tell me and I’ll happily put my hand up and correct it. As I was playing with it, I was also thinking of another rapid e-learning tool that I like using and whose community I would invite over to my house for breakfast, lunch and dinner any time – Articulate. So let’s get cracking and I’ll keep things as short and snappy as I can. My observations about Xerte are in bullet form and my comparisons with the current version of Articulate Studio 09 are straight underneath, preceded by a ‘-’. Hope that makes sense.

What is Xerte?

A web-based environment with a great set of content templates developed by some frightfully clever folks at the University of Nottingham.

Xerte Insert Media menu

Xerte’s main advantages:

• accessible (Tab navigation works very well and the Drag-and-drop exercise template which you can drive only using the Tab and Space keyboard keys is very cool indeed; I haven’t run it through a screen reader personally but I have not read anything suggesting it would not behave nicely so far).
  - Articulate also does Tab navigation, but is less accessible (until Storyline comes out and HTML5 support is added to Studio, that is…).
• lots of templates and the list is growing. From simply inserting content as text, images, and videos, to embedding YouTube, Twitter searches, and RSS feeds, you have loads of choice.
  - The Articulate community has lots of templates, too, but they are mainly PowerPoint (content layout) ones. Articulate Engage and Quizmaker have a contribution, but getting RSS feeds in and the like is currently a bit tricky as you need to embed the dynamic content into a separate webpage or SWF file and then import that into the Articulate resource.
• online environment meaning you don’t need to worry about licenses, copying files across, etc.
  - as an Articulate user, you could get around this issue a little using Dropbox to share files, but you’d still need licenses to edit these files. No online editing option yet and editing off shared drives and memory sticks is not recommended – I personally lost several narrations this way… lucky I had back-ups…
• plays well in Blackboard 9.1, although we didn’t get the SCORM to work first time… then again, as we had no quiz to track, there was little point persevering, so the .zip archive showing nicely in our VLE did it for us.
  - Articulate SCORM hasn’t been supported well in our Blackboard 9.1 and we’re trying various work-arounds. .zip archives were just fine.
• the Drawing template is very cool (although I didn’t work out what the Interactive mode was, but then again, I didn’t get round to reading any documentation for this – I personally blame Apple for the attitude . I tested it with a graphics tablet and it wasn’t bad accuracy at all.
  - nothing similar in Articulate – you’d have to use PowerPoint’s drawing tools which are cool, unless you want to use the Scribble tool which will drive you mad – anything else, even Paint is much better for that!
  

  Xerte Drawing template

• you can add FLV and SWF video to your resources (I tried .wmv, .mov, .avi, and .mpg but they weren’t supported). If you haven’t got the videos in the two required Flash formats, you can use free tools such as FormatFactory to convert your vids.
  - apart from those two, Articulate has native support for .mp4. Moreover, the Articulate Video Converter will do exactly what the name implies, while also allowing you to change the sound volume, crop the video (very cool!), insert watermarks, and chop off the ends.
• the Audio Slideshow template is very cool – it allows you to have a piece of audio running in the background, while several “slides” can be cued in. I see this as a very cool tool for demo-ing synchronous language interpreting:
• have the instructions always visible
• have the source speech in the background
• have individual blocks interpreted, and the sound louder than the source sound, which should be decreased, too, to avoid confusion while keeping the reference speech in the background
• combine these individual blocks with additional images/text which discuss problems related to the individual meaning blocks
• cue everything in (NB: watch out, as you can only set Synch Points which are integers – so 1 second and not 1.3; everything gets rounded up to the nearest integer… not ideal for teaching interpreting come to think about it, but here we are…)
• in the published resource, the nested pages do not appear as subpages and it’s all a continuous flow of sound, text and images.
• cool!

- an equivalent effect with Articulate could be obtained by having the main speech running as an audio track throughout the resource, and then individual PowerPoint slides having their own audio/video/images/text. You could get a lot more content in using PowerPoint animations and you could also synchronise to the exact time in the audio without worrying about integers…

Xerte Audio Slideshow

•  the Transcript Reader template is similar and makes life very easy if you want to sync text with audio (NB: don’t forget the integers, though…)
  - similar effect can be created with PowerPoint, yet if you’re not a confident PowerPoint user, you’ll find this Xerte template a great relief.
• the Synched Video allows to cue in text and image while you’re watching a video, which is something that currently you can’t do with Articulate (but will be able to soon I hear through the grapevine…)
• Multiple Perspectives is another clever little template which allows you to insert several videos and audio files with text and an image to show different points of view. Dead simple, useful, and good looking, too (something which overall seems to be the trade-off with Xerte: you get accessible resources, but the default skins are rather boxy and not very inviting … again, I blame Apple for this attitude on my part . However, the good news is that you can customise the skins if you host Xerte on your own servers, so here’s an avenue for designers to top up their budgets a little…)
  - hyperlinked thumbnails and images in PPT can create that effect, too.
• the Chemists among you will be very excited to hear there is a JMOL viewer built into Xerte. Yey!
  - not sure how to do that with Articulate unless you use a Web Object and insert an external webpage which has the JMOL object running smoothly
• Embed Content is a template that’s meant to allow you to stick in anything else that doesn’t already have a dedicated template (such as YouTube videos, for instance). The good news is that it works. The bad news is that you may need to fiddle, as my embed URL worked, but my embed code didn’t and I couldn’t be bothered to fiddle (I blame it on Apple, you see…)
  - Articulate still needs to go through Web Objects for most of this to happen (except YouTube videos and a small number of other services I believe)
  

  Xerte Embed Content - Zoom.it in this case

• if you’re feeling lazy, Xerte also has a Charts template, where you type in your values, choose the colour for a series of values, and you get a chart. Simples! (just don’t expect anything fancy in terms of layout, shades, 3D and the like…)
  - the PowerPoint charts are likely to look much better and you don’t have to type in your Excel data again, which is a bonus.
• the Hotspot was easy to set up (shame the Interactive Diagram template didn’t want to work…)
  - a capable, though less accessible hotspot is possible in Quizmaker, too; to be honest, you can also generate the same effect in PowerPoint, too – up to you.
• overall, I think the Interactivity templates are worth mentioning as they provide simple, but effective breaks from linear content
  - Quizmaker has 20 question types, but I felt the Xerte ones were easier to set up. Quizmaker, nonetheless, is much better at supporting, combining, and sync-ing multimedia. Branching is also possible from Quizmaker, as it is from Articulate presenter, too, and I couldn’t see anything similar in Xerte.
  

  Xerte Interactivity templates

• a significant compartment of the Xerte box of tricks lives in the Misc and mitchellmedia.co.uk menus, though, with various feeds to be embedded – some trickier than others (don’t say I didn’t warn you about the Twitter feed, although that may be somewhere in the documentation – by now you should know that I blame Apple… )
  - Articulate is not as competent yet, unless you go via the Web Object, in which case you’re sorted.
  

  Xerte Misc templates

My issues with Xerte:

• linear structure of the resulting resource (I find it hard to see how one could devise an educational scenario and allow students to explore) - I couldn’t see straight away a method for creating a tree structure in the resource Table of Contents menu
  - the Articulate Slide Properties all you to go mad with branching, names, tree structures, automatic or user control of resource progress and more.
  

  Xerte table of contents

• my Windows keyboard settings didn’t change in the Xerte editing area, too – for instance, when I changed the keyboard to French, in my Chrome Xerte window it stayed in English, so I had to use the Xerte Character Pad (at the time of writing supporting French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish), which was not ideal… Not sure if this was Chrome being inflexible…
  - PowerPoint, Articulate Quizmaker and Engage will let you type in your chosen language
• the Bullets template didn’t actually give me any bullets – just text
• sound/narration import is limited to .mp3 (no wav or wma) – not a deal-breaker for me, but useful to flag up
  - wav is supported in Articulate alongside .mp3. In addition, a powerful audio editor is always on hand to allow you to brush up your narration until you get it perfect. This is also very helpful when updating your resources, because you don’t need to re-record everything again, but only the bits that are new.
• image resizing is poor, although, if you set the Image size to  ”full screen”, you get a magnifying glass to view the pixelated bits
  NB: choosing the “actual size” image settings will only get you into a pickle with high-res images as I could only see the top right corner of mine and no scrolling was available…
  - images in PowerPoint can be edited and modified quite significantly (cropped, re-coloured, stylised). You can change the Articulate publish settings to achieve quite crisp images in the Flash wrapper. Even better in the upcoming HTML5-supporting versions.
  

  Image inserted with "full screen" setting

• in fact, I have found that images in general are a bit tricky in Xerte unless you’ve resized them yourself beforehand:
• leave them on “auto” and you can’t really work out what they’re about anymore, particularly in the case of software screenshots
• set them to “full screen” and they will cover text that is supposed to appear next to/above/below them
• audio sync-ing with text and images which is possible in some of the templates (see the Highlights section above) can only be done up to the nearest integer – so no chance of text being highlighted at 2.3 seconds into your narration – you’ll have to live with 2 seconds and so slightly out of sync…
  - not an issue in Articulate if you’re happy to use animations in PowerPoint.
• the Morph Image is also quite interesting because you can fool people into thinking they’re zooming into a live image … now what do I think of this? Personally, I would much rather use a high-res image and an online service similar to Zoom.it or GigaPan and embed the result into a webpage through the Embed Content template, although it worked with the embed URL but not the Embed Code for my Zoom-it example… (see above)
  - you can use the Web Object tool in Articulate to embed such resources. For some you may have to set up separate html files, others (e.g. YouTube) will come in directly.

Conclusion

I think this post is probably the longest I’ve ever done, so I’ll try and keep this short.. ha! (and I don’t blame Apple for this, btw.) So how do I feel about Xerte and how does it sit next to Articulate?

As @terrymc put it, too, they’re complementary, and one shouldn’t necessarily replace the other. Here’s what I reckon:

• I love my scenario-based learning resources and building something like that in Xerte would make me throw too many things around in frustration that I can’t combine elements that the templates do not cater for (for instance, a video and an embed object or an RSS feed…) I am aware I can build my own templates if I want, but I really don’t want to do that (I just blame Apple for that). I’m happy to put a video and an External Object in my Articulate resource and be done with it.
• On the other hand, it’s really nice to see so many templates and I feel that if one of my lecturers is short of time and resources, is not a confident PowerPoint user, and needs to get a mixture and static and interactive content out there fast, Xerte will be a good choice.
• Talking accessibility, Xerte is currently much better than Articulate (although you have tabbed and arrowkey navigation in the Articulate files, too). However, I have also seen the future of Articulate and it’s called Storyline – a tool so fine that designers will snap it up as soon as it comes out: HTML5, lots of interactive content, and very cool features which I am not allowed to talk about… yet .
• Talking looks, Xerte is way behind at the moment but some designed skins may push it forward quite a bit.
• Talking internationalisation, Articulate will do pretty much whatever you ask of it (it will take language keyboard changes comfortably as far as I know). Currently Xerte is limited to on-screen language keyboards. On the other hand, Xerte’s XML content publishing format means that it is currently easier to localise (exactly how much easier will be the topic of a future blog post). But Articulate… nope, I can’t say any more

Xerte is free and Articulate isn’t. However, Xerte is just starting up and very keen to see how people can use its numerous templates, while Articulate has the biggest and best (imho) community of instructional designers – who, incidentally, have basically saved PowerPoint for e-learning from a slow and sad demise, put quite a few bells on it through Articulate Studio, and showed the world things that folks didn’t think were possible before. Just wait until you see Storyline, though…

Xerte is an online authoring tool and Articulate isn’t. Now that’s inconvenient and I’m the first to say that, but I am also looking at the bunch of functionalities I have in Studio (powerful audio editing, ok video editing) and wonder how feasible it would be to port all that online … (I know Apple’s taught us to get stroppy if things are not simple, but I also know that if I were on a desert island with an Apple brain I’d be stuck there. Not necessarily waiting and redesigning my raft until it’s perfect, but rather because I couldn’t get very far until an update would send me back…) Cheap shots, I know… I do apologise… I still don’t agree that we should expect simple technology without having a clue what made it so simple. If something breaks, you bet I’m gonna try and fix it – I don’t want to buy more of a breakable thing… Anyway…

Therefore the deal to me is this: in the case of Xerte, you are starting with your current knowledge of e-learning, the templates that the super clever folks in Nottingham have built for you, and also joining a growing community of Open Education Resources (OER) creators. In the case of Articulate, you pay for a very cool (and very soon way cooler) application, and you join a community of established industry and education instructional designers whose contributions can make you a top designer, too, in a short while.

Of course, there is nothing really stopping you from using Xerte but getting your instructional design fixes from the Articulate community… apart from your conscience after a little while, that is If you are truly a professional, you will have one. If not, then … then I guess you are part of the reason why the Occupy Wall Street movement started… (deep sigh)

Anyway, I’m signing off now and I’ll be happy to read your reactions. Best thing to do now, if you haven’t already, is to get an account with Xerte and a demo version of Articulate Studio (and Storyline when that comes out soon).

Whiteboards? Tablets? Smart paper? Hmmm… #edtech #uoltech – thanks 2 @oneiseitwopi & @ul_berg

The web is cruel and direct: not writing for two months looks like a nice long holiday. It was in fact the opposite, with 4 presentations at ALT-C 2011 and several new projects at my University. All in good time, though (or just look on your right and you’ll see the links to the recorded sessions ).

Last week, thanks to an @ul_berg initiative, I attended a very informative and thought-out presentation by Jill Johnston from the University of Sydney talking about why students still bother to come to lectures even if everything is recorded and available online after the session. It kind of boiled down to students being social beings and lecturers being able to provide a lot of added value when meeting face-to-face as opposed to online.

Yet I’m not going to talk about that, but about something which I found quite amusing. Jill referenced 2 papers as a fun starting point: one from 2000 asking whether the new kid PowerPoint will ever end up replacing the blackboard, and one from 2008 asking whether the new kid Lecture Capture will ever end up replacing the lecturer.

As people were half-smiling around the room but actually taking the second question rather too seriously for my liking, I thought I’d share what one of my colleagues – Steven @oneiseitwopi – had just told me 30min before the session: he is a lecturer in Medicine and a confident and frequent PowerPoint user. Last year he joined in a bit of fun I was having with PaperShow, a smartpen which basically enables you to have a very cheap (about £80 at this time on Ryman) wireless interactive whiteboard that you can walk around with and pass to your audience. What Steven is experimenting with this year is to deliver sessions without any PowerPoint: only with hand-drawn explanations and graphs done live in front and with the help of an audience  by using a smartpen and smartpaper. He’s done this for the last 6 hours of his teaching and, together with a colleague, he sees a lot of excitement and appreciation among their students:

• the content is covered at a much slower, digestible rate;
• it almost becomes a story which Wizard Steven is creating under their very eyes and which they can tailor to their needs by asking questions and seeing the answers materialise alongside other explanations.

To me this is so elegant it’s worth giving Steven a hug every day for the rest of his life. However, what it is not quite so, is simple. It looks simple on the outside, but then again so did Steve Jobs’ presentations. Like Steve, Steven prepares thoroughly for his sessions. Unlike Steve, Steven is not afraid to come out of his comfort zone and draw/write live in front of a large audience.

So I wonder: how many people will actually go for something like this? How many people in universities are comfortable using visualisers, interactive whiteboards, and all the technologies that make teaching and learning fun because you’re a bit out of your comfort zone (unless you are a hybrid between one of the animators working for RSA and … you as the subject matter expert)? How many people put their hands up when asked if they like drawing? (not many according to Jay Cross and my heart sinks a little at how seriously we’ve come to take ourselves…)

So where are we? What technology can let us do what we would like to in order to make face-to-face sessions more engaging and effective? Well, we have a few options at this stage:

• PaperShow is a great wake-up call for those who have become a bit too dependent on PowerPoint. That is not to say that PowerPoint will die – presentations will still need to be given and I think you only need to glance at the work done by Duarte Design, Garr Reynolds and their friends to see why presentation software will still be needed.
• Prezi is an interesting alternative for folks who would like to do a little bit of something like kinetic typography (but not know they want it) and stick in some videos, too. I saw a very cool example at the ALT-C conference where it was used as a portal to a whole range of other resources – a dude had set a picture of a tree as the background, and all the resources his team were offering were either leaves or flowers depending on their type. Looked neat!
• tablets are still the way forward for me (not necessarily the Wacom type, but rather the Android/iPad type IMHO), but we’ve still got a little bit to wait until they are as cheap, sensitive and accurate as people want them, and until wireless projection becomes common and folks can walk around annotating, drawing, etc. and sharing (having just mentioned accuracy, I remember seeing an example of an artist using MyPaint on a Nokia 900 – unbelievable!!! and I got this phone 3 years ago

For the time being, though, I am off to find Steven and give him a big hug

An i-P-a-d and an Android tablet walk into a pub… (#uoltech #edtech)

First of all, apologies for the weird spelling. I just don’t want to get spammed (again) by bots with You-Know-Who related offers (that’s even funnier, as I made the mistake of watching Harry Potter recently; fab effects, but it seemed there was no budget left for dialogue… shame…)

So: I had an iPad2 on loan over the week-end. I must say I was getting nervous, so I kept my Android tablet handy just in case I had to counteract an Avada Kedavra move from the iPad (don’t worry, I’ve got better things to do than remember all the HP spells, but Wikipedia doesn’t )

I work in education and therefore I didn’t do any taking apart of the hardware to check out where things were. As far as I’m concerned, they all come from the same factory where people don’t make much a day, so that’s not a good start anyway…

Over two days, I have grown to like quite a few apps on the iPad.

• iTunesU is just mind-blowing. How can rubbish TV continue to get millions of viewers when you can easily find inspirational (and occasionally funny) speakers on iTunesU is beyond me…
• Popple is a great mind-mapping tool. It isn’t brill in terms of sharing your work (PDF and image by e-mail is pretty much all it seemed to handle, but it was extremely good fun to use).
• Flipboard is the most beautiful RSS reader I’ve ever seen… I’ve got to say that! The fact that you can stick in a Google Reader account and presto you get your own magazine-style issue with the latest from the people you follow (similar to what paper.li is doing online) is just brill!
• The Guardian Eyewitness app is both thought-provoking (some very powerful images you can start your lessons with), but it’s also an educational tool (it actually tells you what the settings on the camera had to be, how much time in advance the photographer had to set up, etc.)

I’m pretty sure you’ll find tons of other very cool apps in there (and I have, too, but don’t want this post to be excessively long), but was I ever regretting going for an Android tablet?

• Yes when it came to missing out on iTunesU (but I guess I could go round the issues by watching the podcasts through an RSS or on my laptop, and there is also hope out there and work-arounds).
• No, when it came to everything else. Fair enough, everything is pretty and slick on the iPad, but the Android is not so far behind.

First of all, my Android tablet doesn’t fall over when it comes to displaying Flash websites. That’s very important, especially when looking at Open Educational Resources created a while back. Moreover, not being able to quickly check out a Prezi show embedded in a webpage is just silly… I know there’s an app for that, but there’s also a limit to how modular my world is (and it may not be as Apple think…)

So what do I do currently with my Android? I read a lot more, try and keep up to date with the world and my social networks, and I play word games.

• Pulse is a neat RSS reader. Not as flashy (LOL!) as Flipboard, but very good indeed.
• the Polaris Office suite that comes free with my ASUS Transformer does the job of editing word files, presentations and spreadsheets very elegantly (ok, some tables are displayed in a bit of a wonky manner, but it’s nothing to cry about)
• Hootsuite is not as pretty as on the iPad, but does the job of managing my Twitter activity well.
• the Kindle app is brill! I was a bit low at just having Aesop’s fables to read (although they are superb, I must say), and then I just tried my luck on Amazon to see whether there are any free Kindle books. Guess what! There are tons (and my newly-acquired Don Quixote has just reached the inn at the end of his first day on the road…)

End of the joke (if you can extend your generosity to call it that…)

So: the iPad and the Android tablet walk into a bar/pub . How do they get a beer? Well, the iPad needs to go to a particular spot (the Dragon Dictation app), ask for the beer, then e-mail the request to the bartender because that app isn’t allowed to talk to many other apps (I know, you are in a way centre stage, but it still feels like you’re in the naughty corner… until uncle Steve lets you out…). All this done, though, it will probably get the most beautifully-designed glass you could ever make if you could be bothered to spend the time.

What about the Android? Well, it will ask for a beer straight away from anywhere in the room (the Google voice recognition engine is built into the Android keyboard – how about that?) and the bartender will hear a request. Now it may not hear the right request, so the Android may end up with a deer, a meer..kat and a … something else, but it will get a beer pretty much at the same time as the iPad. What’s more, it will also have some new friends to talk to (the deer, meerkat and other thing) – but it may find they have little in common (but that’s another story)

Beware of PDF gremlins chopping up your hyperlinks (#edtech #uoltech)

It’s no secret that, although it is not actually true that tech falls on its face when you need it most, when it does, it certainly feels like it. It’s just happened to me while working with Adobe Acrobat Pro.

What was I doing?

Not a lot: I wanted to create a PDF from an MS Word document which had some links in it.

Well, a bit more than that to be perfectly honest:

• I also wanted that PDF to have several bookmarks to several points of interest in my document
• I wanted the PDF to show automatically the Bookmarks menu when opened
• I wanted to include metadata for the PDF: the author, copyright info, etc.

Where did I go wrong?

Well, in looking for all these fancy things, I kind of forced myself into having to use Adobe Acrobat Pro (adding and modifying Bookmarks is super easy, although make sure you also position the bookmarked bit where you would like it to be displayed – e.g at the top, middle, bottom of the page, rather than just place the cursor in front of the text and add a bookmark. Moreover, a quick File/Properties in the PDF gave me access to all the other functionalities I was looking for).

I also thought that, if I were to use some features of Acrobat Pro, I may as well use the same application to create the PDF rather than take the easy way out and use the Word functionality to Save As .pdf. This is where things went downhill.

In one case, in my original MS Word file, the link Text to display was not the same as the link Address (right-click on the link and choose Edit Hyperlink… to access this information). Why? Because the address was rather long…

My Acrobat Pro dealt me two serious blows:

1. It disregarded the information in the Address area and just copied the info in Text to display across
2. It converted my dashes in the link to funky codes, thus guaranteeing there was no chance anyone could get to where I would have liked them to be.

Practically:

1. My original link Text to display was: http://suchadrag.wordpress.com/portfolio/suchadrag-goes-for-a-prize
2. The link Address was http://suchadrag.wordpress.com/portfolio/suchadrag-goes-for-a-prize/#comment-142
3. What Acrobat produced was: http://suchadrag.wordpress.com/portfolio/suchadrag%E2%80%90goes%E2%80%90for%E2%80%90a%E2%80%90prize

The fix

Well, apart from recreating the PDFs with the full links, there’s not much to do… the nice folks on the WordPress forum did try to help, but there may not be a lot they could do… Temporarily, I am following their kind advice and have added an additional text box signalling the fact that visitors to my blog may get to a Page-not-found message; I am also telling them where the info they are looking for actually is.

What I will do differently next time

I am still keen on producing bookmarked PDFs (in my experience, having menus on the side does help). I also like this menu of bookmarks to appear automatically for my viewers’ convenience. I also like to be able to add bookmarks in the menu to areas which are not necessarily new headings, but rather important paragraphs. Acrobat Pro allows you to do all of the above with ease.

On the other hand, the integrity of my links is very important to me, too. So I will keep saving as PDF from within MS Word/Open Office to start with. Then I will use Acrobat Pro to add all the other bells and whistles.

Finally, I will try and remember to check every single link rather than a representative sample…

Hope this helps you, too, and saves you a bit of growling and shouting (don’t worry, I did plenty of those for you, too).

Video scribing / animating on a shoestring (#uoltech #edtech #lrnchat) – with thanks to @llewellynk & team

I have been reading quite a few books lately on making your ideas heard, having an impact on your audience and so forth (“Made to Stick” and “The Secret Language of Leadership” stand out). I am also learning a lot from the cool links shared by folks in my Twitter community – such as the work done by RSA Animate on a few TED talks, as well as the Common Craft videos. What’s even better, I work in a team who reads around a lot, talks things over and is not afraid to try and innovate.

This is how @llewellynk and I started talking about a new way of creating a report with a difference at the end of the Leeds Building Capacity project that Karen has been working on. Karen loved the RSA Animate stuff and I had been getting more and more into the visual aspect of presenting information – with a prime example of stick people at work in this interpreter training resource on public speaking that dispenses with written text on slides in favour of relevant drawings.

Our project

What to do then? Despite the cool animations available online from various sources, there was nothing teaching us how to do it. So we got in touch with colleagues in Design and we were fortunate to be recommended a brilliant artist – Misung – (I don’t think anyone, having seen my stick people above, would dispute that we needed someone who could actually draw). Once the team was in place: Karen (author and narrator), Misung (animator), Vanessa (consultant) and me (editor), we worked a lot on getting the storyboard right.

I also had some fun with a few techniques while Karen was getting the script ready. Here is my time lapse video that I mentioned in a previous post:

In the end we settled for a combination of filming Misung draw and then speeding up the video many, many times to make it match the narration, and adding additional effects and layers in Adobe After Effects. Here is the result:

Do you want to know how we did it; how much time it took; what kind of hardware and software you need; what things to watch out for so that you make the most of your time? All the answers are on YouTube in the video description, in the Show More area under the video. (EDIT: Karen’s just seen that the iPad YouTube client cuts the text in the video description and also messes up with the links… typical… we’ll make the resources available on the project website, too, shortly; EDIT2: The iPad is now displaying everything correctly, except for video annotations… confused? me too…

YouTube greatness

Now for the second part: we wanted to make the video more accessible, so we wanted to take advantage of the YouTube built-in subtitling functionality. This is where we were super impressed and felt like sending the YouTube groovy folks a virtual hug.

YouTube subtitles screen

1. First of all, for the fun of it, I went with the Machine Transcription. It was impressive to start with that there was such a functionality. It wasn’t too bad, but it would have needed quite a bit of editing, and we already had a narration script handy, so we decided to upload our own script
2. I then uploaded our script, and the result was a whole bunch of gibberish and random symbols. Someone with a weaker heart may have been tempted to yell, but I just looked at the extension of the original file, sighed, nodded, and proceeded to re-save the original .docx as.doc
3. When I imported the new .doc, I got all the words in. Success! What I didn’t expect to get – and nothing prepared me for it – was near-perfect synchronisation between the file we’d just put in and the audio narration. Obviously YouTube is bringing in its speech-to-text engine when processing folks’ own subtitles, too.
• Even more amazing: our video includes 3 shorter videos from another event. What do the YouTube subtitles do? They stop until our own Karen resumes her speech. Then they pick up at the same time. Brilliant!
4. Finally, I noticed two errors with the synchronisation. I worked out one was because of a missing full stop in the original transcript, and the other one … I just couldn’t work out. The easiest thing I could think of to achieve perfection quickly was:
• download the transcript from YouTube and edit it rather than edit the original .doc. Why? Because the transcript will come with timecodes, and once you edit it and re-upload it, it’s almost instant (processing the .doc takes longer, presumably because of the speech-to-text engine)

YouTube subtitle file

Lessons

In terms of lessons at the end of the project, I have personally learnt a lot about the process and the implementation for such a product, so I can see quite a few alternatives. It always helps if you actually do things

I am now pondering over whether to use the same technique for future videos (and live with the inconsistent contrast and occasional fuzzy video unless i get better cameras and lighting), or trade the human element brought by having the artist’s hand visible in order to have perfect image (which could be done in a number of ways, including using smartpens and graphics tablets – I can see advantages and disadvantages for both, but personally I would go with the smartpens). Hmmm… questions, questions…

In any case, it’s been great fun working on this project with this team and I could put you in touch with the relevent members if needed, too – just let me know.

Hoping the list of steps and project components we put together on YouTube is of help, I’m looking forward to seeing some of your creations.

Videos on a shoestring #uoltech #edtech

I’ve just been asked for a few general thoughts on shooting some video and soon I had quite a few paragraphs… so I thought that, rather than just sending the e-mail and maybe forgetting some of it later, I’ll stick it all into a blog post and dig it up quickly next time I have a video project in the works.

The main idea is that I generally look to get things done reasonably well on very low budgets… I need to. I know it is not ideal and that I’ve just lost any folks in the media business that I may have attracted to this blog over the years, but unfortunately this is where a *lot* of silly thinking and doing on the part of  society in general has got us: while some companies throw millions on ads (and, curiously, some people actually fall for them), university lecturers have trouble finding a couple of hundreds for a video project… don’t get me started: my ash cloud would seriously disrupt traffic…

Anyway: back to the task in hand: DIY video with (very) limited resources

1. Storyboarding is the single most important thing I can think of when planning the shoot. First of all think of the purpose of the video and try to empathise with the target audience. Then, when you have something that will work, think of angles, scenes, and draw stick people to visualise the scenes properly. Improvisation sounds good, but when people are put in front of a camera, they don’t all perform well – so tell them what you want from them. When I was filming roleplays, my third take was usually the best one, by which time I had dispensed with the soft and polite approach and I was in a more shouty “director mode”. People don’t mind too much as long as you snap out of it at the end of the filming and you get them coffees and cake with a genuine smile on your face.
2. Watching someone talk from one angle only is not going to be too exciting. Ideally, have a couple of cameras: one with a wide shot, one with a close-up from another angle and switch between them in post-editing. If you don’t have two cameras, see if you can get the person to repeat some sections with the camera positioned differently.
3. Interrupting the interlocutor in an interview is not a good idea – it makes life difficult in post-editing (it’s also rather rude ).
4. I’ve come to learn that the quality of sound is really important: people put up with average image but good sound, rather than good image and average sound. So I always use an external mic rather than rely on the built-in camera microphone. If you’re getting sound from anywhere else, please get away from the temptation of .mp3 files because of the drop in quality they involve. Use .wav or some other lossless format (thanks to the dudes on the Adobe After Effects forum for drilling this into my skull).
5. I wish I had a nice camera (maybe a Panasonic HD with a 3-CCD sensor and external mic socket…) But I don’t. So I have been using JVC HD handhelds (but still with an external mic socket) for half or a third of the price and the result has been ok. Flip cameras are also quite cool for informal videos and the mobile cams are getting better and better – but you wouldn’t use them for more serious stuff I don’t think … at least not yet…
6. I’ve had problems in the past with the format of the raw video files conflicting with the editing software I was using (Sony Vegas was more responsive than Adobe Premiere Pro). So (at least at the beginning) budget for loads of time for post-editing, tweaking and fiddling. But also expect to spend a lot of time getting things just right, on the exact frame that you want, with the exact effect that you want. I’ve repeatedly spent 8 hours for about 10 min of finished product. If you storyboard properly, it will take less, but still… there is always something happening… Things do get faster as you do more editing, though.
7. If you know you will be doing more editing, it’s worth getting quality training, alongside quality kit. My favourite online training resource is Lynda.com and it’s got tons of extremely stuff on video editing for a fraction of what some face-to-face training may cost (but then again, I enjoy learning online).
8. Framing is important for a nice-looking result: the rule of thirds is a good place to start. I occasionally spend my time watching interviews, documentaries and movies more for the camera shots than the story – lots of them don’t have anything meaningful to contribute to the world unfortunately…
9. Light is super important – you may try colour correction afterwards, but it helps a lot if the original is of good quality. As when taking still images, don’t film directly into the sunlight, watch the shades, and look closely to see what your camera does – they generally have auto settings that are generally helpful, but sometimes ruin the day… The funny thing is that you can have an ok result from a cheap-ish camera which makes good use of light, sound, framing, and a proper storyboard, as opposed to unimpressive results from super-duper cameras that flunk all the common-sensical rules… but then again, there a lot of bad drivers in supercars, too, so nothing new on Earth…
10. I’ve always tried to keep videos as short as possible (2-3 minutes) and, where that wasn’t possible, I created menus with the chapters/main ideas of that video. If that isn’t possible, either, don’t despair: an engaged presenter with a gripping story can hold an audience for longer without any fancy camera work… (plus, you can do some close-ups in post-processing if the quality of the raw footage allows you to do it without ending up with an alternation  of ok and pixelated scenes).
11. When publishing, the question is where your video will live, so that you can work out the settings. No need for 6MB/s video, high-res, if folks access it over SDL connections… roughly 800/600 (or, actually, 752X582 PAL in my case) resolution makes it look good on all tablet, desktop and laptop devices – not great on mobiles, but if you publish through YouTube, YouTube will take care of it…
12. If accessibility is on your mind (and it should be), then consider subtitles. If you’ve already got the video and none of the initial files anymore, you can use YouTube’s subtitling functionality, as well as the functionality of adding a transcript to your video. Don’t think about it too long, just do it. You know the saying: Better late than never. Is your excuse the fact that you don’t want to get RSI by typing any more? Use the voice recognition tools that came with your Windows 7, Android tablet and iPad (the latter through Dragon Dictate).

I guess there may be more stuff, but I think this is something that would have helped me a lot when I was starting out. Hope it helps some of you out there, too.

How cool game dynamics is … until you realise you’re hooked (#uoltech #edtech #elearning #officelabs # ribbonhero #clearcontext)

People do stuff. However, they’re not consistent. Their intrinsic motivation is not usually strong enough to make them good at the stuff they do in the shortest time possible, especially if the immediate sense of achievement is not exactly overwhelming. Working hard consistently for years to get to a specific milestone is getting more and more unrealistic nowadays when social media have influenced most of us to adopt a culture of instant gratification – how many times do I check the blog traffic stats after I post something new? Have a guess! (and btw, it’s no way near as many times as a while back – I am ready to leave “the instant gratification rehab clinic”. I am a reformed, more patient man!) Now that you’ve had a laugh on my account, how many times do you check your Twitter mentions and direct messages? Hm? Same here

So what can you do to get some of the folks that would like to do stuff and see the point of doing it, to do it more often? Simple: appeal to the kid in everyone and turn everything into a game. I very much doubt that I’ll be giving a better intro to game dynamics than Seth Priebatsch at TED. So I’ll let him do his thing and I’m gonna do mine: talk about two things which have got me better at what I do, faster.

Now that you’ve seen Seth’s take on game dynamics in everyday life, here’s what’s happened to me:

1. Learning more about Microsoft Office

Last year I came across a pretty cool tool from Microsoft Office Labs: Ribbon Hero. It’s actually a plug-in for MS Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote which gives you points for everything you do in these programmes on a daily basis, as well as offers you challenges that you can take to earn more points and get better at using those four Microsoft Office components. What a brilliant idea! So what does it look like? Here you go: Ribbon Hero 1 into my PowerPoint (with Facebook integration so that you can brag to your mates – personally I’d have liked a Twitter integration because me and Facebook don’t currently have much in common… well, apart from the info I put on it in past moments of extreme boredom… anyway…):

My PowerPoint Ribbon Hero 1 score

Sounds cool? Wait to hear this then: back in April, the very cool dudes from Office Labs launched the second and improved version of this training tool (because that’s what it actually is, right? whatever you may say, folks, it is NOT a game. It is a clever ploy to make you a better user without sitting you down in a classroom or telling you it is a “training course”). What’s the first thing I noticed? That you can get more points in Ribbon Hero 2!!! Of course, there are lots more things about it: it’s more game-like, with different scenarios (not sure about the ancient Egipt and Middle Ages settings, but hey, why not?), lots more challenges, unlocked levels and … MORE POINTS!!! (but you’ll have to have Office 2007 or later to run it…)

2. Being more productive with Microsoft Outlook

The second story now: a few months back I needed to create some quick mailing lists from all the contacts I had in e-mails I had filed religiously in a few Outlook folders. Although Outlook 2010 is a lot better than earlier versions, I still didn’t find out a quick way of doing that. However, I soon came across an application which I trialled and then bought almost immediately afterwards: ClearContext. I personally think this is a brill plug-in and I reckon it has saved me a lot of time filing my e-mails, keeping track of projects and conversations – and I still haven’t played with every single functionality (should it have a CC Hero button, too? I reckon it would definitely help!). This is what it looks like in Outlook and this is the button you must beware of: Email Stats.

ClearContext plug-in for MS Outlook

I must say that every day I click on that darned thing to see how I have been doing. At a glance, it tells you how many e-mails you receive and send every day, what your response time is, how effective you are and what your workload is. So far nothing earth-shattering and those figures could be anything. However, what it does to manage to get me hooked is that it compares me to the world (presumably the part of the world that has ClearContext). So when I see that my response time is among the bottom 50% after one day off or a longer meeting, what do I do? You guessed it: I try and get to the top 20% where I like being.

How dangerous is this? Very! And if any managers are thinking about using it against their employees, they should promptly be slapped with a fish and made to sit down and think that, if employee enthusiasm and productivity is down, having a few motivational chats and shaking things up a little will be a lot better than using ClearContext to see who’s lazy and who’s not. Unless, of course, the whole point of the job is answering e-mails – but even in that case, researching a helpful reply rather than firing off whatever you have handy will help with customer retention, motivation, etc. So DON’T use it like that!

Conclusion:

So what do I think about this stuff? Well, first of all, I like to keep my eyes peeled for the latest brain-based research, psychological theories, and general tricks that companies might try and use to hook me. When I do spot them in their campaigns, they make me smile, I feel clever, and I swan through life with grace (but *I* would think that, wouldn’t I?). Do I buy the products? Most of the time, not a chance: I prefer to give money to charity rather than buy stuff I don’t need. That makes me feel good. New stuff doesn’t.

On the other hand, I don’t mind admitting I am a kid and enjoying game-like, on-demand e-learning which I can get through the Ribbon Hero (for more e-learning related to other software, I have found Lynda.com to be excellent, so I’m saving up for that, too). Finally,  I do feel that I am in a bit of a race, and the stats fed back to me by ClearContext give me some sort of idea about where I stand (though I very much doubt that are actually real; but it would be so cool if they were… just out of curiosity and, more importantly, to maintain the point and momentum of the game…).

Will this be enough for me? Will I become a person who lives through their e-mail stats, e-bay ratings, blog traffic, and FourSquare mayorships? Nah, but nice try, you sly people out there

On heroes and mentors #lrnchat #edtech #uoltech (with thanks to @nancyduarte)

A good few years back when I came to the UK from Romania following three years in university, I was tingling with excitement at the thought of being able to see quite a few of my heroes in person. After a few years of national prizes back home in my favourite subjects – English and Romanian – and some other related adventures, I’d gone to university to read English and French and had come to think highly of quite a few writers in the field of translation studies who were working in the UK.

So you can imagine how much I was looking forward to my first conference where I could see (and, if nerves allowed, talk to) these superheroes of mine. What is more difficult to imagine is how disappointed I was when I started to realise that my heroes might have been academic superstars, but they did not seem to be very nice, friendly, approachable people (or at least not to folks they didn’t know).

Ever since then, a rather strong dislike has been creeping inside me for artificial superstars – and those of you who know me are well aware of how well-disposed I am towards consultants who always know better than you, are slick and full of hot air, and end up looking like pathetic little machines incapable of relating to anyone and anything, but with a big, checkbox-filled script that they need to go through with you in detail. With a little bit of effort, I have noticed that I can quickly reverse-engineer their so-called life-changing ideas and products and demonstrate that they are not actually that special, but rather a whole bunch of plagiarised stuff crammed together and relying on the others’ ignorance to survive.

So what’s this got to do with #EdTech, learning, etc, you may ask? I reckon it’s got everything to do with everything out there (but I can only use a few hashtags in my tweet, so I chose the ones I am passionate about). One of the few people I have grown to admire a lot lately, Nancy Duarte, put it extremely well in her second book – resonate. She’s mainly talking about presenters and audiences, but to me this applies to life in general and how we interact with others (an audience of one is a start for bigger things):

“ You are not the hero who will save the audience; the audience is your hero. […]

Changing your stance from thinking you’re the hero to acknowledging your role as mentor will alter your view-point. You’ll come from a place of humility, the aide-de-camp to your audience. A mentor has a selfless nature and is willing to make personal sacrifices so that the hero can reach the reward.

Most mentors were heroes themselves. They have become experienced enough to teach others about the special tools or powers they picked up on the journey of their own lives. Mentors have been down the road at the hero one or more times and have acquired the skills that can be passed on to the hero. – Duarte, N (2010) Resonate. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. p.20)”

There you have it: beautifully and eloquently said by one of the most creative persons I have come across, and, most importantly, in a way that resonates deeply with me (and I expect with others, too). It’s a strange, but also wonderful feeling to read a kind of confirmation about something you have been intuitively trying for a while, not completely sure it will work in your workplace, but confident in your heart that it’s the only right thing to do.

My wishes for colleagues working in education, learning technology and instructional design? That we stop parading our superior knowledge; that we stop bombarding students with information and we start challenging them in relevant ways; that we stop falling in the traps of manufacturers flogging us tech that will “revolutionise” learning and teaching; that we stop pretending to other people that what we know and do is way beyond what their little brains can comprehend; that we are not afraid to let our guards down, admit imperfection, invite the learners in, connect and care about them, and show them how to become independent and powerful rather than worry that we will then lose our jobs and starve; and that we are good people connecting with other good people who will not think twice about lending a hand when needed.

My wish for the world? That it grows wise to internalise it can do most things with time, dedication and hard work; that it really does not need to cultivate “heroes” without substance or relevance; and that the only thing worth striving for is to become a mentor in your own right showing people the wonderful (although not easy) world of tolerance, hard work, and appreciation for the small things in life.

What do you think? Drop me  a line if this resonates (or not) with you, too.

#articulateuk11 round-up – the best European #Articulate conference yet (#edtech #uoltech #elearning)

Some people say that, if you really want to learn something, teach it (but they forget to add the second part of this, which is “and watch out for the I-know-best trap”). I’ve been trying to do that since starting to look after the University of Leeds Articulate pilot project almost four years ago and the results are pretty cool in my opinion: lots of folks creating very groovy things (a few publicly available on our own support website); two regular courses for beginners and advanced users; number of resources created with Articulate Studio and made available in our VLE (LMS) going up from 200 in May 2009, to 1,600 in May 2010, to approximately 2,400 in May, 2011.

How did we get to this stage, though? Well, we certainly didn’t do it by building high walls, crocodile-filled moats, and the like around what we’re trying to achieve in the area of blended learning. Since 2009, together with a handful of supercool folks, I’ve been organising the European Articulate Conference every May at the University of Leeds. My managers and colleagues in the University of Leeds Staff and Departmental Development Unit kindly and unreservedly supported my initiative, my colleague Claire very generously gave up her time to help me organise it, Articulate themselves appreciated the thought, lent their support, contributed generously and trusted me to start something groovy, my wife Alina took the role of critical friend (and boy, could she be critical when the programme was rather flaky..  ), and friends chipped in with ideas when needed, too.

Last week we held the third edition and I am pretty confidently saying it was the best one yet, with brilliant participants and excellent sessions.

Collage of sessions at the Third European Articulate Conference

We got a lot of feedback from our participants (66 academic and professional, in-house and freelance instructional designers and e-learning enthusiasts) and the things that stood out were:

• a sneak peak at Articulate Storyline (third photo down on the third row in the collage above – the lady cartoon character on the screen) and the chance to ask our friend at Articulate, Don Freda, a few things about this new product, as well as the next version of Articulate Studio (which will publish for the iPad, too – in HTML5 format; everyone’s keen to play with the beta now to see exactly what the differences in functionality between publishing in Flash and publishing in HTML5 are)
• E-Learning Hero David Anderson’s outstanding session on Design Mapping – a recording of which, together with other resources, is available on the conference webpage
• the opportunity to have Articulate expert Dave Moxon there on the day to quiz about whatever things people could think of (including some of the questions they had asked before the conference)
• the lunchtime informal sessions which Tony Lowe held on customising Articulate skins, and Bruce Graham on running a successful e-learning projects and dealing with customers
• the variety of excellent presentations from many, many university colleagues and representatives of e-learning companies (please see the conference programme for a complete list)
• the fact that there was something for all levels of users
• the technology available on the day – I had “planted” a PaperShow smartpen for folks to play with, and I used Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro for the two online sessions in which Don and David interacted with us from the comfort of their US homes. I am yet to see what my other smartpen has recorded and see whether I can release any other resources.
• the fact that it all ran like clockwork, there was a lot going on, but also plenty of opportunities to socialise and make friends. This was really everyone’s merit: we created a busy, but varied programme, everyone made sure that they were where they wanted to be when they needed to be there, and the venue team (John, Victor and their colleagues) ran the catering side of things to perfection and with big smiles.

Will I do it again? You bet! We’ve got a small team of really cool people volunteering our time for this and we know a lot better what we’re doing. I’ve been learning things since the first edition and I am always humbled by the kindness and high standard of the participants. This is my way of giving back to the e-learning community and I am very keen on giving something back.

What’s the plan for next year? Well, it’s a pretty exciting one, involving certain individuals (they also go by the title of … Heroes) hopefully making an appearance in the UK for the first time, so do watch this space.

Tons of fun with eye-tracking of #Articulate resources #edtech #uoltech

Another day, another project and another thing learned, as they say . Alina (it’s so good to have clever family, I’m telling you!) has very kindly showed me quickly how very cool an eye-tracking system is. After a rapid calibration procedure, you’re up and running (although, I have to say, it’s hard to keep a straight face at first, especially if you’ve seen the movie Wall-E – see photo below to get what I mean).

Calibrating eye-tracker (come on, doesn't it look like Wall-E)?

What I was curious to see is how the eye-tracker would interpret my browsing an Articulate web resource, and I was very impressed by the result (although we didn’t even use it to its full functionality – e.g. we didn’t connect a webcam and mic to see me in a picture-in-picture format as I was browsing, as well as hear any comments that I may have made). So here is a 1-minute silent movie while I was browsing a resource created for the National Network for Interpreting.

Another clever thing that Alina’s eye-tracker does (Tobii X120 – I thought you may appreciate this info, so I did ask ) is to generate heat maps. These maps represent graphically how long you have been staring at various areas of the screen – a red area is one which you’ve been looking at quite a bit, while green ones are those you glanced over. Very cool, and the applications for e-learning are quite significant, as Alina’s project will show (on this page, Alina appears in the 2010-2011 University of Leeds Teaching Fellows tab).

Eye-tracking heat map for another Articulate resource

Will post more when the results are starting to come through, or you can get in touch with Alina directly – she’s @gr82tweet.