I was invited to speak at the local ASTD chapter here in Lansing Michigan.  They asked me to introduce SnagIt, Camtasia Studio, and mention Jing.  (Please remember I in no way represent TechSmith or their products on this blog, but am a happy employee – who gets the great opportunity to work with these awesome products everyday. These comments and insights are mine and mine alone, whether you think a little or a lot of them.)

While I did talk about those 3 in some detail (as much detail as one can get in about an hour and 15 minutes), I was really pleased with the first part of my presentation on visual communication, an am excited to expand it and refine it more. If I get the chance I will have to see if I can take it to a session or two (hmmm…. DevLearn, ASTD, ??????, any good instructional design conferences besides these that I should be aware of?)

I think one of the big things that has been and will continue to shift in e-learning is the amount and the necessity to becom ever more visual. One of the things that I see is the wide spread distribution of tools like the iPod touch or iPhone – and other similar technologies.  These are inherently visual, and even if the specific device doesn’t take off and become the cool e-learning tool of the future – or make mobile learning kick some series butt, its coming and it will be very visual.

In the past one of the big obstacles in e-learning was bandwidth, storage, etc… but now I’m sitting in my kitchen, pulling a signal through a wireless aircard, and able to move quickly along on the internet.  Now granted I’m not able to play network intense games, and it takes a little time to stream movies – but it’s faster than dial-up, and most of the time faster than my parent’s satellite internet connection.  And it will get faster the next few years, especially as technologies like WiMax and others become more prevalent.

Rather than worrying about content being downloadable to computers – we need to focus more and more on information – the content, the presentation, the messaging, the scaffolding, chunking and many other factors – being able to handle the information that is presented.  In other words will the learners have enough personal bandwidth (mentally and emotionally) to handle what is being presented? There are a lot of considerations that need to go into the decision making process – but actual file size will be less of an issue.