Then through Church I was asked to lead the boy’s youth program (I’m LDS, and the program is called Young Mens). As part of the program we have started up  the Boy Scouting portion again. Which as you can guess means we’re starting to do campouts.

So what does this have to do with anything. We’ll I started doing research about stuff I’d need to survive and not be miserable. And I was looking at tents and gear, how light could I get my stuff, how durable, am I going to get everything wet and be miserable? I started reading a few sites and looking at gear sites — like NorthFace and REI.

Of course I’m a total newb- so I had no clue. Gear reviews were helpful, and a big part is cost. So I browsed and browsed.

Then one day I stumbled upon it -my secret obsession site – MooseJaw.com. First, they are based out of Michigan – so its local (if by local you mean its in the same state). 2nd, they have a great rewards program that I didn’t have to first pay to join. 3rd, they are quirky and sometimes a little offbeat which actually fits my sense-abilities (check out one of favorite movies Danny Deckchair- it too is quirky).

I have supplied my gear from MooseJaw over the last several months- from a sleeping bag and Therm-A-Rest Sleeping pad (love them both) to a yet to be tested water filter (I want the water not to be ice when I use it).

I don’t usually look at emails that come from companies that I have given my email too – but 9 out of every 10 I read from MooseJaw – even when I’m not looking from new gear. First of all, I earned K2 status last year (thanks to some good promotions) so I get ideas on how I can use my points. Second, there always interesting things to read – like the recent letter from the wooden squirrel they gave away a couple weeks ago.

Most of all – even though I am light on experience and unchallenged in the way of camping and adventure- I love looking at the all the stuff and imagining how I might use it. Seems like if I can get my learners to want to engage with the thing they are to learn in the way I engage with learning about gear and wanting to see more — wow… that would be powerful. Maybe my next screencast should be a short movie from a wooden platypus as he uses his venomous claw spur to stab an attacker.

Lately one of the threads has been motivation. It’s come up at home, its come up at work and I find myself thinking about it for myself.

Anyone who is designing instruction, at some level, is thinking about motivation. An unmotivated learner will be less likely to learn. I have no scientific proof – although I bet we could probably find some – but I feel that an unmotivated leader will be able to learn less, and at a slower pace than an individual who is motivated to learn.

So what motivates us?

Is it money? Is it the love of learning? Is it intrinsic or extrinsic? Both? Or maybe it changes based on the task…

I’ve been taking a deep look at what does it for me… why I do my job, why I’ve spent more time on this blog that I have in over a year. I’m sure no one actually cares about my motivation. So here’s what I have to offer. Dan Pink, in a 2009 TED talk, talked about motivation.

The TED talk description: “Career analyst Dan Pink examines the puzzle of motivation, starting with a fact that social scientists know but most managers don’t: Traditional rewards aren’t always as effective as we think. Listen for illuminating stories — and maybe, a way forward.”

Click here to check out the video:

My oldest is 9. He loves to learn, he loves to be doing things, but in all honesty — he’s lazy. He’d prefer to scape by and do the bare minimum. My wife expressed some frustration about this last night. Out of that frustration, I decided that I needed to sit down my oldest and figure out what we needed to do to help him. As we started talking an idea came to me: What if I help him understand the problem and find out how he would solve it.

What if he was a supervisor/owner of a small company with 1 employee. In our  case this company made dog houses (He really wants a dog right now). He hires the first employee to build and paint the dog houses, while my son is the owner/sales person. We called the employee Mark.

Mark was good at building the dog house – he really enjoyed doing it – but Mark didn’t want to pain the dog house. The first thing my son did was to get frustrated that Mark wasn’t doing his job. He decided he was going to paint the dog houses. Ah, the dilemma though – if he’s painting the dog house who will sell them? So he fired Mark. He didn’t even hesitate. Okay, so the scenario didn’t go quite the way I hoped — we can’t fire our son.

So I introduced a new worker, Joe. Joe will build and paint – but Joe does a sloppy job. He rushes through it, doesn’t cover all the spots, the houses are crooked - you get the point. So this time, my son actually asked a question – why isn’t he doing a good job. Well, Joe wants to get it done so he can get on to more fun things. Then my son offers him a reward for doing better. Joe totally eats this up, for a few days. I let my son know that Joe does good for a week and then he goes back to sloppy work. At this point my son wants to fire him too. (Watch out world, he’s ruthless!)

So we continue the scenario, where he can’t fire Joe since there are no other qualified people he can find or afford. Rewards work, but only temporarily. So what does he do…

Well we walked through the rest of the situation, and I was able to coach him to set some goals. I am keenly interested to see how school goes today.

If it goes well, I am going to use scenario teaching one-on-one with my kids more often. From what I could tell my son was able to make the jump from someone building sloppy dog houses and being lazy with his work. It also helped me to see how he viewed the problem.

And maybe – if things don’t change or get better – I can always fire him. Well, maybe not.

To be fair, meetings are sometimes a million times better than other communications. For instance, there are times when we could save time by actually just meeting rather than sending around an ever increasing email thread. These email threads have the added disadvantage of having new people tacked on as it spreads, therefore they have to spend more time going back and catching up, trying to understand the nuances and then add their own comment. 

I agree with Joel though. Meetings are tough to swallow. So in thinking about and designing, how can we design without so many meetings or too many people in the meeting?

1) Do the first meeting right… understand the specs and what is trying to be accomplished. 

2) Check in somewhat frequently, but only with the people that need to be checked with. Need broad support – fine — but only get broad support when it makes sense. We don’t need 6 people to determine a color. Let the the designer pick the color and check with the one person who at the end of the day is responsible. 

Its been over two years since my last post.

I’m still here, still working for TechSmith & still doing  instructional design and training.

I’m still thinking about how to best help people learn and how to get people to get over the ‘suckage’ curve, talked about Kathy Sierra, faster.

I think the idea here is I need short little blasts, rather than longer pieces. Maybe I’ll do more. My frequency is still probably going to be sporadic… but much, much better. I am going to try to use more TechSmith products in the process of documenting thoughts.

For the record, I am not a very graphically enabled person. I can sketch a bit, I can get a point across, but I don’t make many visuals that anyone would call beautiful. How about you? Are you graphically minded?

Regardless, being visual, or thinking visually is important part of any learning professional.

For one of the presentations I did, I even put together a presentation that starts with some visual thinking – and the power of how visuals can communicate very powerful messages – both in terms of learning and emotion.

Check out this short screencast, as one example:

Also, check out VizThink – lots of interesting material for anyone interested in become more visual. Or looking to enhance your visual thinking. http://www.vizthink.com/blog/

First off all they have lots of resources and professional writers to make it look good and read it really well.

Second, they understand that the graphics really make a piece. Sometimes the images are truly (which is the positive), sometimes they are just fun (at least they give us something). Check out How to survive and Avalanche

Third… it’s a wiki – meaning anyone can make changes, comment on the content, and even see the changes over time.

Although I haven’t dug in to see if readers of wired.com are adding much content or not, it is still an interesting concept. Allowing user generated content and corrections to create learning content.

Think of organizational possibilities – you create a quick procedural write-up on how to do a task, maybe as a job aid for yourself, or for a co-worker learning on the job. Rather than letting it rot on your hard drive, you share it out to the wiki. Perhaps a coworker sees an error or inconsistency, and takes a minute or two to make a change. A third co-worker disagrees, and changes the process. All is lost– no, from the wiki we can see who made what change and when- it can be restored back to its previous state, or changed again.

So not only does it create transparency, it creates an opportunity for each member of the organization to take ownership.

A potential downside might be if and when employees don’t feel like they have time to add anything. Then we’re no better off than we were before the wiki. Also, I’m not saying that this is the strategy for deploying every type and kind of training- I wouldn’t use it for highly regulated topics, or topics that are mission critical to the success of the organization. It can assist, but probably not the primary tool.

Now, can I get my screencasts to play in the wiki?

Today Toolbook announced it has and will be releasing tools to develop specifically for the iPhone and iPod Touch. I am not a Toolbook user – but I think it seems pretty cool. Focused development on e-learning on a very cool tool.

They even made a screencast to preview it, check it out here: http://www.toolbook.com/demos/iphone_howto_demo/1/index.html

If anyone is working with ToolBook and is able to give this a try, I’d love to hear how it works… and even, if possible I’d be willing to test it out.

A couple things I noticed as I browsed the internet, some of which will be a limiting factor if you are planning to use the iPod touch for mobile learning (m-learning).

One: using the wi-fi feature cuts the battery charge significantly. So if you’re using it with out a charger or a way to plug it into your computer, the actually amount of use you can get out of the touch is limited. I know I went from full to half in an hour or so. For shorter smaller modules this is fine. If its going to be something longer, you may not want to rely on the user going through wifi to access content.

Two: As of right now the actually types of content you can view on the iPod touch through the Safari browser is limited. No flash content. Images of most types seem to work fine. Videos- really I think I’ve only seen YouTube videos that play on YouTube. Even the YouTube video I posted recently only plays on the touch from the YouTube page.

Three: The ability to type and add content quickly from the iPod Touch. While I really like the touch keyboard, I am not yet proficient, and not fast at all. I still make mistakes. Granted I’ve only been using it for two months, I think that the keyboard is going to be ideal at all for writing or entering much information.

Four: At least for now, I don’t have a good application for note taking, organizing, or accessing other documents. I was checking my work e-mail through the web (which is a great and easy way to see wants going on, unless a response is needed ASAP), but I can’t even begin to look at attachments that come in. So again a limit on the formats that can be viewed and accessed.

I’m not trying to be negative, because I do really like my iPod touch – wow screen video looks so nice! I also want to be realistic about what it can and can’t do right now.

There are two things I wanted to comment about, in conjunction with the last post. First, is the notion that with technology, I need to stop and think about the implications for learning– especially for tools.

Think about it. A tool like this, whether it is Launchy or some other program really has interesting potential in a learning environment. If I was working with a synchronous or a-synchronous group and had multiple websites, documents, etc… that I needed to access on even a semi-regular basis, I would add these to the list that Launchy pulls from. I would also have my student’s use this tool. It simplifies some of the process to quickly accessing materials.

I think it also very cool that it makes it very easy to launch an application. I think with a little become familiar with it, and a bit of regular use, it can make teachers and learners processes a bit smoother and faster.

Second Point

Maybe this is an aside, but after posting the video to YouTube, my first by the way, I was shocked to see that withing an hour there was a comment from someone:

I guess I’m not surprised, Launchy is similar to Quicksilver. Although I admit I was disappointed. I can see how someone entering into this space, trying to do something new, get involved in web 2.0 would be intimidated.

Honestly, who cares – I’m a PC user, I’ve taught classes for students at Indiana University, as grad student for both PC and Mac. Both platforms have pro’s and cons.

I think anyone that is using a forum like YouTube to try passing on educational materials probably needs to develop a thick skin, since you never know what will come your way. The idea of sharing and commenting is truly a powerful concept, but it is also can be scary and down right nasty if your materials is received negatively. In the case of this one video, fortunately, there was no cussing

So here’s the question, what do you see as the positives and negatives of posting to sites like YouTube for e-learning purposes?