Matt Lisle :: Blog

Not sure if anyone reads this... if so, my blog has moved to http://mlisle.wordpress.com

A few reasons for my move from Eduspaces -> Wordpress are at http://mlisle.wordpress.com/2007/07/30/why-i-left-eduspaces/

Nice article on Wired about a firm who is helping organizations build training simulations using a "Wii-mote" in Second Life.

A few examples were cited:

* a company interested in training workers for its power plants

* a manufacturer of medical devices

* pest-control firm Orkin, who is hoping "...to create training simulations, which might involve inspecting a house for moisture and heat sources or mixing chemicals and loading them onto a truck.

Cool cool cool...

My wifey sent me an IM the other day while she was sitting in a webinar.

Thought it was a nice illustration of how a poorly designed webinar can be pretty boring...

This month's issue of Wired has an interesting note about some new games being released for the handheld Nintendo DS system:

Gals in Japan are using Nintendo DS to do way more than play with Mario. A flood of femme-focused self-help software now runs on the touchscreen handheld. Female Power Emergency Up! DS (shown) promises to "Change your destiny in three months!" by measuring skills in love, fashion, beauty, diet, and fortune-telling(?!), then challenging girls to increase their scores. My Happy Manner Book gives lessons on social etiquette — vital stuff, like which kimonos are proper for single women. Mainichi Kokorobics DS Therapy (a play on the Japanese word for "heart" and the English "aerobics") is like a series of sessions with a digital psychiatrist. And Yoga Anwhere is a CG personal trainer that demonstrates poses and guides girls through daily workouts.

This got me googling to see of others had developed e-learning for the Nintendo DS platform... which led me to this post:

The only people left in the world who don’t see games as the ideal tool for learning are those that have never played one.  If you can’t see that kids are forming, managing, and leading 60 person Guilds and spending 45 hours planning, and learning the correct strategies for achieving one successful mission than you are playing the wrong games and way out of touch.

I stumbled upon this video a few days ago... it's a Text Your Own Adventure w/ Spiderman! Remember those old Choose Your Own Adventure books? Well, this sorta works the same way.

Basically, you watch a video in which Spiderman tries to save the world from the Golden Girls and trans-fats. At the end of the video, you send a text message to choose your ending. Either spiderman uses his power for evil, spiderman loses to the girls, or spiderman wins... you decide. Once you send a text message with the ending of your choice, you get a message in return that includes instructions on viewing your ending. Click the thumbnail below to see an example:

This is a pretty interesting use of text messaging, and it made me curious if e-learning professionals had begun trying something similar. After all, many colleges are already beginning to adopt text messaging as an option for broadcasting announcements to students. I don't suppose it would be a giant leap for faculty to begin sending pop quizzes, scavenger hunts, hints/tips, reminders, and other messages via text.

Mlearning-world.com recently posted several good examples of using text messaging for education. The first example is a "data burst":

To improve her team’s sales skills, a sales manager polled her top sales consultants as to key aspects of different products that resulted in sales. She also gathered information from various sales training courses. Gathering all of the information collected, she organized this into 100-200 word chunks like the following two examples:

Sales Tip: Use Examples- ABC corporation saved $100 a month by switching from RDI 750 to 1000.

Did You Know: The RDI 1000 can handle 5 times the users as the 750. 

 The next example was a scavenger hunt:

The new Customer Service representatives were sent to random retail stores they supported. Challenges were sent to their mobile phones and the students would text back their answers. In one example, the students were challenged to find the price of a specific model of digital camera. The students would search the store to find the camera and either take a picture with their phone and send it or text the answer back. This gave the students a customer experience in searching for products their customers would want to find.

 Has anyone out there tried any learning activites via text messaging? If so how'd it go?

Kudos to anyone who can comment using only text messaging abbreviations.

A few weeks ago I presented a session at the Elearning Guild Annual Gathering called "BYOW - Build Your Own Webinar". In the session, I demonstrated a variety of free tools that users could copy/paste into their own webinar client. The tools came together to create an interface that includes chat, whiteboard, file sharing, remote-controlled slide deck, polls, video, breakout groups, VOIP, notes, and more.

Take a look at a sample of the final product at http://www.thedayjobs.com/byow (note: the slide deck is remote controlled, so unless I'm logged in as an instructor you will see a message that says, "The presentation has not yet started")

I'm posting this here because I'd like to share some of the tools I used in my presentation. These tools could be used in a variety of ways:

• Slide Deck - http://www.zohoshow.com
• Chat - http://www.gabbly.com
• Polls - http://www.zohopolls.com
• Audio - http://www.skype.com and http://www.highspeedconferencing.com
• Video - http://www.youtube.com
• Whiteboard - http://www.skrbl.com
• FIle sharing - http://www.box.net
• Wiki - http://www.pbwiki.com
• Note tool - http://www.google.com/ig/directory?synd=open (search for notes)

If you'd like to see how I combined all of these tools into one, take a look at my handout.

One tool that was not available at the time of my presentation (or at least I hadn't heard of it yet) was ustream.tv. From Techcrunch:

The basic Ustream service is free, and anyone with a computer, an Internet connection and a web cam can set up their own channel and broadcast live. Viewers can watch on the site, or embed the live video onto any other website.

Coulda used Ustream to provide live video of the instructor in my self-made webinar client... oh well.

The point is this... there's tons of free tools out there. Go play with 'em! Some of 'em might be of use to you during your next project. 

Tom Crawford recently posted a link to an NPR story about 1st round NFL draft pick, Amobe Okoye. Okoye came to America from Nigeria as a young man in high school. When he was 13, a local coach asked him to try out for the football team and gave him a copy of Madden Football to learn the game. Okoye is now getting paid lots of money to run complicated defensive schemes in the NFL.

I've watched football since I was a child, so the rules of the game seem second nature to me. However, I once tried to explain American football to a family friend from England. As I tried to describe the intricacies of 4th downs, extra points, field goals, halfbacks, fullbacks, quaterbacks, and cornerbacks, I realized that this was a pretty complicated sport... and I was only trying to explain the basics that are necessary for being a spectator. Explaining the strategies involved with playing the game would have been a 3-month course.

Had I known then what I know now, which is that video games can be powerful educational tools, I would've just challenged him to a game of Tecmo Bowl. 

Click here to listen to the NPR story about Okoye

A few weeks ago, I attended the E-learning Guild's Annual Gathering in Boston, MA. One of the sessions I attended was the Rapid Elearning Tools panel, in which representatives from Articulate, Adobe Captivate, and Qarbon discussed their existing tools w/ Jay Cross. After the conference, I posted a comment on the Articulate "Word of Mouth" blog, but wanted to expand on my thoughts here.

It was interesting to have someone who is widely considered to be a guru on informal learning exchange ideas with rapid development folks.  Wouldn't it be nice if these rapid development tools could integrate with services such as Blogger, PBWiki, MySpace, Facebook, EduSpaces, etc?

Anyone could give a 10 minute video presentation w/ accompanying visuals and post it to their blog w/ two clicks. Or post a software demo to a social networking profile with a snap. Or post a simulation to PBWiki. (and so on)

Rapid E-learning tools could really take off if they made the "I" in ADDIE so simple that anyone could do it. 

Thanks to Mark for the video

UPDATE: After re-reading my post, I realize that I made it sound as if all there is to the "I" in ADDIE is posting content on the web. There's more to it than that... but a seamless integration between rapid development tools and web 2.0 services would simplify things, no?

So, I've done a fair amount of blogging... created a group blog in Athens, GA that's lived on without me. Done my share of commenting on blogs... blah blah blah.

The question is, "Why don't I blog about my field?" Possibly because others do such a better job than I could ever hope to do. Or maybe it's because I don't feel like I have much to add.

Nonsense... I've got stuff to say. Listen up!