The year’s best presentations: What can we learn?

My Technology Tools to Support Learning course is continuing our overview of elearning this week.  But I also wanted to link elearning to some of the other topics we’ve been discussing over the semester.  As we move from using Powerpoint for presentations to building interactive learning modules, I thought we would consider what we should bring with us from presentations.  Slideshare.net, one of the Internet’s largest archive of slides and presentations, holds a competition each year for the World’s Best Presentation.  The topic for the slides can be on anything.  The winner this year, Dan Roam, built a presentation about healthcare in America, and it’s all written on napkins (sort of).  See for yourself; I’ve embedded it below.

But the second prize, “Sheltering Wings” by Sarah Cullem, and third place,  “Feels Bad on the Back” by Mohamad Faried, are also excellent as well.  These are the overall winners.  There are also winners for different categories. So, you may want to take a look at those, too.  In particular, you might want to take a look at the one for education.  Here’s the list from Slideshare:

• 24 Reasons why Twitter Sucks! in Technology
• Eco-nomics, The hidden costs of consumption in Business in Business
• Simplicity in Creative/Offbeat
• A crime so monstrous in Education
• Who is this guy in About Me

The question…

So after taking a look at a bunch of these (and some of you may have seen them through Twitter, etc. as they came out), I’ve got some questions for you to consider.

1. What can we learn from these presentations about how to design and develop presentations? In other words, what’ the take away for instructional designers?
2. What can we learn about how to present a message to others, particularly when we’re not there to elaborate?
3. How do these (or some of these) presentations echo principles of message design, graphic design, and instructional design?  Or how do they break them usefully?

Let me know what you think.  Jump in and leave your ideas in the comments below.

The power of stars

About a year ago, I found the following slideshow, creating a post about it on a previous —now somewhat defunct — blog. So, I’m reposting it here. It will be able to get archived and found easier. Plus, maybe it will resonate with you.

Consider this slide show on Slideshare: “Knowing.the.World.We.Live.in.” In this slideshow, review it at full screen so you can read the legends for each slide. Another site called this “The Power of Stars.” The message is powerful.  How do you think the message in the presentation is interpreted through visual literacy, graphic design and message design?

Increasing cognitive load without even knowing it

Wikipedia defines cognitive load as “the load on working memory during instruction.” I usually refer to it this way: If your working memory is a bucket, then it can only hold so much stuff. So, filling up your bucket with unnecessary or unimportant stuff, leave less space for the critical stuff and the processing space necessary to work on it.

photo credit: Erlomo

Extraneous cognitive load then is bad all around. It’s not good cognitive load. It doesn’t help you learn. It doesn’t help you process. It doesn’t help you remember. It doesn’t even relate to the learning content in most cases. Instead, it fills up your bucket —read “increases cognitive load.”

One of the most obvious examples of extraneous cognitive load is poor interface usability. When we design a graphical user interface, poor usability forces the learner (user) to have to think about the interface. That is, they have to think about how to interact with the system. When they have to think, the bucket starts getting filled up. If some function in the interface doesn’t behave the way a learner expects it to, then the learner has to think about why and how do I do what I want to do. Working memory continues to be loaded.

Some examples might be in order here. I have seen other university faculty members’ courses that have animations (notice the plural), hyperlinks and supposedly “cute” graphics all on the same single web page. Admittedly, this is amateurish by professional standards. However, for me, the more serious offense is the inconsideration of what it means for learning and cognitive load. Taking a suggestion from “Web Pages that Suck,” a 2008 winner was the Burlington National UFO Center. Similarly, HavenWorks also has created an extraneous cognitive overload with poor layout, organization and unimportant elements. Admittedly, neither of these two sites are strictly instructional and I would never expect any corporate instructional designer to produce this type of development. However, the fact that these pages still exist confirm that learning and utility take a backseat to inexperience.

Instructional design & development project showcase

Tonight is the project showcase for my IDT 7095/8095: Developing Interactive Learning Environments II course.  This semester the teams are comprised of all women.  (Go girl-power!)  The overwhelming majority of this course is based in working with a “live” external client.  At the beginning of the semester, student teams select clients from proposals I have received.  Then students work all semester with the client to analyze, design, develop, implement and evaluate a solution to the proposed problem.  This semester one project is a traditional instructional design training opportunity for a client and friend Dr. Chuck Hodges at Virginia Tech’s Math Emporium.  The other project is more of an electronic performance support system for abnormal ophthalmology at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center here in Memphis.  As part of the showcase, student teams will present an executive summary of their projects’ problems, solutions and evaluations.

In addition to the primary project, students are also learning project management.  We follow Lynch and Roecker’s (2007) Project Managing e-Learning: A Handbook for Successful Design, Delivery and Management, which is based on the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK).  In addition, we supplement with the Fast Forward MBA in Project Management, which has a wealth of examples and templates built in.

On top of the instructional design models from previous courses, including Morrison, Ross and Kemp and Dick, Carey and Carey, we emphasize rapid prototyping as a development model. So, you can see that students are doing a tremendous amount of work and learning.

Below are the project teams’ descriptions.

PB&K Solutions has focused on designing and developing an electronic performance support system for medical students studying ophthalmology at UT Health Science Center.  Their clients are Dr. Bill Brescia and Dr. William Morris.  One of their most unique challenges is to create a system that is scalable and maintainable.  PB&K Solutions’ primaries are Kathy Youngblood, Patti Liddell and Becki Barnhardt.

Joint Creative Design designed and developed training for test proctors at Virginia Tech’s Math Emporium.  The Math Emporium supports several thousand students enrolled in math courses throughout the year.  Their client is Dr. Charles Hodges, a faculty member in Virginia Tech’s math program and geographically located in Blacksburg, VA.  Joint Creative Design combines the expertises of Donna Brunner, Joanne Gikas and Christie Hayes.

I encourage you to leave your thoughts and well-wishes to the students in the comments below.

Where does your inspiration for design come from?

Some examples of items I've collected in my inspiration folder

Sometimes I have a clear picture of how I want to approach a new project.  Other times, it’s open-ended, leaving me without a clear themed direction for the graphic design or instructional design. For a long time, I have kept a simple, nondescript manila folder in the bottom right drawer of my desk.  In it, I collect Sunday circulars, postcards, direct mail flyers, etc., for when it comes time to create a new layout, color scheme, theme or graphic design.  This is akin to interior designers or HGTV-wannabes collating a stack of tear-sheets from magazines.  This is a technique that I learned way back in undergrad when I was print-publishing-and-packaging major.

Even farther back in high school when I was on the yearbook and newspaper staff, we collected headlines from magazines and newspapers that we could reuse.  We used scissors and glue and pasted the headlines into manilla folders.  So whenever we were hard-up for a headline—that is, one that didn’t sound like we were desperate for a headline—we went through the folders.  It was and still is a great technique.

Not long ago, I had a teacher recommend to me that she gets her students to collect really good adjectives and puts these either on notecards on a key ring or in a spreadsheet.  Whenever the kids need to write descriptive paragraphs or just use better adjectives, she gets them to pull them out.

More recently, I’ve begun to collect cartoons and images that I would like to reuse in my instruction.  I use Jumptags to collect my bookmarks, and it also allows you to save images (plus, video and HTML code, too).  So, particularly, now when I’m looking for an image to communicate an idea on a slide or in instruction, I’ll save it into my bookmarks, too.  Just in case I’d like to reuse it or use it as a source of inspriration.

In addition, a few of the blogs that I subscribe to regularly post unique sources of inspiration for designs, such as skateboard designs, photography and typography.  Here’s a list of a few that I am inspired by:

• Smashing Magazine
• instantShift
• Think Design

But here’s a few instructional design, development and elearning blogs that I also use for inspiration:

• Instructional Design and Development Blog
• Rapid eLearning Blog
• eLearning Roadtrip

Where do your inspirations for graphic design, message design and instructional design come from?  Leave some comments and share, please.

Clipart objects. Cool and free. Just the way I like it.

By way of one of my favorite sites for getting things done faster, easier, more effectively or more efficiently (I’m talking about Lifehacker.com), comes a pack of free clip art for presentations, Web pages and word processing.  This simple little pack of icons, things and badges comes by “freeway” of iPresentee.com.  iPresentee describes their freebie pack as:

The background of all objects is transparent and can be used on any colored background. Each object can be changed in size, rotated, increased or decreased in opacity, fitted with shadows or even overlapped with one another to create extra effects. Keynote Objects are compatible with Keynote, iWeb, Pages, Microsoft PowerPoint and Word.

This is just my kind of score: cool and free.  These little gems with a sample of the 100+ above would be easy adds to a presentation, flyer, or Web page.  Props to iPresentee.com.  Kudos to the Lifehacker commenters that solved the download glitch.  Instructions to everyone else: Download away!

• Download the pack for Mac (.dmg)
• Download the pack for Windows (.zip)

You might also like:

1. Free character pack from Function
2. Pics at 4Leaarning.com
3. 31 Sources of quality free icons from Vandelay Design
4. Vanilla Cream icon set by ~djnjpendragon

Are your quotes curly? Are they squirel-ly?

Note:  This is the first post in an occasional series about improving typography.  The series is called “Atypical Type.”

It’s a little know fact that there are different types of quotation marks, apostrophes and primes (or tick marks for feet and inches or minutes and seconds).  Well, really there are just two kinds: the good kind and the bad kind.

For quotation marks, they should be curly, called smart quotes by Microsoft Word that does them by default now.  The pattern should go like this: sixty-six then ninety-nine (see image below).  The open quotes should look like the number sixty-six with the center of the six (called the counter) filled in.  Likewise, closed quotes should look like the number ninety-nine.  The pattern holds true for single quotes, too.  A single quote should open with a six and close with a nine.

Good and bad quotation marks. Look for the 66 and the 99 pattern.

In Word, this usually happens automatically (see the Autocorrect preferences below).  However, the other day while I was using track changes, the automatic feature didn’t insert the right ones. So pay attention.  I have a sneaky suspicion this had to do with whether Word was interpreting the space before a quote or not.

Preferences in Word for "smart quotes."

On the Web, it’s a little trickier.  But here’s the list of HTML codes to produce the right quotes:
‘= opening single quote
’ = closing single quote
“ = opening double quote
” = closing double quote

Wordpress does the conversion to curly quotes by default. But it isn’t to be trusted. Here’s an example from a recent post where Wordpress got confused.  So, you can see why some folks would want to strip the autocorrecting brains right out of Wordpress.  Other blogging platforms need a little assistance from plugins, like Smartypants.

Quotation problem in Word.

In Any Application
On a Mac, you can insert the correct quotes by using key commands.  For a Mac, the commands are listed below:
option + ] = opening single quote
option + shift + ] = closing single quote
option + [ = opening double quote
option + shift + [ = closing double quote

Here are the codes for a PC in any program:
Alt+0145 = opening single quote
Alt+0146 = closing single quote
Alt+0147 = opening double quote
Alt+0148 = closing double quote

Single and Loving It
Now something that omniscient Word is not so good at is inserting a single quote or apostrophe when it's supposed to.  If you use a single quote or apostrophe at the beginning of a sentence, Word automatically assumed it should be a "six."  If you're really using an opening quote that's probably right; however, if you happen to be using a little conversational English or jargon, like below, then what you really need is a "nine."

Incorrect Autocorrect in Word.

The other place I see this happen a lot is with years, like below.

Correct and incorrect single quote for years.

So, in both of these cases, you need to insert your own apostrophe and not let the application do it for you.

Prime Time
Finally, the other instance where most folks use the marks is with feet and inches or minutes and seconds.  These are the primes, but I usually hear them called tick marks.  See the image below.

Good and bad primes (or tick marks).

In these instances, you don’t want the curly quotes or the bad quotes.  What you need are the slanted tick marks.  To get these then you need to use the following key commands.  Here’s the HTML codes for primes:
’ = single prime
” = double prime

On a Mac, the key strokes are:
option + shift + e = single prime (for feet or minutes)
option + shift + g = double prime (for inches or seconds)

Acknowledgments and some other sites to check out:

• “5 Simple Ways to Improve Web Typography” from Web Designer Depot
• A List Apart
• About.com for punctuation marks
• An Eclectic Mind

The instructional design of TRIBE

Beginning tonight, I will be helping to lead our church youth through a 30-hour famine.  This is sponsored by World Vision in an effort to emphasize to youth and adults the poignancy of poverty and famine around the globe.  Norwalk, CT, and Here in Franklin offer two other descriptions of youth participating in the famine.  World Vision reports:

Each day, over 26,000 children under the age of 5 die from preventable diseases such as malnutrition, malaria, diarrhea, and acute respiratory infections. Malnutrition is associated with over half of those deaths.

In particular, tomorrow afternoon I will be leading over 70 youth and adults in a game called TRIBE.  As I worked through the game — rather a series of games, challenges and reflections — I began to think about both the instructional design of the game and the message design of the leader’s guide.  The cyclical nature of game, reflection and whole group sharing seemed to be an effective technique.  Using the word game here is liberal, for sure.  Some are games; some, simulations; some, sort of just challenges.  They are all somewhat fast-paced to meet the audience’s needs, but the opportunities to reflect and debrief align really well with the literature on assessment with serious games and simulations.

Finally, the message design of the leader’s guide is well done and unified, too.  It’s not anything with a spectacularly unique layout.  But the directions in the guide highlight how the graphics used relate to the game and the Indonesian part of the world simulated in the game.  So, the overall game and the leader’s guide toggle back and forth between high fidelity and low fidelity.

I encourage you to take a look at the game and its design. And if you want to know more about TRIBE or the 30-hour Famine or if your community is participating, be sure to leave a comment.