valary with a why

PowerPoint animations are to people as laser pointer red dots are to cats.

Fri, 17 May 2013 15:21:00 -0400

PowerPoint animations are to people as laser pointer red dots are to cats.

"True, a little learning is a dangerous thing, but it still beats total ignorance."

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 13:23:15 -0400

“True, a little learning is a dangerous thing, but it still beats total ignorance.”

- Abigail Van Buren

"People think of education as something they can finish."

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 14:26:36 -0400

“People think of education as something they can finish.”

- Isaac Asimov

"Conversation is a meeting of minds with different memories and habits. When minds meet, they..."

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 13:24:38 -0400

“Conversation is a meeting of minds with different memories and habits. When minds meet, they don’t just exchange facts: they transform them, reshape them, draw different implications from them, engage in new trains of thought. Conversation doesn’t just reshuffle the cards: it creates new cards.”

- Theodore Zeldin

Of bios and boredom

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 15:29:31 -0400

Of bios and boredom:

Roger Courville got me thinking about bios today with his “5 Strategies for Avoiding Biorrhea” and I realized I have worked with some people recently on bios but hadn’t written about it. I’ll let you go and read Roger’s words on your own but just add a few things I have suggested.

First you should no more have one bio than you would have one resume. Different audiences, different jobs, different situations. Different being the keyword here. Questions I have asked my consultees to consider included: What is the medium? Print, long-form writing, short-form, webinar, in person, etc. Generally if its going into print it will be slightly more formal and perhaps a little longer than some others. If it’s going to be spoken, it should be conversational and work in something specific for the venue. Length may vary. If it’s going on a short web-based piece you may need a “twitter-style” bio. That means short and pithy. Like an elevator pitch if the elevator is only travelling a floor or two.

Bottom line, of both Roger’s comments and mine is to think about it. I think bios, like resumes, too often get written once and forgotten about. So give yours a fresh look. Be purposeful and powerful. Make your bio bionic.

"It makes no more sense to blame PowerPoint for boring presentations than to blame fountain pens for..."

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 13:30:07 -0400

“It makes no more sense to blame PowerPoint for boring presentations than to blame fountain pens for forgery.”

- Jay Cross. Informal Learning: Rediscovering the Natural Pathways That Inspire Innovation and Performance

A question of culture

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 10:14:41 -0500

Reading through 3 Tips from Ryan Avery, 2010 World Champion of Public Speaking one of the sections that jumped out at me was about the use of humor in presentations. Avery has a 3 question litmus test for whether something flies or not on the funny front:

Could I use this in front of Grandma?
Could I use this in front of two or more generations?
Could I use this in front of two or more cultures?

That’s a pretty good list not just to filter your humor but could be applied to other aspects of information sharing and working in teams. The last bullet point really struck me in light of something else I read this week. In Daniel R. Tobin’s book Learn Your Way to Success he cites a RW3 research report that finds “40 percent of geographically dispersed teams underperform, primarily because of cultural differences among members.”

And culture isn’t just about physical location or personal heritage. Institutions have cultures. Different offices of the same business can have different cultures determined not only by geography but the makeup of the staff, the temperament of the leadership, the corporate values and so forth.

The Internet and ease of accessing one another globally may cause us to forget at times that there are still great separations between the customs and expectations and interpretations of others, but it wouldn’t hurt for us to take a moment when we are communicating to consider the question of culture.

"Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think."

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 17:38:56 -0500

“Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think.”

- Albert Einstein (via thescienceofreality)

What I found when I lost my text messages

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 15:09:00 -0500

Recently I got the warning beep that the power level on my cell phone battery was approaching the critically low level. I usually carry a spare battery so it was just a matter of a quick swap of the batteries and the little green bar was refilled and the phone buzzed back to life. But something was different. All of my text messages were gone. Kaput. Wiped out. Just a blank screen where they had been, moments prior, a host of smiling avatars and messages. Little snippets of conversations with friends far and wide.

My heart sank at the loss. It felt like a real, tremendous loss at that moment. Especially the heart-felt texts between my boyfriend and me. I had saved them all. I felt my phone had betrayed me and my relationship. But then I took a breath and found some perspective. Some clarity. It may have been partially because I was spending time with an elderly relative at the time. It may have been because I’ve been reading a lot lately about the social impacts of the digital culture. The good, the bad, and the full range of options in between. But I stopped to really think about what was lost.

Sure the record of words sent in jest and love and query disappeared from the screen but what made those no-longer captured words more valuable than the thousands of others that had been spoken between myself and the texters? Did putting them in a text message deserve to give them superior status? What is the hierarchy of communication these days? It wasn’t that long ago that we didn’t have the ability to send text messages. How is it that they have so quickly infused themselves into our lives to such an extent that we feel sadness at their loss?

And so, after the deep breath and the moment of reflection I actually felt a bit lighter. I wasn’t constrained by the messages any longer. They had served their purpose and now had slipped back into the ether. Sure there was some residual sadness. I should have found a way to back them up. There were some beautiful sentiments in there that I would like to have scrolled back through. But what I found was even more precious. I found some clarity and perspective. Technology is wonderful but we are past the point of novelty and it is time to really look at what we do with it and why and use it to our best advantage. We should be purposeful while maintaining our playful sense of digital self. We should stop every once in a while and really think about what we are doing and why.

Dan Pink identifies 6 Elevator Pitches for the 21st Century....

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 09:49:55 -0500

Dan Pink identifies 6 Elevator Pitches for the 21st Century. Think you aren’t in sales? Watch this and then decide.

Today's assignment - Go unlearn something

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 16:30:07 -0500

Sure you spent time learning how to do your job. And you’ve probably gotten pretty good at it. But when was the last time you learned something new about it? Things change. Is there a better way to do something now than when you started doing it originally? Has your approach become stale? Has what used to be considered peak performance become merely meh?

One of the hardest things to do is to admit that as wonderful as you are, maybe, just maybe, you could still learn something about something you already know about. And it’s hard to change habits. But it can also be helpful to do so. It may improve that way you are working. It may make your life easier. It may lead to new revelations about other aspects of your job or life. But before you can do something differently you often have to unlearn the way you are doing it now and retrain yourself to try it a different way.

So what can you unlearn today? And what will the outcome be?

Love the One You're with: Creating a Classroom Community

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 12:00:03 -0500

Love the One You're with: Creating a Classroom Community:

The issue of building community occurs in all types of classes in person and online. I have used a variation of this in online courses to get people interacting by pairing unlikely people. In one course, for example, I had people from different departments in the course and knew that left to their own devices they would pair up with people from their own groups which would rob them of the experience of learning more about the operations and culture of the other departments. In other exercises in the same course I let them choose their partners so they didn’t feel a complete loss of autonomy.

Sometimes love … or learning needs a little push outside the comfort zone. But when it works there are sparks and great things can happen.

When is text not text?

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 15:33:50 -0500

For some time now I have worked at the intersection of e-learning and presentation design, two roads that travel together and intersect at frequent junctions. I have spent countless hours trying to wrestle bullet points away from presenters who felt they had to have them on their slides. Today while reading through the article Converting Classroom Training to Virtual Instruction: Some Tips I can across the following tip:

“Use less text and more graphics in your slides - Stop using your slides as an outline. Remember to design your slides so that they are visual and telegraphic. Get over the feeling that you must use text or that you need to use full sentences when you do use text. When you are creating or revising slides, they should look more like signs than like paragraphs. They are aids for your attendees, not a crutch for you.”

I was also remembering the word cloud I did at the outset of #edcmooc and it occurred to me that perhaps a better way to explain to people that they have too much text on their slides is it to re-frame the way we think of text in those instances. Text becomes a visual component. Each word or phrase becomes a picture. A verbal picture. Most people quickly grasp the fact that they shouldn’t put a dozen different images on a slide or e-learning screen but they don’t think of text as part of the picture.

Text is the tool and much like the discussions this past week about the utopian or dystopian aspects of technology, language is a tool that can be both used and abused, empowering or intrusive, helpful or a hindrance.

#edcmooc Different language, same meaning

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 12:00:07 -0500

After watching the previous video I was wondering what the research said about the use of emoticons, which are clearly the secondary language of chat. We use them to infuse some tone and personality into our messages since those aspects are lacking from purely written communications that are intended to replicate dialog. But do they really influence the reader? Apparently not so much.

In the article by Joseph Walther and Kyle D’Addario entitled “The Impacts of Emoticons on Message Interpretation in Computer-Mediated Communication” they found that:

“e-mail messages containing emoticons did not generate different interpretations than did messages without emoticons. In terms of the known functional relationships of nonverbal communication to verbal communication, the emoticon may serve the function of complementing verbal messages at best but not contradicting or enhancing them.”

There are also a number of other excellent articles that cite this study accessible from the link provided above.

#edcmooc Inbox - Short Film Can you really get to know someone...

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 11:19:10 -0500

#edcmooc Inbox - Short Film

Can you really get to know someone online? This is a question that arises often. Anyone who has every dated online has likely been queried by friends and family. What if s/he’s a psycho or pervert? I always told people that you could meet psychos anywhere. Of course, being behind a keyboard does make it easier for people to not represent themselves accurately as has been highly visible in recent days if you follow U.S. college sports.

But people can also be more themselves at times. For those who are shy, a bit socially awkward or insecure, the safety of the online world can help them show their true selves in a controlled way. It lets them set the pacing and reveal things in a way and timeframe that lets them build up to comfort and competency. The same is true with other online worlds such as education. Not everyone is the kid in class who always shoots their hand up first and wants to be called on by the teacher. Some ponder. Silence isn’t always a sign of boredom or a lack of knowledge.

Inbox is a short film that highlights many of the realities of digital communication in a way that is both charming and very tangible. It also reminds us that technology can be both a wonderful tool for connecting but is not the be all and end all. Communication and the ease and abundance of which technology allows for is truly a gift, befitting a lovely red bag, but it has its limitations. So can you really get to know someone online just through chatting? Yes, and no. Technology can certainly help you exchange a lot of information and help you to learn a lot about a lot of things but ultimately communication is a human event that has to take place in a human way.

Chaos isn't always bad

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 16:04:32 -0500

There’s a lot to be learned from watching what people do when left to their own devices and when you are testing something out. In my craziness I have signed up for two MOOCs in addition to my coursework at UMBC. The first one is “Fundamentals of Online Education” at Coursera. I basically signed up for this one because I wanted to see how this topic would be handled in a MOOC. I don’t expect a lot of new information from this one since it is an intro level course and I have been working with online education for many years now.

It appears it will be a series of video lectures, some discussions and a project. We will be working in groups of 20. In past MOOCs, groups have been self-forming based on affinities: location, interest in a specific subtopic, in person groups participating together, etc. In this one there is a spreadsheet and you just fill your name in one of the open slots. It’s kind of hit or miss who you end up with but we can change groups if we find ourselves in one that isn’t active. Not sure how I feel about this structuring but curious to see how it plays out.

As the professor noted shortly after the course opened: “It has been an exciting few hours. The course has just started and some of you have managed to delete entire rows and columns in Join A Group Google spreadsheet, removed people from their groups, crashed the Google server, and rebuilt the page back up.” So people are in there trying to figure things out which is great. The fact that is was so easily messed up, well that the nature of this brave new world of learning.

10 Tools Challenge - #0.5 - P2PU

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 13:04:24 -0500

10 Tools Challenge - #0.5 - P2PU:

Isn’t the Internet fun with all the connections and ideas that bump into one another? I was eager to try Jane Hart’s 10 Tools Challenge and I am also trying out my first online book club, the User Generated Learning Book Club, in which I read about P2PU which stands for Peer 2 Peer University, “a grassroots open education project.”

I’m always eager to try new technologies and this looked like a great place to add to my list of sites on which I could offer collaborative courses for free. I signed up and looked for a relatively short course to start with, just to get a feel for the site. It is very user-friendly and courses are composed of a list of tasks and a discussion area. You can take courses or create your own. I’m titling this post #0.5 since at present I have only used the “Learn” side of the site. Once I create a course I will post again from the “Contribute” perspective. I have to see all the capabilities but like what I see so far in terms of the site’s philosophy of openness and the ease of usage. Twice a year P2PU does a media promotion to bring visibility to the course offerings through social media and press releases and students get badges to represent completion.

As a side note for those of you who are just trying out blogging, either because you are participating in the #edcmooc experience or otherwise, and who want to try out P2PU there is a course is called Writing for the Web that you might want to start with. It will give you a change to think about the process of blogging as well as try out another place to set up and/or participate in learning events.

As things are gearing up for the Coursera MOOC “E-learning...

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 11:12:00 -0500

As things are gearing up for the Coursera MOOC “E-learning and Digital Cultures”, I was reading Chris Swift’s post about what a MOOC looks like and really liked the visual idea of a digital footprint. So I too headed over to tagxedo and ran a wordle of this blog.

It made me happy to see that the blog is focusing on things I wanted it to like learning and creating and helping and thinking. I think I’ll check back periodically and see how the picture changes.

So what are you really sharing?

After these messages we'll be right back

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 10:40:23 -0500

Those used to be the words jingled to proceed commercial breaks amid Saturday morning cartoons when I was a kid. And we could learn a lot from commercials about delivering engaging, concise and complete messages. What if you only had 30 seconds or even 15 seconds to make your case. Deliver your message. How do commercials do it. Not all are effective, but many are.

We could also learn from commercials in terms of pacing the larger “show.” Attention spans are short. The brain needs breaks to synthesize information. Television shows are broken up into short segments with commercial breaks. How can you use this same idea in your next presentation or course?

Stop creating presentations

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 13:39:44 -0500

Think about going to your favorite restaurant. Is it just the food or the experience? Maybe the waiter is always knowledgeable and makes great recommendations. Or the tables are positioned so that groups can have lively but private conversations. How about your favorite trip. Favorite book. Favorite teacher. Favorite boss. Favorite just about anything. It’s not about the thing as much as the experience. How it made you feel. The space it creates for you. The way it facilitates the experience.

What if we decided to stop creating presentations and started devising experiences? Where could we go? What doors of imagination and innovation might we open? Think about great customer service experiences you have had lately, for instance. What was it about the experience that stood out for you? Did it surprise you? Delight you? Is there some aspect of the experience you can carry over into your next learning or business encounter?

Next time you sit down to create a presentation, just think for a moment about what type of experience you want the audience to have. What can you do to delight your audience?