Category: Consumer Technology

What am I using? March 2014 Edition

From time to time, on previous blogs, I’ve taken snapshots of my tech usage.  These are interesting to reflect on in hindsight and allow me to see trends in how I work.  In the past they’ve also been useful for exposing to colleagues some new tools and features as well as acting as mini reviews of technology.  Here is my current setup:

Hardware/Software

Home – iMac (about 4 years old) mostly for FireFox, Steam and MS Office.  The big advantage is the screen and my habit of doing multiple things at once is very easy on here.

Home – ASUS Netbook (about 5 years old) I bought this originally for when away from the office to take conference notes, check email in hotels, etc.  However, this very rarely leaves the house these days.  A few months back I swapped out Windows XP (which was virtually grinding to a halt) with JoliCloud and it now makes the ‘book a quick and easy middle house between phone and iMac for email checking and browsing (although I installed FireFox rather than use the default Chrome-based browser for Joli).

Work – Lenovo Helix (new but currently downgraded from the default W8 to W7).  Current work is mainly based around the MS ecoystem of Office and SharePoint with a few web apps here and there.  I use two monitors with the laptop screen as the third, when at work, so multiple applications and copy/pasting into docs and websites is easy.  In my current job this has replaced the Netbook as my travelling companion.

Phone (mine) – HTC Windows Phone x8 (about a year old).  Really liked the phone and generally find Windows Phone more to my tastes than iOS or Android, especially the tile notifications approach.  However, the phone itself has developed various problems.  It has been back to HTC once already for battery problems and I currently have an issue where calls from the hearing piece are very quiet.

Phone (work) – iPhone 5.  I basically only use this for work calendar, email and the podcast app (synced to my home iTunes).  I would say I prefer having things on a separate device that you can ignore, at weekends and the like, rather than merging phone use to one device.

The above mix of devices and hardware does help me try different ways of doing things.  For example, I no longer use my netbook for conference notes as I do it straight to Word or OneNote on my phone.  You also end up with a variety of ways to do simple tasks, for example I’ve recently tried Snagit for Chrome (as TechSmith picked up on Twitter) which rolls screen capture and annotation into a nice tool.  This was the first time I had used the Chrome App Launcher on my Mac and it looks an interesting way of bringing in additional functionality to the OS (certainly when, by default, it is a hand braking job to do a print screen).  I’d actually presumed I would try Chrome Snagit on my ASUS but the version of Chrome used within JoliCloud is too old.  However, the experience has made me think again about Chromebooks and if a cheap one would be the natural successor to my ASUS when the time comes.  I do still have a Windows 7 (upgraded from Vista) Samsung laptop, that I have had for years, but it crashes constantly (years of overheating due to poor fan) so I do not even try and use it beyond occasional use as a DVD player.

Websites

My top sites are probably the below (nothing extraordinary here!):

  1. Facebook – mostly for social events and to back up photos
  2. LinkedIn
  3. Old Reader – I have recently signed up to the pay plan to show support for the work they have done in picking up where Google abandoned people
  4. BBC
  5. The Guardian
  6. Google Docs – I back up various personal files in Drive
  7. YouTube – I’ve become somewhat addicted to subscriptions and adding things to ‘watch later’.  However, the constant auto switching (and having to opt out) to my Google+ account from my YouTube account is increasingly annoying.

I still do not use Twitter all that much apart from event back channels via the mobile apps and TweetDeck (on the Mac).  Other sites I regularly visit tend to be related to specific uses – for example I will often visit JISCmail to read messages that I am alerted to by the daily digest emails (due to formatting not always being very clear in the emails).  Currently I am spending lots of time on Rightmove…but thats another, and more depressing, story.

Steam Tags – crowdsourcing the shopping taxonomy

Steam have just launched a beta option for ‘steam tags’ a way for their community (75m users) to apply bespoke categorization on titles in their vast store.  Tags used regularly by users will find their way to becoming ‘Popular Tags’ that can be used by others to discover content via browse and new filtering options.

This will all sound familiar to organizations and institutions who have opened up intranets, library/learning management systems and other platforms to such crowd sourcing methods. Indeed it is not dissimilar to the ‘categories’ approach of this and other WordPress sites.

The FAQs resolve a number of the questions that always crop up with such approaches, such as “what about swear words?”, what about “different languages?” and if the content/game owner can alter the tags.  In all three cases the answers are predictable; swear words will be filtered out (Steam having plenty of experience of hosting complex user discussion boards), you will see tags from users of the same language group as you and customers’ tags will appear no matter what the designer/publisher thinks.  The latter is interesting in that it could show a disconnect and one might expect it opens up some publishers to looking elsewhere, for example, Ubisoft might find lots of “Excessive DRM” tags which they probably will not like and there is room for blatant hate campaigns.  As for the language point, it seems a little disappointing that the expense has not been spared on some kind of automatic translation, yes it might not work well but, at least it would break down some of the cultural/geographic barriers.  Overall, this is another community tool for a platform which, of course, has big plans.

I love the tag idea, thinking about it from my education perspective, I wonder how many organizations would genuinely open their Learning Management Systems to such tagging?  We’ve seen ratings (5-star) approaches for a while and so often see the extreme 1 or 5 star feedback scores, as tends to be the case in the Apple and Google stores too.  This more qualitative approach could be a big help toward sorting through vast content as systems grow and discoverability does seem to be the driving force.

Learning Technologies Exhibition – 29th Jan 2014

Stalls

As predicted, there was much interest in multi-device learning and this seemed to have replaced previous conversations, such as Apps versus HTML5 browser, etc. as mobile learning evolves.  The challenge now seems to be to decide if you want a SaaS authoring tool (such as GoMo), a local desktop application or a hybrid model.  The functionality gap between the SaaS and desktop is decreasing so the issue then becomes more about your workflows (for example if you want collaborative authoring etc).  Cm-Group’s Luminosity is an interesting middle ground with the Studio tool offering rapid authoring and a cloud file storage allowing for collaborative authoring but with appropriate locking of files, etc.

There was not too much in the way of new stalls, with the usual split between big systems doing multiple things (such as Cornerstone), smaller specific systems (such as SpiderGap in the 360 feedback space), eLearning providers and classroom/skills training providers.  One new stall was KPMG Learning Academy’s showing the ability of big organizations to try and leverage their existing expertise into providing services in the space.  Another area where there seemed to be an increase in stalls was with iTunes-esque aggregators for people to sell eLearning and other materials via single sources, such as opensesame.com.  In a related space, I was slightly surprised to not see more of re-emergence for IT Training considering the implications of Windows 8, new versions of Office, etc.

Similarly the talks I attended were largely updates on the on-going evolution of tools and ideas, rough notes below:

Cultures of contribution: How to motivate engagement with online learning communities –Brightwave/LearnerLab/KPMG

LearnerLab talked about engagement:

  • Asked what can learn from the consumer space.
  • Social networks still growing and driving Internet use. Mobile access is the key tool that is facilitating this.
  • Shows people want short, snappy, enagaging experiences [presenters at BETT having pointed out this is not necessarily a good thing for Brain training].
  • User generated content part of people’s persona and online personality whereas people are turned off by business systems as they don’t appear as relevant, easy-to-use, etc.
  • Budgets help but big IT can go wrong – especially if designed around tech not user.  Need to be more Netflix and less Healthcare.gov.
  • Get better by developing a deep understanding of your audience.
  • Should communicate purpose at every point, for example, Facebook does not offer you a blank space, it asks ‘whats on your mind’.
  • Make users understand benefits, seek to innovate experiences around familiar conventions, spot engagement trends and always follow policy of continuous testing using real user input.
  • Push your communication to users, do this by use of notifications, etc. with a call to act.  It should not be about revisiting a website constantly, you don’t want to be ‘another place people have to visit.
  • Take inspiration from emerging trends, for example, MindMeld helps engagement through suggested content.
  • Can we learn from curation techniques of social media? They are designed around the moment, different to how it is used in workplace.  Need clear objective, what should go in and out? What trying to achieve?

Brightwave took this on to think about user experience:

  • Learning tech has been developing rapidly, for example Tin Can.
  • People don’t tend to want to go to LMS, TC offer new approach via capturing informal – Tesselo built around this concept.
  • Capture TC learning experiences via apps (for example scan book or QR code to record) and bookmarklet. Don’t have to be on website to capture learning.
  • Then drive social through sharing and communication.
  • Curator role is SME to pick best resources from social feeds to turn learning experience into resource.
  • But what about motivation? Working in Open Badges (‘allow you to show off outside’) and reputation points for internal recognition.
  • Encourage a circle of activity: collaborate, share, currate and motivation.
  • How can social learning work with LMS? Pick out best of LMS content into social (Tesselo does inc Scorm but is a SSO back to LMS too). (beyond any use of badges – interesting badges mentioned before this?)

KPMG on deploying successful social media:

  • Talking about PEN – partner development program. PEN online launched as social media via Tessello.
  • Change management has recently become much bigger part of business.  Interest in change management really came from VC project, treated as IT project but didn’t really work out. So wanted to improve this project – business requirements, vision, support, behaviours and success criteria.
  • Key to success was clear business requirements before going out to vendor.
  • Vision very succient and clear to what wanted to do.
  • To overcome faculty resistance – gatecrashed faculty day, keep them in the platform, support the supporters step-by-step.
  • Also need to train IT helpdesks, especially to avoid signin problems.
  • Behaviours – know what you want them to do, role model behaviours for sharing, etc.
  • In the end, users were ‘overengaged’! Actually succeeded criteria.
  • Group of seniors so were allowed to go off and use it, good level of engagement but ultimately a small group and had support of faculty. Also did ensure people had agreed to social media guidelines before hand.
  • eLearning authoring tool that has come out of Epic, spin out company but still default tool Epic use when building content for customers.  Looks to have evolved nicely and worked smoother than when I have seen demos previously.
  • Based around responsive content: auto scaling, auto ammend menus to page, etc.  Need to think about layout design differently for multidevice. There approach is to think about column layouts.
  • Cloud based SaS – no software for collaborative authoring, includes locking of content and content reviews for team-based authoring.  Includes standard eLearning functionality like drag and drop activities.
  • Can create corporate theme for colour schemes and branding, etc.  However, showed how easy it can be to tweak fonts, colorpickers, etc. as needed.
  • Multiview previews built in. Don’t have to deploy to devices for testing.  All HTML5 but can also be packaged as native apps.
  • Can choose between vertical and horizontal sliders/scroll for paging. If in phone can have horizontal scroll combine with down (“sensible scrolling” – set restriction on how long scroll will last to avoid ‘scroll of death’).

Epic introduces gomo: beautiful multi-device learning. Simplified – GoMo

  • eLearning authoring tool that has come out of Epic, spin out company but still default tool Epic use when building content for customers.  Looks to have evolved nicely and worked smoother than when I have seen demos previously.
  • Based around responsive content: auto scaling, auto ammend menus to page, etc.  Need to think about layout design differently for multidevice. There approach is to think about column layouts.
  • Cloud based SaS – no software for collaborative authoring, includes locking of content and content reviews for team-based authoring.  Includes standard eLearning functionality like drag and drop activities.
  • Can create corporate theme for colour schemes and branding, etc.  However, showed how easy it can be to tweak fonts, colorpickers, etc. as needed.
  • Multiview previews built in. Don’t have to deploy to devices for testing.  All HTML5 but can also be packaged as native apps.
  • Can choose between vertical and horizontal sliders/scroll for paging. If in phone can have horizontal scroll combine with down (“sensible scrolling” – set restriction on how long scroll will last to avoid ‘scroll of death’).

Make your LMS mission-critical to your organisation – SumTotal

Argued through a number of points to consider:

  • Is your learning strategy aligned to your business needs? How learning impacts all your business? Learning worked throughout workflows?
  • Business environment more complex than ever: Increased regulation, more global, doing more with less, war for talent so retention is key.
  • What business critical issues related to learning?  Need to identify, pull out and highlight.  If fail can lead to business failures, bad PR, etc.
  • Learning tech must do more than automate.  Need just-in-time, real time collab with experts, targeted for career development, etc.
  • Context key, like how Facebook (one of their clients) targets adverts and other material to you.  Mobile isn’t future, its context. For example, pervasive learning including SumTotal learning embedded through Salesforce and retail platform.
  • Key argument: context and pervasive.  BYOD helps with pervasive, access learning from top of telegraph poll to a meeting room. Snippets of content, rather than length courses, help ‘integrated learning’ this is critical if it drives performance.
  • Examples where this can work – quicker onboarding, link learning to development, learning to career plans, improve social/informal learning, succession based planning (identify risks of person losing and where training need would come), drive compensation incentives for learning (completed courses drive compensation), single record for all learners (one place for complete view, HR, payrol, learning, etc).

Mobile learning content strategies for success – Kallidus

Followed on from a session last year, how mobile has moved on as it is no longer hype:

  • Only about 30% of audience doing mobile learning when asked, presenter was surprised not more (Towards Maturity suggests has been bigger adoption in general).

Two examples shown:

  • O2, had lot of old eLearning, looked to migrate. But BYOD so not onesize fits all.  Flash to html5 wasn’t good enough as still inconsistent outputs. Instead building much more detailed specification to try and ensure consistency. Motivation to do it was that staff expected to be access things on mobile and expect it to work.
  • Kaplan Financial Mobile app. Support 30,000 students – 67% said wanted material to be available, downloaded, on device. Students are presented with material related to course they’ve paid for.  Included flash cards for learning reinforcement, key topic video clips and quiz practice. Have had 6500 downloads from 50 countries.

Best practice tips:

  • Delivering eLearning via mobile or developing mobile learning (impact on content design)?
  • Keep it simple (ensure cross device usability – inc swipe functionality over use of buttons).
  • Design for multiple device (responsive).
  • Mobile friendly media (video increasingly so but remember formats and file sizes).

Repurposing existing eLearning:

  • Think about what actually works for mobile.
  • Aspects like shelf life and business case matter: don’t just shrink rethink; interactions need redesign? Do you need to rewrite the text?

The future:

  • More and more tablets
  • Video (inc 4G)
  • Mobile features (enhanced devices to take advantage of)
  • Content creation tools on mobile.
  • Argued that generational changes are impacting how we need to use learning to retain younger staff (especially as LinkedIn has made it very easy to jump ship).

From LMS to LES – CrossKnowledge

  • An LMS used to work, but they do not work for our organizations or us now. We are all generation C(onnected).
  • How move from top-down to Just-In-Time, but global, where everyone is different?  Can we make sure there is no ‘skills gap’ anywhere, no matter what people doing or where on earth they are doing it?  Yes, technology can help by coming in as social tool for a global audience.
  • Move from being about learning management system to technology being the backbone of a learning organization.
  • Argued most of us are generalists – less SMEs as can find what we need rather than being font of all knowledge on specific things.
  • Prescribed/push content is valid but in learner-centric, learning organization, want them to absorb learning, i.e. be free to pull learning that is available.
  • Forgetting curve shows classroom doesn’t work. Need to think longer term, learning as just part of work processes, seamless to working life.
  • BUT admit this idea of learning organization is not easy to create.
  • Argued against Tin Can as it is not important to track informal – allow people to be free and play. Focus should be on sewing together learning activities and work to form true blended learning.
  • L&D cant try and do everything, has to be shared ownership amongst everyone (especially managers and experts)
  • LMS has never been a place people live, they use different systems. So you need ‘invisible jacket’ of learning across workplace.
  • Move from managing learning to delivering experience: learning experience system, a new approach they have built out in last year.

Why we all need a wall

This week I have overheard a few comments about social media, mostly on trains, one was something like:

  • “I have twitter but I don’t do it”

and another:

  • “it is just another place and thing for people to check so nobody will use it”.

Both comments immediately strike me with fear.  Can expanding your own perspective really be seen as a chore and something you can not be bothered to do?  Sure, I am not the most active poster on Twitter but I recognize the value.  In the past I have done basic training on the value of social media for people, I suspect the people I heard above need such training!  Indeed, if the second person is talking the truth for their organization, perhaps it is a bigger problem that I suspected.

This all made me think back to my Christmas movie marathon, which included watching Shirley Valentine for about the first time in 15 years. As at the start of this clip, Shirley talks to her kitchen wall to consider the failings of her life.  This is, of course, a fairly common trait in movies via diaries (Bridget Jones/Twilight) and, more recently, blogs.  Now I suspect that something the people I overheard on the train miss the point of is that whilst social media is what you want it to be but should not be dismissed out of hand.  To me, it is used to learn about land from the world, I also know plenty of people who use it (well mostly Facebook) to effectively log their lives.  Fine, so be it.  If only one person interacts with each posting you have created something beyond what Shirley, Bridget or Bella had managed.

More on content curation for learning

Considering the current interest in content curation, as mentioned in posts including the GOSH event report, it was great to see a Learning Solutions article attempt to clarify what this means for instructional design.

I personally have a real interest in curation as my background (in terms of my MA and MSc at least) straddles the value of information (re)sources and learning design.  Indeed if you look at it from a HE perspective, content curation is not really new, it is about the valuable resources which support and enhance any learning from colleagues and/or experts.  The article points out that designers already do sift through source materials in other contexts too.

Therefore, why is ‘curation’ now becoming such a big issue in workplace learning and development?  I would suggest it comes from a number of factors, including:

  1. L&D departments realizing they can not ‘do it all’ – this is a response to the information revolution and a delayed response to the ‘1990 challenge’ outlined at that GOSH event.
  2. A late realization of the capabilities of Learning Management Systems to deliver resources and support communication/collaboration, not just SCORM-packages.  This change being partly fueled by the move of LMS systems for ‘training’ beginning to use/include the features previously more common in ‘education’.  Most noticeably, Moodle has spread into the in-house training sector (either vanilla or as Totara – partly helped by the cloud) as well as a realization of the possibilities via the functionality of SharePoint and other tools.  The Learning Solution article correctly identifies this as moving away from the ‘single-learning-event’ training model.
  3. Democratization of digital production.  Unfortunately, training providers got hung up on the ‘rapid’ development of SCORM packages a few years back rather than looking at the wider ecosystem.  This has in many cases, I would argue, led to a loss of control over related issues such as tacit knowledge management and social learning as well as some misconceptions.  Unfortunately, the Learning Solutions article echoes one of these misconceptions by arguing that ‘lower production values’ means low quality of learning.  It clearly does not, and if your learners argue they can not learn from something because it does not look nice then you are failing to sell them the learning’s purpose.

Bar my criticism in the above point 3, I would say the article highlights a useful way forward for many training providers in 2014 – the key message being to learn to consider a joined-up curriculum rather than silos of those ‘single-learning-events’.  What else could be done?  Below are some tactics which I have not seen much comment about:

  1. Leverage the sources of content curation directly from the SMEs – browser bookmarks, links currently hidden away on team sites, books in their offices, etc.
  2. Leverage the sources of current awareness – aggregate lists of recommended reading (email subscriptions, RSS reader exports) from SMEs and the training’s audience.

And if we consider what is happening in HE and elsewhere I might suggest three other bits of work for L&D in 2014:

  1. L&D professionals as the organizational ‘guinea pigs’ – spend time test driving MOOCs and other resources prior to recommending to their audiences.
  2. Audio/visual solutions – iTunesU type in-house solutions, Mediacore, etc.  I know a lot of organizations will have this already but I doubt many fully allow for upload/download flexibility across device and with appropriate curation tools (commenting, ratings, categories, etc).
  3. Data and semantics – many of the opportunities of ‘curation’ emerged from Web 2 (wikis, social media, etc).  This video does a good job of summarizing that data, analytics, semantics, etc will bring the next set of opportunities.