Haven’t had enough time to blog, the result of preoccupation with a large project.

Having mentioned Web 3.0 often in the past, I continue my research into it. Last evening, this particular slide share presentation about Web 3.0 and beyond popped into my inbox. Steve Wheeler at the University of Plymouth put it together.

Yes, I’ve not been blogging as regularly as I might have liked to. I’ve been busy with projects – bread and butter.

We’ve always focused on instructional design being essential to the design of courseware. That’s certainly true, it’s the first step to make a learning solution instructionally sound. The next in line is to make it interesting, engaging, interactive. Too many solutions fail at that crucial stage. I’ve seen too many hours of what is commonly termed ‘shovelware’ that result from this failure.

Learning technology today, particularly enterprise-wide online content management systems coupled with the internet provide huge amounts of information. While this is useful for learning, it lacks good narrative. Learners find it difficult to navigate disjoint information, and this affects learning outcomes. Typical elearning courseware is focused around individual topics, while often the challenge the enterprise faces requires knowledge from a variety of domains and functions to be learned and leveraged. Just like McKee’s principles that I mentioned in my last post, we need models or tools that can assist a process-driven creation of narratives for engaging learning.

Recently I made a presentation at IDCI about the basic differences between simulations and games, meant predominantly for beginner learning designers. At the end of the presentation I spoke about five ways to bring more gaminess into the learning interactions being designed by the IDs. One point I made was about the use of ‘narrative’ or ‘stories’. (I use them interchangeably, as they mean pretty much the same to me, perhaps wrongly.) While I ran out of time there, a nice discussion with great points about stories and storytelling being made. I wanted to quickly recap some important concepts I uncovered during my research about the use of narratives in learning.

“How To” is a procedure which is defined by someone in number of steps. The web is full of sites that share information and tutorials about “How To” design and develop characters. However it is also important to know the “Why” to designing a character. Knowing the answers to “Why” helps one take decisions about the design process.

The Tuts+ (pronounced tutsplus) education network which has tons of “How To” tutorials is now focusing on “Why” tutorials as well.

I’ve been continuing my research into user experience and interaction design. I stumbled on this really great presentation on SlideShare by Whitney Hess – 10 Most Common Misconceptions about User Experience Design. She makes points about user experience design that instructional designers could learn from. I’m taking the liberty to reproduce and rehash the points she raises from an eLearning perspective.

We often create scenario based courses for the engineering industry. Because they are for engineers; we consider the best way to represent graphics and animations is to use 3D isometric views with orthographic projections.

Trained engineers and technicians find it easy to read this type of graphic [if rendered properly] as it has clear projections on all three axes. All the lines in this type of drawings are parallel to their respective axis; so there is no distortion in the drawing no matter what the size of surface it’s drawn on.

Interaction design is almost always a synthesis of traditional methods and approaches from varied established disciplines. When I write about interaction, most people reading it view it in the context of software or some form of digital technology.

“Interaction” isn’t only about technology or software. Industrial designers are taught to design ‘things’ that engage people and facilitate their relationships with those things.

Dr. Bhaskar Chatterjee, the chief guest at the CLO Summit India earlier this month, spoke that mistakes should be part of a learning organization’s culture. That resonated strongly with me. I have written about how we all learn more from mistakes.  At Upside Learning do ask all our employees to not be afraid of making mistakes.

When new employees join at Upside Learning, I tell them – “Making mistakes is ok because you learn from them and that’s the real value of a mistake as it gets you ready for success. So go ahead, work with a free mind, give your best, and everything else would be fine”. Note that it’s not a license to make mistakes it is the freedom to try your best and be ok when you make mistakes. I also tell them “while committing mistakes is ok, repeating them is not, as then the mistake is really costly – to them and to the company, as we did not get anything (hoping for some learning there) out of it”