The Future of Reading for Learning

In the Instructional Design community, there’s been a lot of talk about Content as a Service (CaaS) as a method of enhancing Reading for Learning (as opposed to reading for pleasure). The idea is that removing text from formal constraints such as bound books or white papers – divorcing content from form, in other words – lets us provide avenues for collaboration. In short, you give people the opportunity to collaborate and add value to the text – personal reactions, connections with the material, the ability to have your questions answered outside of class, etc.  As David Grebow puts it:

“Add an app [to an eBook] that has been developed to help you learn. … It almost magically knows you. You are connected to your fellow students and even students who have already taken the course. Your notes, highlights, and questions are all collected in one place. The eTextbook is there to help you learn. The app and the content are providing Content as a Service. It’s the dream of Relationship Centered Learning!”

CaaS is an way of acknowledging that our knowledge is constantly changing. By providing students and teachers the ability to continually react to and complement the original text, you provide a dynamic level of engaging interaction to the book that helps it keep up with current thinking while also helping people learn in the manner unique to them.

Of course, simply providing students collaborative applications will not ensure that they get used. The apps need to be well-designed so that they complement the text, not overwhelm it. In addition, an efficient, easily searchable way of storing all of this collaborative data seems essential to its success. But none of these are insurmountable problems.  My suspicion is that a successful CaaS book would need two things:

1. An original text that is truly engaging. IMO, too many scholarly text are filled with needless jargon that make them all but inaccessible to the reader that isn't immersed in the field. Teach while telling stories, add suspense to the narrative, and don’t be afraid of sensational details. Reconnect with your inner storyteller and construct your text in a way that keeps the reader engaged.
2. Presenting collaborative data in an organized way that compliments but doesn't overwhelm the original text. I picture some kind of dashboard where the main portion of the screen is devoted to the book, while a side menu includes sub-windows that potentially includes a chat to other students, search engine (for hard words and learning more about details), and a place for notes (and accessing not only your note history but the notes of everyone else that read the book).

CaaS for textbooks seems like it's a great idea. I'd love to see how effectively it drives knowledge transfer in practice. Ideally, it would closely match William Germano's poetic vision for collaboration in scholarly works:

I’m advocating for a riskier, less tidy mode of scholarly production, but not for sloppiness. I’m convinced, though, that the scholarly book that keeps you awake at night thinking through ideas and possibilities unarticulated in the text itself is the book worth reading. It may be that the best form a book can take—even an academic book—is as a never-ending story, a kind of radically unfinished scholarly inquiry for which the reader’s own intelligence can alone provide the unwritten chapters.

Design is Selfless

"If you ever find yourself designing something a certain way because you think it would be better that way, then you're probably performing art and not design. Art is about self-expression. Design is selfless."

- Jeff Harris

Revenge of the Tab Dump

As always, interesting articles that I indended to write about, but never found the time.

1. I spend most of my professional life working in PowerPoint. Slide:ology helped me to learn how to design better slides. It could help you too.

2. Justin E.H. Smith argues the, to me, obvious point that marriage is work:

One might suppose rather that love and work—or at least a distinctly modern, capitalist conception of work—are two sides of the same coin: both emerge together at the same moment in history, and both carry with them the ungrounded belief that each of us has our destiny in our own hands, that our happiness is entirely a consequence of our life choices, and our misery a surefire sign that we are doing something wrong. In this connection the contemporary use of "passion" serves as a revealing misnomer. For how many can recall that, originally… to undergo a passion was to suffer an affliction over which one had no control? … in the modern world, in both work and love… we are expected to treat the things that happen to us, that cannot but happen to us, as a result of the way our society is structured, as if they were the result of our own sundry projects of self-creation.

He’s a bit too cynical and determinist for my tastes, but there’s some truth in there: many, many people do not hold their destiny in their hands, for one reason or another.

3. I’d Rather Be Writing ponders a good question for all writers.

I was talking with my wife’s uncle last week about writing strategies for fiction, and whether it’s better to outline everything ahead of time, or figure it out as you go. The former is apparently called a “plotter” method and the latter a “pantser” method (called pantser because you fly by the seat of your pants).
He said there’s no right way, but if you’re planning to figure it out as you go, it’s still a good idea to write your last chapter ahead of time. This way you know generally where you want to end up. If you don’t know how your novel is going to end, he said, you often wander around and eventually end your novel in fanciful/unbelievable way. Further, pantsers often lose motivation because they don’t know the point or meaning of their story.

He goes on to connect this to his life as a Technical Writer. I always enjoy his posts; he’s a thoughtful writer who has some great insights in the details of technical communication.

4. AGNI interviews Johnathan Lethem about sampling and creation. I love how Lethem thinks. Some samples:

• On using quotations in his work: “Girl in Landscape is relatively free of cultural reference. The voice is in the third person omniscient and stays relatively close to a thirteen year old girl who’s not a voracious reader or music listener, who lives in the future, and on this other planet. Yet I know there was at least one moment when some descriptive passage of the desert landscape under the sky slipped into a tiny bit of a Joni Mitchell lyric. It was irresistible, it was like a throb in the voice that just felt right, and there’s no reason in the world why I wanted to resist that. There might have been five words of quotation, but direct quotation, and I just let it be. But that’s notable because it’s so exceptional inside that project."
• On Dylan and his sources: “This whole question of quotation and theft in Dylan tends to be looked at in arguments in favor for or against his unique genius, as though he himself were introducing the very problem that undermines his own claim. In a way it’s giving him too much credit to call him an original thief. He’s a typical thief. So can we now please just leave that question behind? When an ideology exists, no one is free of it. He’s spent a lot of time defending himself or obfuscating about sources because he has absorbed the same frameworks that people are using to judge the work."

Ultimately, if art is working then it’s done something and you only need to become interested in sources if they interest you. Nothing more needs to be said. When art succeeds it’s its own law, it’s its own reason for being.” I know that the few “original” things that I write almost always spin off of something else that I’ve read, either consciously or subconsciously, and certain phrases that I use have been used in that way before. If this should be called “sampling” so be it – I believe that the modern world is better off for it.

5. The world's smallest known vertebrate. I miss having frogs in the house.

6. Gotta say, a movie called All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace sounds fascinating: Adam Curtis, the director, describes it as "...This is a story about the rise of the machines/and how they made us believe/we could create a stable world/that would last forever."

7. In her essay collection In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination, Margaret Atwood splits hairs and describes her Science Fiction - The Handsmaid's Tale, Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood - as "speculative fiction" rather than scifi.

8. One of my favorite albums is the Kinks' Village Green Preservation Society, and probably the most rocking tune off this understated album is the majestic "Big Sky." Adam Fieled overthinks the songs implications.

3 of the 26 Tricks to Enhance & Engage Learning

Last week, I attended Marc Ratcliffe’s "26 Proven Tricks to Enhance & Engage Learning" session at the ASTD International Conference and Expo. Each "trick" was organized around a letter of the alphabet, and most of them were designed to facilitate engagement and elicit feedback in ILT. My favorites were:

-- Jargon Jumble. Fill out a unique index card for each of the course’s technical terms and acronyms, then fill out another card for its definition. The class then has to match the term with the definition, giving them the chance to discover the definition on their own. You could also give a single index cards to each student and have them talk to the rest of the participants to find their match.
-- Review Roulette. Split the class up into 3-4 groups and give each group 2 index cards. Each group will take a different module/section of the class and come up with two review questions, putting their answers on the back. The instructor gathers up the cards, shuffles them, and asks two questions to each group – they may get their own review question, but then again, they may not!
This technique also enables you to subtly gather student feedback in two ways:

1. What the students found interesting and/or effective is identified by what topics the students choose as their review questions
2. Their answers will indicate if they effectively learned the topic. If the question and answer are particularly effective, you could even steal it for the next iteration of the class!

-- U-Turn cards. Each student gets a card, and can present it to the instructor at any point during the class. When shown, the instructor needs to present the point he was just making from the opposite perspective. Typically, students use this card when presented with negative statements, such as "you typically don’t attempt to sell product X to group Y." This technique helps facilitate creative problem solving and questioning assumptions as the class typically analyzes the statement from all angles to fully understand why the original point was being made.

Editing Full Motion Recordings

At my job, I recently had to edit some Full Motion Recordings (FMRs) in Captivate, which proved very problematic. In the hopes of saving those of you who might ever need to touch these touchy files, here's what I did.

Essentially, I continually split the FMR into two separate slides and then added any manipulations that I needed into the new slides. To do this:
NOTE: All actions take place in Captivate's Edit mode.

1. Locate the animation you want to edit in the Captivate library.
All FMRs are located in the Media folder of the library, but you can also jump to it by right-clicking the animation from the Timeline and selecting Find in Library from the pop-up menu.
2. Right-click the animation and select Edit with FMREditor.
3. In the FMREditor, click Toggle Mode to switch to Insert/Split mode.
4. Place the triangle indicator at the moment where the next dialog box/page opens.
5. Select Edit > Split SWF. This splits the FMR into two separate files.
6. You’re prompted to select the file you want to keep. Select the first one.
Note: The file names Captivate uses are not intuitive (e.g., Cop71C_1.swf and Cop71C_1.swf), so you may want to make a note of the file names for future reference.
Bonus Note: For me, renaming the .swf files in Captivate rendered them unusable for me, so I was forced to retain these confusing names. Due to this, I made sure I was always editing the correct file by right-clicking the animation from the Timeline and selecting Find in Library from the pop-up menu.
7. Back in Captivate, insert a new blank slide.
8. Insert the second animation created in step 5 from the library by clicking and dragging it from the Library into the main pane.
9. Duplicate the audio for the original slide (right-click the audio in the library and select Duplicate).
Note: I was able to rename audio tracks with no problems.
10. Add the duplicated audio from the Audio tab of the Slide Properties dialog box by clicking Library and navigating to the audio file.
11. Edit the audio files of both slides to match the new (split) animations.
12. Create drawing objects or add screenshot images to cover up the mouse in the animation.
13. Select Insert > Mouse to add a mouse object.
14. Manipulate the mouse object so that it navigates and clicks how you’d like it to.

Note that you can repeat these steps as many times as needed. In my case, I split the original FMR file into four separate files with no problem.
The end result was adequate, but not the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen. If possible, I recommend having the SME re-record the presentation in lieu of devote the time to edit the FMR.
For more information, you can find a series of excellent Captivate training videos – including manipulating FMRs – here: