The Instructional Designers Community of India  is hosting yet another free  learning session on September 19, 2009. This time the session is about Learner Centric Methodology used in E-learning. The session coverage would be: 1. What is LCM? 2. How does LCM help design effective learning? 3. What are the key principles of LCM? 4. How does LCM benefit stakeholders? 5. A case study based on LCM LCM methodology will be explained using use cases/case studies. Audience Level: Advance About the Speaker: Geeta  Bose heads a learning innovations and design company, Kern Learning Solutions. She is an instructional designer passionate about promoting effective learning. Kern Learning Solutions turns 5 this year. In these 5 years Kern has worked in diverse domain from neuroscience to rural retail and has also won the Brandon Hall Award for best blended learning. PLEASE NOTE The session is happening in Adobe India, Salarpuria Infinity, 3rd Floor, #5, Bannerghatta Road, Bangalore. If you are planning to come to Adobe office, please be there by 11:00 am. You can also choose to join the meeting online using the url: http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/idci/ The session begins at 11:30 am IST. Please tweet the interesting points discussed during the session using #IDCI. Do not miss the opportunity to connect with other learning professionals! Do not miss the opportunity to collaborate, discuss and learn!

Marc Prensky publicou um novo livro - Brain Gain - onde abandona o conceito dos digital natives. Com este conceito, Prensky defendia que as gerações mais novas eram constituídas por nativos digitais enquanto que as gerações anteriores eram constituídas por imigrantes digitais.  Prensky defende agora uma evolução do conceito para uma nova metáfora: digital wisdom. Eis a sua justificação para o novo livro e para a nova metáfora: "My goal in writing Brain Gain was to highlight the positive effects technology is having on humans. We all live in an incredibly fast-evolving (and I believe improving) world at the technology level. But to those whose daily lives seem much the same the changes often annoy. Hence their negative reactions to technology. I believe it is important to keep searching for useful metaphors to help our understanding of our evolving man-machine world. Digital natives and digital immigrants was one such metaphor which helped many people understand what was happening over the last decade. But as technology continues to evolve, new metaphors are needed to understand what we are all going through. So I now offer the metaphor of digital wisdom."  Vale a pena ler a crítica ao livro feita por Pedro De Bruyckere aqui. Ver também em Please refrain from the use of digital native (again) e You want to use the concept of the digital native? Just don’t (research) outros comentários deste autor que é crítico da ideia de existência de nativos digitais e do que normalmente se associa como sendo o comportamento dessa geração. A ideia base de Prensky, a propósito da digital wisdom, é que a tecnologia pode levar-nos a um novo estádio de desenvolvimento humano alterando a forma como nos relacionamos com o mundo e com o conhecimento. Outra perspectiva sobre a forma como a sociedade atual lida com a tecnologia é visão que defende a existência de residentes e de visitantes digitais (ver este post). Ainda sobre os nativos digitais (ou Geração Net) ver também Geração Net, Web 2.0 e Ensino Superior. O que é inegável é que as tecnologias influenciam as gerações mais novas e essa influência tem aspectos positivos que devem ser usados por é responsável por a educar mas existe sempre o outro lado da questão: ver esta notícia do jornal Público de 20 de janeiro.

The Incredible Adventures of the Food Detective is a fun learning game. The game emphasizes on the importance of healthy eating habits for youngster. In this game, you play the role of a junior detective. Your objective is to investigate unhealthy habits in young boys and girls and suggest healthy food to each of them. You need to simply click on the mouse button to play this game. There is nothing challenging about the game. This is a guided game, where you are told at every instant what you need to do. Yet you never get bored because you know the objective of the game is to convey an important message and not to challenge you. When you start with the game, you get to choose the girl or boy whose case you would like to investigate. For example I chose to investigate the case of a girl called Althea, who skips breakfast. All that I had to do is click on the clock to  indicate to Althea that it is breakfast time and click on a healthy food like cereals or banana for her to eat. When I succeed in making Althea eat a healthy breakfast, the case gets closed. You get similar other cases to solve in this game. Each case is unique. The problem is specified at the outset and you need to find a solution which is not difficult at all. You also get mini games to play at the close of each case. These games are fun to play and do not necessarily facilitate any kind of real learning. The message "Eat Healthy" is quite predominant in the game. What I liked about the game I liked the use of the anchor or agent (amazing food detective) in the game. She engages and involves you in the activities. You cannot ignore her or get bored with her I liked the graphics, choice of colour, the voice over and the sound quality I appreciate the way fun activities have been designed to convey an important message I like the use of labels that give you some quick fact or the nutrition value when you hover over each food item The  Surprise Element in the Game It was a surprise for me, when I got the following message after I kept the game window open, without interacting with it for a long time. I could not play the game for 60 minutes after that. This is really funny,  though not so user friendly. In short, the game is well designed and worth a play Play the game now and leave your thoughts in the comments section.

IEEE Games Innovation Conference (IGIC) 2013, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, September 23-25, 201.  Conference Theme: New Horizons & New Audience (Single & Social, Console & Mobile). Scope: Social: Multi-player Games Single Players Mobile & Console Cloud & Networks Beyond Entertainment: Games in Education, Health, & at Work Design, Development &Production Interfaces User Experience Call for papers: not available yet.

My post on how to increase call out lengths in Camtasia helped Tina Williams solve her problem. This feedback on my post prompted me to write this post with yet another useful tip When I was working on my tutorial videos using Camtasia, I noticed that after I produced the video in a shareable format such as avi, the video did not have a smooth transition from one slide to another. There was a slight jerk or a random zoom effect. When I previewed the project before producing it in avi format, the transition was smooth. The problem occurred only after I produced the video in avi format. I struggled to fix this problem on my own. I could not solve this problem. Then, when I asked my colleauge, he said using transitions is the only way to achieve smooth visual affects in videos created using Camtasia. I used transitions and it did work very well. So here are some quick steps to include transitions in your camtasia project: 1. Open your project in Camtasia Studio. 2. In the left hand side, in the Task List, click on Transitions. 3.  You should see the Transitions pane with the list of effects that you can use for slide transition. 4. You should also see the storyboard with all the slides as follows: 5. Click on an effect in the Transitions pane, drag and drop it in between the slides, particularly into the slot that has a blue arrow. Side Left is a good effect to use for slide transition. I have dragged and dropped it between the slides as shown below: 6. When you right click on the slot that has the transition, you should see options to set the speed of transition. 1 Second Transition is a good option to choose. 7. Save the changes. Now when you produce your project in avi format or any other shareable format, the transition from one slide to another will be smooth. If you found this post useful, please leave your comment

Call for Papers for the peer-reviewed track of the third European Conference on Games for Health Europe, 28-29 October 2013 Amsterdam, The Netherlands.    Deadline: May 24th, 2013. Founded in 2004, the Games for Health Project supports community, knowledge and business development efforts to use cutting-edge games and game technologies to improve health and health care. Themes and topics:The conference encourages papers from multi disciplines, especially from game & play as well as from health practitioners and researchers. This call for papers is intended to solicit contributions from an international audience on recent developments and experiments that: Present innovative and state-of-the-art design and applications that use playful concepts in health care settings, Describe game-based and playful solutions to behavior change and pervasive healthcare problems, Share experiences, insights, best-practices and lessons-learned, Report the results of technical and social evaluations with regards to playful interaction and serious game design related to health care, Report scientific insights on development and efficacy of gameplay in professional an patient education, Report results of longitudinal studies, Discuss and highlight the key challenges and future developments within the domain.

A adesão recente ao GamFed - International Gamification Confederation resultou num pedido para colaborar na análise de um "case study" de uma aplicação de gamification - uma campanha de marketing gamificada da Sephora. A aplicação - Disco Flipper - não é mais do que um jogo de flippers (pinball) em versão digital. A ideia é que as clientes da marca ficarão mais envolvidas com esta se jogarem este jogo que também serve como veiculo de promoção de produtos. Esta experiência dificilmente pode ser considerada uma aplicação de gamification. Não se estão a usar elementos de jogos mas sim um jogo (que nem sequer é um jogo original). A jogadora em função dos pontos que obtém pode participar num concurso onde são atribuídos produtos da Sephora. Cada uma pode convidar outras jogadoras e partilhar as suas pontuações nas redes sociais (Twitter e Facebook). Esta componente social será talvez o aspecto mais interessante desta iniciativa que no global deixa muito a desejar no que diz respeito ao que se entende por gamification. O próprio jogo é pouco adequado a público feminino e o facto de apelar à competição entre as utilizadoras também parece ser pouco apropriado. Apelar à competição faz mais sentido com um público masculino. O resultado das várias contribuições recebidas sobre este caso de estudo será publicado pela GamFed num white paper a divulgar a 11 de fevereiro. Vamos aguardar. Os objectivos concretos da GamFed não são totalmente claros mas vamos também aguardar para ver. Será interessante se surgirem casos de estudo na área da educação.

FarmVille is a highly addictive multiplayer strategy game that you will find in Facebook. The objective of the game is to build and manage your own farming business. You can easily play this game using simple mouse clicks. The game proceeds in levels. Your success is measured as you move up the different levels, you make more money and expand your farming business. Here is a snapshot of my farm in FarmVille. I am a level 8 farmer Let me now give a brief overview of the activities you do in this game. Low Level Activities Creating your persona Before you get started with the game, you create your own persona using the persona builder. Your persona executes all the activities for you in your virtual farm. Ploughing the land Ploughing costs money. So you plough portions of your land depending on how much money you have. Buying After you plough, the next step is to buy some seeds to sow. In Farmville, you have a market, where you can buy all the stuff to run your farming business. Here again, you buy seeds depending on the amount of money you have. Sowing/Planting/Rearing After sowing, you need to keep checking for the harvest.When you buy seeds, check for harvest time. If you leave it overtime, the crops wither away. You can plant trees. You can buy animals and rear them. Harvesting and Selling Once the crops are ready for harvesting, you sell them and make money.You can also sell cow’s milk and goat’s milk. You can sell sheep’s wool. S0 everything in your farm can fetch you money. Adding Neighbors When you add neighbors, it is an advantage to your farming business. You can visit your neighbors farms. You can make money by helping neighbors clean their farm. You can send your neighbors gifts and they send you gift in return. High Level Activities Watching business profit/loss As you keep repeating the low level activities to run your farming business, it is very important you watch the cash inflow.  You need to keep track of how much money is coming in and how much you are spending. You must make sure nothing gets wasted. Strategising As you move up levels and you expand your farm, you need to strategise and plan how to make the best use of available resources to sustain and grow further. Investing money You invest money in seeds, plants, animals, vehicles, homes etc. Wherever you are investing, you need to keep the overall business in mind and see how this can fetch you more money. You need to spend money judiciously. Noteworthy Aspects of the Game Simple Usable Interface The game has such an usable interface that you do not need to read the help instructions to play the game.  Everything is neatly places and is easily accessible. The top bar has options to send gifts to neighbors, invite friends to FarmVille etc. The main bar clearly indicates progress, business profits. The tool bar has tools to execute activities in the farm. The market is the place where you buy things. There is a bar at the bottom of the screen where you can add neighbours. Easy Game Controls You just have to click on things using the mouse. You get all the options that you require. There is no chance that you will get confused on how to proceed in the game. Use of Indicators In the farm, when you mouse over you should see some figures in percentage indicating how much time is left for harvest. This way you are informed of the progress and you know when you can expect a harvest. Similarily if is a cow is ready to be milked, that cow gets highlighted. For example in the image below, there are 3 cows and one is highlighted. This is really a good idea to use such visual effects to indicate progress or completion of a process. Theory of constructivitism in learning applied This game does not tell you how you should make money out of your farming business. It gives you all the tools you need to do your business. You learn how to do business by experimenting, through trial and error. You learn to do business yourself. You do your business in your own style. You look at what your friends are doing and learn lessons. This is what constructivitism is all about. Example of Immersive Learning This game has this virtual farm setup where you try you hand in farming. The experience is interactive and engaging.You get an idea as to what it means to do business in the whole process of playing the game. A good exercise for  spurring creativity and individualism This game gives you lot of scope to use your creative skills. Your creativity come to play especially when you are arranging things in your farm. So each farm looks unique. You make decisions individually and you do things individually. There are no rules as to how you need to arrange your farm or what decision you need to take. The choice is all yours. This is where you learn a lot through experimenting. Key messages - growth and sustenance I am not sure if the game actually ends. You play FarmVille continously. So the objective is not to complete the game but to start a farming business, expand it and sustain it. You choose when you want to stop. If you are already playing FarmVille, please let me know your views about this game. If you have not played the game before, play it now

Vídeo da sessão realizada no MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) em 21 de setembro de 2012. O vídeo tem 2h40m40s mas vale a pena ver a apresentação (começa aos 5m e termina nos 20m45s) feita for Anant Agarwal, presidente da edX (uma plataforma que disponibiliza cursos on-line, baseada nos cursos oferecidos pelo MIT e outras universidades).  Nesta apresentação que se intitula "Gamifying Learning", destacam-se as ideias seguintes: "... in my view, the future of learning is games" "Great lectures were theater, but the future is in games" "Interactive exercises with instant feedback" "Instant feedback is a game changer" "Point systems, badges and gaming are critical in bringing this gaming thing into learning" O objectivo de gamificar o ensino tem como propósito envolver e motivar os alunos, tendo em conta as diferenças da atual geração de alunos relativamente às gerações anteriores.

In India, there are very few training institutes or universities that offer certification courses in Instructional Design. When you look  at the courses that these training institutes offer, all these courses follow the classical approach to teaching  Instructional Design. In a classical approach, you start with the basic concepts, theories and then move on to application. So the classical approach to teaching Instructional Design to a fresher would start with the question "What is Instructional Design?" , then move on to Instructional Design theories and models, Instructional Design tools and the Instructional Design activities would be taught after the learners have got a grip of the theories, concepts, tools and so on. At the end of the training program, the learner will have to do a storyboard for which he/she will be evaluated and given a certificate. So typically the course duration for such beginner level course would be three months. Now this is one approach to teaching Instructional Design. What about the Hello World approach to teaching Instructional Design? Have you heard of a Hello World program? If you have not, let me quickly tell you what a Hello World program is. When you want to learn Java programming or any programming language for that matter, you first write a simple program that will print Hello World. People who have no prior experience in programming are asked to write a Hello World program, so that they quickly understand the principles of a specific programming language. People write a short code to print Hello World and run it to see how it works. They also trying making small changes to the code and then they run the program to see how the changes get reflected. So when I say Hello World approach to teaching Instructional Designing, I mean a quick workshop or a tutorial , that will help freshers create a complete e-learning course on a very simple topic. When I say "complete" I do not mean just the storyboard, but the digitized e-learning course, may be using some rapid e-learning tool. When the fresher actually completes creating this simple e-learning course, he/she would have gathered a lot even without getting into the Instructional Design theories, concepts and models. After this, the fresher gets to learn more on Instructional Design and undersands better because he/she has already tried a hand in creating a complete e-learning course. Instead of overloading a fresher with lot of information at one go, mentoring and coaching the fresher to gain hands on experience might work well. All freshers who start with Instructional Designing typically work on linear e-learning courses and most often only do storyboarding.  So is it not important to teach the most important skills that will make a fresher productive at workplace? Instructional Design is like programming. You gain mastery and expertise over a period of time. You internalize  Instructional Design concepts over years. So what is the point overloading them with lot of information at one go? What do you think? Considering the young generation joining the workforce and that they are likely to be impatient to get hands on, will not a Hello World approach to teaching Instructional Design work?  Instead of a three month beginner level course, will not short end to end beginner level workshops with lot of mentoring and coaching work? If you want to hire a fresher, what would you look for? A certificate that the fresher can do Instructional Design or the fresher can exhibit hands on experience in Instructional Design or not? If you are from a different country, I would love to know how you teach Instructional Design to freshers? What is the approach you follow? Please leave your thoughts in the comments section.