Here I am, once again, incredibly frustrated and very irritated I got disconnected from the Internet last week Friday, as I blew up my monthly data allowance on my mobile phone for the zillionth time over the course of last few weeks. I got a bit tired of asking friends to use their wifi again and again, so I could continue with my day to day work routines, never mind as well embarrassing myself showing up at a local coffee shop time and time again while the monthly bill keeps getting more and more expensive with all of the additional beverages. Oh well, one more week to go… Indeed, one more week to go before Movistar finally shares some mercy upon myself and decides to treat this customer with some decency by hooking up both my landline and ADSL connection after nearly 2.5 months of much anticipated wait. I just can’t count the days anymore…  Indeed, I just can’t count the days after having endured such level of sheer incompetence and utterly appalling customer service while earlier on today I had a chance to reflect and muse on a conversation I had with a very good friend of mine, back at the beginning of 2014, as I was just getting started with my new adventure as an independent advisor around Social Business and Digital Transformation where we talked, rather extensively, about what it is like being a freelancer in today’s more complex than ever working environment.  I trust his judgement quite a bit, since he has been a freelancer himself in the IT industry for over 35 years and still going strong, so when we, finally, had a chance to talk through Skype, I knew it was going to be a rather intense, massively entertaining, hugely enlightening and incredibly helpful learning experience. And, boy, it surely was! We talked about lots of things about what to expect and what not, about what may work and what may not. We talked extensively of what it is like living in this brave new world of uncertainty and make the most out of it, but if there was a single point of discussion I truly cherished (even to today) as one of my key learning highlights from 2014 was the subject of who my new boss would be from there onwards, now I was no longer a salaried employee at a large big corporation.  We had a good laugh when, as we got started with that conversation, I mentioned to him how in my last project with my former employer at one point I had up to 11 different management lines before I could reach out to the top, that is, the CEO of the company. And of those 11 different bosses I often found myself having to report to several chains of command to keep them in the loop of what I was doing for my day to day work. Never mind how things would have been much much different if they themselves would have been working out loud,  narrating their work (just as I was!), instead of being stuck in their own email Inboxes. Oh well, that’s a story for another blog post coming up on the incredibly inspiring and rather refreshing egalitarian power of social networking tools in helping knowledge workers ignore the hierarchy, flatten the organisation in order to get work done more effectively.  The thing is this good friend of mine mentioned how, despite the uncertainty that will be now part of my daily life, plenty of things will become a lot simpler in terms of figuring out who my new boss may well be from there onwards. The only one I would need to pay attention to. A surprising and rather refreshing change even, because, in his words, my new boss as a freelancer and independent advisor is no longer my organisation, whatever that may well be, as the traditional hierarchy disappears into thin air since that artificial construct is no longer needed, nor relevant. My new boss is not going to be my fellow peers / colleagues / social networks or what not, not even perhaps the so-called influencers in the market, vendors, analysts, business partners and whatever other groupings, but, eventually, and right to the heart of the matter, my boss would be the one and only to care for and delight to no end: my customer(s). Wise words, indeed. Who would have thought about that, right? I mean, if you go out there and ask a few people to tell you who their boss is I bet "My customer(s)" is probably going to be the very last answer you are most likely going to hear. And yet it’s the only one that we should be caring about. The only one that matters. The one we all keep coming back to work for every morning doing what we love doing: serving our clients with a delightful experience and, of course, in a timely manner.  Right at that moment, while we were still conversing and enjoying very much the ongoing dialogue, I realised that sentiment of my customer(s) as my new boss(es) will become my new mantra ever since I went independent and I have never gone back. As a result, and almost after a year going by, I have had the enormous privilege and true honour of having worked with some pretty amazing and rather smart clients who throughout our interactions in 2014 (and beginning of this year already!) have helped me grow not only in a professional level, but also on a personal level. Who knew?  Who knew that bosses / managers could have that effect on you? Who knew that perhaps in the traditional big corporate world we may have had the wrong end of the stick all along? I mean, how many of you folks out there would consider your immediate boss today your customer and not the individual you are directly, or indirectly, reporting to? I am certain not many. The thing is that you may be thinking that since you don’t have an external job to focus on, specially if you are not in sales or marketing, you really don’t have any customers to worry about, as you may be working in internal projects. But how about if we got it all wrong right from the beginning? You see? We are all providing a service, whether internal and / or external, and as service providers everyone that we are serving then becomes our customer and therefore our new boss. Imagine if we could all get to ignore everything else and just focus on the customer as your new manager.  Well, here I am thinking what that may have been like over the course of the last 2.5 months when I first requested a service from Movistar where I wanted to transfer my already existing landline and ADSL I got contracted with them and move it to my new home place, 10 minutes away from the old one. As a service provider you would expect they would go the extra mile for their new boss to provide him with a delightful experience, don’t you think? Yet, apparently, they have been looking elsewhere, inwards, stuck in their paperwork, without resources, providing everything but a delightful client experience. More of a nightmare, if I may add. And perhaps that’s been part my fault as well for not stressing out deep enough the impact I have been suffering from their disservice, as I have no longer been able to carry on with my day to day knowledge Web work activities, losing several opportunities already of incoming revenue in the last two months and still counting… Last week Friday I cancelled one of the many services I had contracted with Movistar for a good few years. Perhaps that’s how I should have made myself heard right from the start vs. patiently awaiting for them to look outside vs. inwards. It won’t be the last one. Currently, I am compiling the various different services I have got contracted with them and over the course of the next few days / weeks / months I will be terminating each and every one of them. I guess I will be firing them all away! I have been saying for a good while now how employee disengagement is a rather serious business problem to tackle in today’s corporate world. Mostly induced by disengaged managers, if you look deep enough into it beyond the initial marketing hype currently going on.  So when your loyal customer, i.e. your new boss, actively disengages away from you by cancelling service after service, due to your rather poor and devastating skills about proper customer service, I guess it’s time now for you to figure out what’s happening, look around, go outside, engage in a meaningful conversation where you can work harder to solve their business problem(s) and see how you may be able, perhaps, to re-engage them back. If ever. If you still care, that is.  The clock is ticking… It has been already for a good few weeks and this customer, yours truly, is just about to have enough of being your boss really, my dear Movistar. Thus, what do you think? Time for us to depart ways and move on? Well, it’s up to you… Like I said, the clock is ticking and I just might be waiting for your response to re-engage me back. You know what needs to be done and, this time around, in case you may not have noticed it, there is a deadline. Friday, January 16th, 2015.    Written by Luis Suarez Chief Emergineer and People Enabler. A well seasoned Social / Open Business evangelist and 2.0 practitioner with over 15 years of experience on knowledge management, collaboration, learning, online communities and social networking for business; and has been living, since February 2008, a (work) life without email challenging the status quo of how knowledge workers collaborate and share their knowledge by promoting openness, transparency, trust, sustainable growth, engagement, connectedness and overall smart work. He can also be contacted over in Twitter at @elsua or Google Plus.

And after 69 rather long, frustrating and somewhat infuriating days of a much anticipated wait … HABEMUS INTERNET! Yes!! You are reading it right. After nearly 2.5 months of waiting for Movistar to, finally, get their act together, I am now, at long last, properly online through my regular landline and its corresponding ADSL connection. I know this may sound a bit silly and everything, but, boy, I am just such a happy camper. Excited, even, to no end like a young kid in a candy store for the first time not knowing exactly where to start just yet, as I get to witness how 2015 can now begin for yours truly with today as my first official day back at work. Relief. Much relief. That was my initial feeling last Friday afternoon, when the local technician came along to patch things together one final time before I was back in business. And what a journey it has been all along! I am not too sure I will be very willing to go through it again at some point in time, specially, since it has been everything but pleasant. Everything but delightful. Nonetheless, if there is anything that this whole experience has taught me over the course of weeks is to embrace the opportunity of highlighting how key and fundamental for an overall excelling client experience would be the whole notion of ownership. Allow me to explain … Once upon a time, on November 7th 2014, to be more precise, I moved out to a new place, right in the city centre of Playa del Inglés, (Gran Canaria) 3rd largest city in the Canary Islands during high season, thinking that I’d be much better connected to the Internet in order to be able to carry on with my knowledge Web work. Wishful thinking, I suppose. I mean, how naïve can someone be to expect that if you go to a much larger city you are bound to assume to have better, faster, cheaper Internet connection. No, not going to happen. Not likely if the ISP is Movistar. During the course of the following 67 days (Yes! 67 days!) a lot of things happened in the mean time that, if anything, only helped increase my frustration and rage to levels I have never experienced over the course of the last 18 years I have been online and in multiple cities and countries, as I witness how every day that I was not online I kept losing an opportunity to generate some more revenue, resulting, in the long run, to having lost three (potential) clients along the way. If you have been reading this blog for a little while now you may have read already the couple of blog posts I have put together on the topic. This entry is the follow-up one to them all as on the 67th day something happened. I got to talk to a human. For the first time. And it was weird, because he wasn’t even a Movistar employee but a sub-contractor from Montelnor who was basically just as surprised as I was for being the first person I talked to face to face and who pretty much showed up where I live as his boss told him they were running out of time on the complaint I apparently raised (I don’t recall having made such claim in the first place, so probably someone did it for me, after nothing happening for 67 days in a row, who knows…) and therefore they needed to act. And pronto! I was in trouble. Big trouble as he kept explaining how the place where I now live was not wired at all and the telephone box was a complete mess. And it certainly was! I saw it and too bad I didn’t think of taking a picture to see the messy situation of how this particular telco looks into the whole concept around maintenance of infrastructure. Or the lack of, better said. What a real mess! According to this technician’s words I was in trouble, because the place where I now live was not wired and that was beyond his control. Nothing he could do or influence to make the necessary adjustments. The local technical service from the complex where I live needed to patch me up instead, apparently, according to his colourful commentary. Meet Frank. Although not his real name, he is the guy from the technical service. A quick short visit, an explanation of the problem I have, a fast and rather thorough look here and there at where the problem was and off he goes! Bang! On to solving the problem. Next morning, while I was working at a friend’s home stealing, once again, their wifi, so I could meet up a couple of clients I will be visiting this week in Madrid, he shows up with one other technician from the same subcontractor company and before I could blink on my way back home the whole house is fully wired and ready to go! Whoahhh! What a difference owning your customer’s problem makes! The next day, the subcontractor technician who was there the day before worked out the final piece of magic and after a couple of hours fiddling here and there the landline gets installed, and I FINALLY have got an Internet connection. And the nightmare is, at long last, over! 69 long days are now a thing of the past! Yay!! No, wait, DOUBLE yay!! Needless to say that Frank did a superb piece of job (and got a lovely tip as a result of that!) in showing and demonstrating first hand to both the Movistar and Montelnor (the subcontractor company) technicians and customer service / support teams one of the fundamental traits of delivering a delightful client experience, regardless of whom the client may well be: no matter what, as the service provider, you always own your customer’s problem. No exceptions. And that is essentially where both Movistar and Montelnor failed big time to deliver. They never even attempted a single time to own my problem (i.e. the transfer of a landline and ADSL from my old home to my new one, never mind the additional services contracted and already paid for, like Fusión, which I am still waiting for it to be completed, by the way!). Yes, I know, I am one of the 22 million customers Movistar has, but it is of no excuse really to make a single customer wait for nearly 2.5 months before having their needs or business problem(s) solved. And that’s what total ownership of your customer’s problems is all about: becoming responsible and accountable for your client’s needs and wants, something that Frank understood really well right from the beginning and who within the course of a single day got everything sorted out. Flawlessly and in a heartbeat and always keeping me in the loop of what was happening so I would know the due progress just as it happened. Why can’t companies that claim to be customer centric get this? Why can’t companies that keep claiming they work really hard on providing excelling client experiences, but fail to deliver, become more accountable and responsible for putting actions behind the (useless) marketing words they utter all over the place time and time again? Plenty of people out there keep saying how we are entering the age of the most personalised, individualised and customised client experiences than ever before, yet it’s got to be Frank, who has been working as technical service for over 35 years, the one who keeps demonstrating on a day to day basis what owning your customer’s problems is all about becoming more customer centric, more accountable and responsible for your work and eventually more human. Why can’t companies become more like Frank? Why can’t companies become more human by showing more empathy and engagement when dealing with their customer’s problems? Why can’t Movistar be one of them? Movistar, are you really listening? I hope you are, because otherwise I think you may have just lost another customer …     PS. Oh yes, the picture I have shared above, as part of this blog entry, is the actual speed test I did right after I got connected the Web through ADSL and, I know what you may be thinking… gosh, it’s awfully slow for today’s standards, I suppose! Well, yes, it certainly is! But I guess it’s better to have such speeds than having no Internet at all, like I have just gone through for nearly 2.5 months! But it gets better, because once again Movistar failed short on the expectations raised, because when I first moved to this new place I was advised I would be enjoying speeds of up to 10 Mbps download (Not lightning fast either, but a minor improvement!) and instead this is the current speed I’m getting and it won’t go any way further up at this point time at all. So I better get used to it, I was told. The alternative would be rather ugly. Fibre. What about fibre?, you may say, right? Well, according to this very same technician from Montelnor I can just simply forget about it, because by the time it arrives right where I live, right in the city centre, I will probably be bored by then… Talking here of waiting times for over a year or much longer, IF we are lucky! Arrrggghhh We will just have to wait and see…  I guess, in the mean time, I can get to enjoy the current speeds from my 3G / 4G mobile phone: I suppose this is the current rather appalling and extremely poor state of things of a telco / ISP infrastructure like Movistar’s, where the local 3G / 4G speeds of your mobile device are FOUR times faster than the regular fast ADSL line back at your home place. As Benjamin Zandler would probably say, "How fascinating!" Not!   Written by Luis Suarez Chief Emergineer and People Enabler. A well seasoned Social / Open Business evangelist and 2.0 practitioner with over 15 years of experience on knowledge management, collaboration, learning, online communities and social networking for business; and has been living, since February 2008, a (work) life without email challenging the status quo of how knowledge workers collaborate and share their knowledge by promoting openness, transparency, trust, sustainable growth, engagement, connectedness and overall smart work. He can also be contacted over in Twitter at @elsua or Google Plus.

We recently began a project called, "Mastery of Aging Well: A Program for Healthy Living".  The funding for this project came from the USDA and the principle investigator and content provider is a very well-respected associate professor tied to OSU Extension.  From a very pragmatic standpoint, the PI’s stated goal at the beginning of the project was to take her content and represent it in a more compelling, web-based format that would incorporate multimedia.  This was an exciting prospect for our group as we have graphic artists, photographers, videographers, journalists, editors and a few instructional designers.  We chose to develop two separate tracks for the content: One option was what was termed "Tier 1″ and would represent a pared down version of the content and very little user interaction. "Tier 2″ would reside within OSU’s E-campus site and would cost the user a fee for access to this more robust set of media assets, i.e. videos, interactive games and other user-centric tasks that focused on knowledge retention and assessment. So, after selecting Adobe Presenter as the most appropriate (and efficient) authoring tool to port the content into a web-based format, we began to think through some of the instructional design considerations for our baby boomer target audience: How many of our users would have access to the Internet and be relatively comfortable with web-based conventions that define navigation and content organization?  We had some poll data that we were able to look over and also extrapolated based on some of OSU’s past experience with online gardening classes. Overall, we felt that it would be reasonable to assume that the vast majority of our users were at least comfortable with the basics of browser navigation.  Beyond that, we assumed accessibility would be extremely essential in the design of the course. How should we handle the basic ergonomic/usability issues with this audience (design mapped to audience need): font size, icon choice, pacing, etc? In short, we were forced to ask a lower-level question: "How much should we accommodate versus migrate or progressively encourage towards adoption? This was an interesting question and as you can imagine, our scale leaned heavily towards accommodation.  While there is a relatively large corpus of literature around workplace accommodation and usability, availability of research on this topic as it relates to Baby Boomers and Instructional Design seems scant. There is quite a bit of anecdotal information on how baby boomers adapt to new electronic media-here are a few examples: Janet Clarey’s Blog (see the bottom for references and interesting discussion)Reeves, T.C. (2006). Do Generational Differences Matter in Instructional Design? Department of Educational Psychology and Instructional Technology (EPIT). Instructional Design - Considering the Learning Needs of Older Learners (Instructional Technology and Distance Learning Journal, 2004) Tom Johnson’s Blog .  While there is quite a bit of discussion and focus on "digital native" versus "digital immigrant", the primary focus of much of this work is how traditional learning institutions need to adopt to meet the needs and expectations of the digital native. In our case, our target audience would be primarily 55 and over and be coming directly to the course via a recommendation from their local extension office or a website like Oregon AARP. As we looked more closely at these questions, we asked ourselves, "Has anyone else focused their research work on this area? Are there any principles of Instructional Design that could help guide us with this specific target audience?" Pate, Du and Harvard in the article Instructional Design - Considering the Cognitive Learning Needs of Older Learners, state: "Research has provided evidence that mental decline is not a consequence of aging.  There is hope that continued learning prevents or delays mental decline.  Results also show significant improvement in memory and confidence in one’s mental abilities through personal physical and mental fitness…The greater challenge is to position education as an essential practice for quality of life across the lifespan." So, in many ways, we need not assume that baby boomers are starting with less cognitive capability than younger end-users and in some ways, if as Clark et al suggest, existing long-term memory plays the more important role in true learning potential, then older learner might actually be starting with an advantage in terms of their ability to relate new content to existing mental cognitive schema or experiences.  However, this provides very little information regarding an optimal approach as it relates to usability and ergonomics.  On that level, we simply assumed that we should aim for the highest level of accessibility possible to ensure audio, visual impairments were taken into account and also a certain level of unfamiliarity with aspects of the electronic medium.  In other words, we used 24 point Arial font, organized graphical assets in predictable and uniform ways, ensured these assets were separated with generous amounts of space, placed large font topic headers above large images, included the narration on the right rail area if a user wanted to read the narration, simplified the navigational scheme so a user could simply enter the course and then watch the presentation with very little navigational interaction, ensured the use of color enhanced readability and so on. What metaphors of communication are primary to this demographic and how could we leverage characteristics of this medium to help bridge the gap between web-based and print-based communication? In many ways, our metaphor for our "Tier 1″ phase of the content resembled the TV as opposed to a typical web-based interactive E-learning course.  "Tier 2″ would include more of this web-based interactive content and would assume more explicit instructions for completing the course would be provided to the end-user. We also received comments from several users early on that suggested they were expecting video or TV-like interaction on the screen and that there were times when they saw a still photo and didn’t immediately understand the person in the photo was not the person doing the audio narration.  Our overriding hope was that what we lost in interaction and user-mediated learning, we would make up for with accessibility and familiarity of the presentation format. We also had to balance our cost and time requirements against benefits and user needs and quickly landed on Adobe Presenter as a "rapid development" tool to help port PowerPoint content to a web-based environment and add audio narration, videos, SWF files and other objects with relative ease. What types of questions could we ask during our pilot testing to ensure our anticipated design choices were consistent with our end-user needs? We obviously asked about all of the usability issues mentioned above. Additionally, we expected the unexpected and tried to collect open-ended information about the user’s motivation and feelings about the content and medium. Feel free to email us if you’d like to see the actual pilot test questionnaire. Is there a significant different between technology fluency for seniors who live in urban areas of Oregon compared to those who live in rural areas? This is something that we still need to better understand. How much should we slow down our course pacing or repeat content for this audience to help ensure content retention? Some designers use one image every seven to ten seconds. We generally tried to introduce a new photo and accompanying bullet points every 10 to 20 seconds. We therefore slowed down the pace considerably.  The audio narration was obviously not slowed down in any way. How would the inclusion of images, videos and other assets influence the learning experience of this audience relative to the core content? In other words, would they the images helpful, distracting? So far, the comments that we’ve received thus far are that the images add to the learning experience. Generally speaking, for modules that have 40 slides, we generally have 90-110 photos, or 2.5 photos per slide.  Slide audio length varies from about 40 seconds to 90 seconds. Should we "auto-navigate" the course for this population in our Tier 1 approach or, force the user to click the advance button from slide to slide? Since our Tier 1 modules do not include any interactive elements, we decided to have the presentation play automatically.  A user can pause the presentation at any given point, but, we felt that it was advantageous to leverage the TV metaphor for the more basic treatment of the content and simply auto play the module. So far, our end-users seem to prefer this approach for Tier 1 content. How would learner affect or motivation influence our population’s perception of E-learning? Would they have more hesitancy or negative affect compared to a younger population? If so, how could we help address this via course design? This obviously plays into the different decisions we are making about the design of the course, the navigational scheme, usability factors and content organization.  We will be conducting our larger-scale pilot test soon and will have more concrete evidence to go on.

In this blog, we will do our best to share some of the interesting and compelling examples of how technology can be used for both information dissemination; and, more relevant to our domain, for instructional purposes.  As mentioned, we are an academic department that has a rich and successful history in the world of print publications and several members of our blogging group (Jeff, Bob and Mark) are tenure-track faculty who see blogging as another channel of scholastic activity.  Our larger group of colleagues routinely produces news articles, journals, magazines and Extension or Ag-related websites.  We have more recently begun to focus on web-based multimedia and E-learning as methods to communicate with our target audience and with every new project, we find that new forms of media expand the range of our group’s ability to innovate and work together in ways that we have never done before. We believe that the confluence between our audience’s needs and our group’s skill sets is a fertile environment to explore issues of how technology overlaps with user engagement, access, and accomodation; so, we hope that you will enjoy this blog.  Please don’t forget to subscribe if you would like content updates.

In future postings on this blog, I will talk about new frontiers in science education publishing. But today I’d like to take you back to an earlier era to celebrate a previous revolution in thinking made possible by science publishing. This year marks the 200-year anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, the famous English naturalist. Charles Darwin (photo in public domain). But it is not On the Origin of Species, Darwin’s breakthrough work on natural selection, to which I refer. Instead, I draw your attention to a lesser known work, The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms. In this, his final book, Darwin presented his observations on the role of earthworms in forming fertile topsoil. The book on such a small subject met with a large reception. Thousands of copies were sold. The publication gave rise to a new understanding of the biological complexity of soil. The previously seemingly inconsequential earthworm would forever after be known as the little hero whose feeding, burrowing, and defecation serve to regenerate, aerate, and naturally plough the precious natural resource of soil. The improved understanding of worms and soil health resulting from Darwin’s writing remains relevant to gardeners and agricultural producers today. In today’s world, publications are just one of many mechanisms available to communicate scientific knowledge to audiences. Videos, for example, are quickly becoming a new standard in science communication (see http://www.scivee.tv/). New audiovisual, modular, and interactive communication technologies can help us engage audiences with 21st century sensibilities and expectations. But I don’t think anything can compare to the power of a well-written publication. Using the old art of writing, authors can still present their thoughts, just as Darwin and countless others have before, and readers can enrich their own thinking and learn something in the process.

In future postings on this blog, I will talk about new frontiers in science education publishing. But today I’d like to take you back to an earlier era to celebrate a previous revolution in thinking made possible by science publishing. This year marks the 200-year anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, the famous English naturalist. Charles Darwin (photo in public domain). I’m not talking about On the Origin of Species, Darwin’s breakthrough work on natural selection. Instead, I draw your attention to a lesser known work, The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms. In this, his final book, Darwin presented his observations on the role earthworms play in forming fertile topsoil. The book on such a small subject met with a large reception in 1881. Thousands of copies were sold. The publication gave rise to a new understanding of the biological complexity of soil. The previously seemingly inconsequential earthworm would forever after be known as the little hero whose feeding, burrowing, and defecation serve to regenerate, aerate, and naturally plough the precious natural resource of soil. The improved understanding of worms and soil health resulting from Darwin’s writing remains relevant to gardeners and agricultural producers today. In today’s world, publications are just one of many mechanisms available to communicate scientific knowledge to audiences. Videos, for example, are quickly becoming a new standard in science communication (see http://www.scivee.tv/). New audiovisual, modular, and interactive communication technologies can help us engage audiences with 21st century sensibilities and expectations. Charles Darwin (photo in public domain). But I don’t think anything can compare to the power of a well-written publication. Using the old art of writing, authors can still present their thoughts, just as Darwin and countless others have before, and readers can enrich their own thinking and learn something in the process.

Don’t look now, but perhaps the next industry to be undone by robots is education. OK, maybe not.  After watching a video clip of the HRP-4C’s Frankenstein-like ambulation, you can more easily conjure up images of terrorized children running out of their classroom when the new substitute teacher shows up with lesson in head. OK, so visions of robot faculty may seem fanciful and far-fetched, but virtual "mediators" of E-learning or web-based environments have become more prominent as the technology behind avatars has become more powerful and affordable for the average user (US News story). So, why the initial hesitation and angst when you hear "avatar"?  Perhaps it’s Clippy, the talking paperclip. If you don’t remember Clippy, he was one of the earilest incarnations of "avatar" technology and lived on the top right corner of Microsoft Word.  While cheerful in appearance, he annoyed us half to death by riddling us with random Microsoft Word trivia. Thankfully, today’s avatars come in many shapes and sizes and to put it simply, many of them look quite good—case in point—CodeBaby’s avatar software. CodeBaby may be a but pricy if you’re scouring for freeware, but it’s still at the top of my list.  CodeBaby has some excellent examples of how you might use avatars in an E-learning course or online environment. More than anything else, CodeBaby’s authoring tool and avatar end product drive home the point that avatar technology has come a long way since Clippy, and is getting very close to being a powerful tool for E-learning designers. Another tool to build online avatars is Second Life. David Miller’s Subquark blog provides some interesting examples of how he and others are using Second Life in E-learning contexts and creating avatars to augment learning environments. You might also look over Learning Light , which has a more comprehensive list of avatar vendors. So what about E-learning or instructional value? One of the more recent papers on the use of avatars in E-learning comes out of Stanford. In this article, Byron Reeves suggests that avatars can help serve as important contributors to "socially intelligent interfaces". The avatar can help with navigation, build trust with the user, explain concepts and instantiate a company’s brand via a face and voice. Within our department here at Oregon State University, we have recently begun to ask ourselves if we can leverage avatars in courses or in web environments where we feel we would like to build a more personal and branded experience. Take a peek at this example, which uses Adobe Captivate and CodeBaby’s authoring tool. What do you think? Do you find any of the examples listed here compelling? In what type of environments could you imagine using avatars?

Flip Videos. You either love ’em or hate ’em. These remarkably compact and easy-to-use Flip Video cameras are a natural result of what has been called the "democratization" of video. Many professional video producers are skeptical of these little cameras and the power of instantly distributing video around the world using the camera’s built-in USB connection. They quickly point out the limitations of the technology and the mistakes often made by amateurs who post their productions for the world to see. As a professional video producer, I can sympathize with them: I am very conscious of the elements of quality video production—professional lighting, sound, composition, and editing. But getting professional can mean getting out your wallet. Professional video production is not cheap—the old adage that professional video costs a thousand dollars per finished minute is likely a low figure nowadays. What I care about most is getting out the story using video. It’s a powerful medium that now comes in a lot of shapes and sizes. Yes, some of them are going to be expensive, and need to be. But what fascinates me about the Flip Video is the power of storytelling it puts into our clients’ hands. Our client is typically an Extension educator who doesn’t have a big budget. They may have only limited experience with video. But what they do have are compelling stories to tell: how-tos on thousands of topics from growing tomatoes well to aging well. One only needs to look briefly at YouTube to see millions of viewers watching "unprofessional" videos. Last spring I was asked to participate in a local video festival, where I screened a program I produced for the Natural Resources Conservation Service that had a price tag of $40,000. The NRCS distributed over one thousand DVDs, so it’s safe to say that perhaps 5,000 people saw the video. The next presenter at the festival showed a 10-minute production on climate change that he produced for less than a hundred dollars and put on YouTube. At the time of the festival, over 550,000 viewers had seen it. Do the math. As communications consultants, what we can do is help our clients to feel comfortable expressing themselves and their work with video, and not hold them accountable to the professionals. The Flip Video does just that. With a push of a button, an Extension field agent can capture a complex process, a unique interview, or short demonstration, return to the office, download it to YouTube, and put the link on their web page. This will pull more eyeballs to the web page, where more information will be read and more learning will occur. In our shop, we began loaning Flip Video cameras to our clients to encourage this. Video—once a complex, expensive process with high distribution costs—has become as ubiquitous as the cell phone, and a highly accessible and powerful teaching tool that educators anywhere with an Internet connection can’t afford to ignore. By the way, you can view the global warming YouTube video here. -Jeff

When I worked as director of publications at the Soil and Water Conservation Society, I set up the SWCS network. Within minutes of invitations being sent out, people started joining, posting information, and forming groups on a variety of topics of interest to them—conservation photography, water quality monitoring, cover crops, etc. The networking technology was a necessary component, but one of the most interesting aspects of the network was the social experience. Members of the network began voluntarily taking on the responsibility of welcoming other new members. Old friends who hadn’t seen each other in years, separated by geography, "bumped into each other" in forums in which they shared an interest. The content generated in the network was user-centered. The old model of experts delivering information to audiences was, in this context, replaced by a network of individuals sharing information according to the needs of the network members. So, I started thinking, social networks are social and technological, but are they educational? To answer that question, I had to start to understand the concept of social learning. Social learning Social learning "is based on the premise that our understanding of content is socially constructed through conversations about that content and through grounded interactions, especially with others, around problems or actions" (John Seely Brown and Richard P. Adler in EDUCAUSE Review). In short, you are more likely to learn if you have an opportunity to ask questions, discuss with others, and apply the information in a social context. Bingo. These are exactly the features that social networking technologies make available to online communities. But that obviously isn’t all you need. Social networking has been weaving its way into almost every Internet environment, but most instances are not what you would call educational. Another necessary component is content, and that requires knowledge and expertise. Social networks and the publishing industry One of our traditional vehicles for transporting content knowledge from experts to audiences has been publishing. If the objective is to communicate content to audiences in ways that the audiences actually learn, "social network publishing" may be a more effective mechanism than traditional publication publishing because it taps into the power of social learning. Periodical publishing seems a particularly likely candidate for migration to a social network because the audiences served are existing communities with shared sets of interests—whether they be regional, topical, or demographical. In fact many publishers in the past few years have been redefining themselves—and their audiences—using social media. Does this sound familiar: Yesterday you were a subscriber. Today you are a member of a network. Yesterday you were a reader of newspapers, magazines, or books. Today you are a participant in your communities of interest. Many publishers now see themselves in a new role vis-à-vis their audiences. They are now providers of "opportunities for edification and involvement rather than just a provider of serial subscriptions" (David Leslie in the Journal of Mammalogy). Here are some examples: Newspapers You don’t have to go far to find a newspaper that has implemented a social network to provide its readers/subscribers opportunities to comment on stories, post photos, or join forums on their favorite topics. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s network is called "My.STLtoday." Here in Oregon, the Willamette Valley newspapers recently launched a community network, "Midvalley Voice." The newspaper model of social networking often capitalizes on a local community’s interest in being involved in local news, photos, sports, etc. Magazines Some magazines with a loyal following around a specific interest area have successfully broadened their relationship with readers—from subscriber base to membership community. For example, Rolling Stone’s community network allows members to review albums and "participate in forums with Rolling Stone editors." Kiwibox is an online magazine and social network in one. The target audience, teens, can build their profiles, establish relationships, and consume and contribute to content. Scouter is a publication and online community for people involved in Scouting. The network allows members to read articles, join forums, and post comments. The viability of magazine-based social networks seems to rely on the community’s passion for the topic. Journals Science publishing has also entered the brave new world of social media. The Nature Publishing Group, for example, hosts a very active social network. Members can self-select regions and topics to participate in groups and forums of interest to them. Many professional and scientific society publishers are using social network technologies to enhance member benefits in ways that complement their publishing activities. The American Chemical Society network allows members and subscribers to network with colleagues, share recent work and ideas, and participate in discussion forums. Who is going to provide our social learning networks? Some of the potential benefits of "social network publishing" are on the publisher’s side—improved target marketing, increased brand exposure, strengthened customer loyalty, etc. Publishing companies may or may not be able to tap into these benefits enough to overcome the financial challenges that currently face the publishing industry. But it doesn’t need to be the traditional publishers who shoulder the transition to social network publishing. In the context of educational publishing, for example, universities or nonprofits could facilitate social networks that bring together content experts, communicators, and interested audiences. These ideal learning-focused social networks would be member-centered (member interests and needs determine what information is generated and what form it takes) and socially interactive (the content is socially processed as members add and share information). In other words, social learning, thanks to technology.

If visual media is king within the world of online instructional technology, then one of its most loyal subjects would be Pachyderm. Pachyderm was developed back in 2003 by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, New Media Consortium and the Institute for Museum and Library Services. Since then, Pachyderm has grown up into a full-fledged collection of different templates and features that allow you to incorporate video, text, audio and graphics into a multimedia presentation. Since Pachyderm’s formative years were spent in the world of art museums, its true strength is conveying visual meaning, oftentimes at the expense of how text is rendered. This is partly evidenced by the small font, text fields and reductionist-like menu structures available in the template-based navigational schemes. But, don’t hop off the elephant quite yet. Pachyderm Logo Did I mention that you don’t need to be a multimedia developer to create a relatively sophisticated Pachyderm multimedia presentation? And don’t fret quite yet about the aforementioned limitations; a new version of the software with significant enhancements is making its way around the corner soon. Truth be told, when I produced my first Pachyderm presentation I realized that a Flash-produced equivalent of my one-day-long Pachyderm project would most likely have taken much, much longer; and keep in mind that I develop multimedia for a living. Of course, if I had used an authoring tool like Flash, I would have had much more flexibility to introduce different types of objects in a more customized presentation. However, most of the assets, i.e. images, videos, that I placed in Pachyderm felt appropriate for the environment since the Pachyderm end product is tightly organized around a uniform look and feel and the constraints that exist in the tool seemed reasonable. In a world where most educators simply don’t have the money to hire a multimedia developer, Pachyderm fits a definite need for educational communicators and students. Here at Oregon State University, we initially rolled out Pachyderm in the Department of Agricultural Sciences. Our plan is to provide Pachyderm training to a group of early adopters who are equipped with Flip cams and very basic video editing skills. A key part of our training is to help encourage Pachyderm users to focus on specific topical themes; just as the California State University System has already done with great success. I would suggest looking through the Merlot Elixr Pachyderm examples. My favorite examples from this list are from a sign language class at CSU and a brilliant Social Documentation Overview project at Cal State Dominguez Hills.  Note that in both examples, the use of visual media is really the glue by which the narrative coheres around a solid core. Our department is already heavily involved in advancing a more "democratized" movement of amateur video producers (see Jeff’s Flip cam post), and with Pachyderm we can now provide a powerful tool for faculty across campus to blend their video with other graphical and textual content to create a cohesive digital narrative that can convey meaning in a compelling manner. Even though Pachyderm utilizes open-source code, which many people equate with "freeware", it’s more probable that your early efforts to introduce Pachyderm to your community will not be entirely without cost or significant effort, requiring some assistance or monthly hosting from the New Media Consortium. In short, it’s not a trivial task to set up the Pachyderm software on a development server; especially if you seek to scale this as your user base grows. As we move into the next phase of bringing Pachyderm to our campus, one of the most important issues will be to ensure that our early adopters understand that Pachyderm is best suited for digital narratives or short treatments of a narrow topic or theme. We hope to leverage existing examples from CSU and other universities to help demonstrate how Pachyderm has been used effectively in other academic environments. If you’re just getting started with Pachyderm, you may want to check out Jeff’s presentation about Pachyderm.