The TED Commandments

What makes TED Talks TED Talks perhaps.

E-learning Development as a Wicked Problem

In the Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology, Katrin Becker argues for Wicked ID: Conceptual Framework for Considering Instructional Design as a Wicked Problem. It seems fair to extend this argument to custom e-learning development as well.

There is no definitive formulation for a Wicked Problem. Just pick any random brief from a client and you will understand the wisdom of this, the first premise of Wicked Problems. Make people aware, impress upon people, ensure compliance, change behavior and other such expressions abound in world of requirement definition, but ask for a consistent definitive formulation and out you go as a development partner. And oh yes, when the program fails, be prepared to be told that you as an expert did not understand the problem and address it effectively.

Wicked Problems have no stopping rule. In other words, there is no point at which you can stop and say done. (Of course you can’t in any form of learning; it’s an on-going activity.) The only stopping rule is what the client defines for deadlines and budgets.

Solutions are not True/False but Good/Bad. More refined, solutions are the-ID-approach-of-this-and-the-UI-of-that-with-the-visual-treatment-of-the-third-at-the-lowest-price than any-one-option.

There is no ultimate test of a solution for a Wicked Problem. There is, but it is always changing. First, the learning manager tampers with the solution; then the sponsor redefines it; finally the learner rejects it. And the developer is wrong at all stages.

Each solution is a one-shot operation. Of course, every client needs a unique solution at every turn. Learners need to have as much variety in treatment as possible so they can learn additional skills with every learning program – like how to navigate through the program.

Wicked Problems do not have enumerable (exhaustively describable) solutions. They certainly cannot; how else can clients keep asking for options at all stages of development?

Each problem is unique. Truly so. Each client does believe that theirs is the most unusual challenge, their organization is unique, and learning is more important for them than for any other organization. Except that the budgets don’t live up to that.

Each problem is a symptom of another problem. That’s the reason we can always argue that measuring the effectiveness of our learning interventions is not possible because there are so many factors at work.

A number of stakeholders are interested in how it is solved. More like, a number of stakeholders volunteer to explain why any solution is ineffective.

The planner has no right to be wrong. Yeah right!

Twitter in Plain English

"Because life happens between blog posts and e-mails."




Courtesy: Commoncraft

The New Buzzword

David Pierce out at The 2.0 World asserts that it is the best online word processor he has ever seen so I signed up for Adobe Buzzword. I write this post using this new online word processor - making observations as I notice them.

The interface is very different from good old Microsoft Word or its online lookalike, Google Docs. I don't know whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, but it certainly will take some getting used to. A first impression is that it gives you the feeling that you are working on a software (Flash it is - it's from Adobe, after all), which one doesn't get with MS Word, probably on account of constant exposure. The alt-text when you place your mouse over the tool bar icons is very distracting as well - may be one can turn it off, may be one should be able to. And having page numbers on the scroll bar is another thing one needs to get used to.

The dictionary seems to be slightly dated - if it gives me Squiggles for Microsoft and Google, I can attribute a competitive killer instinct, but am veered to think that is not quite the reason.

With MS Word, a right-click on a Squiggle is the way to go. Not so with Buzzword. For each Squiggle, you need to hover over it and click to elicit a dropdown from which you can choose. There are no right-click activities on this software - a big re-learning that.

The spelling suggestions you get here are not as many (and therefore not as amusing) as in MS Word - I suppose this will build itself over time and use. The interesting part is the text it uses for the MS equivalents of Add to Dictionary and Ignore All - " is ok always" and " is "ok in this document". Quaint and unnecessarily verbose, methinks.

One of the cooler and useful little features of MS Word is the auto-capitalization it does for sentence starters and the perpendicular pronoun - not on Buzzword. One more handy feature in MS Word (and not in Buzzword) is that it converts hyphens into en-dashes automatically (except for some fonts). Another missing feature - word counts for selected blocks of text.

The font library is also very limited - just seven fonts. This also means restrictions in the basket of special characters. Font size options also get limited because you cannot type the font size directly - Flash, remember?

Inserting tables and images was a breeze and they wrapped around pretty well. If there is an easy way to add titles to images / tables and some way of auto-numbering them, that could be a great help. The ease with which you can add columns or rows to tables is particularly noteworthy. The checklist feature (in lists) is another nifty aspect - small but very useful.

Versioning seems to be perhaps the best feature of this - the Version History feature saves the document automatically at different intervals and you can access any version with just one click. May be this explains the absence of a track-change feature. The comment feature is perennially available on screen, and is quite neat as well. Being an online tool, collaboration is an automatic feature. I wish I could have published this directly on to my blog from here.

Overall, on first use, it does not appear to be too bad a tool, though the functionalities seem far more limited and usability is a bit of an issue. Considering that it is Flash and it is online, it takes some time to save as well. I am not moving away from MS Word in a hurry. If the current recession means slipping over to a free tool, I reckon I'll consider it, but can I ignore Google Docs? And oh yes, Buzzword does not work on Google Chrome. So that settles it then.

Sixth Sense

Wow!

Twittering for Sadness

In his relentless pursuit of sadness, Inkscrawl unearthed the Blogger’s Guide to Unhappiness. To have fun at my expense, he then suggested that I do a similar one for Twittering. Initially, I refused to fall for it. Then I reckoned, what the @, it’s the weekend after all. So here’s my list of nine (the Blogger’s Guide had eight, I had to be one up), 140 characters at a time.

1. Twitter at least once every three minutes, if possible every minute. If you can't clog the feeds of your followers, then why twitter at all?
2. Twitter about every single detail about everyone in your family. If everyone is idle, twitter that. The Twitterati waits with bated breath.
3. If you are really starved of twitterable material, twitter about how Twitter is such a useless application. Some self-flagellation is good.
4. If you find a link that might be very useful for your followers, don’t twitter it. Instead, do a short post on your blog, and twitter that.
5. Attack the tweets of the people you follow viscerally. One of your main tasks is to provide an anti-view for everything in the Tweetosphere.
6. If you can't attack a tweet because it is really good, tweet it yourself without acknowledging the original. Sincerest form of flattery, ya?
7. Take potshots at people who twitter relentlessly. Ask them why they don't have a life, or if you don't know them, why they don't have a job.
8. Take potshots at people who do not twitter relentlessly. Tick them off for showing off their busy work life or their happening social life.
9. Finally, don't forget to RT this post. If you can't spread a little unhappiness around the Tweetosphere, then why twitter at all, I ask you.

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Now to keep those posts going on a regular basis...