Technology’s great, but…. (Part 1)

Years ago (I won’t say how many) before the days of PowerPoint and ipads and digital projectors, if one were tasked with making a presentation to a group of people, that automatically came with certain assumptions:

• It would have to be done onsite, in-person in other words…live.
• The presenter would be standing in front of a group of people.
• The presenter would address that audience by talking – in a loud and proud speaking voice coming from the diaphragm or into a microphone that would project their voice thru speakers to the large room.

Fast forward to the 21^st Century. Nowadays, speakers presenting to a group – unless it’s a recorded performance (e.g., YouTube) – are still going to be “in front” of a group of people. But, that can either be done from a remote location and synchronously broadcast “live” to audience location(s) OR…wait for it… The old-fashioned way – as in standing in front of a group of people in the same room, auditorium or whatever.

They still likely talk loud or have to use a microphone and if it’s a “live” event then the audience is either gathered in front of them or logged on by a given time expecting to listen to and watch the presentation.

Herein lies a key point to this blog entry; the show must go on as scheduled or the natives are gonna get restless.

Ever sat in an auditorium and waited as the time the presentation was supposed to be starting came…and went…and the speaker was still getting themselves ready several minutes past start time? Remember how uncomfortable, restless and perhaps even irked that made you feel? You took time out of your life to be there and made sure to be “in your place with your bright shiny face” at the appointed date and time…only to hurry up and have to wait.

Or perhaps you took time out of your life to be logged into your computer on that date and time with the necessary software to receive the live broadcast of the event up and going. And instead you hurried up only to have to wait because of technology difficulties at the presenter’s end. In addition to feeling restless, bored and even irked, remember how easy it was to get distracted and maybe even lured away from the presentation during this unexpected lull?

My point is this; the technology to give a PowerPoint presentation full of visual aids etc is great. The ability to “drive” that presentation and its projection from an iPad you hold while onstage is great. The ability to synchronously simulcast yourself and your presentation to a variety of learners and laptops at remote locations is great. But….

What if everybody’s all ready to listen to you and…your technology doesn’t work? Have you "been there" as a presenter? Did the seconds seem to turn into hours for you as you desperately tried to resurrect your technology and your material?

I was at a seminar once when a young graduate student thought herself "too leading edge" to put her presentation into simple old PowerPoint and before traveling to the conference had found some new whizbang presentation software that was just all full of "whistles and bells" to use instead. And she even spent a few minutes before she fired it up telling us all just how impressed we were gonna be with it...only to have it crash and refuse to power up.

As the seconds drug into seeming hours and she sweat an entire gallon of embarrassment out right in front of us, one of the conference attendees (a consultant for someone in industry) slammed her laptop shut, declared her client was NOT paying her $500 an hour to sit there and watch this girl flop because of uncooperative technology and stormed out.

My advice to you? At least for in-person presentations is always, always, always prepare a good, old-fashioned version of your presentation that doesn’t involve ANY technology. JUST IN CASE. A “manual backup” to your planned presentation, if you want to think of it in 21^st Century digital concepts.

In other words, be careful just how dependent your presentation is going to be on that technology and plan for it to fail you. In other words, have a backup plan that you can immediately speak with and present that doesn’t involve technology at all. That way, should your technology fail you at the wrong time you can still provide your audience with something and on schedule.

My advice? Heed the motto of the Boy Scouts of America and “Be prepared.”

Technology’s great, but…. (Part 2)

I think back to when I took Basic Public Speaking in college. I know it’s hard for Millennials and those even younger to imagine this, but that once was a world without mobile phones – at all – or almost any kind of personal computer (Commodore 64 and the Apple II being leading edge stuff at the time) and certainly no software like Microsoft PowerPoint or Word.

Back then it was just considered common presentation sense that a speaker’s visual aids were there to support his or her presentation and the points being made to the audience. Not, repeat NOT, the other way round.
Somewhere as we sped along the Information Superhighway on our way into the Digital World, this knowledge has been lost.

Case in point; have you ever witnessed a presentation where the speaker and his obligatory PowerPoint presentation just absolutely bombarded you with graphic after graphic after graphic?

Yeah…. Me too. Can you remember any of the main points of that presentation?

Yeah…. Me either. So, at the end of the day, if the audience can't remember the points of the presentation, what did that presenter and all their cutsie image bombardment gain - for you or for them?

Audiences rarely – if ever – had to endure death by imagery before we put the tools to rapidly and, I would purport, excessively build a profuse amount of images into our presentations – Hello; PowerPoint. That technology is great, but like any tool, there’s a right use of it and a wrong use.

The main points I’m trying to make are these:

• Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
• Use graphics only to support, not be your presentation.
• Use your graphics sparingly so they have the impact desired. Too many graphics [or other “whistles and bells,” for that matter] in a presentation and they lose their effect.
• Use only graphics that present the point better than you can explain them. A great example of this would be demonstrating using an item that to do so in person would be prohibitive or unsafe – e.g., using a fire extinguisher in a classroom makes a mess. But a video demonstrating the proper use of the extinguisher to put out a fire does what can’t be done as effectively in the classroom.

The overuse of graphics is not only the signature of someone who doesn’t know any better. Worse, it causes your audience to disengage with your presentation and miss its main points.

Or, to put it "visually:"

Beware the siren's seductive song. It will absolutely destroy your conversion/transition project.

Too often, people think courseware development is so quick, easy (and cheap) - particularly transitioning courseware from classroom to web deployment or creating another similar from an existing (e.g., between models of a product line).

But what a siren's song of disaster such a misconception becomes when actually try to transition the material. 

Case in point; recently I was tasked with transitioning training content between two different models of machinery from the same product family. I'll refer to them from here on as Model A and Model B.

I'd been provided the audio narration text from the existing elearning course for Model A and was trying to convert it to the features, functions and operation of Model B variant of the product line. Similar, yes; but with enough differences to require a thorough screening of the content and a lot of research. As the saying goes, "the devil is in the details."

So over the course of a day, I spent 3 hours researching various technical publications on both models trying to verify whether or not one component of Model A was installed in Model B and if so, exactly how it functioned in B compared to A. I finally had to consult an experienced technician who'd spent about three decades of his life maintaining and repairing the two models. Even so, it took him about 40 minutes chunking through a gozillion pages of the maintenance manuals, wiring diagrams and a whole host of other technical documents just trying to answer that one question one one part of the machine.

That's the kind of time- and budget-eating activity that folks who haven't ever done courseware development either don't know or - even worse - if they won't listen about from those who do know - can really bite 'em in da bahind on a courseware transition project.

Conversations with the Course Champion 1

A basic first step of any successful learning design/courseware development project – be it for the classroom or for Elearning – involves analysis. Usually it’s a needs analysis determining what the problem is and whether or not training may or may not be able to rectify it. (But, that’s the subject of another blog I wrote on that sometime back.)

More to the point answering a few simple questions before everyone gets started.

Right at the start ask the course champion (or perhaps the Subject Matter Expert) “What does a successful outcome from this learning project being proposed look like?” Another way to ask that is “What do you expect the takers of this course to be able to do after they’ve completed it?”

If about this time they give you a blank stare like you’d get if you’d just asked them to define exactly how high is “Up,” then you can guide the discussion further using questions like “Are we just making the learner familiar with the content? Or are we striving to make them proficiency with it?” (And yes, there IS a difference between those two concepts – a big difference.)

That difference usually gets brought to the forefront with your next question, “How will that be measured exactly?” Now you’re asking evaluation methods which can be anything - a knowledge test, a skills demonstration (practical exam some used to call it) and including the issuance of some kind of credentialing for successfully passing said measurement. It could even involve some minimal measurement at the end of the learning event(s) followed by a “transfer to the job setting” follow-on measurement at some given interval (e.g., 6 months) after having reported for duty after the training.

By the end of this portion of the course champion interview – and quite honestly, that’s what it really is -  your instructional design juices should be flowing pretty well and the courseware developer wheels in your head should beginning to spin with ideas about what direction to go with the training. But, I would encourage you to get the answer to some other questions before you begin laying out your design.

These questions involve your typical learner’s demographics – age, first language, skillsets and abilities and credentials they possess coming into the training. There’s nothing more embarrassing (and hugely wasteful) than to build an entire course outline, timeframe and budget based on certain assumed language proficiency, knowledge level etc only to find out it hugely wrong and your course with a huge gap in it that there’s not time and budget left to develop a fix for.

Moral to the story: Never assume anything at the outset of a learning project. Ask anything and everything about you can . And start with expectations and definitions.

Repurposing with eyes wide open

We’re all continually forced to keep “doing more with less.” Everyone is facing it - big and small business, even the public school systems – and in every aspect. It’s just the times we live and work in.

As a result, repurposing is an option that has more appeal than ever. Repurposing – also known as using something created for one use for another use that may or may not be similar to what it was designed for – can be a very useful and effective solution.

If we go into it with our eyes wide open.

By that I mean, we have to realize that – all things considered – whatever we’re trying to repurpose wasn’t designed or built for the task we’re trying to use it for. If it was, using it wouldn’t be repurposing it at all. It would be using it for what it was made for.

But it wasn’t.

So, in repurposing we have to keep in mind that what we’re repurposing won’t fit the use 100+% and won’t do anything and everything we might need. But as long as it’s close or does most of them, then that’s the compromise we make in repurposing.

But if we do repurposing right, we will have went into it with eyes wide open to these compromises and are willing to put up with them to realize the cost benefit the repurposing allows us to reap by preventing a more expensive custom-built or new perfect solution.

Just to be clear; let me say again, I think repurposing is fine. We just have to go into it knowing there will be some compromises and it most likely won’t be a 100% perfect solution. But using a repurposed something allows us to hit most of the objectives and saves time and/or money.

Common sense, you say? I agree. But you’d be surprised how many times the “it’s not a perfect solution” can get trampled over and forgotten in a project - especially when project team members or project managers change..

Case in point; I was a participant on a project (but not the project mgr) where a Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) software package was being purchased. At first, the software was selected because it filled almost the entire list of needs.

But...as time went by, more groups joined the project and next thing we knew our project had team members from different groups getting in arguments with one another, ladies in tears and all kinds of calamity and drama. Why all the fuss? Because the new stakeholder groups and personnel came into the project - late - with more desired features than the project originally started out with. You guessed it - scope creep! - and they'd allowed it to cloud the knowledge that the COTS software wasn't a custom built solution. Instead, it had been selected because it was being repurposed, if you will, to fit most - but not all - of our needs in one solution.

So, repurposing something is fine. But keep your eyes wide open and realize it wasn't custom built solution. In short, it ain't gonna be perfect. But, it works.

Of "knowns" and "unknowns...."

OVERLOAD!

When sitting in some kind of adult learning situation trying to learn something – a new piece of software, the latest regulatory changes to impact your field or even just learning what and how a coworker does in her job so you can cover her duties while she’s on vacation – have you ever felt like so much new information was coming your way that your head was about to explode from it all?

Learning theory types call this cognitive overload. This is the condition where your brain has way too much new stuff coming at it way too fast to process, archive and tag it all for later recall.

As educators/teachers/trainers/Workplace Learning Professionals/Whatever New Buzzword our profession is referred to by, we need to stay cognizant of this problem and do everything we can to prevent this condition in our learners. But, how to do that effectively is the challenge.

As a solution, I’d suggest taking advantage of the Law of Primacy. That’s the Learning Law that says that, being people, the things we all learned first are those that create the strongest impressions in our minds. In other words, what we learn first is what is learned best (lasts the longest in our memories).

Another variant of this idea is to say that what people already know has a more permanent position in their minds than the new information or skill that they’re learning does.

So, let’s take advantage of that by teaching “from knowns to unknowns.” That’s perhaps just a fancy way of saying let’s narrow down what we’re trying to teach them by focusing on what might be different about the new material from what they already know. 

Some examples to help illustrate the point:

• “Remember how Microsoft Word used to have file extensions of .doc? Well in those created using Microsoft Word 2007, they’re .docx files now – the ‘x’ at the end meaning…..”
• “You know how the umptywidget in the Acme models works, right? Well, that same component in the Binford models works exactly the opposite of that.”  
• “Most of the new employee health insurance package is the same as it used to be. But, here’s the 3 things that are different in the new plan….”

Taking learners from their knowns to the unknowns (new stuff) builds on what they already know (the Law of Primacy) and reduces the quantity of the new material coming at them (reducing cognitive overload).  This makes for a far more comfortable, effective and enjoyable learning and teaching experience.



Graphic source: My own creation in PowerPoint.

So...what's on the radio?

So, you’ve found out you have to give a presentation, write an article or teach a class in the near future. You’re starting to make your outline but you’re drawing a blank as to where to start.

Why should you invest the brief amount of time it will take you to read this entry? Actually, we’ll come back to this point later.

For now, to get you started on your outline, may I suggest you listen to the radio? Specifically, I suggest you to tune into WII-FM.

Before you reach for your iPod or call up iTunes on your iPad or actually head over to your home entertainment center, I should tell you I’m not referring to any kind of electronic device. Rather, I’m referring to you tuning into What’s In It For Me. Not you specifically but your audience.

In other words, your talk or article isn’t all about you. Just the opposite.

Put yourself in their position. What’s in it for them to listen to your talk or read your article? Why should they devote the time and energy to pay attention to what you have to say? Here’s a couple of examples:

·        

• You’ve been tasked to give a presentation at your next staff meeting intending to change the way your coworkers fill out an expense report. The WII-FM approach would be to tailor your presentation to emphasize how doing their reports differently will result in them getting their reimbursement money back faster.
• You are writing a blog entry hoping to pass on some of your wit and wisdom about how to give effective presentations or write interesting articles. Thinking from the perspective of your audience and answering for them – all the way through it - the question of “What’s In It For Me” to read that blog entry significantly increases not only the chance they’ll actually read it all the way through and to act on your suggestions.

Personally, I’ve experienced great success using the WII-FM approach. I know you will too. Best of luck on your upcoming presentation or the article you’re writing.