This week I’ve been attending the Adobe MAX conference. This is the second one I’ve been to and I’ve really enjoyed myself. I’ve always lamented with my classmates, colleagues, and professors that when it comes to teaching and learning, the tools will change and evolve, but the theories behind learning with the assistance of technology will be relatively stable. Having said that, I really like how Adobe has handled and carried themselves as they’ve had the responsibility of ensuring the opportunity for usesrs of the web to have good experiences. Good technology companies find ways to define and proliferate their mission and even though Adobe has a notorious reputation for creating really bloated software, for the most part they’ve handled their recent success since the acquiring of Macromedia who in my opinion had the previous responsibility for success in evolving user experience on the web.Someday, it may be someone else. But in the meantime, Adobe really has a handle on getting creative people to help engage people into using the Internet web browser as a medium for communicating lots of things. My subject of course is helping people who use the web how to learn most effectively.

Recently they’ve introduced a project workflow as a result of a subsequent product initiative previously code-named Thermo into what is now known as Flash Catalyst. What this does is incorporate designers at more levels to have a hand in how users of the web interact with screen design. I’ll elucidate:

Print design for the most part has a number of tools used to get educational materials in the hands of potential educators and learners. Adobe’s Illustrator and InDesign products in no doubt are the birthing area of lots of textbooks and promotional materials that typically are for PRINT.

Print design has several caveats that don’t necessarily translate into screen design. A lot of it has to do with layout and selection of fonts.

Adobe’s Flash Catalyst product allows for someone to take a design from someone skiled in print work and then hand it off to a web developer for production and deployment on the web using Flash as the medium. I’m looking forward to the types of designs that will result from this. Having said that, I wish to bring to mind that just taking an existing print design and pushing it onto the web has its issues, but with innovation comes revolutionary re-education initiatives. Print designers now can be trained in methods proven to work for SCREENS that typically you wouldn’t have had before.

It will be interesting to see how this affects the work/projects I do for my institution and for other potential clients.

With that said, I’m gearing up for a new project that will involve my commitment to the Adobe Education Champions group (E-Champions) to utilize their ‘gift’ of a Connect Pro account so I can begin sharing with the ed tech developer community some of the techy things that apply to what they might be learning theory-wise.

I’m calling this my edutechie corner and someday soon I will have a series of screencasts that showcase some of the Adobe Creative Tecnology software suites.

Details will be forthcoming…

In the meantime, here’s an idea using some of the methods that Adobe itself is pushing in the next generation of designer and developer workflows using one of my more favorite tools: Fireworks:

So if you feel the need to call this work your own, be forewarned that by doing so you have missed the entire point of what it truly means to learn, as with all forms of cheating, plagiarism, dishonesty, etc. Wow, that was really deep…I think I’ll talk more about that later.

Hope you enjoy the paper. Here’s the link: Reivew Paper

And for those who think this post is too serious, I do in fact have a sense of humor. Today it was put away for a short time

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=printArticleBasic&articleId=9044800

Many people in my field would argue that virtual environments are the next cool technology and everyone is going to be using it for formal education. After spending the last 3 or so years really understanding how humans acquire knowledge, the notion of using a virtual environment for programmed instruction in my opinion leaves a lot of holes due to the flawed nature of the environment. In fact if true learning is a desirable outcome and performance is a metric used to assess learning, there are some points to address that specify some causes of performance problems:

• Lack of Skills or Knowledge
• Lack of Motivation
• Flawed Environment
• Improper Incentives

I’d like to address the issue of flawed environments. In a reality setting in a typical classroom, a flawed environment plays a huge factor. Examples of this is an improper student seating arrangement, or  physical conditions such as temperature control, outside noises, etc.

In a virtual interface, Human Computer Interaction design (HCI) must be addressed in order to get all plausible users involved. I think most of the appeal of Second Life is that it’s an environment designed by people in their 20s and 30s because that’s the type of users expected to be there (I think teenagers are also targeted). Apparently according to the article above there are some text size issues and interface issues that need to be worked out.

Lastly, because SecondLife is primarily a virtual social environment and not a lecturing environment, interacting with other people is a key issue. While I do admit that it has potential, I don’t think SecondLife has formal programmed instruction at its core. Like real life, there are distractions, people who don’t play nicely, people trying to make a buck or two, and even worse, developers who don’t know anything about instructional design trying to invoke a learning experience on trusting, believing participants.

Due to the nature of real world learning environments and the already surmountable problems and flaws with learning spaces that exist in reality, shouldn’t educators be concerned with fixing reality before thinking that virtual reality will solve ALL issues?

Sales Engineers have hounded us for money with it…

Conference presenters have put us to sleep with it…

Its inventors insist that it exist in our computing environments…all in hopes that we pay them money just for the privilege…

So what is this ghastly beast? And how can we stop it? Of course this is in jest. Any presentation software to be used to inform, educate, motivate an audience, etc. eventually MUST possess the capabilities that PowerPoint has. The principles of using a large screen to do this isn’t necessarily evil. So who is the true killer of the true intent and power of PowerPoint and its competitors? Most likely its users. Because it is relatively pervasive and so easy to get a presentation going educators and other informers often fall back on it to be the sole source of instruction. Keeping this in mind, my opinion that removing the human element from instruction is almost always detrimental to content that is by nature already dry. The solution? Develop talents of presentation style in the human first, and then focus on improving the human’s use of technology.

Given all this, what is the best software that will allow teachers to do this? Google now offers an online knockoff of PowerPoint in its Docs suite that has already revolutionized word processing and spreadsheet use. Here’s a recent comparison review from Slate.com. I’ll let you be the judge:

Here’s another alternative: Buzzword

Here’s a presentation about it and demo.

http://adobedev.adobe.acrobat.com/p91904463/

What I like about buzzword over Google Docs is the ability to insert images. It’s possible in Google Docs, but very difficult. This is so much easier.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070924-google-testing-my-world-for-launch-later-this-year.html

I would classify this as more of breaking news, but also an opportunity for educational technologists who lament about teaching in a virtual environment that is yet to become devoid of unruly behavior. I’m referring to secondlife and its variants who propose themselves to be the next best thing to the real thing. I’m one to accept most forms of technology in its usage for education, but in my opinion the best place to learn things of a lasting nature IS real life. I know…, big shocker. I get the feeling that many of my co-workers and colleagues would disagree.

Can you learn things in a virtual 3D world? Of course you can. If given a choice of how you want to learn your favorite subject, what environment would you choose? I’m going to refer to a favorite resource of mine called Edgar Dale’s cone of experience/learning. Much like the food pyramid explains which types of food are best for our bodies, this model (if you buy into it as much as I do) explains what is best for our learning experience.

Today’s food pyramid is somewhat different than ones of yesteryear. Whereas before, the food pyramid would list the most important, the American government has now given us a new pyramid that is more in-depth and helps us make better choices about the important foods we eat.

If we transition this metaphor to the types of learning activities we choose for ourselves and others, we ought to give serious thought to the types of activities that will help us (ourselves, and our students) remember, retain, and grow as a result.

I would put virtual worlds in a category almost by themselves. While they are useful for lots of learning activities, I strongly advocate that we look for the real deal whenever possible. Learning space impossibilities such as dangerous conditions and training scenarios aside, the things that we remember most have to do with attention given to it in the first place. Often we don’t have the proper attention because our motivation isn’t there to begin with. Often our motivation is driven by some rooted emotional bias. As my Ed Psych professor from last semester quoted: “Emotion drives attention, which drives learning.”

I’d like to rephrase it into something a little more mnemonic:

Emotion drives attention which drives retention

By the way, I aim to render a really nice version of Edgar Dale’s cone of learning model using Fireworks soon. Hopefully google images will be able to pick it up in their indexing, because I’m going to be releasing it under the creative commons license.

Here’s a picture of the class experience: (sorry it was taken with my camera phone and it’s not the best)

The actual demo of the unit was interesting to see. It has its use in many different arenas. Primarily in the research of HCI and software usage. However, we had a discussion about how it could be used in other educational venues as well. Some of those are:

• Seeing how individuals with reading disorders move their eyes as they scan and try to cognitively process text
• Accurately diagnosing individuals with ADHD
• Seeing how learners trained to read languages using a Romanized font (i.e. for English or Spanish) move to be able to cognitively process other written languages that use different symbols or are more symbolic in nature. (Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, or modern Asian languages such as Chinese or Japanese)

Eye tracking works by bouncing infared beams of light off a user’s eyes so that the reflections get fed into a sensor. The special software and hardware can then record and track where someone is looking on a software interface or has their eye focused on instructional media.

It was interesting to see that it didn’t quite work 100% successfully. One of our classmates is Japanese and for some reason her dark eyes couldn’t register on the system. However for everyone else it provided great insight on how software testing can be done using the system. It generated a heat map that showed where subjects focused their gazes on the most.

This sort of reminds me of the heat maps that we used at the CTL to help us in our website. We used a trial of Clickdensity, and it worked just great.