Getting Beyond Bullet Points (visuals only)

Once again, I consider myself extremely lucky and privileged to have been asked to speak at the Learning and Skills Group Annual Conference earlier this month at London Olympia.

I always try to facilitate a session that (I hope) has  immediate take-aways for anybody that has attended. I believe that there are enough people speaking at a strategic and theoretical level about L&D and it’s associated disciplines without me throwing my hand in too, so I always try to ensure that I do what I can to offer what I call a ‘Monday morning quick win‘ i.e. something that can be implemented immediately (or at worst very quickly back in the workplace) following the attendees return to the ‘real world‘!

This time around I wanted to offer people the next step in improving their presentations. I get the feeling that there are more and more people who understand the need to move away from bullet-point riddled slides but are not sure exactly ‘what’ should replace them.

It was this uncertainty that I hoped to address during my session by showing some examples. It is these examples that will form the basis of my next few blog posts:

Part 1 – Getting Beyond Bullet Points with visuals only

Part 2 – Getting Beyond Bullet Points with visual and audio

Part 3 – Bringing in the backchannel

Part 4 – The Learners Voice

Part 5 – Getting Beyond Bullet Points live recorded podcast

Part 6 – Tools and resources

But let’s get things started, by having a look at the Slideshare presentation below. At first glance it ticks all the boxes in terms of reducing the bullet points and using images to illustrate my story, but there’s something missing. It would be great if you could take a few minutes to progress through the slides and leave your thoughts in the comments box below……

View the original article here

Getting Beyond Bullet Points – Tools and Resources

For those of you who have read this series of posts relating to my LSG11UK session you’ll know that I reference several tools, resources and pieces of research throughout.

Rather than just sitting on these resources I thought I’d share them with you via this blog post.

You can find the bookmarked resources in my Diigo account or alternatively if you fancy viewing them whilst you are out-and-about, here’s a QR code that will get you to the same location.

If you find anything of interest/use it would great if you could let me know in the comments box below or indeed if you know of any resources that I could add, then again please leave a link in the comments box below.

Part 1 – Getting Beyond Bullet Points with visuals only

Part 2 – Getting Beyond Bullet Points with visual and audio

Part 3 – Bringing in the backchannel

Part 4 – The Learners Voice

Part 5 – Getting Beyond Bullet Points live recorded podcast

Part 6 – Tools and resources

View the original article here

Getting Beyond Bullet Points with visual and audio.

If you’ve not already read my previous blog post ‘Getting Beyond Bullet Points (visuals only)’ then I’d strongly suggest having a read of it before you read any more of this post.

Why?

Well for 2 reasons really:

1. The earlier post will provide you with the context behind this post.
2. The purpose of this specific post is to act as a comparison to the first post in this series, hence the benefit of viewing the first one!

As you will have seen in the previous post, using the approach of images and single words in a presentation is certainly visually engaging, however where it falls down (as highlighted during my live session by Laura Dickson) is when the presenter/facilitator is no longer present to provide the narrative – the engaging presentation is now nothing more than a collection of images and out of context words.

Here are the same slides that were contained in the earlier post, but this time with the narrative.

Don’t forget, this is Part 2 in a series of posts surrounding my LSG11UK session.

Part 1 – Getting Beyond Bullet Points with visuals only

Part 2 – Getting Beyond Bullet Points with visual and audio

Part 3 – Bringing in the backchannel

Part 4 – The Learners Voice

Part 5 – Getting Beyond Bullet Points live recorded podcast

Part 6 – Tools and resources

Did you get anything from the Slideshare?

Why not let us know in the comments section?

View the original article here

Getting Beyond Bullet Points – Tools and Resources

For those of you who have read this series of posts relating to my LSG11UK session you’ll know that I reference several tools, resources and pieces of research throughout.

Rather than just sitting on these resources I thought I’d share them with you via this blog post.

You can find the bookmarked resources in my Diigo account or alternatively if you fancy viewing them whilst you are out-and-about, here’s a QR code that will get you to the same location.

If you find anything of interest/use it would great if you could let me know in the comments box below or indeed if you know of any resources that I could add, then again please leave a link in the comments box below.

Part 1 – Getting Beyond Bullet Points with visuals only

Part 2 – Getting Beyond Bullet Points with visual and audio

Part 3 – Bringing in the backchannel

Part 4 – The Learners Voice

Part 5 – Getting Beyond Bullet Points live recorded podcast

Part 6 – Tools and resources

View the original article here

Podcast #16: Getting Beyond Bullet Points ‘live’

If you’ve not already read my previous blog posts ‘Getting Beyond Bullet Points (visuals only)’, ‘Getting Beyond Bullet Points (with audio), Bringing in the BackChannel and The Learners Voice then I’d strongly suggest having a read of them before you read any more of this post.

Why?

Well for 2 reasons really:

1. The earlier posts will provide you with the context behind this post.

2. You will notice in the the earlier posts I suggest that whilst a modern, bullet-point free, visually rich presentation is certainly very engaging and less cognitively challenging for any learners, this approach certainly falls down when you distribute the slides on their own after the event.

Essentially all the learner is left with is a collection of pretty slides, which without the context that your narrative provides may fall short of it’s intended purpose. I mentioned that an audio recording of your ‘live’ presentation can be coupled with your slides to provide that important narrative, possibly utilising Slideshare to synchronise the various elements.

The second of this series of posts coupled visuals with a ‘non-live’ audio recording. The benefit of this was that I could keep the duration fairly short, improve the quality of the recording and stick to the ‘script’ – Of course, that also meant that any questions that were asked during the live session are lost to the learner and that any interesting digressions are not included.

To illustrate this point the audio recording below was recorded live at my LSG session. The audio was taken from my lapel mic, into the audio mixing desk and then directly into my Zoom mp3 recorder.

(listening time 59 mins)

Subscribe to the podcast in iTunes

Upon reflection, I’m not sure that I would ever use this type of audio as a learning resource. I feel that the lulls throughout the recording (when the attendees were undertaking group work) would be off-putting to a listener and only serve to make the recording longer, although of course those silences could be edited out.

I also feel that the duration of a ‘live’ recording would be naturally longer than a ‘clinical’ scripted recording, again I feel that the shorter the resource, the more likelihood of a learner accessing it.

But what do you think, would you rather listen to the live, uncut, raw recording?

Would you prefer the scripted, shorter version?

Or would you actually prefer to have both resources made available so that you can make your own choice?

Don’t forget, this is Part 5 in a series of posts surrounding my LSG11UK session.

Part 1 – Getting Beyond Bullet Points with visuals only

Part 2 – Getting Beyond Bullet Points with visual and audio

Part 3 – Bringing in the backchannel

Part 4 – The Learners Voice

Part 5 – Getting Beyond Bullet Points live recorded podcast

Part 6 – Tools and resources

View the original article here

Learning Beyond the Course (eLN event)

Once again I have been lucky enough to attend a fantastic CPD event in the shape of todays eLN event – Learning Beyond the Course.

@RobHubbard was our compère for the day, decked out as usual in a gloriously flowery shirt

(where do you get them from Rob?)

In line with my previous Blog post ‘Small Chunks‘ I was committed to taking away 1 Action Planning point per session that I could actually do something with back in my organisation.

Here we go…

Ben Betts – And Now For Something Completely Different…

If you’ve ever wondered what you can do with a paper clip, a stick, some constraint and a carrot then you’ll be gutted that you missed Ben’s session. But ‘cos he’s a good bloke he’s blogged about it in some detail here.

Which leads me to my action planning point(s)

Try and sweet-talk Ben into sending me the game that he kicked his session off with (very clever and innovative)Read Daniel Pink’s Drive (Ben referenced this several times and as we have it sat in our library it makes sense to have a look)

Graeme Duncan – Breaking Down Barriers: The Ubiquitous Delivery of Thin Client Immersive Simulations

I’ll be the first to admit that the title of this session was more than a little off-putting when I read about this event on the eLN website, but once I realised that we were going to be ‘virtually’ running around a Type 22 RN frigate, putting out fires and catching saboteurs I was hooked! It was certainly enlightening  to hear that Caspian Learning have been creating some realistic virtual environments for some VERY security-conscious clients…. interesting…

Log into Thinking Worlds and request a demoInvite Graeme into my organisation to demo Thinking Worlds.

Ed Stonestreet – Not eLearning

Ed reminded us that the elearning industry is worth $10bn and is almost without exception dull, dry and academic. As I work within a highly-regulated Industry I could certainly relate to Ed’s point that it is focussed on those who have a mandate to learn, those who need to tick a box. Apparently only 20% of any audience is motivated and inspired to act, the other 80% may have a latent interest but they need to be engaged, entertained and wowed in order to get them to participate. How can this be done….? Well Ed went on to explain in not so many words the Affective Context model, which I aren’t going to attempt to explain here, instead I’ll direct you towards Nick Shackleton-Jones blog.

Ed made such a good job of raising the issue of ‘engagement’ and ‘interest raising’ that I am going to direct our internal Learning Facilitators towards the Affective Context model video.Review the YooDoo tool that Ed is involved in.

Rob had promised us an excellent lunch and Holborn Bars certainly didn’t disappoint!!!

Following lunch we had 3 great Pecha Kucha presentations, I’ve come to realise that these appear to be a staple element of an eLN event and I look forward to seeing them; who knows I may even present one at the November event (if anybody from the eLN board is reading this, that wasn’t a formal commitment!)

Jane Hart – Transforming Workplace Learning with Social Media

Jane Hart – Transforming Workplace Learning with Social Media

It was great to see Jane Hart again after lunch as the last time we met was at a Twitter workshop that she ran back in the Spring at the Informatology conference. Jane (as always) did a great job of proving the power of Twitter as a crowd-sourcing tool by calling upon her Twitter followers to respond to various questions that she was ‘auto-tweeting’ during her presentation. I was quite surprised to discover how few people in the immediate audience were Twitter users, although this is a pattern that I have noticed emerging at the IITT conference and the eLN showcase…. I wonder why….?

Patrick Fitzpatrick – Living in a World Without ‘Click Next to Continue’

Patrick addressed an issue that I have been working on for sometime in my organisation which is “how can my learners progress through a piece of elearning’ without a next button on the screen. He had some great examples of using visuals to act as menu screens, which mirrors an approach I have taken with a Display Screen Equipment awareness package.  This visual approach seemed to split the audience into 2 groups; those that ‘got it’ and those that thought that introducing a ‘fun’, visual component was a distraction and on some occasions set a false impression of how dull, boring and repetitive working life can be

Patrick made a great reference to the level of elearning interaction over the years:

Yesterdays elearning = dictationTodays elearning = investigationTomorrows elearning = exploration (hopefully!)

So what were my action planning points?

Continue the work I am doing on removing the next button from my elearning module and then…publicise this to the remaining elearning authors to show them that it ‘is’ possible.

Throughout the day the entire conference had taken the form of a crossword/wordsearch/game of battleships which I thought was really innovative and brought an interesting element to the event, my only concern with taking this approach was that I (and perhaps my learners) would be so distracted by the gaming element that the learning could suffer… not something I’m instantly dismissing though, and as with the rest of the day has provided food for thought….

View the original article here