In the last few weeks at Saffron Interactive there has been a lot of talk about gamification. For those that attended the recent Learning Technologies Exhibition you may have have seen one of our seminars debating the pro’s and cons of looking to videogames to provide an example for increasing engagement in Learning and development. We also developed a new mobile assessment game based on the Bribery Act. This lead to a lot of interest and also a lot of questions on what makes something an example of gamification and what practical steps can we take to bring this increasingly popular theory into the training mix?

So, shameless self-endorsement over, let’s talk about gamification! In previous posts I have attempted to provide an overview of what the term means, but the problem is that gamification can actually be quite hard to define.  It doesn’t really have an OED-worthy succinct explanation, as it’s a constantly evolving collection of ideas and design theories rather than a concept with fixed parameters. But with gamification rapidly becoming a buzzword in e-learning, now seems a good time to go back to the basics and get to grips with how gamification applies to our industry. As the pro gamers preach to e-learning professionals to think more like game designers, exactly what inspiration should designers and developers be taking?

When you break it down, the structures of gamification rely on design techniques or “mechanics” taken from popular games, which have then been applied to other sectors such as social media, advertising and e-learning.  This doesn’t mean that we have to embrace a ‘shoot ‘em up’ style of systems training, but instead developers can use this collection of ideas to pick and choose the best mechanics to achieve their goals.

I am going to share with you some simple game mechanics and suggest how they might be applied to e-learning, or even to other business situations. Hopefully by the time you’ve finished reading you’ll be able to start implementing your own gamification experiments (it’s a lot easier than people think!)

Here are my 3 simple gaming mechanics:

The Appointment Dynamic

“Be at a certain place at a certain time and you will receive a certain result”

This may not sound very game-like at first, but in fact this simple concept is used almost constantly in games, and lots of other places too. When you think about it, our daily routines have conditioned us to expect certain things to happen at certain times, whether that’s our morning train pulling into the station or Eastenders coming on around teatime. Game developers have used this fundamental idea in hugely successful games such as Farmville where at regular intervals player need to complete activities in order to maintain the upkeep of their virtual farm (this game currently has over 70 million players). Another example some people may remember are the Tamagotchi toys a few years back which had people waking up at all hours of the day to pick up virtual dog…well you get the idea! It is this simple expectation of time managements that keeps people subconsciously coming back and developing regular behaviours.

Idea – When asking staff to do timesheets instead of allowing them to be filled in any time only open the programme in set windows during the day? Often the difficulty with enforcing an area like time sheet compliance is that people don’t condition it as part of their daily routine. Obviously there may be a period of pain with clashes when this gets introduced but over a few weeks habits and compliance will occur.

Achievement Badges

Games use a variety of achievement based rewards to keep users playing. This ranges from digital medals in ‘Call of Duty’ to exclusive character upgrades in ‘World of Warcraft’. This is one of the more widely recognised gamification mechanics and is used very effectively by services such as Foursquare to provide motivation for users to take desired actions. This technique works best when it’s overlaid onto a social platform, or an online game like Warcraft, as the main performance driver is not that the user can see their achievements, but that they know others will.

Idea: Why not reward positive behaviours on your company intranet by allowing employees to display achievement badges on their profiles?

In case you missed the seminar I also looked at how Accenture have been using this simple idea you can find the full story here.

Rate of variable reward

This is a concept that originated long before gamification was ever heard of. It’s also one of the most effective, as proved by its longevity. Research has shown that humans are susceptible to scenarios where there is a degree of the unknown: the best example of this is gambling and is the main reason why it can be so addictive. Some of the games that currently have the highest levels of user playtime and engagement are built around this idea . It is illustrated very well by titles such as Star Wars “ The Old Republic” which uses a sliding scale of probabilities to randomise rewards that players receive whilst playing the game and often carrying out highly repetitive tasks. So, for example, when you open a chest containing items there is a high likelihood you will receive an average one, but a slim chance you will receive something better than you expected and a minute chance that you get something amazing!

When combined with other mechanics such as progress bars this keeps players absolutely hooked, even when doing more mundane aspects of the game, because there is a chance that something extraordinary might happen. The other great thing about the game environment is that it provides developers with almost constant feedback on a mechanic like this as they can analyse the habits of players in this virtual setting, which they manage. This means they can estimate the best probabilities to keep people engaged to the highest level possible without devaluing their rewards.

Idea: If you are trying to increase participation in filling in timesheets when they are due; why not track completion rates within a certain time period (appointment dynamic) and offer a prize draw for those who have completed and passed within the window (variable reward). You could even go a step further and award each of the users who have made it into the draw a badge to display on their intranet profile…..All of sudden timesheets are the talk of the office!

So, gamification isn’t just about having fun, it’s a valuable way to engage users and achieve serious business or learning objectives. The mechanics that I have talked about here are just some of the more common techniques that those sneaky game designers use to keep people coming back time after time. There are many more elaborate ones but hopefully these are enough to get started!

Stay tuned for more ideas around gamification and have a look at some in action from our latest show case at Learning Technologies "The Bribery Act Challenge"

The Bribery Act Challenge Login

In my last blog I discussed the increasing conflict between the long established listen and learn styles of presenting and the ever increasing use of mobile devices by participants during talks. In the first part of my blog I looked at how listeners can ensure these devices don’t disrupt their learning experience. This week we come to the bit everybody has been waiting for. How can presenters ensure they get the most engagement out of those people tapping away on iPhones, iPads and a range of other devices?

Here are my top tips!

• Don’t be put off: Everyone has their own way of learning – don’t take people’s engagement with these devices as a sign of not listening to what you’re saying.
• Recognise and embrace the existence of these tools: Even if you would rather that people didn’t tweet during your talk, the chances are that they will! Rather than seeing this as an inconvenience, use it to get an idea of how your content was received and how you could improve in the future. Providing an official #hashtag will allow you to keep track of what was said. Have you ever wished that there were more questions at the end of your talk? Why not use your #hashtag to respond to comments and queries?

• Make your information available: Many people take lots of notes and don’t participate in discussions during talks because they are afraid of missing things. If you can direct people to an area where they can download hard copies of slides and case studies you remove this concern, leaving them free to participate.
• Structure your talks with these devices in mind: Nobody has really been trained yet in how to deal with the inclusion of these devices in their talks, so innovate! If you feel there is a 5 or 10 minute period where you need 100% attention, try saying something like “For the next 10 minutes we need devices down”. However, you should use this sparingly and explain why it’s necessary. 

• Be as engaging as possible: I admit, I’ve fiddled with my iPhone in some talks not to collate information, but simply because I found the speaker boring! The art of being a good presenter could fill a whole new article, but I will share one great technique I was taught at Reuters; ask one question to the audience for every 3 bullet points on your slide. This stops their attention slipping and can take the presentation in interesting new directions. If you keep your listeners on their toes they are less likely to become immersed in Twitter and more likely to be engaged in what you want to talk about.

Interestingly the future might have presenters using features like Siri (a new set of voice activated functions on iPhone 4s) to give "shout outs" from the speaker. A certain word or phrase could trigger a response from the device instructing it to interact with other devices in the room without the presenter having to do anything other than carry on talking.  I would add as I have been working rather than queuing to get the new iPhone (as well as being stuck on a 2 year contract) this is pure speculation but I think it illustrates the point that that there is a lot of scope to further innovate in this area. QR codes also have great potential to encourage participation in talks via mobile devices. For example the polltogo tool uses QR codes to let presenters ask a question and poll their audience for answers, ratings and comments further enhancing engagement and giving valuable feedback.

If you have any tips or examples on clever ways to incorporate mobile devices and resources like Twitter into presentations I would be interested in hearing about them – please use the comment feature below this blog to share your thoughts so that we can also get input from the community at large. In the meantime, I’m off to play angry birds and check out the app store …

This is a report back from my first day working at Saffron Interactive. Apologies for the short delay, but you’ll understand that I have been very busy for the last month! In an exciting start to my Saffron career I spent my first day attending the Learning and Skills Group (LSG) conference at Olympia – a great way to be introduced to the world of e-learning.

I do not come from an e-learning background but I have always had a keen interest in technology and games and one particular talk really captured my imagination. I’m sure most people are familiar in some form or another with the world of video games whether through PCs or a range of consoles covering all ages and tastes. Gaming however is now beginning to have an effect outside of our leisure time and is becoming prevalent in everyday life, for example the way we shop, network and … learn.

For those unfamiliar with Gamification – a new and growing concept in the world of e-learning – the idea is based on the use of gaming mechanics to increase user engagement whilst delivering key learning objectives. For those still somewhat mystified by the term I have included a definition below;

“Gamification works by making technology more engaging, and by encouraging desired behaviours, taking advantage of humans’ psychological predisposition to engage in gaming.”

Radoff, Jon (2011). Game On: Energize Your Business with Social Media Games. Wiley. pp. xxxii. ISBN 9780470936269.

At the LSG conference, this was explored in depth with a talk from Alicia Sanchez who has been appointed “Games Czar” at the US Defense Acquisition University (DAU).

Alicia’s talk presented some interesting examples, in this case based on military procurement, an area that apparently requires regular and incredibly stringent compliance training. By using the setting of a game, a far more positive response was generated from the workforce in digesting the necessary content for their roles. One such example was a simulation where the user would carry out compliance checks on weapons on the premise of preventing an alien invasion.

What’s more as gaming has begun to take on a social aspect, this can be incorporated into e-learning for even higher levels of engagement. For example, in the same way that Xbox players use “gamer scores” to celebrate achievements and relate to their peers, the DAU allows players to build online profiles giving added value and a social element to their learning achievements. This is also great from a learning provider’s perspective as it provides a method for demonstrating the impact that its courses have on user groups.

If you take this social aspect in combination with a Gamification style of e-learning further, it is also clear how learners working together could gain huge additional benefits in terms of organisation and teamwork given the right environment. In a previous organisation I worked at, the Sales Director actually mused:

“If teenagers can work together in World of Warcraft to be organised and achieve common objectives I do not see why our sales force cannot do the same!”

It will be interesting to see if many of the positive side effects of massively multiplayer gaming would become increasingly prevalent as an additional benefit for this type of delivery. Although I would add a caveat here that had the sales force assembled itself into a 30 man raid group and stormed customers offices (a la World of Warcraft) it may not have gone down well. I do hope however you can see the point I am making In terms of cooperation between departments and employees.

Of course there are limitations to the Gamification of learning. Budgets are always under increased scrutiny and is there as one of my colleagues put it an assumption that “if its fun it can’t be good for you”? Even taking these issues into account it will be interesting to see if this is a view that shifts if Gamification style courses begin to build up a backlog of case studies with quantifiable results. The other long term factor here could be as younger generations of the workforce come into management positions with a greater familiarity with the culture of gaming there will be an increasing appetite at senior levels to champion this as a style of learning.

As a final note I would like mention one of my favourite solutions of this type currently on the market: a revision of House of the Dead which is not only guaranteed to improve users’ typing skills but also looks like great fun!

I look forward to giving some further updates on Gamification from the Saffron perspective in the coming months.

On Wednesday 13th April, Spurs were knocked out of the Champions League by Real Madrid, bringing great sadness upon my heart. The manner of the defeat is not relevant to augmented reality technology in any sense, but I’d like to think that it provides anecdotal evidence that I’d been planning this blog well before this article appeared on the BBC website.

I’d gone to the game with a friend from university, who happens to work for the software development company Autonomy. A couple of days prior to the match, he’d linked me to a demo on a new product they were developing – Aurasma. I didn’t think much of the name either, but Aurasma seemed to be something completely different to anything I’d encountered before. See for yourself.

Augmented reality for mobile devices isn’t anything new. Google Goggles and other Android and iPhone apps can overlay geographical information on your smartphone display, but what really sets Aurasma apart is that it can overlay media and moving imagery within the display. No QR codes or redirection, just immediate delivery.

So does this mean we have a brave new world of content delivery ahead of us? I’d certainly like to think so. It’s easy to start imagining the possibilities of an augmented reality tool like Aurasma; for instance, a manufacturing firm may have installed a fancy new piece of machinery which will cut time and effort required to make the product, be it computer chips or tights (can you tell I’m running with this one on the fly?). Normally, they would have to show each employee one-on-one how to correctly use the machinery, but what if their employees could point their mobile device at it and see a demonstration onscreen? No-one would have to train new employees how to use the machine, and it would also provide a reference tool for old hats who want to refresh their memory.

Despite the apparent potential for immediate use, the cynic in me can’t help thinking that we won’t see this being widely used for another decade or so or perhaps, even, not at all. The success of augmented reality will be fundamentally linked to growth and investment in mobile learning. A lot of people in the industry are pointing to the leapfrogging in communications that parts of Africa are experiencing as proof that mobile learning is where we’re headed. I agree that mobile learning is really starting to gather momentum, but I think the greatest advances might not be on mobile devices as we know them.

At this point though I’m stuck. Although I am tempted to get all Arthur C. Clarke and start making wild predictions about what the future might look like, I’m going to try and illustrate my theory by citing precedent. Remember MiniDisc players? They were far more advanced and convenient than tapes, 33s and 45s. But they missed out on popular support because they were too expensive and, by the time the price had fallen, MP3 was starting to gather momentum.

Although current smartphones are relatively cheap, they’re prohibitively expensive enough for many organisations to be unable to issue a device to their frontline staff. Security is also an issue – where do you host the content, and how do you protect the device?

I’m hypothesising that mobile learning in its current form might end up being looked upon as the MiniDisc player of e-learning content delivery – good, effective and doing what it’s designed to do, but ultimately replaced by the capabilities of the next generation of cheaper, better performing devices. It’s easy to think that with the speed of progress – I can well see my iPhone 3GS being obsolete in less than three years, and I only bought it last year. With a greater number of the population smartphone equipped, mobile learning has a great opportunity to develop, and I can well see augmented reality playing a massive part on those platforms.

So we shot and we shared. At Learning Technologies 2011, we ran an experiment in social learning by inviting people to be filmed answering one of six questions about our industry, such as how were they using social media in learning and what did they think was the best use of mobile technology. We shared these short videos by uploading them, after some simple editing, to our YouTube channel.

The lure was the promise of a Flip Minio camera, the type we used in shooting, and the prize will go to the most valued contribution. So please visit our channel and pass on the links of your favourite videos to colleagues and friends. Vote with your mouse! I’ll wait here until you get back.

What was the outcome of our experiment? We were delighted to upload a valuable collection of ideas and suggestions that forms a resource for everyone. What we wanted to show was that producing such a resource can be achieved at very low cost. And from that point of view, this experiment was an unqualified success.

This in part gives us an answer to the question: how do we get started with social learning? Our answer: just get started! The technology we used is cheap to acquire and easy to use. As with the knowledge management projects of the past, we aspire to capture the know-how of individuals and teams that would not otherwise be shared throughout the organisation. We argue that there is a sense in which everyone is an expert in something useful: even a new starter has experience of the recruitment and on-boarding process and can share that information with others.

Unlike those old knowledge management projects, you’re not looking to fill shelves of ring binders before you can release something useful to your colleagues. It’s easy to start off with a small collection and let it grow over time. One caveat: be sure to make it searchable (or findable, as we like to say) and plan and implement your tagging carefully.

Video also interests us at Saffron because you can go a long way if you don’t allow yourself to be intimidated by questions of production values. How far can you take this? If you’re a fan of TED, you may have seen Salman Khan talking about the video library he created to educate his younger cousins that has grown into the Khan Academy, whose resources are now being used by schools in California. One teacher has remarked that they now set the video ‘lectures’ as homework and work through the exercises (which they used to set as homework) in class, turning the experience of education upside down.

For all that Khan’s presentation gets a ringing endorsement from Bill Gates at the end, I don’t want to get carried away by this. As another teacher has remarked, they never ‘lectured’ in the classroom to a passive audience, anyway, but instead conducted a conversational session with their students. But there’s surely a point to be made in Khan’s favour about the power of technology (and cheap and easy video technology in particular) to transform the way we think about and practise learning.

So, let me encourage you to shoot and share for yourselves. If you’re looking to get started with social learning, here’s how: aim to grow a library of videos of your colleagues, sharing know-how with their peers.

PS If you’re not a follower of TED, I’d really recommend checking it out: a steady and varied stream of interesting and entertaining presentations and performances, from Naomi Klein talking about our society’s addiction to risk to Jake Shimabukuro playing Bohemian Rhapsody on a Hawaiian ukulele.

With their apparent ubiquity amongst office staff, their ease of use, and their mobile connectivity, BlackBerry phones make an attractive platform for e-learning. Here’s our list of things to consider when designing training for this new and different learning environment.

1. Choose the right development model
BlackBerry offers different ways of developing programs for use on its phones. You can use their Web Development approach to create light weight web based tools that users access via their mobile internet. Alternatively you can use BlackBerry’s Java Development environment for fully functional applications that can be installed on the user’s phone.

2. Keep things simple
Remember users will be viewing a small screen and will have to scroll to see more than a dozen lines of text. Reading through lengthy text can be dull and disorientating. Keep text short and pertinent. Equally, keep interactions effective, but fuss free. This doesn’t mean things have to be boring; in fact brevity can lead to more engaging content.

3. Use what BlackBerry gives you
There are many controls that are native to a BlackBerry that you can use for free. Things like drop down menus, buttons, gauges and sliders are part of the development toolkit and it makes sense to use these rather than reinventing the wheel. This will make your application intuitive to use and ensure much of your testing is already done for you.

4. Utilise images smartly
Size and space may be limited, but by using images smartly you can still produce good looking programs. Use slim headers and footers to frame the page and lift content. Produce images with gradients and transparency which can seamlessly merge into static background colours. Design images that can be reused by resizing gracefully.

5. Test it everywhere
Testing on BlackBerrys has its own challenges, but can be managed successfully using the tools that are available. Even within the BlackBerry product range there are big differences in the nature of the phones. Luckily BlackBerry provides emulators for all its phones, so you can test your application on any device just by using your PC.

Download:

Top ten tips for designing training for BlackBerrys

We at Saffron don’t like to pigeon hole ourselves as simply training providers. Yes, we design and develop e-learning, but we do a whole lot more than that too. We’re all about performance improvement and people productivity, and there are more ways to achieve those things than training alone.

In this day and age, with advances in technology opening up all kinds of new possibilities every week, isn’t it time we all broadened our minds a little and started looking beyond training?

For instance, in the past it might have taken days or weeks to notify an entire sales team of updates to a product or service. Not only is that eating up time and money, it also means that for a certain length of time some people are selling the old version, blissfully unaware of the updates. Why not send update notifications direct to their mobile phone instead? That way, they know about the changes right away and can access the details again as and when they need to, at the touch of a button.

Likewise, if line managers are constantly flooded with emails or phone calls from new starters asking the same old question, why not find a way to let them ask and answer questions amongst themselves? Build a wiki, a forum, a portal or a fully fledged social network to facilitate this. With a bit of encouragement it will soon sustain itself, it can be used to start the settling in process before a new starter’s first day, it will complement any existing formal induction training and – crucially – it will save time and therefore money.

One thing that takes up a lot of time in every organisation is compliance training – if every employee needs to take several one hour courses every year or two, it soon adds up. But is it really necessary? How about offering staff the option to download a diagnostic assessment to a mobile device to determine whether or not they actually need to sit the full training course? If the assessment is designed properly, passing it provides confirmation of compliance in a fraction of the time it would normally take them to re-sit the same course they took the year before.

I could offer more examples, but the point is that there’s more than one way to skin a cat – if you need to improve productivity or performance and save time or money, a formal training course isn’t always the answer. These days, the possibilities are seemingly endless – with a little imagination applied to technological innovations, we can all achieve great things.

Last week I gave a seminar with my colleague Jennifer at Learning Technologies 2010 on the subject of social learning. We were pleasantly surprised to see a large audience spilling over into the aisles and (bar a few microphone issues) our presentation seemed to go down well. The theme of Saffron’s stand at the event was also social learning and, despite the lack of smoothies this year, attracted a lot of attention. All in all, over the two days I spent a lot of time thinking and talking about the topic.

So, social learning: is it just the latest buzzword or is it something that’s worth taking seriously?

A few months ago I was pretty firmly in the ‘all talk, no action’ camp. And I still think that a lot has been said and not nearly so much done. But when I found out that social learning was our theme for 2010 I thought I’d better give it a bit more of a chance! Jennifer and I challenged ourselves with turning a few ‘traditional’ learning blends into social learning strategies. We picked a variety of recipes from the Blended Learning Cookbook (call centre training, language learning and compliance training), put our heads together for an hour over a coffee and surprised ourselves with what we came up with. You can see the results of our brainstorming here.

What I’ve learnt while preparing for the seminar and speaking to visitors to the Saffron exhibition stand is that most people are already persuaded of the benefits of social learning and are now looking for practical tips for implementing it as part of their L&D strategy. My top three recommendations are:

• Start small. Our Cookbook examples are designed to show what a well developed social learning strategy might look like, but don’t try to run before you can walk. And don’t think you have to make big investments to see a return – start by using what’s out there (follow Saffron’s lead by setting up a Facebook page, Twitter account or YouTube channel, for example) and maximising any wikis and forums you’ve already got.
• Shout about it. Many a well designed forum has ended up languishing in a dusty corner of the company intranet because nobody actually knew about it. Let people know what you’re doing, why they should use it and how they should use it. And then keep telling them – find innovative ways to point them towards it (viral emails might be one way) and nurture it until it becomes so embedded in business as usual that it sustains itself.
• Remember the blend. It’s probably unrealistic to ‘go social’ for all your training solutions and it won’t always be appropriate. But social learning can really add value if it’s used in the right way as part of the right blend.

Over the past few months, then, I’ve been convinced of the potential of social media to add value to workplace learning – but what do the rest of you think? Would our new social learning recipes do the job? Have you already started adding social media to your training blend? Is social learning just a fad, or is it here to stay?

We’ve all heard stories of or witnessed the powers of social media, so why not create your own success stories by embracing these technologies and embedding them in your learning strategy? Often, the problem is how to get buy in from the business. So here are Saffron’s top five tips for taking the first steps towards winning support in your organisation:

1. Build a solid, measurable plan

Ask yourself what your learning and development goals and objectives are for engaging in social media. This will give you ammunition for building the case in the first place.

2. Do your research and put it to the test

There are so many social media apps out there so decide what features you’re looking to utilise and seek ‘business friendly’ alternatives to these. Then, once you’ve found out all you need to know, why not try it yourself? Write a blog, post on a wiki… start with the simple things.

3. Choose your words carefully

There are still reservations surrounding social media, so try to stick to more familiar terms. For instance, instead of ‘social networking’, consider replacing it with ‘online forum’. Also, present social media in the context of building capabilities, collaborating and exchanging knowledge within your organisation - this will be far more persuasive!

4. Blitz the stigma

Social media apps are worthy tools for enhancing learning – it’s not all fun, fun, fun. Yes, people use them for dating and socialising but they can also be applied for embedding and retaining learning more effectively, consequently shifting the learning culture in your organisation.

5. Educate the decision makers

Show them how social networks can be used in business and learning, and iron out any myths and misconceptions. Explain your plans to create a community of practice and develop members’ capabilities through sharing knowledge.

Download:

How to gain buy in for learning with social media

Imagine a fully immersive virtual environment created for a safety training product, for example. If this environment is presented to the learner using techniques similar to those used to create a game’s 3D environment, would they not find the experience closer to the real situation and would it not leave a more lasting impression?

To further examine the safety example we can look at a situation where the learner is being trained in how to work safely on the roof of a building. The learner would view the location from a first-person perspective and would be able to move freely around the roof, study the environment and identify potential hazards. Using ambient sounds and effects would add more realism to the experience and allow the inclusion of aural hazards, such as sounds of machinery or nesting birds on the roof. The learner would be guided along by an artificially intelligent trainer, in the form of a 3D character, who would not only respond to questions but also react to the learner’s behaviour within the training environment. For example, the learner should not approach closer than two metres to the ungraded edge of the roof; if they did the trainer would call out with a warning then proceed to give an explanation of the correct regulation once they had the learner’s attention.

Recently there have been vast advancements in computer and video games but at the same time these advancements have, by their nature, made the games more complicated. This has created a new hurdle for game designers – how to provide guidance for a new player that is enjoyable and involving enough to keep them interested in playing the rest of the game.

Previously, when game tutorials were first introduced, they were often bolted on as separate modules to the actual game itself; they were basic and often tedious. A player was given the option to play through the tutorial or to skip it completely and start playing the game straight away. For seasoned game players skipping the tutorial was not a major issue but for more casual players this often resulted in them finding the game too daunting and not understanding how to progress, causing them to lose interest.

The solution developers came up with in more recent games was to integrate the tutorial directly into the game which also served as an interactive introduction. This new form of tutorial was designed to integrate in such a way as to make the new player unaware that they were even being taken through a tutorial. It was a gentle and more immersive start to the game which guided the user into understanding how to play the game without detaching them from the game itself. Using in-game interaction to guide the user through the basics made the learning process more effective as well as more enjoyable.

Learning new information is always easier when it is presented in an interactive and fun format; therefore modern e-learning courses tend to look more like computer games than training manuals. If the ultimate goal of an e-learning product is to leave the learner with a full understanding of the subject and for the information to be memorable, isn’t developing more realistic and immersive learning environments and experiences a natural evolution for the future of e-learning?

Please share your views on the subject. What else can e-learning designers learn from game designers and what dangers might occur from making an e-learning course more like a computer game?

It may sound harsh to say that the best thing about X Factor is the ad breaks, but that’s the conclusion I’ve started to reach recently. To be fair, it hasn’t just been Jedward’s tuneless pogoing or the stress of Deadlock that has me urging on the commercials, but rather the innovative ‘brightdancing’ spots for TalkTalk which bookend the ad breaks.

If somehow you’ve avoided X Factor this year or to your dubious delight were gifted tickets to see X Factor live and haven’t seen these spots, they’re short, (mostly) viewer-made videos in which people make colourful neon shapes in the air by dancing around with their mobiles. You can see them here. All you need to make one of these videos is a PC with a webcam, a darkened room, and a small light source such as the screen of a mobile phone or a torch. When linked to the site, the webcam will record a video of you moving about with the light, and will add glowing neon trails to the path of the movement. This allows you to effectively use the light as a pen, tracing shapes that on the webcam video seem to magically hang in the air around you. When you’ve created a video you can upload it to the site, and wait with baited breath to see if it appears in the adverts next weekend!

This is a great advertising gimmick, and also highlights the power of user generated content. Apart from that, however, this promo also showcases a great new piece of technology that could have interesting implications for interactive design and maybe e-learning in particular. The brightdancing effect can be achieved using the latest versions of Flash and its 3D rendering add-on Papervision. Flash can now take a webcam feed and recognise specific shapes or colours within the image. It can then track those points as they move around. It’s clever stuff, and has at least two big areas of potential that I can see:

• Gestural control – Using webcams to pick up body movements could well be the next step in gestural control interfaces (http://www.saffroninteractive.com/2009/blog/show-your-mouse-the-finger/). This is the idea behind Microsoft’s ‘Project Natal’ – an extension of the Xbox which dispenses with controllers entirely.
• Augmented reality – While virtual reality sought to replace the real world with a fully immersive computer generated world, augmented reality seeks to enhance the real world by augmenting it with virtual elements. For example, imagine arriving at an unfamiliar street and holding up your camera phone as if to take a picture of it, with the phone’s screen acting as a viewfinder. Now imagine if that view of the street was overlaid with virtual markers and arrows showing you information about what’s on the street, such as the nearest cash machine or tube station, the bar where you’ve agreed to meet your friends, or shops that currently have sales on. Any virtual information that exists about a place can be melded with the real world space. This could apply to objects too: imagine being in a supermarket, pointing your phone at a box of cereal on the shelf and immediately seeing a warning that you’re allergic to one of its ingredients, that it can be bought 50p cheaper at the shop round the corner, or even that you already bought a box last week so you probably don’t need it.

From a training point of view this type of technology has enormous potential for on-the-spot learning. Let’s say you’re an engineer who services boilers. You get to a house one day to find a very old and unusual type of boiler that you don’t know much about. Instead of having to remember training you did 15 years ago, or calling back to the office for more information, imagine if you could hold up your mobile device to the boiler and instantly bring up its specification, a safety checklist to follow for that model, indicators showing which screws you need to loosen to get access, and which parts most commonly need replacing (along with their order number and stock availability). You could have the thing fixed before you’d even finished your first cup of tea!

At the moment these scenarios are all imagined, but the truth is it won’t be long before you start seeing this kind of thing for real. This technology may be in its infancy, but it does exist and it’s just waiting for developers to start finding uses for it. Those TalkTalk ads are just the glowing neon tip of the iceberg.

‘Show your mouse the finger’, written by Angus last week, talked about the types of cool futuristic gadgets and interfaces that made up Spielberg’s futuristic vision of the world in 2054 in the film Minority Report. I actually think that we may not have to wait another 45 years to realise some of the technologies used in the film.

The University of Bristol has just developed software reminiscent of this film, which captures eye movement data from people engaged in activities such as window shopping and, from analysis of the data, they can monitor what grabs people’s attention in shops. Just think about how this type of technology could influence the world of training (and in particular e-learning) and how powerful instant feedback on what elements of a particular course are grabbing the attention of the learner would be.

My nephew’s attention has certainly been grabbed. He’s already talking excitedly about a range of games that go one further than the mouse-less technology Angus talked about and don’t even use hand gestures. This Christmas he’s coveting a range of games based on thought control. These games feature wireless headsets that claim to have the ability to sense signals generated by brainwaves that are then filtered and processed to control the device or computer. These new games rely on technology licensed from biosensor companies that capture brain activity according to whether the user is concentrating or relaxing. So a grimace or a smile can fundamentally change the end result of the game. It’s all to do with BCI – brain computer interface. So we are not only seeing technological advancements in eye movement but also now in facial gestures. What next? It’s still only 2009.

Well how about a world where the power of thought alone could transmit information? Where just thinking about an action would cause a light to be switched on or (dare I say it) a click and reveal decision to be made. If a wireless headset is capable of detecting different expressions and muscle movements to control a video game on a PC, just think what the world would look like if the thoughts of one person could be communicated to another across the internet and without either of them using a keyboard, hand gestures or facial movements – that is, if we moved from brain computer interface to brain to brain interface. The University of Southampton has taken a giant leap forward recently in managing to translate thoughts into binary signals or commands that a conventional computer can understand. It’s a matter of transmitting thoughts from the motor cortex of one person to the visual cortex of another for that ‘eureka’ moment. Of course, there are a few things that can go wrong at this stage – the transfer of thinking is not immediate and thoughts are subject to interference and distraction for instance – but experiments conducted so far prove that the power of thought alone can potentially achieve brain to brain communication. This brain to brain interfacing is certainly expected to have applications for gaming – and therefore possibly learning.

So what could this mean for e-learning? What sort of learning experience will my 15 year old nephew have when he signs into his first e-learning module in years to come? The possibilities held by the future seem endless and I for one believe that it won’t be too many years from now that we are able to track how engaged a learner is through some of these types of scientific developments.

The big question is, what do you think e-learning will look like in 2054?

In 1999 director Steven Spielberg assembled a team of 15 of the world’s leading futurologists and scientists and tasked them with creating a plausible vision of what life would be like in the year 2054. The best ideas were picked and used in the film Minority Report.

If you’ve seen that film you’ll likely remember a number of cool futuristic gadgets and technologies that make up Spielberg’s future world – jetpacks, robots, hologram films – there’s a lot to look forward to in 2054.

However, we may not have to wait that long to experience what I personally thought was the most memorable of futuristic technologies in the film – the computer which Tom Cruise fully controls with his hands, grabbing windows and physically pushing them around the display in order to navigate through the information. You can watch a clip of it here.

This immersive interface seemed not only stylish, but also an intuitive and practical way to interact with the virtual assets of a computer. Not for futuristic Tom Cruise the clunky old interface of a mouse. In the future it seems there’ll be no more pointing and clicking and we won’t be using the proxy of a cursor to do our on-screen bidding. Instead we’ll be taking an altogether more hands on approach – using natural gestures of our hands and fingers to zoom round files.

For a film that is all about seeing the future, it seems Minority Report was suitably prescient, and of course interfaces like this are no longer purely science fiction. When Apple introduced multi-touch for the iPhone in 2007 we all moved a step closer to this kind of control. Although it’s on quite a small scale, the touch screen interface of the iPhone has removed cursors and buttons from the interaction and replaced them with simple finger controls. Flicks, taps, and twirls of the fingers on the screen can activate a myriad of controls, and lets users manipulate content in a way that comes naturally.

As well as Apple’s efforts, there’s been a general swell of touch screen technologies which progress gestural interfaces, and the last week has seen some significant technology releases in this area.

First, the Palm Pre – the so called ‘iPhone Killer’ – has been released in the UK, and picks up where the iPhone left off. In our office, Mariette is already the proud owner of one of these phones, and has been enthusiastic in showing off the touch screen controls. For the Pre, gestures are all important. Not only can applications be slid around screen, or even flicked off it if they are no longer needed, but gestural controls have also moved off the screen to areas where buttons once were. Pushing your finger over certain areas of the body of the phone reveals menus or applications on the screen. This makes using the phone very uncomplicated and tactile.

Secondly, Windows 7 has been launched with much fanfare. It seems that many improvements have been made over Vista, but there’s an interesting feature added to the operating system which hasn’t yet received much attention. A touch screen pack has been created which allows Windows to be run effectively on touch screen enabled PCs. This pack adds in a number of gestural controls which normal mouse users don’t have access to, such as flicking to scroll quickly through pages, zooming with a familiar pinch movement, and rotating objects by circling two fingers around each other. You can see examples here.

What this pack indicates is that big players like Microsoft are seriously planning for a future where touch screen and gesture controls are much more common. This raises questions about how desktop PCs will be designed and arranged in the future, and there’s already a great deal of thought going into this (see here for an example). For anyone designing user interfaces at the moment, however, I think there are more immediate considerations.

Even before PCs become completely gesture controlled, users are going to become familiar with and reliant on these simple movements to navigate through their virtual world, and traditional interfaces will begin to feel cumbersome in comparison. It already seems elaborate to point and click through something like a photo album on a PC, when the same can be done on a touch screen device with a flick of the finger. It’s the job of good interface designers to start trying to transition the simplicity and fluidity of these new gestural commands to the interfaces they are designing now, and not wait till we’re zooming round on jet packs in 2054.

A couple of years ago Adobe acquired an online word processor called BuzzWord from a company called Virtual Ubiquity in order to further enhance their collection of online applications. The web-based word processor was built using the Flex framework which is part of the Adobe product line and targeted at creating rich internet applications (RIAs) that can be deployed to the web or desktop through the Flash and AIR runtime environments. So how user-friendly and effective is BuzzWord as an online word processor?

Well, at first glance when you login to BuzzWord you will notice that Adobe has obviously taken great care when planning out a slick user interface to enhance the experience of their application. Once you login using your Adobe ID, you are presented with the home screen showing you an overview of available documents. Using the main menu of the home screen you are also able to filter the documents alphabetically or by author, time last changed, size (which means pages rather than file size) and role. Initially when you start using BuzzWord you will probably not have that many documents to manage but the filter options will become very helpful as your collection of documents starts to grow, especially filtering by author if you are sharing documents between friends or colleagues.

Okay, so you have found the document you want to edit, it’s opened up into full view and you are ready to start typing. Around the document the menu and submenu bars have been updated to provide controls to handle fonts, paragraphs, rules, lists, tables, images, version control, and comments. All of which makes for a pretty comprehensive arsenal to choose from when writing your documents. As you start to type in your document the live preview is updated allowing you to see how text wraps around images or tables instantly. One extra that I have not noticed in many of the other online word processors is that BuzzWord also shows your content in a page view so it is a little easier to see how your content will look when it is printed out or exported from Buzzword.

The final step for BuzzWord is to package your document into something you can print or share. The export options currently include PDF, DOC, XML, RTF, ZIP, TXT, ODT and EPUB, which should be enough to cover most situations. I’ve tested exporting to Word from BuzzWord and it does a pretty good job of keeping formatting intact, even headers and footers were converted correctly into the exported version.

Overall, I think BuzzWord is a great online word processor and the fact that it has built in support for version control makes it a great way to manage documents between different people. Best of all, it’s free!

At Saffron, we are always excited by new technologies which can be used as tools to enhance learning and usability. One of the many interesting projects I am currently involved in is the development of a RIA (rich internet application) product, using Microsoft’s Silverlight platform.

In this project, I used Expression Blend to recreate a user interface, based on the original Photoshop graphics, which was then passed on to our developers. The great thing about Blend is that it automatically converts all graphics to XAML, without the need to write code manually. Learning to work in Blend wasn’t difficult thanks to the intuitive user interface with its sleek graphite color scheme and well-arranged layout. Despite being new to this software, I found it straightforward to use which allowed me to concentrate on design rather than spending time searching for the right functions.

In the first stage, the original PSD graphics had to be converted into XAML using Blend which was a smooth process thanks to its support for importing Photoshop and Illustrator files. However, the import was not able to preserve all Photoshop effects and I found the best results were produced when importing vector layers. Blend is able to convert PSD files to XAML code with the original layer structure and names still intact. Additionally, individual layers can be selected for import whilst ignoring others; the pre-import preview function proved to be very useful for this.

After creating the initial static images, the animations were added. Creating animations, such as button controls, was painless using button transition states in Blend, especially as there was no need to write any code. The animation process itself is slightly different from Flash – in Blend, the process works with a true timeline and keyframes are created automatically as the timeline playhead is moved and the object properties changed. This approach seemed slightly quicker than using tweens in Flash but it’s hard to imagine how a frame by frame animation would work in Blend.

When animating movement, Blend creates a movement path which can easily be edited, thus controlling the movement animation; I also found this slightly more flexible than motion tweens in Flash. Another asset that deserves a special mention is the gradient tool in Blend which allows you to create and refine values of gradients directly on the object by dragging the gradient end points, which is extremely convenient to use.

One of the notable features of Silverlight, as often mentioned by Microsoft, lies in the improved designer-developer cycle. This was clearly proven in our experience as we at Saffron had a tight deadline to achieve, and it enabled both designers and developers to work in parallel. Silverlight is undoubtedly worth considering when choosing a platform for RIA, but is it a good alternative to Flash for creating engaging e-learning content? In my opinion, Silverlight can be a very useful tool for e-learning, especially in the following cases:

• When project deadlines are very tight and the project involves making multiple changes to design. Silverlight’s superior designer-developer workflow and team collaboration support means reduced overall development time as designers and developers can work on applications simultaneously.
  
• When the project involves full screen or HD videos. Silverlight 3 supports hardware graphics acceleration. This can lower CPU usage considerably, which means HD videos can be played on older low spec computers.
  
• When the project involves 3D or complex animations. Silverlight’s support for 3D graphics and animation rendering is superior to Flash and provides smoother animation due to GPU acceleration capabilities and perspective 3D support. This website provides a number of examples of Flash verses Silverlight performance comparisons.

There are probably many other reasons to use Silverlight for creating engaging e-learning content that I’ve not mentioned here. Please share your experiences of working with Silverlight and Expression Blend in the comments box below.