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 our top ten tips for creating a look and feel for a new client

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.