Instructional design in virtual worlds

This image (click to enlarge) was taken at the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) location in Second Life (SL). I found it was an effective instructional design example and wanted to post it on my blog. It is strategically placed when you arrive at the ASTD headquarters in SL so that, as a first-timer, you can quickly get up to speed and start making your way around in SL. This makes me think about my profession and whether there are different techniques for improving technical communication in a virtual world.

As a member of the Society for Technical Communication (STC) and working as an instructional designer for online learning, I've often seen the overlap between the two fields. Most of the people I know in the technical communication field specialize in writing. I think as more people go online for learning and training, the shift toward more visual instruction is necessary. Why? It is too difficult to sit and read large amounts of text while staring at a screen for long periods of time. I'd like to see an area of training develop on how to best instruct for virtual worlds. I will definitely continue exploring this while I build training there. I would also welcome any tips, books or links anyone would like to share on how to improve instruction in SL.

Podcast tip #1: Level out sound using GigaVox Levelator

A useful technique for capturing subject matter expertise is to record an interview. This can provide an invaluable resource to go over if you will be producing any instructional content on a topic. There might be times when you will want to broadcast the interviews as a podcast to your learners and would like to improve the quality of the sound. Here is a short (1.5 minute) demo showing a free tool called the GigaVox levelator that improves the sound quality by leveling out different volumes of two or more speakers.

How Do you Teach People about Hardware and Software?

I saw this on another blog, and had to send it to my husband, who works in IT, and share it here. A funny plug for the usefulness of screencast demos.

Good elearning example by Lectora

Part of my informal education in instructional design includes learning from examples, both good and bad. Obviously, I try to recreate the good things I see and avoid the not-so-good in my own projects.

Here is an example of elearning by Lectora that I find particularly effective and well done. I guess if you're in the elearning business then your elearning better be pretty darn good. To view the elearning, you'll have to go to the Trivantis website and click the View Tutorials button. I'm not promoting the product, and have never used it, but find the training is interesting and easy to grasp. It's broken down into very short snippets of about 23-30 seconds each that can be navigated, viewed and reviewed separately. I also like the way the agent speaks in the front while the application tips are displayed in the background. Haven't seen this technique used before and, at first glance, I liked it.

I'd be interested to hear any thoughts on this example or any others you've come across.

Twitter training and update

Over the last few weeks, we've been busy learning Plone 3 for our new website and responding to clients requests for instructional design services. Hence, I've neglected the blog once again.

To make amends, I'll leave you with a short video from my e-learning heroes at Common Craft. This time they are explaining Twitter: a tool for quickly spreading personal newsflashes, but I use it mainly to learn about industry-specific news and trends. Keep 'em coming!