The main questions I’m trying to answer is “What is twitter?” and “Why should I bother?” My interest in this introduction is not to get into branding, or social media marketing, or any of that. It’s really a reflection on why I got interested in twitter, and why you might find it interesting too. It was also to dispel the myth that twitter is just about gossip — because it’s not (though that is a large part of what goes on I must say.)

This also gave me to the opportunity to add to my portfolio and was a warm up exercise to get me motivated to do that learning thing I want to do about wine, which, you know, I’m getting to.

For you viewing pleasure, a slidecast. No complex builds because Slideshare doesn’t allow for that.

There are many older pieces still to add, and many new ones running around in my head. But hey, check it out and I welcome your feedback.

To load – click the Play arrow. Once it loads > click More then Autoplay. Or to step through it at your own pace,  just click the Play arrow.

Try Prezi out for yourself at http://prezi.com – it’s fun and easy to ease. Now I just have to find something else to Prezi…..hmmmm.  I could imagine doing a family tree with historical pictures in this way. Still figuring out the publishing options.

Happy Brains

Last night I uploaded a slidecast of Learning Design for the Brain – Multimedia Learning Principles.

This is a deck that I’ve been working on for some time — I created it back in August to better understand all those rather confusing and repetitive multimedia principles. It’s rather technical and academic in nature, but I’m hoping it will be useful, if only for the checklists at the end.

You can view the slidecast at my portfolio page or at SlideShare.net. Also available is a Checklist (PDF download) of  multimedia principles – this is helpful when designing.

Some notes  on creating slidecasts:

• if you’re doing this for the first time, use a short slide deck
• creating a separate audio file and synching online via the slidecast feature takes time! it’s a Flash-based system – very cool and easy to use but a little slow and painful for large files
• Slideshare does not export your animations – it flattens them. I realized this AFTER creating the audio. What a pain and workarounds to get that they way I imagined. Still not quite right.

So enjoy.

Initial thoughts:

• Wireless communications have untethered our social norms
  • Sherry Turkle observed how we have become tethered to our virtual identities via cellphones and other devices.
  • What used to be considered rude – answering the phone while talking face-to-face with someone – is now the norm (in most of North America)
  • I don’t know what the social norms are in other countries/cultures.
  • Establish a new norm in your learning environment – via ground rules or other means. Discuss and create the norm up front.
    • Discuss how the backchannel can be used. What appropriate to say and not.
    • Give a list of web sites related to your topic for those who will want to surf the web (if laptops are allowed.) Have people surf in areas related to your topic.

• Presenters need to change their expectations.
  • Don’t expect full attention - design with this in mind.
    • Tell the learners what to pay attention to – keywords
  • Expect the back-channel conversation – bring it to to the foreground occasionally during the presentation or have someone moderating it and bring it up. Give the audience the #hashtag so you can let them know that you  know and so that you can follow. Give them the venue for the backchannel.
  • Stop presenting – let the audience engage with each other, either face-to-face table talk or just via the backchannel.
  • Or if you want to be authoritative and have the power – ban latops and blackberries from the room. I’ve seen this done in corporate settings. But you know, people might resort to passing notes.
• Partial-attention learners
  • Initial research into attention and performance showed that even when people are performing other tasks, they would still hear a message when primed to listen for a target word. (Treisman, 1964 Attenuation Theory). Does this mean we should be keying our learners for target words?
  • Perhaps as learners we should learn how to better target our attention and learn when to switch
  • Perhaps presenters should provide break points, pauses that allow for the swtiching.
• Treat the presentation like a game
  • What if we were to treat the presentation like a game?
  • The presenter sets the rules – back-channel rules, front-channel rules
  • The presenter sets the goals – prize to indivdual or table group that can complete a task within a certain amount of time or that answers the quiz at the end.
  • Points for the best answer…
  • Have to think about this one more.

Just some initial thoughts on changing/setting expectations and skills we can learn and sharpen. The game has changed in intensity, lets change with it.

Addtional note (added later 10/14/09): there are two types of attention under current research: top-down attention (attending to a task such as looking for keys or listening to a presentation) & bottom-up attention (automatic attention to something salient or attention-grabbing, such as a fire-alarm or key words) . See full blog post from Scientific American: link.