Day Two: Collaboration and Video

I was so tired when my alarm went off this morning. My visit to Second Life extended into the wee hours last night. Part of it was spent showing my best friend (in RL) all of the cool sites that Anders Gronstedt had shown us yesterday. But I dragged myself out of those soft hotel sheets cause today was the second awesome day of The eLearning Guild’s 2008 Annual Gathering! The day was mostly about collaboration, video production, and personal networking (conference hall connections).

The day began in an excellent Breakfast Byte session called Tips & Tricks When Implementing Social Learning lead by Kevin Jones from GTS. It was a very interactive group and I think we learned a lot from listening to our varied experiences. Kevin did a great job of facilitating.

A few of the best ideas that stuck with me had to do with making a good case for social networking and collaboration in the workplace. It’s all about culture change and combating fear it seems. People still think about information as being “owned” by one person. I know my organization is very concerned about the content “owners”. The idea of collaboration and using tools like Wikis to contain community-generated content means moving away from this old idea of a single owner. That’s going to be a tough one… Another argument the resisters cry is “But what if bad information gets out there?” Well, Kevin had a great point. The “bad” information is already out there - it’s over the phone, near the water cooler, buried in personal email. If that content was put out on a collective space like a Wiki it could be seen by the community and corrected. In a way, there’s more “control” in that. Another concern management has about these tools is that it will encourage people to waste time. Well, again, if they are going to waste time - they are going to waste time. Tools don’t waste time, people do. I’m going to adopt some of these ideas and add them to my elevator conversations.

Next we headed into the big International Ballroom for the keynote. Keith Sawyer, author of Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration, (and creator of the Atari video game Food Fight) spoke to us about about what it takes to have innovation. His stories were great. We learned about the origins of the Monopoly game and Gore-Tex guitar strings, and how the contributions of many were involved in these inventions. Hardly ever does an invention simply come out of one person’s head. Real innovation comes from the collaborative efforts and play. It was one of those talks that you just wish your whole organization could see.

Because of our recent video efforts, I wanted to attend both of the video-related sessions today. Both were lead by Steve Haskin. The first one was called Best Practices for Using Rich Media and Streaming Video in eLearning. This was a very technical presentation. It was all about how to talk to your IT Department intelligently so that you can get your video content up on the web. I have to admit that I didn’t get the math yet, but I hope I will if I stare at the handouts long enough. He explains it like this:

Length of video in seconds times stream rate in kilo BITS (not bytes) divided by 8 = Total file size

Easy, right?

The next session with Haskin was called, Storyboarding for eLearning Video Production. He had a co-speaker call in which was kind of fun. We saw some real like examples of video story boards, including some from Star Wars and one from Indiana Jones. Very cool. We also saw how you can create a relatively detailed storyboard simply using stick figures. (More my speed). Haskin explained the differences between storyboarding for eLearning vs. video production. It seems like eLearning storyboarding is more about laying out all of the content piece by piece. Video storyboarding seems to be more about sketching images that can portray the key elements of what you are trying to convey. Sometimes this can be done in just one picture. It ensures that the production team is all on the same page with the vision. As my group moves into producing our second safety video, maybe I will try to sketch something. I’ll post it if it’s any good…

I also attended an excellent panel discussion with several of the authors of Bill Brandon’s new collection: Best of The eLearning Guild’s Learning Solutions. Subjects included:

• Create successful synchronous events
• Survive the “one-person department” experience
• Create a design document that supports standards and consistency
• Create a content strategy for your organization
• Understand the direction in which e-Learning is evolving

All the speakers were good and there were many take-aways. Most interesting to me was what Marc Gamble had to say about radio style synchronous eLearning. I have really been wanting to try an interview style recording of some kind for some of the more, how shall I say this - boring topics. If I could get my SME to answer questions posed by someone “out in the field” about financial topics I think this could make a much more interesting delivery than the usual PowerPoint monologue. So far, this is the first thing I want to explore when I get back home. (If anyone reading this has some good samples you would be willing to share, please post them here or send me an email.)

The best thing about today, however, was the Dinner Group for the 1-person training department organized by one of my favorite bloggers, Tracy Hamilton. There were ten of us and we had a great time! And I had a great steak. We talked shop - tools, Second Life (that was my doing), training, learning, etc. We also compared notes on the the best places to live since we were from all over. Then we passed around our business cards. Good networking was had by all.

Now I really must sleep so I can get up for another exciting day tomorrow!