Although the drought has not been kind to our turf grass, our backyard is shaping up nicely. Here are some historical photos of our progress over the past couple of years:

January 2010

May 2010

June 2012

Rather than writing a long post, I’ll add a few links:

• Lily D on tumblr
• Wifey’s post on the babe
• Radio interview about the process

Cross-posted from http://www.enspire.com/mad-men-meets-enspire-learning.html

Enspire determines corporate clients’ business needs for training very early in the development process. Occasionally that business need sounds much like advertising. That is, the client asks us to create a course that promotes a product, program, or organization. However, Enspire is a learning company, not an advertising firm. We have a different focus than Sterling Cooper. The line between advertising and adult education can be blurry, however. Here is my attempt at defining both:

• Advertising is the process of persuading others to take some action.
• Educating is the process of teaching others new knowledge or skills.

I’m sure that many people may find issues with those definitions. If so, please correct me in the comments. But, for the sake of this post, let’s break those two definitions down.

• Advertising = process + persuading + others
• Education = process + teaching + others

As you can see, the main difference between the two is the verbs. Does that mean that our projects’ goals should be to teach, not to persuade? Not always. In some cases, a good course can persuade and teach. Let’s look at an example. Recently, AMD asked Enspire to create a short course about their new Accelerated Processing Unit, a concept that salespeople, customers, and partners knew little about. We decided on three learning objectives:

1. Describe the AMD APU platform to others.
2. List the key features and benefits of the AMD APU.
3. Compare AMD APU solutions to the competition

Objectives 1 and 2 are teaching objectives. They ensure that learners understand exactly what an APU is and why it matters. Objective 3 is a persuading objective. That is, we want to persuade the learner that the APU has advantages over the competition. The result is a short course/advertisement for the new AMD Accelerated Processing Unit that achieved all three objectives. Since AMD needed to teachand persuade their learners, an instructional designer was needed. Had they only needed to persuade, Don Draper would be their man. At the risk of seeming like a one-trick pony when it comes to diagrams (see my last post), here’s what I mean:

GSD&M shouldn’t worry about Enspire Learning just yet. We’re not going to move into the business of creating pure advertisements. Learning is still our thing. However, instructional design expertise is occasionally just what the marketing department needs.

Cross-posted from http://www.enspire.com/everything-i-need-to-know-i-learned-from-madden-nfl.html

An entire generation of young football fanatics have logged countless hours playing Madden NFL video games. Over the years, Madden enabled these players to learn the in’s and out’s of football in a safe virtual environment (i.e. they learned to play the quarterback position without the threat of concussions). This made complicated and high-paced offensive playbooks more common at the high school and college levels, which is now bubbling up to the NFL.

As a result, the Madden series has influenced how football is played in real life. Gone are the days of “three yards and a cloud of dust“.

A recent Wired article explores the topic:

These games nowadays are just so technically sound that they’re a learning tool,” says Tim Grunhard, an All-Pro center for the Kansas City Chiefs in the 1990s who now coaches high school football in the Kansas City area, where he encourages his players to use Madden to improve their knowledge of football strategy and tactics. “Back when I was playing football, we didn’t realize what a near or a far formation was, we didn’t really understand what trips meant, we didn’t understand what cover 2, cover 3, and cover zero meant,” Grunhard says, charging through jargon that’s comprehensible only to Madden players and football obsessives.

According to Wired, one youth football coach programmed his playbook into the Madden NFL game, allowing his team of 11-year olds to learn 30 offensive plays. An NPR story describes how Amobi Okoye, a 2007 first round draft pick, learned the rules of football by playing Madden after immigrating from Nigeria. As Patrick Dunn writes, games like Madden NFL are powerful learning tools because they:

• Provide motivation
• Offer varying degrees of simulation
• Tie experience together through narration

Different types of games place more emphasis on different characteristics. Using Patrick Dunn’s model, Madden NFL might look like this:

While a casual game (e.g. Enspire Learning’s Celebrity Calamity) might look more like this:

Back to the Wired article:

If you’re, say, an All-American quarterback at a top college program, odds are that you’ve been training on a very sophisticated, off-the-shelf simulator — a cross between a football tutorial and a real-time documentary, drizzled with addictive Skinnerian action-reward mechanics — for as long as you can remember. The many hundreds — even thousands — of hours that athletes put into videogame football give them more game experience… than Bart Starr, Terry Bradshaw, or Joe Montana were able to log in previous eras. And there’s the possibility, too, that all this electronic play is changing the structure of their brains, at least in some ways, for the better.

For more than 30 years, sports videogames have been focused on simulating real-life athletics more and more perfectly. But over the past decade, games have moved beyond just imitating the action on the field. Now they’re changing it.

If a video game could change the way football is played, imagine the possibilities of games in other arenas. Jane McGonigal believes that games can change the world.

As McGonigal says, we become the “best versions of ourselves” while playing games. We are more likely to stick with a problem as long as it takes. Whether we’re learning to play quarterback, demolish rickety structures with birds, or live without oil, we are motivated to get up and try again after failure. If that’s so, why would anyone prefer to deploy a training program in the form of a narrated PowerPoint presentation rather than a game?

In 2004, I worked with three fellow grad students to create a documentary about a folk artist in Crawford, GA named Bennie Morrison. Bennie paints on a variety of objects including magnolia leaves, bricks, satellite dishes, fans, and more. His art depicts cotton fields, aliens, school buses, farms, outhouses, and any other scene he imagines.

The project was a blast to work on. We were able to spend time with Bennie and watch his process for making art. We learned how to operate cameras, capture audio with a boom mic, and edit video. My old band even provided the music.

It initially began as a class project,  but we continued working on the film after the class ended and were accepted into the 2004 Athens Film Festival. That meant that we got to see our movie on the big screen at the Morton Theater.

So, I finally got around to posting part of the documentary on YouTube. Hopefully more people will learn about Bennie’s work now that he’s Internet-famous.

Jane Hart recently posted her 2009 summary of learning professionals’ top 10 tools for learning and working. I submitted my lists in 2007 and 2008, but failed to submit my 2009 list before Dick Clark put the year to bed. Tardiness hasn’t slowed me down in the past. Why should it now? So, without further ado, here’s my 2009 list of top ten tools:

• Google Chrome: Chrome replaced Firefox as my default browser in 2009. It’s much speedier, particularly when using AJAX-heavy web applications such as Gmail. I conduct nearly all web searches using the omnibox and I’ve even made several Application Shortcuts, which isn’t a terribly useful feature other than the fact that my web applications open within a streamlined Google Chrome window.
• WordPress: I still consider WordPress to be the best blogging platform available, but I have been increasingly using it as a content management system for more static websites. WordPress plugins provide the flexibility to create almost any type of site, including a reviews system for a library catalog.
• Brizzly: Brizzly is a web interface for Twitter and Facebook. My favorite feature is how it displays full URLs rather than those mysterious shortened ones. The mute feature is also nice, particularly when you need a temporary break from elearning folks who get tweet happy during lrnchats.
• Friendfeed: I was really hoping to see Friendfeed become a bigger player in the world of social media in 2009. Those hopes were dashed when Facebook bought them out in August, though I still consider Friendfeed an extremely valuable tool. I’m now feeding my social media content from a variety of websites into Friendfeed. This means that it’s easier than ever to share content with my online contacts. We’re also using it as a collaboration tool in my office to share and discuss online content.
• Readability: Readability is a browser bookmarklet that makes it easier to read online by stripping away all of the typical distractors from a page. This is highly recommended if you follow wordy bloggers.
• Google Reader: Google Reader was included in my 2007 list, but I decided to list it again for 2009. It remains my most used web application other than Gmail. I follow news, blogs, web searches, and social networks using Google Reader. I also make heavy use of the share feature, which is fed into Friendfeed, Twitter, and Facebook.
• Lala: Lala enables me to listen to my music library from any computer. Its interface is very similar to iTunes, which is convenient since Apple recently bought them out. The rumor is that many of Lala’s features, including streaming your purchased music from the cloud, will be integrated into a future version of iTunes.
• Garageband: Garageband has enabled me to start recording and writing music again. It’s much easier to multi-track with Garageband than with my old 4-track cassette recorder (though maybe not as hip).
• Adobe Connect: Connect was also on my 2007 list, however a couple new features (or, new to me at least) warrant a second appearance. Breakout rooms are a great way to promote attendee participation in a web conference, though I must admit I have not yet tried to use them in a live class. Also, the third-party plugins available from the Adobe Exchange site are helpful and fun.
• Handbrake: I have been using Handbrake to convert DVD’s to mpeg-4 files at work. It includes several presets that are helpful when converting videos for ipods, online streaming, Apple TV’s, and more.

My wife recently found this little guy on Manor Road. Each car that whizzed over him knocked him off his feet. She pulled over, picked him up, and now he’s ours. We named him Orzo because he had a few maggot friends… I’ll never think of her shrimp and orzo dish the same way.

He’s healthy now and is making friends with our other animals. Here’s a couple pics and a video:

After ignoring this project for a few weeks, I went back to work on our glass bottle planting bed. The back section was created using wine/liquor bottles. We’ll plant succulents in the back… there are already a few agaves and prickly pears.

The front section will be an herb garden and was built using mexican coke bottles (which beats american coke by a landslide)…

Turned out alright… It’s a bit hippie, but not too much. Pictures below…

Well, we’re basically complete w/ the front entry way. Though, I’m sure we’ll add many more plants in the weeks to come… Before and after photos below:

iLibrarian links to a recent study that says the number of adults with online social networking profiles has quadrupled since 2005. This is relevant to a couple things I’ve noticed recently in my social networks:

• Older family members (i.e. aunts, uncles, etc) are joining my networks. A year ago, I’d never have guess that I’d be reading my aunt Janice’s Facebook status on a regular basis.
• There’s been a rash of old high school classmates joining Facebook recently. This has been good and bad. Good in that it’s fun to see photos of everyone’s kids. Bad in that… well… it got interesting during the Fall presidential campaign.

So, based on my own anecdotal evidence, I already knew that adults were increasingly using social networks. However, it seems that we won’t really see big increases until it becomes easier to create and/or find niche social networks.

I’m sure my aunt would join a social network for her senior center where they could talk about zumba, upcoming trips, etc… But she needs to know how to create her own local network.

My father-in-law would love a retired pilots network… but he needs to know how to find an existing network.

My graduate program desperately needs to create a social network. They’re still using an ooooooooooold school listserv as a tool for lifelong learning…

They could create new networks with Ning or Buddypress, or join existing networks. However, these tools don’t have large audiences, so most adults aren’t aware of them. Once adults learn to find or create their own social networks, these numbers will shoot through the roof.