At our last elearning forum our topic was Second Life. Andy Powell from Eduserve presented from within Second Life to our forum members who were all watching on a big screen. It was very interesting to see the reactions of the gathered audience to Second Life and the presentation format.

Andy gave a really interesting presentation but I thought that it must have been really hard for him as he couldn’t see the reactions of the audience…at the same time the audience couldn’t really see any emotions from Andy other than those displayed in Second Life. After the event I spoke to a number of people who were looking at Second Life for the first time who were disappointed. They had expected so much more in terms of visual appearance and functionality. Such is the depth and complexity of how second life can be used that we didn’t really get the time to show that its about more than the graphics.

From our perspective the most interesting thing was the way the presenter within second life had to interact with a real world audience. Several of the forum members were interested in using it to develop scenario based learning, while others were worried about the unrestricted nature of the world.

Over the past few weeks we have been working on our new website. We are at the final stages and plan to have the site live before the end of August. In addition to the new site which you’ll be able to see at www.realprojects.co.uk we’ve also got plans to update the norfolk elearning forum website. You can view the elearning forum website at www.norfolkelearningforum.co.uk.

We’ve spent a lot of time updating the content for the new site and getting everything ready for the launch. It will be interesting to get feedback once the site is live!

Last week we had a great few days where Ryan joined us in the office. Ryan has just completed his computer games degree and came in to work on a new project. We were interested to see whether we could apply any of the techniques from games design to elearning design.

The result? Excellent, we were all really pleased at how things went. Some of the ideas were superb, ways of presenting information that we had not thought of before. Ryan also found the experience worthwhile as we could share our experience of building learning models. The end result was a great set of ideas that we have presented to our client. We are hoping to build on this experience and develop closer links with the Norwich School of Art and Design Games Degree.

Several of us have been reading Groundswell over the past few weeks. On the groundswell website there is a cool app for finding out social technology profiles for a range of ages. You can find the app at:

http://www.forrester.com/Groundswell/profile_tool.html

We have just been finalising the date of the next norfolk elearning forum. It has been set for 08:30 Thursday 23rd October. The event will take place at St. Andrews House in Norwich. If you have an interest in elearning or learning technologies please feel free to come along. The event is free but we do ask people to register first. Our friends at the Norfolk Network has offered us the use of the event system so that should make things a little easier!

We are in the process of finalising our speaker for the next event and we will post details as soon as we have them.

Recently we purchased a book called presentation zen by Garr Reynolds. It uses some really interesting and often quite obvious techniques to create really powerful presentations. We used a few of the techniques to create some sample presentations and were pretty pleased with the results. When you look at the slide samples it all looks pretty easy but it is not until you start putting your presentation together that it requires a different type of thinking.

After we had put together our slides I thought about how some of the techniques could be used to make rapid elearning development more interesting and powerful, in particular the sections about displaying bar charts and graphs. Reynolds also makes some really interesting observations about the use of space and the best way to convey your message.

Reynolds has his own blog in which he writes

“Graphic designers show restraint by including only what is necessary to communicate the particular message for the particular audience. Restraint is hard. Complication and elaboration are easy…and are common.”

http://www.presentationzen.com/

The same thought process could certainly apply to those of us developing elearning content.

the norfolk elearning forum is looking for speakers for its programme of events for the next year. The next event is in October as is held in Norwich. For more information about the event you can visit www.norfolkelearningforum.co.uk

Microsoft has recently launched Sphere. It’s an interactive spherical display that appears to work like a touchscreen. Find out more here:
http://research.microsoft.com/~benko/projects/sphere/

We’ve shared this with quite a few people that we know and the reaction has been pretty positive. It will be interesting to see what the final price might be and how it can be used in a commerical or education project.