Ever since a trip to Italy last year I’ve been trying to find the ‘perfect’ receipe for pizza dough. After much experimentation and comparing results with my friend Jay (http://www.thechilliking.com/) I’ve stumbled upon something I think works:

• 80g tipo 00 italian flour
• 20g strong bread flour
• 20g semolina flour
• 7g yeast
• 3 fluid ounces of water
• pinch of salt
• brown sugar

I only added the strong bread flour after running out of tipo. After kneading the dough and leaving it for an hour I was really pleased with the results. A quick compare with Jay over email confirmed a few things and we’ve agreed to continue to share notes.

Whilst the latest pizza was in the oven it made me think about my own continual professional development. I’m learning at my own pace, experimenting, using a mixture of research techniques (video, internet, books, tv) and I’ve actually created my own informal learning plan.

I’ll tweak the dough here and there, but my next task is to get the dough into some kind of round shape as opposed to square/rectangle. I’ll go through the same process: research, reviews, testing and measurement. Social networks and blogs have all helped with the quest for perfect pizza. It really did get me thinking about how social networking sites, informal and formal are of benefit to the learning process. I could even post my receipe on a site and have others test it and get all their feedback, a community of testers - carrying out pizza dough research.

….I thought some more about how this would translate to an e-learning module. The receipe and creation would be suited to linear process but I’d want to include decision and thought points where you could review your work. Getting comments from others who have tried the receipe and have their own thoughts.

In a large company this pizza experiement could lend itself to range of topics from the restaurant/bar group looking for feedback on new dishes or getting staff feedback on how difficult it is to create the dish. In a research area people like Johnny Lee are already doing similar things to great effect.

Scott

News reached me this week that Ryan (Games Degree Graduate) has got his dream job! Ryan worked with the Real Projects on a e-learning project in August. his input and new ideas were a huge help and everyone at RP is really pleased for him.

Ryan produced a great model of the forum using the Unreal engine for his final year project. A stunning piece of work.

Everyone wishes Ryan good luck as he starts his career in the games industry.

Which one? Capital E, lower case e, hypen, no hyphen, lower case e and upper case L?

Over the past few weeks we’ve been re-designing the Real Projects website and have a few other things designed. A constant conversation that came up in the office was elearning or e-learning?

We looked on google trends, looked across the web, read forums and I still can’t really work out what is being adopted. I read a forum this morning where they were going for elearning, then I read in the thread the word email….this then made me think about where the hyphen went! I can recall using e-mail many years ago.

How long has e-learning got left? What about eLearning.

We have used a mix of both in the past but we have just decided to go for e-learning but we will be keeping an eye on elearning!

phew…after what seems like months of writing, designing and coding we have managed to upload our new website. We’ve added a lot more content about what we do and improved the layout of the pages. 

This is the third version of the site and we’d welcome any comments about the site.

I’d forgot how tricky it is to get everything together for a new site!

so you agreed the spec, got the contracts right, got the team in place and then you’ve started work. Everything is going well but you know that you have the first review coming up. How do you manage the process? What is going to be documented? How will you make sure everything is done?

We’ve started using a really simple excel sheet for logging all change and test requests. Each entry gets a unique ID and we record:

The problem, the requested change, browser type, operating system, wider impact of the change, who requested it, screen grab (with a reference),who did the work (in our office), any url or reference and any additional notes.

We’ve found this to be really useful when we manage changes. Giving everything a unique ID and sharing the sheet across the development team means that we can track a change and also have something to refer to. Instead of saying has the menu been changed we can ask about 1.1-12. It might seem a bit long winded, especially when you start but if you’ve got lots of requests to manage it is really helpful.

Scott

Before we made the move to Basecamp we did do some thinking about the tools and features that we needed. We looked at a several tools and decided that we wanted to have the following functionality:

1: web based so that our clients could use it without having to buy and install software

2: email notifications so that the system could deal with some of more the basic notifications

3: secure, safe and reliable service - managed by someone else if possible

4: store files so that clients can download them

5: ability to store multiple projects and multiple clients

After a review of several tools we went for basecamp. As an elearning company we were also impressed with the online instructional videos. These saved a great deal of time when training staff and our clients. There is still a challenge in getting everyone to look at the project plan but the easy layout and email notifications makes it a lot easier to encourage use across the project team.

It has been about 6 months since we started to use Basecamp. After years using Project and creating massive Gantt charts that were:

Hardly ever read

Rarely updated

Over about 20 pages when printed

We made the decision to use Basecamp. It doesn’t have all the features of project but we’ve found the functionality elements of emailing, file uploads and chat more than make up for some of its limitations. We’ve foudn our own way of using it and it is working well for our clients who can get an instant update and get email notifications.

I’ll still revert to project when there is a ‘big’ project to plan with lots of depedencies and critical path as Basecamp doesn’t allow this at the moment but basecamp is proving popular.

The real winner for me was the instructional videos. I think that they are excellent, we’ve used them in our project manager training and they have also saved loads of time when we’ve brought the client into Basecamp. As they are always available you can revert to them at anytime. Chatting in the office we can’t recall a piece of software that was so simple to use but delivered so much in terms of efficiency and business improvement.

I’ll always have project on my machine but it is basecamp that I’m using day to day.

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.

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.

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