eel-learning

Rabid Authoring

I attended a short session yesterday on Rapid Authoring, run by the eLearning Alliance in Glasgow. The main speaker was Bill Ward, whom I'd seen before, an engaging and animated presenter. His topic was 'Rapid Authoring - friend or foe?'.  Bill's a big flag-waver for everything web 2.0, so there wasn't much 'foe' in the presentation. And it's hard to argue with the idea that it should be possible to produce useful learning material faster than ... well ...  than what? Than we used to produce it?  That was one suggestion. Than the big elearning vendors produce it? That was another. Bill mentioned how one large and well known UK firm completely dismissed the idea of rapid authoring several years ago but is now offering a rapid authoring product.

When Bill had finished there were questions from the floor trying to probe what he meant by rapid authoring. He'd mentioned only 'Adobe' (I'd previously seen him speak at an Adobe roadshow) and 'Powerpoint on steroids' . The initial suggestion seemed, therefore, to be  the familiar one of Subject Experts Create Own Learning Material. But very soon the suggestion came from the floor that the tools are easy but you need some pedagogy/instructional design/learning psychology to make it effective.

So if RA means just the current glut of new software tools, there's nothing new in this idea. As long as I've been in this business software vendors have been saying ' no need for messy programming, our product will have you creating effective and engaging elearning as easily as ...' - well, they tend to say Powerpoint now. (I'm old enough to remember TenCore Producer!).  They'll always be saying that and I'll always be not quite believing it.

8 Random Facts

Clive Shepherd has invited me to take on this meme of eight random facts.

1. Post these rules before you give your facts.
2. List 8 random facts about yourself.
3. At the end of your post, choose (tag) 8 people and list their names, linking to them.
4. Leave a comment on their blog, letting them know they've been tagged.

Here they are:

1. I can't ride a bike.
2. I once had a Supercar pilot's licence signed by Mike Mercury, convincing me that the puppet show Supercar was based on real people.
3. I was briefly detained in an Egyptian army camp in the desert.
4. I have webbed feet but am a crap swimmer.
5. I have mingled with rock superstardom: I tripped over a member of the Kinks (not Ray) who was drunk and comatose after a gig at Edinburgh University.
6. I come from Ayr 'Wham ne'er a toun surpasses, for honest men and bonnie lassies' (Burns)
7. I was adopted at birth and now have good relationships with both my birth parents.
8. I've never been Chancellor of the Exchequer. It was just a collective delusion.

Clive has already tagged almost everyone I 'know' on the elearning blog circuit so I'll post this in my other blog with the various music friends I'm tagging.