touchscreens – on the comeback trail…!

At Real Projects we’ve recently been invited to look at a number of touchscreen projects for clients. I looked at the possibilities of touchscreens in 1996, since then the technology has moved on a lot. the technology is now being used in many devices from information points in shopping centres to mobile phones. On the blog one of my first posts was about microsoft sphere. A few weeks before I came across sphere I was at Norwich University College of the Arts and some of the students and technicians had created a very cool table top touch screen to showcase the work of the computer games degree.

It was a very clever use of technology and displayed the students work in a really elegant and clever way. I then read last week about a project in Scotland (http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/sep/17/itforschools.elearning) where an interactive desk has been developed. The desk and its possibilities look fantastic. The Guardian article discusses how they could be used in the classroom but I can think of many commercial applications from designers to architects. There are also many custom e-learning applications that could be developed for these touchscreen tables.

After being invited to come up with some design concepts for touchscreens we started to wonder where they were currently being used…we all went out on a march across the city to see where the technology was in use.

• Pubs
• Betting shops!
• The tube
• Shopping Malls
• Train Stations
• Police Information Points
• Mobile Phones
• PDA
• Remote Controls

It was really interesting to see that the technology is already being used in many places and its become part of our technical landscape. I spend a bit of time travelling to clients in London and regularly look at how travellers engage with the video screens in tube stations. I wonder how long it will be before we see interactive adverts using touchscreens. (not on the escalators!)

custom or bespoke?

Custom or bespoke? Which one to use? Hot on the heels of e-learning v elearning we have had another word based debate in the office.

We were preparing a new version of our company brochure when a debate started about custom or bespoke. Custom cars, bespoke suits: everyone knows about Saville Row, West Coast Custom, MTV’s Pimp My Ride…after hours of discussion we’ve settled on custom.

elearning or e-learning

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!

no more i6 for basecamp

A few days I logged into my Basecamp account to be greeted by a new page…bascially they are stopping support for IE6! Ok, so more and more people are on IE7, Safari, Firefox with Chrome coming soon but I was still surprised.

I had read a few articles recently where users had come across websites which no longer supported IE6. Ill still be able to view Basecamp via another browser but it got me thinking about a lot of our customers. Many of the organisations we work with still use IE 6, if they are in big companies IT roll-outs can take time.

I understand why people aren’t continuing to support IE6…I have it on my machine as I’m the company IE 6 tester…but it did get me thinking about how websites could fail to be supported on a browser in a matter of months. Could we reach a situtation where developers are coding sites for specific versions of browsers with the user selecting their browser before they enter the website? I’ll be watching what happens with code standards and the increasing number of browsers coming online.

e-learning – managing change and test requests

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

elearning project management – what did we need?

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.

project management in elearning….what to use?

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.

presentation zen

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.