Screencasts

Want a free wiki of your very own? Listen to Start Your Wiki in Six Minutes. It’s an example of a screencast. It’s a prototype, developed all of ten minutes ago, so forgive the glitches. If informal learning takes hold as I expect it to, you’re going to see a lot more learning chunks in this format.

Jon Udell is trend-setting editor and blogger for InfoWorld. He invented the screencast. Essentially, he narrates what he’s doing on-screen, usually an exploration of a new product or technology, and puts a recording of his tour on the web. It is phenonmenal how much you can learn when instead of fiddle-faddling around, an expert just cuts to the mustard and shows you how it’s done. His most famous screencast is Heavy Metal Umlaut, and if you want to understand how Wikipedia definitions morph over time, go see this one right away. There are many other choices you might want to listen to.

I’m disappointed that whenever I hear some sage extolling the benefits of Rapid eLearning, she’s invariably talking about rapid production rather than rapid learning. Did we really forget “learner-centric” that quickly? It’s like schools that put no value on the time of their students. It’s the instructional design equivalent of Lincoln’s observation that “I would have written you a short letter but I didn’t have the time.” Slapping together a ten-hour course on setting up a wiki is easy; doing it in six minutes is challenging.

The 50-minute class is a hold-over from the industrial approach to school: standardize that sucker. We are so accustomed to introductory clap-trap and a conclusion that says nothing new (this is known as “padding”) that we expect learning to be time-consuming and boring. As you might expect, I have a contrarian view. So do the new graduates just entering the work force. Can’t we just get on with it?