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What matters in the new video?
By Christine Martell | June 27, 2007
In May, Dave Richards from Fourth Star did a short presentation for the Portland State Training and Development program student group on mobile learning. He’ll be doing a longer version for the eLearning SIG in September. He showed some video examples that were clearly created on a computer with a video camera at home. In the garage, then the living room. I can’t remember, did the cat run by?
This sparked an interesting discussion about whether the quality of the content can overcome the details of the production. As someone who is acutely aware of visuals, I have really struggled with this. Can I really say content can trump presentation quality? Would the design police show up to revoke my fine arts degree? Yikes!
Reality is, I can’t afford the time or production costs of high quality video for training programs, and yet the marketplace wants me to deliver training over distance. Dave was making a compelling case for getting the quality content out by letting go of some of the details. Ok, so I’m a bit of a perfectionist. I’m working toward the idea. I started looking at video cameras.
A few weeks later, I am online watching Walt Mossberg from the Wall Street Journal interview Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. I thought I’d poke around the site and see what else was interesting and I run into a post that starts with this:
Everyone can now be a video producer. YouTube and other Web sites are filled with short amateur videos created on typical home computers. Even print journalists like me have joined the trend. For the past couple of months, I’ve been recording brief video commentaries to post along with my columns on The Wall Street Journal’s Web site, WSJ.com.
He’s making videos on the exact same iMac as one in my office, using iMovie that I have on all of our Macintosh computers. OK, Dave, you are right. If Walt Mossberg can make videos for the Wall Street Journal on his home computer, we can use this technology for training!Now I just need to figure out all the details. I’ll keep you posted.
- Headsets for screencasting
- Adding video comments
- Employee Learning Week - more thoughts
- Do expectations affect Web 2.0 adoption?
- Learning Frameworks
Topics: - E-Learning SIG |
June 27th, 2007 at 12:52 pm
I went to ASTD’s TechKnowledge 2007 in Las Vegas this year. In a Keynote, the president of ASTD National said that, still, after all these years, ‘Content is King.’
Then I went to a session where the presenter, Lance Dublin, said that he wholeheartedly disagreed. He thought that CONTEXT, not content was king. He gave the examples of YouTube, podcasts, vodcasts, Blogs, MySpace, etc. Within these places the content may not be, and often is not, perfect. Rather, the context in which they are delivered are - they are delivered to the right people (group), at the time the user wants it with a structure surrounding it allowing the user to consume it they way they want, not in a canned, preformed way. In fact, the quality is down right horrible sometimes, but the users eat it up!
I see it being a mix of the two, they go hand in hand, but it is a very interesting discussion when it comes to the learning function and how we deliver knowledge.
June 28th, 2007 at 8:16 am
Kevin,
So perhaps we can look at it as a triangle, with content, context, and presentation as the three sides.
Guess it gets back to the knowledge management issues also. How can we find the learning when we need it? I think the intention of tagging content with keywords is heading in the right direction, however the inconsistency in implementation makes the value dubious at times.
Perhaps we are moving from being learning providers to becoming learning filters. Or transferring more about how to get what you need rather than trying to provide what you need for better performance?
June 28th, 2007 at 1:09 pm
To a degree, I would agree (do you like that?!?!) I do see us moving toward facilitating the transference. But I cannot be a purest there and say that it is ‘the’ answer.
When the web first appeared people said, “There is the end of the brick and mortar store!” They were very wrong. In the same light, I don’t think this will replace much. Training in its many different forms, in and of itself is still very much needed and some information should only be delivered in this context. However, we have all seen information that training has tried to cover, even though it was not very effective. That is because it was the best we could do.
Now we can take those odds & ends, and use the new tools to go beyond where we have been stuck at for YEARS. I have seen the ‘Training Department’ as the learning funnel in the past - SME to Training to learner. Suddenly, with a lot of the untapped infomration we are no longer ‘funnels’ or ‘filters’ but ‘facilitators’, helping those that learn create and share content (prosumers instead of consumers of knowledge).
So this becomes an in-addition-to method rather than much of a replacement.
I like your triangle. However, wouldn’t context and presentation be the same? How are those different?
June 28th, 2007 at 7:41 pm
Kevin,
So true, seems we don’t ever stop any delivery method, we’re just expected to get good at yet another set of skills. And deliver the learning in half the time with twice the effectiveness
Context and presentation are different to me, but it may just be how I think of things because of my design background. In my mind, context is more the training specific skills of assessing audience, identifying outcomes, and aligning them with the processes you will use to deliver the content. Presentation is a combination of technical (flash, photoshop, imovie, final cut) with visual skills that combine to create information design.
June 29th, 2007 at 7:52 am
Very interesting! It seems that we have different views of what ‘Context’ means. I believe (and correct me if I am wrong) that you view context in that it shapes the creation of the content. You are looking at it from the training perspective where everything is shaped before hand.
But now, with user created content, they don’t go through a formalized process of assessing the audience, identifying outcomes and aligning them with the processes used to deliver the content. Instead, there is much less structure on how it is created. They create the content, put it out on whatever medium they feel is best and from there it is delivered in the way that 1) the first user wanted to deliver and 2) the way the learner wanted to consume it rather than in a formalized way.
Those who create content in this context do go through a quick assessment and outcome alignment, but it is almost (if not completely) subconscious and innate rather than a written process.
So I think we might combine our two definitions into one. While formal training relies heavily on both parts, non-formal learning relies more heavily on the presentation while the formation of the content is ancillary. This brings us full circle to your original post. Because it is ancillary the content and context (both meanings) do not need to be perfect, as long as it is out there, we are all sharing and we all learn.
As a great example, look at my comment here. It is less than eloquent, in pure text format and written off the cuff. But I hope it spurs some expanded thought in others as they consider new issues we face.
June 29th, 2007 at 12:17 pm
Great discussion here. I like the triangle construct, and my lens tends more toward discrete aspects of context and presentation. While I think you could classify presentation as a subset of context, I think that may obfuscate the separate and very real aspect of look-and-feel.
I think we can reconcile the triumph of ugly content on YouTube with the failure of ugly content elsewhere with the prism of expectations management. That is, as a piece of the context, what is it that the audience is expecting to see? On YouTube, it’s somewhat grainy, somewhat amusing short clips — anything at or above that bar will find a significant audience. In a boardroom, the bar is appreciably higher. This is an element of the rubric completely segregated from content.
One might argue that, in fact, presentation sans content can be quite effective. As we enter the longest (and likely most brutal) political advertising season ever, I’m confident we’ll see many such examples. Decried universally? Yes. Effective at shaping behavior nonetheless? You betcha.
September 6th, 2007 at 8:00 am
[...] had been introduced to the idea of mobile learning at a program the PSU student group had on mobile applications for learning with Dave Richards of Fourth Star. Dave is presenting a [...]