Genially Reflections – August 2023
Genially has been ranked as the 46th best learning tool in 2022 by the Top Tools for Learning list. As someone who has tried it, the free trial at least, I can say it is easy to use and can create multiple types of content. Including e-learning screens / slideset learning experiences.
What did I think? What a 180 I did on this product! At first, I didn’t like it. I pigeon holed it as H5P+ with a few questionable design choices. I really get turned off by cartoony / interesting looking design choices. I am Mr Brutalist after all.
Over time, I started to see past some of the template designs and came to appreciate the flexibility it offered. I was genuinely impressed in what was under the hood in terms of variety and the amount of use cases it would meet. One thing I appreciated was the good accessibility support, but I did find the chatbot’s response on exact accessibility issues to be a bit vague.
Genially is in the same space, for me, as Easygenerator, Articulate, Synthesia and Adapt. I would certainly look at them if I was a small firm / learning and development team looking for less corporate / generic authoring straight out of the box. Ultimately, the winner will be determined by the price point and the business model attached to their offers.
Tips for Articulate Rise Aesthetics – August 2023
A few quick tips for making Articulate Rise look nicer.
1. Turn off block animations. They are a little naff and not the best for accessibility.
2. You can add emoji’s. Use the shortcut ‘windows key + .’ for the menu. Use sparingly. Emoji’s are standard issue to us older millennials but to younger generations they are naff and hard to understand. See the example below for a good use of how to deploy them so they enhance understanding.
3. You can add some flair to text by topping and tailing with a background colour image that gives something other than straight lines. You can make these easily enough on Google Slides and output .SVGs.
Reflections on AI – July 2023
One of the unintended things from the sudden explosion of AI is the associated moral panic. NOT the skynet world-endy stuff but a more corrosive and slow burn consequence.
If we come across some prose we don’t like or a slightly formal presentation style we can get annoyed. Annoyed because we assume someone has taken a shortcut and used AI and the product is therefore less meaningful. I have seen people say online ‘Did AI write this twaddle’ as an insult. That is the accent of AI is little plastic and lifeless at the moment. I have also had some experience of super professional quality stuff being feedback on negatively as people assumed it was AI… and therefore couldn’t connect with it.
Now this rings bells for me. I have felt this before. It feels a little like the culture wars between guitar music and electronic music. I once offered to DJ for free at a super cool venue in Bristol and they politely declined my offer. They stated that they have ‘real” music there sometimes. Apparently wedding bands being better than anything electronic. That somehow the technology intervened to the point where they couldn’t connect on a human level. Despite at the root of it it still being humans playing for humans.
I am sure we will have debates about AI created art and also trust on social media. I don’t welcome these as they are hard and also very boring. Yet already there is a fault line or a new weapon in the arsenal of people trying to critique something they don’t like. I think it is worth noting as a side skirmish on our way to the bigger wars ahead.
Theories of motivation reflections – June 2023
Thought for the day: By the time you get to 30+ years on earth you will become very familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. You may even be able to critique it quite pithily at dinner parties or use it to discuss zombie movies. However, it is seldom helpful in your working life. Unless you are a policy maker, social / health worker or leader you kinda don’t have to factor into your work whether someone has shelter or not.
During a training session yesterday I was introduced to McClelland’s needs theory. I may have seen it before but I didn’t recognise it. A similar triangle based presentation of work place motivation. Looking at google it has been rearranged multiple times to be part of Venn diagrams, line graphs or just flattened into bullet points. I can’t find much criticism about it beyond some ‘where’s the science bro’ type sentiments.
It got me thinking about the order or things and motivation. In the triangle shaped hierarchy the bottom layer is ‘Achievement’. It underpins the other motivations such as affiliation and then finally the motivation to exert ‘power’. I think most British people have disdain for the power tier and would find it antithetical to ‘Affiliation’. I think it sits best as a hierarchy.
It was just the frame I needed for my current thinking around work and careers. For me I think the motivation to achieve things during my working day is super strong. Without it being satisfied the other motivations have shaky foundations and are liable to crumble and fall away. If I am not achieving success during my work I have little to no interest in affiliation or exerting power. This theorisation of how I relate to work, whilst not revolutionary, is very useful as I go forward in my career.
Grumblings 2 – April 2023
Quote from an e-learning tool vendor sales email. “In terms of accessibility, AUTHORING TOOL itself is not accessible, nor are there any efforts planned to make it accessible”. I just don’t know if any other kind of discrimination would be so blithely embraced by a company but here we are.
Grumblings 1 – March 2023
Calendar Gore. The messy impenetrable morass of colours, placeholders and reminders that make people’s availability incredibly hard to understand.
Take down these COVID signs if they aren’t accurate – March 203
You wouldn’t put on your website ‘Must eat cereal whilst in the premises’ if you in fact had no policy on cereal on the premises.
Bonjour! Aujourd’hui I would like to talk about the digital and built environment inspired by my recent trip to Brussels. We were wandering through the various websites, apps and checkpoints needed to visit the parliament of the European Union and something stood out….
In the built environment there were no requests or facilities for wearing a mask. You were welcome to but there was no compulsion. On the booking app and the website it was still stated as very much a mandated course of action. We seemingly accept our apps and the websites giving incorrect information.
This tallies with my general experience of pandemic easements. During the height of the national concern over the coronavirus we invested so much time in our end users experience of digital. Whether they were students, learners or visitors. We needed to ensure the information we gave them matched the fast changing nature of our social terms of engagement.
Whether it is down to people not wanting to think about the pandemic, not wanting to be seen to move on from it or just having been burnt one too many times by it we still accept a lot of incorrect messaging. It is not exclusive to digital, we can see plenty o’signage in public spaces that are wrong, but I get a feeling that the digital is back to being the second order mode. Where we let messages, images and policies wither and die because it is not real. Our energy and attention for it has been well and truely spent.
The bottom line is this. Don’t tell people something is mandatory if it isn’t even recommended. It is simple. So to do this, invest some time in doing a post-pandemic or mid-pandemic (delete to your preference) cleansing on your digital estate.
Sort your target operating model out – January 2023
📢 📢 I’m back on my hobby horse 📢📢 Please excuse me completely ignoring AI. I find it a heady mix of being incredibly dry and also really scary. So let’s talk about something else. Something older and more pressing but frame it as a conversation about AI.
☢ ☢ Digital Learning and Learning Technologists are at RISK from no longer existing. SKYNET is here and it’s talking out jobs!! ☢ ☢ Or something.
Institutions have been dragged through a pandemic through many processes of Digital Transformation and yet you can see that institutional attention span wandering. So let me say it loudly:
🎺🎺 Learning Technologists and Digital Learning Professionals have earned the respect to be treated as part of the conversation. 🎺🎺
They should be part of the digital transformation mix. We should be past the days of disparate jobs titles within the same organisation. We should be passed the point of cottage industries where some people do the same work and have a different job title and radically different pay. No career ladder. No way of switching between designer and developer or manage roles. This should be the past.
Solving this isn’t something for tomorrow it’s for yesterday. If your organisation still has this, they are failing. If your HR department has allowed this, they are failing. If you are a senior manager this is your job to sort. If you haven’t or aren’t invested in solving it, you are failing.
It’s time to start asking these difficult questions and expecting answers because soon the tide of rubbish AI products is going to swamp the sector. These products will soon make a home in any weaknesses in your structure and they will grow and they will be worse.
You cannot protect a way of doing things if you have no target operating model. If have no theory of change. If you allow a frankly BS approach to digital transformation based on luck and occasional drive. Because I promise you this, those professionals who went the extra mile to support you even when it made them uncomfortable, you will miss them when they are gone.
The Educologist 