Audio

The Downside of Leaving the House: A Video Diary

July 17, 2014 By Jackie Van Nice 28 Comments

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This week’s Articulate challenge is to create a training video with your smart phone. In my defense, I’ll point out that only the phone was required to be smart.

What Happened

I had the innocent idea of showing how people like me who spend all their time in home offices breathing in more highlighter fumes than fresh air – (which may explain a lot, now that I think about it) – can bust out. I planned to shoot on nearby Hilton Head Island.

When I mentioned this to Dan, in the interest of getting his help filming the drive, he immediately said “and it’s the perfect chance to use this guy!” What happened after that is kind of a blur.

Video Lessons Learned

I used my iPhone with no additional apps and made edits on the desktop in Pinnacle Studio 17 before popping it into Storyline. I learned:

Lighting is never easy.
Shooting in direct sunlight makes seeing the viewfinder nearly impossible.
Shooting in gale-force winds while sand is being whipped at the device will lead to unusable audio, among other things.

The Storyline Piece

Framing the story felt much harder than framing the heinous video for some reason. I ended up liking the time-lapse drive to the island and the layout I designed to view the different video clips. I’d like to use those ideas in other projects.

My favorite part might be the souvenir photo at the end since it sums up the absurdity quite nicely.

If You Must

If you really want to see this, you can check it out right here.

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Can You Motivate This Monster?

June 29, 2014 By Jackie Van Nice 4 Comments

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This week’s Articulate challenge is to create a quiz about an instructional design concept. I decided to create a quiz about Dr. John Keller’s ARCS motivational design model.

The Idea

As I brainstormed (heh-heh) how the heck to do it, I thought of the most basic concept of motivation, which is to spur the learner on: Provide him with a jolt of electricity, if you will.

The next thing I knew, Boris Karloff was staring at me as I carefully wired him up to car batteries. You just never know where a challenge will take you.

The Interaction

The idea is that you choose an appropriate design option for each of the four areas: Attention, Relevance, Confidence, and Satisfaction. I made them appropriate to this learner, pulling more from Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein than Mary Shelley’s classic novel, but it’s all about keeping me entertained.

Feedback Screen

You get feedback whether your answers are correct (motivated monster), or incorrect (unmotivated monster). I included some quick tips in the player with a mini outline of the ARCS model to help explain and/or lead you to the correct answers, too.

So Much More

I’d love to go over the many other scenes and ideas I had for this one, but at some point I have to call it a quick demo and stop.

I’ll also mention that my AA battery > car battery > single battery cable > neck bolt electrical circuit entertains me no end. I think that’s part of what makes these challenges so fun. You do a quick mock-up and it leads to the funniest improvisations.

Try It!

If you’d like to try using the ARCS model to motivate Frank, the interaction is right here.

Podcast: A One-Sided E-Learning Interview

June 24, 2014 By Jackie Van Nice 13 Comments

Image Credit: David Anderson

This week, Articulate’s intrepid David Anderson came up with yet another remarkable e-learning challenge: Create your own podcast. He supplied the questions and we got to make it happen. Here’s mine, and I explain how I did it at the end of this post. If you’d rather autoplay all tracks (rather than click on each one) you can listen to them here.

1. Tell us a little about yourself and the types of e-learning projects you most enjoy.

2. How did you become an e-learning or instructional designer?

3. What are the essentials of good e-learning design?

4. Tell me about your most successful e-learning project.

5. What are the most important criteria in evaluating e-learning?

6. What are some common mistakes new course designers make and how can they avoid them?

7. How is designing mobile learning different than designing for the desktop?

8. How do you evaluate whether your course was effective?

9. How do you keep up your skills and stay current in the industry?

10. What is the future of e-learning?

The Process

There are countless ways to do this, but this is what I did:

Jotted down my first response to each question, treating it as though someone had asked me in conversation. The upside is it’s how I’d really answer a first question. The downside is there are no normal conversational follow-up questions, so I don’t get into any detail.
Used my trusty Audio-Technica AT2020 desktop USB mic to record in Garage Band on iMac (just for fun), referring to my jotted-down answers as a guide. How many takes? Probably a couple for each one. If you’d like to see a photo of my setup, along with some of my favorite recording tips, they’re right here.
Exported individual tracks as mp3s, then imported them into Audacity on PC to edit. Used the noise removal effect to get rid of background hum.
Headed over to SoundCloud where I started a free account.and uploaded the mp3s. Thanks to Tim Slade for thinking of SoundCloud!
Headed here to my WordPress blog to write this up. To embed these tracks I referred to SoundCloud’s instructions which worked quite nicely; though rather than doing a link-type post I simply pasted each of the track links into the body of a standard post.

Update!

David has collected everyone’s podcasts in one place for easy browsing and enjoying. Well worth a listen. (Great job, David!)

A Non-Regulation Spelling Bee

June 2, 2014 By Jackie Van Nice 8 Comments

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This week’s Articulate challenge, with a nod to the latest National Spelling Bee, is to build an interactive vocabulary quiz. It’s a great challenge because you can take it in so many directions.

Inspiration

Intro Screen

I looked at a lot of interaction types, but when nothing struck me I thought I could at least start by choosing characters to work with. That’s when I remembered I’ve got good stock images of children. When I started looking at extremes (who’s the youngest?) then thought about an opponent (who’s the most unlikely?) I suddenly had my theme.

Content

Going for ridiculous words and context sentences was the only way to do it, and the greater the contrast between the participant prompts, the better. Unfortunately, I have far more knowledge of goofball cop humor than little girl references, so I just had to wing it on the kid side.

Quiz Slide in Action

Design

I focused on designing a quick, clean interaction because it’s funnier. I’m pretty happy with it, given the time frame.

Building It

I always have to go back to refresh my memory about how to engineer these things:

Each question slide is actually a fill-in-the-blank graded quiz slide.
To capture the running game scores I created variables for KidTotal and CopTotal.
To add points to their scores, on the “correct” feedback layer I added a trigger that adds a value of 1 to the appropriate KidTotal or CopTotal variable at the beginning of the timeline.
To display their scores, I inserted reference fields on the scoreboards to show the current value of KidTotal and CopTotal.
I also created variables to take you to one of three possible endings based on the final score.
I couldn’t get the text entry screens to refresh after hitting Replay. Those kept holding on to whatever was entered in the prior round. I ended up adding a hidden results slide to create the needed variables so I could add a “reset results” trigger to the Replay button. That worked.

The Result

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I think it’s funny. My clue is when I can’t stop laughing long enough to record audio, but it was pretty late at night, so maybe I was just punchy.

I hope you enjoy it – you can see it right here!

The Stuff That Résumés Are Made Of

April 22, 2014 By Jackie Van Nice 10 Comments

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I’d recently been admiring some examples of graphic résumés, but couldn’t imagine how I could ever do one. Turns out Articulate’s resident nudger, David Anderson, keeps an eye out for that sort of thing and his challenge this week is to come up with an interactive résumé or portfolio. So time for me to figure it out.

I haven’t had much call for a résumé since I’ve been independent, but creating an interactive graphic where I could play with the idea of a résumé sounded like fun, so off I went.

Inspiration

My friend and talented freelance e-learning designer Donna Carson gave me edits for a bio I submitted with my DevLearn speaking proposals on Friday. The phrases she used made me want to both laugh and go conquer the world at the same time. Her description of my “fearless flair” in designing training inspired me to come up with “Fearless Designs!” “Bold Voiceovers!” and “Daring Development!” to describe what I do. For graphic inspiration I turned to old movie posters. They had the expressive graphics and cool details I wanted, plus they could handle the dramatic phrases I had in mind.

My Graphic Inspiration

Design

Graphics: To start, I pinned old movie posters I liked and chose a color scheme that resonated with me. You can clearly see I used the colors and rough layout of the Charlie Chan at the Wax Museum poster. For text callouts and credits I used elements based on other posters including The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms.

Theme: I chose a detective theme because I was drawn to the idea of Humphrey Bogart’s Sam Spade. He’s on the right side of the law, but still seems a little shady. (His line that the Maltese Falcon is “the stuff that dreams are made of” inspired this post’s title.)

More Graphic Inspiration

The Theater: I wanted an entry screen so that, once clicked, the user’s full attention is on the initial visuals, music, and animation when they hit the main screen – and having them click a ticket to get inside made sense.

The way the overall flow works is based on the little theater I practically lived at as an undergrad at Humboldt State University in Arcata, California. The Minor, off the little town square, was an old art house movie theater that changed its double or triple features at least three times a week. I spent a few thousand of the happiest hours I’ve ever spent in my life there, and got to see a gabillion classic movies like the ones that inspired this piece.

The Minor Theater

When it was cold out, you’d come off the street through a thick red curtain, get popcorn and admire the old movie posters in the lobby, then go through another red curtain to enter the theater. So I was seeing my résumé as one of those old posters in the lobby.

Audio: I wanted to bring it to life with sound. There are effects for audience buzz, curtains being pulled aside, cheers, applause, police whistles, sirens, screams, breaking glass, etc., but I wanted a theme song. The whole time I was working on this I kept hearing a driving theme somewhere between Peter Gunn and James Bond. Lucky for me I’ve got an “in” with talented songwriter, musician, and freelance e-learning guy Dan Sweigert who was able to write and produce the theme song in no time flat.

Content

Résumé Elements: I kept it simple and included my (boldly-phrased) skill set, education, experience, and the main software I use. The sections for education and experience were by far the biggest creative challenges, but in the end I was happy to find a quick way to blow through them that still maintains the tone and theme.

Brevity: I find it endlessly entertaining that each of the links from the main screen shows just one screen of content (at best) that makes the audience go wild. I wanted to get in, show a glimpse of just a morsel of my work, and get out.

See It In Action!

Enjoy the vintage-inspired goodness right here.