As previously noted, I gave a presentation to BayCHI on January 12, 2010. Folks have been asking for the slides — here you go!

Tomorrow, September 17 at 12pm CT Mark Trammell and I will be presenting a talk on “Effective User Research” as part of the DIYsummit. I’m pretty excited. This will be a great group of speakers, and the folks behind the scenes (waving to Christopher and Ari) know their stuff.

The DIYsummit will take place online. This does not, however, make it a “webinar” at least as far as my definition goes. A webinar is a slog through PowerPoint slides, presented online by a lifeless salesperson trying to sell some enterprise software solution. The DIYsummit looks like it will be a well-crafted and really engaging online learning experience.

Anyway, wish us luck and I hope to see you online tomorrow!

The typical “webinar” that I have experienced thus far involves an instructor speaking on a conference call while she pages through a series of slides that are viewable using screen sharing software such as WebEx. There could be some great webinars out there, but the ones that I’ve been involved with as a participant could be much better, both from pedagogical and user experience perspectives.

In a classroom, the instructor can look around the room to see if the students look confused or bored. This feedback helps her know if she should go back and explain a difficult point in a different way, or maybe tell a good story to wake the audience up. She can also ask poll the students, through a show of hands or more advanced solution, to discern the level of expertise of the group. She can then adjust her presentation as necessary.

A webinar instructor cannot see her audience. She doesn’t know if people are paying attention or falling asleep. She can’t easily poll her audience about their understanding of the material. She slogs through, slide by slide, with no way to easily adjust her delivery of the content or even know that she should adjust it.

Now let’s think about what a website can do, pedagogically. A user can go through material at his own speed, diving deeper into subject matter that he’s interested in or looking up any words that he hasn’t heard before.

The rigid nature of the webinar environment means that participants can’t adapt the experience to meet their learning needs, like they can on a website, and the instructor can’t adapt her presentation delivery like she can with an in-person lecture.

I posit that the webinar could be a much better learning tool by incorporating some of these aspects of in-person and online learning:

• Have the slide deck available for viewing or downloading at the beginning of the presentation. The participants can then go back and look at previous slides if they missed something, or skip ahead if they want to understand where the discussion is going.
• If the screen sharing tool has a chat function, use it. Ask the participants at the beginning of the session to share their level of expertise with the subject matter. You can make this easier by specifying for example that 1=newbie, 2=somewhat familiar, and 3=very familiar, and have them just type that one number. A quick scan will help clarify what kind of audience you have.
• Decide on a Twitter hashtag for the session, and share it at the beginning. Encourage participants to use the hashtag in their tweets. Monitoring the Twitter backchannel is a good way to know if the participants are bored or confused. (They are unlikely to use the screen sharing chat function to do this.)
• Share a list of URLs with the participants where they can get more information about your subject matter. Advanced members of your audience will benefit from being able to go deeper into the topic while listening to the presentation.
• Encourage the participants to use either the screen sharing chat function or Twitter to ask questions during the presentation.

Let me know if you have other tips! Let’s make webinars a better learning experience.

At Lumos Labs we’ve been enjoying this excellent introduction to brain anatomy.

I don’t remember much about my college commencement address other than that it was really long and it was a cold morning in Pennsylvania and the stupid graduation hat kept popping off of my head. I wasn’t inspired, just cold and annoyed.

I just read the commencement address that David Foster Wallace gave at Kenyon College in 2005 and was floored. You should read the whole thing.

Excerpt:

Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed… This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth.

In June, AIGA will be holding “In Control 2009,” a conference in Cincinnati for web designers. The two days of workshops will give participants a solid grounding in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, design standards, and user research.

The roster of speakers includes some pretty great names, and I’m honored to be on the list.

(And you can use my discount code, INCMELT, to get $50 off the early bird discount rate!)

• Have a slide deck that is too long for your allotted time
• Use bad fonts with drop shadows
• Use funny voices and occasionally sing
• Frantically wave your hands around
• Be sure to never credit your sources
• Talk a lot about your credentials
• Use only really obscure examples of whatever you’re talking about
• Avoid eye contact with the audience
• Bring up lots of anecdotes about times when you were smarter than other people
• Be sure to not leave any time for questions at the end
• Apologize for your presentation

(Recently compiled by me, Mark, Kevin, and Coley at an In-N-Out Burger in Daly City.)

I grabbed this screenshot from an amusingly unhelpful page of help documentation.

Want to learn more about how to set up and manage a user research program within your organization? If so, you are humbly encouraged to vote for our panel for inclusion in next year’s SxSW: Developing Super Senses: Tools to Know Your Users. My partners in crime are Mark Trammell (Digg), Carla Borsoi (Ask.com), Andy Budd (Clearleft), and Nate Bolt (Bolt | Peters).

Vote early! Vote often! And if we make it, come prepared with good questions!

Educational technology of the future - unfortunately, this is pretty close to where we are with most online learning tools in 2008. (From boingboing.com)

Film Based Teaching Machine. Student pushes one of four buttons to give answers and his score appears on paper slip at upper right. Teaching machines, expected to boom in the next decade, usually operate on the principal of repetition until the pupil understands. They aim to speed up the learning process and relieve teacher of much paper work in the classroom.