By Rick Nigol
 I was at a meeting last week when
someone commented on a thick file folder I had brought along,
bursting with papers related to the project at hand. When asked
about it, I replied that I am of the generation that does not like
reading a lot of text off a screen. My eyes get tired easily, I feel
I cannot read as quickly or accurately on screen, and I end up
printing off the relevant information and reading it and marking it
up off-screen.
I suppose on-screen readability will improve as
technology improves. Amazon, for example, contends that its new
Kindle digital book technology has overcome these limitations noted
above.
 |
Kindle |
However, the comment on my printing habits,
along with the following things I have come across in the last
couple of weeks, has lead me to reflect on how much I rely on text
in the eLearning I produce, and whether less text and more visuals
and narration would be more effective. To wit:
-
Tom Kuhlmann, who runs the user community for
Articulate, outlines in this demo how you can present a concept
much more effectively via the use of graphics and narration. The
demo shows four different ways that you could teach someone how
cell phones work.
-
Cathy Moore, in her Making Change blog,
shows how you can create more effective eLearning by trimming
copy, showing rather than telling, and letting learners explore
rather than being spoon-fed.
-
There is a whole conference ( VizThink) now
dedicated to the art and science of visual thinking.
-
There is sub-field of architecture,
transportation and urban planning called wayfinding,
that focuses on how best to help people navigate their ways
through cities and buildings as intuitively as possible (i.e. via
good clean design, creative use of symbols, and an economy of
words).
There are lessons in all of these examples about
delivering messages and enabling learning with more than just flat,
one-dimensional, and often overly long text.
I think I tended towards an over-reliance on text
in eLearning in the past because I began in this field in a
post-secondary environment wherein text is revered. It is the
bedrock of scholarship after all. As I move farther from the
university environment, I am relying less and less on text. And not
just for the practical considerations of ease-of-use. Rather, I do
so because:
-
Most of the adult learners being served by the
eLearning I produce are time-starved and do not have the time or
the patience to read great tomes (online or otherwise), and;
-
Using a variety of approaches (text, narration,
graphics, animation, video, etc.) makes the learning more engaging
and memorable, and accommodates different ways of
learning.
|
