Labor Day 2008 | About Randy Pausch

For over a month now I’ve been trying to figure out how to post about Randy Pausch’s death last month from pancreatic cancer. What his final lecture meant to a lot of people, what it meant to me wasn’t about cancer, it was about how you live.

My dad passed away last year from complications from a pancreatic tumor. According to wikipedia, Randy underwent the same drastic surgery as my father. That’s a 13 hour surgery. No walk in the park. Both Randy and my father, however, lived well past the estimates of medical science. They had their own positive mental attitude (PMA) which burned within them.

That similarity wasn’t why Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture was so profound for me. Positive Mental Attitude: Randy had it in spades. His lecture was so profound six million views and counting were seen on YouTube.

My Lesson: Sacrifice and Responsibility

You learn a lot about yourself being the person responsible for someone. Whether as a parent or in caretaking a parent, it changes us when we are forced to accept or reject life and death responsibility for another human being.

I learned a lot about myself in the past four years and my opinion is that most people don’t know what’s important in their lives until they are confronted with life and death decisions. It’s not something that can be adequately described. It’s a large part of why I posted my essays on Martin Luther King Day and Memorial Day on this blog.

Communication, Education and Teamwork Balanced

It’s amazing what priorities we will set, what sacrifice is defined by when everything else becomes placed into proper perspective. My personal experiences in the past four years make me realize several things.

Lifelong learning is important. Passing those skills along through education is important. Communication with others and the tone and impact of my voice is equally as important. Both for my family and for my community as a whole. Passing a desire to learn rather than simply driving content - that is a finesse that is reserved for the best of teachers.

Whether in a workplace or in a family, teamwork, communication, and education will make or break the team. Randy had it nailed, and I’m still working on it with mixed but mostly good results. 

Randy’s Lecture Defines What’s Important

In a showcase for how to change video into eLearning, Gabe’s Word of Mouth Blog features Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture in Presenter format. The lecture, a YouTube top favorite, has a learning centered focus and is now viewable in smaller chunks and retention is increased due to the formatting and sidenotes.

If you want to learn from Randy Pausch the first time around and in the best eLearning format possible watch this rather than just the YouTube video. You will love both the content and the container it comes in.

See it today.

Australia’s Learning Object Debate

Are flash based Learning Objects dead?  They sure are expensive - since 2001 the Teaching & Learning Federation (TLF) has used “AUD$123 million ….. divided by 6300 curriculum items.

That’s close to AUD$20,000 for each single (eg, Flash) TLF curriculum item,” observed Stephen Loosley

One of the comments had this to say in defense of the cost:

Using a purely economic argument in this discussion is flawed from the start because the real cost of the digital content produced by The Learning Federation is shared by the 3 million plus school children across Australia (using 2007 census data).

A $20,000 Learning Object if only ever used only once by one third of this population equates to a one-off cost of less than 2 cents per student. The reality is that the best of these objects will have a much greater rate of use and for some a longer shelf-life.

Sales of tools such as Adobe Captivate / eHelp RoboDemo brought the cost down for learning objects. Before that it was Flash programming for hours and hours. My question is one of usage. How would anyone know what the value of the content is if they can’t chart the usage statistics properly?

Sounds like a client for Articulate Online or some other LMS. What a case study. Actually, this might be a good time for the administrators to release some usage data justifying the cost of these presentations / learning objects.

In my five part segment last year I examined how well the XBox 360 might be combined into eLearning and also Technical Communication in general over this new settop box / gaming system. Now even more aspects are becoming compelling and pushing the advantages of the Microsoft XBox 360.

“Xbox LIVE is the world’s fastest-growing online social network on TV,” said John Schappert, corporate vice president of Interactive Entertainment LIVE, Software and Services Business at Microsoft. “We doubled our membership the past two years, growing from 3 million to 6 million, and then from 6 million to 12 million.

The Old Is The New

Understand that the ‘New XBox’ is the old XBox 360 with updates. As a matter of course, I believe it’s a short step away from using Silverlight content if it’s not already doing so in this update.

Instead of revamping the hardware within the box, MSFT poured resources into programming updated content and…

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Props to Agent K

I just dropped Karsten Gerhardt off for his connecting rail to LAX. Karsten, one of the principals for 3si2 Corporation, is heading out on a client business tour of Europe. Back in the day, I called him K even before that Tommy Lee Jones character from Men In Black. K laughs a lot more than Jones’ character so it’s not exactly a fair comparison.

K reminded me that he’s never looked back at the salaried employee world or drawn a W2 since our launch back in 2001.

Memories of Startups

Karsten, Jim Nesbitt, and I started 3nW Corporation after NVTL’s dotbomb layoff cycle back seven years ago. The corporation’s founding date is April 20, a homage for Jim’s great Ultimate Frisbee counterculture sense of humor. You’d never think he used to work at the Pentagon for the Chief of Naval Operations.

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I came across a few letters authored in Word 2.0 from my final cruise in 1995 and it got me thinking about my roots in TechComm. Have you had any experiences which led you towards TechComm which stand out?

Yep… Everyone Has a Story…

The initial knowledge management / content wrangling that I learned prior to using specific software tools was through my time in the service in the 1990s. I would have loved tools that MadCap, Articulate and Adobe now make for that. This was even before Microsoft Word and PowerPoint were adopted!

When looking at the time spent in communication simply in my collateral, non-aircrew duties, it seems that my “part-time job” of about 40 hours a week was a Technical Communicator. Somehow I managed to fit flying into this, probably due to the seven day work week that we military folks enjoyed while being deployed.

Workflow of a Typical Aircrew Technical Communicator

While I was in the military, we didn’t have a job description of Technical Communicator however once I was out of training and ‘in the fleet’ we were required to:

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Here’s a small but simple tip to speed up your workflow for those who must capture custom window sizes without the browser address bar.

From Microsoft Windows | Customizing the Links bar

To enable the Links bar in Windows XP SP2 and Windows Vista

Right-click on the Windows Taskbar. Click on Toolbars, and then click Links to select it (a checkmark will be displayed beside it)

You will now see “Links” added just to the left of the system tray on the taskbar.

My addition to this is to hyperlink all your working windows within this small box, then just page through them capturing the screens you need. I found it worked well when reviewing a process with the SME.

Hope this helps reduce some time readjusting windows and pasting addresses into screen capture target browser windows.

According to this BNet article referencing a recent Bersin & Associates study, overall corporate spending on training products and services grew from $15.8B in 2006 to $16.38B in 2007. This is as the total market grew slightly from $55.8B to $58.5B

Let’s hear it for eLearning

eLearning’s growth is phenomenal with a 5% increase in one year for self-study / computer based training, attributed mainly to online training adoption by small organizations. All of this is in line with the top technologies I’ve been tracking.

* E-learning has grown dramatically. The use of self-study e-learning now accounts for 20% of student hours, up from last year’s figure of 15%.

This growth is driven largely by an increase in online training among small organizations (100-999 employees), which are acquiring the skills and technology to make online training a reality.

Web 2.0 - Creating conversations and pushing knowledge

Notice within the article about the study the Web 2.0 effect on learning:

* The younger generation of learners is driving changes in learning strategies. This year’s study shows a sharp increase in new web-based and collaborative learning resources, such as podcasts, communities of practice, blogs, and wikis.

Trend alert: More space for consultants, less offshore content developing

According to the article, outside consulting is growing along with content developed and tailored specifically for the company. 

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I recently was drawn to this video from a small Microsoft IM advertisement because - well, everyone wants to save time. Folding my own laundry is something that I (and most people do to save money and look neat.

Audience: Everyone

Folding a t-shirt faster simply helps everyone. This instructional video is being chosen by savvy web marketers as a way to draw people into their space, whether it’s for ordering t-shirts or printing on t-shirts, or… well you get the point. VideoJug uses this how-to instructional clip as a portal for driving people to their site. Microsoft promoted it and I tried it out.

Finding your audience is something that every Marketing person desires to do. Explaining a process so that an audience gets the point is what every Technical Communicator desires to do. With Microsoft’s Live platform they’ve integrated both of these within their Instant Messaging client.

Click beneath the fold for the instructional video of how to do the 2 second fold…

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This is important for all who are currently examining an LMS system or have one in place with an end-of-life plan.

In a nutshell, Blackboard was claiming Intellectual Property (IP) patented rights to the software user roles and responsibilities, much like the Microsoft NT Server technology assigns them, with an LMS layer of student / teacher responsibilities.

Keeping it brief:

Any Technical Communication software company who has the penetration into the existing e-Learning space has a potential to leverage those existing relationships and push out a Software as a Service (SaaS) demo for their users to try before they buy. Striking down the LMS patent claims held by Blackboard opens up the market along with insulating the existing LMS providers from further IP claims.

In short, my interpretation is that the court found that Blackboard’s claims were too broad. It also ‘Linuxizes’ much of the LMS market. Just what free enterprise needs in a $400 million market.

Of course, Blackboard will appeal the judgement. My perspective is that their model was based on fear and intimidation of the market without any real innovation after the initial development of the concept.

In my brief time away from my construction project in NorCal, I found this article at e-Literate about the Blackboard LMS patents being rejected:

On March 25, the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office issued its Non-Final Action on the re-examination of the Blackboard Patent. We are studying the document, found here, but in short, the PTO has rejected all 44 of Blackboard’s claims.

There are some other background blog articles that are fantastic at presenting the entire picture of what Blackboard’s patents were, how they were presented, and what this means.

Legal stuff? Make it easy please…

I’ve got a background in legal review, but it’s nice to see someone analyze the legal brief and outline it. One of the best and easily understood - A Description of the Blackboard Patent in Plain English sums up its analysis:

Once we cut through the pseudo-technical mumbo jumbo it’s apparent that there is no there there. If Blackboard gets away with this it will be one of the great hoaxes of this century.

I recommend reviewing that article because it’s the most concise and combines visual diagrams along with Michael Feldstein’s e-Literate text explaining the case.

Needless to say, the discussion on the topic at e-Literate is most telling. User opinion is very strong, and this is yet another case of Corporate Authenticity being tested.

Yeah, but what does this mean?

My analysis is that this is groundbreaking.

It means that without the patents, there is a lot less risk involved with getting into the very lucrative LMS game.

It also means that Microsoft and Adobe risk a lot less in pushing LMS boundaries - maybe in existing product lines they already have for Technical Communication.

Other LMS wanna-be’s who happen to have a strong Technical Communication software product offering (Adobe, MadCap, even Microsoft) can now look at SaaS as a model for penetrating the LMS market through their existing customer base.

I see the framework that MadCap has developed as being the strongest towards this area, seconded only by Adobe. With MadCap’s existing focus on Lingo and the Analyzer, they have the ability to 2.0 their existing software quickly and rip a new one in the LMS market. With their rabid and enthusiastic fan (customer) base they’ll lose no time in coming up with a killer application.

Adobe is no slouch to eLearning. They announced a $200 million commitment to developing in India, primarily for TechComm, Gaming, and eLearning over five years. That’s equivalent to $1.2 billion spent in the US. I’m sure they’re working on something in that space as well.

Microsoft has some well hidden LMS potential I won’t speculate too much about publicly.

Maybe someone will offer me some dollars for consulting to talk about it further, but the broad strokes are seen in my past articles.

Previous CharlesJeter.com articles relating to LMS:

• My LMS / eLearning Disruptive Technology Concept
• Halo 3, XBox and Technical Communication? (Part 5)
• eLearning, Gaming & Tech Comm are new Adobe focus | Adobe to invest $200m in five years

In the interest of repurposing TechComm content into ‘Distance Learning’ I’m posting this

eLearning and Blended Learning Business Development Tip - sound smart to the big office crowd

This content allows broadcast television stations in local markets to compete with the 500 channel special content cable providers have enjoyed for years.

That means that educational content has much more of a market in the broadcast media. As you’ll note from the picture below, the ‘Education’ category has three times the access shown.

What does all of this mean?!?

After all, the multicast capability allows much more content during non-prime time hours.

So I’m looking at how to not pay $100 a month for my HDTV signal and found some good resources about the impending over the air broadcast due by 2009. Guess what? In San Diego, we already have some Digital Television broadcasts (DTV) in the area.

I checked out my lat/long on this site and narrowed down the options to the DTV currently broadcasting. It also works for your street address.

Personally it means I’m not a slave to the satellite reseller who struck a deal with the devil (my apartment management company) and cut all the competing cable provider access, forcing a monopoly.

Thought that the Sherman Anti-trust Act of 1890 took care of forced markets, obviously I was wrong… My only protest until now was in refusing to buy into the whole deal, and my life hasn’t suffered for lack of television. That’s what Netflix is for.

Salvation, salvation, salvaaaation… (that 1990s song)

So now I find the time to check into things and lo and behold! Digital TV (DTV) is supposedly broadcast in San Diego already! DTV is best defined from this information on MyFreeHDTV.org:

DTV brings viewers three (3) video formats, each different in picture quality…

SDTV: Better Than Regular TV

With DTV, SDTV (Standard Definition TV) picture resolution is better than today’s analog (640 x 480 min. vs. 440 x 480 max.)-a noticeable improvement. The audio is digital, too, so the sound is of higher quality than on analog TV (like a CD compared to FM radio) and may even feature multiple channels of surround sound.

EDTV: Really getting good

With DTV, the next level of digital television is EDTV (Enhanced Definition TV). EDTV features a minimum of 480p scanning lines, for a more detailed picture than SDTV. You can see the difference. EDTV also can reproduce Dolby® Digital audio. EDTV provides DVD quality pictures and sound!

HDTV: the best you can get

HDTV has all the benefits of EDTV, but goes far beyond it in picture resolution and audio features. The HDTV specification requires a minimum of 1080i or 720p scanning lines, far higher than EDTV and about five times the resolution of analog TV! It’s a level of detail that you’ve never seen before. The added benefit is 5.1 channel Dolby® Digital sound (movie theater quality sound), at home!

I’m going to say that the coolest thing I’ve seen is the ability to multicast on this signal. This means a lot for the non-CSI or non-Law & Order prime time programming.

Picture’s worth 1000 words… or worth 1080i resolution

Here’s a graphic, from MyFreeHDTV.org that explains the potential:

So what’s this mean again - to me?

You’re looking at the potential to push out corporate communication through local access programming. Marketing can repurpose some media content, training videos, etc. in order to gain brand name recognition. Technical Communication, in its blending and fusion, will end up touching into this market in one or another way.

Technical Communication has gained a new (old) market.