Flash For Learning

Just a quick aside on the power of Feedburner: I was alerted by someone at Feedburner that my RSS feed wasn’t rendering the actual Feedburner layout and that my stats were probably off because of it. So, with a tiny bit of coaching, I got it right now (just click on the RSS icon in the sidebar to see for yourself). This morning I checked out my stats and they are through the freaking roof — On top of the 90+ people who actually visit the site, since yesterday afternoon alone I’ve had about 38 people who actively subscribe…. and that’s just since yesterday around 4:30pm until midnight last night.

If I look at the stats on the feed itself as far as live hits, I can see that there’s 25 hits from various news feed readers in the last hour alone. That’s WAY more readership than I ever thought, and most of the content on this site has not been (imho) the most consistent effort.

So thanks if you’re one of the silent masses who’ve been hitting this site and let me re-affirm that more good things are underway. I had no idea that so many people around the world (seriously — people from Athens, Greece and Riyadh??? Awesome) read up on my take on E-Learning, Flash and assorted technologies.

I feel like I owe you something more than the erratic posts you’ve had over the past two years. I’ll try and make your visits worthwhile.

Blogging

Notice how I’ve been a little more active of late? A couple of things related to that:

• I’m using MarsEdit to actually post entries to the blog, which allows me to write when I’m at the computer, and not necessarily just when I’m at the computer and online.

• It also translates Markdown syntax for writing in text editors, which is a habit I picked up very early in my blogging that saved me a ton of time by not having to do HTML markup, allowing me to write more “in the flow”. Markdown has had a spotty history of working or not working quite right with Wordpress (it’s back to working again now), but with MarsEdit, I can do it on the fly much faster, which is awesome. Plus the integration with iPhoto and Flickr, so I can add a little more color to the posts.

• Since I’ve been tracking readership of the blog through Feedburner, I now have a better sense of how much this blog gets read a day/week/month, etc. I thought I maybe had 3-4 people a day hitting the blog, which doesn’t encourage a lot of writing, but Feedburner helps visualize for me how many people subscribe via RSS in Google Reader, for example. It also gives me Metrics on how many people from Morden hit the blog (about 8 visits yesterday alone — Hi, England!). And it helps paint a picture for me of what topics are popular and what’s not (SCORM 1.2 and ExternalInteface by a wide margin). Google bought Feedburner. It’s free to use and it’s been a bit of a motivator, since about 60-90 of you hit this site every business day.

Pecha Kucha

One of the things I picked up at Learning 2007, specifically at Dan Pink’s keynote was this Pecha Kucha thing that I talked about earlier. So this morning I tried it in a bi-weekly staff meeting to talk to what I picked up from the conference.

I could see a look of angst in the crowd of peers and superiors in the beginning, as the pace of my presenting was markedly faster — as if to groan, “Oh no… Aaron’s innovating AGAIN.” But after a couple of slides, I sensed a very dramatic change in response. I think my people responded very positively to the change in the format, recognizing the elimination of waste and the amount of focus it takes to put it together and present information in this way.

Truth be told, I thought it would be a breeze to put together, but I actually had a hard time, both in finding good visuals (pictures) to capture what I wanted to share, and in the absence of graphics — condensing text on the screen to be absorbed in a 20-second exposure.

In the end, I found it a strengthening experience and I plan on exercising my Pecha Kucha skills further, especially when I have to present information live. I don’t know how well it would work in an asynchronous environment, because I think part of the experience is the idea of “being in the room.”

Reading

I ordered a couple of books from Amazon based off of suggestions from various friends at Learning 2007. One of them is Gadgets, Games and Gizmos for Learning, which is turning out to be a very interesting read suggested (and blogged about) by both Tom King and Brent Schlenker. When Tom King is telling me how to cheat this book, I’m way sold.

Kapp describes a differentiation within the GenX/GenY populations in four phases affected by the gaming that was available to each part of the population as they came of age. And I’m completely blown away by his observation — like it speaks to me and my peers both of my age, a little older and younger than me.

Kapp describes “gamers” in four groups:

• Gamer 1.0 (gaming from 1970-1980), defined by the game: Pong.
• Gamer 2.0 (gaming from 1980-1990), defined by Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Battlezone, Super Mario Brothers and Tetris
• Gamer 3.0 (gaming from 1990-2000), defined by Myst, Zelda, Manic Mansion, Tomb Raider, Diablo, EverQuest
• Gamer 4.0 (gaming now), defined by The Sims, WoW, Grand Theft Auto III

Each of the defining games have a level of activity that grows more complex with each group; each have a growing degree of realism; each require an increasing degree of cognitive processing; and each require a higher degree of player collaboration than the games preceding them.

This ties in very well with Dan Pink and Don Tapscott.

So I’ve dabbled with the podcasting thing before, both here and on my family blog. Last week, since some friends of mine are heading into Chicago to attend a music festival with me, I began a podcast where I put on an hour-long radio show featuring music. The subject matter is pretty contained: I don’t talk tech, I don’t wax politic (at least not overtly) — I only talk about the music being played and any anecdotes related to the song, both historical and personal, since I’m kind of a music buff. If you’re curious, you can check it out. I can share how I put it together in comments or offline.

I emailed all of my friends and acquaintences. Maybe 200+ people (I have a lot of actual friends). And of that number, only six people seem to have signed up. Instead of handling the feed myself as I would have using podPress for WordPress, I signed up for FeedBurner, which provides stats on my podcast — who’s signing up via email vs. iTunes vs. Other, how many clicks back to the site have there been, how many downloads of the .mp3 files, etc. But 6 out of 200 is only 3%. I would have thought I’d get better results.

Then a friend of mine called me up yesterday, about a week after I first launched the podcast. She didn’t know what the whole podcasting thing was about, and was confused. So I made my friends a video on how to add my podcast to iTunes, now perhaps better understanding that while most of my oldest friends own iPods… they may never have downloaded a podcast. It might sound weird to this audience, but just think of it as an adoption challenge I didn’t see coming.

I sent the video to my friends, and the numbers the next day? They went DOWN.

Maybe it’s just a bad podcast. Don’t know. But as long as I have my six regular listeners, I’ll keep doing it.