Multimedia Storage

Another good question from a reader. This person works in a military environment with some very particular requirements for how multimedia assets are treated during development. Because of that he's in the position of having to determine how much disk space will be needed during development. He's seeking help to answer ...

Are there formulas you use to determine disk space needs during development of multimedia training?

My first reaction was - just buy more disk space. It's cheap. But the context here does quite allow for that. It's pretty interesting to hear about development in a military environment.

Military multimedia development is contracted to 3 or four different companies who put development teams here on the base to research and develop the courseware using government provided computers, software and networks. Under their contracts everything becomes the property of the government once they receive tasking and begin developing a course (and I do literally mean 'everything'). It's pretty much set up so that each contractor has a 'folder' on the development network - they subdivide within that folder as necessary depending on how many courses they're working on, etc.

The govt prefers that while it is ok to work on your local machine, end of work day or finished items should be kept on the development network. At the moment we use VSS to manage assets - it allows check in and check out and tracks file use. We are just about to move to Adobe's Version Cue.

Additionally, once a course is completed and delivered it's not removed from the network storage - the govt takes over the maintenance and any updating of the course - and on top of that we're required to maintain backward versions of the course. So three months from now if a course is revised in some way we're required to keep the old version as well as the new one. so even our backup storage becomes quite complicated! (requirements state we're to keep 3 back)

Unfortunately for us, the military isn't able to simply add X TB to its storage design. They are required to predict growth, show usage and justify that addition.

So, I have to supply them with storage figures and growth predictions.

I've used various approaches and have based things off of prior work. But in most cases, it is definitely pure guesswork.

I should also add that this is mostly a situation applicable to the development side of the house. Once you have a finished product and it's been cleaned up and put in a 'run time' condition for the LMS, size (while still important) does not become that much of a storage issue.

I know that a lot of this have gone through this kind of thing, especially in large development projects. I'm curious what formulas or general rules of thumb that people have for total development storage requirements. For example -

X minutes of finished video * A MB +
Y minutes of finished audio * B MB +
Z minutes total runtime * C MB

Any such formulas out there?

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Blogging Jobs Careers

Fantastic post by Michele Martin - Blogging for Personal Branding. I would have titled it as Blogging and Your Career. After reading this, I think you will realize the value that Michele is bringing that I mentioned in Social Job Seeker Resource. While I focus on Tapping the Social Grid as a part of current work. Michele is focusing on using Social Media as part of your Career. They are not mutually exclusive, and in many ways, she's covering the more important topic.

At some point Michele and I will have to come up with how you can:

• Always be Learning
• Always be Networking
• Always be Helping Your Career

Now go over to Michele's blog and subscribe.

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Communities and Networks Connection

This is a great week for content communities. And there's a very interesting effect and a realization (aha moment) I've had about all of this that I describe near the bottom.

Yesterday, I was able to announce that I've been working with Judy Brown to launch the Mobile Learning Content Community.

Today I get to announcement that I've been working with Nancy White to launch the:

Communities and Networks Connection

For those of you who don't know Nancy ... She has been my go to person for all things Community for years. She helped me launch Work Literacy. And I'm very happy to have worked with her to get this site going. And have learned a few things along the way.

Nancy has posted a wonderful announcement of the launch. Some thoughts from her post:

This isn’t a community, and not as loose and open as a network. It is in that juicy place in between communities and networks that helps to collect and organize useful content from blogs and other web sites, from people who care about, and are passionate to understand these phenomenon we call “communities” and “networks.” The goal of this page is to create a place where it’s easy to find current and highly relevant content. And perhaps to stimulate a new connection between you and these brilliant people.

One of the wonderful things about the site is that Nancy is collecting content from sources outside of those that are Featured bloggers. I don't have time to go look at all the things that Nancy is finding. It's good to have a flow of them through the site. It's also good to know that I can easily get back and find interesting things.

If you go to my blog’s content page, Full Circle, the page shows on the left the keywords that I write about a fair amount. Keywords like Online Interaction, Technology Stewardship, Catalysts are all pretty good indicators. These same keywords are listed in the new widget in my sidebar provided by the site.

There’s also a page that shows the Best Content from Full Circle based on social signals.

The best part of this is this is not just about my content. In fact, I’m just a drop in the bucket. I’m not alone. There is quite a network that is participating in the launch - from people who are close friends and trusted colleagues, to interesting people I try and follow.

To me the inverse of this is true. It surfaces the best content from Nancy White and her network around these topics.

It’s fun to look at some of the differences in keywords for some of my fellow participants. For example:

• Ken Thompson is laser focused on virtual teams. One key word like an arrow in the center of a bullseye.
• Shawn Callahan of Anecdote covers collaboration and communities of practice.
• Eva Schiffer bridges networks and knowledge sharing, while Valdis Krebs is clearly a social network analysis and networks maven.
• Jessica Lipnack is a network networker, often hovering towards the center of virtual work and teams.

Another interesting announcement post comes from John Tropea - Library Clips - Communities and Networks Connection Blog Aggregator.

.... newbies to the blogosphere sometimes haven’t go time to immerse themselves and build a subscription of blogs they trust, this takes time, but it’s well worth it for personal experience. This also happens to me, I haven’t got time to find and build a list of sources for topics I’m slightly interested in, as I’m too busy on the topics I am interested in.

Anyway, for newbies and others, there has been a movement where this stage of finding and reading blogs on a topic has been made a whole lot easier. The blogosphere has matured and blogs on a topic have proved their worthiness (blogosphere self regulates reputation) and coalesced into one convenient space.

This is very true. It's hard to understand a single blog. I've been exploring exactly that in my recent post: Index Page. It's even harder when you try to understand a network of bloggers. I don't necessarily claim that content communities solve that problem, but they at least help to some degree.

Basically, it’s a convenient one stop shop daily read on what a bunch of bloggers are saying about Communities and Networks.

That's a pretty good summary - with the addition that it does help to surface content on specific topics within the space that have high social signals indicating that it's good stuff.

John then provides one of the better explanations of how it all works that I've seen:

How does it work?

Visit the website and in the middle is a stream of the latest posts from all sources. If you like reading content from the comfort of your own home then you can grab the feed.

On the right sidebar is a list of sources, clicking a source will display content from just that source.

Clicking on Library clips will show my latest posts (click for more), and if you scroll down it will show my “best” posts (click for more) based on social signals (kind of like PostRank I guess)

On the left sidebar we have a way to filter posts from all blogs by concept, tools, type, and year (a bigger picture is available on a page)

For those who want to just see posts about a tool like Twitter, or a concept like Collaboration, can filter to just these pages, or grab the feed.

And then you can filter some more, this page here is filtering to see all posts on Twitter, then filter again to see posts on Twitter and Communities of Practice, and you can keep filtering.

Now I’m not sure how these keywords/categorising work, but it’s a handy way to filter the content.

A really cool thing is that I can see all these keywords based around one source, so here’s a keyword page for just my blog.

Great stuff John!

Evolution and Effect of Content Communities

This has been an interesting evolution for me. Originally, Browse My Stuff (which is the current name of the underlying technology) was created to help me organize my own blog's content. It was so effective that I found myself wanting to organize all the content that I read - so I created eLearning Learning. In the process, it created something of real value to the blogging community as well as to people who encounter it from outside.

Then I realized that there were people like me in other domains: Judy Brown - Mobile Learning, Jay Cross - Informal Learning, Nancy White - Communities and Networks - they could do a similar thing to help their network and help someone like me who is outside the network, but interested in it. I have these three resources that I can get a regular stream of and can easily navigate to find good stuff when I need it. Thanks, Jay, Nancy and Judy.

Who's next?

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Tapping the Social Grid - Free Webinar

I'm going to be doing a free webinar with Mark Sylvester of IntroNetworks that's about Crowdsourcing in the Small and Social Brain. Hat tip to Virginia Yonkers for calling it the Social Grid. I'm still not sold on the term - but the concept is very important. This should be a very interesting discussion.

Tapping the Social Grid

Date: Friday, February 27th
Time: 9 - 10 am PACIFIC, Noon - 1 pm EASTERN

Register Here

Over the past 20 years, knowledge work has been transformed by the explosion of information sources and information flow. This has caused fairly radical changes in core work tools and methods. But the bigger and more profound change is the radically increased accessibility of experts and expertise around the world.

A social grid has formed that provides concept workers new work methods. It allows a worker to get help on particular concept work tasks by crowdsourcing in the small - tapping into the social grid for assistance. The challenge is that the social grid is new and changes all the time. The methods and norms for tapping into the social grid are often not well understood by concept workers.

In this talk, Dr. Tony Karrer will look at the places where the social grid is so important for concept workers. He will show an over the shoulder view of a modern knowledge worker tapping into the social grid. Tony will then discuss the implications and possible actions for individuals and organizations because of the social grid.

About Tony Karrer

Dr. Tony Karrer is CEO/CTO of TechEmpower, a software, web and eLearning development firm based in Los Angeles, and is considered one of the top technologists in eLearning. He has twenty years' experience as a CTO. Dr. Karrer taught Computer Science for eleven years. He has been the acting CTO for several start-ups, most notably eHarmony. His work in social media, e-Learning and Performance Support has won awards and has led him into engagements at many Fortune 500 companies including Credit Suisse, Royal Bank of Canada, Citibank, Lexus, Microsoft, Nissan, Universal, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, Fidelity Investments, Symbol Technologies and SHL Systemhouse. Dr. Karrer was valedictorian at Loyola Marymount University, attended the University of Southern California as a Tau Beta Pi fellow, one of the top 30 engineers in the nation, and received a M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science. He founded Work Literacy, created eLearning Learning; and is known for his blog eLearning Technology. He is a frequent speaker at industry and academic events.



This should be an exciting conversation - don't miss it.

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Mobile Learning Content Community Launched

I'm happy to announce that Judy Brown today officially launched the Mobile Learning Content Community. This uses the same technology behind eLearning Learning.

Judy is THE person I have gone to for years for anything having to do with mobile learning. It's great to have her pull together content and bloggers into this community. In other words, Judy is marking good content she comes across as well as bringing in content from top bloggers in the space such as: Cell Phones in Learning, Golden Swamp, mLearning is Good, mLearning-World, mLearning: beyond the digital divide, mLearnopedia Blog, Mobile Commons, MobilED, MobileDot, moblearn, and uLearning Blog.

I've personally not subscribed to these individual blogs, but I've just subscribe to the feed from this site in order to have Judy continue to feed me good stuff. Thanks Judy!

By the way, if you ever have a chance to attend one of Judy's sessions where she shows examples of mobile learning - you should definitely go.

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Video-Based eLearning Authoring Tools

I've been asked several times a similar question so I thought I would throw it out to see what readers here will recommend for doing basic video-based elearning authoring.

The situation is that they have five, two-hour training videos (10 hours total). It's currently used as a watch and then answer these questions experience. The topic almost doesn't matter, but assume it's Safety Training. They would like to convert this to self-paced eLearning.

The currently planned design is to chop the video up into relatively short segments, put in questions in between the segments as knowledge checks, and then have a graded exam at the end. Thus roughly:

Video Segment -> Questions -> Video Segment -> Questions -> Exam

They do not have an LMS, but they need some kind of reporting. Currently, they use Camtasia and have it email results at the end of quizzes. They are happy to continue to do that. They would also be happy with having some kind of system to collect all the results together into something similar to a spreadsheet. They do not want an LMS because of some false starts and perceived complexity.

Other factors -

• Need an inexpensive solution, but does not need to be free.
• Should be an easy to use and easy to maintain solution.
  
• May outsource some of the production work, but the tool must be an off-the-shelf, known authoring tool - no proprietary tools (see eLearning Course Development for rationale on that)
• Their only experience is with Camtasia. No real video editing experience.

What would you recommend?

Other posts related to this topic:

• Safety Training Design
• Starting Authoring Tool
• eLearning Course Development
• eLearning Course Authoring Tools Satisfaction - More
• Articulate, Captivate, and Lectora Tops in Authoring Tool Satisfaction
• Course Authoring Tools and Rapid Authoring Tools Satisfaction
• Use of Wikis as Compared to Authoring Tools
• Rapid Authoring Tools
• Shift in Authoring Tool Use from Pure Courseware towards Reference Hybrids
• What is Rapid eLearning? and Rapid Authoring Tools?
• Rapid eLearning Tools

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Content Quality

When I do sessions on eLearning 2.0, I often will ask for the audience to provide a list of barriers or risks. Often the audience is quite good at identifying all the things that may go wrong or that will prevent them from doing any of this. And quite often one of the first concerns listed is content quality.

If I allow people to edit a wiki, how will I know it's good quality?

To me this is one of the more overstated risks. Yes, someone could post something wrong on the wiki, but they likely are already putting that same information in emails and IMs. At least on the wiki you can get correction. If you are really concerned, you can moderate. The reality is that in most cases it's safer to make things fairly public than to allow them to be hidden until the subpoena. Plus you can rely on human nature ...

Consider what recently happened when Training Zone published a laughable article - The elearning diet: Not recommended for long term results. I understand why they did it. Controversy gets views and links. Look at the number of views as compared to other articles on the site. It worked. This article is getting lots of page views. Except that whatever belief we might have had in any kind of editorial quality just evaporated. Unsubscribe and subscribe instead to any quality blogger such as Clive (read his response: E-learning: the fad that's lasted 30 years). Where's the quality? The publication? Or the blogger? Sheesh.

But back to the response that the article got - lots of views and comments. Their most popular by far. Why?

People (especially employees) enjoy the opportunity to find things that are wrong, tell you why its are wrong, and maybe correct them.

This natural instinct is the best solution to poor quality content.

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