New 3D & Wearable Devices for Learning

In 2014 we saw an explosion of suddenly affordable cutting-edge devices hit the consumer market and some learning designers and researchers are already bringing them into real and virtual classrooms.  If you missed out on some of these game-changing devices and what they might do for learning, check out the following 2-minute cheat sheet.

Note: Special thanks to Jim Cook & Jai Honeybrook-Carter at the Innovation TechLab at the University of Sydney, Rob Manson & Alex Young at BuildAR, and to the staff at the Powerhouse Museum for sharing their experiences, showing off their gadgets, and catalyzing change.

Trello's Innovative Approach to the Newbie Learning Experience

The project management program Trello is simple, powerful, free and highly recommended.  One of the secrets to their masterful design for both the user experience and the learning experience, is the fun and creative approach they take to progressive disclosure.  The idea of progressive disclosure it that you release information or features gradually rather than all at once so as not to overwhelm the user or learner.

In order to keep the experience of finding your feet in the program fun and simple, Trello shows great respect (and support) for cognitive load by removing some of its features for the first-time user.  As you gain proficiency rapidly by playing around with the features that are available, small contextualized hints begin to appear to suggest there's more to this program than you thought at first glance.  Click to add a due date, for example, and the calendar reads "enable the calendar power-up to see your project in calendar mode".  

Holding back on the calendar feature not only keeps it out of the way, thus allowing new users  to focus on the basics first, but also, positioning it as a "power-up" bestows the extra value of an exciting bonus feature. The game reference is also a nod to the user's progress in mastering the program since in games, power-ups become available with mastery.

Kudos to Trello for the creative mix of progressive disclosure and game style for a great newbie learning experience. 

Learn Design from Don Norman

Don Norman, author of the classic The Design of Everyday Things and my personal favorite,  Emotional Design: Why we Love (or Hate) Everyday Things (among many other books), has made his MOOC debut on Udacity.  You can now learn from a short and accessible intro to his ideas in the form of a free online course made up of videos,  reflection exercises, and design challenges...

Learn Strategies for Better Interface Design for Learning

Eminent eLearning Coach, Connie Malamed is also a master of graphic design in the eLearning context. I had the honor of being invited onto her podcast to talk about how interface designs impact learning. Her show is a gift to the industry offering a wealth of insight from experts in a broad range of areas.

In my interview, we cover the user interface, video, social learning and community building, how to cut cognitive load in graphics,  how to support visual perception effectively, and the surprising findings about emotions and learning.

Subscribe to her podcast or head direct to the episode 16: Strategies that Improve the Interface to Learning.

image source: WebIconSet.com

ThoughtLeaders Webinar - Interface Design for Learning

If you're curious about the book, I'll be doing a ThoughtLeaders Webinar with the eLearning Guild this February 12 (Feb 13 in Australia).  It's online and registration is free!  See the event page for more info.

Update:
The webinar video is available for free download with E-Learning Guild membership (also free!) at: hhttttp://http://htinyurl.com/n8nl9j5 

The webinar slides are now on slideshare at:
http://www.slideshare.net/DorianPeters/interface-design-for-learning-thoughtleaders-webinar

Interface Design for Learning - ThoughtLeaders Webinar from Dorian Peters

Sharon Oviatt Seminar: Future Educational Interfaces

Photo Credit: Anoto AB, Flickr 

Can we learn and perform better if we use a digital pen instead of a tablet, or a tablet instead of a keyboard?  Sharon Oviatt, leading researcher in educational interfaces will share her insights on how the unique affordances of various physical interfaces (digital pen, paper, multimodal, keyboard/mouse, etc.) impact how well people think, solve problems and learn with technology.  Not to be missed if you're in Sydney.

See also Oviatt's excellent new book on the topic, The Future of Educational Interfaces.

The seminar will be held from 11:00-12:00 with questions to follow,
Wednesday, 11 September at the CoCo Research Centre at the University of Sydney.  Full details here:
http://sydney.edu.au/education_social_work/news_events/events/2013/Semester-Two/impact-of-interface.shtml

Modern Art for Interface Designers

How can visual perspective be innovated to tell different stories?  When does a coin make a bad icon?  When does a bolt of lightening make a great artist?  Alan Blackwell of Cambridge University takes us on an insightful tour of some of the suprising lessons that link computer interface design and modern art...

The PBS Kids Lab

Best part of the job?  Playing educational games.
Take an online field trip to the the PBS Kids Lab on your lunch break today.   It's a great place to check out new developments in educational online games and mobile apps created by the long-time leaders in children's educational entertainment.

Get physical, situated and embodied with some of their delightfully web and mobile camera enabled experiments in augmented and virtual reality gaming for kids.  This big kid, for one, had a blast.

Visual Smarts - Science via Typography

Mumbai-based graphic designer, Kapil Bhagat has created a slew of divinely inspired posters in honor of Science Day in India.  They are a perfect demonstration of how much can be said with typography alone and with the simplist of lines.

Each poster is a visual puzzle based on a scientist and/or scientific concept and each is an absolute delight to unravel.

See all 8 clever posters

Elegant activism - Infographics at Bashir Watch

BashirWatch.org is an impeccably crafted site that succeeds in allowing users to explore difficult but important information in ways that add clarity and interest.  Bashir Watch is an organization promoting the prompt arrest of Omar Bashir, the Sudanese leader behind the genocide in Darfur.  There is a warrant for his arrest issued by the International Criminal Court for multiple counts of human rights abuses but he remains free. 

The message of the site is utterly to the point, and they take care to present users with the facts that back it up. They balance clean text and carefully selected imagery in a deliberately restrained way that never overwhelms. Like an increasing number of sites today, they have opted for one scrolling page, which makes it easier to casually move through more information without the "commitment" of a click.

But what's most interesting for learning interface designers are their information visualizations, including an elegant interactive timeline, which can be explored in multiple ways, and an interactive travel map with hotspots to drill down to detail.  Check it out (and sign the petition).

Extreme Accessibility - How to save lives with eLearning

Far from the typical audience of corporate or university eLearning, Thare Machi Education designs lessons on topics like human trafficking and cholera for learners who are extremely poor, mostly illiterate, totally unfamiliar with technology and speak hundreds of different languages.  How's that for a brief?

Graceful interface scaffolding - Learning from Letter School

Letter School, an app by Dutch game maker, Boreaal, is one of the several apps on the market created to leverage touch-screen advantages for supporting preschoolers in learning to make letter shapes.  Like the others, kids use their finger to trace and write letters of the alphabet.  

The animations and sounds in Letter School are delightful, but what I found especially notable was the app's excellent design for gracefully fading scaffodling (akin to seemless contextual help)...   

On Memory and the Life of Maps

There are so many childhood objects that leave indelible marks as one grows up, from the microscope that gives you a secret window into invisible worlds, to the medical kit which made you a superhero with the power to fix people.  In his articles, The gears from my childhood, renowned MIT professor and educational technologist, Seymour Papert, explains how playing with and loving gears gave him a conceptual model that lasted a lifetime.

Upon undertaking a mental hunt for influential childhood objects myself, I ended up in a kind of serenade to maps and memory.  Rote memorization is nearly tabooed in these days of Active Learning and Google access (and with good reason).  But what I learned from maps is that, perhaps, there's a modest place for it yet...

Paper still the cutting edge

Amid the carnival of EdTech excitement you'd be forgiven for forgetting that our digital technologies are still just tools, added to a bag of tricks that has accumulated over millenia.  Sure, there are some tools we'll probably never go back to (punch cards? slide rules?) but then there are the work horses that have survived for a reason, like pencil and paper.

Educational interface design researcher, Sharon Oviatt and colleagues presented a study ("Quiet Interfaces that Help Students Think") in which students working on math problems worked faster, remembered more, and made fewer errors on paper (regular and digital paper) than they did on tablet-based UIs.  The difference was most dramatic for low-performing students.  Some of their comments are telling...

Caution: Color, culture and convention

As designers of learning experiences, we know that color can have a powerful impact on learning. It can improve recall, understanding and appeal when used well. But it's easy to forget how culturally embedded color meanings are.  Americans, for example, can forget green is only the color of money in the US. While red indicates debt and downturns in the financial world, it's prosperity in China. And just as white is for weddings in some countries, its reserved for funerals in others.

Even within one region, different interest groups or industries may have different associations for color.  So, to avoid color faux pas, know your audience. Then check out a color symbolism list or book, or enjoy David McCandless’ cultural color wheel for an elegant visualization of the meaning behind colours in various cultures.

TocaDoctor - An Irresistible Ed App Interface

Toca Doctor is so gorgeous I had to blog it.  With its retro chic style, adults are transported while kids have the bright aquas, pinks and yellows to guide them through a collection of quirky doctor puzzles.  Move the germ through the brain maze and out of the nose, pull the thorns from a sore foot, or mop up and bandage an abrasion.  Instructions are clear, and function without words.  this app is delightful to use and is also a lovely example of how a restrained but vibrant color palette can be used effectively, even for kids.

The Institute for the Future

If you haven't already, head to the Institute for the Future (IFTF). Their site abounds with projects and infographics of interest to eLearning Interface Designers.

For example, they have a project on The Magic of KidsTech which shares insights on unique applications of technology, such as mobile apps, for kids learning, health and wellbeing.

Reknowned game designer Jane McGonigal is an affiliate, and she explores how games can be designed to foster profound experiences that change people and improve the world (see Evoke)

The IFTF also has a project on the Future of Learning.
Check it out.

Educational Apps connect learners with scientists

Educational apps can connect students with science and scientists with students in remarkable new ways.

Take Project Noah with its stunning interface and jaw-droppingly beautiful photos taken by volunteer nature spotters across the globe. This web community gives learners of all ages a unique  networked learning opportunity: Learn about animals and plants while you contribute to scientific research.

Learners scout their yards, parks or forests for animals and plant species, snapping photos on their smart phones along the way.  These spottings become part of a collected knowledge base on the location and movement of species that is invaluable to ongoing research.  You can even contribute to specific missions, like the international spider survey or the global schoolyard bio-blitz.  iSpot (sponsored by the UK Open University) provides the same opportunity with a focus on UK regional wildlife.

Crowdsourcing at its best, nature spotting is great for learners and scientists alike, but scientists are also giving data back to the crowd.

Stanford scientists publish their shark tracking data through the "Shark Net" app so that learners can indulge their passion for predators of the deep by tracking real sharks live on their iPads.  You can also read about their bios (the sharks, not the scientists), and manipulate 3D models of great whites like "Tip Fin" and "Mr Burns" while checking their stats.  It's like interactive baseball cards for ocean lovers.

The app is delightfully free, but they welcome you to contribute to shark research by pledging an app-sized donation which unlocks an extra shark: "Scar Girl".  How clever are these guys?

But don't take it from me, Asia who's 9 says "When I grow up, I want to be a shark scientist because white sharks rock!"  She posted that message onto Tip Fin's profile.

Two inspiring examples of creative digital learning experiences with excellent e-learning interfaces to seal the deal.

EdTech for kids - the tablet explosion

The LeapFrog LeapPad 2

 Apparently IT parents had to wrestle for their iPads one too many times, because the world is suddenly a fireworks display of tablets and digital devices for children, customized to be safer, cheaper and more educational than the parent version.  New learning devices open up opportunities for new learning apps and interfaces, and thus more exciting work for elearning interface designers.

Electronic toy manufacturers like LeapFrog and VTech offer dedicated learning tablets.  The LeapPad and InnoTab (now each in their second release) look and act just like real tablets, complete with dual-facing cameras and wifi connections. However (and I'm not suggesting this is a problem) they're limited to playing educational apps produced by the vendor (no Angry Birds!).  These devices are geared towards younger kids (ages 3-9) and at under $100, provide an option for parents who wish all that screen-time was doing some good.  

LeapFrog also makes the LeapsterGS, a handheld gaming device, like the Nintendo DS (aka. kid-mesmerizer) but again, this one runs educational games that you can download from the LeapFrog store or purchase as cartridges.  I can almost hear the millenial moms mumble... "He's been on that thing for 7 days straight, shouldn't we put it away?  Oh no, it's educational."

Welcome to kids computing

Once it's no longer cool to have a tablet with rubber corners or a princess theme, kids in the modern world can graduate from learning tablets to Android-based kids tablets.  Again, these are designed to be both cheaper and safer than a standard adult tablet and they are pre-loaded with access to learning apps, kid-safe music stores, and stuff pre-teens like.  

The Nabi Kid's tablet.

These tablets, like the Nabi and Meep!, retail at between $120 and $200 and rather than being tied to a particular vendor, have access to the range of Android apps available,  Angry Birds included. 

 Here's hoping the growth in kids computing will support a surge of interest, creativity and research into the design of effective learning interfaces.  

Of course more complex devices with short life-spans add to plastic and electronic waste, suck up finite resources and potentially decrease face-to-face interaction and physical play.  Nothing comes free.

At the same time, I think of the unique opportunities these devices may afford to children with disabilities.  The iPad and similar tablets have already proved to be life-changing assistive technology for kids with autism and other disabilities.  Tools like Nabi and Meep, which reshape the iPad experience into one that is more kid-appropriate and affordable, could prove to be transformative.  

Are there any kid tablets in your house?  

Are they an e-learning miracle or just more e-waste? I would love to hear your thoughts...

UX and UI for eLearning - Presentations online

The eLearning Guild recently hosted an online forum on Graphic design and UX/UI design for eLearning.  One of the highlights for me was the talk by Erin Sappington Kreb and John-Carlos Lozano of SweetRush.  Their slides were impeccable and their advice well communicated.

In a later session I presented a series of research-based guidelines for eLearning interfaces to a dynamic audience of instructional designers, managers and visual designers who made a wonderful momentary community, sharing ideas and experiences.

You can still view presentation recordings on the eLearning Guild Website.