Articles about the persona method in no particular order

• Personas and the Advantage of Designing for Yourself by Joshua Porter
• Persona Non Grata by Dan Saffer
• Personas 99% bad? by Peter Merholz
• Personas are NOT a Document by Jared Spool
• How to Create Effective Personas for You Projects, Part 1 and Part 2, by Ron Akanowicz

Maeda was writing about how the designers of the iPod no longer had to worry about technical issues and that their task was to create an “entire experience of delivery.”

Is it not enough to deliver content in any form whatsoever? Do we have to make an experience out of everything? I thought, is this true about e-learning? And what do we make of the presentation of content presently available in Learning Management Systems (LMS) or, to keep up with the latest terms, a Personal Learning Environment (PLE) (cp. Atwell 2007, PDF)? In other words, does simple or even simplistic design really matter in e-learning? Or would we rather have a full service package experience to make the learning experience more successful?

I’d love to start with a quote from Maeda’s article, which already points to the conclusion I want to make:

Yet in adding features to improve the user’s experience, there is a danger—people want more of a good thing: more colorful transitions, more icons that flip back and forth, and more options that can fulfill every possible fantasy. If we follow this trajectory to its seemingly inevitable conclusion, we could find ourselves asking a simple question of our iPod: “So, how do I play a song on this thing?” Just think of today’s mobile phones, which have “evolved” to the point that it’s not obvious how to make a phone call.

Is it not that we tend to loose sight of the main feature in e-learning by speaking and researching too much about the features we need for the administration of our students and the goodies they allegedly need? The main feature, I think should be the “learning” in e-learning and not the “e”. What Maeda always claims for interfaces in general, one might also claim for e-learning. The functionality of LMS and most CMS which are also used for e-learning purposes has to focus on ‘how to play a song,’ or, in our case, how to guarantee the learning success of the users. If this is agreed upon, we should try and assemble a list of claims for any e-learning environment.

1. Throw out the features which are an obstacle to the learning success. LMS tend to get stuffed full of features which require the users to maintain their accounts and messages and to have a look at their dates and deadlines (which they tend to overlook at times). They sometimes keep them from accessing the content.
2. There’s danger that a PLE might also become a Swiss Army Knife as Maeda puts it for the iPod. We are adding wiki systems, blogging systems, messaging systems to the already existing forums, chats and upload possibilities. Let us rather focus on the content that has to be delivered to the learner and then decide which technology can support this delivery. Wiki systems are great for the creation of certain kinds of text types, blogs are superb for learner diaries. But still, let’s not forget the expert teaching how to keep apart important from unimportant.
3. E-Learning should use the power of good web design to support and enhance the learning experience. Web design is not only about how things look good on the web. It is most notably about usability. The visual part only supports the usability. Thus, a well design learning environment—personal or not—can be the beginning of a better learning experience because the content is delivered without any obstacles.

Maybe it’s a bit unscientific to speculate about this only because John Maeda wrote something about the iPod. Therefore, I will keep up researching to prove my point .

There has been a lot of PowerPoint bashing everywhere, simply because you sit in presentations and people tend to make the same mistakes all over again. But what I experienced yesterday really took the biscuit. I was at some sort of ceremonial act for a new center for didactics in higher education at the university and four keynote speakers were supposed to give presentations on various topics. Ok, step back and think about the following words: keynote speakers, didactics, higher education, ceremonial act. Did you let them sink in? Keep them in mind for later, let’s move on.

They did just about everything wrong that you always try to get across to students who take your courses in which you try to tell them how to hold a good presentation. How it should be well structured and how you should only use PowerPoint if it really illustrates what you have to say and if it does not distract from what you are saying, among several other things.

Now, here is what they did.

The first one had created a PP presentation which was so full of typographical and design related errors that I can’t even begin to list them all. Think about indents, think about lists, think about picture quality, think about certain colors (red) on certain colors (green), and a lot more. Every slide was a different kind of mess. It either had been created in ten minutes or without any care.

The second speaker is out because he didn’t use PP. (It was actually the most pleasant speech I heard this day. Not least because he didn’t use PP.)

The third one had a quite pleasant selection of colors which mainly consisted of shades of gray. The slides were so crammed with diagrams, tables, lists, more diagrams and so on, that it was hard to follow the presentation because it took so much time to read the stuff. At least on the first two slides, because after that I gave up reading and listening. Additionally, the speaker sped up the presentation a bit to catch up some time the speaker before her had overrun. So she flipped through the slides leaving a trace of letters in everybody’s eyes.

The fourth speaker used Comic Sans throughout the presentation. Need I say more? I will, just in case someone will say, why is that so grave an issue. Using Comic Sans is a problem when you hold a presentation in front of two hundred people from the university who are either from the highest ranks in administration, or are professors, or are member of teaching staff anyway. Plus, your presentation is about a highly sophisticated piece of research, even if it’s got to do something with learning. It is not a problem if hold your presentation in front of two hundred ten-year-olds.

Ok, now can you remember the words I pointed out before? What does this tell us? All of these speakers have gone through the whole of an academic career, all of them were professors, and none of them cared to use PowerPoint the way it’s supposed to be used? Or let’s be less intentional: they didn’t know how to. Am I being unfair? Am I too picky when it comes to these things? I think not. Years after years we tried to teach our students how to do all these things right and now we are being confronted with staff that tries to teach staff how to do these things right and they fail to follow the simplest rules you need to know when using PP. This cannot be. Just take a little more time to follow rules or have someone else do it for you. Don’t be ashamed to ask someone.

This article has been posted in my personal blog on February 15, 2008.

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