The Podcast Challenge
Michael Allen is a very smart guy, and a leader in the world of e-learning. He knows the world of training and has spent a lot of time telling us how to use technology well to create successful knowledge transfer and the ever-elusive behavior change. I respect his opinions greatly.
That said, while he is making valid points in his article, he seems to focus on podcasts as stand-alone training, for the most part avoiding acknowledging that they could be used as part of a larger strategy. He does make a slight allowance for it in the end, but really plays down the role it could play. That’s disappointing to me.
Despite my disagreement with his focus, his points are excellent, though. What really got to me was the technical side of his ‘challenge’. He asks that you go to listen to a podcast he created and then answer a poll on his site. A fine concept (if not scientifically valid). The problem is that the podcast is only available on iTunes, which means I’ve got to install bloated, proprietary software to access it. How is that good usability? I’m not even allowed to install iTunes at work (and my IT guy keeps telling me to uninstall it every time he sees its “helper” process running in the background), so even if I wanted to - and I do - I can’t listen to it at work. It’s perfectly germaine to my job, so it’s not like I would be wasting time; he just put a technical inconvenience in my way that’s big enough for me to skip the whole thing.
And while I’m complaining about usability, I might as well mention that I really don’t like sites like his that set a defined size to the content area. A lot of sites limit the width of their content - I understand why they do that despite finding it annoying - but his site also limits height, which really bugs me. I have to scroll all over the place because he only lets me use at most 1/4 of my viewing area. Plus everything is crunched together visually. PLUS the whole site is in Flash, which makes precise bookmarking a challenge (though his setup does allow for more deep linking than other Flash sites I’ve seen).
By the way - a little bit of trivia: Michael once asked if he could quote me for his 2006 book. I had written a simple definition of e-Learning that he had liked, including some examples, on ASTD’s e-Learning discussion board (and now it seems that discussion has been deleted from the ASTD boards for some reason [ooo... and the Wayback Machine saves the day]). It turns out he didn’t directly quote me, but expanded the points I made and restated them with his own take. I’m flattered to have been in the draft at some point, though.
Technorati Tags: e-learning, podcasting, michael allen, astd, training, learning technology, education, usability
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