On February 12, Microsoft will be pushing an automatic update to PCs far and wide that will transform Internet Explorer version 6 into version 7. The blogosphere is abuzz about how to avoid the update if you want to and is asking how Microsoft can tuck a software update into what should be security updates. That’s neither here nor there to me. Why folks would purposely avoid the update is outside my lane. I leave that to IT units at individual offices and agencies. I’m actually kind of psyched to see it; perhaps less cross-browser testing is on the horizon!

See, browsers are not like televisions. Different brands don’t all work the same. Imagine being a video producer and delivering your product to a broadcaster, then stopping by Circuit City for the big debut. Wouldn’t that be a surprise if one TV shifted the picture out of frame while another resized the image to bizarro dimensions, and a third finally displayed the video correctly. Well, you could just produce three versions of your show, right? One for each kind of TV. That’d be a hoot. We may not have to generate completely separate products, but web developers do wrestle with a similar scenario.

Despite the best efforts of organizations like the WC3, browsers just don’t all work the same way. They don’t display content the same way. Pieces move or resize or disappear completely. Depending on the goals of your organization, those differences can have large impact.

The latest stats show Internet Explorer 7 holding 21 percent of the market. IE6 holds 33 percent, Firefox 36 percent, and then a steep drop down to Safari, Mozilla, and Opera. Notice the name Netscape isn’t even tracked anymore! Depending on your goals and audience, you may need to test your websites/applications on all of those browsers (not to mention platforms like Mac or PC) to make sure everyone is seeing the same thing and enjoying the same experience.

So how do you decide how much time and effort to put into cross-browser and platform testing? That depends on what you’re doing. If you’re facing a closed audience with predictable systems, you may be able to cut down on testing. For example, a DoD agency targeting an internal audience can feel pretty good about things as long as they’re targeting Internet Explorer 6 (until Feb 12?) and Windows XP. Meanwhile, that same agency may have a public-facing website, one offering critical information or training, one that could reflect on their image and mission. In that case, how accommodating should it be? Is it OK to serve up content that may look wacky on a Mac because it holds such a small share of the market? I’m happy to say that’s not my call. But I could help you think through it. And would you believe it comes down to time and money? I know you’ve never heard that before.

I will say this: There are standards out there, and if we stick to those when building, our chances for success are good from square one. Further that, simply having the experience and awareness of cross-browser/platform issues is another big advantage. Finally, it’s about paying attention your audience and making educated decisions. My decision would be to dump IE6. One version of that browser is enough for all of us.

Three great examples of the educational potential of new media:

1. This visual dictionary of 53,463 nouns in the English language on one page

2. This incredible video that gives a visual representation of the Civil War in four minutes (please Google it if you have trouble with this version)

3. This animation of the Bayeux Tapestry

Notice the effect in each case of the use of multimedia to compress time and space, relate the visual and the semantic, and give a big-picture perspective.

In the case of the Civil War, for instance, we’re given an instinctive sense of the relative length of its major stages that would be hard to get from a written narrative, as well as an animated representation of wins and losses as control of territory: the time between Lincoln’s inauguration, Southern secession, and the beginning of hostilities; the seeming border stalemate through the middle of the country that begins early on and lasts for most of the war; the significance of certain battles for the control of territory; the seemingly glacial pace of the North’s acquisition of territory, as it moves like an amoeba across the map, until Lincoln’s second inauguration, after which the rate seems to increase exponentially. Meanwhile we get a running tally over time of the war’s cost in human life.

The dictionary is the most obvious case of the relationship between visual and semantic meanings, since it both matches images to words and orders words by the relatedness of their meanings. So you might learn that “Jell-O” and (oddly) “substance” are semantically close and then go on to explore visual similarities or differences.

Finally, there are some good reasons to animate a representation of the Bayeux tapestry: for those of us who haven’t gone to France to see it, it’s nice to get something of the experience by video. But then we need some compensation for the loss of the power of actually being in the presence of a 260-foot-long 12th century work of art—especially one that is also a historical narrative of a central event in English history. Since in this case the new medium—video—is a barrier between the audience and its subject; it needs to overcome that distance by drawing on its strengths. One of these strengths is movement: but what’s needed is more than a long (and potentially boring) pan of the tapestry. The new medium must tell the story in a compressed space that the old medium unfolded along 260 feet. So it’s helpful to have both a long pan of the tapestry and an animation of its content.

Anyone hear that Giant Whoosh?

That’s the sound of the first wave of Baby Boomers leaving the ranks of the Federal Government. As reported by Government Executive magazine, 60 percent of the Federal workforce, and an even more alarming 90 percent of its executives, will be eligible for retirement within the next decade. That’s right, over half the workforce and almost the entire current leadership in Government won’t be here ten years from now.

Is this an impending crisis or a terrific opportunity? Well, both actually.

Certainly, the Federal sector needs to react quickly in order to compete for the future best and brightest—a job that will be made all the more difficult by the fact that there simply aren’t enough Gen-Xrs and Millennials to replace the departing Boomers. This is why I say that in the possible crisis lies a terrific opportunity, especially if viewed as an opportunity to redefine the role of Government and the way it does its work.

If the exodus of Baby Boomers comes to be viewed by Government agencies as both a recruitment challenge and an opportunity for transformation, then the problem takes on a very different and exciting dimension. Taking it a step further, a message of organizational transformation is also a great recruitment message, as long as it’s real and it’s serious. And since Government is already faced with a need to transform itself in order to do more with less, shouldn’t transformation be a big part of the message anyway?

I believe that if Government agencies communicate to an incoming workforce of Gen-Xrs and Millennials that they have an honest opportunity to help transform Government, it will make a big difference in their recruitment efforts. That kind of message will resonate with a new workforce that seems to deeply desire making a difference within and through the organizations they are looking to join.

What do you think?

A recent article in eLearn Magazine by Jane Hart, head of the Centre for Learning & Performance, delivers the results of a survey she conducted on the Top 100 Tools for Learning. I was pretty shocked at the results of this survey, to which 109 learning professionals replied. For some reason I wasn’t asked to be one of them (joke).

What shocked me? Out of the top 10 learning tools, none of them is an e-learning product! How can that be? We use several great tools to create a powerful e-learning experience, many of which earn us lots of client kudos.

The top tool, according to Ms. Hart, is (drum roll, please) the web browser Firefox (now imagine the sound of cymbals crashing to the floor). The rest of the top ten list included del.icio.us, Skype, Google Search, PowerPoint, Wordpress, Gmail, Google Reader, Blogger, and Word. Word? Really? PowerPoint I understand and could defend, but Word? Skype? I’m certainly a little confused here. We were talking about top tools for learning, right?

How does Ms. Hart defend these survey results? She says:

“Most of the tools are not dedicated learning tools, but rather ones that are being commonly used by people in their daily lives, which suggests to me that learning, working, and living are actually becoming one and the same thing. I believe that therein lies the enormous power of these tools for learning.”

Okay, I’ll buy that, but think there may be another answer as well. If you are developing e-learning, users really don’t need to know what tool was used to develop it. They just want something that works, that is effective.

Ms. Hart does mention many products that first came to my mind: Captivate, Articulate, Dreamweaver, and SnagIt. This is still just the tip of the iceberg, of course. Nowhere in the article does Flash come up, which is certainly one of the most important e-learning products to come along in quite a while.

So why was Firefox number one on the list? In trying to rationalize the thinking here, I could only come up with one good reason: Firefox is a more reliable browser to play back e-learning products developed in the programs that show up later in her list.

I can’t argue how important playback is for the user experience. As developers, we want to ensure a flawless user experience, and Firefox is just plain more reliable as a playback system. That I can’t and won’t argue. But I think we have to start recognizing the technology behind the mere means of delivery. There are so many great ways that e-learning is developed that maybe the next survey can be broken into development tools and playback tools.

Actually, l think I might develop that survey myself.

Sometimes it’s when you experience something that affects how you experience it. Timing is everything, right?

Today my friend, a fellow new parent, sent me to Gever Tulley’s TED presentation titled 5 Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids Do. Obviously that was meant to be taken for what it was, an enlightening commentary on countering the ever-tightening safety regulations that, to paraphrase Tulley, are essentially stunting our children’s educational experiences. I couldn’t help taking more from it, due largely to when I watched it.

There’s been a lot of talk around Mind & Media lately, and in the press in general, about the impending retirement of baby boomers. The federal government in particular is facing huge a wave of boomer-based workforce retirement, with a younger generation that just doesn’t have the numbers to fill in. In response, we’ve had agencies turn to us, as far back as 2003, to help recruit job candidates and train existing workers. After a few years of navigating those waters, I couldn’t help draw some comparisons to Tulley’s talk.

As Tulley tells it, we are ever-increasing the safety measures around our children to the point of immobility. Society as a whole is so concerned with a bruise-free existence that experimentation and experiential learning are stifled, and real breakthroughs in understanding and education are missed. Secure, sure, but stunted.

Back to the fed. They need to recruit and train to tackle an impending disaster. Online media should be the cornerstone of those efforts, but all too often agencies are cocooned in safety and security and watch-dogging to the detriment of the effort.

No hard data to back up this claim, but I’m certain that folks who access federal agency websites or intranets actually use the public Internet as well. They’ve heard of YouTube, they’ve seen a Flash animation, and they’ve listened to streaming audio. To pound it home, do you think 20-something college graduates may be familiar with such things? Graduates who may consider employment in the federal workforce? They live it. They expect it. They want to be engaged. And yet use of, and access to, the so-called new media is often outside scope for federal agencies.

Some examples: I’ve come across folks within federal agencies who want us to stream media for their audience but can’t access the media while at work due to policies that forbid it. I’ve had folks request we use Flash animations to aid in training, only to find that they are unable to install Flash player on their agency computers. And I’ve seen just-in-time online training get mired in months of legal review. Not so just-in-time anymore, eh? What’s frustrating is that they are workers in those agencies who get it and who want to evolve the media that is coming out of those agencies. It’s just an uphill climb.

Perhaps federal agencies are scared of new media or dynamic websites, what with viruses, bandwidth constraints, employees watching streaming music videos, and what have you. Maybe they don’t know how to leverage the technology. I understand the gargantuan federal government isn’t nimble, but a systemic shift in thinking is necessary if they are to compete for recruits or are going to effectively train the workforce that remains after The Great Retirement. Static doesn’t do it anymore. Static content doesn’t attract, engage, or help retain. It sure as hell doesn’t compete. Agencies may consider it playing with fire, but, hell, if we can let our kids do it, how bad can it hurt?

It’s time to let folks get dirty, get a little banged up. This is no time to be timid.