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.

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.

A few months ago, I mentioned an article by Tom Kuhlmann called “5 Myths About Rapid E-Learning.” It seems I wasn’t alone in being impressed by Tom’s take on the subject because now he has launched a whole blog on the subject.

Tom’s blog offers tips, tricks, and information about the world of rapid e-learning, a world that most of us are involved in as either developers or students taking e-learning courses. I am looking forward to Tom’s insights.