• Phrases in capitals
• Hyphenated phrases
• Heading case inconsistencies
• Numbers in sentences
• List or bullet punctuation
• Table or figure labels
• Spelling
• Punctuation in tables
• Capitalisation in tables
• Hyphenation of compound modifiers

The original article includes examples of each type of error along with details of how frequently they occur. I’m not at all surprised to see capitalisation topping the list – this is one of my biggest bugbears. I’m not a fan of excessive capitalisation anyway but, if you must do it, do it consistently!

The article does recognise that not all inconsistencies are errors – sometimes there is a valid reason for a phrase to be capitalised or hyphenated in one situation but not in another. Unfortunately, I suspect (and the study confirms) that inconsistencies are more often accidental than intentional.

This study was carried out by Intelligent Editing, the producer of PerfectIt, a tool which I haven’t used. However, I have had a play with their free online consistency checker. Upload a document, and it very quickly generates a report highlighting the type and frequency of consistency mistakes. It doesn’t show you exactly where the mistakes are, it doesn’t correct them for you, and it only checks for a handful of the common mistakes (for a full check of all inconsistencies, you need the paid-for tool; the site includes a comparison table) – but it’s a handy extra check.

Image: Nutdanai Aphikhomboonwaroot / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Here are my simple tips.

1. Give it a fresh look. I’m sure we’ve all written things, reviewed them thoroughly, and then noticed a mistake once it’s too late. In fact, I’d probably bet money on there being at least one error in at least one of these posts on QA. It’s all too easy to miss mistakes or imperfections in your own work, largely because you know it too well. The best solution to this is to get someone else to QA your work after you’ve reviewed it yourself. But if a fresh pair of eyes isn’t available, put the work aside (ideally for a day or two, but at least for a few hours) or transfer it into a new format. When you come back to it, you’ll be more likely to see the detail, rather than seeing what you know you wrote.
2. Consider TVF in turn. My experience is that it’s not possible to review everything at once. You can’t pay full attention to the spelling and grammar if you’re also trying to review the visual details. Likewise, if you’re focusing on trying to break interactions and check functionality, you’ll struggle to pay attention to the flow of content and the sense of the narrative. So I think it’s really worth doing at least two separate QA reviews: one to look at the textual element and the overall sense, and another to look at the visuals and functionality. It might sound laborious, but doing two or three QAs right first time is preferable to doing multiple iterations because your client picks up on mistakes you missed first time around.
3. Allow plenty of time. How long would you allow to QA a 60-minute e-learning course? There’s no right answer here, obviously, but my gut feeling is that around three hours would be right (if not a little longer). This allows enough time to review all three elements in detail, to flick backwards and forwards between screens as required to check consistency, and to log clear and specific details of all the bugs and issues found. This last point is vitally important, whether you or someone else will be making the changes – it’ll help speed up the turnaround of the next iteration without misinterpretation or error, and it also provides you with a detailed audit trail of changes requested.

My final two tips would be practise and spread the word! Next time you have a document to QA, make a conscious decision to set aside plenty of time to do it properly. Even better, ask someone else to set some time aside to QA it as well – and offer to do the same for them. By insisting on high standards and integrity in your own QA process, you’ll help develop a wider QA culture – and that can only be a good thing.

The idea of archetypes stretches back as far as Plato, with teachers and thinkers defining different numbers and names of archetypes over the millennia. As Pad’s focus is on performance, he’s chosen to hone in on just six archetypes which define the Team Me model:

• The Sovereign is a confident individual who isn’t afraid to take command and use their position of power in order to establish justice, prosperity and success in their ‘realm’.
• The Warrior is a capable, passionate individual who ensures boundaries are respected and enforced and whose focus is on getting the job done (and getting it done right).
• The Sage is a logical, rational individual who places a lot of emphasis on evidence and intellect, and who considers life to be about continuous learning and searching for truth.
• The Mystic is someone who can detach themselves to take a big picture view or adopt different perspectives, making them good mediators, skilled at managing change and influencing people.
• The Lover is a trusting, open and nurturing individual who values relationships, harmony and personal connections between people most highly.
• The Jester is someone who lives life like a game, avoiding boredom or monotony and always finding the funny side in situations, sharing their lighthearted views with those around them.

Pad explained that everybody has elements of all six within them, but some will be more dominant than others, as illustrated by a simple ‘personal profile’ bar chart based on 1-10 ratings against each archetype. The archetypes group broadly into two categories: those associated with left-brain logic or rationality (Sovereign, Warrior and Sage) and those associated with right-brain creativity (Mystic, Lover and Jester). We’ve all heard that ‘opposites attract’ and this applies to archetypes too – opposite archetypes often have common connections, for example in what drives them or their perception of time:

• The Sovereign works well with the Mystic, because both are driven by power and both tend to look ahead.
• The Warrior works well with the Lover, because both are driven by passion and both focus on the present.
• The Sage works well with the Jester, because both are driven by perception and both look heavily to the past.

Of course, everything so far suggests that archetypes are fairly one-dimensional. We might well recognise these profiles, particularly when we think of characters from literature, film or TV, but most of us probably don’t like to think we can be so simply defined. Pad acknowledges this with the notion of ‘the shadow side’: the idea that each archetype has its healthy, balanced state but also has the potential to become ‘overheated’ (an excessive caricature, almost, often as a result of their personal needs not being met) or ‘frozen’ (almost the antithesis of their balanced state, often prompted by failing at something despite giving it their best shot).

I found all this pretty interesting – and obviously this is just a taster of the Team Me model – but I do have some reservations:

• Although Pad does have a questionnaire he sometimes uses to help people identify their archetype profile, this often seems to be done simply by asking an individual how strong they feel each archetype is within them. I think I have two concerns about this. Firstly, I think I know myself fairly well. Yes, this perhaps provides a structured framework through which I can articulate that knowledge, but I’m not sure that a list of recognisable archetypes will really help me develop my understanding of myself. Secondly, what would help me develop that understanding would be something beyond my own perspective, a more objective exploration of my character – for example through a questionnaire or others’ views of me. For me, this would be a more useful application of the model.
• I feel a little bit ‘so what?’ about it all. It’s interesting to think about what my profile might look like – although, again, I don’t really feel like my personal profile as created by me is particularly valuable – and it’s fascinating to consider to what extent authors and scriptwriters draw on the archetypes. But it does feel a little superficial, a little one-dimensional. I’m not entirely sure what I’m meant to do with this information.

It’s disappointing, then, that the hour-long webinar had to (understandably) spend a considerable amount of time simply explaining the concept of the archetypes, leaving little time to explore how they might be used to transform personal and professional development. Pad made two suggestions:

• Mapping an individual’s personal profile separately from their professional profile, and comparing the two. For example, someone might consider the Lover to be their predominant archetype at home and in their personal life, but the Warrior to be more evident at work. Mapping the two against one another and identifying any significant disparaties can, Pad says, help to get to the root of performance issues and I guess lead to constructive discussions about strengths, weaknesses and development actions.
• Creating the ideal archetype profile for a particular role and using this during the recruitment process. This might involve asking candidates to rate themselves against the model and then mapping them against the role profile to see who is likely to be more or less suitable. There was some uncertainty about this on the Twitter backchannel, and I doubt Pad was suggesting that this be used as the sole recruitment tool. It’s not unusual for organisations to include some level of psychometric profiling in the recruitment process, and this is just another take on that.

I think ultimately for me this has given me something interesting to think about; like learning styles, right-brain/left-brain theories and MBTI (which, incidentally, Pad approves of but thinks is less easy for people to connect with) the Team Me archetypes offer a potentially useful reminder of different character traits and preferences when designing learning solutions, but I’m not yet totally convinced of the value of archetypes for really transforming performance. Maybe I need to explore it more deeply though to really uncover the value.

(I cheated a bit with Find 15 this week – after Learning Technologies and Performance Support conferences last week, there’s simply too much to reflect on and share. So I’ve been blogging in my lunchtimes and evenings all week, and used my ‘designated’ 75 minutes to attend and write up this webinar.)

Image: digitalart / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

This year’s Learning Technologies event was a bit different from previous years for me. In the past, working for a supplier, I’ve spent most of my time on the exhibition floor – although I gained something new from the experience each year. This year, though, I was able to really experience the conference as a delegate and a track chair.

Don Taylor and the team pulled off a bit of a coup with three impressive keynote speakers, along with a varied programme of topics and presenters. I’ve got pages of notes I want to look back over to help consolidate my takeaways and follow-up actions, but as I reflect on the two days there are three overarching themes that stick out for me.

• Creativity and innovation don’t just happen – they require a conscious effort and a willingness to challenge the status quo. We as L&D professionals have a responsibility to question, rather than accept, the way things have been done before and find ways to generate and drive forwards new ideas.
• We mustn’t lose sight of who we are designing learning solutions for – the users. It’s all too easy to give in to business requests for ‘click Next to continue’ e-learning or to allow dense, dry subject matter to become an excuse for ‘crapathy’. Keeping the end users front and centre in mind helps to deliver engaging, effective learning.
• Sometimes, a back-to-basics approach is the right one. Edward de Bono held a full auditorium in the palm of his hand armed only with an armchair, OHP and pack of coloured pens – demonstrating that, in a world of flashy gadgets and ever-changing technology, less can indeed be more.

There is no shortage of blogs and articles out there already reflecting on Learning Technologies 2012 (and I’ll be adding more of my own over the next few days and weeks). I’d recommend following Kate Graham, the event’s official rapporteur, to make sure you don’t miss the best of the bunch.

I’m interested to know whether the three themes that stuck out for me were the same for other people – do we all take away different messages from these events depending on our roles, interests and pre-existing ideas, or are there a few broad themes that defined the conference for all attendees?

If you were QA-ing a newspaper article, the review would of course cover spelling and grammar. But it would also cover factual accuracy, tone of voice, sources for quotations and so on. You’d probably want to check the headline appropriately reflected the thrust of the article, and that any accompanying photographs made sense with the story.

If you were QA-ing a dining table, however, there’s no proof-reading required. Instead, you’d probably check that the wood was in good condition, that the dimensions of the table top are suitable for the given number of people, that the four table legs were all the same height, and that everything was screwed together securely.

So, when you’re QA-ing an e-learning course, what are you looking for? It depends a little on the stage of the process: what you check at storyboarding stage will be slightly different from what you check once it’s built. But overall I think there are three categories of things you should check during an e-learning QA.

• Textual: This covers spelling, punctuation and grammar, of course. But it also covers accuracy – are all the facts and figures correct? Obviously the subject matter expert will need to check this too, but you should pick up any contradictions or any statistics that don’t add up, for example. Your textual QA should also cover the tone of voice – is it appropriate and is it adopted throughout the course? This is particularly important if more than one person has been involved in storyboarding. Finally, consistency: someone once told me consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative, but I maintain it’s important. Some learners might not notice inconsistent writing, but some will and it disrupts the flow and experience. Is the writing consistently UK or US English spelling? Are capital letters used consistently? Are bullet points punctuated consistently?
• Visual: This covers the layout, which should be user-friendly and clear, as well as more detailed visual considerations. Check every text box to make sure that no words or letters have been cut off, check that special characters are appearing properly, and check that different elements on screen are aligned appropriately and (yes, again) consistently. Check that all images are of a high enough resolution, that they support the message on that screen, and that any animations or diagrams are easy to understand. And, of course, check that the visual design throughout is in line with any branding guidelines.
• Functional: This covers how the course works. You should be checking that all interactive elements are easy to use and smooth – disjointed or stilted activities aren’t user-friendly. You should also make sure that all interactions have been translated correctly from the storyboard – that right and wrong answers are designated correctly, for example – and that any URLs launch the expected page. Finally, if accessibility is a requirement, this needs checking too, as does the interaction between the course and any system it needs to be hosted on or interact with.

So which of these three areas is most important when carrying out a QA?

That’s a trick question, of course: none of them is more important than the others. Every learner will focus in on different things so you can’t afford to have mistakes in any area – your QA needs to give each element equal attention.

Next up, I’ll share my tips for carrying out a QA of the three elements mentioned above in the most effective, time-efficient way.

(Subscribe via email on the right to make sure you don’t miss my next post, providing three simple tips for efficient, effective QA.)

I have to confess though – and I’m sure this won’t surprise anyone who knows me even a little bit – that I do enjoy QA. There’s definitely an editor inside me. I like QA-ing other people’s work most (because it’s much easier and more effective when you’re objective and not close to the content) but I’m pretty happy QA-ing my own work too, when I need to.

Regardless of whether or not you enjoy QA, however, it’s important and something that needs to be done. What’s more, it needs to be done properly – giving something a cursory once-over and ticking the QA box isn’t enough.

A thorough and reliable QA process will eliminate all avoidable errors or bugs before you send something out to stakeholders. This means that they can focus on content and design reviews and it’ll take fewer iterations to get to sign-off point. It also means you can rest assured that any rework required will be about improving and enhancing content and design, rather than fixing mistakes you missed the first time around.

Aside from the financial benefits, giving QA the attention it deserves helps you deliver high quality deliverables, which means happy customers who trust you. You’ll earn a reputation for integrity and excellence (either as an organisation or as an individual (and both matter)) and, because happy customers talk, you’ll benefit from recommendations.

There’s an internal benefit as well: a focus on QA helps to develop a culture of continuous improvement. Colleagues will help each other develop, challenging things and preventing complacency setting in and leading to carelessness. In my experience, high standards are infectious – if one or two members of the team set the right example and pick up even the littlest things, these good habits will spread and you’ll develop a true QA culture.

So I see six key benefits of a thorough and effective QA process and culture:

• You’ll achieve sign-off more quickly.
• You’ll reduce the time and money spent on rework.
• You’ll build trust and respect.
• You’ll earn a reputation for excellence.
• You’ll win word-of-mouth business.
• You’ll nuture ongoing improvement.

What’s not to like?

(Subscribe via email on the right to make sure you don’t miss my next post on what you should look for when doing a QA.)

Once I’ve attended a few more, I’ll try to share some of my tips for making the most of them. (In the meantime, take a look at David Kelly’s post.) For now though, a quick report of last week’s chat will do.

Before the tweetchat we were pointed towards a document summarising four learning scenarios of the future. These scenarios were the outcome of a challenge given to delegates at Business Educa in December, when they were asked to consider what workplace learning will look like 10 years from now. As Chat2Lrn put it: ‘taking a bit of time to look at some possible scenarios for the future will help us understand both the freedoms and constraints that we are likely to encounter in the years ahead.’

After initial introductions, @Chat2Lrn posted a series of questions at regular intervals throughout the hour:

•  On the scenario model, where do you see your organisation now?
• What will the world be like in 2020, economically, socially, technologically?
• What major changes does that vision suggest for organisations?
• What changes will be required for learning in supporting organisations?
• What opportunities open up for learning to add value to organisations?

There’s a full transcript available if you want to catch up on the entire conversation, but here are some of the things that stuck in my mind most:

• Most of us seemed to be aspiring to the flexible, individualistc and enabled side of the learning scenario model. When it comes to distinguishing between a data-driven approach and a relationship-driven approach, the consensus was less clear. It seems our vision for the future is one where relationships and data are equally important.
• It seems inevitable that in 2020, we will be ‘on’ and connected all the time. The implications of this include if not the loss of a healthy work/life balance at least further erosion of clear distinctions between the two, and greater adoption of home and remote working. Near-universal connectivity and more non-office working in turn mean personal brand will become increasingly important, and managing that brand as well as ‘breaking through the noise’ will become core competencies.
• Agility was something that came up time and time again in the discussion. Businesses will need to become quicker at adapting to change if they are to thrive. The Towards Maturity 2011-12 Learning Technology Benchmark, Boosting Business Agility, takes a close look at this and how learning technology can help achieve it.
• Many people commented on the expectations of employees and learners in the future. Navigating the wealth of resources out there will be second nature to people joining the workforce, and they’ll expect to be able to make use of technology to help them work, learn and perform. They’ll expect more trust from their organisations and there’s potential for the role of L&D to become one of supporting, guiding and facilitating learning – helping people do it themselves, rather than delivering it to them.
• On the other hand, many contributers pointed out that 2020 isn’t really that far away and that we’re perhaps being a little over-ambitious. Many of the things we’re talking about (like a focus on performance rather than learning, and more peer learning than top-down learning) we’ve been talking about as an industry for years. Realistically, can we expect big corporates to loosen the reins, remove the firewalls and allow employees the freedom to determine their own technology-enabled learning within that timeframe?
• The last question prompted some really interesting responses. For example, we have an opportunity to really position learning as part of the workflow (rather than as an interruption to it), and to be (and be seen as) the people who improve workplace performance. This made me think of Don Taylor’s recent article about what we in L&D really do, and his conclusion that we’re the people who make it possible for organisations to deliver on their promises.

All in all, it was a fascinating discussion. Some challenging questions, a fast-moving conversation to follow, and a lot of food for thought – I’m still mulling over many of the questions and responses, and am looking forward to finding out what the next Chat2Lrn topic will be.

Image: digitalart / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Up till now I’ve probably taken a fairly inefficient approach to managing my various online sources of inspiration and information. I used Google Reader to collate all the blogs I’ve ever been interested in, and marked anything I wanted to come back to again as ‘unread’. I used Hootsuite (on the computer) and Tweetdeck (on my phone) to help me manage my Twitter feed, with separate columns for mentions, direct messages and any searches or backchannels I was following. If a Tweet included a link to something I wanted to look at later, I emailed it to myself. (I’m not sure why, but I’ve never really got into ‘favouriting’ Tweets.) I also emailed anything else I found online that I was interested in to myself, again marking them as ‘unread’ to keep them near the top of the pile. And I used Evernote to draft and store blog posts.

That’s a lot to keep track of, and I decided last week was the week to do something about it.

First of all, I tackled Google Reader. I deleted subscriptions to blogs I tend to skim over rather than read or to blogs that haven’t been updated for a very long time. I then sorted the remaining subscriptions into four categories: L&D, presenting, writing/blogging, and entertainment. Finally, I took the time to go through everything I’d marked unread because I had intended to come back to it in more depth: anything that was no longer of relevance or interest, I marked as read; anything that I still wanted to explore, I emailed to my Evernote account.

Evernote itself was my next target. I got rid of all the notes that were just one-liners I jotted down, initially blog post ideas but now fairly meaningless for various reasons. Everything that was left got cleaned up into three notebooks (draft posts, ready-to-publish posts, and published posts) and I grouped these three notebooks under the heading ‘Good to Great’. I then added four new notebooks, corresponding to my four Google Reader categories, and grouped these under the heading ‘To read’. Now, whenever I see a Tweet or blog post that I want to come back to later, I email it to one of these four notebooks in Evernote. I also have an Evernote notebook dedicated to recording (very briefly) what I do with my Find 15 slot each day.

All in all, I’m trying to make Evernote my personal development centre, rather than having numerous emails-to-self, unread Google Reader articles and open browser tabs. I’m sure this more streamlined approach, as well as having inspiration and reference material in the same place I draft my blogs, will really help me maximise my daily 15 minutes set aside for personal development.

(Everything I’ve described above I did during my Monday and Tuesday Find 15 slots. I used the time on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday to draft and polish this blog post and my last one, about the use of language in learning design.)

Image: digitalart / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Academia instills a different mindset, certainly in my experience, and so my undergraduate essays were formal in register and complex in sentence structure: that’s what was (rightly or wrongly) expected. But since entering the world of business communications, I’ve been converted. I now think that most situations call for a back to basics approach to writing.

I think it’s absolutely right that school teachers encourage pupils to find more interesting and descriptive replacements for ‘nice’ and ‘said’ and ‘get’. It builds vocabulary and encourages an appreciation for (if not necessarily a love of) creative writing. But while I’m all for e-learning scripting to be approached more like a creative writing exercise (within reason), I tend to think that in many – if not most – cases, those plain and simple words we were trained out of as children are just right for the job.

That’s why I was really interested by the results of a study by language consultancy The Writer. My impression is that this wasn’t a particularly extensive study (you can read more about how and where they gathered these results in their original blog post) but it’s interesting nonetheless. Essentially, the study supports The Writer’s belief that there are some words we use in written communication that just don’t crop up in speech. They compiled a short list of words that are found many more times in the written word than in the spoken word, and their counterparts that are much more commonly used in spoken English. Words like ‘purchase’, ‘obtain’ and ‘receive’ are replaced by ‘buy’ or ‘get’ in speech, for example.

What’s particularly interesting is that, as far as I can tell from The Writer’s summary of the study, this research is not based on any particular type of writing or speaking: it reflects global usage (global in the sense of genre, rather than geography). There’s no second list of the words most commonly used in spoken business situations, for example. This means that ‘get’ is used by speakers in situations ranging from playground chit-chat to board room presentations, and from dinner party conversations to politicans’ speeches. And if it’s good enough for world leaders, it’s good enough for learners.

So let’s get back to basics when writing for e-learning and close that vast, unnecessary divide between the way we talk and the way we write.

Image: sheelamohan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I’ve got a few other goals for the year – related to my Greek lessons, house-buying and the usual health and fitness things – but these two resolutions require daily or weekly commitment and lend themselves to online tracking of my progress.

365 Project

Firstly, I’m going to post a daily photo on 365 Project. This resolution was inspired by Karyn Romeis, who joined 365 Project last year and whose photos I looked forward to every day. I don’t know anything about exposure or shutter speed or composition. I have two cameras – neither particular fancy: one which I carry around with me most of the time and a slightly bigger and better one which I take with me if I’m going somewhere that’s likely to be particularly photogenic. But more important, I think, than my technical ability is my enthusiasm.

I’ve always loved taking and looking at photos. I remember the joy I used to get from opening the wooden chest my parents kept their photo albums in and looking at pictures from their wedding or their pre-children holidays, or at the ‘baby books’ my mum made for us (scrapbooks of hospital bracelets, first drawings, special birthday cards and photos documenting our lives right up to graduation). I don’t remember how old I was when I got my first camera, but I had shoeboxes filled with blurry snaps of my sisters upside down on the climbing frame, of every trip to the zoo and of my friends and I as teenagers wearing face masks and pyjamas at sleepover parties.

Now those shoeboxes are replaced with my own albums and scrapbooks dedicated to particular things – the year I spent living in France, or my time at university, for example. At the end of my hallway are four framed and treasured photos of special places I’ve been: le petit jard next to my flat in France, where I used to go to read, work or clear my head; the misty path I climbed up Kota Kinabalu in Malaysia; the view from some cultural site or another on the last day of a long weekend in Milan with my sisters, on one of our ‘sister bonding’ trips; and a picturesque set of steps in Granada, taken on my 22nd birthday during a family holiday which was also the week I made, and had accepted, an offer on my very first home.

Having photos of special people and places, and even of quite ordinary, uneventful occasions, is important to me and brings me a lot of happiness. So the pictures I upload to 365 Project this year may not be the most technically-accomplished, but they will provide a record of my year and something for me to look back on. And there will no doubt be some memorable things to record: my youngest sister will graduate from her masters degree, my brother will become a teenager, my other younger sister will get married, the Olympics will take place practically on my doorstep, my godchildren will be turning two, and my other half and I will (hopefully) be buying our first shared home together.

Find 15

Secondly, I am going to try out the Find 15 approach to my personal development, inspired by Julie Wedgwood. I first heard Julie speak about this programme at Learning and Skills back in June, but it was reading her more detailed description of it in November’s Advance article from Saffron Interactive that really made me think about giving it a go myself. It tied in with something else I was thinking about at the time, which was how I might share more of my personal learning with my online network.

Julie’s Find 15 initiative is simple: take 15 minutes each day (or 75 minutes each week) during which to focus on your personal development. This isn’t difficult, really, if you think about how many minutes you spend chatting while making cups of tea, for example. You might work through a chapter of a reference book, participate in a webinar, search blogs and wikis for advice and best practice in a particular area, watch a YouTube video or listen to a podcast. Most importantly, you must record how you spend the 15 minutes and what you believe you’ve gained from it.

I often find myself catching up on Tweeted links or blogs in Google Reader over my lunchbreak, making a note of those I might want to return to for a more detailed review, and really just creating an ever-increasing list of useful resources which I often don’t get round to exploring in depth. I’m hoping the slightly more structured Find 15 approach can help me become more efficient in my personal development – and my intention is to report back on what I’ve done in and gained from my Find 15 slots at the end of each week.

Something for 2013?

Just this weekend I came across another great idea for personal development called 12 in 12. This involves committing to doing something new each month, and doing it every day of that month. I think this is a brilliant initiative but have decided it’s not right for me this year – but thought it was worth sharing in case it strikes the right chord with anyone else.

Happy new year!

Image: digitalart / FreeDigitalPhotos.net