learning

Loving lurkers

I couldn’t agree more with Mozilla’s Laura Hilliger:

We can’t force people to participate, and if we really care about educating people, we shouldn’t try. We should build and design for the people who are participating, and we should be careful to ensure that the lurkers feel welcome. We should create safe spaces of learning and mentorship where even those who don’t complete the call to action still start to develop trust in us, in our products. The fact is you are always a lurker before you participate, so we should be careful not to push people away by implying that they don’t count if they aren’t like us. If we work to love our lurkers, maybe some of them will find their reason to participate.

Digital learning materials – any point to video?

Here’s one you can all help me with. When putting together learning materials – particularly aimed at a public sector audience – what’s the best format to use?

More specifically – is there any use in using video? Problems with video in the office include:

  • lack of sound cards / speakers / headphones to hear them
  • lack of access to video hosting sites
  • lack of bandwidth to download them
  • …and so on

For a couple of projects I’m looking at putting together learning resources for people about digital “stuff”, and I am leaning towards just writing lots of blog style bits of text with screenshots, rather than going down the screencast or video route.

It makes it chunkable so people can learn in bits if they choose, and of course text and images are a pretty universal, low bandwidth means of content delivery – they will work fine on whatever screen size, and won’t take ages to download.

Plus, by adding a social element, enabling people to talk about the content and discuss it in the context of their own work and projects, that will help embed the learning a little more.

What do people thing?

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