When I was a kid, the whole world was one giant “Learn-O-Rama.” For the most part (outside of the standard classroom), I picked what interested me and learned my way through it. It was a nonlinear process, much like a bloodhound follows its nose to sniff out new information.

Nonlinear learning suggests that how we work our way through information can itself contain information, and frame our learning. “It’s the road not the destination,” said Jared Bendis, a multimedia developer who works and teaches in the area of nonlinear multimedia storytelling at Case Western. This may seem like a new concept to many: the idea that the learner chooses the sequence in which they learn new material.

But the idea on nonlinear learning isn’t new. It’s been discussed in the literature for some time. It’s only in the past few years that tools have emerged to take advantage of a nonlinear approach and put it within reach of educators, not just programmers (remember Macromedia Director and Toolbook? Yikes.) One tool we’ve discussed here before is Pachyderm, a multimedia web-based authoring program that creates highly interactive flash presentations without having to be an Adobe Flash programmer. (See Chris’s Pachyderm post.)

Most online learning remains linear with learner choices limited to “next-page-previous-page.” What nonlinear learning offers is a model based on self-organization of ideas by the learner where, as Eleanor Duckworth points out in The Having of Wonderful Ideas, “the individual has done the work of putting [ideas] together for himself or herself, and they give rise to new ways to put them together.”

“Learning often takes jumps throwing new light on and affecting much that has been learned before,” says Dr. Uri Merry of the Institute of Organizational Consultation. “In learning sometimes a small input can have enormous reverberations. We learn with disorderly jumps between whole and parts, parts and whole.” (Nonlinear learning LO14329.) When you combine this nonlinearity with the power of these disorderly jumps in learning, you arrive at a place of wonderful chaos. The kind of chaos that made learning so effective and compelling to us as kids.

A nonlinear approach is not for every learner; there is evidence that learning styles can predispose a learner toward or against it. And some material is intrinsically linear, as in step-by-step procedural knowledge. But the potential for a nonlinear approach to impact e-learning is too good to pass up as another tool to add to the mix. It all boils down to the potential for nonlinear multimedia storytelling. But that’s a story we’ll take up at another time.

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Don’t look now, but perhaps the next industry to be undone by robots is education. OK, maybe not.  After watching a video clip of the HRP-4C’s Frankenstein-like ambulation, you can more easily conjure up images of terrorized children running out of their classroom when the new substitute teacher shows up with lesson in head.

OK, so visions of robot faculty may seem fanciful and far-fetched, but virtual “mediators” of E-learning or web-based environments have become more prominent as the technology behind avatars has become more powerful and affordable for the average user (US News story).

So, why the initial hesitation and angst when you hear “avatar”?  Perhaps it’s Clippy, the talking paperclip.

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We recently began a project called, “Mastery of Aging Well: A Program for Healthy Living”.  The funding for this project came from the USDA and the principle investigator and content provider is a very well-respected associate professor tied to OSU Extension.  From a very pragmatic standpoint, the PI’s stated goal at the beginning of the project was to take her content and represent it in a more compelling, web-based format that would incorporate multimedia.  This was an exciting prospect for our group as we have graphic artists, photographers, videographers, journalists, editors and a few instructional designers.  We chose to develop two separate tracks for the content: One option was what was termed “Tier 1″ and would represent a pared down version of the content and very little user interaction. “Tier 2″ would reside within OSU’s E-campus site and would cost the user a fee for access to this more robust set of media assets, i.e. videos, interactive games and other user-centric tasks that focused on knowledge retention and assessment.

So, after selecting Adobe Presenter as the most appropriate (and efficient) authoring tool to port the content into a web-based format, we began to think through some of the instructional design considerations for our baby boomer target audience:

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