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Microphones and Audio Information

I just saw a couple of comments on my post Recommended End of Year eLearning Tools Spending? that were asking about quality differences between a Blue Snowball mic and SHURE mics. While I wouldn't know the specific answer to this off the top of my head, I thought I'd show what I do to find a pretty close answer and some people who I could easily ask.

I start by going to eLearning Learning and then I search for something like audio which gets me quickly to a page that's a bunch of great posts and other items all about Audio in eLearning. The keywords on the left are highly related to audio as well, so I'll drill down to pages on Audio Voiceover or Audio Microphone. On the Audio Microphone page I scroll down to the Best of Posts and see a bunch of great posts:

Of course you could cheat and search just for Snowball and/or Shure and find some reviews. And make sure you read about creating the mini-sound booth shown below.

Recommended End of Year eLearning Tools Spending?

I received a question today that I really wasn't sure how to answer and thought that lots of folks might have thoughts around this. Here's the question:

I have some extra budget money and I need to invest in software and hardware that will help me create cutting edge, top shelf eLearning programs.

I already have these software programs:

Articulate Suite '09

Adobe Master Suite CS3 (Not sure that I really need to upgrade to CS4)

Camtasia & Snag It

Are there any other must have software programs? It has to work with Articulate of course! Free software is always nice but I don't mind paying for high quality products. I have still and video cameras, a mic and a computer ... do you think I need any other hardware items? I'm happy with my LMS, so I don't need help there.

I can't claim that many of us will face the problem of having a budget that we need to use before the end of the year. But I thought it might be fun to help someone else spend their money.

I realize that with this little bit of information, it's almost impossible to have the right answer, but I'm sure there are lots of interesting possibilities.

What purchases would you suggest?

Learning Power Laws

Great post by Dion Hinchcliffe - Twenty-two power laws of the emerging social economy where he discusses what Steve Balmer calls “the new normal”. Balmer talks about how a reset of economic expectations during the downturn has created an environment that is putting pressure on business to do more with less. Some of the specifics of this transformation are captured in the following graphic:

This is lines up really well with a lot of what I discuss in Business of Learning and Trends in Learning. The primary shifts he talks about are:

New resource constraints. Requiring that we find ways to accomplish our goals using fewer resources.
Value shifting from transactions to relationships.
Business flux.
Moving from change as the exception to change as the norm.
A shift of control to the edge of organizations.

Dion then goes through his 22 laws that are useful to understand what is going on with all of this shift. Several of them I regularly talk about:

Amara’s Law (backstory) states that "we tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run." – I cite this in Work Skills Keeping Up? and Adoption of Web 2.0 and eLearning 2.0 Revisited and often use this during presentations. It's easy to look at any one technology and go through a hype cycle. We first think, wow this will really change things. Then we realize go through a cycle where we think, it's not that big a deal. But over time it often has pretty incredible effects that sneak up on us. This describes a lot of what we see around web 2.0 tools.
Jakob’s Law roughly tells us that "users spend most of their time on other sites", and so you must be there too. This has big impact on us as it forces us to think about being in the flow of where the work and learning will occur. See eLearning Portal Integration as one example of this.
The The Long Tail which tells us moving from providing best selling products to a wider spectrum of offerings gives an opportunity for larger, potentially more lucrative market overall, if you can service it cost effectively. This is a common theme in my posts: Long Tail Learning - Size and Shape and Corporate Learning Long Tail and Attention Crisis.
Principle of Least Effort notes that they will tend to use the most convenient method, in the least exacting way available, with interaction stopping as soon as minimally acceptable results are achieved. This is important for things like Social Software Adoption.