Quick Links- Comics and PENS

Two quick and mostly unrelated links to discuss.

Mark Oehlert references a great book, Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud, which I first saw back when I was working on training for the F-22 figher in the 1990s. Yes, even fighter pilot training can benefit from storyboarding, communication and visualiztion tips from comic art techniques. Anyway, Mark’s post Following up on the ‘learning as art’ meme – Let’s Start With Comics has some great links and a nice example of applying the principles to something as simple as a bulleted list. Check it out. I may even get an extra copy to circulate amongst the team for the current commercial aviation training project that I am working on now.

PENS (the protocol for simplified publishing of elearning, not the Rapidograph tools favored by comic artists), is getting more attention and support. I just noticed the current (du jour?) Wikipedia entry for AICC mentions PENS. Thanks to Google News Alerts, I learned that IBM customers are asking about PENS support in Lotus Learning Management System (LMS) or IBM Workplace Collaboration Services Learning on the support pages. Great to see that PENS is showing up on the radar of more LMS providers like IBM and Oracle (recently at an AICC meeting), and that the list of PENS supporters is growing. Getting a new standard going and accepted is tough work upfront, but it really catches on once a few early adopters see a competitive advantage to supporting it.