For this week’s Featured Five post, I’ve chosen five free movies from our library that emphasize efficient, organized, collaborative communication. Sometimes this means formatting your work so that people can find and use it easily, sometimes it means presenting your data in a visually organized way so that people can immediately comprehend it, and other times it means effectively using the features of your software application that are designed to help you track important collaborative notes. At the heart of it, it’s always about communicating in an organized way to make your work more efficient and your projects more successful.
1. Communicating effectively and efficiently with colleagues
Good organized communication is critical for collaboration. In this movie from chapter four of Effective Meetings, Dave Crenshaw discusses the importance of the one-to-one meeting, and why establishing one-to-one meetings can not only increase effectiveness, but efficiency as well:
2. Choosing your favorite images to share from a photo shoot
Lightroom is a great program for developing your digital photographs, but it also has a lot of pure organizational power that you can use to find just the right image you (or someone else) are looking for. In this movie from his new course Photoshop Lightroom 4 Essentials: Organizing and Sharing with the Library Module, Chris Orwig shows you how to use Lightroom’s built-in ability to quickly tag photos with picks, rejects, star-ratings, and colored flag labels. Then, once you have using notations and labels down, you can use your tags to quickly find the photos you want to share:
3. Sharing complicated information visually
Sometimes complicated information is best initially understood and communicated with graphics. In this movie from chapter one of Infographics: Visualizing Relationships, Shane Snow walks you through the infographic creative process and demonstrates setup on an infographic example that contains 24 entities, or ‘characters’ as he calls them:
4. Documenting your audio post-production session in Pro Tools
Creating a film or video with a lot of moving parts takes clear, documented communication. In this movie from chapter three of Audio for Film and Video with Pro Tools, Scott Hirsch takes you though the preparation and documentation process that makes a meeting between the film’s director, producer, music composer, and other creative forces effective. This meeting is called a spotting session, because its purpose is to spot exact points in the video where sound ideas can develop:
5. Making your web site accessible to improve human and computer communication
One main reason to have a web site is to communicate efficiently with others—and with web technology, that means being able to communicate across a multitude of platforms and interfaces in a language that is clear and easy for humans to understand. In this movie from chapter one of Improving SEO Using Accessibility Techniques, Morton Rand-Hendrickson demonstrates the communication benefits of implementing strong web site accessibility practices that will improve your SEO, and your human-to-human communication:
What other things have you learned on lynda.com about getting files, people, or entire groups organized? Are there any areas you’d like to see us explore in more depth?
Are you feeling inspired to explore more content? Remember, 10 percent of all lynda.com content is free to try. Just click on any of the blue links on any course table of contents page in our library.
See you back next week with five more free selections!
Suggested courses to watch next:
• Effective Meetings
• Improving SEO Using Accessibility Techniques
• Audio for Film and Video with Pro Tools
• Infographics: Visualizing Relationships
• Photoshop Lightroom 4 Essentials: Organizing and Sharing with the Library Module
