I read in The Wall Street Journal about a study that says the best way to rest and rejuvenate a tired brain is to take a walk, in nature specifically. It’s better than a walk in the city and better than just relaxing with a cup of coffee.

Being in nature, the research shows, helps your brain get ready to pay attention and remember things, and that sounds like a perfect state of mind for learning, eh?

If you’re developing e-learning that really has to teach, as opposed to simply “check the box”, I’m thinking you might add, “take a hike” to the list of your course prerequisites!

In this next clip, our video team literally got their hands dirty working for the Army Environmental Center. This video was part of a larger effort to communicate and assess the risks associated with finding new uses for former Army training ranges. These lands were becoming more widely available and our client needed to make sure that decision-makers and citizens were well informed about associated public safety and environmental issues.

Our team travelled to several former ranges, capturing the beauty of the lands and also learning about the technology used to remediate them. We interviewed policy makers and program managers as well as scientists and environmental experts and incorporated these viewpoints into the final award-winning video.

To learn more about the campaign, visit our portfolio page here: http://www.mindandmedia.com/aec-risk-com.html

As perhaps the first agency to respond to a June 13 directive to improve online services, the Energy Department just shut down a stand-alone news service site (energyempowers.gov), folding the content into the Energy.gov redesign. You can read about that on nextgov.

Collapsing separate, focused websites into larger, more general sites may not always be the way to go. Sure, it might, might save money, but at what cost to usability or to brand recognition? For example, when the National Center for PTSD was rolled up under the main VA.gov domain, not only did their acronym (brand name) vanish from their URL, but their specific content got surrounded by a ton of irrelevant VA content as their site got dropped into the VA content management system wrapper. That may simplify the VA’s Web presence, but does nothing to simplify the task of navigating that enormous site for information on PTSD.

Beyond usability challenges, moving several distinct programs under one single domain also brings up challenges with content management. One contractor may be creating content for a specific program office initiative, but since they don’t hold the web hosting contract of the larger .gov entity they can’t easily post or update the content they create. We run into that too often. Technical specifications of the primary .gov web server can stalemate a website that would, if allowed to run in another environment, be serving the public as intended. Instead, months vanish from the calendar while program offices and contractors, with no partnerships in place, and separate contracts to honor, negotiate which group must accommodate the other. Instead of focused, nimble contracts, and websites, the agency gets one giant, clunky website (plus one giant web hosting contract).

So while I applaud most efforts to reduce government waste and right the financial ship, I can’t help but hesitate when I read agencies are being encouraged to collapse sites, that might currently do a great job serving a niche purpose or audience, into often already super-sized .gov parent websites.