Knowledge Management > Learning Strategy > E-Learning > Flash
Evelyn Jeanette, or Evie, was born at 12:21 this afternoon. A very healthy 9 lbs, 10 oz and 21 inches tall… she has wavy brown hair and deep blue eyes. Mommy and baby are doing very well, and Daddy and big sister are extremely proud.
The next several postings to this blog will likely be authored in the middle of the night, likely in-between feedings 
Or at least it starts to.
From the site:
“Enkin” introduces a new handheld navigation concept. It displays location-based content in a unique way that bridges the gap between reality and classic map-like representations. It combines GPS, orientation sensors, 3D graphics, live video, several web services, and a novel user interface into an intuitive and light navigation system for mobile devices. Check out our web page enkin.net.
Charles Stross’ novel, Halting State is an interesting mystery/thriller recommended to me by Rovy Brannon back at Learning 2007, and the major technological device it employs is a world about 4 years away now where the phone is THE pre-eminent device that connects us to the internet. Bounded with glasses, the book shares an impressive vision of how Augmented Reality works in the context of gaming, commerce, recreation, work, productivity — everything.
Enkin looks a LOT like a predecessor to the vision Stross described.
Yahoo has a fantastic Design Stencil Kit in several formats, including OmniGraffle and Visio. I’ve recently started jumping on the Information Architecture bandwagon and found that visually planning out a web-based design with wireframes was not only helpful but saved me a bunch of time from the “let’s see what kind of layout I can code today” method.
As I continue to work on my pet project of building good SCORM content for the iPhone (just for kicks), this kit from Yahoo will be a big help.
As learning profressionals, we spend almost ALL of our time and resources cranking out new ways to motivate our audiences and design to make the content enriching, challenging, thoughtful and most importantly to enable the instructional goals intended by the production.
But what about the audience? Don’t THEY have a responsibility to themselves as active participants, even in asynchronous learning?
I point this out because a friend of mine (IRL - “In Real Life”) directed me to a website another buddy of his put together to share his lessons learned from smoking meat — barbecuing for long periods of time using smoke (hence “smoking”).
Here’s the link, but what’s striking to me is what happens after the jump:
Gary explains his rationale for the pledge:
What’s that? Terms seem a bit harsh? Well, here’s why I insist that you follow the 5-Step program as written before going off on your own. The 5-Step program is not so much about cooking any particular meat as it is about learning fire and smoke control. Once you understand that, you have the skills to cook any kind of meat. But it’s been my experience, from both cooking and being a member of BBQ oriented mailing lists (listservs) for the past 8 years, that when newbies try to mix and match advice from different sources, disaster is just around the corner. I am by no means saying that my way with the WSM is the only way. But I’ve found, without a doubt, that if one follows all 5 steps straight through they gain a damn good understanding of how to use the WSM—and will have learned how to prepare four different meats and enjoyed five damn good meals in the process, which is hardly a high price to pay for keeping your ego in check and following orders at the very beginning. Once you have the basics down, it’s fairly easy to cook BBQ better than 99.9% of all BBQ restaurants, and you are invited, heck encouraged, to do whatever you want after that point. But for your first five cooks, follow the program exactly—or don’t start it at all, and spend years screwing around and trying to figure out what went wrong, like I did.
I think the statement speaks for itself, but I’ll share my analysis anyway: You have a subject matter expert here, sharing lessons learned through lots of trial and error. There’s context, there’s relevance, there’s humor and personality — it’s good learning.
Thoughts?
Paul Artiuch at Wikinomics had a fascinating blurb today abouta recent OECD report that compared how many hours workers spend on average in a couple different nations, vs. their GDP. What’s interesting is that the technological capability edge by itself doesn’t look like the big indicator of GDP that productivity might be.
Artiuch writes:
The OECD numbers, however, show that this linear relationship does not exist. For instance, an average South Korean works almost 1000 hours per year longer than the average Norwegian, while enjoying half the GDP per person. Both countries rank in the top in terms of their use of advanced technologies – Korea might even have a slight edge in terms of internet and mobile adoption. Granted, there are many other factors at play including natural resource wealth, distortions such as wars, workforce participation rates and cultural norms. However, the differences are significant even between seemingly similar countries such as Germany and Italy.
I only mention this because one of the things that Pink and Covey hit at is that the indicators of success are the drive and consistency to keep trying. This is another piece of a performance puzzle that supports that if you have the drive and can keep trying more efficiently… well, to the victor go the spoils.
So keep cranking out that AS3, kids — and reuse the code that works as much as possible
Summary: If you want the all open source (for reals) SCORM 2.0 to address something in particular, get it in a white paper to LETSI by August 15.
LETSI, Learning Education Training Systems Interoperability, the international, nonprofit federation dedicated to improving individual and organizational learning, has taken on the task of developing the next generation of SCORM, the Sharable Content Object Reference Model. As part of this initiative, LETSI is soliciting White Papers from all stakeholders interested in shaping the future direction of SCORM and the implementation of learning systems technology.
Stakeholders in all parts of the education and training world are invited to submit White Papers concerning the technical and pedagogical requirements for future learning systems interoperability. The deadline for submission is August 15, 2008. The open solicitation was announced May 28th, 2008 at the SCORM Technical Working Group meeting, hosted by the Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative in Alexandria, VA.
The development of the next SCORM, the Sharable Content Object Reference Model, has been tasked to LETSI, a new international federation for Learning-Education-Training Systems Interoperability. LETSI’s goal is to advance innovation and adoption of learning technology across all market sectors and to support the use of open software standards in learning technology.
Open standards reduce life cycle costs and risks, and promote innovation. SCORM allows content developed in one system to be shared and fully functional within any other SCORM-conformant system. SCORM has been successfully used to develop sharable content in self-paced military training; automobile sales force training; healthcare professional re-certification; K-12 after-school tutoring in South Korea; and many other types of e-learning applications. Over the last decade, SCORM has become the de facto international software standard for learning systems interoperability.
SCORM 2.0 will include specifications and standards created and managed using open, transparent processes that are not encumbered by patents, licenses or restrictions that would impinge on its availability to the global LET community. LETSI will create an open source software community to support SCORM adopters and product developers. LETSI itself does not develop the component standards that go into SCORM.
“Given the demands for harmonization across international technical learning standards, Core SCORM will be based on unencumbered open standards to maximize market growth and global adoption and implementation.” — Paul Jesukiewicz, Deputy Director, Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative.
Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative (ADL), which has been the advocate and steward of the first ten years of SCORM’s development, will continue to support the SCORM community and will maintain the current version, SCORM 2004, 3rd Edition. LETSI was formed by the ADL and eleven other organizations to provide an international, balanced, open forum for SCORM development and to harmonize activity across the diverse communities that are investing in learning technology: public education, higher education, for-profit education, military training, professional development/certification, corporate training, and on-the-job performance support.
To accommodate these diverse market needs, SCORM 2.0 will have two components:
SCORM 2.0 will have a modular, extensible architecture that will allow specific communities of practice to adapt and extend the model with functionality and innovations that are important for their particular situation (e.g., a new medical simulation standard or aviation-industry specific metadata). LETSI will play the leadership role in publicizing such extensions and will consider them for future inclusion in SCORM.
In mid-October, LETSI will host a 3-day SCORM 2.0 Workshop where participants will discuss alternative future learning technology solutions. The results will be incorporated in the next release of SCORM, which LETSI will announce at year’s end. It is expected that new products that are SCORM 2.0 conformant will begin to appear in late 2009.
LETSI is sponsored by a dozen organizations with commitments to SCORM and to the development of open learning technology standards. LETSI is organized as a program under the IEEE Industry Standards and Technology Organization. For more information about LETSI, please visit: http://www.letsi.org.
LETSI’s White Paper Solicitation is available here.
For more information about the white paper solicitation and the SCORM 2.0 Workshop, visit: http://www.letsi.org/SCORM2/
Last week, I finished a two-day class on the 7 Habits for Managers (the FranklinCovey class). I’ve been down this path a few times having attended Leadership Forums a few times, reading through 7 Habits way back in college and the 8th Habit a few years ago. It’s all good stuff, but I entered the class a bit reticent that I wasn’t going to have any big a-has about myself having been through this material before. I was wrong.
On Saturday night, I saw Crowded House perform. This event provided an epiphany that I will attempt to relate in my normal, long-winded and winding manner.
As a former music major and the writer of many many cheesy love songs back when I lazily pursued musical ambitions, I appreciated many torch singers. I knew a handful of Crowded House songs and I like those songs. I’d tape them off the radio or off of other friends who had them on CD when I’d make mixtapes. I just never liked them so much that I had to own their CDs until I worked at a used-CD store. Then I had so many CD’s that, like my penchant for buying books, the CDs just sat in my shelf until the advent of iTunes allowed me to rip them, store the albums electronically and sell of the CDs. As a very early owner of the iPod, I’ve now gone through several iPods, each with far less capacity than my music library. In fact, it is to the point that even though I create new playlists on a weekly basis (the modern day mix tape), I can’t dig into my library fast enough or far enough, and now I just fill my iPod up completely at random just to discover what I have in my library.
Now that’s already a paradigm shift over how most people approach their music library, but it continues further down the rabbit hole. I’ve been taking this approach — just randomly filling up my iPod to listen through my library, metal or classical or outlaw country or throat chants from Nepal — for years now. And it’s through this shuffling that I’ve now heard pretty much every Crowded House song recorded and discovered that I’m a HUGE Crowded House fan. Despite never really being aware of my exposure to them when they were regulars on the airwaves, I look through my catalog of torch songs and they sound like imitations (at worst) or allusions (at best) to Neil Finn’s work, both solo and collectively in his bands Split Enz, Crowded House and the Finn Brothers. This epiphany combined with a deep and abiding love of music drove me to network through friends of friends to find someone willing to go with me (my wife is six weeks from delivering our second child, so standing for three hours at a show is just not high on her preferences — also, she’s much more into metal as far as shows go).
I found a friend of a friend who was game, even though he was just a passive fan of the one or two songs he knew. It mattered not, I just needed to share the experience with someone, as well as enjoy a couple pints of Guinness before the show. It was a fantastic show, and Crowded House introduced several new songs — my favorite new song, “Turn it Around” is below:
After my 2am burrito following the show, I was still pretty awake ruminating on the performance I just saw. I thought a lot about this song and how much I really liked it. I spent a little time on Sunday night (after catching up on Battlestar Galactica) seeing if the set list from Saturday’s show was posted by a fan so I could, at least, figure out the name of the song. By Sunday night, I had not seen a set list from my show… but there were a number of setlists already posted up in various fan forums. This is a practice that goes back to fans of the Grateful Dead, Phish, Black Crowes and Pearl Jam: dedicated fans who chronicle every show and bootleg available. From this I was able to get the name of my song, and then I proceeded to search again for “Crowded House Turn It Around” and TWO YouTube videos came up immediately from different fans at different shows.
It immediately hit me that I should’ve brought my new Flip camera instead of chickening out, but I’m still in a mindset that cameras are going to be taken away at shows, like an unfortunate experience I witnessed years ago at a Phil Collins show. Since then, unless it’s expressly stated that cameras are allowed, I leave them at home.
This thought immediately turned me on my head with regards to how we distribute official knowledge. Let me try and work backwards. See, even three years ago, there wasn’t a YouTube (at least, not a popular one). There weren’t compact video capturing devices that people could afford easily (like around $100). There wasn’t a culture that made it de-facto “permissable” to record concerts even with amateur equipment. If you were brave and cunning enough to sneak in your equipment, there wasn’t a way to easily share it with anyone beyond your immediate friends, unless you were also resourceful enough technically to run your own FTP server, and even if you were using BitTorrent or some kind of Gnutella-based file sharing protocol, people would have to be stumbling onto it — it’s not like you would be able to easily Google it. But now you can. Now, it’s expected that after I go to a show, there are perhaps multiple ways of getting a recording of that show, even if it’s not me who’s doing the recording and posting.
There’s a lesson to be learned with how we approach Subject Matter Expertise. It’s been said on a few forums that the biggest time delay in getting Rapid Learning out to learners is in the Subject Matter Expert reviews. In the current (and arguably antiquated) model, this assumes that SMEs can’t create the content themselves — that producing instructional material is a job for ISDs or content developers — some other “title” or person than the SME themselves.
Well, what if the learners capture the content live and share it, doing the work of producing and tagging material they find interesting? That’s an idea. The rub is that much of the content we’d expose them to probably doesn’t reap the same kind of fandom as a band does. Well, okay then: what if our Subject Matter Experts just put it out there? The tools are getting better (Articulate Studio 08 looks promising and easier than Articulate Studio 5). The tools are getting cheaper. The tools are getting easier to use (try editing some video with iMovie 08 and let it just export directly into YouTube). SMEs aren’t taking up the valuable time to get information out to learners — WE ARE. We need to think differently (again) about what our job is — our job is to help craft the message. We can help contextualize it. But getting the message OUT to learners? That doesn’t have to be the job of content developers or instructional designers any more. And it shouldn’t, because we’re wasting time.
What we should be doing is helping identify what the semantic questions are addressed by the SMEs when they capture their knowledge and publish. We should help make it easier for knowledge centers, be they groups of people or individuals themselves, to know that there’s new informational content out in their periphery and provide border resources to pull information together. Field Trainers and Training Managers can be creating “playlists” of the information that is put out by SMEs, customizing that information for learners who have finite and contextual instructional needs.
We’ve tried to automate this with intelligent agents (both in the instructional technologies and even tools like “The Filter” for iTunes) — and they kinda work. But a good instructor knows how to build curriculum. If we make it easier for people to answer their own questions or for facilitators to pull on knowledge resources to quickly create informational materials, I think you’ll have a state where knowledge transfer happens faster and the information is more appropriate. If you couple this with an ability for the learners to SHARE the information that’s useful to them with others, you start to build communities, however dynamic, of learners engaged in the discourse.
This is how users of many generations behave online now. We need to think about how to capitalize on the active engagement of the learner as a possible facilitator of flexible organizational learning.
I welcome your thoughts…
Anyone hear about Adobe’s Open Screen Project? Well, good news if this is the first you’re hearing about it:
Basically, what’s happened is that Adobe wants Flash on as many screens and devices as possible. To do that, they’re pretty much COMPLETELY OPENING UP THE PLATFORM. What does “completely opening up the platform” actually mean?
So what does this have to do with learning? I think it’s going to have a huge impact on creating all sorts of learning applications (content engines and assessment tools) that can play on lots of different devices. I think when you start rolling integrated content tools into your Learning Management Systems (if you really need to track the experience), the ability to throw in Flash Remoting via AMF becomes a VERY easy way to just track using methods that Flash developers know how to do — without the encumberance of necessary web services or JavaScript or whatever else. Adding to that — most organizations embrace Flash because it deploys the same regardless of browser… now imagine a world a few years from now where Flash deploys the same regardless of mobile device.
I’m glad I plunked down the cash for CS3….
