Flash For Learning

My personal development methodology probably mirrors what many developers reading this blog are doing: I abstract my textual content as much as possible as an XML document so I can do more with it (potentially). It makes for cleaner development, keeping functionality separate from the information being conveyed, and then I keep the style and presentation as separate from code and content as possible, too.

One of my big reasons for wanting to move the content — the main course — into XML is because it allows me to serve up my content on a number of different plates. Need immediate 508? Turn it into standards-compliant XHTML as an option (or even to make your content printable without making everything Flash Paper).

So how can you do that easily? Create a stylesheet for your XML so it reads like XML (even when you view source), but looks like a nicely designed HTML page.

But how do you do that? Well, for that, you just need to check out this tutorial posted on Macromedia — an excellent hands-on presentation from MAX 2005.

dreamweaver, xml, xslt, xpath, development, web, how-to

There appears to be a leading book on Captivate for anyone who’s new or a little uncertain of what all you can do with the program. The book is called Essentials of Macromedia Captivate: Skills and Drills Workbook (Spiral-bound), and it’s available for $35 on Amazon. I halfway trust Amazon reviews, and this book is very well reviewed.

captivate

Tom King put out some pretty helpful tips to help you shrink down Captivate files. This came up in both my sessions at MAX 2005, so it bears the reprint here, especially since Tom was citing work by Dave Mozealous:

• Troubleshooting movie file size
• Recording Tricks and Tips

Tom also suggests that when conditions warrant you can take these extra steps:

• Select Movie>Preferences>Preferences and deselect 508 and Include Breeze metadata (if not publishing to Breeze).
• Select Movie>Preferences>Preferences and select ‘Advanced Movie Compression’.
• Select Movie>Preferences>Preferences and select ‘Compress compiled SWF file’.
• Select Movie>Preferences>Start and End and deselect the option for a loading screen, this should make the svelte SWF play ASAP.

Tom also notes that the most likely culprit for file bloat is audio. So to reiterate what Tom spells out on his blog, if you’re deploying for the web, go for the smallest/lowest practical audio rate you can get away with.

captivate

Alan and I wanted to share our general thanks to Macromedia, as well as everyone who came to our sessions on SCORM, Flash and Captivate — and a huge thanks to the other developers and designers who contributed some excellent dialogue to our sessions, as well as those who gave some excellent presentations that we were fortunate enough to attend.

Between watching my White Sox clinch the World Series berth on Sunday, the great discussions with Director folks, putting names to faces on the Open Source Flash mailing list and getting to talk shop with so many of you in the E-learning sector who are succeeding and struggling in similar ways to what we go through in our daily trade — this was an excellent experience for us and it’s all due to you.

MAX 2005, flash, e-learning, captivate, scorm

It may not be clear on how to contact me if you’ve attended MAX 2005 (or even if you haven’t).

Email me at aaron.silvers [at] gmail [dot] com

Obviously, this is slightly obfuscated so that I don’t get a ton of automated spam. You can also register for this site and include your e-mail address if you’d like me to contact you directly, either for answers on SCORM and your specific needs, or any consulting you need in that space if you need more in-depth help.

Hey kids:

Breaking Down the Barriers to Effective Online Training and Communication

Macromedia has 30-minute field seminar demonstrating how you can use Breeze to combine existing learning assets with quizzing and real-time interactivity for collaborative communication, teaching and learning experiences.

See how Breeze makes it easy to deliver a blended learning program that includes both narrated self-paced courses and live virtual classes, complete with live and recorded audio and video, screen-sharing, two-way text chat, and more.

The registration link is here.

The dates are:

* Dallas, October 25
* Denver, October 26
* Seattle, October 27
* Parsippany, NJ, November 1
* Atlanta, November 3
* San Jose, November 9
* New York, November 10
* Tyson’s Corner, VA, November 15

Technorati Tags: macromedia, conferences, e-learning, breeze, seminars, workshops

Thank Griffin for this nugget:

Griffin asked me about a bug we saw in Firefox where a Flash movie embedded into a hidden div was just plain never showing up. The fix Griffin applied while perusing W3C validates XHTML 1.0 Strict:

Pay particular attention to that “wmode” parameter. That seems to do the trick.

Technorati Tags: flash, javascript, xhtml, w3c, css, dhtml