Flash For Learning

I got an interesting email from Jason Haag of Conform2SCORM today, asking me about if I had recently switched blogging services because he noticed that the theme here on Flash for Learning has changed again as is my wont. I responded that no, in fact, I merely switched the theme which is the term that Wordpress users use to describe the skin or template used in the blog. Since it’s easy as pie for me to switch themes, I do it whenever I fancy which I’m sure has either helped or hurt readership depending on how much anyone likes a given theme.

On the topic of switching blogging engines, though, I guess it may help some of you who are thinking about blogging to at least give you some context behind which blogging engine I use, what else I’ve tried and how I came to Wordpress.

Back as far as 1998, I had a my first Web site surgeweb.net. I used a hosting service that got bought out by some other company which in turn was bought out by someone else. Since I had registered the domain name through them, though, I lost it. And it angered me quite a bit to have to pay insane hosting fees for a 100MB web space. In 2001, when I was working at now-defunct content house Learning Insights, I went into a small LLC partnering with my two bosses on a consulting service (we saw the end coming). I started hosting surgeweb through them, and it was a royal pain to switch the registry provider, but my friend, Justin helped me do it, and I turned out a fairly nice Flash portfolio site for the time (and my lack of graphic design talent). If you want to check out the Internet Archives, it might take a while for the flash to load (if it loads at all), but there’s stuff there.

Well, having my own Web site was all fine and good, but in the summer of 2002, I was getting ready to buy a dog, and I wanted a Web site where I could post daily or weekly pictures and stuff about my wife and I with our first baby. So even before we brought the dog home, I had the Web site up: http://www.mr-chompers.com. Blogs didn’t exist back then; there wasn’t a shared engine that could be templated… blogging was something you did (it was a verb, not a noun). I built my own engine in PHP and MySQL — complete with an admin system, membership handling including threaded messages, themed games. Basically, I created and harbored for a small time social community around the dog. I had big dreams.

And they crashed

It was just too much work. Add to that I took a job a year later in Johnstown, PA working on this little thing called SCORM… well, I needed something automated. Enter Blogger.

I played with Blogger for a while starting in early 2002. I wanted to have more of a professional journal of what I was experimenting with. At the time, I was fairly active on the [Flashcoders] mailing list and all the cool guys (Brandon Hall, Phillip Kerman, Ben Forta) all had sites of their own devoted to their experiments. So I was playing with Blogger so I wouldn’t have to think about it, and I opened up a domain for aaron21.com. Turns out, I didn’t really have much to say, but I experimented with Blogger enough that I got a free sweatshirt from them before they were acquired by Google. After the acquisition, I played around with it a bit more, but I never found it flexible enough for me to modify or hack with for what I wanted to do… and the automagic parts weren’t quite automagic enough (though it’s pretty solid for a instamatic blog now if you want one).

In early 2004, I had a slight falling out with one of the partners from our LLC. We were all really good friends. I should’ve manned up… but I had a kid coming and I was a solid 350 miles away in Pennsylvania on my own. At any rate, I took my personal sites off our shared host and was convinced by a co-worker at the time, Phil, to get on the Dreamhost bandwagon. In preparation for the baby, I bought a license for Movable Type so I could get the updates free for a year. I read and hacked my way through figuring out how to do the Perl and CGI-BIN settings to host it myself. It was very powerful, easy to administer. I loved it… until I had to upgrade it. I’m not very knowledgeable about Perl or working with the whole CGI-Bin. I’m a scripter, not so much a hardcore programmer. PHP/MySQL? I can at least read PHP and figure out what’s going on. I had (have) no patience for Perl.

And in 2004-2005… there were ALWAYS upgrades to be done. And if you let it go, you’d have to do successive upgrades to keep up (you couldn’t just install the most recent version to patch as a cover-all). I’d have to set permissions manually. I’d have to adjust for comment spam all the time. I grew to hate it. In a fit of fury, I came across an article about Wordpress and its growing popularity and it planted a bug in me. I attended FlashForward 2005 and heard O’Reilly talk about the social revolution at his keynote, and he talked about the rising tide of APIs — and named Wordpress as the new titan in blogging.

That was about all the pushing I needed. I started Flash for Learning encouraged by the friends I made at Flash for Learning to created a collaborative site devoted to learning and Flash. Unfortunately, I was not a very good collaborator and just charged ahead and did it on my own, so it never quite became the collaborative vision I wanted for it.

I can’t provide any excuse for my gumption at the time, but the move to Wordpress for Flash for Learning was so pleasant and drama-free, that I switched mrchompers.net to it, also, and have since launched both a podcast and another ranting/opinion blog through Dreamhost — which now offers Wordpress as a one-click install so I have even less work to maintain it.

Wordpress, being open-source, also has an incredibly large community of plug-in and theme developers who release the majority of their work as open-source. That’s why you can digg posts here, or add them to your del.icio.us account… all without me having to touch a thing extra other than upload the plugin files and turn them on in the administration system.

So… there’s the long of it. If you’re looking to get into blogging for yourself or for your organization, there’s plusses and minuses to the three systems I’ve mentioned, and I’ll be happy to share insights through comments or email.

I’m putting together my first comprehensive E-Learning standards guide for work. Â Last year, I revised it by cleaning it up and correcting the technical details the first week on the job. Â

Well, now it’s been a year, and I can count on one hand how many people have looked at that document, let alone actually read through it (that would be one other person).

With a learning organization made up of 46 other learning, education and training professionals, I’ve decided to take a break from the (ahem) “standard” and completely re-write the document to be more a guidebook than a standards document. Â I’m also injecting graphics, wit and narrative humor. Â So hopefully when people are digging into the guide for the nugget of information they need, they’re thrown off by the accessibility of it and maybe read on a little bit — and with any luck, they actually get the medicine with the spoonfuls of sugar I’m trying to put in it.

Comic Life on my renewed Macbook Pro is my friend.Â

So this morning I was reading Phillip Hutchinson’s post on pipwerks.com linking to video profiles of people with disabilities — mild to severe — using assistive technology to communicate, work and improve their lives.

When I worked as a contractor for DoD and Homeland Security, accessibility was given the due lip service, and that was about the extent to which content was made accessible for 508. Truth be told, most of the content I’ve worked on commercially has been much the same treatment, where we talk about the need to make things accessible but rarely is any effort put toward doing so.

But when I was at Learning 2007, I snuck into Tom King’s session on SCORM - 10 Years After and 10 Years Ahead. I got there right as he was winding up the session, and he said something that was remarkably profound and insightful — which was something to the effect that accessibility isn’t a problem of the disabled, but actually a tool that helps us improve our design for our own use. In interface design, I’d say that’s especially true.

If you think about the iPhone (and who doesn’t) — my kid can move pictures around and navigate the iPhone. There’s been plenty of YouTube videos of dogs pawing at the iPhone and their able to navigate it, as well (even if they don’t know what they’re actually doing more than at a Pavlovian level). That’s not an accident, folks — it’s an excellent study in accessible visual design. Now the iPhone is probably the least usable device for a blind person — but let’s think about web design then. People who have poor visual acuity need structured information in a web page, text that is large enough to read in clear areas that is unencumbered by distractors.

Guess what? We all benefit from clean design, too.

Phillip has some decent links to W3C’s accessibility guidelines, too.

I could just punt my Macbook Pro right about now.

It’s a good thing I did a full backup last week of my drive using SuperDuper. If you’re thinking about upgrading your Mac to Leopard, here are some words of advice:

Most of you are probably okay with doing just an upgrade, in which case if Flash is working already, you’re in the clear.

But for those of you like me who are especially anal about upgrades and look at them as a time to flush out the crap and do a pristine installation of the new system, I would HIGHLY recommend not reformatting your drive to HFS+, Case Sensitive, Journaled…. this is a new (to me) option available to you with Leopard. Thing is, Adobe CS3 — it doesn’t like the Case-sensitive part AT ALL.I did the clean install and used Migration Assistant to get my files and preferences back into place. I kept trying to launch Flash and had nothing but issues. Then I did a completely clean installation and tried to manually install Flash again. But that kept resulting in a “Supported System Error.” Like a good boy scout, I reported it to Adobe, but then it got me thinking that it was my choice in File Systems for the disk… so… round 3, I reformatted to HFS+, Journaled and Flash installed just magically.

So… freaking… annoyed.

Interesting, INTERESTING brain dump from Elliott Masie on “Talent 2.0.”

One of the things Don Tapscott (Wikinomics) was very passionate about yesterday was about the future of talent management and retention. Elliott shared some pretty radical but insanely genius points that I’m sure he’s collected from a host of people over the conference.

What if your company had a hiring model where you weren’t trying to hold onto people for 30 years? What if you only tried to hold onto workers for three years and embraced the fact that your talent will leave… learn more… and come back — probably several times in the span of their careers? What if instead of hoarding all the big learning events for managers, your company made it a policy to on-board your workers with a very advanced set of skills and certifications that are transferable throughout your organization and others, like LEAN/Six Sigma, PMBOK, PMP, BABOK and so on? What if you profited from your workers wanting to leave, by contracting them out to your business partners, clients, competitors or even organizations in different verticals than your company’s? What if not only your organization was known for its products or its customer service… but that your model of employee development could become a profit center? What if your company kept up with what your alumni workers were doing and maintained relationships with them to return to your company as consultants, contractors or even clients?

The big thing is that no one really knows what’s going to work in the coming shifts in the demographics of the workforce. No one really knows how well the methods employed in learning and development work NOW. But there are ideas floating around that paint a picture. I’m going to be reading a lot more on this topic, because I find it fascinating, provocative and most of all, truthy.

You could hear a pin drop this entire Learning 2007 conference if you were trying to have conversations about LCMSs. In other words, no one was talking about it other than me. Lance Dublin, whom I admire a lot, led a session on implementation and lumped the LCMS and LMS in the same bucket, but everyone was talking LMSs. LCMSs? Nada, zilch, zip, nein!

So, by a nifty mistake, I ended up in a Learning Consortium meeting instead of the 10 Years of SCORM meeting I had planned to show up to. I sat with Judy Brown and Rovy Brannon from the ADL Academic Co-Lab at University of Wisconsin, and at 8:30 in the morning on the last day of the conference, it became a very intimate open discussion with Elliott Masie, instead of the guided activity to collect themes for the next year of the Consortium.

I addressed the elephant in the room and asked Elliott why no one was talking LCMSs this year when last year we were beaten over the head with it. His reply was honest and maybe a bit surprising.

Elliott told me that an LCMS purchase right now has about a 30-month lifespan, because the real shifts in the tools learning organizations will use will be in powerful Talent Management systems and powerful Content Systems (not solely learning content or authoring tools), because there is a shift more and more towards immediate knowledge, which means that the traditional e-learning as we do it will be supplemented more and more with our broad spectrum of documents (excel, word, powerpoint stuff within what we currently call a document management system). Elliott suggested this is because the search and retrieval features of document management will significantly improve.

Now, Elliott did tell me that it’s not a bad idea to turn on an LCMS because of the workflow benefits we can gain and the way in which it, as a tool, will support standard quality of content… but his caveat was that we should know going in that in three years or so it will probably be outmoded because of the leaps in both technology and the necessary shifts in talent management that will make the top-down management of content too time-taking and too laborious to do. In other words, “rapid” will get “rapid-er.”

So as “learning content” changes in its form, its authors are going to be spread throughout the organization. I think an LCMS is useful for the reasons Masie described, but in the planning for my organization, I need to organize the change management issues related to shifting our Instructional Designers into learning content producers and then, eventually, learning content specialists consulting with the rest of the organization which will do the authoring. That’s a very distinct set of change issues that is related but not necessarily coupled with change management dealing with the LCMS.

When I think about this distinction, I think the LCMS isn’t such a big deal for my organization to handle… and the change around the roles, communication chains and workflow in our future are going to be much more difficult if we’re not very clear about the change we want to create and understand the impacts on all of us and the clients inside the company we serve…

Basic Approach:

• Conceptions of learning and human nature matter
• We tend to adopt one or more of three common sets of conceptions
• There are basic tensions and questions raised by these sets
• It’s worth struggling with these questions

Conceptions of Learning:

• Behaviorist
  • Selection of behavior by educator
  • Pursuit of individual satisfaction
• Cognitivist
  • Mental representations mediate
  • Active learning toward genuine understanding, like a scientist
• Sociocultural
  • Tools & systems beyond the lone thinker
  • Humans embedded in social applications

I’ll forego much of the discussion of Behaviorism and Cognitivism because they’re pretty well-known. Learning isn’t something that an individual does — it’s something that a whole system does. Reading uses a number of different tools. There are heuristics attached — teaching kids to read isn’t about putting something in the kid’s head that wasn’t there before — it’s about filling in the gap in the system that enables them to do something they weren’t able to do before.

People are essentially social, where others fill-in the gaps. People only function in environments where they have the tools to function — maps, communication tools, etc.

Does it matter if people “genuinely understand” as long as they get the behavior right? One answer belies a cognitive slant — that given the right information and the right environmental variables, it’s still up to the individual to be able to make the right decisions. The other answer is hard-nosed, “the result is all that matters” model of performance.

At a meta-level, we need to treat people as cognitivists… but as an organization, we need to be behaviorists. Over a long enough timespan, behaviorists believe that a dumb, rigid process selects and reinforces things naturally. In the case of intrinsic motivations, though, behaviorism can subvert the things that cognitivists nurture and take away the performance unless there is the motivation to follow it.

Can others choose the direction of learning, or should people explore? There’s no solid answer one way or the other on this. Which is why sociocultural approaches may make more sense in a corporate environment.

Do individuals learn, or does learning involve others, objects and tools? Instead of formal assessments, use authentic assessments where the assessment is built into the activity, like a simulation. We think of individuals as units that can be moved around an organization (or outside of it).

“Wikinomics” is up for a Pulitzer Prize for Business literature.

How are youngsters changing the way we think about talent? Training, retention, collaboration and managing them? Within this new culture, there is a new culture of work and therein will lie the answers of how to accomplish this.

Myspace has 220 million members, growing at 2 million members a week. 85% of all college students are on Facebook (700,000 in Toronto alone). But this is no longer about getting online — this is now about a new mode of production. Web 2.0 is a change in the way we innovate the structure and architecture of an organization. It’s changing learning in many ways, driven by economic, social and demographic factors.

Tapscott worked with a group of 300 kids; found out they have no fear of technology. They’re not thinking about the technology — they’re thinking about what they’re using it for — the content, be it a live chat with their friend(s), downloading from iTunes, looking through the Hubble telescope. We focus on how amazing it is that technology enables this… they’re thinking about how cool Mars is.

The population is biforcating. There’s a huge wave of youngsters (biggest in other parts of the world) under 28 and they’re entering the workforce. Meanwhile, we talk about cutting funding for education and there’s more kids under 28 than there ever were Baby Boomers.

If you look at the map of kids under the age of 15, India and China dwarf the rest of the world. And Asia as a whole is way more wired than the US and Western Europe.

Kids are growing up bathed in digital. They watch less TV than the Boomers. They telescope online, chatting, IM’ing AND doing their homework on the computer when they get home from school. They think differently. Brain development between 8 and 18 years is affected by the change from being hooked on video. Kids are now authorities on the massive changes in government, economics, trends, ideology — because they’re more connected. Kids are lapping their parents on the information track.

“Kids look at Email as a formal technology, like for thank-you letters and official communications.”

How these kids are different:

• They want freedom of choice
• They want freedom of mobility
• They are better scrutinizers
• They have integrity and expect integrity

“The Daily Show isn’t funny… unless you know the news”

• They need to be entertained (which is blended in with learning, collaboration and “work”)
• They want speed, not immediate gratification. They can’t stand useless bureaucracy.
• They flock to innovation

This leads to Talent 2.0 — the kids got it right. Paradigms put boundaries around things — based on assumptions that are so strong that you don’t think about them. Peter Sengey was right in that the person at the top can’t learn for the organization as a whole.

And… it turns out that I’m one of three people in the entire audience blogging this by show of hands. Nice.

Tapscott just stated that the Gen X’ers are having more problems adapting to these changes than the Boomers, because the Boomers have kids and understand better how to talk to them.

Opinion: I call bulls__t, but I agree with everything else Tapscott is saying, so I’ll investigate further at his follow-up session.

The new web is dropping collaboration costs (the technology is just better), so peers can now come together and create value. Marketocracy is a peer-to-peer mutual fund with picks selected by the network. Wikipedia puts out encyclopedic information that rivals Britannica. Zopa allows people to borrow money from other people without the need for banks. Linux is the dominant operating system in the world, and it’s not “owned” by anyone.

Stanton Wortham from The University of Pennsylvania, Wharton School of Business is talking about learning theories, their characteristics and contradictions.

Behaviorists believe that organisms learns by feedback from their environment. B.F. Skinner is among the most prominent behaviorists. You create a situation that rewards students for doing what you want them to do. Positive behaviors lead to positive responses — negative behaviors result in negative responses. Behaviorists want control and access to good rewards, has to have clear goals for what they want students to achieve and they need to be consistent.

Cognitivists believe that students need to have control of a situation in order to understand it. Students are trying to get students to build their own models of understanding of the world. They create an environment with lots of tools and manipulables to come up with their own answers and monitor/question their actions to support the students in building their own path to the right answers. When students fail, it presents an opportunity to revisit issues and choose another path.

Behaviorists and Cognivists believe that the individual is the thing that learns, and learning transfer happens when an individual learns something from one context and applies it in another context. Socio-culturalists believe that it’s not individuals that learn, but a system that learns. It’s not crucial that an individual understands everything about a subject, but that they contribute their part to the system.

Note… this is the first time I’ve heard about a theory of social learning, so I need to find out more about this because I’ve previously thought of myself as a Cognitivist, but this sounds like a way to highlight where learning is going — possibly coupled with Cognitivism.

I was originally going to go to a discussion on Performance Support with Frank Nguyen next, but I may follow up more with Dr. Wortham.

(Downtown) Judy Brown, former head of the ADL Academic Co-Lab is now a MASIE Fellow following her passion and bliss with mobile technology and learning. Slides are posted on the Learning 2007 Wiki.

.mobi

New domain names are available for mobile sites, starting at $7.99. The masie.mobi site was created with a wizard by mobisitegalore.

Industry status and directions

Most of us have mobile devices. We take them everywhere, they’re always on — they can be both incredibly private AND social. Mobile provides choices. When we define “mobile,” any one of us can be talking about laptops, micro pcs, cell phones, tablets, audio/video players, handhelds or pdas, wearable items (including usb drives or e-books) or even gaming devices.

Mobile growth has grown to more than 100 million handsets with touch screens to ship in 2008 (ABI Research). Global mobile phone use is hitting 3.25 BILLION (Reuters, July 27 2007). Over eighty percent of Americans over the age of FIVE have a mobile device.

America is still playing catch up with data speeds and connection process in cell phone use, but the demographics, speeds and prices are all suggesting that there is a huge opportunity in mobile devices as a platform. The adoption and the adopters are there. It’s a convergence of supply and demand. More and more of the workforce needs better access to learning when they’re away from the office. There’s volatile information that requires constant updating and delivery to staff and there’s pressure to maximize productivity and downtime.

Mobile users tend to focus more on the content of what they’re looking at on their mobile device, part in due to the private and personal connection to the device itself.

Examples

• Mobile Pandemic Flu Preparation - http://publichealthgames.com/
• Colorado State University -
• DMRTI - Open site with multiple examples and checklists
• Mayo Clinic InTouch
  • $2.99 a month
  • First aid tips
  • Watch health videos
  • Find the closest emergency room
• myfoodPhone
• Bones In Motion
• SkynetMD
• http://podclass.co.uk/ - partnered with Apple to reward course participation with iTunes store credits
• Language and Culture on iPod
• Homewood Suites - Video iPods deployed for training
• iPods in baseball
  • Pitchers review batters videos in the dugout (this is happening now!)
  • “It’s a good way to refresh yourself on how you got guys out.”
• Audio tours for portable digital players (http://podtrip.com/)
  • Museum tours
  • Download to iPod
  • Receive discount (even for colonial Williamsburg)
• Montclair State University - Campus Connect
  • All incoming students
  • GPS-enabled phone
  • Part of their tuition/fees
  • Bundled with tools for mobile learning, safety, community, campus navigation
• PSP with video-enabled.
• Questionmark Perception - assessment tools to develop mobile assessments
• Augmented Reality Scientific Role Play Environments
  • Game Engine decoupled from Game Content
  • Desktop PC-based AR content editor
  • Significant collaboration, teamwork and inquiry-based learning
• Assessment and Learning in Practice Settings (ALPS)
  • 9000 students
  • 16 subjects
  • Assess competencies
  • Encourage reflection
  • Capture evidence of achievement

“Developing competence and confidence in a practice setting is vital for students training for a career in health and social care because there is a wide range of general and specific skills that can only be developed in the clinic, hospital or workplace.” - Rob Arnsten

• Collaboration - coaching and mentoring via mobile — particularly for sales
• C-Shock Mobile Game (helps international students cope with culture shock and to get accustomed to UK university life) > onboarding game

We’re seeing a convergence of devices, network, applications and lifestyle(s).

Hardware

iPhone is influencing innovation in all hardware makers. Bug Labs is an open source, web-enabled, modular software + hardware platform coming Q4 2007 — with GPS ssystem, camera, motion sensor and LCD screen.

The top Japanese Smartphone Features: 1. mobile wallet 2. MANGA on mobile 3. mobile check-in at airports 4. mobile keys for doors 5. mobile employee badges 6. mobile cinema tickets 7. mobile transport passes …

Tiny movie projectors can fit into a phone now. Texas Instruments has a working prototype that beams DVD-quality video onto a screen or a wall. Motorola is beginning to build this into their nextGen phones.

The constraint is the battery — and they are also improving.

Tools

Check out what you have at http://mr.dev.mobi/ which tells you what you need to do in an emulation to adjust your content for mobile devices.

There are lots of authoring tools. Captivate publishes to Flash Lite (mobile Flash). Camtasia exports to quicktime for iPod use.

Zirada (gotzapp.com) allows you to build applications in a non-wizard way (like an actual authoring tool). Looks a lot like Lectora.

Hot Lava Learning Mobile Author supports both JavaScript (SCORM???) and Blackberry. It acts as a player that can send data back to your LMS.

iWriter allows you to build support sites ported directly onto the iPod via the Notes.

studycell.com allows you to create flashcards online, and then downlaod them to your mobile device

Alternatives to Mobisite Galore are Mob5 and Winksite (focused more on collaboration). MobiSiteGalore is the only one that allows you to download the files that it generates.

Future

• Cell Phone as a guide
• For additional information - graphical codes where you use your camera to transpose a black and white graphic into text that is over 4000 characters long. (Quick Response Codes)

Management considerations

Opportunities

Look for opportunities Focus on user’s context and needs Build content in modular formats Assess readiness Begin with pilot initiatives

Resources