Flash For Learning

Welcome back from the holiday break, those of you stateside.

Finalists have been announced in the 2007 EduBlogs Awards. I’ll be trolling through their nominees and subscribe to some new feeds. Only slightly tongue-in-cheek, though… I didn’t know such awards existed, but now that I know, I’m pretty disappointed that in no time since this very blog began in 2005 has it even been nominated.

I used to think it’s because no one knew this blog existed, but as I’ve reported… thanks to the use of feedburner, about a hundred people around the world visit this site daily (let alone subscribe to the feed). So somebody from the Edublogs Awards has seen this site — there are just not that many education geeks on the internet (otherwise we’d have more applications geared for us as a market).

Like I said, I KINDA kid. At either rate, check out the nominees and winners past and present. Once I get over being jaded, I’m sure I’ll find some pretty good resources there.

In the States, it’s the Thanksgiving holiday and my wife bought me an early Hanukkah present — a Wii with Guitar Hero III and a few other games. So it’s going to be a little quiet on this blog or on the mailing list for a few days. New toy, shiny object… you understand, I’m sure.

So don’t “fret” (get it — fret? Guitars? Sometimes I only amuse myself) — I’ll be back next week, probably with a few cautionary tales of working with Captivate 3 and Articulate since I’m pressing on with a few projects using both.

Enjoy the holiday if you’re in the States, and if you’re not… uh… have a laugh

And now… a small plug for one of my homeboys.

I had the outstanding pleasure to work and travel with Jono Poltrack for the bulk of my 2+ years working with ADL. Jono was the original project lead for the Sample Run-Time Environment, and for a while before my man Doug took over for him, Jono knew more about the actual workings of a Run-Time engine for SCORM content in 1.2 or 2004 than just about anyone. Seeking other windmills, Jono joined his roommates and best friends in creating an IT Consulting business a few years back, and lo and behold he’s coming around full circle, now via the Knowledge Management space — back into working with SCORM again.

Together with his regular and some new partners, they’ve put together a site called ADL eXchange. They are trying to shepherd some new voices in the ever-ongoing dialogue with ADL from the user community.

At the last SCORM TWG, Jono and Mike Hruska were there, bought me a beer and asked me to write for them. I can’t refuse good friends, so I took a page from my presentation last year at ILCE’s conference on SCORM, and put down a few thoughts about Instructional Design since it was on my mind now (as it was at the conference) that I cobble together a standards guide for my own organization relating to E-Learning content.

If you’ve never put together a standards document for your production team, you probably don’t realize how important instructional strategy is to the final product for E-Learning — if you care at all about learner engagement or consistency or the end-user… stuff like that. At least, you probably don’t realize it until it’s smacking you in the face.

Anyway, feel free to give ADL eXchange a look, if nothing else, for the pictures of Jono and Mike, both members of now-defunct 90’s band Badwrench (this is no lie).

I posted how much I was impressed with Doug Lynch from Wharton School of Business… thanks again to Elliot Masie for making these great videos available.

I admit it, I’ve been a big fan of Dan Pink since the book came out. Masie just posted the very well-produced video of his keynote at the Learning 2007 conference.

If you want to see the wonders that Flash 5 Actionscripting brought back in the day (like 2000), check out this little learning game that got me hooked on the idea that Flash and Education combined could be a career.

Warning, the controls in the Flash 9 player are not as fluid as they used to be in Flash 5. The game also now runs so fast that it’s a lot jerkier than it used to be on a Pentium I

It’s not often I bring my personal life to this blog, but I came across something that just hits you hard (in a good way) about the innovation that Nintendo is bringing to gaming.

In an article on Game Daily, the new (and gorgeous) adventure game Super Mario Galaxy introduces a new mode of gameplay, which Nintendo calls a “coaster” mode.

The key quote:

“… the game’s cooperative mode gives the second player an assistive function. As the second player, you don’t get a character on screen, you get a cursor that is used to capture gems, gather coins, help give Mario jump boosts and distract would-be foes. So younger gamers still get to control the primary character, feel like they’re controlling a game and ensures that the game experience lasts longer than what would occur based on their current abilities.”

I was just talking about this with my wife and I, as I was promised a Wii for the holidays this year. I really want to play games that I can play with my three-year-old, but it’s generally difficult because while she wants to play and is clearly excited by the activity on the screen, she lacks the digital (as in finger) dexterity to control with any accuracy items on a virtual plane. So… this will be so awesome for her and me. She gets to play… and so do I.

This just made the must-buy list.

I don’t know how I missed this, but back in May my ol’ pal and programming buddy back in PA — Kraig Mentor published this article on Director And SCORM.

If you’ve downloaded the Plug-in Technology Example, which demonstrates the code and the activity you can employ to create both Flash and Director-based content objects — that’s the handiwork that Kraig and I worked on in our first months of working together. Kraig, who worked on the Director team for Macromedia, is a pretty nifty dude and he took his experience working with SCORM to a whole other level by creating a full-fledged library for use with Lingo (or any other language) to easily access whatever he wanted through SCORM.

Then… Kraig got really crafty and started on a path of hardcore Sequencing and Navigation strategies back when it was even more obtuse than it is now (before 2nd Edition of SCORM 2004). He also built this content engine in Director that uses XML to populate it… much like a lot of Flash developers do to create E-Learning. Except Kraig’s doing with with Director.

So for those of you still down with Director (which Adobe is still developing), check this article out. It’s also a good read for those of you looking to construct your own template engine with Flash, at least from an architectural perspective.

Gotta love the distribution of information.

Link: sevenload.com

Someone uploaded Don Tapscott’s presentation from a Web 2.0 conference in Berlin. It’s not word-for word, but it’s pretty similar to the keynote he gave at Learning 2007. So for those of you that want to hear straight-up and unfiltered what I’ve been blogging about… enjoy. Since Tapscott’s own blog references it, rest assured that you’re not doing any harm by watching the extraordinarily high-quality bootleg.

I was watching South Park on Wednesday night where Stan relieves his anxiety over the pressures to reach a million points in Guitar Hero III with Heroin Hero (stay with me — I have a point). In the game, you continue to chase this cute flying dragon reminiscent of DragonTales (get it… “chase the dragon?”) and no matter how much you advance, you can never ever get the dragon.

I know it sounds odd to read about what I learned from watching South Park, but I’m not exactly normal.

In that South Park episode, Stan is trapped by the external pressures and succumbs to them. For many designers and developers, I get a lot of feedback and messaging about how you’re chasing after authoring tools with more bells and whistles to produce more engaging content.

Sound like you? I don’t know which step in a program is acknowledgement, but I need to tell you that you’re just chasing the dragon… because if you’re looking for a tool to make your content better, you’re missing the point. You’re addicted to the shiny objects and you’re (in effect) chasing the dragon.

Tools allow you to do a lot of things — some of them might be things you want to do for instructional intent. Some of them are things enabling an easier development of that which you think is cool (timed bullets to audio, templates for tabbed interfaces or slideshows, etc). Phillip Hutchinson commented on here just the other day about how XML templates in Flash ultimately constrain — and I think he has a point. Any tool you use that gives you wizard-like control is ultimately going to limit you to the initial design capabilities of its inventor. Tools sometimes also do things you find instructionally odd, maybe even wrong. They’re tools.

It’s not the hammer that builds a better house. It’s the carpenter who wields it.

Some authoring tools are more flexible than others. Captivate, Articulate or FlashForm all allow you to embed your own content — but at least with Captivate or Articulate, there are some caveats to that. Articulate has an API exposed so you can send navigational control or set completion status from your customized content… but you can only embed one Flash file per slide. Captivate doesn’t seem to care how many things you embed or where and it even allows you to branch pretty fluidly… but you can’t talk to the Captivate engine.

Point is… the limitations on how effective training can be are on you and your creative instructional instincts — the tools only help you expand that, and I would argue that you need to prioritize what’s most important to you and let that dictate your decision to use any tool (and that includes rolling your own set of templates). Code is cheap — it may not always be free, but there is so much code available to you off-the-shelf now compared a few years ago — that it’s closing in on ubiquity.

Anything technical — from figuring out how to make that cool activity in Flash you want to make all the way to figuring out how to report something to an LMS — can be bought, borrowed or lifted from someone. At the end of the day, what differentiates your E-Learning and makes it special is what you want to message to your learners. Figure out what you want to do first and THEN find the right combination of tools and technology to support the instruction.

Unless expediency and the notion of the 80% solution is more important… then go for the tool that affords that for you.

Bottom line: don’t be addicted to the tech. Don’t adopt the new toy to make your E-Learning better. Only you can make it better. The tool is only as good as the ideas that feed it. I’m as guilty as anyone on this, and it’s only through the pain of withdrawal from authoring tools that I start to see clearly that solid instructional vision is more powerful than the delivery mechanism.

My preaching is done for today