Flash For Learning

In no particular order…

Dropping AdSense from Flash For Learning.

I’m not getting any click-through (not that I really expected any) and it’s absolutely as ugly as I thought it was — before I started using it. I know how to share what I know, and given an honest task to do — I can make a good buck or two doing just that. Some people are awesome at making Amazon or Google revenue. I’m awesome at E-Learning, so I’m sticking with that, and getting rid of AdSense will help me stop worrying about why no one isn’t clicking on the crappy ads that have been appearing on this blog.

Focus my writing (on this blog) to three domains that I really care about:

• Learning Content (tools, tips & tricks, tech stuff, design)
• Observations on how younger generations of workers are impacting my organization
• The convergence and evolution of Information Management, Knowledge Management and Learning Management.

I may from time to time write in on any number of other issues that come up — like how I might go back to school this coming year for some kind of Business/Adult Learning/Organizational Change degree (want: Ed.D. — might get:MBA of some stripe). But my passion is growing far beyond playing with the tech toys — I’ve been really re-energized this last year from looking at the change I’ve helped stir up in my organization and I want to hone my strength in the Force (metaphorically) so I’m not just wielding “change” like a wild person — I want to be focused, measured, deliberate and most of all — I want to be even more right, and I want to keep doing it at a higher level with larger and measurable impacts. I think I sit very much at the generational divide in both actual age this coming year and in work habits, and these should be some very exciting times to be a professional educator. Toss in a hefty dose of shifting an organization that loves structure, silos and hierarchy and transition it to a knowledge economy that bubbles up information from the users… it’s going to make the change from buying E-Learning to rolling our own E-Learning this past year seem like a very very small thing.

Plan the next five years…

This year has in many ways been a big payoff for several years of effort. I got the job I pretty much always wanted, working with smart people who work hard and (luckily for me) are gracious with feedback (both glowing AND poignant). But as my favorite song of 2007 recites, “It can’t all be wedding cake, it can’t all be boiled away…” I can’t rest on my laurels, and even though I’m rolling on with the growth I’ve had in 2007, I know that I need to have a direction to go in (and the plan on going back to school isn’t quite good enough).

With any luck, this year’s going to be another wonderfully stable year professionally for me, with another kid on the way and a spouse returning to full-time school in the fall (that’s the plan anyway). But I’d be lying if I wrote that I didn’t miss speaking at conferences, learning what’s at the bleeding edge of our craft and trying to make it make sense. Our first learning game is underfoot; there are some opportunities opening up in my organization to do some very interesting things with Knowledge Management, Performance Support and user-generated content… I’m interested in so much that’s going on in this profession — I just need to pick a handful of ideas that are at least vectoring in a similar direction and then “go that way.”

Get better.

I meander a lot. I also “go native” as a techie when I’m under stress and I need to get better about keeping up with what questions I’m really being asked — because often I’m answering questions that no one is asking. I get cut a lot of slack (both in the FFL mailing list, the blog and even at work) because I come up with good responses more often than not — but I can do better as a consultant.

REALLY learn ActionScript 3.

It’s not unnoticed by me that I write a lot more about everything but Flash on this blog. I need a practical reason to use ActionScript 3 so I can learn and apply what I learn to a task. Once I have that (or create it), we’ll be talking about a lot of code.

Inspired a bit by Tom King’s article on authoring tools, I started playing with Google Trends and was a little interested in how E-Learning is faring against the notion of Performance Support — my idea being that E-Learning is stuff we have to evaluate, manage and track the learner’s interaction with — and performance support being, perhaps, not so rigid.

Here’s my not-so-scientific report:

E-Learning is by far more popular in searches, though the volume of searches definitely has dropped from 2004 (which we can discuss by itself ad nauseum as far as reasons why people are searching less for E-Learning). But in 2007, in particular, the notion of “Performance Support” has gained much more buzz in news references. Now, this can mean a lot of things, but the fact that E-Learning never makes a blip in the news probably says something, too.

As we make E-Learning smaller and more granular… are we naturally evolving a model of instruction to something more like Performance Support?

By the way — as an interesting post-script to this, the top 10 regions, in order, who are literally looking for Performance Support, are…

1. South Korea
2. India
3. Singapore
4. Australia
5. Taiwan
6. United Kingdom
7. Canada
8. United States
9. Netherlands
10. China

Anyone want to take a stab at how employee productivity by nation matches up with this ranking for a search?

Adobe just released a free and open-source Java implementation of flash/flex remoting service called Blaze DS for Java.

This is pretty huge for people, as it supports remoting to the new AMF version (3) which just got documentation released, but it also supports remoting and polling over port 80 — so no more getting blocked out behind firewall constraints (a common theme today?). And, did I mention — it’s FREE?

So this will allow Flash and Flex developers to do realtime data manipulation with databases through this Java service — and you don’t have to run ColdFusion (or AMFPHP) to do it. I love remoting. I’ve loved it since I first played with it and Flash MX (6).

The impact of this and developing media-rich (or just plain pretty) performance support tools is a very positive one, especially for enterprise IT departments that may not know anything about PHP but will support Java.

Every now and then, I need to do some quick file conversions and I don’t have my Macbook Pro handy. Zamzar is a really nice web app (that’s free!!!) and it converts most everything to everything.

What I didn’t know, and just realized because I was asked to do it, was that it now takes YouTube URLs and will convert those movies into a variety of movie formats — and it works through my firewall.

So even when Masie sends out video URLs that I can’t see, I can still download them in a format that I can see.

Now if only Zamzar released an API…

On the topic of Common Cartridge, I’m psyched to see that this little blog is actually a reference.

Here’s to hoping I’m right

At work we’re upgrading from an older, sunset-ed version of our LMS to the latest service pack of the more recent version. We’ve been going through the upgrade for Vendor X for the past eight weeks, and up until last Thursday it was like a dream — nary a glitch to be found. We started the move on our Production server to make the switch last Thursday night, and that is when our tune took a sour note.

We’ve been experiencing a host of content issues — not SCORM communication issues, mind you. Content. Like, the first time you launch a course, everything works just right. If you close a course and it bookmarks your progress, logging back in (depending on the content) you get the interface, but you don’t get the actual content. In some courses, this breaks the content outright and there’s no way of getting it back.

At first, we were (I was) thinking it was some weird kind of security issue where it was treating Flash content recently run as a security risk and locking it out on subsequent sessions — but this was quickly dispelled, since multiple users could log in after the initial blockage and see all the content the first time they would experience it in their own login. Then, we thought that the scope of it was contained inside our firewall, so we started to divert traffic to our external content server — but that, too, started showing the same issues. So while it’s not ruled out as a factor, our network environment isn’t the only factor involved.

Currently we have a theory that there’s a security setting that’s scrubbing data sent to the LMS by content, escaping characters and such. And it’s doing that on content that is, on its own, escaping characters (like what Articulate does). And that may be underneath whatever Tomcat or IIS is doing to filter data for malicious strings. So, perhaps with all this filtering of the data, something breaks down when the feed comes back. We can trace the string coming back on consecutive data transactions with SCORM content and that’s definitely going on — pipes (|) are being sent the first time. Then, when they’re coming back, they’re URL-encoded. Then it looks like the URL encoding is changing the Ampersand (&) into something else… so it’s being URL-encoded in one place and then that URL encoding is being treated as a straight-up string by something else.

Which for you non-technical types — is un-good.

Everyone is working very diligently to figure this out, but I predict quite a few help desk calls today (I don’t get them, but I know they come). And with members of the team having invested so much time and effort, it’s a drag to see the snags come in so late in process.

I’m pretty confident that everything will be fixed — it’s only a matter of time, as are all things digital. But it’s a drag, and that is no doubt. It’s not a matter of finger-pointing — it’s not Vendor X’s slip-up or anyone’s negligence — this is just a point of pain that comes with enterprise software, especially since enterprise software generally has to be configured specially for an enterprise’s unique needs.

I know I’m not the first (nor will I be the last) to witness it, but I feel horrible for other members of the team who have put in so much time — only to find out they’re going to put in a lot more time

I’m a geek. A big one, and not just physically (though that stereotype applies as well). I’ve been using computers to program my own virtual experiences since I was six. A great portion of it has been an individualized experience.

Now I have a kid. Most people who meet me in real life assume that my three year-old is already quite computer savvy. On the contrary — I’ve deliberately kept her off of computers and gaming devices from the get-go. My stance has been (and to a large degree continues to be) that surrounded by the technology in her world, she’s going to be able to “get it” when she needs to. There’s no need to rush her experience with a computer or its interfaces — she sees it all the time when I’m on the laptop and she’s quite obviously interested from that aspect alone. I can continue to build the mystery, right?

I’ve kept her off the computer because my feeling (there’s a danger word) is that kids need to learn physical agility and social behaviors before entering a technological arena that is largely individualized (and sometimes plain anti-social). It’s hard to argue with that, right? She should be running around, playing with other kids, learning how to share — not self-absorbed in one of what will be a very long line of virtual experiences.

My feelings are starting to change a bit as the technology world is changing, even under my watch — which for a geek is hard to admit. You see, I got my Wii at long last for the holidays from my wife. My daughter watched my brother and I play a round of boxing and she asked if she could play the game with me two days later. She didn’t know what it was, but she could mimic the punching (arms flapping) and recognized somehow she could do that. I sat there dumbfounded… she’s brilliant. Of course she could play boxing with me. I mean, she may not be very good, but she could certainly make the movements necessary to play. So we’ve been playing over the past week, and it’s been incredibly “touching” to share this experience with my kid, even one so young. She forgets to keep punching after about five seconds — I think she just gets absorbed with the characters on the screen (her Mii looks like Peppermint Patty). And if she goes too fast, she complains that her elbows hurt, so we end up stopping. She lacks the fine motor skills necessary to do much more than blunt movements yet, so rather than screw her up orthopedically, we stop and switch to Super Mario Party 8, because that requires less movement, though is ultimately less engaging.

But this is where the technical literacy is playing a part. Having never controlled a mouse before, she has no idea how to use the Wiimote to navigate and click a button. She can clearly identify the button or the icon that needs to be selected and she knows how to select something. But she can barely recognize a relationship yet connecting wrist and arm movement and an object on the screen. This is a limiting factor.

I guess it just dawned on me that I made a dangerous assumption about the nature of virtual experiences in that they’re largely anti-social (based on my own history)… my daughter is entering a world where the virtual experience can be much more social, and the skills of using a mouse and keyboard are important in social experiences — as technology is now changing the way social experiences simply are.

I’m not running out to stock up on programs for her to use on the computer… but I may set up a computer for her to simply play with once in a while — maybe with some painting programs or language re-enforcement stuff.

More importantly, I need to recognize that even as a progressive, forward-thinking learning geek… that my experience colors much of what I see going forward — but that can only be part of the picture I paint. I also need to see the forest for the trees — that the technology isn’t just changing — it’s changing the world that uses it, and that has impacts on how people relate to each other and to new ideas or concepts.

One of the links that came across my Del.icio.us feed this weekend was a little post about how to make a living at being a freelance web designer without having to be really good at design. The author wrote about the 80-20 rule — that basically getting 80% competent at being a web designer wasn’t really hard — but that last 20% to go from competent to awesome was really really tough, and takes a very long time.

With learning content so similar in every technical way to web content, the same rules apply, but as with everything in our trade, it’s got a little bit of a twist to it.

Keep reading for an example of real action items from a cursory review of existing content being modified for a new version of the learning content. Continue Reading »