Flash For Learning

I just had my eyes checked for the first time in six years, and it turns out that while my short-distance vision deteriorated very slightly, my long distance vision has significantly gotten worse. I’m 35, and I DON’T WANT TO BE old enough for bifocals, so I bought two different pairs of glasses. My short-distance lenses make my computer work and reading a lot clearer, and my long-distance lenses keep me from squinting while watching tv, movies or video games (they also make sure I can actually see oncoming traffic when I make left turns — at least that’s the plan).

My wife thinks me insane, as do most of my peers. I call my new short-distance lenses my TACTICAL lenses, and my long-distance lenses my STRATEGIC lenses. I do this to honor my academic advisor and mentor, Dr. Michael Straebel from University of Wisconsin. In the second class I took for my Master’s degree, he introduced the notion of postmodernism with the example of looking at a situation with different sets of lenses. It’s with this inspiration and in this context that I offer the following story.

Lots of organizations in the last 10-20 years solve problems by looking at the immediacy of issues. The brushfires. The low-hanging fruit. Even your GTD methodology (of which I’m a big fan) is often subverted into breaking everything down into tasks and priorties. This keeps things very much afloat, but it belies a lot of the issues that fester underneath the surface. Back in 2005, I attended a Knowledge Management conference focused on eGov — it was a really fascinating conference that highlighted just how very real Knowledge Management concerns were for US Government. The part of the government that regulates the Nuclear Industry was about to face a demographic shift, where the vast majority of their organization was working beyond their retirement age and were now starting to literally die off. In the early 90s, US Gov laid off a bunch of the younger workers (tactic) because they were not productive enough. The older veteran workers were able to do 3-4 times what the younger, novice employees could do. It was cheaper to pay the older employees more and keep them working.

Now, that workforce is literally dying off — and there’s no one to replace them, thus the major cause for concern. What does it mean if no one knows how Nuclear Power Plants are run? Hopefully, we’ll never find out, but it’s now a very real risk as the immediate cost savings US Gov enjoyed in the 90s may cost millions (or billions) more because of the lack of (strategy) investment in succession planning.

This is not an isolated example, and all I need to do is ask the following questions to highlight my point:

• With all the focus on maintenance for SCORM over the past couple of years (tactical), where’s the vision for E-Learning standards going forward (strategic)?
• In organizations where we spend significant time and money onboarding talent (tactical), what’s the plan for keeping the talent there and getting that return on the investment in recruitment and onboarding (strategic)?
• For all the buzz about what we can do to combine social media and mobile with learning, education and training (tactical) — who’s painting the picture of what it should look like if it’s right (strategic)?
• By being divisive and getting into legal squabbles about who owns what part of SCORM (tactical), what’s the long term ramifications of alienating the very people who will evolve E-Learning standards (strategic)?

I’ve been struggling with getting a handle on balancing the tactical and the strategic in a lot of different areas, all personal to me… and what I’m finding is that it can’t be an either/or set of priorities — they both have to coexist at the same time. You ignore tactical realities or strategic planning only at your peril — it really is “pay me now” or “pay me later.”

I didn’t need new glasses to figure this out, but it was an interesting reminder, when I put on my STRATEGIC lenses, and could see things walking on the streets of Chicago that I hadn’t seen before, like the Art in windows of galleries in Wicker Park. That’s when it occurred to me — I probably could’ve avoided my car accident last year if only I had better distance vision.

There’s a lot you need a vision for, and you don’t think about it until it’s too late.

I wanted to first put out a quick promo for a new blog I’m writing for in addition to the 75 other (actually four other) blogs and podcasts I currently contribute to. Becoming Legit is a blog I started up with two peers in my company about what we’re doing to make social media (blogs, wikis, podcasting, collaborative tools, social networking) and make it legitimate (blessed) inside our organization. It’s an uphill battle as I’m sure you are feeling yourself (maybe?). It’s a young blog, but we’re going to be posting to it weekly and we’ll be covering a number of subjects, technical, political and otherwise on what it takes to go from working in the shadows to stepping out into the light. It should be interesting if you’re into social media and/or knowledge management.

Second, there’s SO MUCH I want to write about concerning IMS and their passive aggressive overtures towards open licensing with Creative Commons and the on-again/off-again romance with SCORM (right now it’s off again), but there’s a lot of drama and it keeps changing, so I can’t really write to it without sounding like a guy with way too much time on his hands. And it has never been my intention to be the “Comic Book Guy” of the E-Learning world. So I’m sorry to Philip and others for being silent on this subject — there’s a lot of marrow to boil out of this stew yet.

Third, I hope you’ve been enjoying the ActionScript 3.0 stuff I’ve been tossing up here. There’s more coming.

So, in ActionScript 2.0, there existed such a thing as attachSound which would allow you to call on sounds in your library and iterate them in code much like you would call on movieclips in the library.

With ActionScript 3.0, there is no attachSound, so you need to do a little workaround. It took me a while to find this, but here you go:

import flash.utils.getDefinitionByName;
import flash.media.Sound;


var mySound:Sound;

var librarySound:Class = getDefinitionByName ( "nameOfYourSoundasLinkedFromTheLibrary" ) as Class;

mySound = new librarySound();

Basically, anything that you’re referring to as an Object in ActionScript 3.0 seems to require having a class file. So when you go to your library and export your sound objects for ActionScript, a class file is published for each one, and you need to call on these as a class in your code in order to use them like you would an external .mp3 or other audio file.

Now, for the fun part — remember what a pain in the ass it was to trigger some kind of event when an audio file would stop playing in Flash circa ActionScript 2.0? Throw the following code in to the above:

import flash.media.SoundLoaderContext;
import flash.media.SoundChannel;

var myChannel:SoundChannel;

myChannel = mySound.play();
myChannel.addEventListener( Event.SOUND_COMPLETE, AudioDoneAction );

function AudioDoneAction( event:Event ):void
{
    // Do something when the audio is done
}

So basically, the Sound class in ActionScript 3.0 allows you to load sounds and play them, but if you want to manipulate them or use them to evaluate other stuff, you want to include the Sound object as a reference in a SoundChannel object.

This seems pretty overcomplicated for my simple example here, but think about it this way. What if you had five different external audio files you wanted to load as a playlist for just one slide in an E-Learning piece, and you wanted to trigger different images and text with each audio file. You can code yourself a playlist and trigger changes upon completion of an audio file — and even track where you are in the playlist so that you could have different actions upon completion of the first and/or the last (or really at any defined place in the order of) audio in the playlist.

I couldn’t figure out the embedded audio as class thing on my own. It took a while of experimenting and searching until I found the solution here and here.