Flash For Learning

It’s been a busy month. My workload at… well, at “work” has increased both in scale and diversity of projects. My involvement with LETSI has increased quite a bit in the last month as I read and continue to comment on the over 90 white papers submitted (so far). I’m picking up contracting work from Facebook, of all places. And there’s real life, which has lots of interesting and pleasant distractions from activity online.

Which is ultimately why I’m merging my two main blogs, Flash for Learning and Gen1us into aaronSILVERS.com. There’s two main reasons: convenience and evolution.

I’ve been actively maintaining three blogs and a music podcast, as well as a presence on my company’s wiki. I just don’t have the time to keep up with all these different online activities. Family blog and everything else is one thing. Personal blog, Family blog, Professional blog… I love the sound of my own writing voice, but not that much

Plus, after three years of active blogging, I’m at a place where I’ve learned a bit about my writing style. Between Gen1us and Flash for Learning, I have over 600 posts. Not that many are about Flash, which makes it hard to be honest about a site called “Flash for Learning.”

Twitter has thankfully given an outlet to be weird. Yammer has given me a new opportunity to share and read project activities in a way that’s easy for me to write and consume. My need for a “personal” blog has been satiated by Twitter. I’m wanting to write geekier about a wide variety of subjects — but not so different and off-kilter that my rambling on technology has no basis in knowledge sharing.

There will still be irreverent posts on the new aaronSILVERS.com, but I’ve scraped all my content (the 600+ posts over the last three years), re-categorized my writing into the five major themes that dominated my blogging: Flash, E-Learning, SCORM, Nerd and Personal.

I’ve even called out the categories so you can subscribe to each by email or your RSS reader, in case going to the site isn’t your thing. This way, if you don’t want to read about my quests for world domination, or you just don’t want to read about my adventures in distracting my three year-old with my iPhone — you don’t have to (they’re filed under “Personal” and “Nerd” respectively).

• Flash Subscribe by Email | Feed
• E-Learning Subscribe by Email | Feed
• SCORM Subscribe by Email | Feed
• Nerd Subscribe by Email | Feed
• Personal Subscribe by Email | Feed
• All Subscribe by Email | Feed

This site and the other one will stay up at least throughout the year, and then we’ll see. You’ll still for the time being be able to find everything you’re looking for here. Anything new I write is going to be on aaronSILVERS.com — so if you’re not subscribing now… consider doing so before I start blogging about SCORM 2.0 work… and my plans to rule the world.

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If you’d like to leave a comment today or at any other time, you’ll need to register for this blog. You’ll be approved immediately upon registering. This is an unfortunate but necessary change resulting from the DDOS attack from last week.

GenY workers are going to need to come into the workplace and approach their older coworkers, managers and peers in ways that make them “user-friendly.” I’ve been fortunate enough to land in an environment where the favor is returned many-fold, which is to say — the boomers I work with and for take an active interest in not just “what” I’m saying…. but “why.” I think that’s a pretty good start for a survival guide to working across generations over the next several years. Thanks to this economy, we’re all going to be working together a lot longer than anyone thought

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There’s been some fantastic writing of late in the realm of digital learning, education and training. I don’t know if I know about it more because the tools for sharing via RSS are more ubiquitous or there are just more people writing about it — but the point is that ten years ago, this was a professional field that didn’t even exist as its own discipline (but for the Authorware folks) and now we have hundreds of bloggers building up the calluses in their fingertips as they blog away about this domain, and that’s wonderful for everyone involved.

There are a couple of peers blogging who are fairly regular readers (and when the FFL discussion list is active, they also chime in), so I make it a point to follow what they do. One of those guys is Philip Hutchinson who I think writes very well in all things meta concerning E-Learning. Philip’s most recent post to Pipwerks is his take on choosing authoring tools for E-Learning, and I can’t find a single thing I disagree with in his post.

Most eLearning tools do not promote the creation of effective courses, do not promote web standards, and do not promote accessibility; they merely make cookie-cutter course development easier for technically inexperienced course developers.

I agree. Most of the authoring tools I’ve seen port right to Flash. I love Flash. It’s done me and my family well for many years now. But it’s not the most open of formats. It’s also not the most flexible of formats. It’s just about impossible to do anything with the published Flash content that any of the popular E-Learning tools on the market. And if you ever want to talk about reusability, there’s just about no easy-bake oven method available to make published Flash content look like something other than what it was published as unless you know a lot about the underlying code in the compiled file. Sure, the textual content of tools like Articulate is all extracted into XML, and theoretically you could use that XML as a basis to reformat content in a different medium, but again that work is highly prohibitive — as are any of the alternatives that actually work with web standards (at least the ones that might be released in the market today).

Philip writes more…

…not being tied to a particular tool or proprietary format means that practically anyone with general web development experience will be able to make edits to your course or even create new courses using your system. Millions of people around the world work with HTML, and hundreds of thousands work with JavaScript. I’m willing to bet that the number of people familiar with proprietary eLearning development tools is much smaller, probably numbering in the thousands. It’s a niche.

Okay, here’s where we part ways a little bit, I guess. Philip is absolutely correct that the shear number of “web developers” of which “E-Leanring developers” might be a subset in that they mingle in some of the same technologies is about, maybe, a 10,000:1 ratio. I’m not disputing that working with web standards wouldn’t significantly improve the likelihood of making revisions and edits faster and cheaper, let alone the opportunities for re-use.

I’d argue, though, that one of the reasons why authoring tools like Articulate, Captivate, Raptivity, Lectora, FlashForm, Adobe Presenter (we can go on) are so popular is specifically because, as Philip also writes…

…They’re geared towards users with little or no development expertise. Yes, they’re geared towards the PowerPoint crowd.

Couple that fact that learning, education and training budgets are smaller than just about every other department, at least in corporate America — and that’s if budgets for training even exist, and the likelihood of attracting and maintaining (or even contracting) qualified talent to work with tools from scratch make it prohibitive to work with what I call low-level authoring tools like Flash (as a tool) or Dreamweaver (as a tool) or even Textpad to produce standards-compliant HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

The trick is that these people will use a great authoring tool if it’s easy to use, and the use of any authoring tool is likely to be a trap in and of itself, because the designers and the engineers of a tool have their own assumptions about the nuances like class and id names in CSS — it’s still going to be difficult to translate this into reuse. And if you’re not talking about reusability, now that you’re going with CSS and JavaScript, you now have to contend with possibly making sure it presents and functions correctly across browsers, which was one of the biggest strengths for Flash-based platforms from jump.

And we’re still talking about single authors using tools, which works great if you’re a one-person army building E-Learning. But I know on my team, we’re already running into some pretty glaring issues of source portability with tools like Articulate, where we want to collaborate and have multiple people authoring — but have issues of losing our audio or embedded media paths, versioning, etc. If we want to discuss collaborative authoring, none of your big, popular authoring tools really cut the mustard (though I’m curious what Adobe and maybe Articulate has cooking in this regard).

So What’s the Answer?

Well, there is no one right answer at the moment for weening off the PowerPoint-to-Flash model, but I’ve heard about some interesting things from Eduworks. Robby Robson has been heavily involved with standards organizations from before I got into E-Learning and has brought up some interesting ideas in conversations over the last year that make me think they’re thinking about solutions for standards-based content development in the E-Learning realm.

There’s also a nifty open-source project called eXe that amazingly runs on both Mac, Linux and Windows, and purports to publish content as standards-compliant HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I don’t know if I’d say it’s ready for primetime, but it’s promising that there’s an open source tool that runs on all platforms and may get to being as user-friendly as any other given authoring tool.

My point is that Philip is absolutely correct that if we keep using the same authoring tools, we’re going to eventually be limited by design implications inherent in the technical constraints of the tools that we choose to use. The more flexible a tool is, the greater skill is needed to wield it.

But no matter what, to get to making it easier to edit or adapt learning content, we need to get out of published Flash to do that — and, oh by the way, we need to make the experience collaborative to take advantage of efficiencies that can be gained by having multiple contributors to projects and integrating QA into the workflow.

As Philip suggests, moving towards web standards should make all this much easier to do, but it will be the authoring tool, and not the technologies themselves, that will get corporate learning, education and training to jump to it.

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.

Just a quick aside on the power of Feedburner: I was alerted by someone at Feedburner that my RSS feed wasn’t rendering the actual Feedburner layout and that my stats were probably off because of it. So, with a tiny bit of coaching, I got it right now (just click on the RSS icon in the sidebar to see for yourself). This morning I checked out my stats and they are through the freaking roof — On top of the 90+ people who actually visit the site, since yesterday afternoon alone I’ve had about 38 people who actively subscribe…. and that’s just since yesterday around 4:30pm until midnight last night.

If I look at the stats on the feed itself as far as live hits, I can see that there’s 25 hits from various news feed readers in the last hour alone. That’s WAY more readership than I ever thought, and most of the content on this site has not been (imho) the most consistent effort.

So thanks if you’re one of the silent masses who’ve been hitting this site and let me re-affirm that more good things are underway. I had no idea that so many people around the world (seriously — people from Athens, Greece and Riyadh??? Awesome) read up on my take on E-Learning, Flash and assorted technologies.

I feel like I owe you something more than the erratic posts you’ve had over the past two years. I’ll try and make your visits worthwhile.

Blogging

Notice how I’ve been a little more active of late? A couple of things related to that:

• I’m using MarsEdit to actually post entries to the blog, which allows me to write when I’m at the computer, and not necessarily just when I’m at the computer and online.

• It also translates Markdown syntax for writing in text editors, which is a habit I picked up very early in my blogging that saved me a ton of time by not having to do HTML markup, allowing me to write more “in the flow”. Markdown has had a spotty history of working or not working quite right with Wordpress (it’s back to working again now), but with MarsEdit, I can do it on the fly much faster, which is awesome. Plus the integration with iPhoto and Flickr, so I can add a little more color to the posts.

• Since I’ve been tracking readership of the blog through Feedburner, I now have a better sense of how much this blog gets read a day/week/month, etc. I thought I maybe had 3-4 people a day hitting the blog, which doesn’t encourage a lot of writing, but Feedburner helps visualize for me how many people subscribe via RSS in Google Reader, for example. It also gives me Metrics on how many people from Morden hit the blog (about 8 visits yesterday alone — Hi, England!). And it helps paint a picture for me of what topics are popular and what’s not (SCORM 1.2 and ExternalInteface by a wide margin). Google bought Feedburner. It’s free to use and it’s been a bit of a motivator, since about 60-90 of you hit this site every business day.

Pecha Kucha

One of the things I picked up at Learning 2007, specifically at Dan Pink’s keynote was this Pecha Kucha thing that I talked about earlier. So this morning I tried it in a bi-weekly staff meeting to talk to what I picked up from the conference.

I could see a look of angst in the crowd of peers and superiors in the beginning, as the pace of my presenting was markedly faster — as if to groan, “Oh no… Aaron’s innovating AGAIN.” But after a couple of slides, I sensed a very dramatic change in response. I think my people responded very positively to the change in the format, recognizing the elimination of waste and the amount of focus it takes to put it together and present information in this way.

Truth be told, I thought it would be a breeze to put together, but I actually had a hard time, both in finding good visuals (pictures) to capture what I wanted to share, and in the absence of graphics — condensing text on the screen to be absorbed in a 20-second exposure.

In the end, I found it a strengthening experience and I plan on exercising my Pecha Kucha skills further, especially when I have to present information live. I don’t know how well it would work in an asynchronous environment, because I think part of the experience is the idea of “being in the room.”

Reading

I ordered a couple of books from Amazon based off of suggestions from various friends at Learning 2007. One of them is Gadgets, Games and Gizmos for Learning, which is turning out to be a very interesting read suggested (and blogged about) by both Tom King and Brent Schlenker. When Tom King is telling me how to cheat this book, I’m way sold.

Kapp describes a differentiation within the GenX/GenY populations in four phases affected by the gaming that was available to each part of the population as they came of age. And I’m completely blown away by his observation — like it speaks to me and my peers both of my age, a little older and younger than me.

Kapp describes “gamers” in four groups:

• Gamer 1.0 (gaming from 1970-1980), defined by the game: Pong.
• Gamer 2.0 (gaming from 1980-1990), defined by Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Battlezone, Super Mario Brothers and Tetris
• Gamer 3.0 (gaming from 1990-2000), defined by Myst, Zelda, Manic Mansion, Tomb Raider, Diablo, EverQuest
• Gamer 4.0 (gaming now), defined by The Sims, WoW, Grand Theft Auto III

Each of the defining games have a level of activity that grows more complex with each group; each have a growing degree of realism; each require an increasing degree of cognitive processing; and each require a higher degree of player collaboration than the games preceding them.

This ties in very well with Dan Pink and Don Tapscott.

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.