Flash For Learning

As learning profressionals, we spend almost ALL of our time and resources cranking out new ways to motivate our audiences and design to make the content enriching, challenging, thoughtful and most importantly to enable the instructional goals intended by the production.

But what about the audience? Don’t THEY have a responsibility to themselves as active participants, even in asynchronous learning?

I point this out because a friend of mine (IRL - “In Real Life”) directed me to a website another buddy of his put together to share his lessons learned from smoking meat — barbecuing for long periods of time using smoke (hence “smoking”).

Here’s the link, but what’s striking to me is what happens after the jump:

Gary explains his rationale for the pledge:

What’s that? Terms seem a bit harsh? Well, here’s why I insist that you follow the 5-Step program as written before going off on your own. The 5-Step program is not so much about cooking any particular meat as it is about learning fire and smoke control. Once you understand that, you have the skills to cook any kind of meat. But it’s been my experience, from both cooking and being a member of BBQ oriented mailing lists (listservs) for the past 8 years, that when newbies try to mix and match advice from different sources, disaster is just around the corner. I am by no means saying that my way with the WSM is the only way. But I’ve found, without a doubt, that if one follows all 5 steps straight through they gain a damn good understanding of how to use the WSM—and will have learned how to prepare four different meats and enjoyed five damn good meals in the process, which is hardly a high price to pay for keeping your ego in check and following orders at the very beginning. Once you have the basics down, it’s fairly easy to cook BBQ better than 99.9% of all BBQ restaurants, and you are invited, heck encouraged, to do whatever you want after that point. But for your first five cooks, follow the program exactly—or don’t start it at all, and spend years screwing around and trying to figure out what went wrong, like I did.

I think the statement speaks for itself, but I’ll share my analysis anyway: You have a subject matter expert here, sharing lessons learned through lots of trial and error. There’s context, there’s relevance, there’s humor and personality — it’s good learning.

Thoughts?

On Saturday night, I saw Crowded House perform. This event provided an epiphany that I will attempt to relate in my normal, long-winded and winding manner.

As a former music major and the writer of many many cheesy love songs back when I lazily pursued musical ambitions, I appreciated many torch singers. I knew a handful of Crowded House songs and I like those songs. I’d tape them off the radio or off of other friends who had them on CD when I’d make mixtapes. I just never liked them so much that I had to own their CDs until I worked at a used-CD store. Then I had so many CD’s that, like my penchant for buying books, the CDs just sat in my shelf until the advent of iTunes allowed me to rip them, store the albums electronically and sell of the CDs. As a very early owner of the iPod, I’ve now gone through several iPods, each with far less capacity than my music library. In fact, it is to the point that even though I create new playlists on a weekly basis (the modern day mix tape), I can’t dig into my library fast enough or far enough, and now I just fill my iPod up completely at random just to discover what I have in my library.

Now that’s already a paradigm shift over how most people approach their music library, but it continues further down the rabbit hole. I’ve been taking this approach — just randomly filling up my iPod to listen through my library, metal or classical or outlaw country or throat chants from Nepal — for years now. And it’s through this shuffling that I’ve now heard pretty much every Crowded House song recorded and discovered that I’m a HUGE Crowded House fan. Despite never really being aware of my exposure to them when they were regulars on the airwaves, I look through my catalog of torch songs and they sound like imitations (at worst) or allusions (at best) to Neil Finn’s work, both solo and collectively in his bands Split Enz, Crowded House and the Finn Brothers. This epiphany combined with a deep and abiding love of music drove me to network through friends of friends to find someone willing to go with me (my wife is six weeks from delivering our second child, so standing for three hours at a show is just not high on her preferences — also, she’s much more into metal as far as shows go).

I found a friend of a friend who was game, even though he was just a passive fan of the one or two songs he knew. It mattered not, I just needed to share the experience with someone, as well as enjoy a couple pints of Guinness before the show. It was a fantastic show, and Crowded House introduced several new songs — my favorite new song, “Turn it Around” is below:

After my 2am burrito following the show, I was still pretty awake ruminating on the performance I just saw. I thought a lot about this song and how much I really liked it. I spent a little time on Sunday night (after catching up on Battlestar Galactica) seeing if the set list from Saturday’s show was posted by a fan so I could, at least, figure out the name of the song. By Sunday night, I had not seen a set list from my show… but there were a number of setlists already posted up in various fan forums. This is a practice that goes back to fans of the Grateful Dead, Phish, Black Crowes and Pearl Jam: dedicated fans who chronicle every show and bootleg available. From this I was able to get the name of my song, and then I proceeded to search again for “Crowded House Turn It Around” and TWO YouTube videos came up immediately from different fans at different shows.

It immediately hit me that I should’ve brought my new Flip camera instead of chickening out, but I’m still in a mindset that cameras are going to be taken away at shows, like an unfortunate experience I witnessed years ago at a Phil Collins show. Since then, unless it’s expressly stated that cameras are allowed, I leave them at home.

This thought immediately turned me on my head with regards to how we distribute official knowledge. Let me try and work backwards. See, even three years ago, there wasn’t a YouTube (at least, not a popular one). There weren’t compact video capturing devices that people could afford easily (like around $100). There wasn’t a culture that made it de-facto “permissable” to record concerts even with amateur equipment. If you were brave and cunning enough to sneak in your equipment, there wasn’t a way to easily share it with anyone beyond your immediate friends, unless you were also resourceful enough technically to run your own FTP server, and even if you were using BitTorrent or some kind of Gnutella-based file sharing protocol, people would have to be stumbling onto it — it’s not like you would be able to easily Google it. But now you can. Now, it’s expected that after I go to a show, there are perhaps multiple ways of getting a recording of that show, even if it’s not me who’s doing the recording and posting.

There’s a lesson to be learned with how we approach Subject Matter Expertise. It’s been said on a few forums that the biggest time delay in getting Rapid Learning out to learners is in the Subject Matter Expert reviews. In the current (and arguably antiquated) model, this assumes that SMEs can’t create the content themselves — that producing instructional material is a job for ISDs or content developers — some other “title” or person than the SME themselves.

Well, what if the learners capture the content live and share it, doing the work of producing and tagging material they find interesting? That’s an idea. The rub is that much of the content we’d expose them to probably doesn’t reap the same kind of fandom as a band does. Well, okay then: what if our Subject Matter Experts just put it out there? The tools are getting better (Articulate Studio 08 looks promising and easier than Articulate Studio 5). The tools are getting cheaper. The tools are getting easier to use (try editing some video with iMovie 08 and let it just export directly into YouTube). SMEs aren’t taking up the valuable time to get information out to learners — WE ARE. We need to think differently (again) about what our job is — our job is to help craft the message. We can help contextualize it. But getting the message OUT to learners? That doesn’t have to be the job of content developers or instructional designers any more. And it shouldn’t, because we’re wasting time.

What we should be doing is helping identify what the semantic questions are addressed by the SMEs when they capture their knowledge and publish. We should help make it easier for knowledge centers, be they groups of people or individuals themselves, to know that there’s new informational content out in their periphery and provide border resources to pull information together. Field Trainers and Training Managers can be creating “playlists” of the information that is put out by SMEs, customizing that information for learners who have finite and contextual instructional needs.

We’ve tried to automate this with intelligent agents (both in the instructional technologies and even tools like “The Filter” for iTunes) — and they kinda work. But a good instructor knows how to build curriculum. If we make it easier for people to answer their own questions or for facilitators to pull on knowledge resources to quickly create informational materials, I think you’ll have a state where knowledge transfer happens faster and the information is more appropriate. If you couple this with an ability for the learners to SHARE the information that’s useful to them with others, you start to build communities, however dynamic, of learners engaged in the discourse.

This is how users of many generations behave online now. We need to think about how to capitalize on the active engagement of the learner as a possible facilitator of flexible organizational learning.

I welcome your thoughts…

It looks like I will have a rare (for me, anyway) opportunity to have an hour or two of face time with Dan Pink tomorrow in downtown Chicago along with what I assume is 3-4 other people. This has been “brewing” (har har) over the past several days, so in addition to re-reading his books, I’ve been also scouring the internets for other writings (and speeches he wrote for Al Gore, but I’m having trouble finding attributions). I know we’ll be talking about his current book. I’m hopeful he’s going to talk about ideas for a next book. If I have the opportunity to ask him open questions, I want to ask questions that either challenge his views or open up something new.

I’ve been compiling them over the past couple of days, but if you have a question, PLEASE leave it as a comment on this thread or twitter me (mrch0mp3rs) today.

Here’s some of my questions:

• A bedrock of the arguments presented in Free Agent Nation and A Whole New Mind seems to be an enabling force in Johnny Bunko: that as a nation “…we create greater wealth, deliver more and better goods and services, and positively kick butt on innovation.” (Reason Magazine, 2001) I think there are lot of people who would agree with that statement.But in the context of a large disparity of wealth so large that by just one measure, “top executives averaged $10.8 million in total compensation, over 364 times the pay of the average American worker, a calculation based on data from an Associated Press survey of 386 Fortune 500 companies…” (Fair Economy, 2007), can that same wealth generated by the US as a nation also be disabling for US workers? If so, how can American workers (knowledge workers or otherwise) mitigate or reconcile the lessons from Johnny Bunko?
• The lessons expressed (and certainly the story) in Johnny Bunko focuses mainly on knowledge workers. There are a lot of “blue collar” workers in the GenX/GenY/Millenial audience that Johnny Bunko is written for. For people working a retail, manufacturing job, how can these lessons be actualized? And if these aren’t the lessons for hands-on or front-line workers, then what lessons should these people adopt?
• Your books all address the GenX/GenY/Millenial audience as they are entering or already are in the workforce. The secondary audience seems to be everyone else, which in the corporate but non-tech company world, is a demographic that Millenials by and large reports to. There is a wealth of information about how GenX/GenY prefers to work, what they value, etc. There is little information for my managers on how to manage me. If Johnny Bunko can teach me about how to approach my career, what can managers learn about how to manage me?
• Online learning has opened the doors to a broader population of students, but the business of online education is in decline, as stock prices for American Intercontinental University and University of Phoenix are in steep decline and have been for the past year or two. Where online universities are booming are in the traditional brick and mortar universities which establish online programs, such as Pepperdine’s doctoral programs in Education. At the same time that the knowledge is being released for free, like MIT, Berkeley and Harvard classes shared via iTunes; the college textbook industry is consolidating, concentrating in print which runs up the cost of college texts while at the same time placing DRM on the online “courses” they publish for the online portals of institutions. Do you think there is a danger to innovation by the concentration of “official” media and by the restriction of its use?

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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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.

Have you looked at the Stock Market lately? You don’t have to be in the United States to appreciate the situation. We’re in for a bumpy ride. It may not be the end-of-days scenario that noted economists, politicos and pundits predict, but it’s obvious to me here in Chicago that the market is going to be turbulent, which is undoubtedly going to affect what people, organizations and governments spend money on — and that’s going to affect corporate, academic and government budgets… and as far as it impacts corporate budgets, it’s definitely going to impact me and my work. Here’s how I see it rolling.

How solid are those plans for upgrading your LMS? Chances are you won’t unless there are technical reasons that make it an imperative. It might have been difficult last year to make the business case to upgrade a piece of enterprise software last year when the market was still good, but this year with the coffers tightening, dropping another couple hundred thousand (or a couple of million depending on your scale) is just not likely. Big ticket items like LMSs and LCMSs are probably going to be on=hold for acquisition unless you can show without a doubt how what you buy will a) save the organization a ton of cash in other ways, thus reducing costs overall; and/or b) improve productivity in measurable ways, thus reducing your operating costs overall.

In fact, let’s make that the common theme for this post. See, when budgets are just the “normal” kind of tight for learning, education and training, you have the opportunity for doing small Research and Development projects (not like there’s lots of official time for those, but you can fly some pet projects under the radar until you’re ready to show them off). When there’s a promise that next month will be another record breaking milestone, you can get that expansion or that new acquisition through a little easier. But when times get tight, you need to really be concerned about the bottom line — but you also need to focus on infrastructure. You want to be able to do more with less — but you also don’t want the people or the services you rely on to get destroyed in the process of running lean.

Your budget was probably set in stone (concrete, maybe?) before the start of this year. Use it to train your people in a variety of needed skills so that an Instructional Designer or a Content Developer can do a lot more than they could before. Use it to upgrade the authoring tools you use. Use it develop those reusable templates you’re going to need next year.

If your organization hasn’t gone mobile yet, you’re likely not going to in the next two years. Keep reading what other organizations are doing with mobile, because discussing and designing the future is very important — but not as important as being able to squeeze the most value you can right now.

If I was to weigh in on how we’d spend what money we have this year, I’d advise the following:

Definitely

• Transition our main authoring tool to something collaborative.
• Upgrade our simulation capturing tool to make sure it’s as robust and stable as it can be.
• Invent or Acquire a means to manage media assets, learning objectives, competencies and how content maps to and with these things.
• Pick up some media software (Flash, maybe something for digital video)
• Code for custom E-Learning content (for those custom jobs or content upgrades from years ago that all of the sudden just stop working)
• Train the tech savvy on Flash, HTML and JavaScript; train the Instructional Design-savvy on Graphic Design principles. Train everyone on curriculum development, project management and personal productivity skills, because when organizations make due with less, that usually means people who do — do more.

Maybe

• Upgrade hardware to mobile equipment to go to where the internal client is
• Push out collaborative authoring tools to Subject Matter Experts.

I’d welcome any questions or input on this topic, because I think we’re going to see a shift similar to what the commercial sector saw in 2002 and 2003 when the dot-com bubble burst. For government, this will be the first time in a very long time experiencing this. For you folks in the acaedmic sector, this is old hat to you

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.

I received a Google Alert this morning from Al Moser’s blog where he basically states it’s time to blast our thoughts of reusability, in terms of reusing content objects into other contexts, and instead focus on reuse of content across learning environments. I urge you to read the original post, but let me riff on Mr. Moser’s thought:

The SCORM philosophy will work best if we go back to its original purpose which was to ensure that you could re-use existing (compiled) content from one LMS to another; not from one COURSE to another, or from one authoring tool to another. Right now they are caught between trying to ensure that a course will work well on any LMS (therefore, it pretty much has to be static) and the Web 2.0 concepts of content aggregation in real time from multiple sources (thereby breaking LMS-independence)

I must admit I’m a little torn on the subject, because I don’t think that reusability of content into different contexts is impossible. I think it’s very difficult to pull off without the use of some aids in the form of applications, tools, search technologies and rigid presentation standards, admittedly none of which are used together today. But I can picture it. Others pictured it. Claude Ostyn and Phillip Dodds even pictured it. If you can see it, I’m tempted to believe you can build it when it comes to digital technology.

However, in stating this which I think is in direct opposition to Mr. Moser’s thought, I definitely agree that getting the E-Learning community over the hump of reusability is important, and this notion of redefining reusability by coupling it with “interoperability” isn’t a fragmentary notion. At the big SCORM Technical Working Group meeting, one of the ideas batted around for what to do next was to consider which “ilities” were really relevant.

I agree that it’s near impossible to reuse content in different contexts where we’re at now. We still can barely get tools we use all the time to work all the time. I mean, jeez… I defined Articulate and Quizmaker as a standard for my organization. And guess what? If you have special characters in your Quizmaker assessment, it can break your suspend data on closing the content, and thus it makes it look to the LMS like you didn’t complete content, even though you might have. So you work though that one issue and maybe you inserted a special character into the title of your content — which ends up as an attribute in your Metadata and in your Manifest — and that breaks your content. You fix that, but decide to put in multiple Quizmaker assessments into an Articulate Presentation, but you don’t want to use any of the assessments as a determining factor towards completion — which after much testing you find out will never leave a student’s enrollments because of some weird issue with how Quizmaker assessments are leveraged in Articulate Presenter.

I don’t mean to go off on a rant on issues Articulate has in Vendor X’s LMS. But I want to highlight the issues I see in just getting content from the same authoring tool, with the same code base, working in one LMS in a consistent manner with other pieces of content authored in the same tools and deployed to the same environment with the exact same code base.

See, my point is that as difficult as my scenario above is — I’m not trying to mix my content in with content possibly produced by somebody else — possibly not even built with Articulate. Even using certified SCORM products isn’t good enough. Articulate IS certified. Vendor X IS certified. But that doesn’t mean they work together out of the box.

So maybe for slightly different reasons, I agree with Al Moser about reusability. Because, from my vantage point, we can’t even talk about reusability — even at a technical level, until we can address interoperability. And frankly, we can’t talk about interoperability until we finally settle on compatibility.

Because at the end of the day, you just want the content you buy or build to work in the system you support. And if you’re building the content, this should be a science, not an art.

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.