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?

With my 3G iPod nano, I’ve run the course on getting my learn on as far as adjusting my fantasy football team or catching up on political satire. This weekend I was getting jiggy with ActionScript 3 and actively sought out what podcasts might be available, video or otherwise, on the subject.

I didn’t find much. However, I found at least one use of podcasting that are extending the official knowledge out there. I’ve been reading the ActionScript 3.0 Game Programming University by Gary Rosenzweig off my Safari account to get a little more hands-on with the code. Turns out, Gary also has a podcast that extends the lessons in the book, complete with screen grabs (done on the Mac, just to needle it in for some of you) on how to further modify or extend the code examples detailed in some of the lessons. That’s pretty nifty from both a marketing and an educational perspective.

I’d love to find out more about podcasts centered around Flash, Actionscript 3 or scripting in general (for all my experimentations and tutorials, Ruby on Rails still isn’t taking for me — and neither is Flex).

“We’re still trying to figure out what the questions are.”

Accenture had an opportunity for Mobile Learning. The Business need they had was to increase the speed and ease of uptake of corporate required training by senior executives. They also needed to provide important information at the moment of need.

Fortunately, they have a receptive audience that would benefit from and use a mobile approach to training. Mobile devices for their senior executives are enabling technologies. Senior executives make up a large population of our mobile device users.

• January 2007 = 6,000; October 2007 = 14,000

The Future Scenario:

1. The SE receives email aobut required training on their mobile device just before heading to the airport.
2. SE selects the “myLearning mobile solution” option for this training from her mobile device.
3. myLearning automatically enrolls the SE in the course and the SE has access to the mobile training course
4. SE takes a 15-20 minute segment of training and successfully completes an assessment en route to the airport.

Obstacles:

• Flash not supported as it needs to on mobile
• LMS Communication issues
• Configuration issues with the broad span of devices that need to be supported (dozens with different OSs)

Accenture decided to pilot it with a 12-screen prototype, intentionally selecting 12 screens that would present a challenge porting from their E-Learning to mobile. The decision to do this rather than designing from the ground up was intentional, as SEs wanted an experience that was as close to traditional E-Learning as possible. Accenture started in-house with a live demo with a very small population, and then they went remote for a pilot. Both groups came back and said they’d use it (about 90% in each group) when asked — stating they had a “better than expected” experience with the prototype.

Phase 1: Prototype

• Goals
  • Develop small prototype
  • Test with SE
  • Refine future scenario
• Key Research
  • Audience reaction
  • Insight on mobile technology
  • User interaction design considerations and trade-offs
• Content Interaction Definition
  • Ten minutes of content from existing ethics course
  • Simple text and graphics
  • Two types of interactions: multiple choice and fill-in-the-blank

Phase 2: Field Testing

• Goals
  • Develop a full Ethics course on a mobile device (no LMS interaction)
  • Test with a broader audience
• Key Research
  • Audience reaction and insight use of mobile devices
  • user interaction and design considerations
  • Preliminary infrastructure research

Phase 3: Infrastructure (including LMS integration for the first time)

• Goals
  • Develop LMS integration for mobile training delivery
  • Create a seamless experience from notification and enrollment on through to completion
• Key Research
  • Enrollment and completion communication to the LMS

Phase 4: Rollout

• Goals
  • Expand Accenture’s mobile learning asset catalog
  • Increase the richness of the user experience
• Key Research
  • Determine how to make the user experience better

Effective Design

Elements of effective designa nd usability of a mobile learning solution:

• Refreshable content
• Appropriate chunking of focused content
• Concise writing
• Effective and logical navigation
• Simple graphics

Sorry for being silent for so long (again… again). There’s a lot going on with work that’s been keeping me busy enough to ignore blogging on all my sites.

I wanted to propose a podcast curriculum where I’ll talk to something having to do with SCORM and Flash in small chunks, and hopefully keep it light, somewhat entertaining but valuable and focused.

So from the feedback I’m gathering in comments on the SCORM 1.2 ExternalInterface demo, here’s what I think you need to start with:

• Content Package and the Manifest in SCORM 1.2
  1. Get to know the tools we’ll use.
  2. The Parts of the Manifest
  3. Organizing your Manifest in SCORM 1.2
  4. The Manifest and Metadata in SCORM 1.2
  5. How Aaron Rolls (practices and conventions)
• Communicating with the SCORM API
  1. The Parts of your SCO
  2. Using the APIWrapper.js
  3. Accessing the Run-Time Data Model
  4. The Top 10 Data Model Elements in SCORM 1.2
  5. How Aaron Rolls (practices and conventions)

Now… what else am I missing? And are you willing to help, either in the production of the content, QA and testing or simply in supporting the effort with a couple of bucks for some caffeine goodness?

So I’ve dabbled with the podcasting thing before, both here and on my family blog. Last week, since some friends of mine are heading into Chicago to attend a music festival with me, I began a podcast where I put on an hour-long radio show featuring music. The subject matter is pretty contained: I don’t talk tech, I don’t wax politic (at least not overtly) — I only talk about the music being played and any anecdotes related to the song, both historical and personal, since I’m kind of a music buff. If you’re curious, you can check it out. I can share how I put it together in comments or offline.

I emailed all of my friends and acquaintences. Maybe 200+ people (I have a lot of actual friends). And of that number, only six people seem to have signed up. Instead of handling the feed myself as I would have using podPress for WordPress, I signed up for FeedBurner, which provides stats on my podcast — who’s signing up via email vs. iTunes vs. Other, how many clicks back to the site have there been, how many downloads of the .mp3 files, etc. But 6 out of 200 is only 3%. I would have thought I’d get better results.

Then a friend of mine called me up yesterday, about a week after I first launched the podcast. She didn’t know what the whole podcasting thing was about, and was confused. So I made my friends a video on how to add my podcast to iTunes, now perhaps better understanding that while most of my oldest friends own iPods… they may never have downloaded a podcast. It might sound weird to this audience, but just think of it as an adoption challenge I didn’t see coming.

I sent the video to my friends, and the numbers the next day? They went DOWN.

Maybe it’s just a bad podcast. Don’t know. But as long as I have my six regular listeners, I’ll keep doing it.

At the urging of one of my more artistic friends, I went downtown to Columbia College to participate in a free one-day program where we take discarded junk (electronic and otherwise) and turn it into electronic musical instruments — all without knowing anything about electronics at the outset.

With about 20 minutes of basic instruction on the high-level concept of completing a circuit, and switching feedback on and off by closing and opening the idea of a switch, we were let loose to tear apart junk with screwdrivers and hacksaws, and then given wire strippers, speaker cable, soldering iron and hot glue guns to make something happen.

After about two hours of just ripping stuff apart, inspiration came upon me and I put together a five-key keyboard out of an old computer keyboard and a stainless steel coffee mug. I was done with my instrument early, so I built drawing robots out of battery packs, tiny 5v motors with a counterbalance, dixie cups and magic markers.

Everyone was able to produce something musical — but I was the only one who could play a song (”Smoke on the Water” — and yes, the thumbkey was programmed to add cowbell).

http://www.scrapyardchallenge.com/chicago/MSCCCChicago.html

End result: I don’t know much more about electronics than i did when I got there, but it’s way more accessible to me now than it ever was out of a textbook. I’m running to Radio Shack this week to buy tiny motors to build draw-bots with Logan, and I’m researching online circuit boards to interface with my midi software that’s on my Mac.

This was the most awesome learning experience I’ve participated in in quite a long time.

Today’s announcement about the release of Adobe’s CS3 suite of tools, including a new IDE for Flash, got me highly motivated to divde into my Safari Rough Cut of Colin Moock’s ActionScript 3 book, as well as pick up where I meandered off in my Flex 2: Training from the Source book.

And then I thought to myself, “Wow, do these books take a while to get through.” That’s when my buddy Santi IM’d me about renting training videos from SmartFlix. SmartFlix has instructional DVDs on all sorts of things — like metalworking, soldering and other geek wonderment. But I was very happy to find two different DVDs from TotalTraining on Adobe Flex 2.

I’ll have a week to go through them, but that should be enough to kick my but into gear. If you’re like me and you want to play, but lack the time or the motivation to read even when you surround yourself with good materials, give SmartFlix a shot.

I’m really looking forward to their arrival. And thanks for the tip, Santi.