Flash For Learning

Last Friday, I submitted two white papers forged with considerable ideas and suggestions from professional colleagues (Tom King), fellow professionals (Ethan Estes and Steve Flowers), and new colleagues from around the world (Martin Ebner).

Like Philip Hutchinson, I began the efforts with a serious attempt to produce a formal and very “serious” (read: academic) body of work. I additionally tried to take an informal, yet collaborative approach to writing the papers through the use of Google Docs. Like Philip, even though I turned in my papers on time, I don’t know that I got it all written exactly as I want to express my thoughts. Without ample review of the papers prior to their submission, I must accept that they’re conversation starters (hopefully), and that the discussion that should follow will take the initial ideas proposed and give them life and definition.

My papers are here:

• SCORM 2.0 Content Authoring Standards & Services
• Engagement, Collaboration and Community in SCORM 2.0

I would ask (beg) regular readers and other interested parties to read and discuss the papers on the LETSI pages. But if these papers don’t strike your fancy — there are plenty more to poke your sticks at. At the time of my writing this blog post, there are 70 papers submitted for review, and more are coming in as I write. To say the call for white papers is a success is underscored by the overwhelming (and seemingly unmanageable) response.

Ironically (or just coincidentally depending on whether you’re a fan of Alannis Morrisette or not), the transparent and completely open formation of what is to become SCORM 2.0 is happening at the same time as we learn about the dissolution of the ECMAScript group and the CSS-WG in the W3C. Plenty of good discussions of what went down here, here, here and here.

It’s pretty crazy to me that all the reasons being cited as to why these two groups fell apart all boil down to similar root causes:

1. Trying to take on too much by doing innovation by committee instead of codifying exemplars of best practice.
2. Working behind closed doors.
3. Losing the “vision.”

LETSI is starting off well. Everything is out in the open. You don’t need a login to read any of the goings on — it’s all there for the public interwebs to see. You can read the white papers. You can sign up on the site and add commentary and contribute your thoughts into the fold. You can blog about your opinions and just by mentioning SCORM or LETSI, someone is bound to pick it up with Google Alerts, and even in passing, your constructive feedback is going to get rolled in. Many of us are on Twitter (I’m @mrch0mp3rs). And look at the response so far: 75 white papers submitted for review. I don’t know how many submissions were expected — I figured ~30 would be a success, so the number we have (and more are coming in daily) is just a resounding signal of the interest and the resounding success of transparency.

At least, that’s how I see it.

Managing that level of response is proving to be challenging. The rewards, however, are so worthwhile. Each member of the Program Committee has a “Bird Dog” — which means we have a paper we’re going to actively promote and raise awareness to. I have ten (they’re small ones — like a page each). That also means ten times the discussion (suckas!!!)

We’re going to swipe at these white papers by tagging each of our bird dogs to help us wrangle them into the requirements that will ultimately come together at the SCORM 2.0 Workshop in October (see the LETSI site for details — I’ll be there). The first stab we’re going to take is tagging a paper as proposing a SCORM “evolution” or “revolution.” It may seem simplistic, but we have to get a handle on the wide scope of ideas by starting to categorize them.

• Evolution - SCORM looks like relatively the same animal as before. It has the about the same scope and it solves very similar problems, but perhaps in new and innovative ways.
  
  
• Revolution - SCORM is a new beast entirely. It tackles new problems, increases the scope or completely changes the conceptual model.

The papers I’m particularly fielding are all by Yannck Warnier. I would encourage you to read them and discuss them (topics and links below):

Avoid SCORM Profiles

Cross Domain

Cross Platform Test Suite

Database Structure

Documentation License

Interactions Objectives Example

LMS SCORM Library

Not Exportable Type

Recommend SCORM API

Sequencing Examples

Technorati Tags: scorm 2.0, letsi, standards, css 3, ecmascript 4, w3c, white papers, transparency

Or at least it starts to.

From the site:

“Enkin” introduces a new handheld navigation concept. It displays location-based content in a unique way that bridges the gap between reality and classic map-like representations. It combines GPS, orientation sensors, 3D graphics, live video, several web services, and a novel user interface into an intuitive and light navigation system for mobile devices. Check out our web page enkin.net.

Charles Stross’ novel, Halting State is an interesting mystery/thriller recommended to me by Rovy Brannon back at Learning 2007, and the major technological device it employs is a world about 4 years away now where the phone is THE pre-eminent device that connects us to the internet. Bounded with glasses, the book shares an impressive vision of how Augmented Reality works in the context of gaming, commerce, recreation, work, productivity — everything.

Enkin looks a LOT like a predecessor to the vision Stross described.

Perhaps it’s a side-effect of the age we’re living in, but I’m easily distracted. I have three screens during the day with which to do my digital work. I have two computers. I have virtual desktops that help me stay organized. Two main email accounts. Instant Messaging. Multiple Blogs to write for. About 50 RSS Feeds that I read regularly. Podcasts. Music.

That’s just the digital daily work environment. Couple that with working in a cubical and all the pop-ins that normally happen, and anyone with as many inputs as I have would be prone to distraction, too. I’ve gotten to the point where I can’t really shut off any input without mulling over the fact that it’s gone. But… I still need to tune things out once in a while. This probably sounds like it’s akin to leaving the TV on as background noise while you work, and to some extent that’s true. There are some tasks that require a greater level of concentration. Writing is up there.

As one of my development projects at work is winding down, I’m starting to pick up the organization’s learning standards revision work that I began back in November (funny how time flies). Unfortunately, unlike my email that I normally skim through, this requires me both to read what I’ve already written and make changes based on some feedback that I received — and now append new writing and some re-organization on the side. I can listen to music as I do this, but all the windows I have open on a regular basis make it very difficult to focus my attention. And, call me nitpick-y, even the various toolbars and formatting in all the different Word Processors and text editors I have available to me distract me as I worry about the presentation of the content rather than focus on the content itself.

A good programmer works on abstracting the “presentation” layer of things from everything else. That way, you can “skin” an application or a piece of content to look however you want it to look. I’m now writing with that in mind thanks to two different text editors for both Mac and PC.

On my PC, I’ve downloaded a very simple text editor called DarkRoom, which is basically all the power of Textpad — only it’s fullscreen text on black (instead of black text on white). There’s no spellcheck. There’s no grammar checking. There’s no formatting of the text. It’s simply the text, much like in the days prior to Windows. It blocks everything else out and allows you to just write and save as a .txt file. You can open it or copy-and-paste it into Word when you’re done and do all the formatting there. The software is free, and stable ‘enough’ to use.

This software was inspired by software for the Mac called WriteRoom, which does the same thing but is a bit more mature (and thus is an actual product you have to buy as shareware). WriteRoom allows you to modify a number of settings, including setting the background color. WriteRoom also has an auto-save function, which is always handy. WriteRoom is a joy to use on my Mac and now after trying both of these text editors, especially after reading so much about them on 43 Folders, I get why people love this way of writing.

So if you need to write AND you need to focus on writing, I highly recommend whichever of these runs on your desktop or laptop.

If you’ve been coming to the site for information, you’ve probably noticed that I’ve been very slow to update for quite a while.� I’ve been pretty busy managing the technical team at my company, and in that time I’ve been going beyond just espousing SCORM theory and prototyping, and I’ve been putting that knowledge to practice on several LMS implementations.

In the coming weeks, I’ll be addressing issues such as Cross-Domain, interoperability and working with SCORM Version 1.2.� My hope is that sharing my struggles with these issues will provide you with some insight on things to try, things to avoid, and questions to ask of your clients or vendors.

Thanks to the fine folks at Macromedia, my outline for MAX 2005 was approved (and I’m currently half-way to completing the first draft of the presentation).

• Introduction
• Biography
• What does SCORM mean to a content developer?
  • The SCORM 2004 library
  • ADL’s goals for SCORM (the “-iliities”)
  • View the information flow
  • Data Model – allows tracking of the learner
  • API Instance – allows interoperable communication between content and the Learning Management System (LMS)
• Making your content sharable and communicative
  • Minimum requirements to create a SCO
  • Find the LMS’s API
  • Initialize communication
  • Terminate communication
  • Interactivity and tracking are optional (from a SCORM perspective)
  • Packaging for distribution
  • Flash – DIY
  • Captivate – “It’s in there.”
• What Captivate does for you…
  • Easy Bake E-Learning Content
  • How to package
  • Remember: Captivate requires at least one interaction
  • What’s an interaction?
  • Let’s make one.
  • Exporting for an LMS
• What Flash can do for you
  • Roll your own E-Learning content
  • The Flash/JavaScript Integration Kit
  • Exposing the SCORM API to your Flash content
  • Packaging your sharable content for Learning Management Systems
  • The Manifest
  • 3rd Party Tools you can use
  • What can you do with Flash if you develop this way?
  • Inter-content navigation control
  • Sending user information to the LMS
  • Presenting information from the LMS
  • All your other JavaScript goodness
• Testing any content for SCORM-conformance
  • Debugging? SCORM 2004 Sample Run-Time Environment
  • Validating? SCORM 2004 Conformance Test Suite
• Questions?
• Downloads
• Thank You

Will and I have posted our notes/things learned from FlashForward 2005 on our wiki. We’re looking to fill the wiki with all sorts of Flash and ActionScript goodness, so if you attended FlashForward 2005 in San Francisco and/or have something to add, share or extend the knowledge tree, please .

It would figure that success breeds more success, and now I have a ship that flys about the screen using the arrow keys, again controlled via a Ship class. Try it for yourself right here!

Download the source files. Continue Reading »

With a taste of success under my belt, I started remaking the Asteroids game using ActionSctipt 2.0 and class structure.

Download the source files.

While the Asteroids you see here are movieclips with polygon fills, unlike the completely code-rendered Asteroids in the original game, there is no code in the entire flash movie. All the code takes place in the Asteroid.as class file that each Asteroid movieclip is bound to. I didn’t even have to instantiate these Asteroids for them to behave. I just drag them out of the library and let them do their thing. Continue Reading »

Starting from scratch at understanding just how Object-Oriented Programming, ActionScript 2.0 models inside of Flash. I took a stab at what Grant Skinner spoke about at FlashForward 2005 in San Francisco (last week). Here’s the finished product…

Download the source files.

Grant’s a pretty smart guy. Sure the example he wrote above isn’t terribly sexy, but Grant revealed a key element in how to conceive of OOP in a way that bridges most developers’ understanding of Flash and very evident objects — associating movieclip behaviors with a class that describes the behavior.

I’m going to journal these experiments, working my way up to rebuilding my (somewhat famous) Asteroids code with ActionScript 2.0.

But for now, let’s get back to the basics…

Directly associating Classes to movieclips isn’t the only approach you can use in grasping OOP with ActionScript 2.0, but it’s a great start for understanding how theoretical object structures can relate to the virtual objects that you can manipulate in Flash’s IDE. Continue Reading »

I need to build up my strengths in Flash to talk in terms of ActionScript 2.0. So my goal is to write about Object Oriented Programming with AS2 as I learn it. This helps ensure that my understanding is accurate and it might provide insight to others in how to learn it for themselves.

Low-hanging fruit, indeed.