Flash For Learning

Aside from rocking out, quoting movies and tv shows incessently, cooking, troubleshooting a wide array of technical issues… one of the things I do really well is start things I’m excited about. I’m getting better at finishing them.

There are at least two ideas I’ve had brewing that I’d like to write a white paper on, but I probably won’t have the gumption in me to finish both of them by myself by August 15. I’m posting them here in the hopes that you or someone you know might be interested in collaborating on a white paper topic through helping edit, research, add some other ideas and/or even to help write.

I think there are many people who feel a little nervous about the idea of writing a whole paper on their own. I’d feel a lot more comfortable myself if someone else thought I had a decent idea before I submitted it.

So if you’re interested in either of these ideas, let me know. I’m going to really try to draft up a brain dump on these topics by the beginning of next week, and we can take a stab at collaborating through Google Docs or the web 1.0 way of emailing Word Docs as an attachment.

My interests…

• Exposing a content authoring feature as a service to support subject matter experts and user-generated content, resulting in XML with media attachments packaged that can be “skinned” according to LMS-administered settings for organizational presentation rules.

  • DITA has a schema proposed for Learning and Training content.

  • Having E-Learning content that validates to the same schema helps with interoperability.

  • A standardized content authoring platform allows user-generated content to conform to organizational norms.

  • Separating out the “content” from the “presentation layer” allows organizations to control the presentation of interoperable content.

  • A market for LMS or service vendors opens up to compete on the strenth of the user-experience in authoring such content.

  • Services are already proposed to package content for SCORM “from the cloud.”

• Expose a service for tagging content (a la del.icio.us) and elevating the relevance of content (a la Digg/Pligg) to engage a community of learners to both assist in the metadata collection on content.

  • Metadata is still important, even if the implementation has been crap to this point.

  • Elevating the relevance of specific content over others in a repository helps with connecting to talent management systems, automated intelligent tutoring agents, etc.

  • Martin Ebner helped spark this specific idea and has agreed to help, but there’s room for a couple more collaborators if there’s interest on this topic.

Several weeks ago, a call for white papers was announced to provide the broadest possible input into shaping SCORM 2.0.

We have this framework that most E-Learning content and Learning Management Systems use as a basis for their data tracking, communication and delivery — it’s called SCORM. You may not know how SCORM works, but if you’re involved in any way with E-Learning, you must know that its very existence affects you; specifically in how it sets the parameters for the learning experience you can provide in Learning Management Systems and Learning Environments (like Moodle or Blackboard) that support the framework.

10 years ago, it was a sketch on a chalkboard (literally). Today it permeates every way in which organizations of all kinds approach distributed learning and its technologies.

And we’re going to do it again with SCORM 2.0. We’re willing to start from scratch and solve future learning challenges. And we’re willing to fix what’s broken.

Much has been discussed (for a very long time) about what’s wrong with SCORM. It is a subset of the greater discussion about what people feel is wrong with E-Learning. What the community is missing are the solutions… how do we fix it? How do we transform the field into something better/appropriate/right/good?

This is the opportunity I present to you. SCORM affects you as a purveyor of E-Learning, whether you create it, manage it, believe in it or loathe it. There is a real honest-to-goodness effort to bring in voices from outside the mainstream of standards development and produce an open (read: source) model for how learning takes place.

I am chairing a Program Area for LETSI, which means I’ll be helping to field, promote and review ideas presented about Interaction, Collaboration and Community.

I ask you with the whole of my heart: if you have a gripe about E-Learning, write it down and send it on — that is the basis of a White Paper for our purposes. This is not the academic or government world “white paper” — you don’t even need to propose the solution — just help us define the particular problem you want solved.

If you have a solution (but can’t figure out the problem exactly) — at least capture your pondering about what scenarios your idea could address. Direct me to your blog post — that works, too.

Your voice NEEDS to be heard. I/we at LETSI need to hear it.

Please consider the following…

• State the business, learning, or technology problem you want to address.
• Identify an existing or new service, specification, model or standard that should be incorporated into SCORM 2.0 to solve your problem.
• Explain how the solution could be implemented and tested by early 2009.

There are no constraints on format. We’re calling this kind of briefing a “white paper” — but if you want to produce a video or audio podcast to get this information to us — hey, that’s awesome.

Please send your white paper to scorm2@letsi.org — and if you’d rather send it directly to me, I’ll be happy to handle it from there.

Technorati Tags: scorm 2.0, scorm, white paper, standards, letsi, interaction, collaboration, community

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’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.

“Wikinomics” is up for a Pulitzer Prize for Business literature.

How are youngsters changing the way we think about talent? Training, retention, collaboration and managing them? Within this new culture, there is a new culture of work and therein will lie the answers of how to accomplish this.

Myspace has 220 million members, growing at 2 million members a week. 85% of all college students are on Facebook (700,000 in Toronto alone). But this is no longer about getting online — this is now about a new mode of production. Web 2.0 is a change in the way we innovate the structure and architecture of an organization. It’s changing learning in many ways, driven by economic, social and demographic factors.

Tapscott worked with a group of 300 kids; found out they have no fear of technology. They’re not thinking about the technology — they’re thinking about what they’re using it for — the content, be it a live chat with their friend(s), downloading from iTunes, looking through the Hubble telescope. We focus on how amazing it is that technology enables this… they’re thinking about how cool Mars is.

The population is biforcating. There’s a huge wave of youngsters (biggest in other parts of the world) under 28 and they’re entering the workforce. Meanwhile, we talk about cutting funding for education and there’s more kids under 28 than there ever were Baby Boomers.

If you look at the map of kids under the age of 15, India and China dwarf the rest of the world. And Asia as a whole is way more wired than the US and Western Europe.

Kids are growing up bathed in digital. They watch less TV than the Boomers. They telescope online, chatting, IM’ing AND doing their homework on the computer when they get home from school. They think differently. Brain development between 8 and 18 years is affected by the change from being hooked on video. Kids are now authorities on the massive changes in government, economics, trends, ideology — because they’re more connected. Kids are lapping their parents on the information track.

“Kids look at Email as a formal technology, like for thank-you letters and official communications.”

How these kids are different:

• They want freedom of choice
• They want freedom of mobility
• They are better scrutinizers
• They have integrity and expect integrity

“The Daily Show isn’t funny… unless you know the news”

• They need to be entertained (which is blended in with learning, collaboration and “work”)
• They want speed, not immediate gratification. They can’t stand useless bureaucracy.
• They flock to innovation

This leads to Talent 2.0 — the kids got it right. Paradigms put boundaries around things — based on assumptions that are so strong that you don’t think about them. Peter Sengey was right in that the person at the top can’t learn for the organization as a whole.

And… it turns out that I’m one of three people in the entire audience blogging this by show of hands. Nice.

Tapscott just stated that the Gen X’ers are having more problems adapting to these changes than the Boomers, because the Boomers have kids and understand better how to talk to them.

Opinion: I call bulls__t, but I agree with everything else Tapscott is saying, so I’ll investigate further at his follow-up session.

The new web is dropping collaboration costs (the technology is just better), so peers can now come together and create value. Marketocracy is a peer-to-peer mutual fund with picks selected by the network. Wikipedia puts out encyclopedic information that rivals Britannica. Zopa allows people to borrow money from other people without the need for banks. Linux is the dominant operating system in the world, and it’s not “owned” by anyone.

I’ve tried this before, but there’s been a pretty significant uptick in the amount of email and activity on the blog related to Flash and SCORM. I thought maybe it’d be useful to have a more collaborative knowledge share. So I’m inviting friends, readers, developers and designers who are involved in E-learning projects and are using Flash to join up with the Flash For Learning group.