Flash For Learning

Paul Artiuch at Wikinomics had a fascinating blurb today abouta recent OECD report that compared how many hours workers spend on average in a couple different nations, vs. their GDP. What’s interesting is that the technological capability edge by itself doesn’t look like the big indicator of GDP that productivity might be.

Artiuch writes:

The OECD numbers, however, show that this linear relationship does not exist. For instance, an average South Korean works almost 1000 hours per year longer than the average Norwegian, while enjoying half the GDP per person. Both countries rank in the top in terms of their use of advanced technologies – Korea might even have a slight edge in terms of internet and mobile adoption. Granted, there are many other factors at play including natural resource wealth, distortions such as wars, workforce participation rates and cultural norms. However, the differences are significant even between seemingly similar countries such as Germany and Italy.

I only mention this because one of the things that Pink and Covey hit at is that the indicators of success are the drive and consistency to keep trying. This is another piece of a performance puzzle that supports that if you have the drive and can keep trying more efficiently… well, to the victor go the spoils.

So keep cranking out that AS3, kids — and reuse the code that works as much as possible

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.

Inspired a bit by Tom King’s article on authoring tools, I started playing with Google Trends and was a little interested in how E-Learning is faring against the notion of Performance Support — my idea being that E-Learning is stuff we have to evaluate, manage and track the learner’s interaction with — and performance support being, perhaps, not so rigid.

Here’s my not-so-scientific report:

E-Learning is by far more popular in searches, though the volume of searches definitely has dropped from 2004 (which we can discuss by itself ad nauseum as far as reasons why people are searching less for E-Learning). But in 2007, in particular, the notion of “Performance Support” has gained much more buzz in news references. Now, this can mean a lot of things, but the fact that E-Learning never makes a blip in the news probably says something, too.

As we make E-Learning smaller and more granular… are we naturally evolving a model of instruction to something more like Performance Support?

By the way — as an interesting post-script to this, the top 10 regions, in order, who are literally looking for Performance Support, are…

1. South Korea
2. India
3. Singapore
4. Australia
5. Taiwan
6. United Kingdom
7. Canada
8. United States
9. Netherlands
10. China

Anyone want to take a stab at how employee productivity by nation matches up with this ranking for a search?

So, I bet you thought I was going dark again since it’s been almost a month without a post.

Actually, there’s been some moderate activity on the Flash For Learning grouplist. Not a ton of activity, but while there are many Flash developers and designers doing E-Learning, there’s probably not too many who are vocal. In the first month since the list was launched, we’ve got about 25 subscribers and maybe six people who post so far. Everyone’s in the same boat, realizing that there isn’t much out in the wild web on gearing Flash and related products for E-Learning. One of the members of the group is working on a full-on ActionScript class to handle the API communicaiton with SCORM. I’ve been hard at work doing something pressing that I’ll open up when I have it working.

Remember a few months back when I wrote about QA? I got a QA entry linking to a database working right out of Articulate Presenter as a tool in the upper right-hand corner. Honestly, it’s just a link to a URL, so it could be linked to anything, but the point is I have it working out of Articulate, using the LMS to provide your name when you enter a bug and Articulate to auto-fill the slide number you’re on, so all you have to do is tag what the problem is with keywords and then write a detailed description of the problem, and submit. The last week or two, I’ve been working on the management system to handle all that QA data, and I’m using it as an excuse to learn Flex 2 and AMFPHP 2.0 (currently in 1.9 beta 2). It’s fast, it’s effective, it’s efficient, it’s clean and neat — I’m surprised at how easy the combination of Flex 2 and AMFPHP 2 are to develop with. If I had tools like these when I was knocking out my first e-learning apps in 2001… well probably nothing would be different, but it sure would’ve been easier.

I’m currently gathering requirements to produce a learning game for my company. I won’t be developing it myself as the scope is just way too large for one guy to tackle. Right now we’re buying some serious games and we’re going to play and evaluate them at the same time we build the momentum from the businesses that will be served by this learning game for championing the project and get stakeholders identified and on-board. If anyone has experiences they’d like to share on the learning gaming front, I’d love to talk to you, as it’s completely foreign to me which makes it interesting to sell the idea of it to more conservative corporate types.

So this post isn’t really saying much except I’m alive, I’m active and communicating and there’s some pretty cool stuff going on that I’ll post here and on the Flash for Learning group.