Mobilemind

The TryPhone site run by MobileComplete is very nice if you want to check out the menu structure and general user interface of most popular cell phones. It breaks down a bit on more complicated user interfaces with gestures, button double-clicks and shortcuts. It gives you the general idea, but the graphics are a little coarse and something is definitely Lost in Translation compared to an actual iPhone.

They do have some Captivate-esque animated demos, but they seem to be driving the TryPhone simulation rather than playing animated captures or video of the phone. Anyway, check out TryPhone if you're looking at a new mobile for a Christmas gift. Just be aware that the iPhone emulation gives a weak impression of the experience.

Mac users- If you're developing pages to be viewed on iPhone, check out iPhoney from MarketCircle. It is basically a shell around WebKit that acts like the iPhone browser, Mobile Safari. It isn't exactly like iPhone (address bar can't scroll, not multi-touch obviously, and adds scroll bars in many cases were iPhone wouldn't). That said, it is a nice way to get a quick "iPhone Preview" of any site from your laptop or desktop computer. You can even rotate the phone to vertical or horizontal/landscape view.

Tip: I found that I get more "iPhone-like" results with iPhoney by using a custom user-agent. The one below matches exactly what a web server sees my iPhone user agent as, whereas the iPhoney returns a slightly different version. Just use the appropriate menu item to enter the text below as "Custom User Agent".

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/3B48b Safari/419.3

Labels: Apple, simulation, technology

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One of the great take-aways of Learning 2006 for me was Machinima. Now there's some IP follow-up that is due for anyone considering using Machinima content for training. I think machinima is a powerful, effective and low cost alternative technique to "from scratch" 2D/3D animation, graphics and video production for e-learning. However, as always, one needs to be respectful of intellectual property (IP). A blog posting that I recently found is a good reminder of that.

But first, a little background. In February of 2007 I posted some information on machinima when I was fortunate enough to snag Tom Crawford as a guest speaker for an Adobe eLuminary web seminar titled Machinima: When Video isn't Video [description at bottom of page here, direct link to recording here (free registration req'd)]. By the way, Tom did the best job I have ever seen of formatting/encoding machinima clips for use inside Adobe Connect, but that may be a whole other seminar topic.

Since then I have been openly wondering about using imagery and recorded screen captures of Flight Simulator X and other tools for training. Hopefully, Microsoft and other vendors will make their IP policies clearer regarding this use case. It seems the use case for the elearning developer is not to use game storyline, but to co-opt it as a graphics or animation generator. I'm really not sure how this plays into their IP policies.

In August of 2007, Mark Methenitis of The Vernon Law Group posted some informative discussion and commentary on Microsoft and machinima on his blog Law of the Game. from the original post, Microsoft's New Content Usage Rules: A Small Step for Machinima –

Microsoft has set forth an interesting new content policy, found here, that seems to be giving the non-profit machinimist a break. In fact, I would go as far as to say this is really what needed to be done, but only addresses half of the issue.

The rules boil down to this: You can use the following games:

• Age of Empires (all versions)
• Flight Simulator (all versions)
• Forza Motorsport (all versions)
• Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 2, and Halo 3 (when released)
• Kameo
• Perfect Dark Zero
• Project Gotham Racing (all versions)
• Rise of Nations (all versions)
• Shadowrun
• Viva Piñata

to make machinima, provided you put the following disclaimer on it:

[The title of your Item] was created under Microsoft’s “Game Content Usage Rules” using assets from GAMENAME, © Microsoft Corporation.

The blog entry goes on to list the rules Microsoft requires (which you really should read from the Microsoft Xbox.com page), but I prefer Mark's witty Carlin-esque summary.

Consider these the 7 Deadly Sins of Microsoft Machinima. In short, they are:

1. Hacking
2. Obscenity
3. Profit
4. Audio
5. Other IP
6. Fanfiction
7. Piggybacking

When using machinima techniques, I doubt that corporate trainers will ever intend to hack, cuss, directly profit, pirate audio, abuse IP, craft fan fiction or support derivative works (piggybacking), BUT even the best of intents doesn't mean that use for corporate training is legally acceptable to the IP owners. I hope that Microsoft will clarify the IP issues regarding use of game-generated images or image sequences for non-game corporate training purposes at the upcoming Microsoft DevCon 2007 or the related/co-located AvSim 2007 conference & exhibition.

In an interesting and relevant turn, the AvSim 2007 conference features guest speakers including both Capt. Mark Feuerstein, the Project Pilot for Boeing Commercial Airplanes’ 747-8 program and commercial pilot and flight instructor, Erik Lindbergh– grandson of Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh. I wonder what their thoughts on training "fair use" might be.

Labels: blogs, events, gaming, learning, simulation, technology, virtual worlds

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I'm barely in "Gen-X." I'm about 12 years too young to truly appreciate the Abbie Hoffman reference I just made. I'm about 12 years too old to be a real "gamer." Nonetheless, here I am in my 40's staying up late to write a book report on Gadgets, Games and Gizmos for Learning by Karl Kapp. Sorry Mom.

I apologize to my mother, my beloved late-night term-paper typist, but NOT to you dear reader. This book is pretty good. I am going to apply a little gamer style that I learned from the book and mix it up with a little of my own Yuppie Yippie geezer pre-gamer culture jamming of my own. (Whew, too much social anthropology to parse there, no wonder one of the reviewers/contributors has a background in Anthropology.)

Learning Designer/Developer Cheating Tips for Gadgets, Games and Gizmos for Learning: Tools and Techniques for Transferring Know-How from Boomers to Gamers

1. Use the Corporate Card to buy it. It's expensive, but you'll come-off like a super-genius. Plus you'll want to share this book with co-workers and clients. Boomers will be able to throw down some gaming terms, and understand what makes gamers tick. Gamers will even gain some insight into Boomers.
   Bonus tip: Independent consultant like me? Buy it anyway and "Stick it to the man." It's fun, even if you are "the man."
2. Read Chapter 1 first, and read it all. Well, duh. It's like doing the tutorial at the start of a game, you'll get further faster. This chapter has a lot of the background and research references that helped shape the book.
3. Jump to Chapter 5, it's about cheats Why? 'Cause one man's cheats is another man's job-aid (or performance support tool). Besides this whole post is a cheat, right. Don't hate the playa, learn to game the gamers.
4. Now skip to Chapter to Chapter 10, it's about the coin You're going to need budget or at least time to do some interesting games, get some gizmos, design networked social learning and generally do other cool stuff. Chapter 10 gets right to the new math of explaining that not just playing, but designing games is critical and worthwhile. You'll need to justify this stuff.
   Bonus tip: Now go back and read the "Workplace Implications" from Chapters 2-4 and 6-8-- they'll have some good fodder for the Exec Summary of that budgeting proposal.
5. Refine and Polish Go back and skip around, read more in any order... don't be so linear dude. Refresh some basic ISD in Chapters 2-3 and re-orient it to games and gamers. Think about recruiting them in Chapter 9. Think about how you obtain, train and retain across the board for boomer and gamers alike.

Not exactly a book report, but hopefully an interesting stop on this virtual book tour. I like the book for the anecdotes, data and scenarios. Those are things that resonate with me and I find memorable, repeatable and applicable. Right there at the front (p. 16-17), Karl pulled together a nice chart of the attributes of the games and gamers across 4 "generations" of gamers from Gen I Pong and Odyssey to Gen 4.0 Halo, The Sims and GTA3. I'm starting to use bits from this table like a mini Meyers-Briggs assessment for quickly sizing up and adjusting to gamers. Check out the book on Amazon, or do a little more recon and learn more about it via the current virtual book tour that is underway.

Labels: blogs, gaming, learning, simulation, technology

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That last post on the Wii and SecondLife was supposed to be a quick puff-piece, but as I mulled it over it grew and grew until I split it into two with this opinion post as the second part. Personally, I think something good is brewing with Second Life, but first we're headed for (already in?) a goldrush that will be followed by backlash, similar to the era when companies rushed to establish a presence on dial-in line networks likethe Source, and CompuServe, and Prodigy, and America Online, (and others- anyone remember GEnie or Minitel or ...) . It was relatively cheap and tremendously popular to build-out forums and email lists and knowledge bases there, but it all got eclipsed by the internet + the web. Second Life also just feels too "siloed" for my tastes, with no good way to interact across worlds (yes, I am aware of various SL mash-ups). The virtual worlds and games reek of the multiple ID's problem of the early 90's. I remember when you were really cool if your business card has like 6 email addresses on it. I also agree with folks suspicious of the hype and over-the-top "me-too" crowd it is attracting now, again like the AOL-era landgrabs. Here's some good quotes and interesting data I found on a quick web news search:

More often than not, you'll hear that "Second Life" boasts millions of users. But the truth of the matter is that no one knows how many people are using the service other than Linden Lab, the company that hosts "Second Life."

According to Clay Shirky, a faculty member in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University who's made a four-month study of Second Life's audience, the number of regular users is well under 200,000.

Virtual worlds may indeed play a big role in the future of the Internet. But for the moment, the talk far exceeds the actual worth of these services-- at least in business terms.

If fewer than 200,000 people are regularly using "Second Life," it's not the best marketing tool. And though virtual worlds are certainly a means of long-distance communication, it's yet to be seen whether this makes sense — in the long term — for anything other than fun and games.

So many companies are entering "Second Life" because it's the thing to do, because the press gives virtual worlds so much attention.

Source: Is Corporate Mania for 'Second Life' Just a Lot of Hype? As for the Wii, pretty cool, but then so was the Magnavox Odyssey that Dad brought home in '73 to spoil all 5 of us kids. Does anyone else miss video games that included real dice, poker chips and plastic overlays you had to tape to the screen? We eventually got an Atari 2600, but never bothered with Colecovision, Mattel Intelvision, Sega and the lot that followe-- including the very first PlayStation released about 21 years later. Dang I'm old.

Labels: second life, simulation, technology, virtual worlds

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Interesting thoughts on using a Nintendo Wii and Second Life together, from the Gadgets blog of Wired online

Nintendo games have made the Wii controller a satisfyingly realistic controller for pretend tennis, golf and baseball. But how about using it to practice doing surgery, applying pesticides or operating a nuclear power plant?

It will be interesting to see how this pans out over the next year or so for mainstream corporate training. For edu-tainment, the surgery bit has already happened. In a March Edition of Learning Trends (link followers- scroll to March 5, '07 #434), Elliott Masie mentioned a Wii application called Trauma Center: Second Opinion that is only $49 and lets you perform a varierty of tests and interventions using the simulated environment and the motion-sensitive Wiimote controller.

More from Wired:

One of the attractions of [MIT Research Fellow David E. Stone] Stone's approach is the low cost. In Second Life, it's relatively easy to build chairs, buildings and other objects for avatars to sit on or walk through. Tools like wrenches or manual controls are also easy to build and, with a little tweaking, users can control them with a Wiimote.

Labels: learning, secondlife, simulation, technology, virtual worlds

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UPDATE: Google Blogger is totally crappy about providing any feedback other than failure, so I'm breaking this into 2 posts. Validating the HTML of the posts with the W3C and Dreamweaver validator is useless; Blogger just silently fails with a blank screen.

I perceive much of my own value as being a node in a network. The connections I make and the connections that pass through are valuable. I like to share them. Here are a few of the blogs I'd like to share with you and some of my personal editorial comments that may help you.

Learning and Elearning

Clark Aldrich- Elements of Interactivity If you want to apply simulation to professional development, then Clark IS the man. Fantastic on-going posts on the ASTD Learning Circuits Blogand his own blog are great reading, thought provoking and encouraging for those who want to use more simulation to increase training effectiveness and performance.

Jay Cross- Internet Time Blog My summary about him? Foresight + Insight + Raconteur + ?? = Jay Example Entry: Now What Invited to speak about"Informal Learning Goes Mobile" at the Seriously Mobile Summit, Jay realizes they "get it" already and moves on.

The audience had already drunk the web 2.0 KoolAid. I pushed them to think about the implications several years out. As a starting point, I eliminated talk about devices. The previous week, when talking with a dozen very sophisticated learning technologists about mobile, the conversation rapidly devolved into complaints about unreadable screens and buttons too small for beefy fingers. Moore's Law will take care of those in short order, so we started as if it already had...

more to come

Labels: blogs, learning, simulation

  

The Association for Computing Machinery (acm) publishes eLearn, an online magazine about Education and Technology. Just a few days ago they published Another Life: Virtual Worlds as Tools for Learning, by Jay Cross, Internet Time Group; Tony O'Driscoll, IBM; and Eilif Trondsen, SRI-Business Intelligence.

Quite a coincidence, since I unknowingly published an entry about that here last month. Given this article and the interest emerging amongst members of the Masie Consortium, I think SL and Virtual Worlds are going to be a big trend this year, and maybe even a big elearning reality. Earlier this week, I learned of a forward thinking bank in Europe that is also looking to Second Life as a means to support its training efforts as it expands. I'll share more on this as it develops.

Labels: second life, simulation, virtual worlds

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Expect to see increased use of animated, speaking characters as guides, customers and colleagues in elearning this year and next. The tool are becoming more powerful, more approachable and more pervasive. Output to Flash SWF format makes it much easier to incorporate these characters into elearning, whether you use Authorware, Breeze, Captivate, Dreamweaver, Flash, Lectora Publisher or Toolbook. A year ago I posted about Animated Talking Characters for Elearning mentioning Oddcast and Sculptoris. Recently, the actionscript Hero (ash) linked back to my post and mentioned another tool along those lines from CodeBaby. Vcom 3D also has tools for interactive characters that I really want to learn about. I look forward to seeing (and hearing more from them later this month at the AICC meetings in San Diego. I saw a really impressive demo of Vcom characters during a NATO panel meeting at UCLA last Fall. Multiple virtual communicators interact with each other and use culturally-specific gestures (yea/nay nods or head motions) synchronized to their speech while presenting or responding to learners. The demo was part of a prototype for training soldiers who need to have dialogs with diverse cultures at checkpoints and in other situations. It was really cool to see spouses glance at each other while speaking, or catch a child showing deference to a parent (if only it were so consistent in real life). I can't wait to see how this has advanced since then, and how it might be attainable for more mainstream elearning applications.

Labels: simulation

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There is alot going on with simulations lately.

Learning Circuits Blog- Clark Aldrich and others have been having a running dialog on the ASTD Learning Circuits Blog.

I particularly liked the "SimWord of the Day" series that started back around the 18th of December 2005

AICC Simulation Forum- The AICC will be hosting a mini-forum on Simulations during the AICC San Diego meetings January 30 - February 3, 2005. There will also be 2 full days devoted to researchers, organizations and vendors in the simulation space. I look forward to catching up with some of my Adobe (Macromedia) colleagues who will be presenting.

Simulation Interface Standards (Study Group)- The IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee (IEEE LTSC) is working together with the SISO SAC (Simulation Interoperability Standards Organization Standards Activity Committee). Together they are evaluating additional standards are appropriate and feasible for elearning simulations. Together they issued a call for position papers, which is found here on the IEEE LTSC site. Related discussion will be held February 2-3, 2005 and co-located with the AICC meetings.

Labels: simulation

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